Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

We are confronting a monster; a force that ridicules, deceives and wants to destroy us.

– Miguel Angel Ibara, member of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, (SME) on the 80th day of a hunger strike.1

There is a direct relation between the rise of criminal gangs, the deepening of neo-liberalism and the repression of social movements and trade unions.

Mexican President Calderon’s firing of over 44,000 unionized electrical workers is the latest in a series of repressive acts which have shattered the social fabric of society. The denial of meaningful, well remunerated employment and the criminalization of legitimate trade unions like the Mexican Electrical Union (SME) has led to mass immigration and to an increasing number of young people joining the drug gangs. State repression and electoral corruption has prevented Mexican workers from redressing their grievances through legal channels and has aided and abetted the rise of a parallel narco-state which controls vast regions of the country and which recruits young men and women seeking to escape poverty.

Over the past 25 years, Mexico has regressed socially, economically and politically as a result of the neo-liberal offensive, which began with the stolen election of 1988 in which Carlos Salinas robbed Cuahtemoc Cardenas of the presidency. Subsequently, Salinas signed the free trade agreement, NAFTA, which led to the bankruptcy of over 10 million Mexican farmers, peasants and small urban retail shop owners, driving many to immigrate, others to join social movements and some to revolt as was the case with EZLN. Over 10 million Mexicans emigrated since NAFTA.

State repression and the forced isolation of the EZLN, in Chiapas and other rural movements in Guerrero, Michoacan and elsewhere, the denial of rural justice, forced may peasants to flee to the urban slums where some eventually became members of the emerging narco-gangs.

By the turn of the new millennium Mexico’s experiment with neo-liberal “reforms” deepened the systemic crises – inequalities widened, the economy stagnated and poverty increased. As a result, millions of Mexicans fled across the border into North America or joined popular movements attempting to change the system.

Two powerful social and political movements emerged, which sought to reverse Mexico’s slide into political decay and social disintegration. On the political front Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Presidential candidate of a broad citizens coalition, led millions to an electoral victory in 2006 – only to be denied through massive voting fraud perpetrated by supporters of Calderon. The second force, a coalition of trade unions and social movements, led by SME, fought to preserve the public social security system and state ownership of the electrical system from privatization and exploitation by the voracious predator foreign and domestic capitalist class.

Mass mobilizations involving hundreds of thousands marched in Mexico City and throughout the provinces, while millions of consumers expressed their solidarity, as did all of the major trade unions in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.

What was at stake was not merely the jobs of the unionized electrical workers and the social security system but one of the most effective social movements defending a social safety net for the working class.

By attacking SME and the social security system, one of the last major social institutions providing social cohesion, Caldera and the judicial system were further denying Mexicans legal political and social instruments through which they could aspire to defend their living standards.

By destroying the social net via the privatization of public programs and institutions, by repressing vital social movements like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the teachers and trade unions in Oaxaca and the SME in Mexico City, the Mexican State is effectively denying hope for improvement via democratic political processes.

Neoliberal stagnation, state repression of democratic popular movements and the repeated theft of electoral victories by peoples movements in 1987 and 2006 has led to widespread and profound disillusion with politics as usual. Even more ominously it has turned thousands of Mexican youth into enemies of the state, and toward membership in the numerous violent narco-gangs. The Mexican states’ rejection of peaceful electoral changes and its repression and denial of the rights of social movements like the SME has left few outlets for the mass frustrations which are percolating under the surface of society.

In the last four years over 25,000 police, soldiers, civilians and narco members have been assassinated in every region of the country. Despite Calderon’s militarization of the country, the 40,000 soldiers in the streets have failed to prevent the escalation of violence, clearly demonstrating the failure of the repressive option to end violence and prevent the disintegration of Mexico into a ‘failed state’.

The recovery and reconstruction of Mexico, begins with strengthening the social fabric of Mexican society – the promotion of the urban and social movements and in particular the mass democratic trade unions like the SME.

These movements and trade unions are the essential building blocks for the transformation of Mexican society: the end of neo-liberalism, the repudiation of NAFTA and the reconstruction of a powerful public sector under workers control. To fight the twin evils of the corrupt militarized neo-liberal state and the violent parallel narco-state, which currently exploit and terrorize the country, a new mass based political-social movement which combines the solidarity of the trade unions like the SME and the popular appeal of political leaders like Lopez Obrador must coalesce and offer a radical program of national reconstruction and social justice. The alternative is the further disintegration of the Mexican state and the descent into a condition of unending generalized violence, where the rich live in armed fortresses and the poor are subject to the violent depredations of the military and the narco terrorists.

1. La Jornada, July 18, 2010.

Three months ago, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the notorious SB 1070, a bill that put her state at the forefront of a movement to intensify the criminalization of undocumented immigrants.

Since then activists have responded through legal challenges, political lobbying, grassroots organizing and mass mobilizations. More than a hundred thousand people from across Arizona marched on the state capitol on May 29. Today, hundreds more have pledged to risk arrest through nonviolent direct action. These are the public manifestations of an inspiring and widespread struggle happening in this state. The organizations leading this fight offer a vision for people around the US concerned with human rights.

A Rogue State

Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction against sections of Arizona law SB 1070, which is scheduled to go into effect today. The judge put a hold on some of the most outrageous parts of the bill, such as language that mandates racial profiling by officers. However, Judge Bolton left much of the rest of the law intact, including sections that specifically target day laborers.

For Arizona activists, the legal ruling represents – at best – a small respite. “It’s not a victory, it’s a relief,” says Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). “We’re putting a band aid on a wound.”

Alvarado and the organizers with NDLON are part of a broad network of national organizations and volunteers who have joined with local organizers to fight not just against this unjust law, but also against a general climate of anti-immigrant hatred. “Arizona is a rogue state,” says Alvarado. “We’re going to use every single means that we have at our disposal to fight back.”

Puente Arizona, a Phoenix-based organization that describes itself as a human rights movement working to “resurrect our humanity,” has formed Barrio Defense Committees in neighborhoods across the city. Emulating the structure of groups founded by popular movements in El Salvador, the community-based structure works to both serve basic needs, and also build consciousness and help bring people together. According to Puente activist Diana Perez Ramirez, the committees host regular “know your rights” trainings and ESL classes, and are organizing “Copwatch” projects. “We ask the community to unite and organize themselves,” says Ramirez. “And we are just there to support that.” More than one thousand people have joined these neighborhood organizations so far, with more joining every day.

Puente has made use of volunteers from across the US, utilizing national support to help with local organizing, and initiating direct action with the support of out of town allies like the Ruckus Society, Catalyst Project, and various chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They have issued calls to action including a Human Rights Summer (modeled after the civil rights movements’ Freedom Summer) and “30 Days for Human Rights,” a month of actions culminating today, the day SB 1070 will become law.

Just after midnight, as the law took effect, the first protest of the day began, as nearly 80 people blocked the intersection at the entrance to the town of Guadelupe, a small (one square mile) Native American and Hispanic community just outside of Phoenix. The town has a long history of struggle against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has been one of the main public faces of SB 1070, and most of the protesters (and all of the organizers) were from the community. Holding signs declaring their opposition to the new law and leading chants against police brutality, activists declared that Arpaio’s officers are not welcome in their town. The stand off against police lasted more than an hour, before protest leaders in consultation with the town’s mayor decided to open the intersection. Several more actions are planned for today.

Working Proactively

The Repeal Coalition, a Flagstaff- and Phoenix-based grassroots immigrants-rights organization, was formed in 2007. The group came together because they saw a vacuum in the immigrants’ rights movement in Arizona. “Some of the left here were not being very audacious,” explains Luis Fernandez of the Repeal Coalition. “The positions in the public debate ranged from ‘kick them all out,’ to ‘get their labor and then kick them out.’” The Repeal Coalition has staked out a position of calling for the elimination of all anti immigration laws, declaring, “We fight for the right for people to live, love, and work wherever they please.” With this call, says Fernandez, “Now we have a real debate.”

When the coalition was founded, organizers brought in labor activists to advise them on how to build an organization along similar models to those that have built strong unions, utilizing house calls, neighborhood mapping, and group meetings. Although they are an all-volunteer group with little to no funding, they have developed a structure that has initiated large protests and provided direct service, and they are now strategizing more ways to take direct action in the post SB 1070 era.

Fernandez says that this struggle is ultimately about overcoming fear and moving from reaction to proactive action. “We’ve been in a crisis in Arizona for a long time,” he explains. “Even if  SB 1070 weren’t implemented, it wouldn’t matter. The political crisis would continue.” To address this crisis, Fernandez believes organizations must build unity across race and class. “Traditionally in America, when the working class starts suffering, instead of connecting together and looking upwards at the cause of the problem, they look sideways or downwards for who to blame.” Most importantly, he believes activists must take action to seize the initiative.

In this vision, he has been inspired by young organizers working on the federal DREAM ACT, a federal law that creates a path to citizenship for undocumented youth. “They came to Arizona and said, ‘we’re undocumented and we’re going to commit acts of civil disobedience.’” At first, Repeal Coalition members tried to talk them out of this action, but the youth explained, “We are going to lose our fear because it is the fear of being arrested or the fear of being deported that fuels the inability of political action.” The bravery and vision of these youth has inspired Fernandez to continue to search for new and bold ways to take action, rather than just continually respond to right wing attacks. “We need to set the agenda,” explains Fernandez. “We have to say, ‘No, you’re going to react to us.’”

Despite a range of tactics and philosophies, one thing organizers here have in common is a dedication to exporting the lessons of their struggle. While Arizona’s law is the first and most draconian, similar laws are pending across the country. And during this current national economic crisis, more and more politicians have found that they can score political points by demonizing immigrants. “The last two months we’ve had a lot of people calling us asking what they can do to help Arizona,” says Fernandez. “We say, organize in your own town. You don’t have to come to Arizona because Arizona is coming to you.”

Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer.

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

The interview will be available in four parts. Scroll to the bottom to read all of Prof. Carriere’s questions.

Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

MC: The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?

AK: Absolutely. I see opportunity springing from every crack in the structure of capitalism. For all those who wish to see a different world, this moment is dripping with opportunity because the old order is crumbling before our eyes.

The crisis extends far beyond the broken financial system. Millions of people are losing their jobs, homes, and savings as the burden of the crisis gets shifted onto the poor and working class. Public faith in the system, both the government and the capitalist economy, has been shattered and is at an all-time low. And it’s not just the economic crisis. The bank bailouts, the endless wars in the Mid East, the BP spill and the meltdown of the climate, and about a dozen other crises have shaken us deeply. It’s become common sense that the system is broken and a major change is needed. Barack Obama was elected in the US precisely by promising this change. Now that he is failing to deliver, more and more people are questioning whether the system can provide any solutions, or whether it’s actually the source of the problem.

Shattered faith is the dominant sentiment today. You can see it in people’s faces – the disappointment, grief, worry, and anger. To me, this loss of faith presents an enormous opening for putting forth a new, non-capitalist way of life. People are ready to hear radical solutions now, like they haven’t been since the Great Depression.

Historic Crossroads

If we go back to 1929, we’ll see some interesting parallels to our current moment. When that depression started, millions lost their livelihoods to pay for the bankers’ crisis. Faith in capitalism sunk to rock bottom. The public flocked to two major ideologies that offered a way out: socialism and fascism.

Socialism presented a solution to the crisis by saying, roughly: “Capitalism is flawed because it divides us into rich and poor, and the rich always take advantage of the poor. We need to organize the poor and workers into unions and political parties so we can take power for the benefit of all.”

Socialism attracted millions of followers, even in the United States. The labor movement was enormous and kept gaining ground through sit-down strikes and other forms of direct action. The Communist Party sent thousands of organizers into the new CIO, at the time a more radical union than the AFL. Socialist viewpoints even started getting through to the mass media and government. Huey Long was elected Senator from Louisiana by promising to “Share Our Wealth,” to radically redistribute the wealth of the country to abolish poverty and unemployment. (He was assassinated.) Socialism challenged President Roosevelt from the left, pushing him to create the social safety net of the New Deal.

On the other side, fascism also emerged as a serious force and attracted a mass following by putting forth something like the following: “The government has sold us out. We are a great nation, but we have been disgraced by liberal elites who are pillaging our economy for the benefit of foreign enemies, dangerous socialists, and undesirable elements (like Jews). We need to restore our national honor and fulfill our God-given mission.”

When people hear the word fascism, they usually think of Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, where successful fascist movements seized state power and implemented totalitarian control of society. Yet fascism was an international phenomenon during the Depression, and the United States was not immune to its reach. General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, testified before the Senate that wealthy industrialists had approached him as part of a “Business Plot” and tried to convince him to march an army of 500,000 veterans on Washington, DC to install a fascist dictatorship.

Today we are approaching a similar crossroads. When I hear the story of the Business Plot I think about the Tea Party, which has sprung from a base of white supremacist anger, facilitated by right-wing elements of the corporate structure like Fox News. This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. The tea-partyers have moved from questioning Obama’s citizenship, to now trying to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the ability of everyone, regardless of color, to enjoy public accommodations like restaurants.

I think it’s fair to name the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Christian Right, etc. parts of a potential neo-fascist movement in the United States. Their words and actions too often encourage attacks on people of color, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, and anyone they don’t see as legitimate members of US society. Ultimately, many in this movement are pushing for a different social system taking power in the United States: one that is more authoritarian, less compassionate, more exploitive of the environment, more militaristic, and based on a mythical return to national glory. This is not a throwback to Nazi Germany. It’s a new kind of fascism, a new American fascism. And it’s a serious threat.

Tea Party racism in Denver, April 15, 2009

On the other hand, this crisis is also an opportunity for all of us who see capitalism as a destructive force and believe the message of the recent U.S. Social Forum that “Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary.” “Socialism” in the post-McCarthy/Cold War era of the United States is a dead word, because it carries a lot of baggage from the Soviet Union. Rightly so, the USSR was a terrible dictatorship that is hardly an example to follow. The question is, how do those of us who are progressive and anti-capitalist articulate our ideas to resonate with a mass audience in this moment?

Common Values

I argue that we need to speak to the population in a language of our common values: democracy, freedom, justice, and sustainability.

Adopting this mainstream language is not an attempt to be deceptive. These words have captured people’s hearts for a real reason: they offer a window to the world we want to see. It is the government, corporations, and media who deceive us by evoking these words to justify their atrocities, as in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” (Over a million dead, and the Iraqi people are no closer to any kind of “freedom” I would want.) Rather than surrendering these noble ideals to the right wing, where they become meaningless dogma, I see immense potential to take language back and use it with honesty, as if words actually mean something.

So what if progressives reclaim these common values and make them guideposts on the way to a better society? For example, how can we talk about freedom if there is no self-determination, either in Iraq or here in the US? Let’s be honest, what freedom do we really have? The freedom to choose Coke or Pepsi, or similarly, to vote Democrat or Republican?

What about the freedom to determine our own destinies outside the constraints of corporations and government? What freedom is more basic than freedom from poverty and suffering? How can anyone speak of freedom if they have no income and no opportunity to escape unemployment? Or if they have nowhere to live because their home was foreclosed? What if their community is torn apart because so many youth are filling the prisons on nonviolent drug offenses? Is a prisoner free? Is their mother, spouse, or loved ones free? What does freedom mean if you’re queer or trans, and you face emotional and physical violence every time you express who you are and live your own life? How can we claim to be a free society if immigrants live in fear of being locked up by ICE and deported? What freedom do you have if your neighbor has none?

I think real freedom requires self-determination, the ability of an individual or community to choose their own destinies. We can’t pretend we have freedom in this country until “we, the people” have a say in our neighborhoods, towns and cities, in our workplaces, our schools, and our government. This requires that the public actively participate in managing their own affairs, for example through neighborhood councils to have a say in the neighborhood, through labor unions to have a say at work, student unions to have a say at school, and other democratic organizations that give people the power to defend their rights. There is a dire need to hold our corrupt representatives in Washington accountable to popular will. But to be truly free, might we also need to structure government in a new way, so it can be run by the people themselves? Or even to abolish the government, if it can’t do what the people say?

So I believe when we get to the meaningful core of the word “freedom,” it poses a radical challenge to capitalist society. We can say similar things about “democracy,” “justice,” and “sustainability,” and I would add, “love.” I’ll talk more about this in response to your third question. These values reinforce each other, and if we honor them for their true depth of meaning, they can be effective tools for change.

The Power of Imagination

This might sound good, but do progressives have the power to achieve these kinds of changes? It may sound farfetched. The media and government, especially in the U.S., have done an excellent job convincing us that we can never win. People with our views are routinely excluded from official conversation on the news or in elections. When we try to protest and take our voices to the street, they corral us within “free speech zones” so we look crazy and feel powerless. If a progressive voice does get through to the public somehow, it’s dismissed as “unrealistic.” We’re pressured to just vote for the lesser of two evils and be silent. The result of this silencing is that we have no idea how many people share our values and aspirations, because we’re often too intimidated to proclaim our views proudly. Worse, to some degree we’ve internalized this silencing so that we hesitate even to imagine our progressive hopes and dreams, lest they accidentally slip past our lips into polite conversation.

The stifling of progressive views is part of a larger culture of silence that helps the system maintain control. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call it Manufacturing Consent, the use of media and propaganda to create a passive, obedient population. The message we receive constantly from media is that we are spectators, not participants. Rather than take a stand on an issue and risk being wrong or foolish, why not leave it to the experts? Besides, we’re too busy being consumers, workers and students to worry about politics. Better to not make waves. We might as well amuse ourselves with television, celebrity gossip, and Facebook, and try not to get involved. From all the propaganda we consume over the course of our lives, we come to develop the core belief that we are powerless to affect change. This myth of powerlessness is one of the biggest lies in the history of the world, and we need to dismantle it.

What the U.S. Social Forum proves is that there is a large, broad-based movement for change here in the United States, the very core of the global capitalist machine. There are millions of average, everyday people all across the nation who are working and pushing in a progressive direction in large and small ways, whether on immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, housing, health care, education, prison justice, queer and trans justice, environmental justice, peace in the Middle East, etc. The system doesn’t want you to know about this, which is why they don’t show it on television. Our movements are alive and well. They are strong. They are inspiring. And in many places they are winning.

Coalition to Save the Libraries confronts the Philadelphia City Council and its Budget Cuts, May 21, 2009

I’ll just share a local example from here in Philadelphia. In late 2008, Mayor Nutter announced he would close 11 libraries due to budget constraints. Seemingly out of nowhere – but actually out of strong communities throughout the city – a movement emerged to oppose and prevent this decision, facilitated by the multiracial, multigenerational Coalition to Save the Libraries. The coalition organized creative actions at library branches slated for closure and at City Hall. People from across the city came together to imagine what kind of library system would best serve the public. Pressure kept mounting until the Mayor had to abandon his closures. All the libraries remain open to this day, despite continuing budget cuts and layoffs. Kristin Campbell wrote a fuller description of how grassroots organizing saved the libraries.

We can look at this victory and downplay it as limited because it only restored a public service that shouldn’t have been attacked anyway. But like all grassroots organizing it points towards a better future, for the simple reason that people became empowered by working together. Capitalism is a system of disempowerment. It cannot tolerate our active participation in public affairs. As soon as we begin to break our silence and speak out against the injustices we are being subjected to, the system begins to quake and it searches for ways to pacify and silence us again. If we remain alert, active, and vocal, we can break the culture of complacency and bring more and more people into the awareness of their own power. So I think that’s the opportunity we have in this crisis.

I want to excite people’s imaginations of what a better world might look like. There is no better time to do it. If my theory is right, then capitalism, the system that has dominated the world for the past 500 years, is coming to an end. Recognizing this opens up a world of possibility for the future. Maybe that’s scary, because who knows what will happen? We might be driven into a neo-fascist nightmare. Things might keep getting worse, in which case maybe we should just find reasons to enjoy our current way of life while it lasts. I can see some of my friends saying that. But that leaves out two crucial truths that I want to highlight.

The first truth is that capitalism is a terribly abusive and destructive system, which we would be better off without. The second truth is that if we organize and push for a better world, we might win. So the time for complacency is over, and the time for taking bolder steps toward our dreams is here.

For the next few months, the world will be focusing on Arizona’s SB 1070 – the state’s new racial profiling law. However, in this insane asylum known as Arizona, where conservatives have concocted one reactionary scheme after another, another law in particular stands out for its embrace of Dark Ages-era censorship – the 2010 anti-ethnic studies HB 2281 – a law that seeks to codify the “triumph” of Western Civilization with its emphasis on Greco-Roman culture.

Unless it is blocked, HB 2281 – which creates an Inquisitorial mechanism that will determine which books and curriculums are acceptable in the state – will go into effect on Jan 1, 2011. Books such as Occupied America by Rodolfo Acuña and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, have already been singled out as being un-American and preaching the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

Both laws are genocidal: one law attacks the physical presence of red-brown peoples; the other one, our minds and spirits.

Lost in the tumultuous debate regarding what can be taught in the state’s schools is the topic of what actually constitutes Ethnic/Raza Studies.

In general, the philosophical foundation for Raza Studies are several Indigenous concepts, including: In Lak Ech, Panche Be and Hunab Ku. Over the past generation, the first two concepts have become fairly well known in the Mexican/Chicana/Chicano communities of the United States. The third concept, Hunab Ku, is relatively less well known, though it actually forms the foundation for In Lak Ech – ‘Tu eres mi otro yo – You are my other self’ and Panche Be – ‘to seek the root of the truth’ or ‘to find the truth in the roots’. As explained by Maya scholar, Domingo Martínez Paredez, Hunab Ku is the name the Maya gave in their language to the equivalence of the Supreme Being or the Grand Architect of the Universe (Hunab Ku, 1970). Such concept is an understanding of how the universe functions.

These three concepts are rooted in a philosophy based on maiz. Maiz, incidentally, is the only crop in the history of humanity that was created by humans. Also, the Indigenous peoples of this continent are the only peoples in the history of humanity to have created their/our own food – maiz – a food so special that it is what virtually unites not simply this continent, but this era. These three maiz-based concepts, in effect, constitute the essence of who we are or who we can be; human beings connected to each other, to all of life and creation. Part of creation; not outside of it. This is the definition of what it means to be human. While these concepts are Indigenous to this continent, they also exist generally in all cultures.

Despite the destruction of the many thousands of the ancient books of the Maya (along with those of the Aztecs-Mexica) by Spanish priests during the colonial era, these Maya-Nahua concepts were not destroyed, nor are they consigned to the past. Today, they continue to be preserved and conveyed via ceremony, oral traditions, poetry and song (In Xochitl – In Cuicatl) and danza. And they continue to be developed by life’s experiences.

