rich

Canadian Oligarchy: How the Super-Rich Rule "Socialized" Healthcare

By Miranda Schreiber


At the intersection of College St. and University St. in Toronto, six hospitals crowd together over five blocks. Although they are public institutions, most of their various departments are named by both speciality and private donor. In fact, nearly every center for care, research center, ‘wellness gallery,’ and atrium - even the nearby medical school - bears the name of its wealthy Canadian financier. Papered onto bus stops and the temporary barriers around construction sites are hospital fundraising campaigns, sometimes containing the stories of patients who feel particularly served by a given institution. Testaments to the power of private capital are everywhere.

In many ways this philanthropic basis of public healthcare is a virtually unquestioned aspect of the Canadian system, which is partially dependent on sporadic ‘gifts’ of millions of dollars from the highest echelons of the capitalist class. Major hospitals repeatedly characterize such events as generous, rather than reflective of the system that causes much of the sickness they spend their time treating. The Canadian situation is an example of the limits of public services under fundamentally capitalist conditions, the ways that the super-rich rule even ‘socialized’ systems.

Like many other kinds of capitalist infrastructure, the public healthcare system is useful to Canadians. However, it was designed to serve profit, not working people. An institution that has existed since the 1960s, it is easy to forget that it was not a gift from the government, a sign of an enlightened national character, but a concession from the capitalist class. Public healthcare did not simply appear due to a moment of moral clarity on parliament hill, it was demanded.

The history of Canadian medicine reveals this. Capitalist expansion onto Indigenous land led to the state-sanctioned destruction of food systems and smallpox epidemics; Indigenous nations were coerced into signing treaties in the midst of famine, allowing material resources to be expropriated by the settler state. [1] The Canadian government’s refusal to meet basic treaty obligations facilitated the spread of tuberculosis in substandard living conditions on reserves and in residential schools, internment camps where thousands of Indigenous children perished. [2] [3] Since its founding Canada’s existence as a capitalist colony has been contingent on the spread of disease. [4] This was simultaneous with the attempted destruction of Indigenous medicine and healthcare.

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After the first world war, the Canadian settler population became increasingly conscious of class warfare as their economic exploitation accelerated, frightening the capitalist class. “It seems strange now but at the time the possibility of a socialist or communist revolution was a viable threat to the ruling classes everywhere internationally,” says Tyler Shipley, author of Canada and the World. Revolutions in the USSR and Latin America revealed the possibility for working people to seize the means of production. As Alex Birrell explains on the podcast Unmaking Saskatchewan, the rapid spread of infectious disease among settlers led to grassroots organizing for the purposes of establishing public clinics in rural Saskatchewan for the treatment of diseases like tuberculosis. [5] In the 1930s during the depression, farmers who could not pay off medical debts unionized and formed the Farmer’s Labour Party, demanding social security and socialized medicine from the provincial government. [6] Even while farmers faced starvation due to drought, the medical establishment - specifically insurance companies and regulatory bodies representing urban doctors with wealthier patients - resisted public clinics from their inception, fearing a reduction in profits. [7] As Birrell explains on the podcast, “We had to drag the government around and force them to care, force them to act.” The first medicare bill was dramatically diluted by representatives of the medical establishment and commerce, so that “moderates won the battle over what medicare would look like….it was a victory built to be moved to the right.” A more comprehensive medicare plan was rejected in favor of one that placed more power in the hands of physician regulatory boards and industry.

Socialized healthcare in Canada came about at a time of capitalist crisis, as a concession, and so an aberration, of a fundamentally exploitative system that has required human deprivation from its beginning. As Shipley explains, the creation of Canadian healthcare, along with the rest of its social welfare system, stove off revolutionary activity and permitted the social reproduction of labor, offering enough care and security primarily to keep people looking for work. In the sixty years since medicare was passed, this Canadian social security net has been slowly stolen away, as the very forces that resisted public healthcare in the first place have reclaimed the infrastructure they reluctantly handed over to the working class. Over six decades, although more rapidly since the 1980s, the Canadian state has cut back government services and civil service employment while transferring power to private capital in the mass sale of public infrastructure and increases in tax breaks. [8] [9] Public health has been targeted at two ends: in the destruction of the resources that keep people healthy, and the sale of aspects of the healthcare system to private industry. Since 1985, housing and public sector pensions have been consistently clawed back, drug companies have been permitted to monopolize pharmaceutical drugs over generic brands, and thousands of civil service jobs have been eliminated while unemployment insurance has been cut. [10] [11] Grants to advocacy groups supporting the environment, Indigenous people, women, and children have been slashed, and occupational safety training programs have been defunded along with health and welfare grants.  At the same time, the wealthy have received massive tax breaks and government shares in transportation, universities, colleges, and communications have been sold off to private ownership.

The healthcare system is whatever remains after this attempt to maximize surplus profits, which has only hastened in the last several years. This is what explains the absurdly common event in Canadian healthcare in which a person who does not have a house is sent back out into freezing temperatures after receiving a free medical procedure. It clarifies the government decision to offer citizens care for ears but not for eyes, and a free patient-intake interview but not free medicine. There is no moral justification for this with the explanatory power of class analysis.

The story that healthcare makes Canada extraordinary is circulated in the media, in textbooks, and in political rhetoric. Another story we are often told is that people who can’t work but need healthcare are responsible for social misery. Patients are chided for ‘poor lifestyle choices’ and ‘wasting government resources’ by a healthcare system that effectively resents having to treat them. Predominant leaders in healthcare continue to collaborate with the philanthropists who are responsible for increasing homelessness and poverty. These multi-millionaires and billionaires have stolen from the public once through the theft of surplus value and the destruction of the public welfare state, and again in an evasion of just taxation. They donate to hospitals to expedite exploitation, not to end it; it’s just PR and a tax write-off. Representatives of commerce who are price-gouging groceries during a housing crisis like Galon Weston sit on hospital boards, claiming the system. [12] They name every medical building in their image.



Notes

[1] Clearing the Plains pg 24-29 (More in depth chapter 5, chapter 9)

[2] Clearing the Plains pg 27

[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/9432774/saddle-lake-cree-nation-residential-school-investigation-report/

[4] Clearing the Plains pg 24-29 (More in depth chapter 5, chapter 9)

[5] Unmaking Saskatchewan

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] https://www.sfu.ca/~mcohen/publications/Polecon/dismantl.pdf

[9] Stephen McBride and John Shields, Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993), Table 2.4.

[10] Stephen McBride and John Shields, Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993), Table 2.4.

[11] Federal Budgets 1985 to 1995; Canadian Council on Social Development, Canada's Social Programs are in Trouble, (Ottawa 1989);

[12] https://sunnybrook.ca/team/member.asp?m=948&page=4071

There Is No Substantive Economic Recovery In Sight: Capitalism and Its State Are Running Out of Tricks

Pictured: A Maricopa County constable escorts a family out of their apartment after serving an eviction order for non-payment on Sept. 30 in Phoenix. [John Moore / Getty Images]

By Shawgi Tell

One of the fundamental economic laws under capitalism is for wealth to become more concentrated in fewer hands over time, which in turn leads to more political power in fewer hands, which means that the majority have even less political and economic power over time. Monopoly in economics means monopoly in politics. It is the opposite of an inclusive, democratic, modern, healthy society. This retrogressive feature intrinsic to capitalism has been over-documented in thousands of reports and articles from hundreds of sources across the political and ideological spectrum over the last few decades. It is well-known, for example, that a handful of people own most of the wealth in the U.S. and most members of Congress are millionaires. This leaves out more than 95% of people. Not surprisingly, “policy makers” have consistently failed to reverse these antisocial trends inherent to an obsolete system.

At the same time, with no sense of irony and with no fidelity to science, news headlines from around the world continue to scream that the economy in many countries and regions is doing great and that more economic recovery and growth depend almost entirely, if not entirely, on vaccinating everyone (multiple times). In other words, once everyone is vaccinated, we will see really good economic times, everything will be amazing, and we won’t have too much to worry about. Extremely irrational and irresponsible statements and claims of all kinds continue to be made in the most dogmatic and frenzied way by the mainstream press at home and abroad in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the deep economic crisis continually unfolding nationally and internationally. Dozens of countries are experiencing profound economic problems.

While billions of vaccination shots have already been administered worldwide, and millions more are administered every day (with and without people’s consent), humanity continues to confront many major intractable economic problems caused by the internal dynamics of an outdated economic system.

A snapshot:

1.      More rapid and intense inflation everywhere

2.      Major supply chain disruptions and distortions everywhere

3.      Shortages of many products

4.      “Shortages” of workers in many sectors worldwide

5.      Shortened and inconsistent hours of operation at thousands of businesses

6.      Falling value of the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies

7.      Growing stagflation

8.      Millions of businesses permanently disappeared

9.      More income and wealth inequality

10.  High dismal levels of unemployment, under-employment, and worker burnout

11.  Growing health insurance costs

12.  Unending fear, anxiety, and hysteria around endless covid strains

13.  More scattered panic buying

14.  The stock market climbing while the real economy declines (highly inflated asset valuations in the stock market)

15.  Spectacular economic failures like Lehman Brothers (in the U.S. 13 years ago) and Evergrande (in China in 2021)

16.  All kinds of debt increasing at all levels

17.  Central banks around the world printing trillions in fiat currencies non-stop and still lots of bad economic news

18.  And a whole host of other harsh economic realities often invisible to the eye and rarely reported on that tell a much more tragic story of an economy that cannot provide for the needs of the people

The list goes on and on. More nauseating data appears every day. Economic hardship, which takes on many tangible and intangible forms, is wreaking havoc on the majority at home and abroad. There is no real and substantive economic improvement. It is hard to see a bright, stable, prosperous, peaceful future for millions under such conditions, which is why many, if not most, people do not have a good feeling about what lies ahead and have little faith in the rich, their politicians, and “representative democracy.” It is no surprise that President Joe Biden’s approval rating is low and keeps falling.

What will the rich and their political and media representatives say and do when most people are vaccinated, everyone else has natural immunity, and the economy is still failing? What will the rich do when economic failure cannot be blamed on bacteria or viruses? To be sure, the legitimacy crisis will further deepen and outmoded liberal institutions of governance will become even more obsolete and more incapable of sorting out today’s serious problems. “Representative democracy” will become more discredited and more illusions about the “social contract” will be shattered. In this context, talk of “New Deals” for this and “New Deals” for that won’t solve anything in a meaningful way either because these “New Deals” are nothing more than an expansion of state-organized corruption to pay the rich, mainly through “public-private-partnerships.” This is already being spun in a way that will fool the gullible. Many are actively ignoring how such high-sounding “reforms” are actually pay-the-rich schemes that increase inequality and exacerbate a whole host of other problems.

It is not in the interest of the rich to see different covid strains and scares disappear because these strains and scares provide a convenient cover and scapegoat for economic problems rooted in the profound contradictions of an outmoded economic system over-ripe for a new direction, aim, and control. It is easier to claim that the economy is intractably lousy because of covid and covid-related restrictions than to admit that the economy is continually failing due to the intrinsic built-in nature, operation, and logic of capital itself.

There is no way forward while economic and political power remain dominated by the rich. The only way out of the economic crisis is by vesting power in workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on. The rich and their outmoded system are a drag on everyone and are not needed in any way; they are a major obstacle to the progress of society; they add no value to anything and are unable and unwilling to lead the society out of its deepening all-sided crisis.

There is an alternative to current obsolete arrangements and only the people themselves, armed with a new independent outlook, politics, and thinking can usher it in. Economic problems, health problems, and 50 other lingering problems are not going to be solved so long as the polity remains marginalized and disempowered by the rich and their capital-centered arrangements and institutions. New and fresh thinking and consciousness are needed at this time. A new and more powerful human-centered outlook is needed to guide humanity forward.

Human consciousness and resiliency are being severely tested at this time, and the results have been harsh and tragic in many ways for so many. We are experiencing a major test of the ability of the human species to bring into being what is missing, that is, to overcome the neoliberal destruction of time, space, and the fabric of society so as to unleash the power of human productive forces to usher in a much more advanced society where time-space relations accelerate in favor of the entire polity. There is an alternative to the anachronistic status quo.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Economic and Social Crises Keep Deepening: 48 Points That Will Shape the Future

By Shawgi Tell

Not only have the policies of the rich at home and abroad not stopped economic and social decline, the rich are actually taking social irresponsibility to new levels and making things worse worldwide. They are unable and unwilling to solve serious problems plaguing humanity. Opening the path of progress to society is not on their agenda.

Connecting just a few dots in an intelligible way produces a clear picture of the destruction unfolding worldwide. It is no accident that more people are writing about a miserable dystopian future where people will have to develop new creative ways of defending the rights of all. The information below is especially timely given the cheap euphoria displayed recently by the short-sighted rich and their political and media representatives about the “solid” 850,000 jobs the U.S. economy “added” in June 2021.

  1. Inflation is increasing rapidly at home and abroad and the dollar’s purchasing power is still falling.

  2. Globally, supply chains affecting many sectors are not operating smoothly; many are worried about contrived and non-contrived disruptions lasting for months, even years.

  3. Ransomware incidents and major cyberattacks are not diminishing.

  4. Millions of U.S. workers are misclassified as contractors, which means that they do not have (generally weak) protections.

  5.  Thousands of companies at home and abroad are “zombie companies”—i.e., they don’t make a profit after paying down their debts, they just live a dead life.

