A research paper published by Oxfam, published to coincide with the World Economic Forum at Davos in late January 2015, shows that the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014, and at this rate will be more than 50 percent by 2016. Members of this global elite had an average wealth of $2.7 million per adult in 2014.
In my view, the issue is less that the disparity between the rich “elite”‘ is widening, and more to do with how that rich “elite” use their power and influence. Provided people have enough to eat, good sanitation, clean water, safe housing and peaceful living environments, the issue of disparate incomes becomes less an issue of need , and more of perception and unfairness. Why should I be poor when you are rich, and you clearly have no more r right to those riches than I do, and certainly don’t use those riches in a way that benefits anyone other than yourself and your immediate clique?
The concern about the majority of the wealth and power and control resting with a minority of the word’s population is therefore not so much an issue of how the world’s “wealth” is shared, but the quality of the decisions that are now being made about our future world as a result of the disenfranchisement of decision-making from those who are connected to their local environment. That wealthy elite make their decisions on the property they own based almost exclusively on how much profit can be accrued through its exploitation.
The history of absentee landlords in Scotland and Ireland in the late 18th and 19th centuries is unequivocally clear on this, and a lesson for today , where more than 50% of the world will soon be owned owned by absentee owners.. The welfare of Scottish and Irish rentees on the land was of absolutely no concern to the landlord in most instances. Neither was the environmental destruction of the land of any concern, unless it impacted on profit or pleasure.
Those who remain connected to the land, particularly inter-generationally, have a much greater driver to ensure it remains sustainable for the long-term. Bad short-term decisions can undoubtedly still be made that destroy natural habitats and species, by those connected to the land, but an algorithm of exploitation based purely on short-term monetary gain, does not make sense to those who will inherit that land in the future.
As just one of so many examples, in New Zealand, the rise of dairy absentee millionaires and conglomerates who buy up large tracts of pasture land (which was once dense bush with a myriad of species within it) and then proceed to destroy the land through unsustainable exploitation of the water resources available to them and the long-term contamination of the water table with dairy foecal and nitrate pollutants. Once the profits have gone from the “business” and the land destroyed, those absentee landlords will take their money and move on to another more profitable exploitation option.
The rapid erosion of local ownership to land and property therefore is not simply and issue of equity or even poverty; but more importantly, just one more ingredient in that lethal recipe for environmental global disaster.
As Robert Parry wrote in Consortium News “If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
But this impervious narrative is an essential component of the drive to crush the Russian economy with sanctions and lowered oil prices, along with the attempts to encircle China via the East Asian Pivot.
Much like the sanctions imposed on Iran for decades because of their fictional nuclear weapons development, every political player West and East knows that the fictional Russian troops in Eastern Ukraine (aside from the Crimea) are a wonderful excuse to attempt to economically destroy the country. It is virtually impossible for the sanctioned country to prove the absence of something that did not exist in the first place. But as Cuba has so ably proved in the past 50 years, alternative strategies are possible and even beneficial.
The impact of crashing oil prices -however temporary- on all the major oil producers- including Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar as well as Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the shale oil industries of the U.S. and Canada , are unknown and unpredictable. Did the powers-that-be in Washington and London consider what the impacts of plunging oil prices would have on their jihadists in Syria and Iraq and their consequent capacity to buy more men and equipment? or even consider that weakening oil prices will strengthen China’s economic position in the world?- we may never know…
In response to these threats , Russia and China have launched a whole swathe of economic agreements between themselves and with other neighbouring countries . As Pepe Escobar describes it, the development of the new silk road via high speed rail links between China and the rest of Asia and Europe has begun at a startling rapid pace and will result in a completely changed political/economic dynamic in the world within a very short space of time that will also be out of the reach of U.S. and U.K . interests.
There is therefore urgent need for the UK and US war economies to move fast to eliminate these new threats as Western economies start to crumble and their capacity to control markets and other state and non-entities is progressively reduced.
Perhaps that haste is the reason for the level of incompetency shown by the State Department in putting “their man” Natalie Jaresko as Ukraine’s new Finance Minister. The contempt shown to Eastern Europeans by the US government in the appointment of this corrupt US citizen and State Department official as Ukraine’s Finance Minister is staggering, but yet remarkable for the lack of a response from the (for now) subjugated Western Ukrainians. Or the even more absurd Obama reaction to some hacker group infiltrating Sony and threatening the company for its film which encourages the assassination of a living head of state – something for which the company could in fact be indicted for in an international court of law; (were there such a neutral international player)
The recent reports from the U.S on the types and extent of torture US officials are prepared to disclose, is a tiny drop in the ocean of the countless examples of the extent to which US and UK governments have long been prepared to enslave, murder, torture and destroy indiscriminately if it serves their interests. While the British Empire’s brutality against those of other skin colour should need no further explanation, it is often useful to point out that the United States’ history of state terrorism and genocide is also a very long one; beginning with the terror and genocide against the Plains Indians in the late 18th century, to the US’s brutal colonizations of the Philippines and Caribbean in the 19th century and the genocide committed in the name of “democracy and freedom” in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq ( to name just a few). The 21st century is no exception to this long litany of terror, torture and murder by these two so-called “civilised” countries. The scale of devastation and horror inflicted by these two countries against other (‘foreign’) populations, has no equal.