In Raza Studies, these ideas are designed to reach those that are unfamiliar with these concepts, including and in particular, Mexicans/Chicanos and Central Americans and other peoples from the Americas who live in the United States and who are maiz-based peoples or gente de maiz, albeit, sometimes far-removed from the cornfield or milpa. Despite their disconnection from the fields and despite the disconnection from the planting cycles and accompanying ceremonies – and in many cases the ancestral stories – their/our daily diet consciously and unconsciously keeps us connected to this continent and to the other original peoples and cultures of this continent.

In part, this effort to understand these concepts is an attempt to reclaim a creation/resistance culture, as opposed to viewing themselves/ourselves as foreigners or merely as U.S. minorities. It is also an affirmation that de-Indigenized Mexicans/Chicana/Chicano and Central and South American peoples are not trying to revive or learn from dead cultures. Instead, as elders from throughout this continent generally affirm, these cultures have never died and neither have these concepts; peoples have simply been disconnected from them. That is one definition of colonization and/or de-Indigenization. The effort to understand these and similar concepts and to embrace and live by them, is also one definition of de-colonization. And to be sure, it is elders from throughout the Americas that have for more than a generation reached out to these communities, imploring them/us to “return to our roots.”

Asserting the right to this knowledge that is Indigenous to this very continent is an effort to proclaim both the humanity and Indigeneity of peoples who are matter-of-factly treated as unwelcome and considered alien in this society. HB 2281 bizarrely treats this knowledge as “un-American.”

Additionally, asserting the right to write modern amoxtlis or codices – is also part of an effort to proclaim that all peoples – including de-Indigenized peoples – also have the right not simply to repeat (or recreate) things ancient, but to produce their/our own living knowledge. And in the case of Arizona – with red-brown peoples continuously under siege – these concepts can help us bring about peace, dignity and justice, with the potential to create better human beings of all of us.

Much attention the past three months has been focused on the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill disaster and clean up efforts. Government officials estimate that the ruptured well leaked between 94 million and 184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. However, not much attention has been given to which communities were selected as the final resting place for BP’s oil-spill garbage.

A large segment of the African American community was skeptical of BP, the oil and gas industry, and the government long before the disastrous Gulf oil disaster, since black communities too often have been on the receiving end of polluting industries without the benefit of jobs and have been used as a repository for other people’s rubbish. 

Given the sad history of waste disposal in the southern United States, it should be no surprise to anyone that the BP waste disposal plan looks a lot like “Dumping in Dixie,” and has become a core environmental justice concern, especially among low-income and people of color communities in the Gulf Coast — communities whose residents have historically borne more than their fair share of solid waste landfills and hazardous waste facilities before and after natural and man-made disasters. 

For decades, African American and Latino communities in the South became the dumping grounds for all kind of wastes — making them “sacrifice zones.” Nowhere is this scenario more apparent than in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi from Baton Rough to New Orleans. Gulf Coast residents, who have for decades lived on the fenceline with landfills and waste sites, are asking why their communities are being asked again to shoulder the waste disposal burden for the giant BP oil spill. They are demanding answers from BP and the EPA in Washington, DC and the EPA Region 4 office in Atlanta and EPA Region 6 office in Dallas — two EPA regions that have a legacy of unequal protection, racial discrimination, and bad decisions that have exacerbated environmental and health disparities. 

Today we are seeing a disturbing pattern re-emerge in the disposal of the BP oil-spill waste.  Because of the haphazard handling and disposal of the wastes from the busted well, the U.S Coast Guard and the U.S. EPA leaned on BP and increased their oversight of the company’s waste management plan.  BP’s waste plan, “Recovered Oil/Waste Management Plan Houma Incident Command,” was approved on June 13, 2010.

BP hired private contractors to cart away and dispose of thousands of tons of polluted sand, crude-coated boom and refuse that washed ashore.  The nine approved Gulf Coast solid waste landfills, amount of waste disposed, and the percent minority residents living within a one-mile radius of the facilities are listed below:

Alabama 

Chastang Landfill, Mount Vernon, AL, 6008 tons (56.2%) Magnolia Landfill, Summerdale, AL, 5,966 tons (11.5%)

Florida

Springhill Regional Landfill, Campbellton, FL, 14,228 ton (76.0%)

Louisiana

Colonial Landfill, Ascension Parish, LA, 7,729 (34.7%) Jefferson Parish Sanitary Landfill, Avondale, LA, 225 tons (51.7%) Jefferson Davis Parish Landfill, Welsh, LA, 182 tons (19.2%) River Birch Landfill, Avondale, LA, 1,406 (53.2%) Tide Water Landfill, Venice, LA, 2,204 tons (93.6%)

Mississippi

Pecan Grove Landfill, Harrison, MS, 1,509 tons (12.5%)

According to BP’s Oil Spill Waste Summary, as of of July 15, more than 39,448 tons of oil garbage had been disposed at nine approved landfills in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. More than half (five out of nine) of the landfills receiving BP oil-spill solid waste are located in communities where people of color comprise a majority of residents living within near the waste facilities. 

In addition, a significantly large share of the BP oil-spill waste, 24,071 tons out of 39,448 tons (61 percent), is dumped in people of color communities.  This is not a small point since African Americans make up just 22 percent of the coastal counties in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, while people of color comprise about 26 percent of the population in coastal counties. 

Clearly, the flow of BP oil-spill waste to Gulf Coast communities is not random.  The mix of waste and race was the impetus behind the Environmental Justice Movement in Warren County, North Carolina more than twenty-five years ago. In 1982, toxic PCBs were cleaned up from North Carolina roadways and later dumped in a landfill in mostly black and poor Warren County. We also saw the pattern in 2009 when 3.9 million tons of toxic coal ash from the massive Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power plant spill in East Tennessee was cleaned up and shipped more than 300 miles south by train and disposed in a landfill in rural and mostly black Perry County, Alabama.  

The largest amount of BP oil-spill solid waste (14,228 tons) was sent to a landfill in a Florida community where three-fourths of the nearby residents are people of color.  Although African Americans make up about 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, three of the five approved landfills (60 percent) in the state that  received BP oil-spill waste are located in mostly black communities.  African American communities in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast were hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina and have experienced the toughest challenge to rebuild and recover after five years.  Dumping more disaster waste on them is not a pathway to recovery and long-term sustainability. 

Clearly, Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898, “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations,” signed by President William J. Clinton in 1994, requires the EPA and the U.S. Coast Guard to do a better job monitoring where BP oil-spill waste ends up to ensure that minority and low-income populations do not bear an adverse and disproportionate share of the burdens and negative impacts associated with the disastrous BP oil spill. Allowing BP, Gulf Coast states, and the private disposal industry to select where the oil-spill waste is dumped only adds to the legacy of environmental racism and unequal protection.

Consumer confidence is terrible; citizen confidence is worse: Only 11 percent of Americans have confidence in Congress. No surprise there is record-setting anti-incumbency anger rampant among Americans. But the sad truth is damned if you do and damned if you don’t vote for incumbents.

The problem is that the reformers, populist outsiders, tea party candidates, surprise primary winners and others expecting to oust incumbents in the coming mid-term elections for members of Congress and state governors and other officials mostly suck. Why? They are nutty, ignorant, dishonest or racist.

Pathetic US Senate candidates like Alvin Greene on the left in South Carolina and Sharron Angle on the right in Nevada, for example, are intellectual nits and an insult to a once envied political system. And in Memphis, Tennessee Willie Herenton, who is African-American, sells black racism to oust two-term incumbent Congressman Steve Cohen in a primary, telling blacks to not vote for his white opponent.

Many ambitious candidates drained the economy to become super-rich. Is this any time to trust people who have taken advantage of our corrupt corporate system to run the government and serve those they have previously taken advantage of for personal gain? Will anger about the corrupt, dysfunctional government system be sufficient for voters to turn the government over to people who have nothing in common with most Americans?

Consider California. Meg Whitman, a Republican candidate for governor, wants to beat the familiar, incumbent-like Democrat, Jerry Brown, now attorney general, and was previously the chief executive of eBay. She has outspent all other self-financed candidates across the country by using $91 million of her own money to knock out Steve Poizner, who spent $24 million of his own money, in the Republican primary. California is big, but $91 million and likely even more!! She will greatly outspend Brown. And Carly Fiorina, a Republican who is challenging Democrat Senator, Barbara Boxer, in California, has the audacity to claim on her website that she will “fight for every job” if elected even though, as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in 2003, she cut about 18,000 jobs and did little good for the company. She has already spent $5 million. Are these people worthy of public support?

Consider Florida. Republican Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA Healthcare — an awful large hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in fines for fraudulently billing government programs like Medicare — has become the front-runner for Florida governor. He supposedly is worth about $200 million. He was ousted by his own board of directors in 1997 amid the nation’s biggest health care fraud scandal. He loaned his campaign $22.9 million during the period from April 9 through July 16 and spent $22.65 million of it. In contrast, he received only $415,126 in contributions. Bill McCollum, his Republican opponent, raised a little over $1 million during the reporting period and spent about $1.7 million. He has raised $5.7 million since he announced his campaign last year. He has less than $500,000 left. Democrat candidate, Alex Sink, with no primary opponent, raised $1.1 million for the reporting period and has raised $7.3 million so far. Is Scott better qualified because of his wealth and ability to advertise more?

Also in Florida is Jeff Greene, who wants to be US Senator, a Democrat who had been a Republican with a strange gang of friends like Mike Tyson and Heidi Fleiss. Incredibly, most of his fortune, estimated at $1.4 billion, came from derivatives that let him profit from the collapse of subprime mortgages which helped tank the US economy. He lives in an oceanfront mansion when he is not on one of his yachts or his plane with gold seat-belt buckles. He recently reported taking a paltry $3,036 in outside contributions, while lending himself — and spending — $5.9 million in the second quarter. Recent polls found Greene roughly even in the primary with Democrat Representative, Kendrick B. Meek, who had been the party favorite and took 18 months to raise a similar amount. Incumbent-like candidate Governor, Charlie Crist, still leads as an independent in a three-way general election. Greene boasts that now is the moment for self-financed candidates. “If 2008 was the year of change, 2010 is the year of frustration,” he said. But does frustration justify voting for these characters?

And then there is Linda E. McMahon, a Connecticut Republican who made her fortune in professional wrestling before her Senate run. She has stated a willingness to spend $50 million of her own money to win the election, a lot of money for such a small state, and has already spent $21.5 million. A television ad declares “politicians have had their chance, and blown it” while her jobs plan “is backed by experience.” She became president of the WWF as a legal maneuver to save the company in 1993, because her husband was indicted for distributing steroids to his wrestlers. Cleverly, she blew the whistle and told regulators something few in the industry would admit: wrestling matches were scripted shows and not athletic competitions that required the kind of oversight that, say, boxing required. The financial benefit was that her wrestling business operates in 29 states without supervision by state athletic boards or commissions, saving the company licensing fees. She served only a few months on the state Board of Education and then became a candidate. She supports policies that favor the rich and advocates offshore oil drilling. She faces Democrat incumbent-like, Richard Blumenthal, now attorney general of Connecticut. Is her wrestling business experience really the basis for being a great senator?

Voters should remember this: None of these characters are legitimate populists, progressives or reformers with a political record to show their true capabilities or positions. Why trust them? Would they perform better than incumbents? I don’t think so. More likely, they would serve elites and corporate interests. In the past very few rich candidates have won office (just 11 percent), but considering the anti-incumbency sentiment this year, big money may prevail.

Is the evil you don’t know really better than the evil you do know because of failed government experience? Are some incumbents worth support? Or will many Americans admit that voting no longer can fix and reform our battered democracy and stay home? I think I will. There are just too many fools and idiots voting that offset the votes of informed and intelligent citizens. Maybe if voter turnout was totally abysmal, say 20 percent, maybe then we would get the reforms or revolution we need by de-legitimizing our delusional democracy.

In the early sixties, the young black students in the South had had enough.

Enough separate drinking fountains, enough all-night drives because no motel would provide a room, and enough refusal of service at restaurants and lunch counters.

“Screw this,” they said, and so they sat at Woolworth’s lunch counters anyway, where they were taunted, spat upon, beaten, and arrested.

The white restaurant owners resisted, most notably one Lester Maddox in Atlanta who stood at the door of his Pickrick restaurant, axe handle in hand, threatening to use it on any black citizen who might attempt to enter. Enough white Georgia citizens were sufficiently delighted by Maddox’ act of defiance that they elected him Governor of the state.

But the students persisted, organizing “freedom rides” throughout the south, where they were joined by supporters of all ages and races from around the country until, at last, they prevailed. In 1964 the Congress of the United States passed the first Public Accommodations law, which stipulated:

All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, … without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

Today, the right of all persons to access to motels, restaurants, transportation facilities, etc., is settled law and is accepted throughout the land by most citizens.

“Most,” but not all. Among the remaining dissenters is Rand Paul, a libertarian and the Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky.

Racial discrimination in public facilities is morally wrong, Paul agrees, and those who disapprove have a perfect right to boycott establishments that discriminate.

But the property rights of the owners, he insists, are sacrosanct. And however much we might deplore and protest the owners’ decision to refuse service on the basis of race, the facilities are still private property and the owners have the indisputable right to do with their property as they wish.

The Myth of “Absolute Rights”

The moral center of libertarian dogma is a triad of rights: the rights to life, liberty and property. William Bayes expresses the dogma with admirable clarity:

Where do my rights end? Where yours begin. I may do anything I wish with my own life, liberty and property without your consent; but I may do nothing with your life, liberty and property without your consent….1

This proclamation is accompanied by a qualification – the so-called “like liberty principle”: You have “the right to live your life as you choose so long as you don’t infringe on the equal rights of others.”2 As we shall see, this qualification proves to be the undoing of libertarian absolutism.

An unyielding defense of property rights runs afoul of an inescapable moral conundrum: anyone who holds more than one moral principle must face the possibility of a conflict of principles, whereby one principle might have to yield to another. I call this “the moral relativism of conflict.” And as Charles Frankel wisely pointed out, the person who attempts to escape this dilemma through an unyielding adherence to one and only one principle is not a moralist, the correct description is “a fanatic.” Moliere’s Misanthrope, whose single moral precept was to never tell a lie, is the classical example of a fanatic.

For example: If you are asked directly by a Mafia hit-man the location of his intended victim, do you tell the truth? In fact, in defense of the target’s “right to life,” you are morally required to tell a lie. In fact, the law so stipulates, for if you tell the truth you will be charged with being an accessory to murder. A scene from the sixties movie “Dr. Strangelove” exemplifies another such conflict: Is it permissible to steal coins from a Coke machine in order to make a phone call that saves the world from nuclear annihilation?

Libertarians cannot escape from this “relativism of conflict,” for they insists upon not one, but at least three fundamental principles: the rights to life, liberty and property.

And yet, David Boaz, in his Libertarianism – A Primer, proclaims that “Fundamental rights cannot conflict. Any claim of conflicting rights must represent a misinterpretation of fundamental rights.”3 Boaz offers no defense of this dogmatic pronouncement.. Small wonder. It is indefensible. Talk to a libertarian for a few minutes, and if he affirms that all persons are entitled to equal rights (the “like liberty principle”) and if that libertarian has even a modicum of moral rationality, he must yield on this point. For consider:

Is there an inviolable right to establish a hog farm on one’s property in a residential area? Such a “right” degrades the property values of one’s neighbors.

Is there an inviolable right to own a tactical nuclear weapon or to manufacture explosives in one’s basement? This violates the neighbors’ right to life.

Is there a right to run past a “No Trespassing” sign to rescue a drowning child or an infant in a burning building? The law permits such exceptions; it is called a “defense of necessity.”

Is a person permitted to steal a loaf of bread to avoid starvation? To condemn such an exercise of one’s “right to life” is too much even for the dogmatic libertarian. Yet David Boaz’ evasion of this trap is curious, and ultimately inconsistent. On the one hand, he writes that “[property] rights cannot apply where social and political life is impossible,”4 which is to say that property rights are not absolute. And yet, earlier in the book, Boaz, citing John Locke, writes that the rights to life, liberty and property are “prior to the existence of government – thus we call them ‘natural rights,’ because they exist in nature.”5 This latter pronouncement would seem to indicate that because property rights are “prior to government,” a starving person is never justified in saving his life and that of his family by stealing the property of another. But does not the libertarian also insist that the right to life is also “prior to government”? Thus the libertarian offers no resolution to this conflict between the rights of life and property.

Which brings us, at last, to the right of access to public accommodations.

Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 curtails the absolute property rights of the owner of a motel or a restaurant, etc. But the act does so to affirm and protect the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness of those who would otherwise be discriminated against. For racial, religious, or other discrimination is a fundamental insult to the dignity of the affected individuals and a validation of their second-class citizenship. This is intolerable in a civilized society. The libertarian agrees: “The ethical or normative basis of libertarianism is respect for the dignity and worth of every (other) person.” (Boaz 97)

By defending the right of the owner of a public facility to deny access “on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin,” the libertarians repudiate their proclaimed adherence to the “like liberty principle” and they betray an absence of that most fundamental of moral sentiments, empathy. In other words, they fail to comprehend what it is like to be the victim of discrimination.

Martin Luther King’s elaboration of this point, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is unsurpassed in its force and eloquence:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

The Upshot

As a youngster, I was taught that virtue in the individual and justice in the state consisted of the triumph of good over evil. But then I entered the university and studied philosophy, where I learned that the moral life is not as simple as that. For, in addition, virtue and justice can also consist in making the optimal forced choices among several competing “goods” or among several necessary evils – what moral philosophers call “tragic choices.” These include engaging in a defensive war to resist aggression, performing an abortion to preserve a woman’s life, stealing food to avoid starvation, and requiring the owner of a motel or a restaurant to serve all customers regardless of their race, religion or national origin.

It is all well and good for citizens to engage in lofty abstractions as they discuss moral principles and political rights. As a practicing philosopher, I would be the last to decry such an activity.

But, as Aristotle taught us, morality and politics are, in the final analysis, practical. They are about the conduct of our lives and the ordering of society in specific, particular, day-by-day circumstances. Thus moral principles and political rights must have application to ordinary particular life experiences. Otherwise, they are of no use to us, merely “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.” Accordingly in the arena of ordinary day-by-day life, moral dogmatism and absolutism have no place.

Thus it was that Martin Luther King, when confronted with the charge that “the law” must be upheld without exception, answered not with competing abstractions but with a bill of particulars – with a list of specific indignities and insults that the afro-American must face every day.

Put simply, it is not enough to have the will to do what is right. One must also have the practical intelligence to know what is right. And, in ordinary life, the application of abstract moral rules has consequences that often impact competing rules. Just as the ecologists have taught us that due to the complex interrelationships among organism, “you can’t do just one thing,” the morally sophisticated citizen must constantly ask the ecologist’s question: “and then what?”6

Like Lester Maddox in 1964, Rand Paul today has failed to acknowledge the complex ecology of morality, as he insists that absolute property rights must allow the owner and proprietor of a public facility to discriminate if he so chooses. And also, typical of the dogmatic libertarian, David Boaz fails to acknowledge the ecology of morality when he proclaims, without a shred of supporting argument, that “fundamental rights cannot conflict.”

Yet it is just this kind of unyielding fanaticism that is polluting our civic and political discourse today. If the American republic is to survive the polarization of today’s politics, we must, on both sides of the political divide, learn to pause and think through the implications of our moral precepts and our rhetoric. And the ultimate test of those precepts and that rhetoric must be in the laboratory of our practical everyday experience.

Libertarians and other dogmatists to the contrary notwithstanding, fundamental rights and abstract moral precepts can and do conflict. Accordingly, if one affirms, as both the liberals and the libertarians affirm, that we must respect the dignity of each individual and that each person’s rights must be consistent with the equal rights of others, then it clearly follows that property rights are not absolute and that the public accommodation law of 1964 is correct:

All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, … without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

1. Bayes, William W. (1970). “What is Property?”, The Freeman, July 1970: 348.
2. Boaz, David (1997) Libertarianism – A Primer, The Free Press: 59.
3. Boaz, 89.
4. Boaz, 86.
5. Boaz, 37.
6. Hardin, Garrett (1985), An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament, Filters Against Folly, Viking.

Calling itself “the intelligence agency of the people,” WikiLeaks is “a multi-juristidictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive material to communicate to the public” that has a right and need to know — to then use responsibly for better government in a free and open society, absent in today’s America run by warlords, criminal politicians, and corporate bosses, spurning the rule of law for their own gain.

On July 26, WikiLeaks published “The Afghan War Diaries,” its modern day Pentagon Papers, top-secret documents eroding support for the Vietnam War, the New York Times saying they “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance” — what Julian Assange has done on Afghanistan, revealing Bush and Obama administration lies and duplicity about their illegal war of aggression, America’s longest. More on that below.

Releasing over 75,000 of nearly 92,000 reports, they represent a small fraction of millions of US files uploaded to WikiLeaks databases, more to be regularly released, “high quality material,” according to Assange.

They’re chronologically listed in over 100 categories, covering the period January 2004-December 2009, describing lethal US military actions, including numbers internally killed, wounded, or detained by geographical location, units involved, and major weapons used.

Since the Pentagon Papers, they comprise the “most significant (comprehensive) archive about the reality of war,” with no resolution or opposition in Congress, providing “a comprehensive understanding of the war (and) modern warfare in general.”

Accounts come mainly from soldiers and intelligence officers, but also from US embassies and other sources revealing corruption and criminality across Afghanistan, including coverups, collusion, distortion, and duplicity — a sordid story needing telling to shock a comatose public to action, and revive a badly needed anti-war movement.

As expected, the White House reacted sharply and deceptively, National Security Advisor James Jones saying:

“The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security,” ignoring the war’s illegality; its duplicitous, mindless, shameless destructiveness; a brutal quagmire; waged under false pretenses; and its shocking human costs on both sides; Afghan civilians mostly, but also NATO casualties, including deaths, mutilations, disabling injuries, PTSD, suicides, deadly toxins exposure, and proper care at home denied.

In several Nation magazine articles, Joshua Kors highlighted how US soldiers are treated, his April 26, 2010 article titled, “Disposable Soldiers: How the Pentagon is Cheating Wounded Vets,” mistreating them, misdiagnosing their needs to deny care and disability pay, providing substandard care, abandoning them when no longer needed, the major media not reporting it, how they’re now sanitizing WikiLeaks revelations, downplaying their importance, omitting important truths – about illegal wars and crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, both Bush and Obama administrations culpable.

America’s Lawlessness

The Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8 grants Congress only the power to declare war, appropriate funding, and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the” nation.

The UN Charter is also explicit, explaining under what circumstances violence and coercion (by one state against another) are permitted. Articles 2(3) and 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use, and Article 51 allows the “right of self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member… until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”

In other words, justifiable self-defense is permissible. Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 absolutely prohibit any unilateral threat or use of force not specifically allowed under Article 51 or authorized by the Security Council.

Three important General Assembly resolutions concur, unconditionally prohibiting “non-consensual military intervention:”

– the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty;

– the 1970 Declaration on the Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations; and

– the 1974 Definition of Aggression — “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations….”