  6. Student debt in the U.S. keeps soaring.

  7. College tuition in the U.S. and elsewhere keeps climbing.

  8. Marriage rates in the U.S. are at an all-time low.

  9. Birthrates are declining globally.

  10. The U.S. experiences a higher infant mortality rate and a higher prevalence of obesity compared with most OECD member countries.

  11.  The number of Americans who have moved back in with family or friends over the past 18 months is extremely high.

  12. Homelessness is high nationwide and increasing significantly in some major U.S. cities; crime is also up.

  13. Various “reforms” in countless sectors in many countries are superficial, phony, and non-substantive.

  14. Anxiety and depression remain widespread worldwide.

  15. Anti-depressant use remains high.

  16. Mass murders and killings have increased in recent years in the U.S.; so have social and civil unrest.

  17. Everyone everywhere is skeptical of the mainstream media and struggling not to be confused, ambushed, and humiliated every hour.

  18. Around the world hundreds of millions have joined the ranks of the poor over the past 18 months.

  19. Globally, well over ten million business have disappeared permanently and thousands more will disappear in the next five years.

  20.  Leading economic experts and officials have no real solutions for anything and people continually have low levels of trust in “experts” and government; the rich continue to operate with impunity.

  21. There is more polarization, division, and anger in society.

  22. Poverty and inequality keep growing worldwide; wealth concentration is staggering and unprecedented.

  23. Digital addiction and attendant problems won’t stop increasing.

  24. More U.S. college and university administrators, trustees, and leaders are abandoning the intellectual mission of colleges, restricting faculty voice, and turning college into Disney and fun.

  25. Getting simple things done is taking longer and becoming more convoluted and frustrating, especially when dealing with retailers, companies, and various agencies.

  26. Surveillance and police-state arrangements are multiplying rapidly and becoming more diverse and sophisticated at home and abroad.

  27. The media blackout on thousands who continue to experience serious side effects from vaccines continues.

  28. Newly-elected “progressive” politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere are proving to be as ineffective as the “old guard.”

  29. Privatization and deregulation keep increasing and wreaking havoc worldwide.

  30. Anglo-American imperialism thinks that constantly treating China and Russia as bogeymen will keep fooling the gullible and divert attention from deep problems in the Anglo-American world.

  31. The unionization rate of American workers is at a historic low, which is bad for all workers in all sectors.

  32. More than 130 million working Americans can live off their savings for six months or less before going broke.

  33. Mergers and acquisitions continue apace in 2021, concentrating even more wealth in even fewer hands.

  34. Central banks around the world keep printing phantom money while stock market bubbles grow larger.

  35. The U.S labor force participation rate remains low.

  36. The number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) in the U.S. is still increasing.

  37. Millions of Americans have started to lose their jobless benefits.

  38. More than 40% of Black families and Latino families in the U.S. have no access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.

  39. Black and Latino Americans are experiencing the biggest decline in life expectancy in decades.

  40. In recent years, overall job quality for Americans has deteriorated significantly.

  41. At least thirty million Americans lack access to high-speed internet.

  42. The U.S. opioid overdose crisis, which pharmaceutical companies were recently found guilty of sponsoring, persists.

  43. In Africa, nearly 40% of employed youth are considered poor.

  44. Around the world, nearly one out of ten people experience hunger and the number of undernourished people has grown by millions in recent years.

  45. The official unemployment rate exceeds 10% in at least 12 countries in (Western and Eastern) Europe. Fourteen countries fall into this category for North and South America. The real numbers are higher.

  46. More than 27% of youth in Central Asia and Southern Asia are not in employment, training, or education.

  47. In the past five years more countries have experienced violent conflict, while violent crime across the world has also increased.

  48. Despite endless happy economic news in the mainstream media, economies around the world are far from recovering; many never recovered from the Great Recession of 2008 and mass vaccinations will not solve deep structural economic problems.

The list goes on and on. This is the tip of the iceberg. Numerous problems persist on all continents. The facts above do not paint a picture of a bright and promising future for humanity. Widespread destruction prevails in the obsolete neoliberal world.

But there are also openings and contradictions that people from all walks of life are being compelled to harness in order to advance the public interest and restrict the illegitimate control and authority of major owners of capital. The desire for real progress is palpable and growing; it emerges from the concrete conditions as they present themselves today. The international financial oligarchy cannot provide any solutions to the problems plaguing humanity today, they just have more catastrophes in store for everyone and are blocking the empowerment of the people. None of these serious problems can be solved, however, so long as the people remain marginalized and disempowered. A new direction, orientation, and public authority are urgently needed.

Humanity is entering a new and deeper crisis with qualitatively different and more dangerous features. Crisis is a turning point that contains both peril and opportunity. Crisis is not always just a negative thing; it means things cannot continue in the old way and something significant is going to have to eventually give. It usually takes a serious crisis or trauma to catalyze and propel much-needed change. In this way, crisis overcomes stagnation and complacency and sets the stage for something new. The negation of the negation operates with a greater vengeance in such defining moments, giving rise to a new synthesis, a new equilibrium, which gives rise to yet another dynamic which must assert itself sooner or later. The dialectic lives and cannot be extinguished. What comes next in the complicated here and now is unfolding consciously and spontaneously.

The pace and rate of change today is exhilarating and people’s desire to protect the social and natural environment is growing. The trial of strength between capital-centered forces and human-centered forces is bound to increase because conditions are demanding a new authority that affirms the rights of all. An alternative is necessary and possible. What this will look like is in the hands of the people themselves. Only they can be relied on to usher in a bright future for humanity free of privileged private interests wrecking the social and natural environment.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Their Freedom, and Ours: A Case Study on Morality, Inequality, and Injustice Amid a Pandemic

Photo: Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

By Peter Fousek

David Hume opens his essay “Of the First Principles of Government” with the statement that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”[1] Though she uses different terminology, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power is analogous to Hume’s “Force.” In On Violence, she asserts that “[i]t is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and that this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with.” Both accounts consider social power to be something fundamentally popular, rooted in collective action undertaken in accordance with a shared will. Thus, “[a]ll political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power,” which “petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”[2] This understanding of power is consistent with the nature of the social world: institutions do not come into existence of their own accord, but are created and maintained by the actions of people. Laws do not exist as natural truths—they are established in accordance with shared beliefs and modes of understanding, and retain their jurisdiction only insofar as people assent to them. Therefore, those social structures and formations which hold significant influence over our world, do so because they have substantial, popular support underlying their authority and answering their commandments with corresponding action.

Given this notion of power, “[n]othing appears more surprising…than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”[3] If the governed possess a constitutive power over their social world, how is it that institutional authority so often supersedes the will of the masses with that of its ruling contingent? I will argue that this counterintuitive state of social organization, in which the few hold dominion over the majority, must rely on an imposed, hegemonic system of belief capable of convincing the general population that their oppression is just and their liberation villainous. Such a system of belief, while certainly instrumental in the maintenance of totalitarian states, is especially important in the context of ostensibly representative systems of government like that of the contemporary U.S.

In these contexts, voters must be convinced not that it would be amoral for them to overthrow their rulers, but rather that it is moral for them to continue to formally reproduce the power of those rulers year after year, by way of the voting booth. In the United States, that process of coercion has proved quite successful. According to exit polls, over 42% of voters with household incomes under $50,000 per year voted for Donald Trump, despite his promises to cut taxes for corporations and the super-wealthy while defunding already limited social services; in 2020, that contingent rose to 43%.[4] Over half of the Kentuckians in that income bracket voted to reelect Mitch McConnell in the same election cycle.[5]  In a country where well over half of the population has a household income of under $75,000,[6] our governing authorities consistently promote the aims of the wealthiest few, often at the expense of the many. While the United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and while 969 people have been killed by U.S. police this year alone,[7] the State does not rely solely on such direct repressive force to achieve its inequitable ends. As the electoral data shows, the electorate consents to its own socioeconomic oppression; with shocking frequency, we as a nation “resign [our] own sentiments and passions to those of [our] rulers.”[8]

What system of belief is responsible for convincing American citizens, whose collective sovereignty is systematized in electoral systems, to continue voting directly against their economic interests? If we are to build a better world by overcoming the oppressive systems and structures of the established order, we must first understand the mechanism by which that implicit consent of the oppressed is elicited. A society designed to pursue the aims of a small and exclusive minority at the expense of the majority cannot rely on force alone to sustain itself, since institutional authority possesses the apparatus of force only so long as a substantial contingent of the people are willing to follow its orders. Instead, it requires the tool of an official moral framework capable of securing the popular mandate upon which its dominion is established. It is possible for a small ruling class to maintain its jurisdiction over a much larger oppressed one only when the dominant segment promotes its ends as necessary, and thereby convinces its society that anything which goes against those ends is immoral. The ruling class perpetuates its existence by convincing the ruled majority that their subjugation is just, according to supposedly universal moral precepts.

That moral indoctrination is possible because, to use Marx, the economically dominant class “rule also as thinkers and producers of ideas and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”[9] Therefore, the ruling class is able to disseminate its own beliefs and understandings as comprehensive fact, absorbing, in the words of Barthes, “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination.”[10] The universality of the established ruling order and its corresponding cultural norms supersede any alternative worldviews or systems of belief, and thereby create the illusion that the entire social formation lacks meaningful class differentiation (the absence of ideological stratification is implied as evidence that social class does not cause a fundamentally different experience of the world). So, using its near monopoly on the dissemination of far-reaching ideas and discourse, through channels including broadcasting companies, social media platforms, and the national political stage, the economically dominant class convinces its entire social world that its particular morality, corresponding to its particular class interests, is in fact universal, natural moral law, obligatory for all.

Any system of official morality imposed on a society is necessarily repressive on account of that claim to universality. Morality is the product of social development in the same sense that the institutions, laws, and norms of our societies are, as Arendt notes, the products of beliefs held by the popular masses. As social institutions etc. exist to achieve defined ends, such as the preservation of property rights and relations, morality also serves social interests. We see this to be the case in moral precepts as basic as the commandment that “thou shall not kill,” which provides a foundational basis for social cohesion by establishing a normative framework in which a might-makes-right paradigm becomes condemnable. Nonetheless, even so fundamental a moral tenet as that one fails to prove universally applicable in the context of the real and dynamic world. History shows that societies which condemn killing in times of peace often herald it as the most honorable task of their soldiers in times of war. Therefore, the presentation of any system of morality as something universal, and so too ahistorical, is deceptive, given the necessarily specific and dynamic nature of moral analysis (and thus the impossibility of truly natural and universal morality).

Still, such universal moral precepts do serve social interests, even if those interests differ from those which the popular majority perceive as the purpose of their moral laws. The imposition of a particular morality onto the whole of society establishes a moral hegemony, wherein only that which promotes the aims of the social class who defines the moral system is considered right and just. Such a process serves the social interests of the dominant class, allowing the many to be subjugated by the few: the universal application of specific moral norms is all too often employed to prevent the oppressed from striving towards their own liberation. During times of relative historical calmness, that morality-mediated oppression may be concealed to the point of near-invisibility. In the United States, a nation satiated with spiritual and secular prosperity gospels, whose popular consciousness is inundated with myths of the American Dream predicated on the principle of productivity (the notion that an individual’s success is the reflection of their efforts), the illusion that social mobility is always possible—if only for the “most industrious” among us—lends credence to a moral framework that condemns the poor as lazy people suffering from self-imposed shortcomings, while celebrating the wealthy as tenacious and driven individuals whose opulence is merely the manifestation of their moral virtue.

On that basis, cycle after cycle Americans vote against their economic interest, without even understanding that they are doing so. When we are taught that poverty is personal iniquity embodied, and wealth the reflection of the opposite, then those who are not wealthy must identify “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,”[11] if they are to consider themselves virtuous according to the official moral framework. Thus, as they have for decades, millions of working-class Americans continue to vote for “representatives” who facilitate their exploitation for the sake of the wealthy elite. When we fail to recognize the foundational social power we hold as a class, or even our position as members of the working class as such, we unwittingly provide consent for our continued oppression. The underlying misconception of the meritocratic nature of our society is bolstered by the perception that our political and legal institutions are egalitarian, and therefore that all members of our citizenry have an equal shot at financial success, free from any undue external influence or restriction. In other words, we are told that the official morality of our society is just, because all members of our society share equal freedoms under the law. However, I will argue that even if we use that politically conservative understanding of freedom, labeled negative liberty by Isaiah Berlin (that is, the understanding of freedom as freedom from interference in an individual’s exercise of her rights), supposedly universal freedom is not, in fact, shared universally across class divisions.[12] For that reason, the official morality imposed by one class onto all cannot validly substantiate its claims to universality, and can only be understood as a repressive apparatus implemented to ensure the continued self-subjugation of the oppressed. 

The contradictions of normative morality often appear more sharply when contrasted against a backdrop of historical tumult and upheaval. Such has been the case over the past fourteen months, as the national response to the pandemic in the United States has exposed the degree to which our official morality is willing to sacrifice the wellbeing, and even the lives, of the working class, in order to promote the interests of the possessing one. In this time, it has become clear “that lack of money implies lack of freedom,” even in the sense that it is defined by Berlin and the political Right, as “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.”[13] This inequitable distribution exposes the class-interestedness of an official morality which heralds such freedom, by which is meant, for the most part, negative liberty, as the most just and morally virtuous ideal to be promoted by our norms and institutions. Our socioeconomic order is one predicated on the value of individual productivity and wealth accumulation. Resultantly, the freedom of the individual to exist in such a way that they might promote their own wellbeing without restriction by external influence is foundational to the American sociopolitical psyche. Hence Berlin’s explanation of the moral condemnation of the poor, whose wellbeing, we are told, is not our concern, since “it is important to discriminate between liberty and the conditions of its exercise. If a man is too poor or too ignorant or too feeble to make use of his legal rights, the liberty that these rights confer upon him is nothing to him, but it is not thereby annihilated,” (Cohen 4). According to the Right, that is the freedom of which this nation’s founders wrote, the liberty to which the United States declares its dedication, our ultimate moral value: the nominal liberty to act without restriction in pursuit of a given set of possibilities, with no guarantee to the outcome or ease of such a pursuit.