That is not to say that those state entities the United States and the UK wish to destroy are themselves necessarily humanitarian and democratic; but it can be argued that -as in the case of post 1917 Russia, Weimar Germany, North Korea and Cambodia; where civic institutions are crushed by an overwhelmingly powerful outside force, then despotism can freely reign.
The United States , the United Kingdom and a few other ex-colonial powers, have no such excuse. It is interesting to note, that up until the development of the “Terrorist” threat post 9/11, the actions of those two states against their own citizens had been relatively benign; their emphasis has traditionally been on harming external states for commercial benefit; that locus appears to be changing into a more wide-ranging capacity to harm or destroy any individuals or entity within or without their state borders that impinge on the powerful “elite”s capacity to extract more money for itself. In all probability, this shift in focus is directly attributable to the dawning understanding that the days of Western hegemony over the world’s resources are numbered.
What is blindingly obvious in this analysis is the totally banale and infantile drivers for these constant wars, let alone their leaders’ complete lack of understanding and compassion for the suffering of others. And we should not forget the massive contribution to environmental destruction this 300 year old process has delivered. This is certainly not an intelligent process, although the processes of domination and extraction of plunder are often complex.
We can only watch in amazement at the psychopathic behaviours of key US officials delighting in the violent deaths of others -eg Dick Cheney, or Hilary Clinton (below)
or Obama joking about killer drones, knowing full well the impacts in families and communities of the thousands of innocent lives killed by these random killing machines.
In fact recent evidence on Hillary Clinton’s motivation’s for the war in Libya, reveal little else than the fact that she didn’t like Muammar Ghaddafi. Certainly there was absolutely no evidence of the genocide of Libyan civilians by Ghaddafi’s forces as was alleged and provided as rationale to U.S. supporting the jihadist forces there. Clinton’s maniacal delight in Ghaddafi’s brutal death is a warning to us all.
and the UK’s Blair and Jack Straw who simply refuse to acknowledge that their orders resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans based simply on their whim ( ‘I kill because I can’). It may be salutory to read Ahmad Baqawi’s damning analysis of the NATO intervention in Libya and the resultant total and deliberate destruction of Libya as a nation-state, or perhaps Peter Lee’s account of the brutal murder and destruction carried out by the West proxy’s in Syria in the name of “democracy and freedom”
In another more equitable world , those politicians would have long ago been convicted and sent to high security forensic mental health wards; or perhaps, as the highly respected American columnist William Pfaff notes -simply tried Nuremburg style and, if convicted on the evidence, hanged.
The Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change earlier this year noted if action is not taken “soon’ the resultant 2C increase in global temperatures will have ‘severe’, and ‘irreversible” impacts on human habitation and economic activity.
Governments, in their desperation to feed the “god of growth” are increasingly making more and bigger foolish decisions that undermine our sustainability as a species on this planet. Take for instance, the ever-increasing taxpayer dollars pouring into oil and gas explorations, or the actions of corporate-resourced governments such as the UK or New Zealand, with their intent to emasculate regulations that protect the environment against corporate interests . Or the potential horrendous environmental impacts of international agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). The “god of growth” must be fed, regardless of the consequences to our planet and the species who inhabit it.
While climate change gets all the press these days in the media; it should be noted that climate change is just one of a multitude of impacts of homo sapiens’ drive for “progress’ and ‘growth’ over the past 200 years. For those species (including humans) at the sharp end of climate change- those in tropical countries or drier hotter climates, the impacts are likely to be truly horrendous over the next 100 years -and for the next few thousand or perhaps million years beyond that. However what underpins this destruction of our planet is our incurable arrogance that we are somehow “superior” beings who are overlords of the other species on this planet.
It is absolutely undeniable that unless we can co-habitate with the other remaining species that we have not killed off as yet-we too are doomed as a species. We are entirely reliant on other species for our short , medium and long-term survival. No amount of concrete or tar or metal or money can hide this fact. The journey to bio-extinction in the pursuit of profit in New Zealand is just one of countless stories of man’s folly.
What is required is a fundamental shift by all humans on this planet to understand that every other species shares an equal right to life on our little blue ball. Killing off a species or a few million individual sentient beings to make way for a shopping mall, is just nonsensical.