Under Bush and Obama, Washington violated these laws by attacking and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, two nations posing no threat to America, willful aggression, what the Nuremberg Tribunal’s Justice Robert Jackson called “the supreme international crime,” enforceable under the Constitution’s “supremacy clause” (Article VI, clause 2), under which international laws and treaties automatically become US ones.

Then since October 2001, US forces (including CIA operatives) committed appalling crimes of war and against humanity, in violation of the four Geneva Conventions, the US War Crimes Act, the UN Torture Convention, the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles, US Army Field Manual 27-10, and other US and international laws — using weapons of mass destruction to massacre millions (mainly civilians), cause vast devastation and destruction, and continue oppressive occupations illegally.

WikiLeaks documented the evidence, lifting the fog of war, revealing its true face, the human carnage, shocking atrocities, rampaging death squads against civilians, murdering women and children wantonly, torturing randomly arrested victims, operating freely under a media blackout.

Partnered with NATO, America’s military/industrial/media collaborators misportray US wars as humanitarian, hiding their imperial purpose — state terrorism against millions, showing an utter disregard for the law, truth, humanity or justice.

Even now after WikiLeaks revelations, media reports focus largely on their legality, political impact in November, and how congressional Democrats and the Obama administration may be harmed. They say nothing about nine years of duplicitous lies, shocking war crimes, no accountability, and two illegal wars, demanding they end, their grotesque harm stopped, and hundreds of billions for war profiteers used for homeland needs to revive a sick economy, harming millions as a result.

Undaunted, the White House vowed to keep fighting, continue America’s longest war, its occupation and violence in Iraq, defying popular sentiment against them, discounted for imperial gain and expediency — what the media won’t explain.

WikiLeaks Reports

Civilians are willfully targeted, those killed or wounded called insurgents, the numbers affected downplayed and misreported, embedded journalists an echo chamber for Pentagon/NATO lies and distortion.

Reports cover most Army units, not Special Forces, top-secret European ones, and other International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) except in combined operations, including assassinations and killing of civilians, including women and children, the media calling them militants or saying nothing at all.

Downplaying the revelations, the New York Times described “an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war,” portraying a bleaker picture than reported, yet collaborating with the White House to sanitize it, clearing it in advance before publishing, its usual practice for sensitive materials to keep readers misinformed, an article like this one impossible to clear its censors.

Der Spiegel published an interview with Julian Assange on his motivation for publishing. He said it eclipses everything released so far about the war and modern warfare, shockingly detailed to influence public opinion and political decision-makers: by “shin(ing) light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war,” in hopes the mood will shift to end it.

“Reform can only come (when) injustice is exposed. To oppose an unjust plan before it reaches implementation is to stop injustice.” America’s most dangerous men wage wars, not whistleblowers who expose them, their motives, false promises and crimes. Asked why he established WikiLeaks, he said:

“We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time (and) do something… meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work,” more than ever vitally needed.

Headlining “Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation,” London Guardian writers, Nick Davies and David Leigh, discussed numerous incidents of tens or “hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops,” covert units hunting leaders for “kill or capture,” the “steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on NATO,” and the paper’s full war logs investigation, exposing real war, not a sanitized version omitting the human toll, vast destruction, corruption and drug-dealing, collusion and deceit, key unreported incidents happening daily, an “unvarnished picture,” lifting the fog of war.

The Guardian said “Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material, including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings, and uncensored opinions of other governments.”

Interviewed on Democracy Now!, Daniel Ellsberg was “very impressed,” calling the release the first “in 39 or 40 years, since I first gave the Pentagon Papers to the Senate,” saying he hopes it will inspire others to come forward and reveal what they know despite the considerable risk.

The documents were released in advance to the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and New York Times, revealing “a contemporaneous catalogue of conflict,” classified secret, encyclopedic but incomplete, in total presenting a very disturbing picture, including many accounts of coalition forces willfully targeting civilians, killing or injuring them, unreported until now.

Other reports cover hundreds of border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops, armies supposedly allies, Special Forces killing Taliban, Al Queda leaders, and civilians, mindless slaughter on both sides, and numerous incidents of lethal friendly fire, taking NATO, American and Afghan forces lives — the main concern then concealing the evidence, weapons used, and crimes committed, embedded journalists saying nothing, including about regular demonstrations against America’s presence and the corrupted Kabul government, Hamid Karzai a US stooge.

The documents also discuss Pakistan’s ISI (its Inter-Services Intelligence) linkage ‘to some of the war’s most notorious commanders,” sending 1,000 motorbikes to warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani for suicide attacks in Khost and Logar provinces. In addition, Islamabad’s involvement “in a sensational range of plots, from attempting to assassinate President Hamid Karzai to poisoning the beer supply of western troops.”

Even the White House admits that elements of Pakistan’s army are linked to Afghan militants, endangering US troops by providing them safe havens.

As revealed, “this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain” are about to turn over to the Kabul government. “Quite the contrary. After nine years of warfare (a Guardian editorial wanting it indefinitely extended), the chaos threatens to overwhelm. A war fought ostensibly for the hearts and minds of Afghans cannot be won like this.”

Neither can one be fought for imperial gain, Afghan and American hearts and minds be damned. The first casualty also — the truth, WikiLeaks courageously exposing it to arouse a groundswell of public outrage and opposition, demanding the (Iraq and Afghan) wars end, and wasted billions diverted to homeland needs, people ones, including economic development creating jobs and futures, not handed to war profiteers and Wall Street bandits.

A Final Comment

In his 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, former Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, said “we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why” about a war that shouldn’t have been fought and couldn’t be won, what he told Lyndon Johnson privately, what the public never knew and few know now.

It’s no less true about Iraq and Afghanistan, General Stanley McChystal not sacked for deriding his superiors but for losing an unwinnable war, his Chief of Operations, Major General Bill Mayville saying: “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” an assessment McChrystal and others know, what major media accounts won’t report, what WikiLeaks hopes to change by inspiring a crescendo of antiwar sentiment, what can’t come a moment too soon.

The Atlantists are on the ascendant these days in Moscow. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s hamburger lunch with United States President Barack Obama during his visit to Silicon Valley last month apparently left a pleasant taste in his mouth. Now relations with NATO are on the mend, as Russia plans to send 27 Mi-17 helicopters to Afghanistan, NATO Military Committee Chairman, Giampaolo di Paola, said after a meeting with Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Nikolai Makarov, last Friday. Rosoboronexport has even offered to throw in the first three helicopters for free.

Makarov went further, telling di Paola that Russia was now ready to work with NATO “to pool efforts to find solutions to contemporary challenges and threats to international security”. Di Paola welcomed the Russian general’s offer, assuring him that NATO views Moscow as a “strong strategic partner, not as a threat or an enemy”. He spoke vaguely about new members having to “meet NATO standards”, avoiding the U(kraine) and G(eorgia) words during their press conference. Russian and NATO experts will draft a joint action plan for 2011 within the next few months, he said.

Russian NATO Ambassadoor, Dmitri Rogozin, recently boasted that “Russian helicopters will ideally fit Afghan conditions: they are easy to operate, reliable, efficient and known by Afghan pilots.” He offered to train Afghan pilots in addition to the Afghan police Russia is now helping train. Makarov even offered “consultancy in military and combat training based on our Afghan experience, including our mistakes”. The deal is estimated at $300m though Rogozin hinted that a discount beyond the three free copters was possible and that Russia could kick in another 19 in 2012. So, if I understand this correctly, Russia’s Afghan communist allies from the days of Soviet occupation are now going to man the same old Russian helicopters to kill yet more Afghan patriots, the only difference being the language the occupiers speak and their capitalist pedigree.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is also feeling the chilly wind of Russia-US detente these days. The Russian state-owned NTV, watched by millions of Belorussians, broadcast a scathing two-part documentary “The Belarusian Godfather” last week as the Kremlin was hosting leading Belarusian opposition figures, in a campaign to unseat their troublesome ally in the presidential elections next February. The Russian ire peaked last month over unpaid gas bills, disagreements over the proposed new customs union with Kazakhstan, and Lukashenko’s refusal to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as it, like Russia, seeks to curry favour in Brussels. Upping the ante, a sympathetic interview with Russian nemesis, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, was broadcast on Belarusian TV and Lukashenko is currently hosting deposed Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Bakiyev’s overthrow was approved if not abetted by Moscow, and the comparison of Lukashenko and Bakiyev in “The Godfather-II” is a stark warning to Lukashenko that his days are numbered.

What accounts for this sudden effusion of East-West friendship, after years of complaining about NATO encirclement and missile bases in Poland?

Obama’s more accommodating tone and NATO’s pause in its eastward march has clearly mollified the Russians. It also looks like disagreements over Ukrainian/Georgian membership in NATO and South Ossetian/Abkhazian independence are all on the backburner now as the US sinks deeper and deeper into its Afghan quagmire. Russia backs the losing war there because it is very worried about the prospects of a Taliban victory. Better a pro-US dictatorship than another Islamic neighbour. Besides, the helicopter deal (and who knows what else?) will replace its $1 billion loss on Iranian missile sales.

But Afghanistan is not Belarus, and rather than moving forward and trying to reach an accommodation with Afghanistan’s popular resistance movement, Russia is ignoring the lesson it learned with such pain two decades ago, gambling that the US can produce a miracle where it failed. It is also gambling that the US and NATO are too preoccupied — and grateful to a newly nice Russia — to try to pull off another colour revolution in Belarus, where Russia is counting on a largely pro-Russian nation finding a replacement to Lukashenko who will not cause the headaches that he, the orange, rose and tulip revolutionaries have caused.

Whatever happens in Afghanistan and Belarus, Medvedev’s two greatest wishes now are to get SALT through the US senate and to pave the way for Russia to join Europe. To clinch this westward reorientation, there are now signs that Russia will do the unthinkable: work with the US on missile defence. In a New York Times oped, ex-Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov and ex-German US ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, co-chairmen of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative Commission, joined former senator Sam Nunn in calling for “North America, Europe and Russia to make defence of the entire Euro-Atlantic region against potential ballistic missile attack a joint priority”. They propose the creation of a “more inclusive and better-defended Euro-Atlantic community … what national leaders in their moment of hope at the Cold War’s close spoke of as a ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals whole and free for the first time in 300 years’.”

Acceding to US plans for missile defence will kill Medvedev’s two birds with one stone. The NYT oped panders to Russian self-image by calling for the US, EU and Russia to “undertake as equal parties to design from the ground up a common architecture to deal with the threat”. It soothingly assures us that a joint Starwars will “aid progress in bolstering the nuclear nonproliferation regime”. Left out of the equation is the glaring fact that a world encircled by hair-trigger missiles is more likely to be a trigger for war than peace, that the whole point of Starwars is to create facts-on-the-ground for the US empire which will allow it to dictate just what kind of world order is acceptable.

As for boosting the NPT, the only way to discourage countries from emulating the nuclear powers is for them to give up their deadly weapons and stop threatening the world with them. It is naive of Russia to think it will be able to veto, say, a war on Iran or some other “offender” of what the US deems to be OK, or that countries threatened by US invasion will stop trying to acquire weapons that will make the US think twice.

This new accommodating Russia is very much in the US global interest and Obama is sure to keep courting Medvedev, despite attempts by Cold Warriors to undermine the budding friendship, as witnessed in the mock spy scandal last month. Given the new westerly wind blowing out of the Kremlin, geopolitical logic could mean an end to Brzezinski-like plans to encircle Russia. Much better to leave the problems of a remote Kyrgyzstan to a friend. Let it deal with complex ethnic and economic problems which Americans can’t hope to understand or solve, using a Russian (NATO?) military base as the occasion demands rather than maintaining an unpopular US one. Ukraine? Georgia? Bela-who? Afghanistan is what’s important, if it can be secured in the Western fold, with Russia in tow. And Starwars.

The goal of Obama’s imperial team is to rally Russia to the US (oops, I mean NATO) flag and push on. Ivanov et al explain that if all goes well, soon along with China, we “can explore cooperation on the role and place of missile defense in a multipolar nuclear world.” It looks like Medvedev has opted for US empire even as it implodes. Will Hu get the hint?

Capital is more than happy to enlist the mainstream [environmental] movement as a partner in the management of nature. Big environmental groups offer capital a threefold convenience: as legitimation, reminding the world that the system works; as control over popular dissent, a kind of sponge that sucks up and constrains the ecological anxiety in the general population; and as rationalization, a useful governor to introduce some control and protect the system from its own worst tendencies, while ensuring the orderly flow of profits.

– Joel Kovel, 20021

Global capitalist elites have long been masters of the exploitation of labour to manage sustained destruction of life. With utmost concern for shareholders, the principles of scientific management have been used to shackle workers to corporate priorities to efficiently harvest planet earth. In this way, humane citizens are socialized to accept absurd capitalist growth imperatives as natural, which enables the wealth of human energy to be channelled into the eradication of nature. Moreover, in this world of inverted realities, radical alternatives to this toxic state of affairs are regularly considered to contradict true human nature; so we are told it is natural to submit to arbitrary authority and let a tiny elite profit from the corporate management of life. This, however, does not prevent ordinary people from resisting such brutality. Indeed, throughout history ruling elites have been kept busy devising more effective ways of containing such dissent, and so this article will review some of the most significant elite-driven environmental initiatives that have served such purposes (from the 1960s onwards).

By highlighting the way by which elites, working hand in glove with the United Nations, have sought to manage the environmental terrain to disable radical movements seeking to eradicate capitalism, it is hoped that individual readers will recognize the futility of putting their hope in the hands of such illegitimate environmental managers. Only then, when such false illusions have been shattered, will mass movements driven by radical analyses be able to begin to work to sustain life in a just and equitable fashion.

Ending the Nuclear Threat? And the Birth of a Movement

Environmental historian John McCormick suggests that it “is credible” that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963) was the first global environmental agreement.2 Yet paradoxically, as peace historians Frances McCrea and Gerald Markle observe, this important agreement marked the point at which “the tide of peace activism began to ebb,” such that “nuclear testing, [now] widely perceived as an environmental and health issue rather than one of disarmament, was now a non-issue.” In fact, the sad reality is that once this pioneering global environmental agreement had been signed “American nuclear testing — conducted underground where the U.S. enjoyed a technological advantage — greatly accelerated.”3 The conservation movement thus ironically celebrates the advent of an environmental agreement that coincided with the weakening of the global peace movement; that is, the single strongest movement that challenging the legitimacy of the largest source of pollution, war.

Following the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, McCormick writes that the “idea of universal threats to the environment” was then “further reinforced” with the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic book Silent Spring (Hamilton, 1963). Here, to his credit, McCormick points out that Murray Bookchin had published his groundbreaking book Our Synthetic Environment six months earlier (to “relative failure”), observing that the key difference between the two books was that Carson’s “concentrated on a single issue” (pesticide overuse), while Bookchin’s “examined a broad range of the incidental effects of modern technology, from air pollution to contaminated milk.”4 Understandably, simple uni-focal environmental issues that failed to implicate all aspects of capitalism’s destruction of the world’s flora and fauna were clearly easier for capitalists to integrate and co-opt than systemic critiques such as those offered by more radical analysts like Bookchin.

With imperial wars ensuring total devastation of land and millions of people, concern for the environment gathered momentum throughout the 1960s, especially within liberal political elite circles. For example, in July 1965…

… Adlai Stevenson (then US ambassador to the United Nations) gave a speech before the UN Economic and Social Council in Geneva on the problems of urbanisation throughout the world. In the speech (originally drafted by Barbara Ward), he used the metaphor of the earth as a spaceship on which humanity travelled dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil. (p.80)

Here it is critical to observe that Barbara Ward went on to play a key role in driving the corporate environmental agenda, and before her death in 1981, Ward had served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation-backed Conservation Foundation.

Blame the People!

Something had to be done to save the environment, and as Katherine Barkley and Steve Weissman point out in their classic 1970 article “The Eco- Establishment,” the “elite resource planners took as their model for action the vintage 1910 American conservation movement, especially its emphasis on big business cooperation with big government.” The Conservation Foundation was a leading member of the eco-establishment and helped (amongst various other propaganda duties) to prepare the congressional background paper for the 1968 hearings on National Policy on Environmental Quality, a paper that explicitly laid out how elites planned “to pick the pocket of the consumer to pay for the additional costs they will be faced with” as a result of capitalism’s inherent destructiveness. Elite conservation groups and the mass media quickly ensured that population growth, not capitalism, was portrayed as the major threat to life, and in 1968 the Sierra Club (under the guidance of David Brower) published the work of the “unashamed neo-Malthusian” Paul Ehrlich as The Population Bomb, which “became one of the best-selling environmental books of all time.”5

Later, elite environmentalists adopted a faux-holistic approach to aid them in their efforts to manage the environment, which resulted in another widely celebrated neo-Malthusian book, The Limits to Growth (Club of Rome, 1972). McCormick writes how the roots of this book “went back to the late 1940s, when Jay Forrester, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pioneered the application of the digital computer, tactical military decision making, and information-feedback systems to studies of the interacting forces of social systems.” These ideas were then picked up by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian management consultant and president of Olivetti, who in 1968 “convened a meeting in Rome of a group of 30 economists, scientists, educationalists, and industrialists,” which subsequently became known as the Club of Rome. Under the remit of this elite “Club” Forrester recruited Dennis Meadows who authored The Limits to Growth.6 Club of Rome critics, Robert Golub and Joe Townsend, write:

The arguments of Limits imply the need for an international body to regulate the global economy, but the need for such a body grew out of the intrinsic instability of the world’s economy — as was recognized earlier by many students of the multinational corporation. The growth and spread of multinational corporations in the sixties outstripped the abilities of national governments to regulate and control the global economic system. Given enough foresight one might even have expected that the inability of governments to regulate the world economy in the face of the increasing economic power of the multinational corporations would be most evident in those countries (such as Italy) whose governments, because of their weakness, had the most difficulty in protecting their native capital.7

Priming the Environmental Movement

In 1971 two meetings were held in preparation for the forthcoming United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (otherwise known as the Stockholm Conference), the first in Founex, Switzerland, and the second in Canberra, Australia. The Founex meeting was convened by Maurice Strong, then director-general of the Canadian External Aid Office, who was subsequently “appointed secretary-general of the Stockholm conference, and headed a 27-nation Preparatory Committee set up to make plans for Stockholm and to draw up an agenda.”8 Significantly, in the preparatory meetings “Strong had constantly emphasised the compatibility of development and environmental quality in his preparatory talks with LDC [Less-Developed Counties] governments.” These consensus-making talks ensured that any controversies were aired prior to the main event so that the actual conference could be managed more efficiently: “Differences of opinion remained, but they did not polarise the conference irretrievably.”

Another important tool that helped solidify a political consensus at Stockholm was an “unofficial report that would provide Stockholm delegates with the intellectual and philosophical foundation for their deliberations” that was commissioned by Strong and co-authored by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (and then reviewed by a committee of 152 consultants).9 Funding for this report was provided by the Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia University, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation.10 This report was later published as Only One Earth (Norton & Company, 1972) “by a new research institute, the International Institute for Environmental Affairs (IIEA), set up in 1972 under the sponsorship of the Aspen Institute.”11 The IIEA had already played an important role in the pre-conference preparations, and so it is significant that the “philosophical foundations of IIEA lay in the results of a four-month feasibility study conducted in February-May 1970 by the Anderson Foundation.”

IIEA’s cochairman, Robert O. Anderson (chairman of Atlantic Richfield and the seed funder of the Institute), believed that the institute should “steer a steady mid-course between doom and gloom alarmists and those who resist acknowledging the clear danger to which the human environment is being subjected.”12

Anderson was, and still is, a powerful oil executive, with excellent contacts in the broader corporate world, having formerly served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (1961-4) and on the board of directors of other well-known corporate giants like Chase Manhattan Bank, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Weyerhaeuser Company. In 1974 Anderson was chair of the Rockefeller’s Resources for the Future, sitting alongside fellow board member and fellow oil profiteer Maurice Strong, who served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1971 until 1977.13

The United Capitalists’ Environment Programme

After Stockholm Maurice Strong went on to found and head the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and in 1973 “he appointed senior staff from the areas he knew best: business, politics and international public service.” Strong remained as UNEP’s head for nearly three years, after which he was appointed president, chairman, and CEO of Canada’s national oil company, Petro-Canada.14 However, despite UNEP’s corporate approach to organizing, funding “has been a continuing problem,” and during its first eight years the United States was the single largest supporter of their work, contributing some 36 percent of the operating costs.15 Thus one can understand why UNEP, working in coordination with groups like the IUCN (now known as the World Conservation Union), adopted a highly conservative approach to environmental management. Of course funding obtained from liberal foundations helped ensure that already conservative organizations did not stray far from elite agendas. Raymond Dasmann…

… recalls that, at the time he joined IUCN in 1970 as a senior staff ecologist, there had been three changes in the Union: it had new leadership, a new organisational structure, and had been given a major grant from the Ford Foundation. Ford had suggested the need for more centralised control by IUCN headquarters over its activities. … A more significant development noted by Dasmann was the shift in emphasis at IUCN towards a concern for economic development; for example, conservation and development was the theme of the 1972 IUCN General Assembly in Banff, Canada. (p.196)

Three years after UNEP was established, “UNEP asked IUCN to prepare a wildlife conservation strategy,” and Dasmann and Duncan Poore spent the next few years working on drafts of this critical policy document. Lee Talbot, who went on to head the IUCN, “recall[ed] that ‘the first draft was essentially a wildlife textbook’, but that each subsequent draft brought the previously opposing views of developers and conservationists closer together, and that the final draft was a consensus between the two points of view.”16 Then in 1977, with UNEP funding, the IUCN set about preparing a World Conservation Strategy report.17

Published in March 1980 under the principal authorship of Robert Prescott-Allen, the IUCN’s World Conservation Strategy was by the admission of its authors, a compromise which attempted to establish an “accommodation between conservation and development.” On the one hand the authors of the report…

… recognized that conservation and development should be promoted as compatible objectives. On the other, by limiting itself to the conservation of nature and natural resources, the Strategy paid little heed to the fact that the problems faced by the natural environment are part of the broader issues related to the human environment.18

McCormick correctly points out that “The two cannot be divorced.” Yet they were, thus providing a solid ideological base for subsequent pro-capitalist means of managing the environment, which were quickly realised through the work budding “conservation” biologists and by the World Commission on Environment and Development (otherwise known as the Brundtland Commission).