In times of crisis, like that brought on by the pandemic, the most crucial exercise of such freedom involves the liberty to protect oneself and one’s family from immediate threat of harm. The relative ability or inability of American citizens to do so, depending on their socioeconomic status, provides a tragic illustration of the fact that in the United States, “lack of money implies lack of freedom.”[14] In contemporary America, as in any capitalist society, right (as either or both ownership and access) to any object or pursuit is conferred largely by money. This claim is exceedingly apparent: for example, one does not have the freedom to sleep in a hotel room that they have not paid for, and their attempt to do so would likely be met with interference regardless of their otherwise complete ability, will, and legal allowance. In Cohen’s words, “when a person’s economic security is enhanced, there typically are, as a result, fewer ‘obstacles to possible choices and activities’ for him.”[15] Even under the dictum of nominal or negative freedom, an individual’s liberty is largely determined by their wealth. During the COVID crisis, the limits to liberty begotten by poverty have become a visible, existential threat to the marginalized poor.

In the early months of the pandemic, when we knew little about the life-threatening contagion sweeping the globe, many state and local governments to attempted to secure the safety of their citizens through mandatory stay-at-home orders and economic closures. However, the Trump administration, along with countless others in positions of power and influence, were quick to employ the tools of their official morality to an antithetical end. Mask mandates designed to promote some degree of communal security were decried as unjust, immoral attacks on freedom,[16] and as to shutdown orders, these guarantors of liberty held at best that it is the prerogative of an individual to stay at home if she so chooses, but that the State should have no say. As a result, sections of the country opened prematurely, well before the prevalence of testing, much less the existence of a vaccine.[17] Even in places where that was not the case, the categorization of almost 74 million working class Americans as “essential workers” forced them and their families into positions of very real, potentially life threatening, risk.[18] That undue burden placed on the working class was deemed the necessary condition for the restoration of moral equilibrium, according to the language of negative liberty. The resultant dichotomy of freedom as a function of wealth is substantiated by New York Times polling. Higher earners, far more likely than their lower-income counterparts to hold substantial savings, were largely free to continue working from home without risk of job loss or pay cuts. Lower earners were not afforded the same security, financially or otherwise.[19] In this, we see that the working class were compelled to observe moral norms established by the investor class, and thereby to sacrifice of self in accordance with precepts that the wealthy members of our society did not observe themselves. Through the mechanism of universalized official morality prescribed by the dominant contingent, the subjugated were convinced to accept their own suffering while those who demanded their sacrifice refused to do the same.

And to what end? While many essential workers were employed in healthcare or public infrastructure fields, millions of others included members of the food service industry,[20] Amazon warehouse laborers,[21] Tesla factory line workers[22]—in short, the exploited employees of massive, profit-seeking firms focused solely on their goal of increasing shareholder’s returns. In pursuit of profit, these firms compelled countless workers, for pitifully inadequate wages and often without even the most basic protective measures, to sacrifice their safety,[23] and in many cases even their lives.[24] These efforts by executives for the sake of their investors certainly did pay off: according to Inequality.org, “between March 18, 2020, and April 12, 2021, the collective wealth of American billionaires leapt by $1.62 trillion, or 55%.”[25] All this, as thousands died preventable deaths and millions in the world’s wealthiest country faced hunger and eviction. But what of the workers’ freedom? Surely, they were not literally forced to come into their workplaces. The answer to that depends on how we define force. Essential workers, as well as employees of businesses allowed to preemptively reopen, were barred from receiving unemployment benefits if they refused to work, as our legal framework for employment regulation deemed such refusal voluntary even when motivated by fear of death.[26] So, these workers, many of whom would have received more money through unemployment insurance than they were paid at their “essential” jobs,[27] were compelled—quite literally under threat of starvation—to put themselves and their families in harm’s way so that the rich were able to continue amassing wealth at as aggressive a rate as possible.

The hypocrisy of the official morality, and thus its repressive class-interestedness, is evidenced by the fact that this shockingly inhumane restriction of the right of the working class to self-preservation was undertaken under the guise of “freedom,” and thereby given a “moral” justification. In April 2020, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth echoed widespread convictions with his statement that “in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”[28] That stance was, and remains, a truly popular sentiment—protests in opposition to shutdowns were prevalent across the country last spring, populated largely by working class Americans who had been convinced that economic closures represented government overreach and a restriction of individual liberty.[29] To foster that sentiment, members of the investor class funded media campaigns to promote the notion of the shutdowns as morally wrong[30] These campaigns serve as a tragic example of the investor class forcing its ends onto the whole of our society, portraying anything that interferes with the pursuit of those ends as morally condemnable. The campaigns, of course, concealed their class interestedness to preserve the supposed universality of their precepts. In their polemics against “unfreedom,” they were careful to omit the fact that the “immorality” of the shutdowns, the restriction of liberty which they constituted, was a restriction of the freedom of wealthy firms to force their workers into life-threatening conditions for the sake of profit margins.

Only in being justified by the official morality of the dominant class was such blatant disregard for human life allowed to occur. During the initial months of the COVID pandemic, the foundational social power of the working masses could have been utilized to substantial and life-saving effect, if only there had been sufficient organization for the development of a collective will to do so. Consider the power represented by the opportunity of essential workers to join together in a general strike in protest of unsafe conditions, or in opposition to unjust regulations which cut them off from unemployment insurance if they refused to work. Consider the power of the voting population to hold their elected officials accountable for refusing to put such protective measures in place, or that of the consumer base to boycott companies engaged in blatantly exploitative and dangerous labor practices. These collective actions were not taken because the iniquity of the situation was masked by a veil of official morality, which labelled the direct repression of the working class—the elimination of its most basic liberties—as itself a crusade for freedom. Such “moral” manipulations enable the paradox of power noted by Arendt and Hume, in which “the living power of the people,”[31] despite its foundational importance, is restrained and left unrealized by the amplified repressive force of a small but economically dominant social contingent.

It is important to note the role of the State in this process of moral imposition on behalf of the ruling class. By debating and legislating in accordance with the official morality, institutional authority reifies it, providing those precepts of ruling class interest with an appearance of naturalness and thereby working to validate their claims to universality. Representative Hollingsworth was not alone in expressing the sentiment that the flourishing of the stock market is more important than the lives of American workers; instances as brazen as the vehement attempts of conservative politicians to prevent an increase in food stamp funding despite the staggering number of children going hungry represent efforts to embody the official morality. [32] The success of such reification is heartbreakingly clear: ours is a country in which Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton “explained the anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’,”[33] having failed to realize their own “moral value” in the terms imposed on them, unable to earn anything above a starvation wage regardless of their efforts.

Such is the outcome of the ruling class indoctrinating “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it,”[34] using the apparatus of authority as an aid in its illusion. The supposed truth of the official morality, that most insidious of the “ruling ideas”[35] disseminated by the dominant class, holds a devastating weight in the popular psyche because it is manifested by our systems of power and thereby made to seem concrete. To that end, our political representatives, armed with the formalized consent of their constituents, speak and legislate in a manner that serves to enshrine official morality in the rule of law. In the face of the pandemic, they declared that the just action on the part of the working poor was to accept their loss of liberty for the sake of their country. And, faced with that reactionary mandate justified by an apparently eternal morality, we chose not to oppose oppression, but instead to clap for the essential workers as they made their way home.

“The price of obedience has become too high,”[36] writes Terry Tempest Williams, following a vivid illustration of the destruction wreaked by U.S. nuclear arms tests in the Southwest on American lands and American people. Such state-sanctioned harm is the norm, rather than the exception, as we have seen in examples ranging from the Tuskegee Study to the COVID pandemic response. It is enabled by the “inability to question authority,”[37] on account of its justification by official morality, which would have a repressed populace rather accept the rule of their oppressors than challenge it in the hope of change. But this does not have to be the case; ours could be a better world. A governing body loses its legitimacy if its commands are not carried out; its orders are not heeded if the popular masses refuse to recognize its sovereignty. Strikes, protests, and other acts of defiance, in which participants utilize their communal power by refusing, in unison, to conform to the commands of their oppressors, demonstrate the ability of an organized populace to make authority impotent and annul its influence. That transformative kind of resistance is only possible when the official morality which condemns it is recognized as a tool of reaction, when the oppressed declare a morality of their own, oriented towards the liberation and collective betterment of the social world. “[A]nd even then, when power is already in the street, some group…prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.”[38] These tasks: the revocation of repressive morality, its replacement with a conviction for true justice, and the development of leadership capable of organizing such a movement, are all possible. It is imperative that we undertake them if we are to liberate ourselves by realizing our collective power.  

 

 

References

Arendt, H. On Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970.

Barthes, R. Mythologies. Trans. Jonathan Cape. Paris: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957.

Blake, A. “Analysis | Trump's Dumbfounding Refusal to Encourage Wearing Masks.” The Washington Post.      Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 25 Jun. 2020: Digital Access.

Cohen, G.A. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Scholarship Online, 2011.

Collins, C., Petergorsky, D. “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers.” Inequality.org. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 29 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

DeParle, J. "As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become a Partisan Flash Point." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 6 May 2020: Digital Access.

Desilver, D. "10 facts about American workers." Fact Tank. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2019. Aug. 2019: Digita Access.

Diaz, J. “New York Sues Amazon Over COVID-19 Workplace Safety.” The Coronavirus Crisis. Washington,     D.C.: National Public Radio, 17 Feb. 2021: Digital Access.

“Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together.” Occupational Health & Safety. Dallas: 1105 Media Inc., 7 May 2020: Digital Access.

“Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 22 Jan.        2020: Digital Access.

Flynn, M. “GOP congressman says he puts saving American ‘way of life’ above saving lives from the coronavirus.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 15 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Hume, D. “Of the First Principles of Government. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume Texts Online,   2021: Digital Access.

“Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.” CNN. Atlanta: Cable News Network, 2020: Digital Access.

Maqbool, A. “Coronavirus: The US Resistance to a Continued Lockdown.” BBC News. London: British         Broadcasting Corporation, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Marx, K. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M. “Who Are Essential Workers?: A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages,             Demographics, and Unionization Rates.” Economic Policy Institute. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy             Institute, 19 May 2020: Digital Access.

Nuttle, M. “Essential Workers Accounted for 87% of Additional COVID-19 Deaths in California, Data         Shows.” abc10.com. 30 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

Reinberg, S. “Nearly 74 Million Essential Workers at High Risk for COVID in U.S.” U.S. News & World        Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. News & World Report, 9 Nov. 2020: Digital Access.

Siddiqui, F. “Hundreds of Covid Cases Reported at Tesla Plant Following Musk's Defiant Reopening, County            Data Shows.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 13 Mar. 2021: Digital Access.

Tankersley, J. "Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Tempest Williams, T. "The Clan of One Breasted Women." Psychological Perspectives (23): 123-131. Los Angeles: C.G. Jung Institute, 1990.

“U.S. Income Distribution 2019.” Statista. Statista Research Department, 20 Jan. 2021: Digital Access.

Vogel, K. P., et al. “The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests.” The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 21 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Wright, R. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.

Wronski, L. New York Times|SurveyMonkey poll: April 2020. New York: The New York Times, 2020: Digital Access.

Zhang, C. “By Numbers: How the US Voted in 2020.” Financial Times. London: Financial Times, 7 Nov.        2020: Digital Access.

 

Notes

[1] Hume, 1

[2] Arendt, 41

[3] Hume, 1

[4] Zhang

[5] “Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.”

[6] “U.S. Income Distribution 2019”

[7] “Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.”

[8] Hume, 1

[9] Marx, 129

[10] Barthes, 140

[11] Wright, 124

[12] G.A. Cohen provides a proof of this in his essay “Freedom and Money.” 

[13] Cohen, 9

[14] Cohen, 9

[15] Ibid., 10

[16] Blake

[17] Tankersley

[18] Reinberg

[19] Wronski

[20] McNicholas

[21] Diaz

[22] Siddiqui

[23] McNicholas

[24] Nuttle

[25] Collins

[26] “Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together,” 1

[27] Ibid.

[28] Flynn

[29] Maqbool

[30] Vogel

[31] Arendt, 41

[32] DeParle

[33] Livingston

[34] Barthes, 140

[35] Marx, 129

[36] Williams, 128

[37] Ibid.

[38] Arendt, 49

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

By James Plested

Originally published at Red Flag News. Republished from Monthly Review.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves. It’s burning forests in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Siberia, Canada and California. It’s melting ice caps, receding glaciers and rising seas. It’s ecosystem devastation and crop failures. It’s the scarcity of resources spreading hunger and thirst. It’s lives and communities destroyed, and millions forced to flee.

This crisis is escalating at a terrifying rate. Every year, new temperature records are set. Every day, new disasters are reported. In Australia, we’re living through a summer of dust and fire. Hot winds from the desert are sweeping up dirt from the parched landscape and covering towns and cities hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. Creeks and riverbeds are being baked dry. Our cities are shrouded in smoke from fires burning for weeks on end, while on the hottest and windiest days the flames grow, devouring everything in their path.