While we may pretend, we have not behaved in any way as caretakers of this planet; we have not behaved rationally and with fore-thought, we have not allowed the blinkers to fall from our eyes to let ourselves see the folly of our shallow understanding that because we are homo sapiens, then anything that does not exist or think like a homosapien is inferior, and not worthy of life, unless it is for our use: for us to kill and eat, or for human tourists to gawp at while they destroy the surrounding environment. A supposed scientific principal which argues that other species are inferior to one particular species whose “superiority” is based on the core attributes of that one species and no other, is a rather dubious piece of scientific endeavour! This superficial belief, called anthropocentrism, must be eliminated from human consciousness, if we are all to continue to thrive or even survive on this planet.
To put it bluntly, those rationales exhibit primitive thinking and zero compassion for other species; let alone a rather dubious understanding of the laws of cause and effect.
As Prof. Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre notes; “Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”
In all the reports about climate change or even loss of bio-diversity it is very rare to see an analysis of the impacts of homo sapiens’ folly on other species. In almost every case you will instead see a superlatively superficial analysis of the impacts of climate change in dollars and cents, or the cost of a species lost we can no longer exploit. Those analyses are proof in themselves that we have lost our way as a species in a spectacularly ignorant way.
As the long hot Ukrainian summer turns to autumn and winter, the euphoria by Western Ukrainians of having thrown off any servitude to Russia will begin to recede…
The new Kiev government signed the IMF agreement so it could access a $17.1 billion bail-out package spread over 2 years. That money will be used to repay international bank debt, and will not reach the Ukrainian population. And, as with all IMF agreements there are conditions… These include:
Achieving a self-sustained energy sector- ie cutting the subsidy to Ukrainian consumers and thus increasing prices significantly
Balancing budgets as soon as possible ( Kiev has to determine how to do that-likely by increasing taxes and decreasing expenditure (note that the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) has already approved a temporary 1.5% increase in taxes to cover the costs of the war in the East).
Reduce corruption, and “improve the business climate”, to achieve high and sustainable growth. (note that “improving the business climate” generally means reducing subsidies to consumers, tax incentives to businesses, opening up Ukrainian businesses to foreign ownership etc etc..
Pension reform (ie pension cuts and raising the age of entitlement) have been on the agenda for a number of years now with previous IMF agreements, but no previous Kiev government has been ‘brave’ enough to battle the ferocious activism by unions and pensioners against the draft pension reductions.
This current government led by prime minister and neocon Arseniy Yatsenyuk has actively pushed for a 50% reduction in pension from $160 to $80 per month for all pension types along with a 50% hike in gas prices .
In just one example of the concessions to banking solvency Ukrainian citizens are having to make as of July 1st 2014, the average cost of heating a standard fifty-square-meter apartment has risen from about 200 hryvnia to 280 hryvnia (from $18 to $25) per month. It’s a significant hit, considering that the average monthly wage in Ukraine is only about 3,150 hryvnia ($275), more than half of which typically goes toward food, Sergei Kiselyov, an economist from the school of political analysis at the Kiev-Mogilyanskaya Academy, said.
While Yatsenyuk’s policies will undoubtedly reduce the influence of the old Ukrainian oligarchs, the new “transparent ” systems will enable US and European companies the opportunity to purchase failing Ukrainian businesses at rock-bottom prices and in a new “business-friendly” environment where worker exploitation can become the norm.
Yatsenuk (both as a Jew and because of his pro-U.S./pro EU and internationalist business policies) is anathema to the Right Sektor and Svoboda parties. Both right wing groups are patiently waiting their moment. The journey to the Reichstag of their long dead German hero reminds them that patience and a sense of impeccable timing are crucial to their ultimately taking the reigns of power in Kiev and smashing any remaining Russian influence in Ukraine.
Ukrainians, Eastern and Western, are well-educated but particularly in the West, have a high rate of poverty, and a long history of well-deserved grievances against Soviet Russia. President Putin as an ex Soviet KGB man, becomes an easy target for that anger. As I noted in the previous blog on MH17, Vera Graziade, a young British/Russian/Ukrainian says it all : When you have one big bad figure, and everything is Putin’s fault, the world is simple and you don’t need to think anymore.
While the war in the East provides a very useful patriotic focus for Western Ukrainians as they fight the evil “Russian terrorists”; that jingoistic fervour will be hard to maintain unless the “terrorists” are able and willing to hit back at Kiev on Western Ukraine soil. It will become more and more evident to Western Ukrainians that they have been conned by all the talk of ‘terrorism’ and Russian infiltrators.
While there are increasing numbers of media reports of desertions from the Ukraine Army ,and resistance to further mobilisations, the extent and impact of these is hard to judge at this point.
The callousness of the nazi-like references to Russian speaking Ukrainians as sub-human and genetically inferior beings (even President Poroshenko, who formerly enjoyed very good business relations with the Russians over the border, has sunk to racial inferiority references about the people in the East) casts a long shadow over any potential for reconciliation between East and West Ukraine. The neo nazi influences of the Svoboda Party and Right Sektor seem to have permeated throughout the ruling cliques in Kiev. In their view, the Colorado Beetles (referencing the black and orange emblem of St George so revered by Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians), must be stamped out underfoot by the ‘pure race’ of Western Ukrainians .