Sustainable Development for Ecological Imperialism

Convened by the United Nations in 1983, and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Brundtland Commission held its first meeting in 1984, with funding provided by various foreign governments and liberal foundations, including not least the Ford Foundation.19 The secretary-general of the Brundtland Commission (1983-7) and lead author of the Commission’s most famous report, Our Common Future, Jim MacNeill, happened to be the former chair of the International Institute for Sustainable Development — a group whose current president, David Runnallis, had in the 1970s, worked with Barbara Ward to found the International Institute for Environment and Development. Thus it is wholly fitting that Maurice Strong was counted on as an important member of the Brundtland Commission.20

The Brundtland Commission’s report Our Common Future (Oxford University Press, 1987) is perhaps most famous for popularizing the misnomer of sustainable development. On this rhetorical success, Brian Tokar observes:

Merging the language of long-term sustainability from the environmental movement with the “development” discourse of neo-colonialism, sustainable development became a rationale for advocating the continued expansion of capitalist market economies in the global South, while paying lip service to the needs of the environment and the poor.21

Consequently, it should come as little surprise that the Brundtland Commission’s report failed to incorporate an “analysis of the military-industrial complex and its role in industrial development.” Moreover, as Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger point out, the chapter of the Brundtland report on peace and security “leads the Brundtland Commission to propose a military kind of international management of environmental problems and resources, the so-called commons.”22 This militaristic logic was extended in 1989 by then World Resources Institute vice president, Jessica Matthews, whose Malthusian article “Redefining Security” played an important role in “set[ting] the stage for the linking of environment and security.” Incidentally, the elite stronghold, that is the World Resources Institute, also happened to have been commissioned by UNDP (in 1987) to make policy recommendations based on the Brundtland Commission’s conclusions. This advice in turn eventually led to the creation of the World Bank-initiated Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which was initially chaired and then headed by one of World Resources Institute’s senior vice presidents, Mohamed El-Ashry.23 The GEF was of course an integral part of the eco-establishment, and as Zoe Young points out, it has succeeded “divid[ing] activists willing to play along with the US and [World] Bank’s strategic agenda from those who will not; the latter can be dismissed as extreme and unconstructive, while the former’s skills and passion can be channelled through GEF processes to extend the reach of corporate capital and culture.”24 Given such outcomes it should come as no surprise that in 1990 the World Resources Institute “issued a study purporting to show that underdeveloped nations of the global South — especially China, India, and Brazil-pumped as much carbon dioxide into the biosphere as the developed countries of the North.” The evident absurdity of such conclusions was highlighted by Mark Dowie, but despite the reports illogic, Dowie correctly noted how: “As a justification for environmental imperialism, it will surely be used to formulate aid and multinational lending policies for years to come.”25

A Corporate Earth Summit

Such elitist precedents demonstrate the success the eco-establishment has had in effectively seizing control of the mainstream environmental agenda. So, as Chatterjee and Finger suggest, while “[o]verall, the Stockholm Conference was characterized by heavy confrontation between activists of all sorts and governments” (which is itself debatable) this phenomenon was certainly not to be repeated at the Rio Earth Summit (otherwise known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, or UNCED). Indeed, they continue that at Rio “the overall climate was one of consensus and cooperation”;26 a result that should hardly be considered surprising given that the secretary-general of the Summit was Maurice Strong. (Strong’s senior advisor at the Earth Summit was former congresswoman and Women’s Environment and Development Organization co-founder Bella Abzug.) Chatterjee and Finger conclude:

Rather than developing a new vision in line with the challenges of global ecology, UNCED… rehabilitated technological progress and other cults of efficiency. Rather than coming up with creative views on global governance, UNCED has rehabilitated the development institutions and organizations as legitimate agents to deal with new global challenges. These include the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN, as well as the national governments and the multinational corporations. And, finally, rather than making the various stakeholders collaborate and collectively learn our way out of the global crisis, UNCED has coopted some, divided and destroyed others, and promoted the ones who had the money to take advantage of this combined public relations and lobbying exercise. (p.173)

Likewise, Michael Goldman writes that:

If we are to learn anything from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio… it is that the objective of the Summit’s major power brokers was not to constrain or restructure capitalist economies and practices to help save the rapidly deteriorating ecological commons, but rather to restructure the commons (e.g. privatize, “develop,” “make more efficient,” valorize, “get the price right”) to accommodate crisis-ridden capitalisms. The effect has not been to stop destructive practices but to normalize and further institutionalize them.27

The business co-option of the Earth Summit had of course been a long time coming. Indeed, the “sustainable” business community had begun organizing in earnest in 1984 following the first World Industry Conference on Environmental Management: a forum that eventually led to the creation of a Business Council for Sustainable Development on the eve of the Earth Summit. Timothy Doyle observes how:

As the 1980s wore on environmental antagonists looked to other less conflictual means of securing their future power. No longer did many business interests across the globe deny the existence of environmental damage caused, in part, to their own malpractices. Their ploy changed: to beat the environmentalists at their own game (but on newly defined terms and agendas); to subvert them, to divide them, to supplant them, to appear to be greener than the green.28

The formation of the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) is particularly interesting as the organizations two cofounders were Maurice Strong and the Swiss billionaire industrialist, Stephan Schmidheiny29 — a friend of Strong’s from his days at the Davos World Economic Forum (which Strong had chaired). According to critics, this group was part of “a strategy to dislodge the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations as it moved towards enforceable rules governing the operations of multinational corporations.” Indeed, as Joshua Karliner observed, one particularly significant outcome from the Earth Summit was the “agile and successful endeavor to virtually silence all discussion among governments about the need for international regulation and control of global corporations in the name of sustainable development.” In this regard, Karliner writes that one “of the first obstacles that the corporate diplomats from the [International Chamber of Commerce] and the BCSD had to overcome was a branch of the United Nations itself — the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC).” Problematically it seems, the United Nations Economic and Social Council had asked the Centre to “prepare a set of recommendations on transnationals and other large industrial enterprises that governments might use when drafting the Earth Summit’s central document,” Agenda 21, which were to be submitted in March 1992. Yet the month before this date, the then UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali (1992-7)…

… announced that the UNCTC would be eliminated as an independent entity. This move in effect gutted the agency of what little power it might have had. But it still had the report commissioned by ECOSOC to deliver to Maurice Strong and his UNCED Secretariat. Try as it might, however, the UNCTC couldn’t get the Secretariat to accept its report. Meanwhile, Strong had appointed Stephan Schmidheiny as his senior industry advisor. Schmidheiny proceeded to form the BCSD and prepare Changing Course as an official industry submission to UNCED.30

But his was not the only way in which the United Nations had actively served elite interests at the Earth Summit, as they simultaneously acted to subtly co-opt the very nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provided radical criticisms of the entire event. Thus according to Chatterjee and Finger, UNDP spent US$475,000 on sponsoring NGOs in 1990 and 1991, and “then US$206,000 in the final six months up to and including Rio.” And from these funding initiatives “sprang two major drives among the Southern country NGOS,” the Third World Network, and Maximo Kalaw’s Green Forum of the Philippines. Subsequently while the Third World Network “directed [most of their criticisms] against the World Bank, the IMF, GATT, and of course the USA” they “were silent about UNDP.” This was a critical omission on their part given the integral role that the United Nations has played, and continues to fulfil, in legitimizing and promoting neoliberalism. Indeed, the extent of cooperation between UNDP and the Third World Network meant that the latter was even privately briefed “on the key issues that the World Bank could be swayed on.”31

Given the Third World Network’s uncritical stance towards the United Nations, it is fitting that Martin Khor, who formerly led this Network since its inception in 1984, is now a member of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy. Moreover as of March 2009, Khor has been the executive director of the South Center — a group whose board of directors was chaired by the former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali from 2003 until 2006. (Khor had previously served on the South Center’s board of directors from 1996 until 2002.) Incidentally, the current chair of the South Center is the former President of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, who is presently also a trustee of the democracy-manipulating African Wildlife Foundation; while prior to Boutros Boutros Ghali’s chairmanship of the board, Gamani Corea served in this position, which is interesting given that he chaired Maurice Strong’s Founex Panel of experts in 1971 in preparation for the 1972 Stockholm Conference. Returning to Khor’s background, it is also worth adding that he is also a board member of the International Forum on Globalization, a group that has been heavily supported by Ted Turner and Douglas Tompkins’ controversial eco-philanthropy.

From Earth Summit to Earth Mining

When Maurice Strong’s tenure as secretary-general of the Earth Summit ended (in 1992) “he became the chairman of the organizing committee for the Earth Council.” The Council’s mission was to “support and empower people in building a more secure, equitable and sustainable future” and at the invitation of the Costa Rican government their Secretariat was established in San José, Costa Rica, in September 1992. Amongst others sitting alongside Strong on the initial organizing committee for this group was Stephan Schmidheiny.32 Now known as the Earth Council Alliance, their chair is Tommy Short (who is also a council member of Earth Charter International);33 ) while their president, former Imperial Chemical Industries executive, Marcelo Carvalho de Andrade, is the founder and chairperson of Pro-Natura, which “was started in Brazil in 1985 and by 1992 had become one of the very first ‘Southern’ NGOs to be internationalised following the Rio Conference.” Marcelo de Andrade additionally serves as a board member of the controversial group Counterpart International, and on the board of Earth Restoration Corps (which is headed by Maurice Strong’s wife Hanne Strong).

To this day, Strong’s dedication to corporate liberalism remains strong, and in the wake of the Earth Summit he took up the chairmanship of both the World Resources Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Then in 1999, Strong, the former CEO of Petro-Canada, felt it was time to retire from the board of directors of the oil and gas company Cordex Petroleums — a company that had been managed by his son, Fred Strong. That said, despite maintaining his commitment to managing the environment, Strong continues to enjoy harvesting the planet, as he is a board member of Wealth Minerals Ltd — an organization that describes itself as “a well financed and managed leader in uranium exploration focused on identifying world-class discoveries in Argentina.”34

Solutions

While this article has clearly demonstrated that the global “environmental” management championed by Maurice Strong poses a significant threat to life on planet earth, Strong is by no means the main problem. Instead, Strong is merely a brilliant example of the breed of two-faced technocrats that have arisen to sustain capitalism and protect wildlife (but only where it is deemed profitable). However, by tracking Strong’s stewardship of capitalist interests historically — as this article has done — it is possible to demystify the grotesque global circus that has grown over the years to ostensibly save the environment. Elite institutions like the United Nations must be superseded: something that is unlikely to happen until we collectively start channelling mental resources to describing suitable alternatives: Communism anyone?

1. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (Zed, 2002), p.154. Kovel continues: “Foundations tend to be created by rich people to soften the contradictions of that which enabled the rich to become so in the first place, and are basically no further from capital than the state. Like the state, the foundation is relatively free to express a more universal interest — and some of them are, like religion in Marx’s view, the ‘heart of a heartless world’, and able to support marginal or even radical projects. However, taken all in all, the foundation’s basic function is to rationalize the given society and not to overturn it.” (p.154)
2. John McCormick, The Global Environmental Movement (Wiley, 1995), p.64.
3. Frances McCrea and Gerald Markle, Minutes to Midnight: Nuclear Weapons Protest in America (Sage, 1989), p.81-2.
4. McCormick, p.65, p.67.
5. McCormick, p.84. As an aside McCormick adds: “Curiously, a remarkably similar book published three years before — The Silent Explosion by Philip Appleman, a professor of English at Indiana University — sold well, but achieved nothing like the impact. Ehrlich made no reference to Appleman’s work.”
6. McCormick, p.90. Another book, A Blueprint for Survival, which was published in The Ecologist in early 1972, concerned itself with similar themes and was influenced by The Limits to Growth.
7. Robert Golub and Joe Townsend, “Malthus, multinationals and the Club of Rome,” Social Studies of Science, 7, (1977), p.202. “Our argument is that, during the decade of the sixties, the international economic (and many national financial) systems became increasingly unstable and the systems by which the advanced countries control and dominate the underdeveloped countries were growing more fragile…, at the same time as (and in some cases as a result of) the multinational firms were becoming more significant in the international and national economies. These increasing instabilities and uncertainties made the economic environment more threatening to the multinational firms themselves, and this situation was initially and most strongly perceived by those ’second rank’ multinationals whose governments were too weak to adequately provide the ‘public functions’ listed by Murray. As a result of this, the Forrester and Meadows ’scientific’ studies were commissioned as ‘tools of communication and control’ to operate the ‘transmission pulley’ of public opinion in order to force the governments of the industrialized societies to institute a ‘new world moderator’ (with ’stern rules about voting’) which would have sufficient power to stabilize the international economic situation and ensure a constant supply of raw materials.” (p.216)
8. McCormick, p.113.
9. McCormick, p.116-7.
10. Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth (Norton & Company, 1972), p.ix.

    Ward and Dubos write: “Ambassador Adlai Stevenson clearly had in mind the overpowering influence of man’s role in determining the quality of the environment and therefore of human life when, in his last speech before the Economic and Social Council in Geneva on July 9, 1965, he referred to the earth as a little spaceship on which we travel together, ‘dependent on its vulnerable supplies of earth and soil.’” (p.xvii-iii) Barbara Ward neglects to mention that she drafted the content of this speech.

11. In 1973, Barbara Ward then became president of the Institute, which was renamed as the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
12. McCormick, p.118.
13. In 1978 Anderson received the inaugural Lindbergh Award, an honor that has since then been graced on most of the world’s leading corporate environmentalists. For instance, in 1979 the award was given to Aurelio Peccei, and then to Maurice Strong in 1981. Eco-baron Ted Turner received the award in 2008, and in 2009 he was followed by Lester Brown.
14. Maurice Strong served as a vice president of conservative WWF International (1978-81), and a member of the executive council until December 1986, and as a chairman of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, IUCN (now known as the World Conservation Union).
15. McCormick, p.137, p.136.
16. McCormick, p.196-7.
17. “The final drafting was guided by Robert Allen (one of the authors of the Blueprint for Survival, and then IUCN head of publications) and David Munro IUCN’s director-general.” McCormick, p.197. It is worth citing the comments of influential environmental manager and former president of both the Club of Rome and of the IUCN, Ashok Khosla. He notes:

    “In the late 1970s, I was one of the contributing authors of the World Conservation Strategy, which made extensive use of the word Sustainable Development for, I believe, the first time. It was produced by the World Conservation Union in collaboration with the United Nation Environment Programme and WWF. WCS was liberally sprinkled throughout with the concept of sustainable development. It was launched “simultaneously” in major cities of the world as the sun came up to 10.00 am at each of them, starting with New Delhi on 5 March 1980.

    “Later I worked with Brundtland Commission. It adopted this phrase as the central message of its report, and helped to make it globally accepted. From there it became the theme of the 1992 Johannesburg Summit.”

18. John McCormick, “The origins of the World Conservation Strategy,” Environmental Review: ER, 10 (3), Autumn 1986, p.186.
19. In 1988 Gro Harlem Brundtland received the annual Third World Prize of $100,000 from the Third World Foundation. Here it is interesting to note that the Third World Foundation was set up by Altaf Gauhar, along with the academic journal, Third World Quarterly, with funding provided by the CIA-connected Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

    For a recent critique of the BCCI, see Lucy Komisar, “BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad,” In: Steven Hiatt (ed), A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007).

20. During the 1980s both Brundtland and Strong had been board members of Ted Turner’s Better World Society: another influential trustee of this Society was Monkombu Swaminathan, the former IUCN president and World Resources Institute trustee — who served as the chair of the Brundtland Commission’s Advisory Panel of Food Security in spite or perhaps because of his reputation as the “Father of the Green Revolution in India” — who has been described by UNEP as “the Father of Economic Ecology.”

    Other notable members of the Brundtland Commission who had already, or went on to represent, corporate conservation outfits include: Istvan Lang (who is now an honorary board member of Green Cross International), and finally the Brazilian ecologist Paulo Nogueira-Neto (who is an emeritus director of Conservation International, and a former executive board member of the IUCN), Saburo Okita (who at the time served on the executive committee of the Club of Rome, and was chairman of World Wildlife Fund Japan), Shridath Ramphal (who is the former co-chair of the Commission on Global Governance, former president of the IUCN, 1990-3, and former chair of the international steering committee of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Leadership in Environmental and Development), former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Ruckelshaus (who is the former chair of the World Resources Institute), Mohamed Sahnoun (who is a board member of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a council member of Earth Charter International, and is co-chair of the international advisory board of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect), and Janez Stanovnik (who is a former board member of Resources for the Future). The chair of the Commission’s Advisory Panel on Energy was Enrique Iglesias, who went on to serve as the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, and as an honorary member of the Club of Rome.

21. Brian Tokar, “The World Bank: Biotechnology and the ‘Next Green Revolution’,” In: Brian Tokar (ed), Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger (Toward Freedom, 2004), p.51.
22. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development (Routledge, 1994), p.25.
23. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.152.
24. Zoe Young, “The Politics of GEF,” (pdf) ECO: The Voice of the NGO Community in the International Environmental Conventions, 15 (7), March 2006.
25. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1995), p.119.
26. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.101. They write: “With the exception of one demonstration in Rio de Janeiro which brought together 50,000 people in downtown streets, most protests drew a few dozen people.” (p.101)
27. Michael Goldman, “Inventing the Commons: Theories and Practices of the Commons’ Professional,” In: Michael Goldman (ed), Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons (Pluto Press, 1998), p.23.

    In their scathing article published in The Ecologist magazine titled “The Earth Summit Debacle,” they noted how the “best that can be said for the Earth Summit is that is made visible the vested interests standing in the way” of meaningful grassroots action. The Ecologist wrote, that for such grassroots groups “the question is not how the environment should be managed — they have the experience of the past as their guide — but who will manage it and in whose interest. They reject UNCED’s rhetoric of a world where all humanity is united by a common interest in survival, and in which conflicts of race, class, gender and culture are characterised as of secondary importance to humanity’s supposedly common goal.”

    Caroline Thomas agrees and in 1993 she noted how: “At the most fundamental level, the causes of environmental degradation have not been addressed, and without this, efforts to tackle the crisis are bound to fail. The crisis is rooted in the process of globalisation under way. Powerful entrenched interests impede progress in understanding the crisis and in addressing it. They marginalise rival interpretations of its origins and thereby block the discovery of possible ways forward … The result is that the crisis is to be tackled by a continuation of the very policies that have largely caused it in the first place.” Cited in David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996), p.105.

28. Timothy Doyle, “Sustainable development and Agenda 21: the secular bible of global free markets and pluralist democracy,” Third World Quarterly, 19 (4), 1998, p.772. Doyle concludes that: “The only force which currently seems capable of moving beyond the boundaries of nation-states in hot pursuit of transnational corporations are social movements and NGOs, also acting through transnational conduits.” (p.785) Doyle evidently is unaware of the extent to which corporate interests have already subverted civil society to serve their antidemocratic neoliberal interests. Here the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood is worth citing at length. She writes:

    “The moral force of these movements [organizing against the threat of 'nuclear annihilation and ecological disaster'] is unquestionable; but in a sense, the very qualities that give them their particular strength make them resistant to transformation into agents of a fundamental social change, the transition from capitalism to socialism. These movements do not reflect, and are not intended to create, a new collective identity, a new social agency, motivated by a new anti-capitalist interest which dissolves differences of class interest. They are not constituted on the basis of the connections that exist between the capitalist order and the threats to peace and survival. On the contrary, their unity and popular appeal depend upon abstracting the issues of peace or ecology from the prevailing social order and the conflicting social interests that comprise it. The general interests that human beings share simply because they are human must be seen, not as requiring the transformation of the existing social order and class relations, but rather as something detached from the various particular interests in which human beings partake by virtue of belonging to that social order and its system of classes. In other words, such movements have tended to rely on the extent to which they can avoid specifically implicating the capitalist order and its class system.” Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (Verso, 1986), p.176.

29. Stephan Schmidheiny is a former board member of the World Resources Institute, and presently serves as a member of board of overseers of the International Center for Economic Growth — a group whose funders include the likes of the Ford Foundation and the Center for International Private Enterprise. Another notable person who sits on this group’s board of overseers is the former Director of the UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who was also the former initial chairperson of George Soros’s democracy-manipulating venture, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa.
30. Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization (Sierra Club Books, 1997), p.53.
31. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.102.
32. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.161.
33. Earth Charter International’s council has three co-chairs: Steven Rockefeller (United States), Razeena Wagiet (South Africa), and Brendan Mackey (Australia). The son of the former vice president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller, Steven Rockefeller is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College, and has served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for twenty-five years (chairing the Fund’s board of trustees from 1998 to 2006). Steven is also a member of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality’s Global Council on Planetary Ethics and Values, which is home to notables like Ervin Laszlo and Vaclav Havel. The other two co-chairs of the Earth Charter council, like Steven, have similarly elitist backgrounds, as Wagiet has previously worked for WWF South Africa, and thereafter was “appointed as environmental adviser to the previous National Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal for four years (1999-2003)”; while Mackey co-chairs the World Conservation Union Ethics Specialist Group.
34. According to his official biography, Wealth Minerals Ltd board member, Paul Matysek, “is the former President and CEO and a co-founder of Energy Metals Corporation. Under Mr. Matysek’s stewardship, Energy Metals Corporation, a pure uranium mining and development company, was recently acquired by Uranium One Inc. in a deal valued at over one billion dollars.” His biography adds that Matysek has formerly served in a senior management at the mining and metals company, First Quantum Minerals Ltd. One notable current board member of First Quantum Minerals is Rupert L. Pennant-Rea, who is a former member of the Group of 30, an international body of leading financiers and academics that was founded in 1978 by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The most effective anti-poverty program ever invented was the labor union.

– George Meany

There are three important things that need to be remembered about the 1947 Labor-Management Relations Act — commonly known as the “Taft-Hartley Act,” after its congressional sponsors, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, and House Representative Fred Hartley of New Jersey.

First, even though political pundits and social commentators continue to talk — 60-odd years after the fact — about how Taft-Hartley was a necessary corrective, an antidote to runaway union excesses, a move that had to made to preserve the economic health of the nation, the legislation was far more toxic and insidious than these “reasonable response” accounts make it out to be.

Taft-Hartley was the naked attempt to neutralize America’s unions by revoking key provisions of the landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act (commonly known as the “Wagner Act,” after its sponsor, New York Senator Robert Wagner), the act that legitimized a union’s right to strike, engage in collective bargaining, and serve as the workers’ sole representative.

Make no mistake, the vitality of the post-World War II labor movement was staggering — so staggering, in fact, that the federal government and America’s leading corporations were in a state of panic. It’s no exaggeration to say that never in our history had organized labor come so close to becoming an equal partner in the national economy than in the years directly following the war.

Not only were unions full of confidence and buoyed by the support of a sympathetic public, they were fearless. In 1946, the year before Taft-Hartley became law, five million people had taken part in strikes. Five million people had put down their tools or shut off their machines to hit the bricks, to protest the fortunes made by war profiteers, to protest the picayune wages being offered union members.

However, even though the working class was clearly on the ascendancy and the road ahead appeared wide-open, there were storm clouds gathering on the horizon. The realization that working men and women were now wielding genuine power —power that translated into independent political and economic clout — was scaring the wits out of the Establishment. It was that fear that precipitated the legislation.