Do our rulers–the political leaders and corporate elites who, behind the facade of democracy, make all the important decisions about what happens in our society–understand the danger we face? On the surface they appear unconcerned. In September, after millions of school students participated in the global climate strike and Greta Thunberg gave her “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations, prime minister Scott Morrison responded by cautioning “against raising the anxieties of children”. And when, in November, hundreds of homes were destroyed and four people killed by bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, he told the ABC there was “no evidence” that Australia’s emissions had any role in it and that “we’re doing our bit” to tackle climate change.

Is Morrison stupid? Somewhere along the line it appears his words have become unmoored from reality, and are now simply free-floating signifiers, spinning out of control in a void of unreason. As the empirical evidence of the devastation being caused by climate change in Australia and around the world mounts, so too does the gulf between this reality and the rhetoric of conservative coal-fondlers like Morrison grow into a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

But something is wrong with this picture. To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around.The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.

On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.Morrison is smart enough to see that any genuine effort to tackle the climate crisis would involve a challenge to the system of free market capitalism that he has made his life’s mission to serve. And he has chosen to defend the system. Morrison and others among the global political and business elite have made a choice to build a future in which capitalism survives, even if it brings destruction on an unimaginable scale.

They are like angels of death, happy to watch the world burn, and millions burn with it, if they can preserve for themselves the heavenly realm of a system that has brought them untold riches. This is language that Morrison, an evangelical Christian, should understand. What might be harder for him to grasp is that he’s on the wrong side.

When seen from this perspective, everything becomes clearer. In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however–in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands–they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.

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We’re not, as some in the environment movement argue, “all in this together”. There are many ways in which the wealthy minority at the top of society are already protected from the worst climate change impacts. Big corporations can afford to spend millions on mitigating climate change risks–ensuring their assets are protected so they can keep their business running even during a major disaster. Businesses and wealthy individuals can also protect themselves by taking out insurance policies that will pay out if their property is damaged in a flood, fire or other climate-related disaster.

The rich are also protected from climate change on a more day to day level. They tend to live in the leafiest suburbs, in large, climate-controlled houses. They have shorter commutes to work, where, again, they’re most often to be found in the most comfortable, air-conditioned buildings. They’re not the ones working on farms or construction sites, in factories or warehouses–struggling with the increasing frequency of summer heatwaves. They’re not the ones living in houses with no air conditioning, sweating their way through stifling summer nights. They have pools and manicured lawns and can afford their own large water tanks to keep their gardens green in the hot, dry summer months.

What about in the most extreme scenarios, where what we might call the “natural defences” enjoyed by the wealthy are bound to fail? What happens when the firestorms bear down on their country retreats or rising seas threaten their beach houses? Money, it turns out, goes a long way. In November 2018, for instance, when large areas of California were engulfed in flames, and more than 100 people burned to death, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired their own private firefighting crew to save their US$50 million Calabasas mansion.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by “Black gangbangers”, in response to which the contractors “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters … ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said’”.

In the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off–people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.

The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys … from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

There’s a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that “we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels, recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.

The rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to advance their interests even when those may conflict with the imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.

There are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are working toward this. First, they’re building their military might–spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.

Military strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon, U.S. researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.

More recently, a 2015 U.S. Department of Defense memorandum to Congress argued: “Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time”.

The Australian military has also been preparing for an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment driven in part by the impact of climate change. The 2009 Defence White Paper included a section, “New Security Concerns: Climate Change and Resource Scarcity”, which pointed to the vulnerabilities of many countries in our region. The paper was explicit in linking these to a possible increase in “threats inimical to our interests” and suggested that military capabilities would need to be strengthened accordingly. A 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for “national security” drew similar conclusions.

Although discussions about military preparedness are often pitched in terms of the need for increased development assistance, disaster relief and so on, the practice of the U.S., Australian and other military powers over the past few decades leaves little room for doubt as to what their role will be. When they’re not invading countries on the other side of the world–killing hundreds of thousands, reducing cities to rubble and imprisoning and torturing anyone who opposes them–to secure access to fossil fuels, they’re acting as the enforcers of capitalist interests closer to home.

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is again a good example. When troops from the U.S. National Guard joined the army of private contractors sent to establish “security” amid the death and destruction of the hurricane’s aftermath, the Army Times described their role as quashing “the insurgency in the city”. The paper quoted brigadier general Gary Jones as saying, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control”. A similar dynamic was at work in Australia when, in 2007, the Howard government sent troops to establish “order” in remote Indigenous communities as part of the racist Northern Territory Intervention.

The idea that the military could be a force for good in the context of environmental catastrophe and social breakdown is laughable. Whatever the rhetoric, the role of the military is to secure the interests of a nation’s capitalist class amid the competitive global scramble for resources and markets. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had it right when he argued in 1999: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. The military are gangsters for capitalism. And in the future, they’re likely to double down on savagery.

The next way in which the world’s most powerful capitalist states are preparing for climate catastrophe is by massively increasing what’s euphemistically called “border security”. In 2019, Germany celebrated 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event supposedly ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy. In the decades since, however, European countries have built around 1,000 kilometres of new border walls and fences–six times the length of that hated symbol of totalitarianism in Berlin. Most have been constructed since 2015, when millions of Syrians were forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Europe amid a brutal civil war that was triggered in part, at least, by climate change.

A 2018 report by the World Bank, Groundswell–Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, found that just three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia) could generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood will be affected severely, with several Pacific island nations forecast to disappear completely under rising seas. Already, in response to the relatively small numbers of refugees who have managed to reach Australia by boat in the past few decades, the Australian government has established one of the world’s most barbarous detention regimes. Other governments are now following suit.

So far, the measures discussed have been those primarily directed outwards by states seeking to defend the interests of their capitalist class in the international sphere. This is in part designed to create an “us and them” mentality within the domestic population. In Australia, this has been a staple of both Labor and Liberal governments for decades–the idea that the outside world is dangerous, full of terrorists and other bad people whom we should trust the government to protect us from. In the context of growing global instability associated with climate change, we can expect governments everywhere to double down on these xenophobic scare campaigns.

This should be resisted at every step. Not only for the sake of those “others”–civilians in Afghanistan, refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and so on–whose lives the government is destroying in the name of our security. But also because the racist fear of the outsider promoted by our governments is designed in large part to draw our attention away from the increasingly direct and open war being waged against the “others” within.

In the years since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Western governments have expanded and strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. Today we’re seeing, as many predicted, how the crackdown on basic freedoms carried out in the name of the “war on terror” has created a new normal in which anyone opposing the government’s agenda becomes a target. Environmental protesters, and anyone else standing up against the destructive neoliberal order, are now firmly in their sights.

In the U.S., the battle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline provides the most extreme example to date. In November 2016, the Native American blockade at Standing Rock was broken up by a police operation so heavily militarised that it looked like something out of the invasion of Iraq. In sub-zero temperatures, blockaders were attacked with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades. Hundreds were injured and many hospitalised. Two women who were involved in the blockade and who later vandalised the pipeline are now facing charges under which they could be jailed for up to 110 years.

In Australia, we’ve seen those protesting peacefully outside the International Resources and Mining Conference in Melbourne face an unusual level of police violence and mass arrests. In Queensland, the state Labor government has passed new laws targeting environmental activists. In early December, three members of Extinction Rebellion were jailed when a magistrate refused them bail–something without precedent for charges related to acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

**********

Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout–all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.

If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead.Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.

We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism–and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.

A Better History Will be Decided by Ending the Rule of the Rich and Powerful

By Jeremy Cloward

"Had I so interfered … [on] behalf of the rich, the powerful … or any of that class … it would have been alright."

- The "Old Man" John Brown, shortly before he was hanged on December 2, 1859.

In a Virginia courthouse in 1859 John Brown was declared insane by his own attorney and sentenced to death for attempting to start a nation-wide revolt to bring an end to the most brutal form of capitalism to ever have existed - slavery. Two years after his execution, a bloody civil war began in the United States which finally brought an end to that barbaric system that had torn apart the lives of millions of men, women, and children. The cost for doing so was the death of some 750,000 soldiers-a total higher than all US lives lost in all other 270 US wars combined-as well as the crippling, maiming, and injuring of 500,000 more.[1] Yet, why was the war fought at all? Because the rich and powerful of the South were unwilling to give up their class privilege and rule. Instead, they engaged in treason by ordering their fellow Southerners to take up arms against the United States government and forced millions of their countrymen, North and South, to pay a steep price-one they were often unwilling to pay themselves [2]-to try to maintain their position atop the existing politico-economic order of the day.

Class power in the South was based on control of the productive forces of society (i.e., farms, factories, etc.) by the rich or what we have come to know as private property. It is the fundamental component of capitalism that allows for wealth, power, and inequality to develop into enormously disproportionate dimensions throughout the world. Those that control property are able to determine what will be produced, how much will be produced, at what cost, and for what wage. Through ownership of the means of production of society, great wealth is produced for the owning class which often translates into great political power as well. While the idea of private property in the West has its roots in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, its most recent conception comes to us from the Enlightenment and is best understood through the political philosophy of liberalism and the economic doctrine of capitalism. Or more specifically, liberal-capitalism.

Liberal-capitalism holds up individual rights, limited government, reason, and private property as virtues. In fact, John Locke, one of the most notable thinkers of the Enlightenment and for many the father of liberalism, considered property rights to be so important (as well as nearly every framer of the US Constitution [3]) that he argued "the preservation of property [is] the end of government." [4] However, even Locke recognized that "where there is no property, there is no injustice." [5] Thus, in two brief statements Locke made clear the truth about private property. The truth is that private property creates such inequality that any society that introduces it into its social relations will need the full force of the state to "protect" owners of property from those who are the victims of property ownership. Indeed, if private property creates injustice then the state will be needed to both legitimate its existence and suppress any kind of dissent against the privilege and power that comes from its possession. Still, in the end, economic inequality-including slavery-and all the injustices that come from it were not a problem for Locke nor most of the Enlightenment thinkers. Instead, these men helped bring into existence a world where political equality was a necessity (for white men with property anyway) but any notion of economic equality was simply beyond the reaches of human civilization.


Neoliberalism

So, it has been left to those who have come after the Enlightenment to create a social order that is rooted in political and economic equality as the foundation of a just society. While there is no formal name to this post-Enlightenment period that is now emerging, the most recent historical chapter that has been written by liberal-capitalism has been the problematic age of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism might be thought of as an extreme variant of state-regulated (or deregulated) capitalism. The idea of neoliberalism was first developed by the so-called "Chicago Boys." The Chicago Boys were a group of Chilean economists who received their Ph.D.'s in economics primarily from the University of Chicago and were trained by the neo-conservative economist Milton Friedman. They later played high-ranking roles as economic advisors in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Neoliberalism is essentially a two-pronged approach to political economy and consists of: (1) the reduction or elimination of government spending on social programs such as education, health care, and programs for the poor, and (2) the deregulation of private industry and the transferring of government services such as electricity, water, and oil into corporate hands. The purpose behind the system is to allow capital to move around the globe unhindered by the state in its never-ending pursuit of profits. Many times, this system of capital accumulation is reinforced by state power, including by a nation's military.

Neoliberalism (as is true with capitalism itself) places into motion the most basic law of wealth accumulation and poverty creation through a simple formula: the owning class pays the working class less than the value of the commodity or service that they produce . Even if there are different degrees of wealth distribution between companies and countries, there are no exceptions to the relationship between the owning class and the working class. The more capital the owning class takes for itself the less there is for everyone else. To not see this is to be awake but not see the sun. However, when the relationship between those that own and those that work is not taught in our schools and universities, revealed by our news media, nor whispered in the once hallowed institutions of our government then it is clear that a conspiracy of silence in understanding power has reached our culture. In so doing, our society has lost its ability to generate fundamental truths about itself from the very institutions that are supposed to provide them. Nevertheless, global capitalism (and one of its recent modifications-neoliberalism) with its opposing classes, remains the dominant economic system embraced or imposed upon nearly the whole of the world. Aside from its unequal distribution of class power, this system of capital accumulation has caused a whole series of national and planetary concerns. Consider just a few:


Responsible for Near Endless Wars Around the World

While many nations fight wars for one purpose or another, no nation behaves quite like the United States on the world stage. In examining the United States and its involvement in war, we can more clearly understand the forces at work within neoliberalism. The United States is the world's empire and its history makes it clear that war is very much a part of the American character. In fact, in its more than 240-year existence the US has been at war for more than 90 percent of the time. Since the end of World War II, the United States has engaged in more than one-hundred separate military "interventions" with more than thirty of them initiated after the turn of the twenty-first century. With none being formally "declared" as required by the Constitution, these often-brutal and long-lasting wars have resulted in the death and dislocation of millions of people around the world. It should not come to us as any surprise then, that from the millions of lives obliterated by the arithmetic of what are the ever-expanding American wars that the United States is now considered by a fairly wide margin, according to global public opinion polls, to be "the greatest threat to peace in the world today." [6]

Still, the massive size of the military, the military budget, and the reasons for military intervention across the planet are rarely questioned or investigated in any genuine way by the corporate press or discussed in any real detail by the United States government. In fact, the US enters one violent conflict after another with virtually no institutional debate, no declaration of war by congress, and virtually no understanding by the American people. Likewise, at almost no time whatsoever is the military budget placed into any meaningful context or even put into question by either the media or the US government. Indeed, the actual US military budget stands at some $1.2 trillion and is greater than all other 194 countries combined but is never even discussed by either the media or the United States government. [7] Rarely do the corporate press or the US government ever identify the hundreds of US corporations and industries located in any of the more than 150 countries where there are United States military forces. No real connection between capital extraction and the need for a military presence is presented, explored, or considered in the media and government or framed as a part of the larger economic system. Instead, questions about the US military in the world tend to be viewed through the prism of the "War on Terror," similarly to how military questions were once viewed through the viewpoint of "anti-Communism" or the Cold War.