The irony is that of course, most Ukrainians are of Slavic origin like most Russians, and share more commonalities of culture than they do differences. However their differences and grievances have been exploited by outside influences; first by the Nazis, and later via significant Western intelligence operations in the West during and after the cold war in order to undermine Russian influence, and latterly by the purely amoral connivance of neocon stormtroopers like Victoria Nuland (US-Assistant Secretary of State) .
In the past decade we have also seen the advent of the European Union seemingly help-bent on incorporating any Russian “satellite” into the Union regardless of the cost to central EU states. Whether Ukraine will be able to access the huge investment and underwriting from the EU that Poland has seen, remains to be seen; but in the current economic climate in the EU, that appears unlikely.
Certainly EU investment and incorporation of European values and a corruption-free state , is what many in Maidan Square demonstrated for: -along with the opportunity to migrate to EU states for higher wages!
It now appears increasingly unlikely in the short to medium term that Ukraine could become an EU member, particularly with the anti- democratic tendencies entrenched in Kiev via the Right Sektor and Svoboda Party, as demonstrated by the elimination of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Those anti-democratic tendencies will become more and more embedded and the paramilitary influence of the Right Sektor more powerful, the longer the war in the East continues.
In addition the war is undoubtedly bleeding Ukraine dry economically. (hence the “temporary” 1.5% war tax recently imposed by Kiev)
Eastern Ukrainian industrial infrastructure , (although much of it outdated Soviet style industry) has provided much income to the state via predominantly steel exports to Russia . Business Insider notes that exports to Russia accounted for nearly a quarter of Ukrainian external trade and contributed around 8 per cent of GDP before the war. Thirteen per cent of Ukraine’s iron and steel exports used to go to the neighbouring country. That income resource is now closed until such time as Kiev decides to negotiate, rather than impose its will on Eastern Ukrainians. While defeat for the separatists is almost inevitable (given the balance of military weight) without real Russian support, victory for Kiev needs to come soon. Kiev may have been banking that the destruction of the industrial and commercial infrastructure in the East could provide an opportunity for European/U.S. re-investment, but this is unlikely in the present international economic climate.
While the separatists certainly are not supported by everyone in Eastern Ukraine and there will be many in the East who will welcome victory by Kiev, the level of anger and resentment towards Kiev for the death and destruction, and the genuine fear of the phobic anti-Russian neo-nazis installed in positions of state influence in Kiev, will create a burning resentment that will likely erupt again and again in violence , unless there are more intelligent politicians in power than those who hold sway in Kiev today.
The vicious anti-Russian propaganda of the Right Sektor and others in Western Ukraine against Russian-speaking Ukrainians is likely to have poisoned potential detente between the two populations for a long time to come.
As this bombastic jingoisim begins to lose its appeal to the majority of Western Ukrainians, the resentments and fears of the previous decades of corruption, violence and poverty will begin to re-surface, as gas price hikes and pension cuts begin to bite and winter approaches. Undoubtedly this is the opportunity that the Svoboda Party and the Right Sektor will have been waiting for…
Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko knows this all too well- they will be desperate to “finish the job” in Eastern Ukraine in the next month; although paradoxically it would also be useful politically for those currently in power in Kiev to not include Eastern Ukrainian voters in the next Rada parliamentary elections scheduled for late September/October, as they would skew the vote towards more federalist and less neocon perspectives .
One other issue to consider is the urgency of Kiev being able to fast-track shale extraction in the Dnieper-Donets basin in Eastern Ukraine. Curiously (!) the first assault by the Kiev military was at Slayvansk, the likely centre for shale oil extraction in the basin. War creates many possibilities for those who are victorious….including of course U. S. Vice -President Jo Biden’s son , R Hunter Biden.
or see economist Michael Hudson’s take on this…
Maidan re-visited….
Postsript
Read this excellent piece of analysis of the Ukrainian neo-nazi movements in Ukraine by Jonathan Marshall at Consortium News here
(note that this post is a short updated summary of the issues previously outlined in other posts on this site)
Many articles in mainstream media regarding the current violence in Gaza portray the conflict as a Hamas terrorist vendetta against Israel and Jews.
The reality is somewhat different.
Al jazeera notes as of 17th July, that “of the 214 Palestinians killed so far in Operation Protective Edge, at least 67 were women and children and 11 were elderly, according to Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry. Over 1,500 have been injured, and Gaza hospitals have reported severe medical-supply shortages. (In contrast)the first Israeli death was reported Tuesday, after shrapnel from a rocket hit a civilian handing out food to soldiers near the Gaza border. The disproportionate death and casualty rate between the two sides in this conflict clearly illustrates the overwhelming destructive power of the Israeli military machine against this tiny isolated ghettoised non-state. Israel, as the occupying force, has a UN mandated obligated to protect those people’s whose lands it has occupied.