Second, the Taft-Hartley Act did precisely what it set out to do. It crippled the labor movement. Among other things, it outlawed wildcat strikes, jurisdictional strikes, solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts and secondary picketing; and, in an odd footnote, it required union leaders to take an oath that they weren’t Communists (as if anyone who sided with the working class was a suspected Commie).

Taft-Hartley prolonged the union certification process; it gave the federal government the right to issue strike injunctions; it expressly excluded supervisors from union membership and collective bargaining; and it severely weakened the union security clause (language under which joining a union was a condition of employment).

By lengthening the certification process, management could now stall; with injunction power, the feds could now squelch any large-scale strike; by excluding supervision, bosses could now reclassify workers as “supervisors,” thereby exempting them from union membership; and by de-fanging the security clause, 22 states now have right-to-work laws — five of which (Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas and Florida) are embedded in state constitutions.

The third thing to remember about Taft-Hartley is that, while it became the law of the land despite the veto of President Harry Truman, it was congressional Democrats who assured its passage. Liberals and progressives like to place the blame on anti-union Republicans, but it was the Democrats, themselves, who pushed it across the finish line.

Fact: A majority of the Democrats in congress voted to override Truman’s veto. While many were Southerners (“Dixiecrats”), many were not. Had the Democrats simply supported their president — had they provided working people with the economic equivalent of the same privileges guaranteed to citizens under the Bill of Rights — Taft-Hartley would not have become law.

All of which raises a question: If American voters were given the choice, how would they choose to be governed? Would they prefer that Big Business — with the blessings of a corporate-oriented government — dictated our domestic and foreign affairs? Or would they prefer giving working men and women an equal voice in determining policy?

We can argue all we like about the practicality of regular citizens making national policy, but one thing can’t be disputed: If regular citizens had been running the show, they never would have abandoned our manufacturing base. They never would have agreed to enrich international oligarchies at the expense of the American economy..

Taking the greatest manufacturing power in the history of the world and dismantling it — relegating it to the role of industrial “spectator” — is something that working people would never allow to happen. Never. Only the U.S. Congress would see the wisdom in pissing away something that took 150 years to build.

The arrest by Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, of an Israeli Jew accused of killing at least four Palestinians, has thrown a rare light on the secret police, including attempts by one of its agents to enlist the accused to assassinate a Palestinian spiritual leader.  

Chaim Pearlman, who was arrested a fortnight ago, has been charged with murdering four Palestinians in Jerusalem and injuring at least seven others in a series of knife attacks that began more than a decade ago. Police are still investigating whether he was involved in additional attacks.  

Although Pearlman was denied access to a lawyer until last Friday, far-right groups have rapidly come to his aid, waging what the Shin Bet officials have described as “psychological warfare” by revealing damaging details about the case.

Pearlman has released tape recordings he secretly made of recent conversations with an undercover Shin Bet agent who tried to get Pearlman to incriminate himself.  

The agent, who befriended Pearlman and was known as “Dada”, can be heard exhorting him both to go to an “Arab village” to “turn it into a fireworks display” and to execute Sheikh Raed Salah, a leader of the Islamic Movement and a recent participant in the aid flotilla to Gaza that was attacked by Israel.

In another blow to the Shin Bet, Pearlman’s supporters have released a video secretly filmed of the head of the Shin Bet’s Jewish division, which arrested Pearlman, both naming him and identifying where he lives.

Although he is in charge of handling “Jewish terror” cases for the Shin Bet, the video states that he lives in Kfar Adumim, a West Bank settlement. It is a criminal offence to identify any employee of the Shin Bet.

Pearlman’s allies, who posted the video on overseas websites so they could not be removed, appear to hope that the Shin Bet will be intimidated by their move. Identification of such a senior figure will prompt fears that he may be in danger either of revenge attacks or future prosecution in an international tribunal.  

The Shin Bet have also been cornered into admitting that they recruited Pearlman as an agent in 2000, in the midst of his alleged stabbing spree, despite the fact that he was a known member of Kach, an outlawed group calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from “Greater Israel”. He later chose to leave the Shin Bet.

Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre that handles Palestinian security cases, said: “The Shin Bet is facing an internal crisis over this arrest and the settlers are trying to exploit that with their campaign.  

“Many members of the Shin Bet are settlers themselves and think of these extremists as their colleagues, not as the enemy. The line between the Shin Bet and these extremist organisations is very blurred.”

The Shin Bet’s modus operandi in Pearlman’s case has been exposed in part because, unusually, the judge supervising the investigation partially revoked a gag order immediately after the arrest.  

Pearlman, who apparently suspected he was being tracked by the Shin Bet, sent the recordings of his conversations with Dada to local media to be broadcast in the event of his detention.

Unlike in the case of Palestinian attacks on Israelis, attacks by Jews on Palestinians are rarely solved, leading to criticisms that the Shin Bet is not serious about tackling the problem of “Jewish terror”.  

Amir Oren, a security analyst for the liberal Haaretz newspaper, accused the Shin Bet of having “chains on its feet and weights around its neck” when it investigated such cases.  

Yaakov Teitel, a settler who was arrested by the Shin Bet last year, is accused of his first murder of a Palestinian 14 years ago. Some observers have suggested he was only arrested after he started attacking left wing Jews, including placing a bomb at the home of a prominent academic in 2008.  

Baker said Jewish terrorists often found it easy to evade the Shin Bet because they had learnt about the organisation’s investigation techniques while working as agents.  

Although Pearlman, aged 30, was living in the Israeli town of Yavne, north of Ashdod, at the time of his arrest, he was raised on a settlement and spent many years living in Kfar Tapuach, which is closely identified with the Kach movement.

Despite being illegal, Kach operates relatively openly in the settlements and Pearlman’s connections to the group may explain the well-organised campaign quickly mounted in his defence.  

Itamar Ben Gvir, a parliamentary aide to Michael Ben Ari, an MP who has maintained his ties to Kach, is reported to be heading the media campaign against the Shin Bet. Pearlman is also being helped by Honenu, a legal organisation that defends Jews accused of attacking Palestinians.  

Anonymous Shin Bet officials told Channel 2 television that the psychological warfare they were experiencing from the far-right was “a completely different game” from previous confrontations.  

Nadia Matar, leader of the pro-settler group, Women in Green, told the Jerusalem Post this week that the Shin Bet divisional head “has to know that there is a price to stabbing Jewish brothers in the back. … People have to be loyal or bear the consequences.”  

In the 20 hours of recordings with Dada, some of which have been broadcast on Israeli television, the undercover agent can be heard repeatedly inciting Pearlman to kill Sheikh Salah.  

Dada says: “Why haven’t soldiers killed Raed Salah, may he die? … Someone should take care of him, send him to the next world.”  

He then suggests Pearlman shoot at the sheikh’s car or put a bomb under it. “That’s the classic one. Nothing’s left, everything goes everywhere,” he adds.  

Dada’s advice is particularly controversial given that at the time Salah had recently stated that Israeli commandos onboard the Mavi Marmara ship had tried to kill him.  

Israeli officials too appeared to believe in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the ship that Salah had been killed or seriously injured. Early reports in the Israeli media justified his presumed death on the grounds that he had opened fire on the commandos. Later his wife was called to a hospital to identify a man undergoing surgery, although it turned out not to be the sheikh.

It emerged last week that Pearlman may have been helped by David Sitbon, a settler who is suspected of stealing weapons from Israeli army bases.

The House of Representatives will be voting this week, possibly as early as Tuesday, on $33 billion in funding to escalate the war in Afghanistan. The vote comes at a time of embarrassment and evident failure in Afghanistan. Record deaths of troops and Afghan civilian, rapidly rising spending and reports indicating it will just get worse.

The news reports of problems on the ground are bad enough, but the release of 92,000 documents by Wikileaks shows the war is “more grim than the official portrayal,” as the New York Times concluded. TIME’s Joe Klein reported that the documents make clear how futile the situation in Afghanistan is – and how utterly duplicitous our Pakistani “ally” has been.

Summarizing the Wikileaks war documents, the Guardian says:

• How a secret “black” unit of Special Forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

The House vote is not a slam dunk but you can be sure that the White House and military establishment will do everything they can to get the supplemental funding. The vote is likely to be close as the previous vote for war funding in the House won with only a five-vote margin. To accomplish that the House leadership had to manipulate the vote so that it was a procedural vote on “a self-executing rule” as well as amendments but not an actual vote on war funding. In addition, the war vote was sweetened with funding for unemployment benefits and state budgets included.

This week’s vote could be even closer. This vote is likely to be an up or down vote on war funding with the economic sweeteners removed by the Senate. It will be a clear vote to which Americans can hold elected officials accountable in the mid-term elections. Let your congress member know you will be watching their vote and it will determine your vote in the fall.

While the Afghan war is America’s longest ever, the military has been unsuccessful in developing strategies and tactics that work. General Patraeus, who has taken over command of the war from the fired Stanley McChrystal, says he is reviewing the strategy and changing its emphasis to put more effort on counterinsurgency. In fact, counterinsurgency was McChrystal’s specialty; indeed, it is why he was put in charge of the war.

Reports indicate that Patraeus is likely to amend the rules of engagement to allow the deaths of more Afghan civilians. Every civilian death puts success further away. Last Friday there was a report of a mass killing of 52 civilians by NATO forces. Civilian deaths is one reason why the Afghanistan security monitor reports that the counterinsurgency tactics are showing no signs of success and that the U.S. military build-up in Kandahar will actually strengthen the Taliban by uniting Afghans in their resistance to the U.S. military.

And, the size of the U.S. troop presence is becoming an absurdity. The U.S. now has 1,000 troops for every single Al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan and each of those troops cost the U.S. $1 million per year – all in borrowed money. In addition, there are even more mercenaries in Afghanistan. The cost of the war mounts to $7 billion per month. More and more Americans are recognizing that the weapons and war budget are wrecking the U.S. middle class.

The strategy of training Afghans to defend themselves has been backfiring. In recent weeks three British troops were killed by an Afghan soldier in Helmand Province when the Afghan turned and killed them during a joint patrol. A week later, an Afghan soldier opened fire at a training exercise in northern Afghanistan killing two US civilian trainers (aka mercenaries) and a fellow Afghan soldier.

As bad as all of this sounds, Admiral Mike Mullen, America’s top military officer, warned this weekend that the Afghanistan war will get worse, that there will be more troop deaths as well as deaths of Afghans. Mullen’s views are consistent with the number two in command in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez. Rodriguez testified before Congress in early July that while U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan were at record highs during the last two months, deaths will continue climbing for the foreseeable future.

While the U.S. has no exit strategy and the administration has been backing away from Obama’s promise to remove significant numbers of troops in 2011, documents from Great Britain, show that country, the closest ally of the United States, will be out of Afghanistan by 2014.

It is time to end this futile and counterproductive war. This is the time for Americans to push Congress to stop the war by voting against the supplemental funding for the increase in troops in Afghanistan. Please call and email your elected Representative today.

You can call toll free on a number provided by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, 1-888-493-5443, or use the regular Capitol Hill switchboard number, (202) 224-3121.

Congress has the power and the constitutional responsible to end this war. Citizens have the power and responsibility to demand that they do so.

I once had a coach who could spit tobacco hard enough to break a window. He smelled like an old hamper, and only wore pants that came with an elastic waist. Still, every last one of us loved the guy. He always said, “Sports is like a hammer, gents. And you can use a hammer for all kinds of things. You can use it to build a house, or you can use it to bash somebody’s head. Choose wisely.”

In the twenty-first century, the heads of far too many sports fans have been bashed by far too many hammers. Our collective migraine comes from the idea that we are loving something that just doesn’t love us back. If sports were once like a playful puppy you would wrestle on the floor, it’s now like a housecat demanding to be stroked and giving nothing in return.

Sports fans are fed up.

It’s the extra commercials tacked on to a broadcast, as companies attempt to use the games to brand our subconscious. It’s when you decide to finally take the trip to the park, look up the ticket prices, and decide immediately to do something –anything — else with your time.

And so you go a year without making it to the ballpark and fail to even notice. Or you don’t feel the same urgency to watch every minute of every game for fear you might miss something magical.

If a car’s brakes failed, you wouldn’t blame the driver. You’d blame the manufacturer. And when we feel bludgeoned by the state of professional sports, it’s the owners who need to answer for this sorry state of affairs.

Players play.

Fans watch.

Owners are uniquely charged with being the stewards of the game. It’s a task that they have failed to perform in spectacular fashion.

In fact, with barely a sliver of scrutiny, they are wrecking the world of sports. The old model of the paternalistic owner caring for a community has become as outdated as the typewriter. Because of publicly funded stadium construction, luxury box licenses, sweetheart cable deals, globalized merchandising plans, and other “revenue streams,” the need for owners to cater to a local working and middle class fan base has shrunk dramatically.

Fans have become scenery for television broadcasts.

Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News once wrote, “You are owed nothing in sports, no matter how much you care. You are owed nothing, no matter how long you’ve rooted or how much you’ve paid to do it.”

I couldn’t disagree more. We are owed plenty by the world of sports.

We are owed loyalty.

We are owed accessibility.

We are owed a return on our massive civic investment.

And more than anything, we are owed respect.

We aren’t owed this respect because it’s the kind or human thing to do.

We aren’t owed any love because we cheered ourselves hoarse and passed the precious rooting tradition down to our children.

We are owed it because the teams are ours as much as they are theirs. Literally.

By calling for and receiving public funds, owners have sacrificed their moral, if not financial, claim of ownership. Cities and city councils that allow their funds to be used by private franchises should, in turn, have some say in the relationship between team and fan.

That means lower ticket prices.

That means an end to the $8 beer.

As sports fans, we have to accept that we do, in fact, deserve better, but as the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

If we aren’t making demands, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

This piece runs in the August issue of the Progressive magazine.

Dear Democrats,

Logically, it is pointless to vote for you, as I explained in 2008. But, public delusions and political pork barrel being perennially popular, you will no doubt retain your hold on the hopes of tens of millions nationally, which you will invariably continue to betray.

Clearly, it is your job to prod the reluctant rear of the herd into the same stockyard that your Republican partners lead the eager, stampeding front. It’s easy to see the attraction of this drive from the cowboys’ perspective: anticipating the camaraderie of a hearty feed on prime rib around the campfire, and pockets bulging with wages at the end of the drive. However, when given any thought, one has to concede that the attractions of the drive are lost to any members of the herd being driven. Fortunately for you, few in the herd think beyond chewing into the immediate satisfaction rubbing into their muzzles, so they usually serve their function as prime rib.

Much of the public has the mistaken belief that the purpose of political parties in the United States is to consolidate a set of broad consensus on national issues, such as the economy, the mechanics and economics of food production and distribution, the structure of national defense forces, and the implementation of social services: education, health, retirement and elder-care; so as to craft legislation that governs how these and other matters are to be dealt with for the public good.

It is amazing that such a mistaken and inverted view of reality could ever have become common. Of course, it is the parties that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of government action, and the public whose purpose is to ensure that beneficence by supplying the labor and capital needed to implement government action (or inaction) mandated by the bipartisan directorate. For example, it is the public’s duty to:

• provide a mass base of unthinking public approval for the status quo, such as by voting for Democrats and Republicans only (and so helping decide the biannual and quadrennial local and national contests selecting which partner will be the respective pork barrel meister-in-chief for the term), by manning party and race rallies (to maintain public social disunity), and following directions en masse in the many sanctioned corporate-financed political campaigns;
• supply the living and future dead soldiers for the ongoing foreign wars;
• buy products and services as directed by the entertaining and instructional advertisements in major media;
• assume the tax burden necessary to underwrite the profitability of otherwise failing corporations, which profitability the bipartisan directorate deems to be a “national interest”;
• be an absorptive market for the waste production of national security industries (e.g., assume liability for civilian nuclear power; sustain the use of high-tech para-military cop equipment);
• sustain the operation of a wealth-based adjudication-prison system, a corporate-government partnership and punitive element of social control;
• support by every thought, word and deed the primacy of national security needs, as defined by the Pentagon and the bipartisan directorate, to the access of national resources over any selfish humanitarian or public social considerations (e.g., expending tax revenues — “emergency war supplemental” — to continue funding the bombardments in Central Asia and East Africa, instead of profitless subsidies for continuing unemployment benefits or a variety of public social services);
• remember that the nation is defined by its national security tasks framing its corporate financial capital essence, NOT by the massed and, by definition, petty concerns of its self-absorbed “rubber bumper” population.

At this time in U.S. history, the Republican Party commands the loyalties of those motivated by simple white Judeo-Christian supremacy, finance capital greed, and hegemonic US militarism. Humanitarian, cultural, artistic and environmental considerations are absent, except when seen as impediments. This is the mindset of social inertia supporting exploitation full speed ahead. The Democratic Party captures the hopes of people who want to live like Republicans, but want to think of themselves as nice. It is easy to see how minimal intellect presents few problems in maintaining a Republican mindset, yet how helpful intellectual agility can be for a Democrat, whose self-image can require considerable mental gymnastics to maintain. In both cases, the identification with a party is usually reduced to a habit, because most people try to minimize their amount of thinking (which is sad, because this popular lack of thought is a very useful lever exploited by the manipulators of social control).

So, Democrats tend to “reach out” to leftist political outcasts, presumed to be politically homeless without them (intentionally so, as the Democrats work to suppress “third” parties), in an effort to produce electoral majorities that will gain Democrats pork-barrel-dispensing seniority when in government. Of course, the purpose of the voter is to promote the interests of the party, and not vice versa; so after the electoral victory the leftist issues and vote-seducing party rhetoric are expeditiously excreted, to trim the party for its primary purpose of implementing its previously agreed upon corporate agenda.

One can be forgiven for being “used” or “fooled” and “disappointed” by such political exploitation once, but not multiply. If nothing else, then just self-respect demands one decide on what one really wants to vote for, and then stick to it. Vote for what you believe in. If a party does not act as you believe it should, then don’t vote for it. If you follow that simple rule (just stated twice), then you will never be “used” or “fooled” and “disappointed” by a political party or political campaign again.

People loyal to either the Republican or Democratic parties, and completely satisfied with the conditions of the United States and the world today, have a completely consistent position because they unambiguously support the bipartisan consensus that produced those conditions. If, like me, you do not like the current situation, domestically and internationally, then you can make a list of your priorities and use it to gauge the performance (NOT just rhetoric) of candidates and parties you could vote for (and campaigns and public interest groups you could join and work with). Let your allegiance follow your values, and not be shackled by habit nor fear (nor pork barrel) to any one political power club.

So, dear Democrats, in a public answer to your many mailed and e-mailed appeals for my money — oh, and yes, my vote — here is my list of what I am voting for, and which I will use to identify matching candidates: the people whose past performance suggests they are most likely to implement my political goals. You may quantify my loyalty to your party by its degree of coherence to these goals.

Checklist for 2012 and Beyond:

1) Safeguard the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund and its traditional use: no privatization of any kind, no diversion of funds ever.

2) End the Israel subsidies until Israel’s complete withdrawal (of its military and settlements) behind its 1967 borders with Gaza and the West Bank. Since it would be impossible to ensure that foreign aid money given to Israel for humanitarian purposes would not be surreptitiously diverted to the Israeli military and the Israeli settlement activity (land theft in Palestine), a complete ban on foreign aid would be necessary until verifiable Israeli compliance with the world consensus on international justice (codified in UN resolutions, its charter, conventions and reports) is achieved.

3) Prompt withdrawal of U.S. troops from their invasions and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stop military incursions elsewhere, and begin the process of substantially reducing the foreign deployment of U.S. troops on foreign bases (e.g., the complete evacuation from Okinawa — Japanese territory).

4) Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and modernize it to deal with the 21st century electronic technology of banking and finance (the internet and computer networks). Bring back strict regulation of the banking industry, and also nationalize the Federal Reserve because the management of the nation’s currency is too important to be left to for-profit corporations.

5) Eliminate the Bush Tax cuts as only the first step to reintroducing fairness into the U.S. tax code: a reduction in personal income tax rates for incomes below $100,000/year, the taxing of capital gains like wage income, the elimination of offshore “tax haven” loopholes and special tax-exempting subsidies to businesses.

6) Repeal of the Patriot Act. Defending the nation should mean defending the civil rights of its people, not making it easier for hidden and unaccountable administrators to secretly select scapegoats and designate enemies-of-the-state from the national citizenry and world public.

7) Establish a national health-care system, a public “single-payer” all-living-souls-included system. If necessary, nationalize the entire insurance industry to do so; the maintenance of each human life is too important to be left to for-profit corporations. The savings to be gained by the retrenchment of the military (items 2 and 3) will easily cover the expense of managing a national health plan.

8) Repeal the “No Child Left Behind” abomination hypocritically pretending to improve the nation’s patchwork of primary public education systems. Establish a national kindergarten-to-college all-living-souls-included plan. Education is a right. The mental and character development of the nation’s children (that is to say, the children residing within the national territory at any given time) is too important to be left to for-profit corporations or local racist atavistic groups.

9) Remove patent protection from drugs and medical technology based on the results of publicly funded research. If tax dollars paid for the work to devise new types of medicines, or their enabling insights and mechanisms, then the public has a right to the health benefits of these advances, over any considerations of profits by private companies that seek to restrict and control such use. A similar principle should apply to the privatization of all publicly funded research, for example in physics, aviation, electronics, and materials science.

10) Fund the development and deployment of solar and sustainable energy sources and technologies; end fossil and fission fuel subsidies; develop the range of occupations (jobs) that would design, build and sustain a network of local and regional sub-networks of sustainable (solar, wind, hydro, geo-thermal, tidal and ocean) energy generation and distribution (of short-range and low-loss).

There are other issues I would like to see action on, but let’s start with these.

It’s more than eight years that the world’s newspapers are filled with miscellaneous news, reports and commentaries concerning Iran’s nuclear program. Controversy over Iran’s nuclear program has spanned through two administrations in Iran: ex-President Mohammad Khatami’s government and the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration. The term “Iran nuclear program” returns more than 6 million results in Google web search. Thousands of scholars, journalists, politicians and political pundits have made their own statement regarding this debatable subject.

Terminologically, Iran’s nuclear program calls to mind the words holocaust, Israel, Zionism, Axis of Evil, George W. Bush, stretched hands and uranium enrichment. The world is watching the uninteresting continuation of confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program and the opportunist journalists find this tedious charade the best subject to entertain their readers and enrich their portfolio.

Iran says that it needs enriched uranium to meet its energy demands and produce electricity. The United States and its European allies claim that Iran wants to produce nuclear weapons in order to launch a military strike against Israel. Israel, over the past five years, has been incessantly threatening Iran with a preemptive attack, warning that it would not allow Iran to achieve nuclear technology.