Aside from the failings of government and media in explaining the causes for war, mainstream academia and international relations scholars will provide every answer under the sun why two countries go to war except for what is often the truth. The truth is that war is many times driven by a want by the powerful to take from the powerless. Or more specifically, in the case of the United States war on Iraq: the rich bribing the state to kill the poor and then steal from them . This is one of the most basic features of the political economy of neoliberalism. And, it was laid bare for anyone with eyes to see when US economic elites "influenced," through campaign contributions and lobbying dollars, the US ruling class to wage war on the Third World country of Iraq resulting in the deaths of at least one million Iraqi citizens so the oil industry might further increase its already enormous corporate profits. [8] In fact, these cultural thought leaders who often occupy prestigious chairs in our centers of higher education (e.g., Madeleine Albright of Georgetown and Larry Diamond and Condoleezza Rice of Stanford, to name just a few) regularly fail to come to this most obvious of all conclusions for multiple reasons. They do so because either they can't see it, don't want to believe that there are deeper systemic causes for war, out of concern for their own role in the "war crimes" against the targeted country, or out of fear of being labeled a heterodoxic thinker or scholar (or worse still, a Marxist) and as a result have their analysis brought into question by being identified as such.

Yet, the truth remains. And, the truth is that war is good business. Indeed, the provisions of goods and services to the military is a massive source of capital accumulation in the United States and is fundamental to the functioning of the nation's economy. In fact, it is not too much to say that the United States maintains a "permanent war-time economy" as the nation has been at continuous war since September 11, 2001 (if not from its inception) and the military is fueled by nearly every sector of the US economy. For sure, when we think specifically in terms of political economy and examine the top ten donors to the Democratic and Republican parties we see that every single donor comes from a sector or industry within the national economy that is directly tied to military spending, including (but not in rank order): (1) health, (2) communications and electronics, (3) energy and natural resources, (4) transportation, (5) agribusiness, (6) defense, (7) labor, (8) construction, (9) lawyers & lobbyists[9] and (10) finance.[10] Through their massive-sized donations, each industry ensures that it will receive contracts from the United States government including some of the most profitable ones that exist-the contracts for war. In filling their war contracts, one powerful and large-scale industrial center of our society after another more fully embeds itself in the military political economy of the United States and further deepens the nation's dependence on war to sustain the nation's economic system. Thus, again and again since the 1980s, the starting point of neoliberalism, we have watched the state reduce funding for the republic while expanding it for the empire-one of the most basic principles of neoliberalism.


Global Warming and Climate Change

The universe is fourteen billion years old. In it are some two trillion galaxies. One of those galaxies is our galaxy, the Milky Way. It contains at least one billion planets and, at minimum, the same number of stars. Nine billion of those planets are estimated to be in the "Goldilocks Zone"-meaning they are neither too far away nor too close to the star that they are orbiting to prevent life from developing. However, so far, the only planet that we know has life on it is our own-Earth. Of all fifty billion species that have existed on our planet, 99% are now extinct. Human beings have already walked the planet for some 200,000 years-100,000 years longer than the average species. Yet, with all of that knowledge at hand, human beings remain the only species to have ever planned their own destruction. Second only to the terrible power of nuclear weapons-there are now enough to kill everyone on Earth many times over-global warming and climate change are the most immediate long-term threat to the continued existence of the human race.

Global warming and climate change are a product of the Industrial Revolution which is itself a development of global capitalism. The industrialization of global society began just 200 years ago and was brought into existence to make the rich, richer still. It allowed for all kinds of goods and services to be produced at an ever-faster pace which translated into more profits and new markets for an emerging international owning class. In time, industrialization gave rise to powerful cross-country locomotives and the automobile industry which were fueled by coal and oil. As time passed, fossil fuels would come to heat, cool, and power our homes and workplaces.

However, the burning of oil and coal releases carbon dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere. An excess of CO2 in the atmosphere upsets the Earth's natural chemical balance and creates warmer global temperatures which in turn leads to climate change. In burning fossil fuels for a relatively short period of time, human beings have fashioned a state of affairs where the Earth now has more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any other time in the last three million years. [11] Yet, with the whole world already experiencing the harsh effects of global warming and climate change, the real concern is that it may, as the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking noted, become permanent. For certain, he writes that:

"The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect [and further heat the temperature of the Earth]." [12]

Whatever the case may be, the United Nations has concluded that all countries must take "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" to avoid increasing the Earth's temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by as earlier as 2030.[13] If not, then the world risks more extreme weather including more intense droughts, wildfires, floods, and food shortages impacting billions of people across the globe. With that call to action in the background, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) later explained that climate change and "the relentless pursuit of economic growth" [14] has created a situation where one million species (or one in eight species known to exist on Earth) are now faced with extinction. With the planet already moving into the sixth mass extinction period (or what is known as the "Holocene extinction"), many of these species will begin to disappear within decades if nothing is done to slow the increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. [15] Yet, how did we get into this situation in the first place? Through the non-stop pursuit of capital by capital, irrespective of its impact on the physical environment or the Earth's people.


Created A Massive-Sized and Expanding Global Poor

Neoliberalism and global capitalism have allowed those who own to accumulate wealth at heights almost never seen before in history. Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Ford, and Gates rank behind only a handful of emperors and kings (and one of the most brutal warlords in history in Genghis Khan) whose wealth has been unmatched in world history. As a consequence of this ongoing "Gilded Age" for the very rich, today 80 percent of the world's population, or more than six billion people, live on $10 or less a day, amounting to just $3,650 a year. While troubling enough, according to the anti-poverty organization Oxfam International (founded by Quakers and Oxford scholars) not only is the majority of the world poor but "seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased" from 1980 and 2012. [16] In fact, any humane definition of global poverty indicates that not only has economic inequality increased, but so too has the number of people who are poor grown in size as well.[17] Conversely, from 1980 through 2012, Oxfam found that, "the richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries" that the organization inspected[18] with this trend continuing right through 2018. Though rarely noted in the corporate press or discussed by almost any capitalist-government, if the richest 1 percent are getting richer, then someone else is getting poorer. In the United States and throughout the world, that would be almost everyone else. In fact, not only has poverty increased but it has become so extreme that in the richest country in the world today more than "five million people [are] living in Third World conditions" in the United States.[19] In other parts of the world, poverty has become so entrenched that some people have been forced to consider doing things that many of us would rather not imagine. For example, in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and in a country where 80 percent of the population already lives on $2 or less a day, some people have been left so far behind by the virtues of neoliberalism that they have, at times, turned to eating "mud-cookies" (a mix of dirt and water sunbaked on the cement) [20] to ward off their hunger. Yet, in spite of some Haitian's attempts not to starve, hunger is still the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined each year. [21]

Still, in 2014 it was almost shockingly reported that a mere eighty-five people possessed more wealth than the bottom half of the Earth's population, combined.[22] While a clear sign of massive wealth inequality and all of the problems that come with it, today, depending on whose numbers are correct, possibly as few as eight men control more wealth than the bottom half of the world combined[23] As the merciless logic of global capitalism continues to place all of the world's wealth into the hands of a few exceedingly rich individuals, neoliberalism's predictable end of also creating and further expanding a massive-sized global poor remains the present state and future trajectory of the world economy. Whatever the outcome, the increased ranks of the global poor as a consequence of the increased concentration of wealth into the hands of the few runs contrary to the common argument made by the ruling classes and the wealthy few the world over that all people are "better off" as global capitalism spreads around the entire planet. [24]


Narrowed Our Sources of Public Information

In a democracy, the news media is responsible for investigating public officials and political institutions to ensure that each is working on behalf of the people or, more generally, the "public good." The investigation of the political arena by the news media is to occur from a variety of independent and unconnected sources which are based upon a variety of ideological viewpoints. In the United States, the airwaves are supposed to be publicly owned which would allow for, at the very least, a not wholly corporate-based telling of the news. Yet, when we examine the American media, we find that this is not always the case.

As recently as 1983 fifty separate corporations owned 90 percent of all the United States' news media-print, TV, and radio. However, as neoliberalism concentrates economic power into the hands of fewer people, today just six large global corporations control 90 percent of everything that people read, watch, or listen to in the United States. Notably, four of the six media corporations are controlled by individuals who are billionaires, and three of the six companies are owned by just two people. By definition, then, the American news media does not include multiple diverse interests but is instead an oligopoly-a market that is controlled by a very small group of for-profit companies.

If the media is controlled by very wealthy members within the global elite, it is reasonable to ask whether or not the news media has an identifiable political and economic ideology. Liberal scholars regularly argue that there is no discernible politico-economic ideology of the news media, or that Democratic and Republican issues are given roughly the same attention in the media. However, this argument is undermined by the fact that mainstream news media focuses almost exclusively on conservative and liberal concerns. If the news media did not have some identifiable ideological value-system, then a whole range of individuals and issues and a whole series of political and economic questions would either be discussed in the corporate press or at the very least, not attacked, such as: the virtue of public ownership in all of its forms, the value of unions and collective bargaining for working people, the reality that the majority of left-leaning Third-party platforms align with the majority of the American people's interests, a thorough and highly critical critique of the exploitation of the Third World by international capital (including by the American owning class), and the nature and massive size of the US military and military spending, including a questioning of why US troops are stationed in more than 150 countries around the globe. Yet, this is not the case. Instead, the corporate press is either silent on each of these issues or is, in fact, hostile toward them.

For certain, it is not correct to say that the news media in the United States is unbiased or does not hold any political or economic ideology. In general, liberal scholars' argument that the mainstream media pays equal or almost equal attention to liberal and conservative concerns is likely correct. However, that misses the point. What is most alarmingly true is that the media ignores, downplays, or places a negative connotation on virtually any issue, person or idea that is in contradiction to the class interests of those that own the corporate media or criticizes the capitalist economic system itself. Instead, the corporate press overwhelmingly tends to see social reality in the United States-and around the world-through the eyes of the class that owns it.


Concentrated Political Power in the Hands of the Wealthy Few

Irrespective of the founders' intentions, today the United States is a plutocracy. Plutocracy is an Ancient Greek word that means: "a society ruled by the rich where wealth is valued over goodness." As wealth accumulates in any society, the owning class, unless politically prevented from doing so, will eventually come to shape state policy. As the state is a reflection of class power, they will do so not on behalf of the bonum populi (i.e., "good of the people") but instead on behalf of their own class interests. This is done in the United States by the wealthy few spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying dollars to "influence" the state. Known as bribery in other countries, this arrangement (made worse by "corporate-personhood" [25]) has allowed powerful American trusts and wealthy individuals to essentially purchase the state for their own use. If this were not the case then we would see a whole series of issues debated and resolved by the government in favor of the people and not the rich. For example, today the United States would provide free health care and a free kindergarten through graduate school education to each of its citizens. All American wars would be brought to an end and US troops would be recalled from their many locations around the world. People throughout the country would be paid a living wage and housing and day care would be provided affordably, if not free. But this is not the current state of affairs in the United States nor is it the reality of daily existence for an enormous majority of the world's people. In the US (and often times throughout the world) it is because of a longstanding class advantage by the rich even if it is not recognized as such.

In the United States, through their massive-sized campaign contributions and lobbying dollars, the wealthy few are able to produce policy outcomes that provide for immense-sized tax-payer provided bailouts for their already giant-sized banks. How big are the banks? The top ten financial institutions in the United States have combined assets that are greater than the total GDP of China which is second only to the US. The amount each bank uses for "political influence" amounts to only a tiny fraction of their total assets and is often the best money they will ever spend. So too is the owning class able to ensure huge tax breaks for their class [26] yet at the same time make it more difficult for the working class to be released from heavy financial burdens or file for bankruptcy. [27] Through their class rule, the rich have been able to make sure the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued for more than fifteen years even though the majority of the nation's people have been against them since less than two years after the start of each war. And, the wealthy few are able to ensure that healthcare remains private and highly lucrative for their class though70 percent of the country favors a state-funded healthcare system. [28] Thus, when we examine national policy in the United States it becomes quite clear where real class power resides-with the wealthy few.


In Sum: Neoliberalism & Future Generations

As today turns into tomorrow and future generations begin to write the history of our time, they may look at the physical world that has been ravaged by neoliberalism and unrestrained global capitalism and may point to Native American culture with its respect for the Earth and ask why it wasn't paid attention to more closely. Or upon considering the horrible conditions created by poverty, they may ask why we did not better follow the example left by Martin Luther King Jr. Or in thinking about the terrible destruction of war they might wonder why we didn't take John F. Kennedy's position about war more seriously when he said, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." Or to our horror they may have a more sympathetic view toward people like Ted Kaczynski and his critique of the "techno-industrial system" than the one that we currently possess.[29] In fact, in due time, as global capitalism and an ever-increasing technological-neoliberalism continues its stampede across the globe, creating great wealth but generating planetary-sized concerns, Kaczynski may well someday be viewed more as a modern-day prophet than a historical pariah. Whatever the case may be, capitalism marches on, with the rich and powerful continuing to provide every reason under the sun why the system that so richly benefits their class is the only one possible and is, irrespective of the evidence to the contrary, beneficial to all.