As the history books show, Israel has pursued a violent and illegal process of the elimination of the ‘Palestinian problem’ since its brutal occupation of Palestinian lands in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their houses and lands by the Israeli Army, in what Palestinians call the ‘Nakba’ -the Catastrophe. That process of occupation and removal of people who have lived in the area for thousands of years, is ongoing. Operation ‘Protective Edge” is just one more step along the way to finally eliminating those troublesome Arabs who persist in trying to subsist in the homeland of their forefathers.
Along with that occupation goes an ongoing military ever-tightening noose around Gaza and the West Bank, which has seen Gaza literally strangled by Israeli occupation forces into a primitive society where sewage, water and health systems are largely nonexistent. Palestinian children continue on a daily basis to be arrested, tortured and thrown in Israeli jails for crimes such as stone throwing or protesting the occupation. Since the beginning of 2000, 1407 Palestinian children alone have been killed by Israeli forces.
And this ignores the many thousands of adults tortured jailed and murdered in Israeli prisons for daring to resist the occupation. And let us not forget all the Palestinian homes and orchards bulldozed by armoured bulldozers to make way for Israeli “settlers”, on a daily basis.
Israel is one of the largest and most well resourced militaries in the world (fourth largest); courtesy of the United States, who since 1948 has blindly promoted and applauded each atrocity committed by the Israelis in the face of overwhelming international condemnation.
Certainly no violence can be supported from either party in this horrendous and savage conflict, but readers of this post should not need to wonder why Hamas is angry and violent in response to this brutal and seemingly never-ending tragedy.
The only way forward is a one-state solution, where fair compensation for lives and lands lost is given to those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homeland; and all the resident populations-whether Jew, Christian or Muslim, learn to create a peaceful and sustainable future in a new and just Palestine.
And lastly, lets look at who supports this ongoing terror by the Israeli war machine ( note an abstention means tacit support for the status quo of more war).
Postscript:
Note the chilling banner at the end of Craig Murray’s blog here on the Gaza genocide
The banner reads: “There are no innocents in Gaza“
The video (below) of “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” (another one of the fictional “nom-de-guerre” names so beloved of Islamic jihad fighters), shows a hesitant youngish man delivering in Koranic verse style the announcement that he (in all modesty appropriate to a disciple of Mohammed) is the new caliph of Iraq, Syria and Levant that all must bow down to.
As the Angry Arab says; When you bill yourself as a caliph you inevitably raise expectations. And as the Arabic saying goes: ‘the mountain went into labor and gave birth to a mouse’. What a lousy performance.
While these young psychopaths have a certain predilection for violent murder and ignorance, they are definitely not idolised by the vast majority of Sunni Muslems around the world. The sectarian violence, mysoginism and vengeance they espouse, fomented largely through Wahhabi funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and with “special assistance” from U.K. and U.S. “intelligence” over the years, fools few on the Arab street. These young violent men are simply tools of those who wish for nothing better than all-out mayhem, death and environmental destruction in middle eastern states that do not sufficiently support a Western view of who should control the world’s resources.
Desperately seeking fame on Youtube, as they behead another infidel of whatever religious persuasion, they are like little children given dangerous toys to play with by the grownups.
Their “secret” cavalcade of many miles of brand new Toyota’s through the deserts of Iraq from Syria to capture key Iraqi northern towns, was somehow never spotted by Western spy satellites. Make no mistake, these are the “moderates” that Western governments have been funding to overthrow Assad’s Syria , and now Maliki’s Iraq, for the past five years. This is a deliberate plan by Western governments to de-stabilise and overthrow any middle eastern government that 1) doesn’t support the ongoing Israeli destruction of Palestine and Palestinians, and 2) doesn’t support the right of the U.S. to basically do anything it wishes to.
It would be amusing if it were not so sad that these nasty little psychopaths in offices in London, Paris and Washington who get others to do their killing and torture for them, believe that this is the way to a brave new future; a “New American Century“. Take the former British Chief of Defence Lord Richards’ brilliant proposal to train and equip 100,000 jihadists to take Damascus from Syrian Government forces, with substantial Western air support- (read collateral air damage) on the pretext that this would reduce civilian casualties in in Syria! . Fittingly, the great Lord Richards was also once Nato commander in the brutal fiasco that is the fourth Anglo Afghan War and is now a senior advisor to the right wing British International Institute of Strategic Studies, and which strangely enough, supported the US invasion of Iraq and is now very anti the current Shi-ite based Maliki government in Iraq.
And of course let’s not forget the $500 million dollars worth of armaments and training from President Obama and Congress that will go only to the ‘moderate’ extremists in Syria fighting the Syrian government forces.