The United Nations Security Council, under the pressure of United States and its stalwart allies, has imposed four rounds of backbreaking financial sanctions against Iran to dissuade it from developing “nuclear weapons”. Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected the claims that they’re moving towards developing nuclear weapons and called the sanctions ineffective, valueless.

These scenarios have been taking place over the past 8 years repeatedly and there was not a single magnanimous politician to put an end to the exhausting war of words between Iran and the West categorically.

There are only two possibilities which can terminate Iran’s nuclear deadlock. The first solution is that Iran has to withdraw from its nuclear accomplishments and submit to the calls of Western politicians by giving up its uranium enrichment program. The other solution would be the West’s abandonment of its uncompromising stance by accepting a new nuclear power in the Middle East.

Both of the solutions, however, seem to be impractical and unattainable as none of the parties involved in Iran’s nuclear standoff have so far shown any sign of flexibility and reason. The West staunchly insists that Israel should remain the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and the employment of nuclear energy by the other countries, even for peaceful purposes, violates the policy of a Middle East with an unrivaled nuclear Israel. Iran, on the other hand, insists that it would never accede to halt its uranium enrichment program in lieu of receiving a certain amount of uranium enriched by a third country to be consequently transferred to Iran to be used in the nuclear reactors in Bushehr and Natanz.

Both sides of the game continue to stick to their stubbornness and adamancy. None of them retreat from their stances which have been indicated a number of times are baseless and unfounded. The game which they’ve started has no winner. It’s a “lose-lose” competition. Amidst their erosive and probably unending clashes, the Iranian people seem to be the only loser. They’re the ones who should tolerate the intolerable consequences of financial sanctions. They’re the ones who will be deprived of the barest rudiments of their daily life as a result of the financial sanctions which are purportedly imposed on the government of Iran.

The Iranian people are the only loser of the power game between Iran and the West. They’re competing to surmount each other in a nonstop match which is designed to show the most powerful competitor.

Once the turn comes to boasting of respecting the human rights and freedom, the Western leaders chant that they want the well-being, liberty and safety of the Iranian people. Once it’s time to keep silent and watch, they interfere disturbingly and affect the political destiny of a nation. I’m referring to Iran’s June 2009 presidential elections in which the Western politicians blatantly took the side of the reformist candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and made an opposition figure out of him, laying the groundwork for his being demonized domestically; however, once it’s time for them to take action and prevent the Iranian nation from being affected by the grave consequences of a meaningless power game, they vote in favor of a fourth round of financial sanctions against Iran unilaterally and prove that their claims are drastically futile and unrealistic.

The only losers of this power game are the ordinary Iranian people. There’s no doubt about that.

Call me evangelist for anti-racist conversion and apologist for conversations that would get us there.

“Well, let’s face it,” says John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute speaking Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley, “when people say that they are supposed to be in a national conversation on race, they do not mean an exchange of the kind that we are having right now. What they mean is a conversion.

Nobody puts it in so many words,” says McWhorter, “but the way that conversation is supposed to go is that white America is supposed to realize that the civil rights revolution wasn’t enough, that structural racism, et cetera, still remains prevalent, and that there is still more admitting that needs to be done and probably some sort of second civil rights revolution.

“That is the basis for what the supposed national conversation about race would be,” says McWhorter. “And I don’t think that white people are interested anymore. I don’t think that most black people are interested anymore. And I don’t think it corresponds to modern reality.”

In its inception the Tea Party was a movement by “water carrying” mortgage holders against their own “loser neighbors” who were nothing but “water drinkers.” There was a slippery slope from the philosophy of mortgage relief and public health assistance straight down into the universal poverty of Castro’s Communist Cuba. Don’t forget that Obama had already been in office for several weeks.

Now what provoked so much fear from Chicago in the midst of a historic financial crash, as Washington and Wall Street hinted that they might have to appease the mortgage crisis? And how does our understanding of this fear relate to that thing we call the real world? The fear that ignited the Tea Party was founded upon a perception that with the Obama years we were about to experience a national lack of discipline.

From the floor of the CBT, their neighbors’ lack of mortgage discipline was intuitively extended across the crashed economy as its primary cause. Finally, the force opposed to this looming lack of discipline was named “capitalism” which was melded at gut level into the sovereign meaning of the Fourth of July. In capitalism there would be national discipline. Public options on the other hand would only bring ruin.

Soon enough the Tea Party Express was traveling across the country denouncing the kind of laxity that accompanies people who are sick, poor, and barely making rent. And where was the discipline to be found? In “free market capitalism”, of course, to which all contributors to CNBC are apparently obliged to swear loyalty oaths on videos that are played nightly on the Kudlow report.

So it’s capitalism, is it? Let’s see. What does Black history have to say about the discipline of capitalism’s free market? What would a former slave have to say to Your Tea Party on any given Fourth of July? To make the claim that Fourth of July Capitalism is tantamount to moral discipline is already to expose a mind frame that is willfully negligent of Black history.

What about the moral discipline that faced down capitalism’s addiction to slave labor? The moral discipline that faced down the business district of Birmingham, Alabama? The moral discipline that organized poor farmers, white and black, so that they could learn how to keep themselves from getting plowed under by capitalism’s advance over land? The moral discipline of farm aid, food aid, rent control, Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, state universities, land grant colleges, head start programs, legal aid services.

What about the moral discipline with which A. Philip Randolph organized Black railroad attendants so that decent wages would be paid? What about the moral discipline with which James Farmer, Jr. desegregated private transportation systems? And what about the moral discipline of today’s hotel and motel workers who are standing up for livable wages as they are asked to take responsibility for all that wonderful service that capitalist and administration elites expect to receive?

Now the point I want to make after all this recollection is actually not to be confused with anti-capitalism, because after thinking about the question for twenty years I’m not sure what the essence of capitalism comes down to. But what I do want to say is that when a movement picks up the term capitalism as the full meaning of moral discipline, then what they are calling “capitalist” I am definitely against.

What Shirley Sherrod witnessed in the relationship between a poor, white farmer and a semi-wealthy white lawyer is what more people who work at the CBT need to get out and see first hand. Because if the Tea Party had been built upon experience like that, then there would be much less to worry about in terms of complicity with structural racism in the real world.

I suppose that anybody who swears by “free market capitalism” and who knows history intends to signify something in the term “capitalism” that is different from anything we have quite yet seen. They are appealing to an ideal of discipline and fairness that a “free market” would make manifest if it were allowed to exist in pure form.

But the problem with “pro-capitalist” movements is that they practically—which is to say structurally—support the existing corruptions of capitalist institutions which have nothing to do with discipline or fairness. Ask any business student what they imagine they would do if some small risk of cheating had some larger likelihood of reward. In capitalism as a lived experience, there is an expectation that because others are out to cheat you, you may hold your own buyers accountable if they do not beware.

If pro-capitalist movements practically and structurally empower further expectations of unfair actualities such as predatory mortgage lending, and if they willfully talk about history as if the unfairness of capitalism means nothing so long as we’re thinking about the mere case of Black History, then we have in a Tea Party movement what many white folks recognize intuitively as a mob to keep your distance from.

McWhorter may be correct to divide the Black community between those who are interested in the conversion of structural racism and those who are not. But he is wrong to ignore the divisions in the white community that continue to mark the Tea Party as a splinter movement from which progressive whites tend to keep their distance. The latest poll shows Harry Reid’s appeal is rising, which in Nevada means that the Tea Party Express is not a train most white folks want to ride.

In the televised hugs between Sherrod and the white farmer she saved, we see what a real Tea Party movement would look like. It would be a movement where the unfairness of capitalism is recognized across the racial divides and where struggles of moral discipline remain in tearful embrace. It is not altogether an anti-capitalist movement unless you first allow the term capitalism to be defined by the Tea Party in their supremacist way. A pure anti-capitalist movement would never attempt to save the farm for the farmer. In the hug between Sherrod and her beloved white farmer, at last, the theories of Thomas Jefferson outlive his practice.

Look again at the Global Dow. On April 15, 2010 the Tea Party movement had a hundred pro-capitalist rallies announcing to the world what would be their effective definition of capitalism here on out. Investors, who are only human after all, have been taking their money out of that capitalist system ever since.

Do we need a conversion? If you accept a deeper moral realism along the lines professed by Martin Luther King, Jr., then we know that the contradictions of class and race domination shall never have the strength to live on their own. They are contradictory to the plain meaning of what a “free market” means to a liberated mind. Therefore, if there is a Tea Party that is not playing games with minstrelized concepts, or that does not put profound conclusions in the take-out bin, and who is therefore truly interested in discipline and fairness for all, then yes, of course, a conversion is still needed.

The plain history of our July 4 system is a story of moral discipline breathing new life into the Constitution generation after generation. Any movement that claims—as did the Tea Party movement of 2009—that the economic survivors of that year were the only ones who actually deserved to survive have revealed only their supremacist foundations. Their conversion is therefore necessary, morally and historically. Nor will there be any national progress unless those conversions are evangelized, over and over again.

McWhorter was careful not to include all Black people in his review of those who are no longer interested in a national conversion. If structural racism does not correspond to modern reality, what is McWhorter’s account for why CNN needs him on camera this week? Or why Latino activists are stretched between Phoenix and Washington this week trying to push back an anti-civil rights stampede?

This month’s national conversation—not conversion—has to do with two swift responses to NAACP President Ben Jealous, who raised the question: is Tea Party racism structural or accidental? In reply, the National Tea Party Federation “flatly rejected” the charges made by Jealous, inferring that he was the one guilty of racism. Then two prominent Tea Party activists retaliated against the NAACP.

In the first case of retaliation, a prominent Tea Party organizer put out a minstrel-style parody of Jealous. In the second case, a prominent Tea Party propagandist found video from an obscure NAACP address in Georgia, sliced the message up, and provoked reflexive national denunciations of a Black woman who had actually said something quite profound. Meanwhile, the National Tea Party Federation, three days after flatly rejecting any knowledge of racism in its ranks whatsoever, announced that it had just expelled the cross-country Tea Party Express for refusing in turn to expel a minstrel wannabe.

What the Tea Party has proven in this July heat wave is that its members share an impulse to fight back against the NAACP through mockery, deceit, and denial. To put the case more plainly, the Tea Party movement has amply answered the question that Ben Jealous posed. Its racism cannot pass for accidental.

According to McWhorter, however, white people should never have been expected to take interest in manifesting their anti-racist conversion because the structure of racism is no longer a significant part of modern reality. And so we wonder, does McWhorter’s reading of modern reality include this kind of white intransigence.

Notice the way that McWhorter uses the term “white people” in the development of an analysis that purports to deny structural racism. If “white people” and “most black people” have joined together to disavow the need for conversations that would lead to structural conversion, how is this alliance of interest to be understood? Is it structural?

In his CNN appearance, McWhorter conceptualized racism as “skin color animus” or what used to be called prejudice. Of course, prejudice would seem to have very little explanatory power in describing the way Shirley Sherrod was treated by the Obama administration or by Jealous when she was denounced and forced into retirement on the basis of a three-minute video clip.

This leaves us to ask whether the actions of the Tea Party, the Obama administration, and the NAACP leadership could be coherently illuminated by some recognition that racism in the real world is structural.

Sherrod herself was caught in the act of trying to accentuate the reality of economic class conflict. She tried to explain to her NAACP audience how the salience of economic class came to play a more effective role in her understanding of the real world. Yet she insisted at the same time that her understanding of economic class inequality did not overturn or negate her appreciation of racism in that same real world.

Even many people who recognize the structural racism of the Tea Party movement want to sympathize with its apparent defense of common folk against the elite powers of Wall Street and Washington. But historians of the movement may not want to forget how the Tea Party movement was sparked into visibility by a ruckus that was televised from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBT).

“Are you listening, Mr. Obama?” shouted the eminently charismatic Rick Santelli over the groans of CBT floor traders in Feb. 2009, as the daytime audience of the Capitalism Knows Best Channel (CNBC) was galvanized into a pro-capitalist protest against “public options” for housing and health care.

Existing theories of political economy, liberal as well as Marxist, see capital as a dual entity. According to these theories, the “real” essence of capital consists of material/productive commodities, while the “financial” appearance of capital either accurately mirrors or fictitiously distorts this underlying reality. We reject this duality. Capital, we argue, is finance, and only finance. In its modern incarnation, capital exists as forward-looking capitalization, a universal financial ritual that discounts expected future earnings to a singular present value.

The universality of this reduction makes capitalization the most supple power instrument ever known to humanity. Previously, distributive power was associated with clear socio-ecological distinctions – differences between king and subject, owner and slave, tiller and landlord, field and citadel, village and town. Capitalization flattens these qualitative features to the point of irrelevance. In principle, anyone can be a capitalist, and what distinguishes one capitalist from another is the quantity of their capitalization: the most powerful are those with the greatest capitalization (dominant capital), and those that hold that power achieve and augment it by increasing their capitalization faster than others (differential accumulation). In this way, capitalization crystallizes the power of capitalists to shape their world, as well as the resistance of those that oppose this power. It gauges the capitalists’ success in directing production and consumption, in shaping ideology and culture, in affecting the law, public policy, conflict, war and even the environment. It is the all-encompassing algorithm that creorders – or creates the order – of the capitalist mode of power.

The purpose of our paper is to examine the breakdown of this algorithm. To be sure, this type of inquiry is hardly novel. Marxists have long searched for objective signs of capitalist collapse, preliminary omens that would foretell the system’s imminent disintegration. However, because of their dual conception of capital, they’ve tended to look for such signs in the so-called real sphere of production and consumption, while paying far less attention to finance, which, in their view, is merely a distorted mirror of that reality. But finance isn’t a mirror of real capital; it is real capital – and indeed the only real capital. So if we want to look for signs of systemic crisis and possible disintegration, our search should begin here, in the very ritual of capitalization.

The specific focus of the article is two historical ruptures of modern finance – the periods of 1929-1939 and 2000-2010. During both periods, capitalists abandoned the conventional forward-looking ritual of capitalization, resorting instead to the backward-looking posture of pre-modern finance. In our view, these rare episodes are of great importance for understanding the nature of capitalist confidence and the capitalists’ ability to rule – as well as the possibility that this system of rule will collapse. Our inquiry seeks, first, to characterize key features of these episodes; second, to speculate on their causes; and third, to assess, however speculatively, what they might imply for the future of capitalism.

Propositions

We set the stage with a number of related propositions. These propositions aim to establish a “nested relationship” between a series of entities – beginning from the broad concept of a mode of power, and continuing with confidence in obedience, dominant ideology, the ritual of capitalization and the forward-looking disposition of modern finance. Most of time, the components of this nested relationship are mutually reinforcing. But on rare occasions the relationship implodes. The trigger for such implosion is systemic fear: fearing for the collapse of their system, capitalists lose sight of the future; with the future having become opaque, the ritual of capitalization falls into disarray; with capitalization having been punctured, dominant ideology is deeply shaken; with dominant ideology having cracked, the capitalists’ confidence in obedience tumbles; and with no confidence in obedience, the very continuation of the capitalist mode of power is put into question. Let’s examine the relationship between these concepts more closely, beginning with power.

● Modes of power and confidence in obedience. Hierarchical societies, we argue, are characterized by their modes of power. Every mode of power – whether slave-based, feudal or capitalist ­– rests on confidence in obedience: the confidence of rulers in the obedience of their subjects. This confidence is never perfect: the ruled often resist, rise up and revolt; occasionally they demand and periodically achieve moderate change; sometimes they even manage to effect significant reform; and in very rare instances they take over power, though only for a brief historical moment. But as long as the bottom-up disobedience of the underlying population does not significantly undermine the top-down confidence of those who rule them – a breach that seldom happens on a large enough scale – the mode of power itself remains intact.

● Confidence in obedience and dominant ideology. The framework that shapes and fixates this confidence in obedience is the dominant dogma, or ideology: the broad belief system that propels and restricts the social imagination. The dogma or ideology that dominates a given mode of power conditions action and inaction, justifies the prevailing social structure and provides its organizing principles. It molds rulers and ruled alike – and in so doing locks them both into the same mode of power.

● Dominant ideology and capitalization. The dominant ideology of modern capitalism revolves around the ritual of capitalization: the financial algorithm that discounts expected future earnings to their present value. This ritual is all pervasive. The capitalist system is denominated in prices, and for the past century or so, the habitual price-setting mechanism has been capitalization. Discounting seems to pervade every thing and every process: it determines the prices of human life and its genomic code; it sets the prices of consumer goods and services, it generates the prices of corporate assets and government debt; it calculates the prices of military operations and humanitarian aid; it is even used to compute the price of our ecological future. The imperatives of capitalization are accepted, internalized and obeyed, usually without question, by the rulers as well as the ruled – and that acceptance makes capitalization central to the dominant ideology of our society.

● Capitalization and the forward-looking outlook. The ritual of capitalization is feverishly forward looking: it is concerned not with the past or the present, but with the future. The elementary particles of capitalization – earnings, investors’ hype, risk perceptions and the normal rate of return – represent not what is known to have happened, but what is expected to happen. The expectations themselves are inherently uncertain and always in flux. But underneath their shifts and turns, one thing remains constant: the conviction that the capitalization process itself will continue to rule and organize humanity, forever.

This latter conviction is necessary for the existence of modern capitalism, at least in its present form, and the easiest way to demonstrate that necessity is to assume it away. Suppose for argument’s sake that capitalists, instead of expecting capitalization to continue indefinitely, believed that the process would cease to exist at some future point. At that point, with capitalization gone, their assets would have a nil value, by definition; and with future prices being zero, current prices would have nowhere to trend but down. Now, the fact that capitalists invest shows that they expect the very opposite – i.e., that the value of their assets will grow, not contract – and that expectation means that, consciously or not, they also think that the ritual that valuates their assets will never end.1

These propositions lead to two related conclusions. First, they suggest that the very existence of capitalization attests to the capitalist confidence in obedience. The fact that this ritual is so pervasive implies that most people believe it will remain so; and the only way for this ritual to remain pervasive is if capitalists are convinced that they can continue to impose it on a society that is unwilling or unable to oppose it. The second conclusion is that a protracted breach of capitalization – a period during which the ritual breaks down – signifies the loss of confidence in obedience, the potential disintegration of the dominant ideology and, ultimately, a threat to the very existence of the capitalist mode of power. If correct, these conclusions can offer a quantitative insight into the long-term outlook of the ruling capitalist class – and, by extension, into the prospect of systemic change to the capitalist mode of power.

The first question, then, is how do we know that capitalization has “broken down”? What are the features of such a breakdown? How do these features differ from investment as usual? Can these features be quantified – and if so, how?

Takeoff

To begin answering these questions, let us backtrack a bit and consider the situation in early 2010. The capitalist class is finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. For many months now, its analysts, statisticians and public officials have been spotting “green shoots” everywhere they look. The snowballing global recession, they say, seems to have slowed down and perhaps even ended. Managers the world over are purchasing more inputs after a period of buying much less; the factories of Asian exporters are running at full steam; raw material prices have rebounded strongly; bank lending is reviving and home owners are starting to refinance their mortgages at lower rates; and in the United States, the world’s biggest producer-consumer, initial unemployment claims seem to have peaked, while consumers are beginning to loosen their purse strings. But the most important sign that the worst of the crisis is over comes from the equity market: stock prices are the ultimate barometer of capitalist health, and they have been soaring.

The market takeoff is evident in Figure 1. The chart traces the U.S. dollar price of three key indices – all world equities, U.S. equities, and the equities of the U.S. FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate). All three indices show a sharp, synchronized rise. In slightly more than a year, from February 2009 to April 2010, the world index gained 67%, the U.S. index 62%, and the U.S. FIRE index – previously the most battered of the three – a whopping 93%.

Suddenly, the bulls are everywhere. The greatest returns are usually earned during the initial part of a rally, and no respectable fund manager likes being beaten by a rising average. With the economy apparently bottoming out and with the stock market having been in a major bear phase for nearly a decade, investors are no longer afraid of losing money; their fear now is not making enough of it.2 And so arises the specter of “panic buying,” a frenzied attempt to jump on the bandwagon before the really large gains are gone.3

Of course, not everyone buys this rosy scenario. Many observers continue to feel that the recent stock market rally is no more than a dead-cat bounce. In the eyes of the pessimists, investors are knee-jerking to a false start. The economic recovery, they say, will be W-shaped, and the market will re-collapse before any real boom can begin. This recession, they warn, is nasty and likely to linger for years.4

Looking Forward

Regardless of who is right, though, there is something fundamentally wrong with the debate itself. The current news may be good or bad, revealing or misleading – but, then, investors aren’t supposed to take their cue from the current news in the first place.

To trade assets on the basis of today’s statistics is to be backward looking. It is to be retrospective rather than predictive, to react rather than initiate, to trail rather than lead. It puts investors at the tail end of social dynamics.

Needless to say, such behavior is entirely improper. According to the sacred annals of modern finance, formalized a century ago by Irving Fisher (1907) and popularized during the Great Depression by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934), asset prices are forward looking: “The value of a common stock,” dictate Graham and Dodd in their immortal doorstopper, “depends entirely upon what it will earn in the future” (p. 309).

These lines were written against the backdrop of the 1920s. The roaring stock market and the accompanying optimism ushered in by the end of the First World War offered a fertile breeding ground for what Graham and Dodd called the “New-Era Theory,” especially in the land of limitless possibilities. The principles of discounting the future gained adherents, and soon enough past profits became passé. They no longer mattered for the stock market. From now on, declared the gurus of finance, one should view the markets “from the standpoint of eternity, rather than day-to-day” (Benjamin Graham quoted in Zweig 2009). Looking forward, the only thing that counted was the future trend of earnings.5

It should be noted, though, that initially this approach didn’t win too many supporters. In fact, it faced a rather stiff opposition, and not for naught. The late nineteenth century gave birth to a new entity: the modern, publicly traded corporation. It was an entirely novel way of organizing business, both inside and outside the firm, and it spread very quickly, carried on a tidal wave of public offerings. Forward-looking securities of every color, size and denomination were being floated in ever larger numbers, all promising a future of riches to the daringly prescient, and the sheer magnitude and exponential growth of it all left economists baffled and public officials gasping for air.

At the time, there were very few theoretical tools and scarcely any data to make sense of this new development. There was no corporate transparency to speak of, no models to predict future earnings, let alone their trend, and no formal methods to assess risk. To make matters worse, the newspapers were only too happy to amplify the forward-looking exploits of corporate promoters. The key owners and their bankers were blamed, not without cause, for “overcapitalizing” their assets and “watering” their stocks relative to their “actual” (read greenfield) investments – all in order to rip off the innocent public.6

The whole thing smelled of a racket: “the principle that capitalization should be based on earning capacity rather than on actual cost,” declared one disgruntled rejectionist, “is not only unsound in theory but is also vicious in its practical application” (Bonbright 1921: 482). Under these conditions, officials and theorists were unsure of how to reconcile the new practice of discounted future earnings with the familiar “par value.” It seemed much easier to stick to the conservative principles of “historical cost” accounting.