Consequences of Confronting the Rich & Powerful: The Case of Chile in the 1970s

Dating back to the Ancient Roman gladiator and slave Spartacus and continuing right up until the present day in countries such as Venezuela and Cuba, those that have opposed the rule of the rich and powerful have often paid a heavy price. They have opposed the class rule of the privileged few not out of greed but instead out of a want of ending the inequities and injustices that come with it. Dr. Salvador Allende and the nation of Chile are a case in point. One of the best and most thoughtful men to have ever graced the political stage, Allende tried to breathe life into a new conception of government and society in his country. After becoming the first democratically elected socialist president in the history of the world in 1970 he began to transition the Chilean economy, which was controlled by the international owning class, into a socialist economy that would be presided over by a democratic-socialist state and Chile's working class.

With more than one hundred US corporations in Chile at the time, key sectors within the United States' owning class stood to lose billions of dollars under a man and government that had every intention of nationalizing industries and corporations for the benefit of the Chilean people. Once in power he did exactly that. One of the largest and most profitable sectors brought under national control was the mostly US-owned copper industry. After expropriating Chile's mines from US corporations, Allende provided relatively little money in return. His argument for doing so was based on the American companies past exploitation of Chilean workers and the damage that they had done to the country. Allende's government also seized control of the utilities sector which was owned by American capital and nationalized US and internationally owned banks. Not stopping there, in its move toward a more equal society, Allende's government imposed heavy state regulation on or nationalized the iron, coal, and steel industries. And, if that was not enough for the owning class, he began to increase wages for workers and impose price freezes on goods and services throughout the country. Finally, Allende's government focused on an agrarian reform program not unlike the one undertaken by Fidel Castro in Cuba. [30] A program that was popular in Latin America at the time for its ability to redistribute wealth amongst a nation's poor and unpopular in the United States for the same reason.

By early September of 1973 the Chilean oligarchs and key members within the American ruling class had enough. Daring to call themselves patriots, and with the full support of the United States government and many of Chile's rich, a clique of Chilean generals and admirals conspired to overthrow the Allende government. The events that followed made up one of the most tragic chapter's written about democracy during the twentieth century. Indeed, the future military junta that was now forming in close alliance with the United States government ordered the Chilean Air Force to bomb the presidential palace, La Moneda-Chile's White House-with Allende and members of his government still inside. In his final hours, Allende chose to end his own life (for some, rather valiantly) instead of falling into the hands of what would become the murderous General Augusto Pinochet regime. After the coup and Allende's death, and fully reinforced by the United States government, the military junta allowed Chile's rich and the American owning class to regain control of industries and factories that had been nationalized by Chilean workers and the state just a few years earlier.

Later, the Pinochet military dictatorship would go on to torture and "disappear" (i.e., murder and vanish from the face of the Earth) thousands of Chilean citizens from 1973 to 1990 who were considered to be opponents of the regime or supporters of Allende. This again was done with the full support of key members of the US ruling class. [31] In time and with the Chicago Boys fully entrenched in Pinochet's government, any chance of a return to a working-class republic disappeared from Chile's foreseeable future as did any sign of democracy for almost two decades. In destroying this once promising socialist-democracy, the US and Chilean owning class made it clear that when their class power was threatened, they would use violence and unconstitutional measures to restore their class privilege atop the social order of Chile. While Pinochet's rule eventually came to an end and he was later indicted for hundreds of human rights violations (though he was likely guilty of thousands more), his dark legacy remains that of introducing "the gun" into Chilean politics to resolve the class conflicts that are so elementary to the system of capitalism and capital accumulation on behalf of the rich and powerful.

Yet, the case of Chile is just one example of the same brutal history lesson taught many times over by the United States government in the past 75 years. As popular movements and government leaders who have attempted to nationalize their country's resources, redistribute wealth, or keep US multinational corporations from exploiting their nation's riches have so bitterly learned, they have often been the target of US-backed assassinations and government overthrows. In fact, since 1945, the United States (via the CIA) has assassinated, attempted to assassinate, or played a role in the assassination of at least fifty foreign leaders or heads of state and tried to overthrow, through a variety of means, at least thirty separate foreign governments. [32] In spite of its public pronouncements to the contrary of "spreading" democracy" or "nation-building," not one time since 1945 has the United States government worked to protect a democratic government, improve the living conditions of the poor or working class, or assist a popular movement abroad. Instead, each time the US has "intervened" in a nation's affairs since the end of World War II it has been done to support or enhance the class position of a very specific class.


An American Caligula and a Troubled Republic: When the Rich Rule

The long and violent history of US involvement all around the world is a legacy that we will leave to future generations. In fact, they may well one day think of the US troops spread all around the globe, the ongoing deadly wars, the seemingly non-stop social violence throughout the country, the ravenous greed of the rich, and an increasingly corrupt government that is led by a man that resembles the Roman emperor Caligula (12 AD-34 AD) and view this time in history as the beginning of the end of the American republic. Like children wandering through the ruins of their ancestors and confronted with the vicious truth of a powerful empire that they have inherited, they may well wonder why those who came before them seem to have brought back into existence some of the darkest days of the Roman Empire.

In fact, the parallels between Rome under Caligula and the United States under the current American president might be quite striking for them. The historical record is in almost complete agreement that Caligula was insane, self-obsessed, cruel, a tyrant, and a sexual deviant. Or as Anthony Barrett writes, he was a "self-indulgent and unpredictable ruler devoid of any sense of moral responsibility. Totally unsuited to the task of governing, without training and with little talent for administration." [33] While his debased personality traits likely would have made him noteworthy in Roman history, his actual rule as emperor brought about or exacerbated a whole series of problems that Rome was already facing. In just four years, he further undermined the Roman notion of republican government and the rule of law and made it even more remote that this once promising city-state would ever return to its previous formulation as a republic.

Caligula's time in power included not only waging costly wars but also sending Roman troops on meaningless military excursions. He worked to increase the political power of the emperor to almost unlimited degrees and used state funds to build grand-scale and self-aggrandizing "public-works" projects. Never shy to enhance his own wealth and prestige, while emperor Caligula continued to build expensive residences for himself with it not always being clear if the money being spent came from the state or himself. After squandering much of Rome's money, Caligula tried to replenish the republic's treasury through a series of unpopular tax measures and legally doubtful and dishonest expropriations. With Rome knocked askew from his unscrupulous rule, Caligula announced that he was going to Egypt to be worshipped as a living god. After already making his horse a priest, this decision was apparently one step too far for the Roman elite. His announcement led to an assemblage of murderous-minded men to coalesce around him resulting in his assassination by the Pretorian Guard-the very men assigned to protect him. Though removed from the political scene, the damage Caligula had done to Ancient Rome cast a dark shadow over the once great city-state long after his death. Today, his rule echoes down through history as an example of the toxic mix of power and madness.

Yet when we think of the United States and consider the actions of the man leading the republic and empire today can we really conclude that the United States is so different than Rome was under Caligula? The American president too has debased personality traits, is self-obsessed, cruel (and ignorant), a sexual deviant, amoral, and appears to be of an unsound mind. With respect to his governing style, the president has pushed the limits of power of his once venerated office to bounds never before seen in American history and not intended by the framers of the Constitution. He has openly violated the Constitution and the rule of law as well as disrespected the republican principle of a separation of powers by trying to fund a "public works" project with money that has not been approved for it by congress and by ruling through his constitutionally questionable decrees. In so doing, he has undermined the very foundation of American government.

With a military already unrivaled in world history, he has further turned plowshares into swords by increasing the size of the military budget and then sent American troops on a meaningless military expedition to the US-Mexico border. In fact, some of his actions are more reminiscent of the grim character Fames in the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid than they are of Caligula. Fames-or "Hunger"-loitered in front of the "Gates of Hell" urging people to commit crimes. [34] Yet in the United States, instead of loitering as the embodiment of hunger, the American president has given massive tax-cuts to the rich (including to himself and his family) while he and his party have made deep cuts to important social programs for the people and the poor. He has done this all the while requiring hundreds of thousands of federal employees to work without pay. Then the president and his wealthy cast of cabinet members wonder mindlessly why some federal employees can't "make ends meet" by simply taking out a loan, borrowing from their local grocery store, or relying on a food bank. Like a thief for the rich (and not unlike Fames), he tempts the American people to become like a modern-day Jean Valjean, an otherwise honest man who resorts to stealing bread so he might continue to live.

Whatever the case may be, perhaps worse than his debased personality traits and morally questionable policies, the current American president has tried to murdered Truth. In fact, "this man of the rich" (yet out for himself) has told more than 10,000 lies in just over two and one-half years. If there is such a thing as a national tragedy then it will be if he is successful in this pursuit. While obvious to many, it seems that nearly one half of our citizens, and many of them working class, seem not to notice or care about his dishonesty. Or worst of all, they have become like a collective Pontius Pilate-all quietly asking themselves, "What is truth?" as they and the Republican Party continue to support the "Father of Lies" irrespective of his daily dishonest, and many times, disrespectful public pronouncements. In reality, if the Republican Party had an ounce of self-respect, they would have voted to impeach the president the first day he took office for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. With interests in over a thousand businesses in more than one hundred countries when he took office, today it is impossible to know if he is working on behalf of the United States or on behalf of himself. But they did not. Now, too often in ruling unchecked it is hard not to read the daily newspapers about one of the president's delusions or lies and not wonder how far away his mind is from considering if not he too should be worshipped as a living-god, much like Caligula once did. If Caligula's rule was characterized by chaos and absurdity then minimally we too have moved to the reductio ad absurdum (i.e., reduction to the absurd) or the "Age of the Absurd" when, in addition to the above, a man who presides over the most powerful nation in the history of the world has also…

- 24 women accuse him of sexual assault

- Taken the side of two foreign leaders who are enemies of American democracy

- 100 plus documented instances of contact with a foreign power during his election

- Chronically denied the scientifically proven reality of global warming and climate change

- 15 plus ongoing investigations against him involving his businesses and politics

- 10 plus documented instances of what appear to be "obstruction of justice"

- Continued multiple "undeclared" wars abroad

yet, the Democratic Party, which now controls the House of Representatives and was largely elected in response to the policies and personality of the current president will not even begin impeachment proceedings against him in that chamber. To their shame and ours, our children will likely only shake their heads and wonder why we didn't do anything. They will be right to do so and we will have no excuse. For in the final analysis, just as the "disaster that followed" the elevation of Caligula to the highest seat of power in Rome "was inevitable and of the Romans' own making" so too has the placement of the current American president in the most powerful seat in the world been done with the electoral blessings of the American people. [35]


Conclusion: Moving Toward a Better Tomorrow

In a just society Malcolm X would have been a senator and Martin Luther King Jr. would have been president. Instead, they were killed. Yet, their deaths reveal a basic truth about historical progress: "History moves slowly and it is unkind to those who try to make it move any faster than it is ready to move." However, today, the greed of the rich and the injustices visited on the people of the world by the powerful require us tomove history. The major task facing the world's people today is to change the nature of the political economy of the global system. While plutocrats never go easy, [36] to move the state and the world's economy away from the rich and powerful, the world's people only need to begin with their refusal to acquiesce to any social order other than one that is founded in true equality and justice. The whole notion of one person being more equal than another has "come and gone" in the world of political ideas. It died in political philosophy during the Enlightenment. Today, for an ever-growing number of people around the world, the notion of economic inequality as a worthwhile, much less moral, economic doctrine has died out as well. Thus, for more and more people around the world, any unequal social arrangement should only exist on the pages of history.

Once the world's people refuse to bow down to the rich and powerful, the only thing this hour in history needs is the simplest of all things-the Truth. If patience is the burden of thoughtful people, then thoughtful people need to patiently shine a light on the truth of the world. In doing so, it will be possible to bring forth the people and ideas that are needed to make a better tomorrow. In fact, the people and ideas that are needed are already emerging today. For example, in the United States, reparations for African Americans to address the cruel legacy of slavery are now being talked about by every major Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential election. No longer can that atrocity and its many shocking brutalities be ignored. It was a "deal with the devil" that our founding fathers made and one in which the country would eventually reap a bitter harvest (i.e., the Civil War). Today, the long, dark shadow cast by slavery continues to haunt our nation's very soul. For many, a nationwide settlement of that issue is long past due.

"Economic rights" are now being discussed as human rights and merely as a continuation of the New Deal. Today, Establishment Democrats are quite removed from Franklin D. Roosevelt's conception of a "good society" and a return to his politics would be a step in the right direction for everyone in the country, including the rich. Economic rights for the people and the poor would prevent the rich from snatching up too much of the nation's wealth which could lead to social unrest and a diminishing of their class power to proportions that they may not be prepared to accept. Progressive lawmakers and people throughout the United States are taking global warming and climate change more seriously than at any time in the past. A threat to all the world's people, it is one of the most significant issues that our children will face. And, while congress will not move toward impeach of the president (for the time being anyway) there are right now some young, thoughtful women of color in congress that are very much progressive thinkers that seem to have the good of the nation and world in mind as they work within the halls of power in Washington D.C.