Or perhaps note the leaked ( unverified but eminently plausible ) Rand Corporation document advising the Western Ukrainians how to destroy Eastern Ukraine- these guys in their cosy little offices in the city are oh-so-ruthless in getting others to murder and torture and destroy on their behalf ( but only of course where it benefits their bank accounts).
In that article Monbiot once again traces human civilization’s inability to look at the reality of our circumstances; our headlong race to “having our number called” because of the inherent insanity of the concept of “growth” and “progress” in a finite world system. It seems extraordinary for a so-called “intelligent species” that we globally refuse to acknowledge the inevitable trajectory of the “growth” strategy almost every human being on the planet has subscribed to.
And not only are we fouling our own back doorstep with poisons, the detritus from our consumption of “things” and the laying waste of the natural world upon which we depend, we are also fouling the world’s upper atmosphere with our “space junk”! We seem determined as humans to destroy ourselves and all the living beings we share this planet with. In less than a blink of an evolutionary eye, homo sapiens have largely destroyed the living fabric of this world.
The logic of this insanity should be absolutely clear to every single human being on this planet, and yet the argument that ‘growth and progress’ are anathema to our medium to long term survival, is seen as heresy. Look around: the world we share with millions of other species on this planet, is rapidly turning into a totally homo sapien centric world; where every living and dead thing exists simply for our use and gratification. We are rapidly closing down this planet as a living entity: – sealing over the soil with roads and buildings, poisoning the land with chemicals, burning pieces of it to spread into the atmosphere at colossal rates, modifying the landscape to meet human needs without regard to the other species inhabiting it, digging holes in the ground so we can spread more detritus over the surface of the planet, killing off innumerable species to feed our insatiable appetite- the list goes on and on and on….
What are we growing into?-where are we “progressing” to? are we happier?, more contented?, more in tune with the world?, kinder to our offspring and other beings?. No; we are more discontented, more avaricious, more grasping of things we do not have but which mean nothing, and more determined to destroy both other humans and the environment, to satisfy our short-term greed.
How can the supposedly so well-connected collectivity of humans on this planet have acquiesced to such an insane model of living? Are humans so blind that they can only see what is immediately before them and the immediate well-being and gratification of their own species? Humankind’s current 50 year strategy leads over a cliff.
What does it take for there to be change?-and will it be too late?
We live in a perpetual cycle of mutual self-justification of our crazy system which creates a seemingly sane “bubble” of human world activity within an insane and dead-end construct. The self-perpetuating myths of progress measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are the very measures of change in countries’ economic activity that are driving the world’s living things to extinction.
Stead and Stead (p1) Joseph Campbell (1988) points out that these myths reflect the underlying paradigms that guide the thoughts and actions of the people of a particular culture. Espousing society’s myths is a primary function of all of its institutions, be they political, religious, educational or economic. Campbell (1988) says that you can tell the dominant myth of a given society by examining the heights of its buildings. The multi-storey seats of economic activity that define the skylines of our cities today demonstrate that humankind’s most dominant current myth is economic wealth.”
In the “Common Knowledge” framework, a paradigm shift of societal knowledge can occur with the input of just one new point of reference.
Our lives as social beings are based on shared certainties of how the world works. Because those illusions are no more real than any other “certainty”, they can easily come crashing down, and a new set of “certainties ” or “truths” constructed. Game theory has also often been used in the area of economic assumption and speculation.
Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100. This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology we depend on for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.(from ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’, Tim Jackson)
And yet – despite the hype from corporates and governments, it will be relatively easy for most of us to change to become part of a steady state economy. Within a few decades we will have forgotten the importance of having the latest gadget, the next holiday to God-knows-where, or the latest fad or food. Small-scale organic farming provides a readily usable model to replace agri-business’ toxic produce, whilst producing wonderful benefits to the world and our fellow species. We will take our essential equipment for repair, instead of “recycling” to the landfill pit, we will accept as normal that everything we own does not have to be new and shiny, and rely more on local food resources and communities. Yes, the investment banks, multi-national corporations and billionaires will disappear, but we will all then have the time to re-assess what it means to be human and happy and connected to our living world.
The People’s Republic of Donestk was formed in 7th April 2014; breaking away from the state of Ukraine after a very informal referendum of its local population. The referendum was largely caused by the decisions of the Kiev interim Government, after it deposed the former elected ( but like almost every other President of Ukraine since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 – extremely corrupt) president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych fled from power as a result of the Maidan protests and threats to his life, led by right wing extremists.
The interim Ukrainian government’s decision to effectively marginalise Russian speaking Ukrainians through banning the Russian language and subsequently calling anti-Maidan groups in the East, “terrorists”, led to the formation of pro-Russian paramilitary groups in the East, in the oblasts of Donestk and Luhansk. Their stated aim was to preserve their Ukrainian/Russian identity against the threats by neo-nazi extremists to “purify” Ukraine, in the new interim Kiev government; largely from within the Slovoda Party and Right Sektor paramilitary groups based in the West of Ukraine.