In retrospect, though, these were futile acts of resistance. Forward-looking finance was not a mere technical gismo. It was the basis for a totally new architecture of power: capitalization. As noted, capitalization is a symbolic financial entity, a ritual that the capitalists use to discount to present value risk-adjusted expected future earnings. This ritual has a very long history. It was first invented in the capitalist bourgs of Europe, probably sometime during the fourteenth century. It overcame religious opposition to usury in the seventeenth century, to become, for the first time, a conventional practice among bankers. And its mathematical formulae, previously relying on habit and rules of thumb, were first rigorously developed and synthesized in the mid-nineteenth century by a group of German foresters. But it was only in the late nineteenth century, with the birth of the publicly-traded modern corporation, that these principles were poised to become the broad norm of what we now call modern finance.7

Capitalization: Marx’s Fiction

Karl Marx, one of the first to dissect the social underpinnings of capitalization, sided with the rejectionists. The capitalist system, he said, fancies two different entities: “actual” capital and “illusionary” or “fictitious” capital. The driving force of the system is actual capital, which exists as commodities. For Marx, actual capital comprises means of production, work in progress and commodity money, whose prices are governed by the reality of labor time, whether historical or current. By contrast, fictitious capital is an ownership claim on future earnings, an illusionary entity whose price is the present value of those earnings.8

According to Marx, the latter entity is fictitious for three separate reasons. First, the ownership claim on earnings often has no “actual” principal to call on, as is the case with state debt, for instance. Second, the claim extends into the uncertain future: it capitalizes expected earnings, and these could easily fail to materialize. Third and finally, discounting depends on the rate of interest, which means that the same flow of earnings can give rise to many different levels of capitalization (Marx 1909, Vol. 3: 546-47 and 550-51).

For Marx, then, actual and fictitious capitals are totally different creatures. They consist of different entities, and they are quantified through different processes – the former via past and current productive labor time, the latter through future earnings expectations and the rate of interest. So, when considered separately, their respective magnitudes and movements need have nothing in common. The problem, though, is that they cannot be considered separately. The capitalist system is denominated in prices, and as Marx himself conceded, prices are affected by both fictitious and actual accumulation. As a result, any divergence of the former from the latter is bound to “distort” the value system:

All connection with the actual process of self expansion of capital is thus lost to the last vestige, and the conception of capital as something which expands itself automatically is thereby strengthened…. The accumulation of the wealth of this class [the large moneyed capitalists] may proceed in a direction very different from actual accumulation…. Moreover, everything appears turned upside down here, since no real prices and their real basis appear in this paper world, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in the centers, in which the whole money business of the country is crowded together, like London, this reversion becomes apparent; the entire process becomes unintelligible” (Marx 1909, Vol. 3: 549, 561 and 576, emphases added).

These considerations led Marx – and many Marxists since – to view the “illusion” of capitalization as antithetical to the “real” essence of value and accumulation, and therefore as offering only secondary insight into the larger analysis of capitalism.9 The seemingly independent gyrations of fictitious capital of course could be hugely important, and in recent years Marxists have put increasing effort into their analysis. But this importance is mostly negative and temporally limited. In the short run, capitalization wreaks havoc: it contaminates the underlying system of labor values, it sends false signals, and it amplifies the underlying economic cycle with an even more violent financial cycle that oscillates between euphoric bubbles and deflationary crashes. In the long run, though, it is the “real” economy of production, not the nominal “fiction” of finance, that counts. Production is the Galtonian anchor, the historical trend from which finance deviates and to which it must eventually revert. And since the key to capitalist development remains a proper understanding of the labor process, the extraction of surplus value and the accumulation of actual capital, Marxists never felt they needed to develop their own unique theory of capitalization, let alone to place such a theory at the heart of their analysis.

Capitalization: The Neoclassical Reconstruction

This later task was taken on by the liberals. Contrary to the Marxists, who begin from two different entities, the neoclassicists start from equivalence: capitalization both derives from and reflects the actual capital goods. One of the first stylized expressions of this symmetry is due to Irving Fisher. In an article aptly titled “What is Capital?” (1896), Fisher opens by devising a consistent set of definitions. His starting point is a distinction between “stock” (quantity at a point in time) and “flow” (quantity per unit of time). Capital is a stock; income is a flow. Capital gives rise to income, whereas income gives capital its value. The precise correspondence between these concepts is articulated in his book The Rate of Interest (1907):

The statement that “capital produces income” is true only in the physical sense; it is not true in the value sense. That is to say, capital-value does not produce income-value. On the contrary, income-value produces capital-value…. [W]hen capital and income are measured in value, their causal connection is the reverse of that which holds true when they are measured in quantity. The orchard produces the apples; but the value of the apples produces the value of the orchard…. We see, then, that present capital-wealth produces future income-services, but future income-value produces present capital-value. (13–14, original emphases)

The feedback loop is illustrated in the Table 1, adopted from Fisher (14):

Explanation: In the material world, depicted by step 1 of the sequence, capital wealth (measured by the physical quantity of capital goods) produces future income services (similarly measured by their physical quantity). In the nominal world, depicted by step 3, the income value of the future services (measured in dollars) is discounted by the prevailing rate of interest to generate the present value of capital (also measured in dollars). The two worlds are connected through step 2, whereby the physical quantity of future income services determines their dollar price.

Hypothetical numerical illustration: Intel has 10 million units of capital wealth, which, during its future life, will produce 1 billion units of income services in the form of microchip-generated utils (step 1). These 1 billion utils’ worth of services, spread over the life of the capital wealth, will fetch 100 billion dollars’ worth of future profits and interest (step 2), which in turn are discounted to 50 billion dollars’ worth of capital value (step 3).

From a theoretical standpoint, this articulation is deeply problematic – primarily because neoclassical “capital goods,” much like Marx’s “actual capital,” cannot be measured in universal units, whether we call them utils or abstract labor hours.10 But this difficulty hardly deterred the neoclassicists. At stake here was the wholesale conversion of capitalism to a new, financial footing, and the articulations offered by Fisher and other liberal economists provided the detailed rituals on which this new capitalized structure were to stand from then to eternity.

Dominant Ideology

And, indeed, liberals soon began to believe, first, that any expected income flow can be discounted to present value; second, that, in addition to earnings, discounting reflects both the normal rate of return and the risks specific to the income in question; and finally, that capitalization applies universally across time and space. Now, since in capitalism every process has a potential impact on the flow of income, it follows that accumulation, seen through the spectacles of capitalization, incorporates, at least potentially, every aspect of social life. From this viewpoint, capital is no longer a narrow matter of economics – or, alternatively, everything is now a matter of finance. Whatever affects the future trend of earnings, risk and the normal rate of return can be capitalized; and once capitalized it becomes part of capital.

And so a new comprehensive ethic was born. What Marx dismissed as a fiction, and what early twentieth-century liberals considered a rip-off, became the new template for creordering capitalist power. By the middle of the twentieth century, the forward-looking notion that asset prices discount the deep future had replaced “actual cost” as the new creed. In the 1950s, capitalization started to appear in finance textbooks; in the 1960s and 1970s, it helped propagate portfolio theory and took over corporate budgeting; in the 1980s and 1990s, it was underwriting the worldwide spread of neoliberalism and the tenfold increase in global stock prices; and by the 2000s, it was safely established as a sacrosanct gospel, an organized belief system with more followers than all of the world’s religions combined.

The rituals of this forward-looking gospel are now articulated, published and republished in millions of learned papers and monographs, and reproduced endlessly in finance textbooks. They are deeply embedded in computer models and are hardwired into pocket calculators. Every accountant, analyst and capitalist accepts them as an article of faith; most politicians and government officials are conditioned to follow their dictates; and the remainder of humanity – from employees and small business owners, through pensioners and the unemployed, to criminals and illegal aliens – unknowingly obeys their decree. Encompassing, imposing and largely beyond dispute, forward-looking capitalization has become the heart and center of today’s dominant ideology.

The Puzzle

Now, turning from this broad discussion back to the current historical moment, a puzzle arises: if asset prices look forward to the long-term future trend of earnings, why worry about the ongoing economic cycle, however volatile?

Every investor is conditioned to know that crises come and go with remarkable regularity and that recession always gives way to expansion, so what’s the point of following the latest news on green shoots, commodity prices, or the actions and inactions of purchasing managers and policy makers? Although these immediate news items may be important for journalists, politicians and even economists, their impact on the long-term trajectory of profit is negligible – so why should they be of any concern to dominant capitalists and their prescient strategists?

The short answer is that, normally, the latter indeed don’t seem to care. But there are crucial exceptions to this rule. And in order to understand both the exceptions and the rule from which they deviate, we need first to step back and examine the historical record.

The Great Divide

Consider Figure 2, which shows the relationship between the dollar price and dollar earnings per share of the S&P 500, a group representing the largest listed corporations in the United States.11

The chart contains two sets of monthly series. The top set, starting in January 1871, displays the actual levels of the series. The price series is calculated as the monthly average of daily closings. The earnings-per-share series is computed in two steps: first by interpolating monthly earnings from annual data (before 1926) and from quarterly data (after 1926); and then by expressing the result as a 12-month moving average. In the chart, both series are normalized, with September 1929=100, and are plotted against the left logarithmic scale to facilitate visual inspection.12

The bottom set, beginning in December 1874, shows the respective rates of change of the top series. The series are calculated, first, by computing for each month the percent growth rate relative to the same month a year earlier, and then by smoothing the resulting data as a three-year moving average (so that each observation shows the average annual growth rate of the last 36 months). The resulting series are plotted against the right-hand arithmetic scale.

Table 2 shows the Pearson correlation coefficient between the two growth rate series (smoothed as three-year moving averages). The coefficient, which quantifies the co-movement of the series, is measured separately for the periods before and after 1917, as well as for four sub-periods that make up the post-1917 era.13 The rationale for delineating between the different periods is explained in what follows.

If we take a bird’s-eye view of the entire period from 1871 to 2010, equity prices seem to have moved more or less together with earnings per share. But from a shorter perspective, there is a great divide between the periods before and after the First World War.

During the period ending in 1917, which the figure shades for easier visualization, the correlation between the two series is very high. The fit is evident in the tight co-movement of the levels of price and earnings per share (top series) and even more so in their almost identical rates of change (bottom set). Between 1873 and 1917, the Pearson correlation between the latter series was +0.72, and this tight fit shouldn’t surprise us.14

Recall that during that period, forward-looking finance was still in its infancy, and that investors were conditioned to believe that “what you see is what you get.” According to Graham and Dodd, the investment outlook was largely conservative, and most stock owners tended to view common equities as little more than glorified bonds. The main reason for holding equity was dividends – which, at the time, were free of any taxes and accounted, on average, for 70% of corporate profits (compared with less than 50% in the second half of the twentieth century and about 45% since the mid 1970s).15 There were of course those who bought stocks with an eye to future capital gains, but these were considered “speculators,” not “investors.” For the latter, the main criteria for choosing stocks were: (1) stable dividends; (2) a somewhat higher level of earnings to support such dividends and maintain the company; and (3) a stock price that was solidly backed by so-called tangible assets.16

Like the interest on bonds, corporate earnings and dividends were not expected to trend upwards; although investors would have welcomed such an increase, the common premise was that both streams would remain solidly stable. And since the ownership of equities, like the ownership of bonds, was supposed to generate a fairly constant yield, equity prices tended to fluctuate closely with current corporate earnings and dividends – which is more or less what we see in Figure 2.

The second period, though, from 1917 onward, is completely different. For the most part, the fit between price and earnings per share is very loose and often negative: the variations of the series are usually out of sync, the magnitudes of the variations are often very different, and there are extended periods during which the numbers move in opposite directions. The Pearson correlation coefficient for the growth-rate series over the entire post-1917 period (including the anomalous 1930s and 2000s) is a mere +0.35 – less than half of its pre-1917 level.

Of course, theorists of finance don’t consider this decoupling problematic. On the contrary, they see it as a vindication of their forward-looking model, clear evidence that capitalist finance has finally come into its own.

Decoupling Price from Earnings

According to the modern forward-looking habitus, investors price an asset by discounting the future profit trend that the asset is expected to generate. In this ritual, the participants set the price of the asset – say a share of Microsoft – as equal to the ratio between what they expect Microsoft’s future profits to be on the one hand and the rate of return they wish those profits to represent on the other. For instance, if investors expect ownership of a Microsoft share to generate a fixed annual profit stream of $100 in perpetuity, and if they want this stream to represent a 20% rate of return, then they would be willing to pay for the share (or demand to be paid) a price of $500. We can represent this computation symbolically, so that:

where Kt is the price of Microsoft’s share in year t, E is the level of annual earnings investors expect Microsoft to generate in perpetuity, and r is the decimal rate of return appropriate for Microsoft.

Now, given the common belief that capitalism is a perpetual growth system, it seems only reasonable to expect Microsoft’s annual earnings to flow not at a fixed rate E, but at a rate that grows over time. This expectation could easily be fit into the framework by substituting a higher fixed level of earnings for the exponentially growing one. Alternatively, if we assume, as investors habitually do, that the expected growth of earnings will be maintained indefinitely at a rate g, say 10%, and provided that this growth rate is lower than the discount rate r, Microsoft’s share price can be computed as follows17 :

In general, the practical pricing process can be far more intricate, but the basic ritual of contrasting expected profits with a discount rate of return is always present.18 Now, regardless of the merits of this ritual, one thing seems obvious: prices set in this manner should bear little or no relationship to the current level of profit.

There are three reasons for the dissociation. First, since the price reflects the future trend of earnings, and since this trend is affected only marginally, if at all, by present or past earnings, there is no inherent reason why month-to-month fluctuations in current profits should affect stock prices. And that is just for starters. Note that the future earnings trend, by its very nature, cannot be known with certainty and is forever conjectural. For this reason, investors discount not the profits they will earn, but the profits they expect to earn. In the case of Equation 1 above, for example, investors can easily misjudge the perpetual future flow of Microsoft’s earnings per share to be $50 or $400 instead of the eventual $100; this error will in turn cause them to price the company’s stock at $250 or $2000, respectively (=50/0.2 or 400/0.2). Similarly, if investors erroneously predict that Microsoft’s earnings will grow annually by 1% or 19% instead of the eventual 10%, they will misprice its stock at $526 or $10,000, respectively. And since profit expectations are rather open ended and commonly hyped either positively or negatively, the effect is to widen further the disparity between the movement of price on the one hand and of current earnings on the other.

Second, a given level of expected earnings can generate any number of asset prices, depending on the discount rate of return. For instance, if the discount rate in Equation 1 were 10% (rather than 20%), the stock price would double to $1,000 (=$100/0.1). Now, the discount rate changes constantly – partly because of variations in the overall rate of interest and partly in response to changing perceptions of risk specific to the particular equity in question. However, since in and of themselves these changes are unrelated to current earnings, the effect is to reduce the correlation further.

Finally, investors are not always able to follow the rituals of finance with sufficient precision. Regardless of how hard they try, their computations are constantly thrown off, or so we are told, by various market “imperfections,” government “intervention” and other such diseases; and sometimes, particularly when investors get overly excited, the calculations can even become “irrational.” Now, since neither the miscalculations nor the irrationality are correlated with current profits, the result is to loosen the fit even more.

So if we adhere to the scriptures of modern finance, we should expect to see no systematic association between equity prices and current profits. And given that most if not all present-day investors obey the scriptures – including the allowed imperfections and irrationalities – their actions tend to validate the “theory.”

But not always.

Looking Backward

Figure 2 and Table 2 show two clear exceptions to the rule: the first occurred during the 1930s, the second during the 2000s. In both periods, which Figure 2 shades for easier visualization, equity prices moved together – and tightly so – with current earnings. Between 1929 and 1939, the correlation between the respective growth rates of the two series (smoothed as 3-year moving averages) was +0.89, while in the period between 2000 and 2010 it was +0.64. The difference with the rest of the post-1917 period is stark: in the period from 1917 to 1929 the correlation was a much lower +0.29; and in the period from 1939 to 2000 the correlation was –0.15 – which means that the series had very limited co-movement, and that the limited relationship that did exist was actually negative.

Needless to say, the tight positive correlation of the 1930s and the 2000s, reminiscent of a bygone era, is a gross violation of modern forward-looking finance. In fact, the violation is worse than it seems. Note that, despite their name, monthly earnings per share represent profits that were earned not during the current month, but during the previous twelve months. This measurement convention means that, during the 1930s, and again during the 2000s, investors committed a cardinal sin. They priced assets based not on future earnings, and not even on current earnings, but on past earnings!

What caused this sharp departure from conventional practice? Why would investors regress to a backward-looking posture that the scientists of finance tell them is patently “false”? Why would they suddenly abandon their convenient forward-looking ceremony and instead take their cue from the dead past? Why give up the predictive powers of precise positivism in favor of poor historicism?

A naïve observer, unschooled in the rituals of modern finance, may be tempted to blame such regression on the heightened turbulence of the two periods. According to this view, investors are always forward looking. But when rattled by crisis, they become more cautious about the future, and that greater caution causes them to use the movement of current earnings as an indication of heightened future risk. As a result, increases in current earnings mitigate risk perceptions; lower risk perceptions reduce the discount rate; and a lower discount rate raises stock prices (and vice versa).

This type of behavior, although possible, would be entirely inconsistent with the basic ritual of forward-looking asset pricing. First, according to this ritual, the level of caution – or the “risk premium” embedded in the discount rate (r) of Equations 1 and 2 – is a slowly-changing magnitude. It reflects the overall price volatility of the assets – historically as well as with an eye to the future – and as such, it changes very little from year to year. Second, in the manuals of modern finance the “risk premium” pertains to the volatility not of earnings (E), but of prices (Kt). This association means that even if the risk premium were to exhibit large temporal variations, still there would be no reason for such variations to track the ups and downs of current earnings.

So what is behind the two reversals?

Systemic Fear

In our view, the reason is systemic fear.

Systemic fear is a class of its own. It has little to do with the periodic downswings that make capitalists cautious, and it has no connection to the dread and apprehension that regularly puncture their habitual greed. “Business as usual” is always uncertain, and with capitalism constantly in flux, investors are forever fearful about profit and wary about risk: they are concerned that earnings may not rise as quickly as they hope, or that they might fall; that volatility will increase; that interest rates will rise; and so on.

But these fears, no matter how intense, are self-contained. They pertain to the level and pattern of profit, not to its existence. They do not impinge on the normality of profit – i.e., on the belief that assets have a “natural” tendency to grow and that capitalists have the power and right to enforce and appropriate such expansion. And most crucially, they reflect the belief that expected profits, whether high or low, could always be priced to their present value. Regardless of the market’s ups and downs, the underlying assumption is that the capitalization process itself – the ritual that creorders modern capitalism and anchors its dominant ideology – will remain intact.

Occasionally, though, there arises a very different and far deeper type of fear: the terrifying thought that the entity of profit – and, worse still, the very institution of capitalization on which the entire capitalist megamachine stands – might cease to exist.19 This latter fear is associated with systemic crisis – that is, with periods during which the very future of capitalism is put into question. It is what Hegel meant when he spoke of the bondsman’s “fear of death”:

For this consciousness [of the capitalist bound to the steering wheel of a megamachine gone wild] was not in peril and fear for this element or that [such as falling profit or rising volatility], nor for this or that moment of time [like a sharp market correction or a declaration of war], it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master [the ultimate wrath of the ruled]. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it [will capitalism survive?]. (Hegel 1807: 237)

The first time capitalists were gripped by such systemic terror was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The second time is during the present crisis, a protracted turbulence that started in the early 2000s and is still ongoing.

The 1930s

Let’s examine each of these periods more closely, beginning with the 1930s.

Figure 3 “magnifies” the data from Figure 2. It focuses specifically on the period from the late 1910s to the early 1950s, with the shaded area denoting the period of systemic crisis. For ease of comparison, the two top series are rebased with October 1929=100 and plotted against an arithmetic left scale. The rate-of-growth series, as before, are plotted against the arithmetic right scale.

The data show that, after the First World War and during the happy 1920s, stock prices moved rather independently of earnings, exactly as the “New-Era Theory” decreed. But once the stock market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression began, the “New-Era Theory” broke down: the two series, instead of moving independently of each other, suddenly converged and remained tightly locked for nearly a decade.

Both series fell in tandem from 1930 to 1932, and then rose in tandem from 1933 to 1936 – charting what initially looked like a V-shaped recovery. But the hopeful V soon became a disheartening W. In 1937, a new downturn began, and the two series, which briefly decoupled, again converged in a free fall. It was only in 1939, after a decade of frustration, that the two series again diverged and that the “New-Era” theorists could breathe a sigh of relief.

The political-economic background of the period requires little elaboration. During much of the 1930s, the United States, along with the rest of the world, was mired in a systemic crisis. The very existence of the capitalist mode of power was at stake, with liberalism fighting for its life against both communism and fascism. The dominant ideology suffered a major blow. The “free market” didn’t seem to be working, and with laissez faire theories in deep disarray, the rulers were no longer confident in the obedience of the ruled. Few felt certain that capitalism would survive, and many – including some of the system’s leading advocates – feared its imminent demise.

In this context, the “future trend of earnings” was no longer a very meaningful concept, and there was little point in extrapolating, let alone quantifying, its growth rate. Furthermore, the very institution of capitalization was put into question, so even if future earnings could somehow be predicted, it didn’t seem certain that future ownership claims on these earnings could be priced and transacted.

There was no anchor ahead. All that was solid melted into air, all that was holy was profaned. And so, in despair, forward-looking investors found themselves latching onto the only “real” thing they could see: the past. Like the Aymara Indians of South America, they suddenly realized that the future was behind them.20 Nominally, their assets still represented a claim over the future; but the only way to price that future was to look backward, to what the assets had already earned.

The pricing anomaly ended in 1939. Suddenly, the disorder dissipated, optimism re-emerged and history could again be forgotten. The onset of the Second World War and the boom that ensued sent profits soaring (they doubled in less than two years). And the capitalists, cajoled by the apparent efficacy of the new welfare-warfare state, regained their systemic confidence. They abandoned the stale past, returned to their forward-looking rituals and resumed the discounting of expected future earnings. Within two years, the stock market was down 25%, but this decline was no longer symptomatic of systemic fear. On the contrary, it was evidence that capitalism had survived and that capitalists could fearlessly practice their capitalization rituals.

The 2000s

This situation lasted for sixty years. During that period, capitalism went through many ups and downs, and there was the occasional scare that sent markets reeling. But none of the jolts was serious enough to evoke the Hegelian fear of death. At no point was the existence of the system itself in doubt. It was business as usual, with greed and fear easily incorporated into future earnings projections and risk calculations. The financial model seemed to work like clockwork.