Outside of the United States, progressive movements in Europe are confronting a rising tide of extreme right-wing nationalism that pretends to be a kind of stern but still acceptable populism. Not only are these far-right politics on the move in Europe but so too in countries such as the Philippines which is led by an outright murderer and Brazil which is overseen by a neo-fascist. Still, popular movements have made historical strides. For instance, in the most recent European Parliament elections, the Green Party in Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, England, Wales, Portugal, and Belgium won high seat totals with multiple countries seeing the Green Party finish in second place. In fact, according to public opinion polls, in Germany, the Green Party is the most popular party in the whole country. [37] Other forward-looking individuals and groups have created international organizations to advance the concerns of all people of the world. One of those groups, the Progressive International, was specifically created to "transform the global order" and create "global justice" on an international scale. [38] At the same time, however, progressive nations such as Cuba and Venezuela are having their national sovereignty openly disrespected by much of the West and outright threatened with violence by the United States. One wonders how a country such as Cuba, which provides free education kindergarten through graduate school, free health care, and free food and housing to each of its citizens, is a threat to anyone. The fact of the matter is that it is not. Instead, because Cuba and Venezuela have the courage to control their own resources and have chosen to bow down to no one, they are targeted for harassment and destruction by the global ruling classes and the wealthy few.

Whatever the outcome of world history, the present moment in the American experience likely will be remembered as a troubled time. A period where the future of our nation may well hang in the balance. Only time will tell but there is no mistaking that in the last few years there has been a nastiness in the air. A graceless age, when a stupidity has run nearly unconstrained over our republic. In fact, if it is not the many bloody and unconstitutional wars that will come to symbolize our times, then it may just well be possibly the saddest incident to have occurred during this time. That was the day a two-year old girl was put on trial alone. All by herself, she wept heart-breaking but ultimately bitter tears in front of a judge to answer for her crime of coming to the United States-the land of the "tired, the poor, [and] the huddled masses"-to escape poverty and violence in her own. [39] A dream that was once offered to the world but has become a nightmare for an increasing number of people who have acted on the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

In empathetic wonderment, our children might look back and ask us, "Why did any of this happen?" Shuffling our feet, we know we will have no good answer for them. But, possibly the only response that we should give them is that all of this occurred because we and our political leaders forgot one of the most important teachings that Christ ever gave us and one that the American president never bothered to learn: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."[40] Christ offered us a world without suffering. We rejected it. With it now clear to them that we had lost our way, our children may once again turn to Ancient Rome to try to understand our times. In looking back, they may well recall the words of the great Roman orator Cicero. Though he was speaking of Ancient Rome, our children may just as well conclude that he was speaking about us when he said, "You see, the Republic, the Senate, dignity dwelt in none of us."[41]



About the Author

Jeremy Cloward, Ph.D. is a political science professor and author living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has taught at the junior college and university level for the past 13 years and is the author of three books and multiple articles that have been published in theOakland Post, the Hampton Institute, withSocialist WorkerProject Censored, and the East Bay Times. His college-level American Politics textbook, Class Power and the Political Economy of the American Political System , is now in its second edition and has been endorsed by the progressive author Michael Parenti, the director of Project Censored, Mickey Huff, and the professor and former central committee member of the Black Panther Party, Phyllis Jackson. The book is currently being marketed to a national audience of political science professors throughout the country. In addition, Dr. Cloward has run for public office on three separate occasions (Congress 2009, 2010, and City Council 2012) and has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including FOX and the Pacifica Radio Network (KPFA). Today, he remains involved in the politics of peace, justice, and equality for all. His website is located at: https://www.jeremycloward.org/.



Notes

[1] For a detailed list of all US wars and interventions abroad see: William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004).

[2] During the American Civil War, the Confederate Congress passed the so-called "Twenty-Negro Law" as a part of the Second Conscription Act of 1862 which exempted from military service any white man who owned twenty or more slaves on a Confederate planation or who owned two plantations within five miles of each other.

[3] See the discussion about private property and government in James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 244.

[4] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), see for example pg. II, Section 3.

[5] See reference to the quote in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 72.

[6] Eric Zuesse, "Polls: U.S. Is 'The Greatest Threat to Peace in the World Today,'" Global Research, August 9, 2017, https://www.globalresearch.ca/polls-u-s-is-the-greatest-threat-to-peace-in-the-world-today/5603342 .

[7] The United States "base budget" of $700 billion does not include other military spending that clearly involves the military such as appropriations for nuclear weapons, space defense, homeland security, and supplemental spending for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just a few.

[8] For a full discussion of the political economy of the US war on Iraq, who drove the war, and who benefited from the it see Chapter 6 in my Class Power and the Political Economy of the American Political System (Redding, CA: BVT Publishing, 2018).

[9] See for example OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, "Ranked Sectors: 2014" OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYear=2014 and OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, "Sector Totals, 2013-2014" OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/ . Note: similar results are located in the top Campaign Contributors to Congress by Sector (2013-2014).

[10] Thomas Jefferson once somewhat famously wrote, "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." Whether this is true or not depends on one's perspective. However, what is true is that private banks do have the power to help fund governments that, in turn, can fund standing armies. Standing armies can then open markets for finance capital (and capital, in general) to invest in newly opened markets abroad, which allows corporate interests to accumulate more capital to, among other things, further finance government. This, of course, leads to additional markets being opened by the state in a never-ending cycle of private capital funding the state so the state can open markets and help private capital exploit land, labor, and resources at home and abroad.

[11] Yale Environment 360, "CO2 Concentrations Hit Highest Levels in 3 Million Years," Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, May 14, 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/digest/co2-concentrations-hit-highest-levels-in-3-million-years .

[12] Stephen Hawking, Interview, ABC News, August 16, 2006.

[13] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments," The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, October 8, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/ .

[14] Aljazeera, One million species to go extinct 'within decades,' Aljazeera, May 6, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/million-species-extinct-decades-190506130910133.html .

[15] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), "Media Release: Nature's Dangerous Decline 'Unprecedented'; Species Extinction Rates 'Accelerating'," IPBES | Science and policy for people and nature, April/May 2019, https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment .

[16] OXFAM Briefing Paper, "WORKING FOR THE FEW: Political capture and economic inequality," OXFAM, January 20, 2014, http://templatelab.com/working-for-the-few-research/

[17] Jason Hickel, "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn't be more wrong," The Guardian, January 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal .

[18] OXFAM Briefing Paper, "WORKING FOR THE FEW: Political capture and economic inequality."

[19] United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner, "'Contempt for the poor in US drives cruel policies,' UN expert says," United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner , June 4, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23172&LangID=E .

[20] For example, see Associated Press, "Haiti's poor resort to eating mud as prices rise," NBCNEWS.com, January 29, 2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22902512/#.Uw0iGc7wqzw .

[21] The World Food Programme, "What Causes Hunger?," The World Food Programme, November 5, 2013, https://www.wfp.org/stories/what-causes-hunger .

[22] Michael Parenti, "85 Billionaires and the Better Half," Commons Dreams, February 18, 2014, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/02/18/85-billionaires-and-better-half .

[23] See for example: OXFAM International, "Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world," OXFAM International, January 16, 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world .

[24] See for example: Bill and Melinda Gates, "Three Myths on the World's Poor: Bill and Melinda Gates call foreign aid a phenomenal investment that's transforming the world," Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304149404579324530112590864 .

[25] Corporate personhood, a "legal fiction" created over time by the Supreme Court, has made it so corporations are viewed as "people" in the eyes of the law. In so doing, corporations now have the same rights under the law and Constitution as any other citizen. One of those rights is the right to a freedom of speech. The Court, importantly, has held that the freedom of speech includes the right to "speak" with money in support of political campaigns. The most serious consequence of that conclusion is that corporations can now give unlimited amounts of money to political candidates for their campaigns and being allowed to do so because of the 1st Amendment's free speech clause.

[26] For example, the 107 Congress (2001-2003) passed Public Law 107-16: The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and Public Law 108-27: The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 which were a group of tax reductions known as the "Bush-era tax cuts" for the rich and were extended by President Obama. While the tax breaks lowered federal income tax rates for all income earners, they also lowered capital gains taxes and the tax rate on dividends, prevented the elimination of personal exemptions for higher-income taxpayers, prevented the elimination of itemized deductions, and eliminated the estate tax, - all of which were a financial boon to the wealthiest members of US society. Later, President Trump signed off on his own tax breaks for the rich that resulted in the wealthiest 1 percent of the country receiving $1.9 trillion in tax cuts over a ten-year time period.

[27] For instance, Public Law 109-8: The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act passed during the 109th Congress (2005-2007) made it more difficult for the vast majority of the American people to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 7.

[28] Letitia Stein, Susan Cornwell, and Joseph Tanfani, "Inside the progressive movement roiling the Democratic Party," Reuters Investigates, August 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-progressives/ .

[29] While Kaczynski's crimes are difficult to excuse under almost any decent line of thought, his logic justifying his actions are very difficult to refute. His writings analyzing global society, whether agreed with or not, are illustrative of a truly sharp mind at work. For examples of his thought, see: Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2010) and Theodore John Kaczynski, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (Scottsdale, AZ: Fitch & Madison Publishers, 2015).

[30] For an excellent film documentary of the Allende government filmed in the lead up to his downfall which chronicles the Chilean working class's movement toward control of the means of production and political power see Patricio Guzman's, The Battle of Chile (Icarus Films, 2009), DVD.

[31] For the best discussion of the Pinochet Regime and its support by the United States government see Peter Kornbluh's, The Pincohet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York, NY: The New Press, 2003).

[32] For a complete listing of assassinations and assassination attempts by the CIA, see Appendix III in Blum, Killing Hope, 463-464.

[33] This quote is taken from the back flap of Anthony A. Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)

[34] For the whole poem see Virgil, The Aeneid trans. David West (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990).

[35] Barrett, Caligula: The Corruption of Power, back flap.

[36] For example, see the historical instances of the slave Spartacus leading a slave rebellion against the Roman Republic (73-71 BC); Haitian slaves rising up against their colonial masters during the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804); the working class of France overturning the aristocracy during the French Revolution (1789-1799); workers in Russia overthrowing and executing the fabulously wealthy and autocratic tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, during the Russian Revolution (1917); the movement for Irish statehood organized and led by Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera which included their war for independence against the British (1919-1921); the Cuban people pushing the corrupt US-backed military dictator Bautista from power during the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959); or attempts by the American people to create a more just and equal society throughout their history such as those attempts made by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s.

[37] Jochen Bittner, "The Greens Are Germany's Leading Political Party. Wait, What?," The New York Times, June 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/greens-party-germany.html .

[38] See The Progressive International: A Grassroots Movement for Global Justice website located at: https://www.progressive-international.org/ .

[39] Vivian Yee and Miriam Jordan, "Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A Two Year Old's Day in Court," The New York Times, October 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/migrant-children-family-separation-court.html .

[40] Mark 12:30-31

[41] As quoted by Joaquim Fest in his excellent study of Adolf Hitler, entitled Hitler (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1973).

How Did Capitalists Get So Rich?: On the Marriage Between Capitalism and Government

By James Leach

It is difficult to know what to say to the smug self-satisfaction of the business class who gaze upon the enormous wealth of their country, and then pat their back for the capitalist utopia they have built. In critical analyses of capitalism, considerable weight is put on examining the contradictions in the modes of exchange, the formation of crises, and the tension between labour and capital. But I want to address how capitalism developed, and how the considerable wealth of developed nations was produced, as well as how it became so acutely concentrated within a few pockets. As Marx asks in Wages, Prices and Profit, "how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence… and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains?"


"Primitive Accumulation": Enclosures and Erasing the Commons

There is no concrete date which we can mark as the first day of capitalism, or the last day of feudalism, since its development was somewhat gradual. The results of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, for example, saw movements away from feudal society and towards capitalist society, but it was not until two centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, where capitalism truly flourished. However, a significant policy which marked a shift towards the dominance of private property is the agricultural enclosures. This involved the fencing of farmland into private property, mostly within the hands of large, propertied landowners. Before this, agricultural labourers either worked on common land within their village, or they were peasants working for a local lord. A portion of the labourer's produce would be seized by the lord as a tax and the labourers would then sell what was left in local markets. Enclosures saw the new dominance of wage labour, the separation of agricultural workers between themselves and their means of production, the formation of the first labour market, and of the first proletariat.

Before enclosures, common land was able to significantly rival wage labour. Jane Humphries essay Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women, published in the Journal of Economic History, explores the results of enclosures, as well as the significance of common land. Humphries finds that the family possession of a single cow on common land could "remain significant compared with landowner's wages" and on an annual basis "the comparison would probably be even more favourable to cowkeeping." Keeping cows communally also had other benefits. The by-product of rearing cows was goods such as skim-milk, which provided a 'gratifying addition to the monotonous diet of the adult farm workers', and was crucial to the healthy development of the labourer's children. However, after enclosures, due to high rents and resistance from farmers, common cowkeeping virtually vanished, and labourers could not often afford to buy milk.

Now that the efficiency of "communing" has been briefly established, to what extent did this communal lifestyle exist? Peter Linebaugh's exceptional text Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance is instrumental in answering these questions. Linebaugh documents the work of the seventeenth century statistician Gregory King, who estimated that were was "twenty million acres and pasture, meadow, forest, heath, moor, mountain, and barren land in a country of thirty-seven million acres', Linebaugh continues to say that 'even if common rights were exercised in only half of these, it means that in 1688 one quarter of the total area of England and Wales was common land.' Such an enormous measure of common land would have been extremely valuable to agricultural workers. Naturally, enclosures reversed this. 'Between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million areas of land… to the politically dominant land owners.' It does not take a genius to work out the effects on the newly formed working class. Reliance on Poor Relief went up, there was a poverty crisis in the eighteenth century, and as Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis simply puts: 'More than 70 percent of the peasants were thrown out of their houses and off their ancestral lands. It was devastating, brutal, cruel and… highly effective.' E.P Thompson called enclosures a plain case of class robbery.