It is currently unclear what level of support the “self-proclaimed” (are not all state entities initially “self-proclaimed”?) Donestk People’s Republic has with the local population, with some very problematic opinion polls run out of Kiev and funded from the U.S. which state pro-Russian support at less than 40%. Facts on the ground would seem to suggest otherwise, especially since the killing of 39 people in the Trades Hall centre in Odessa on May 2 2014, apparently by right wing football hooligans from the West.
It is also problematic whether those currently running the administration of the Donestk PR have the best of the local population at heart, or are simply opportunists , ex-soldiers and thugs. In addition there is always the tendency with any revolution, especially when under pressure from the outside, to respond in more and more draconian and violent ways towards its own population. Are the Donetsk PR officials any less rascist, anti-Jew and voracious than those in Kiev?-time will tell.
Notwithstanding those concerns, the creation of this ‘people’s republic’ does present a unique opportunity for a better state not seen for perhaps almost a hundred years on this planet. The opportunity to begin afresh, untainted by cronyism, the powers of the corporates, the drive for “progress” at the expense of the planet. An opportunity for a state entity driven by altrusim, responsibility for the vulnerable and a respect for the environment. Impossible you say?- certainly improbable when we look at our current rapacious “growth” (read; money-for-the-rich and baubles for the poor) driven state entities.
What we need then, is the development of state structures that foster:
Community initiative and responsiveness- local town “councils” where every citizen has a voice and a right to be heard and responded to.
Central and local policies that recognise that “growth for growth’s sake’ is nonsensical and destroys both our own living environment and the other living things around us- ‘growth’ is the short term path to death
Central and local initiatives that encourage inter-connectivity between people- eg local community places within walking distance for food and product distribution, green spaces,
Town planning which “forces” people to mingle together to get their work done: eg small interconnected urban areas, green spaces and gardens
Local and central state welfare systems that all citizens buy into according to their capacity to pay through taxes, and all are recompensed equitably in times of trouble
Principles and policies that create respect for the other living beings interacting with the human population.
Training for all age groups in the art of mindfulness
An understanding that violence to others destroys oneself
an inalienable obstruction to business interests influencing state and local political decisions (i.e absolutely no capacity for corporates to finance politicians)
It can (and must) be done. For the sake of all of us on this little blue ball.
T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Hollow Men, ends with the following lines…
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
A recent study, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and using new statistical modelling methods, predicts that this current civilization will likely collapse in another twenty to fifty years. The study draws analogies with past human civilizations; the Assyrian, Roman, Mayan, Minoan, the various Chinese empires…. We can assume that like us; the populations of those civilizations had every reason to believe their civilization was unique and would last forever. While civilisational collapse is quite rare, characterised by entire ways of life, systems of thought, cultural values and worldviews disappearing, political collapse occurs frequently ( eg empires and kingdoms disintegrating). What appears likely to happen in our modern context, given the confluence of a number of catastrophic events, is civilisational collapse.
While this particular study has been sharply critiqued by journalists and scientists alike for its simplicity and generalisations ; the broad conclusion that, as Paul Simon aptly put it ,”everything put together falls apart” , is a healthy reminder of human hubris.
The single most important story unfolding in not-so-slow-motion on this planet is the ongoing destruction of the natural world in the name of “progress” and “growth” (ie consuming ever more “stuff”) by humans; , which will in the near future, significantly negatively impact on this species. Despite our insistence to the contrary, humans are entirely reliant on other species for our survival. It is a given that is blindly ignored by politicians, businesspeople and businesses and all those with a current stake in the way our “civilization’ currently works ( ie all of us).
As key resources become more expensive to extract, the world economy (which is apparently now the full extent of this ‘civilization’) begins to contract and distort . And as the gap between rich and poor widens, the “have-nots” increasingly demand in more and more violent ways, their right to a slice of the pie. As the oceans and atmospheric temperatures rise, so do the pressures on our artificial nation-states. As we progressively and rapidly eliminate species after species to produce more things, to make “progress”; our chances of long term survival as a species are being rapidly reduced. Our civilization demands that we assume that we have an infinite volume of resources to consume for the infinite future in a closed planetary system – a small contradiction in terms! We are indeed heading for the perfect storm.
Study after academic study shows that the more we gain from a civilization’s prosperity, the more we are blind to its failings and contradictions and its inevitable fall. This tunnel vision says , that ‘if I am doing well out of this catastrophe then it cant be a catastrophe at all!’
Homo sapiens pride themselves on their remarkable intelligence; their capacity to manipulate their environment for their own ends. They appear unable to grasp that that self-definition process of appropriating everything good, intelligent and wonderful to human attributes, is simply the result of their blinded vision. If by definition, species that manipulate their environment are determined to be superior to all other species; then lo-and-behold!- homo sapiens are superior beings! Because homo sapiens are above all other traits, social beings, all of us have an intensely strong need to “fit in”, to belong to the group. Agreeing with other people on ‘our’ group’s thought processes and paradigms is an essential part of this togetherness. However, agreement does not it make it truth.
Thus, it does not matter that the capacity to manipulate the environment for the benefit of our species and at the expense of all other species on this planet might not be quite such an intelligent thing to do, given that the environmental devastation and species destruction is largely for homo sapiens’ short term pleasures, power and baubles.
Were we to say that a species that can sustain itself easily and efficiently without damaging its environment in the process, were more ‘worthy’ beings than other species ; then homo sapiens would not be registering on the short-list!
Over the millenia, homo sapiens have been able to convince themselves that people of other cultures, or colour, or background are inferior to one’s own culture because of this self-defining process. Using the same intellectual process, the more different another species is from ourselves, the less worthy , less intelligent, more expendable and worthy of our exploitation and destruction that species becomes. The more differentiated from our species the “other” is, the easier it is to dismiss its inherent traits and qualities and its right to life. However on our ever smaller blue planet, we no longer have the luxury to differentiate between “them’ and ‘us”.
How much easier then is it to dismiss the equality of other species with ourselves when their characteristics, strengths and skills are so different from homo sapiens, and when it is so much to our benefit to be able to kill and exploit other species without moral qualms.
As Henry Gee also points out succinctly in his Guardian article , each species’ particular traits or “strengths” are based purely on, firstly, what biological mechanisms of sense are available to them ,and secondly, how they use those senses to that species’ best advantage. Homo sapiens may not value our sense of smell because its not a particularly efficient sensing mechanism in homo sapiens, but you can bet a dog does!
The capacity for self-delusion in our species is immense. Witness the largely American driven anti- climate -change camp. Of course we cannot be destroying our planet with C02 through industrialization, because capitalism and owning the means of production is the reason for our being! – after all, aren’t we, the US consumer, the greatest people on earth because our nation is the epitome of capitalism?
As another example of collective self-deception, Seth Klarman, the manager of the $27billion hedge fund, the Baupost Group, recently remarked on the similarities of the world’s banking system to the ‘Truman Show’, the late nineties Hollywood film, where the lead character “lives a seemingly charmed world, snuggled comfortably into an American suburbia of white picket fences and crisply cut lawns. But gradually Truman starts to notice something is not quite right. He is actually trapped inside a film set controlled by hidden directors, and discovers to his horror that he is the unknowing star of the world’s most popular reality TV show.” In one of the more blatant nuances of reality shifting homo sapiens have acquiesced to, our financial system is in essence simply one of “smoke and mirrors” -the manipulation of facts and figures designed to obscure reason and reality; a fragile house of cards.
The dreaded “black swan”!
One key point of difference with previous human civilizations around the world is that our current civilization is a global one; each of the parts are inextricably connected. Apart from a few small tribes in isolated areas, every one of us has bought in to this unique method of environmental destruction. Thus when this civilization collapses -(and it is a “when” and not an “if” ), that collapse will be both more rapid and more global; there will not be another model of homo sapien civilization around for the survivors to pin their hopes on. The other significant difference with other previous human civilizations is this current one’s geographical reach. Vast areas of the planet have now been laid waste in the name of human progress.
So, while the modelling conducted by Safa Motesharrei may be flawed, it does provide an opportunity for serious debate about the direction this global civilisation of ours is taking us..
In the latest absurdity upon absurdity in this fictitious “war on terror”, the UK Police have defended their actions in holding and interrogating for 9 hours Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda on the grounds that Miranda was suspected of terrorism because he may have been relaying truthful information about a wide range of Western governments’ illegal spying on its citizens.
As the headline above notes; the UK Police’s rationale for the infringement of Miranda’s rights, was that they “had a duty to protect the public and our national security ” (from such unwarranted journalism). With both the UK and US police forces being increasingly accused of both corrupt and violent behaviour, it is little wonder the public in those countries feel a sense of betrayal by the state. Who are their police and armed forces in fact protecting?
Certainly the deliberately manufactured farce of muslim terrorism ( funded with enthusiasm by the CIA, and various other “intelligence” western agencies around the globe- not to mention our “allies”- the Saudis), is providing an ever more thinly stretched excuse for heavy handed enforcement behaviours, surveillance and the erosion of civil rights.
Who and what is it all for?
It would appear that much of this deterioration in rights and freedoms is simply to improve the profits of those international corporates , whether media, arms manufacturers , energy companies telecommunications or security companies that are able to buy the required influence in western “democracies”.
As it becomes increasingly clear that we are nearing the end of the free capitalistic lunch-with the remainder of the world’s natural resources being rapidly frittered away for a few quick bucks – the corporate billionaires are rushing for the exits, and trampling us “little people” in the stampede.