It is difficult, however, to drill into the minds of a global population that they do not own much besides their labour power. The Indonesian novelist Promoedya Ananta Toer reported on the response from native Indonesians to enclosures in his memoirs: 'The native people had no word for "fence"- the concept was completely foreign to their culture. They didn't recognise such manmade limitations on land-use rights.' How could such a disaster for the global population not be overthrown immediately? Unfortunately, the rich and powerful have 'experts in legitimation', to use Antonio Gramsci's words. Garret Hardin's text The Tragedy of the Commons sought to justify enclosures. Hardin's thesis appears rational. He suggests that the commoners, in their simultaneous desire to profit as much as possible from the land, and the un-fettered access to land, would bring 'ruin to all.' Hardin's misanthropy is de-bunked with plain historical fact by Linebaugh: '… the commons is always governed… [an] officer elected by the commoners will impound that cow, or will fine that greedy shepherd who puts more than his share onto the commons.'


Imperialism

The consequences of imperialism are, and always have been, deeply lodged within the cognitive dissonance of the body politic. For example, it takes the most basic logic to recognise that capitalism developed alongside Transatlantic slavery, and it takes little extra effort to make the connection between them, yet this line of reasoning is often left un-pursued.

Pre- Civil War America is often seen as split between the free-market north and the plantation complex of the south. They were, however, inextricably linked. Forbes, a popular and prestigious business magazine, ran an interesting article on the subject, in relation to Sven Beckert's book Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. It turns out, in contrast to popular fantasy, that the capitalists of the American north were crucial in keeping slavery alive, and, of course, it was crucial to their development. The slave economy effected the north with 'plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities…' The slave production of cotton 'offered a reason for entrepreneurs and investors to build manufactories… thereby connecting… Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier…' The latter point is particularly poignant. The Industrial Revolution ushered capitalism into a golden age where it could stand with two feet on a fertile ground of free trade accompanied with low tariffs (a subject which I will later address). The swollen shadow which shades the conscience of capitalism, of course, is the fact that it required the possession of human beings to help stimulate its progression. This can not be understated, since, for the first six decades of the 19th Century, raw cotton amounted to more than half of the nation's exports.

It would be tough to go through the entire history of modern imperialism to weigh its effects and thus measure the arms which propped up capitalist development, because there are simply too many cases. But it is worth addressing the very land that is now the 'United States of America'. It goes without saying that before European colonists arrived, there was a Native population who organised themselves locally and communally. It also goes without saying that this way of life has been mostly exterminated with state violence and the commodification of land. In 1845, California was part of Mexico. How did this change? Imperialism. Back in those days, the mainstream press could be more honest about the practices of the state. An article by the Washington Union said: 'Let the measure of annexation be accomplished… For who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the Wes? The road to California will be open to us.' In the 19th Century, the establishment did not have to wax lyrical with tales of 'democracy'. There is surely no questioning that such actions are inhuman; they create 'the wretched of the earth', to use Franz Fanon's turn of phrase. But what is the motive? It is rare for humans to be motivated by sheer violence. There must be a reward to legitimize violence. In the case of the United States' invasion of Mexico in 1847, the reward was the rich natural resources of California. Historian Howard Zinn, in his seminal text A People's History of the United States, quotes the Illinois State Register in 1846:

Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance?... myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its riches and inviting prairie's; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.

This quote goes some way to explain how much the expansionist ethic of the American government meant to slave-owning economy of the south.

We need not go as far back as the 19th Century to look for examples of state force providing for the economy of a nation state. War has always been profitable. The neo-imperial oil wars of the 20 th and 21st Century have meant that the U.S and Britain have had cheap access to oil. Given that state force has brought this about, it has nothing to do with free trade.


Anything but Free Trade, In the Name of Capitalism

If we only pay attention to the dictates of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other free-market enthusiasts, we can be easily fooled that (with a few nuances), the un-rivalled wealth of the modern superpowers is owed to its policies of free markets and trade. If we look at economic history plainly, however, we find remarkably different results. Ha- Joon- Chang's tour-de-force Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective , is a good place to start in studying what policies truly led to economic development.

Chang begins by invoking Friedrich List, the 19th Century German economist who fathered the 'infant industry promotion' theory, which proposed that budding industries require state protection from competitive markets which were dominated by experienced and long-standing manufacturing countries. List, in his albeit tediously named 'The National System of Political Economy' is important. He finds that Britain was 'the first country to perfect the art of infant industry promotion' because

[the monarchies of Britain] perceived that their newly established native manufactures could never hope to succeed in free competition with the old and long-established manufactures of foreigners… Hence, they sought, by a system of restrictions, privileges, and encouragements, to transplant to their native soil the wealth, the talents, and the spirit of enterprise of foreigners.

Chang then systematically goes through the historical development of almost every highly-developed nation, starting with Britain, 'the intellectual fountain of the modern laissez-faire doctrines…' The fourteenth century monarch Edward III is known for being the Brit to first actively start developing British wool production. His tactic was to ban imports of raw wool, centralise its trade and bring in Flemish weavers (he also only worse English cloth, to set an example). Naturally, through the most anti- free trade policies possible, Britain became the dominant exporter of wool. It was a hundred years after Henry VIII's import substitution policies of 1489 that Britain decided to be competitive in a market, which consequently drove the industries of the previously dominant Low Countries into the ground.

As already stated, the Industrial Revolution formed the blueprint for un-fettered capitalism. But how was this blueprint written? Britain had 'very high tariffs on manufacturing products as late as the 1820's, some two generations after the start of its Industrial Revolution, and when it was significantly ahead of its competitor nations in technological terms.' As well as tariff protection, Britain felt that for its businesses to develop, it needed to ban the imports of superior products from the colonies, in order for its own industries to remain economically viable. In 1700, for example, Britain banned the import of Indian cotton products, leading to the decline of the Indian cotton industry. It was then totally destroyed by the 'ending of the East India Company's monopoly in international trade in 1813.' Clearly, the economic supremacy of Britain in the 19th Century was not predicated on free trade. There was, however, developing pressure from the business community for free trade, once they had acquired enough wealth from protectionist policies to be competitive in global markets. By the 1850's, considerable steps (such as the eradication of tariffs) set in motion a liberalised capitalist economy. This did not last long. 'By the 1880's, some hard-pressed British manufacturers were asking for protection.' However, the true move away from free trade occurred in 1932, when the manufacturing advantage of Germany of the USA demanded protectionism from Britain.


Conclusion

What can be seen is that there have been gigantic impediments to true laissez-faire economics. These impediments have taken numerous forms: violence, colonialism, protectionism etc. Today, the impediments are slightly different. Enormous taxpayer subsidies to the corporate sector, for example, turn free-markets from fact into fantasy. The state ghosted every step capitalism took; their relationship is fascinating. Capitalism and the state are the main actors in a Sophoclean tragedy in which capitalism cannot function with or without the state. On the one hand, capitalism has considerably relied on the state for the conditions of its development, may that be enclosures, access to the captive markets of colonies, tariff protection, or plain violence to silence the rebelling masses. On the other hand, centralised government can be a leech on the efficiency of business. It has the cheek to demand

for taxes, and occasionally it represents 'we the people', and the interests of 'the people' are at odds with the interests of the capitalists. The government is often accused of being a threat to the freedom of the capitalist class, but history has shown that the latter needs the former to protect its interests. It is within this tragic comedy that we have lived since the origin of capitalism, and that we continue to live in today.

Panama Papers: Capitalism Working Well for Obscenely Rich

By John Passant

The Panama Papers show us, once again, that capitalism is a system of absolute greed. It is a system where capitalist governments help their mates to hide their income and wealth while all the time businesses pretend they are paying their "fair share" of tax.

The 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca contain details of the 14,000 clients of the Panama headquartered company and the 220,000 shell companies it has set up for them in tax havens around the globe.

Why tax havens? Not only do these countries have no or low tax rates they also have secrecy provisions which protect the income and assets of wealthy individuals and companies from the prying eyes of state bodies like tax offices and company regulators.

Shell companies mean that the ostensible owners of the companies are often front men and women for the real owners or are companies whose ultimate owners are untraceable. One senior tax officer many years ago summed up tax havens for me when he said they kill the paper trail.

Take Wilson Security here in Australia for example. It runs the "security" on Australia's asylum seeker and refugee gulags, Manus Island and Nauru. It is owned by Wilson Offshore Group Holdings (BVI) Limited, a British Virgin Islands company set up by Mossack Fonseca to protect the true identity of the owners from any governmental scrutiny.

Thomas Kwok, one of those true owners, is in jail for fraud in Hong Kong. The other, his brother Raymond Kwok, was acquitted of similar charges. They had resigned as the directors of Wilson Offshore Group Holdings (BVI) Limited shortly after the charges were laid. Two companies, Winsome Sky and Harmony Core, replaced them as directors. The Panama Papers show the brothers control those two companies.

The reason for these arrangements? Wilson Security would not have won Australian government contracts if it knew that one of the real owners was in jail for fraud.

By the way, Wilson Security also supplies the guards for various government bodies, including the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

It is not just Wilson Security. The ATO is investigating 800 Australian entities named in the leaked documents. The Panama Papers refer for example to Australian banks and BHP Billiton. Banks are involved because you have to get the money out of your jurisdiction and into the tax havens, often via more reputable tax haven countries that supposedly aren't, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, The Netherlands or Luxembourg.


Ripples

Iceland's Prime Minister, in the face of big demonstrations, has gone on indefinite leave (resigned) after it was revealed his wife held shares through a shell company in the very banks her husband was negotiating a bail out with. UK Prime Minister David Cameron inherited wealth from his Dad whose Panama shell companies made tax free money for 30 years.

Australia's current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, one of Australia's richest men, has what appear to be high earning investments in or through the Cayman Islands. He used to have an investment in a vulture fund (a hedge fund that buys distressed debt) based in the Cayman Islands. He sold out of that and bought into some hedge funds (unregulated funds that long and short the assets they hold).

The point here is not whether they are legitimate or not or that the investors pay their "correct" amount of tax. It is that they are part of the game the rich and powerful play to increase their individual wealth and that that game is rigged in their favour by governments too afraid to crack down on "legitimate" investments in tax havens.

So the problem is the tax havens is it? Before we get too carried away with colonial outrage, remember that many tax havens exist today as outposts or former outposts of empire set up to hide the money of British colonialists and capital. Some of them, like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, are British Overseas Territories, still under some form of British control. At the centre of these tax havens is the City of London, one of the main financial hubs of British, and indeed, global capitalism.

The US has its own equivalent tax havens, in particular Delaware where half of all Wall Street companies are incorporated for the low state taxes and slack company regulation.

So the traditional view of tax havens as sunny places for shady people is actually not correct, unless climate change has turned the City of London into a tropical paradise.


Tax avoidance

These revelations are not new. They are the latest in a range of leaked and other information about the dark underside of capitalism. We have had the Luxembourg leaks, the Tax Justice Network which estimated that between US $21 trillion and $32 trillion is held in havens (about twice US GDP and five times the wealth of Australia all up), the TJN/United Voice report into tax avoidance by Australian companies, and the ATO release recently of tax data of public and private big business companies which shows that well over one third pay no income tax and the majority pay less than the statutory rate of 30 per cent. Apart from a bit of huffing and puffing nothing has happened to address rampant tax avoidance by big business.

Big business tax avoidance gives the lie to the Turnbull mantra that we have to live within our means. This mantra will be the justification for the ongoing cuts to public health and education, to public transport and to social welfare. There would be no budget crisis if we addressed big business tax avoidance. Our mantra in response to Turnbull should be to tax big business and the rich.

Using tax havens and shell companies is part of a wider capitalist dynamic of hiding assets and arrangements from prying tax and other State body eyes. It reflects the business view that any profit is "theirs," rather than the reality that it arises from the unpaid labour of workers.

As Google Chair Eric Schmidt said about his company's tax avoidance activities around the globe, activities which have seen it funnel almost $10 billion into Bermuda, saving $2 billion in taxes:

"The company isn't about to turn down big savings in taxes. It's called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I'm not confused about this."

The problem of tax avoidance is systemic. It requires a systemic solution, a democratic and socialist revolution o put the vast majority in control of the assets of the world and to organise production to satisfy human need, not to make a profit. In such a world we would not need tax havens and shell companies.

In the interim we on the left must continue to argue for taxing the rich and to build all the campaigns against the injustices social and economic that capitalism creates, including the austerity agenda which is about transferring wealth from labour to capital.

We could tax the rich to fund better services. None of the parties of neo-liberalism - the Liberals and Nationals and the Labor Party - are going to really do that. At best they will offer minor changes as part of a smokescreen to give the impression of doing something without actually doing anything major to upset the rich and powerful, the capitalists, whose system drives them to avoid tax and hide their affairs in secrecy jurisdictions.

Now I know none of this tax the rich stuff will in reality get on the agenda willingly of the ALP. The answer is that when the current or future governments attack funding for workers or the poor, attack public schools, public hospitals and public universities, the fightback against those attacks has the potential to challenge the ruling class and its systemic tax avoidance and secrecy. To tax the rich we must build the fight against austerity.



Originally published by Solidarity.