But in 2000, the machine stopped. The threat of a new systemic crisis suddenly loomed large, and the specter of backward-looking pricing, having been dormant for decades, returned to haunt the markets.

Figure 4 displays price and earnings per share data from 1970 to the present, with the shaded area denoting a period of systemic crisis. The two top series, denoting levels, are rebased with December 2007=100 and graphed against the left arithmetic scale. The bottom series express the annual rates of change (smoothed as 3-year moving averages) and are plotted against the right arithmetic scale.

As the data in Figure 2 and Figure 4 show, from 1939 to the early 2000s, both price and earnings per share trended upwards. But in line with the “New-Era Theory” – which by now had become mainstream finance – the short-term correlation between them remained loose and indeed negative (see Table 2). During that long stretch, earnings went through several sharp declines. For instance, during the end-of-communism crisis of 1989-1991 they dropped 37%, and following the emerging markets scare of 1997-1998 they fell 6% – yet in both cases stock prices continued to soar. And conversely, in 1972-1974 earnings increased by 42% while prices dropped by 43%; similarly, at the end of 1987 earnings increased by 14% while prices dropped by 27%. All in all, then, investors seemed perfectly happy to obey the theory. Throughout the period, they ignored the ephemeral present in favor of the eternal future.

But in 2000, they suddenly lost their forward-looking vision, and they haven’t regained it since. Over the past decade, earnings have experienced two very violent swings; yet stock prices, instead of remaining impartial to the immediate gyrations of the earnings cycle, have traced it, and rather tightly: the correlation coefficient between the rates of growth series, smoothed as 3-years moving averages, jumped to +0.64, up from to –0.15 in the preceding six decades.

A fairly similar picture arises at the global level. Figure 5 shows price and earnings per share for the Datastream world equity index, covering the period between January 1973 and April 2010 (there are no prior data). The top series, plotted against the left logarithmic scale, show levels and are rebased with January 1986=100. The bottom series show the annual rates of change, smoothed as a three-year moving averages, and are plotted against the right arithmetic scale. As before, the shaded area denotes a period of systemic crisis.

Because the world aggregate is far broader than the U.S. one, reflecting many different markets that often move through different phases and that are subject to different conditions, one would expect the correlation between the two series to be looser throughout. But it is not. For the period from January 1974 to August 2000, the Pearson correlation coefficient between the two rate-of-growth series, smoothed as 3-year moving average, is –0.16, which is similar to that of the U.S. And the coefficient for the subsequent period is +0.48 – lower than U.S.’s +0.64, but still far too high for the forward-looking ritual.

Is Capitalization Approaching a Glass Ceiling?

Let’s examine the experience of the past decade more closely, beginning with the first market cycle, which started to decline in 2000, troughed in 2003 and peaked in 2008 (given the similar statistical patterns in Figure 4 and Figure 5, our discussion refers to the former figure only). The 2000 “dotcom” crash and the demise of the “new economy,” together with the 2001 collapse of the Twin Towers and the onset of the “infinite war on terror,” signaled the beginning of a new era of uncertainty. Analysts started to debate the end of the “Washington Consensus,” strategists deliberated over the decline of the “American Empire,” and culturalists lamented the death of the “global village.”

It is true that, initially, nobody was seriously contemplating the “end of capitalism.” But capitalists nonetheless started to grow wary. This didn’t feel like yet another “crisis as usual,” and the long-term trajectory of future profits – which in previous decades had appeared neatly bounded and relatively easy to project – suddenly looked murky. And so, once again, capitalists found themselves with their backs to the future. As we can see in Figure 4, instead of projecting the earning trend looking forward, they began to watch earnings as they unfolded and to discount their past declines.

By the middle of 2002, the earnings crisis finally appeared to have ended, and in early 2003 the stock market bottomed. Profits staged a massive, V‑shaped recovery and, over the next five years, rose by nearly 350%. And yet, despite the surge, capitalists still found the future hard to envisage. The earnings boom certainly was real enough – but so were its limits.

These limits become visible when we take a bird’s eye view of the postwar period. During that period, U.S. market capitalization was fueled by a highly favorable combination of several power processes.21 First, after the Great Depression, capitalists managed to force a systematic redistribution in their favor, seeing the combined share of their pretax profit and interest in national income rise from about 12% in the 1930s and 1940s to roughly 17% in the 2000s. Second, they also succeeded in pushing down the effective corporate tax rate – from 55% in the 1940s to less than 30% in the 2000s – a decline that caused their after-tax corporate earnings to increase even further. Third, the broader consolidation of power relations and the establishment of capital-friendly regulations and macro stabilization policies helped them reduce earning volatility – and, by extension, their own perceptions of risk. This decline in perceived risk, along with the general fall in interest rates since the late 1970s, lowered the rate at which they discount their expected earnings, thereby boosting their present value even more.

These power processes all had the same impact on the stock market: they pushed it up. The effect of income redistribution and falling corporate taxes convinced capitalists that net profits would continue to rise much faster than national income, while falling risk perception along with the drop in interest rates over the past thirty years allowed them to re-price this steep earning trend at ever lower discount rates. The net consequence was that the overall stock market capitalization rose more than four times faster than the gross national income: it soared from $167 billion in 1952 to $20.3 trillion in 2007 – a 127-fold increase – compared with a mere 39-fold increase in dollar value of gross national income, which grew from $312 billion to $12.4 trillion.22 ,23

The trouble was that, by the early 2000s, after half a century in overdrive, these power processes have already run much of their course, making future increases in stock prices more difficult to achieve. Capitalism is inherently conflictual, so power is always imposed against opposition. This built-in conflict means that from a certain point onward, there tends to be a positive relationship between the existing level of capitalist power on the one hand, and the force that needs to be exerted in order to further increase that power on the other. Thus, the higher the income inequality, the harder it is to make it more unequal; the lower the corporate tax rate, the harder it is to cut it further; the smaller the volatility of earnings, the harder it is to stabilize them further; and the lower the rate of interest, the harder it is to see it fall further.

The exhaustion of these redistributional/conflictual fuels left the stock market at the mercy of aggregate growth – and yet the “real economy” too seemed to be running into the sand.24 Expressed in purchasing power parity, annual GDP growth in the United States has drifted downwards, from 3.6% in the period from 1950 to 1975 to 3.1% since then, while world GDP growth dropped from 4.7% to 3.5%.25 Since the late 1990s, official growth measures seemed to have recovered, leading capitalists to hype the unlimited potential of “high technology” and the “knowledge economy,” along with the fabulous riches promised by rapid urbanization in the so-called “emerging markets.” But by the early 2000s, these hopes were increasingly spoiled by new doomsday scenarios, ranging from “peak oil” and “climate tipping” to “runaway pandemics” and “environmental devastation” (scenarios that we consider later in the paper).

The fact that redistributional difficulties tend to arise together with overall stagnation is no accident. In order to redistribute income and assets in their favor, rulers need to exert their power on the rest of society; to exert such power, they have to strategically limit and partly sabotage the well-being of the underlying population; and this strategic sabotage tends to appear at the aggregate level in the form of stagnation.26 The rulers themselves, because of their social position, cannot comprehend, let alone accept, this necessity, and their dominant dogmas and ideologies hide and deny it. But the historical evidence, particularly during acute crises, proves it time and again: unable to see the contradiction, the rulers attempt to alleviate the general malaise as well as to keep their redistributional power intact; but because their power depends on the sabotage they cause, this attempt invariably fails.

In light of this discussion, and given the current convergence of redistributional and aggregate limits, can we say that the capitalist mode of power is approaching a glass ceiling? During the early 2000s, few capitalists were expressing the question in such stark terms; but the menacing possibility was certainly lurking in the background, and with the future looking disheartening at best, most preferred to keep their eyes on the immediate past. Share prices started to rise only in October 2002, a full six months after the earnings upswing began, and for the next five years they increased in tandem with profits (albeit at a much lower rate).

And then came the “subprime crisis,” and all hell broke loose.

Is the Dominant Ideology Broken?

As Figure 4 shows, between their June 2007 peak and their May 2009 bottom, earnings fell by 91% – a decline greater than the 75% collapse experienced during the first three years of the Great Depression. If capitalism were here to stay, this must have been the mother of all investment opportunities: with profits bound to rebound back to their long-term trend, their rise was sure to be spectacular – as were the gains to investors loyal to the forward-looking ritual. But few seemed convinced. And, so, instead of anticipating the Galtonian reversion to trend, share prices continued to slide, closely following the footsteps of current earnings.

Given that the bear market, measured in rates of change, was approaching historical lows, and since such bottoms had previously always been followed by major upswings, many forward-looking strategists – from permanent bull Barton Biggs, to Wizard of Omaha Warren Buffet, to doom-and-gloom Martin Wolf – were advising their followers to fasten their seat belts in preparation for an imminent takeoff.27 And in early 2009 they were finally vindicated.

But the rebound had to do neither with the advice of analysts nor with the prescience of capitalists. The real trigger was earnings. Recall that, by now, investors had lost their belief in the inevitable, at least for the time being, and that instead of looking forward to eternity they kept staring at the past. Everyone was glued to the earning cycle, anxiously waiting for it to find a bottom. And, sure enough, it was only after profits finally started to increase that stock prices began to rise.28 By April 2010, the market was up 60%; but as with the decline, the increase, too, merely traced the path of earnings. Given the thrust of the profit up-cycle, though, with earnings having risen more than nine-fold from their near-zero level at the 2008 bottom, the question arises again: why are investors still behaving as if they doubt that the upswing is real, not to say sustainable?

In our view, the answer is that the crisis of the late 2000s reintroduced an additional and far deeper form of fear. During the early 2000s, the concern was largely practical: the stock market appeared to be running out of fuel, and the main fear, however fuzzy, was that the level of capitalization may have been approaching a glass ceiling. But since the late 2000s, the very ideology of capitalization has been put into question: the capitalist class seems to have lost confidence in its own theories and rituals – and, therefore, in its ability to rule.

“Uncertainty is the only certain thing in this crisis,” bemoan the editors of the Financial Times. As of today, nobody knows what is going to happen:

[A] dense fog of confusion has … descended, obscuring where we are – falling fast, slowly, bumping along the bottom, or finally turning the corner…. Economies are behaving unpredictably and will continue to do so. The instability is both cause and consequence of the great uncertainty that has been spreading out from the financial markets. Fearful and confused, people react erratically to changing news, reinforcing confused market behavour. It doesn’t help that our economic theories were constructed for a different world. Most models depict economies close to equilibrium…. And unlike what most models assume, prices are not properly clearing all markets…. [etc. etc.] (Editors 2009)

This sentiment is echoed in numerous publications and speeches, academic and popular. “The whole intellectual edifice . . . collapsed in the summer of last year,” concedes former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (Andrews 2008). “Our world is broken – and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it,” grieves Bernie Sucher of Merrill Lynch. “[T]he pillars of faith on which this new financial capitalism were built have all but collapsed,” observes Gillian Tett in a special Financial Times series on the future of capitalism, and that collapse, she concludes, “has left everyone from finance minister or central banker to small investor or pension holder bereft of an intellectual compass, dazed and confused (Tett 2009). And with no intellectual compass to rely on, confesses Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, “judging the balance of influences on the economy” becomes “extraordinary difficult” (Editors 2009).

Financial crisis, argues György Lukács, threatens the foundations of the capitalist regime. The ruling class loses its self-confidence and begins to substitute ad-hoc excuses for natural-state-of-things theories. And as the ideological glue that holds the regime together weakens, class conflict becomes visible through the cracks of universal rhetoric, while the threat of naked force suddenly looms large behind the front window of tolerance.

The present stage of the crisis fits this pattern, and so do the justifications. Some, like Alan Greenspan, blame it all on humans failing to live up to their true nature:

All the sophisticated mathematics and computer wizardry essentially rested on one central premise: that the enlightened self-interest of owners and managers of financial institutions would lead them to maintain a sufficient buffer against insolvency by actively monitoring their firm’s capital and risk position. (Greenspan 2009).

[T]hose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief. Such counterparty surveillance is a central pillar of our financial markets’ state of balance. If it fails, as occurred this year, market stability is undermined. (U.S. Congress 2008)

Other observers, like Oxford economist John Kay, see the fault not at the level of the individual, but of the system as a whole. When the Queen of England wondered why “the credit crisis and its evolution were not predicted” by the experts, her “loyal subject” (as Kay names himself), quickly jumped to his colleagues’ defense. National economies, financial markets and businesses, he explained, are simply too complex, dynamic and non-linear, and these systemic intricacies turn prediction into a “wild goose chase” (Kay 2008).

And then there are those, like financial commentator Gideon Rachman, for whom the problem is largely temporary. The economists, Rachman suggests, have actually made great strides in understanding how the economy works. But from time to time the delicate machine gets infected by a “new type of economic virus,” and we need to be a bit patient until the economists discover the cure (Rachman 2009).

By 2010, though, it seems that the virus continues to elude the pundits. The threat of default has spread from business enterprise to sovereign governments, with countries like Iceland, Dubai, Greece and who-knows-who-is-next flirting with bankruptcy. Participants at a special conference hosted by Soros’ Institute for New Economic Thinking at Kings College, including five Nobel-winning economists, expressed grave concern that “many investors now find it hard to judge the ‘real’ riskiness of sovereign debt.” Gillian Tett conveys the atmosphere of theoretical bewilderment and ideological anxiety:

Three years ago, it seemed inconceivable that a country such as Greece would be allowed to default, or exit the eurozone. But back then it seemed equally hard to imagine that Lehman Brothers might fail. Now that Lehman has gone, who knows what the worst-case scenario might be? Could the eurozone break up? Could Greece default? What might happen to other debt-laden nations, such as the US, if the worst case scenario occurred? The one thing that is clear is that the answers to those questions now depend as much on culture and politics as on macro-economics…. In this new world of sovereign risk, what really matters is a set of issues that cannot be plugged into a spreadsheet. The old compass no longer works. (Tett 2010)

The predicament is so serious that even the know-all “market” – the collective brain of the capitalist class – has become disoriented. According to Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, the markets “don’t know what to fear: will it end up in deflation, default, inflation, financial shocks, or all of these?” “Markets are unpredictable,” he informs his son, “like children….” And when the youngster asks “So what’s going to happen next?” the elder, who is usually able to answer questions that most people cannot even ask, replies: “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be a mere economic journalist…” (Wolf 2010)

Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin: Is Capitalism Heading for Systemic Collapse?

The decade-long breakdown of capitalization is no fluke. The fact that for ten years now capitalists have been pricing equities based on past profit betrays deep distress. Their fear now is not only that the level of capitalization may be bumping into a glass ceiling; it is also that the very ritual of capitalization – the universal crystal ball through which they have been “seeing” the future for nearly a century – may be giving them awfully wrong signals. And when the future looks bleak, and the dominant ideology appears opaque if not misleading, there arises the specter of systemic fear.

Given the foregoing, the obvious question to ask is: does systemic fear signal the imminent collapse of capitalism?

This is by no means an easy question to answer. The difficulty is threefold. First, systemic fear – in capitalism as in other modes of power – is rare and therefore difficult to generalize about. Second, although much has been written about previous episodes of social collapse, it is unclear how much of it applies to the capitalist mode of power. Third and finally, systemic fear and systemic collapse are deeply intertwined in ways that may not be easy to disentangle. Nonetheless, given that we are dealing with the very existence of capitalism, discussing these questions – even speculatively, as we do in the remainder of the paper – seems appropriate.

To start with, we need to distinguish between gradual decline and final collapse. The slow weakening of a mode of power – for instance, the prolonged descent of European feudalism, or the progressive decay of Soviet Union – can happen for many different reasons, stretched over a long period of time. But, in our view, for a mode of power to finally implode, these reasons must be complemented by the loss of confidence in obedience. When the ruling class is no longer certain of its ability to govern, it becomes indecisive; indecision inhibits ruthlessness; lack of ruthlessness fuels opposition; and effective opposition is the other side of disintegrating rule. It is only at that point, when it becomes obvious that the ruling class, benumbed by systemic fear, has lost control, that final collapse becomes possible.

Systemic fear often appears when it is least expected. On the surface, the mode of power seems unassailable, the rulers hubristic and the underlying population submissive. But under the surface, redistribution requires greater sabotage and larger doses of force, and as social stress builds up, the stage is set for the crucial inversion. One such drama is narrated in the biblical story of Babylon. The last Babylonian emperor, Belshazzar, celebrates the height of his power at a sacred royal feast when, suddenly, a mysterious hand comes out to put an indecipherable writing on his wall and sudden terror in his heart: “the king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together” (Book of Daniel, Ch. 5: Verse 6). None of his enchanters, Chaldeans or astrologers can read the strange writing. Only one pundit – a foreign analyst named Daniel – knows what it means. “Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin,” he reads the menacing omen: “MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians” (Ch. 5, Verses 24-28). That very night, the king is slain, and his empire collapses.

The socio-ecological collapse of Easter Island, whose final implosion occurred sometime during the seventeenth century, was also triggered by hubris-cum-fear. In a last-ditch effort to stave off their decline, the island’s rulers engaged in a competitive orgy of statue building. The likely purpose was to bolster their status and self confidence; but since statue building did nothing to alter the social structure, the only consequence was a hastening of the destruction of their environment and the demise of their mode of power. Soon after, the rulers and priests fled, the island sank into civil war, a new religion came into being, and the giant moai statues – the chief symbol of the rulers’ power – were systemically toppled and broken (Diamond 2005: Ch. 2).

A similar story can be told of the Soviet Union. Shortly before its collapse, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev asserted that Perestroika was a “revolution from above,” and that, “Naturally, we [read the country’s rulers] have no intention to change Soviet power; we will not depart from its basic principles” (Gorbachev 1987: 30-31). But signs of deep fear were there for everyone to see – from the Party’s admission that administered prices distorted the law of value (whatever that “law” means) to its apprehension that central planning could no longer deliver growth to keep the mode of power together. “We only thought we were in the saddle,” confessed Gorbachev, “while the actual situation that was arising was one that Lenin warned against: the automobile was not going where the one at the steering wheel thought it was going” (p. 18). Two years later, the Soviet Union was no more.

The collapse of a mode of power is always underwritten by its own historical circumstances. But as these and numerous other examples suggest, it is the rulers’ systemic fear and loss of confidence that makes those circumstances – whatever they are – culminate in an abrupt crash. In and of themselves, fear and loss of confidence are rarely if ever sufficient to set off the implosion; but they are always necessary, and that necessity makes them important to analyze.

Complex Systems and Time Transformers

As noted, systemic fear is not unique to capitalism. But in our opinion, the likelihood of systemic fear turning gradual decline into rapid collapse is much greater in capitalism than in any prior mode of power. There are two related reasons for this claim. First, modern capitalism is much more “complex” than earlier modes of power, and that complexity makes it susceptible to implosion.29 Second, unlike other modes of power, the ritual of capitalization acts as a “time transformer”: it condenses the long future into the singular present, and that reduction can turn capitalist expectations – particularly during times of systemic fear – into an immediate reality. Let’s consider these reasons more closely.

Most of the time, the high complexity of capitalism allows it to quell and encompass limited challenges to power and local breakdowns of rule. But the agility and flexibility of capitalism have limits, and when these limits are crossed, complexity can turn “against the system.” At that point, internal challenge, external attack and ecological calamity, instead of being counteracted and absorbed, get amplified. And as the reverberations spread, the system doesn’t simply weaken; it implodes.

This type of scenario, in which complexity facilitates collapse, is spelled out in David Korowicz’s Tipping Point (2010). His argument, like others in this genre, builds mainly on standard “real-growth” economics, of which we are critical, and it offers very little discussion of the power relations that we emphasize. But his analysis of complexity could easily be extended to a broader power perspective and therefore is worth exploring in some detail.

Korowicz claims that the imminent peaking of oil production is a “tipping point” – a threshold beyond which capitalist civilization will not simply decline, but rapidly disintegrate. His initial premises are similar to those of most peak-oil analysts: (1) capitalism requires continuous economic growth; (2) ongoing economic growth necessitates ever-increasing energy inputs; (3) the key energy input – oil and its derivatives – has no immediate substitutes; and (4) once the production of oil – and of fossil fuels more generally – peaks and starts to decline, economic growth and the capitalism that is based on it must follow suit. The disagreement is over what follows. According to most analysts, the systemic consequences of peak oil are likely to be gradual: the optimists envisage an unstable period during which the piecemeal development of renewable energy sources and energy-saving techniques substitutes for the decline of fossil fuels, while the pessimists see a drawn-out process of deindustrialization and social decline. For Korowicz, though, these gradual scripts all suffer from a crucial omission: they ignore the operational fabric of capitalism, and that oversight leads them to the wrong conclusion.

Global production, he says, is mediated through highly complex and deeply intertwined critical infrastructures – including money, trade, transportation, communications, water, and electricity, among others. The operation of these integrated infrastructures rests on and presupposes the ongoing expansion of credit and debt. And that expansion is possible only because investors believe that the additional credit and debt will be serviced and ultimately repaid. According to Korowicz, though, this latter belief – and therefore the entire operational fabric that rests on it – can only hold in a growing economy. And here lies the trap.

Once humanity passes the threshold of peak oil, economic growth must turn negative – and, at that point, the assumption of ever-growing credit and debt breaks down. Investors suddenly realize that, looking forward, their assets have an inherently negative yield. And since this realization inverts the basis on which the whole society operates, the result is not a gradual decline but sudden collapse. The first to tank are the equity and debt markets; these are followed by mutually reinforcing reverberations and the eventual rupture of money, trade, investment, communications and other critical infrastructures; and the process is then sealed by conflict, war and die-off (as argued for example by Jay Hanson).30

Note that the collapse here begins with a seemingly inconspicuous change. Roughly half of the oil is still under ground, and its extraction rate is still positive. But that rate, instead of accelerating, is now decelerating, and this deceleration is enough to set the social avalanche in motion. Because the operational fabric of capitalism is highly complex and mediated by forward-looking debt and credit, the mere realization that this is the beginning of a long, secular decline in oil output causes a contiguous implosion of the entire society.

Korowicz’s collapse scenario focuses on peak oil, but its dynamics can be readily generalized. Regardless of whether the capitalist of mode of power is expanding, declining or collapsing, the forces that drive it – social as well as ecological – are always mediated through the ritual of capitalization. This ritual is unlike any the world has ever known. It endows every member of society with a miraculous power previously reserved to wizards, oracles and prophets: the ability to “transform” the future into the present. By discounting expected future earnings and risk, capitalization encapsulates their complex social and ecological causes into a single value – and then sends it back to the present.

Under normal circumstances, this all-encompassing “time transformer” enables capitalists to mange their fears and exert their power in ways that previous rulers could only have dreamed of. But the ritual also has a dark side, a lightning-like menace that prior rulers could not even fathom. As long as capitalists take their mode of power for granted, capitalization makes their power appear unassailable. But when they begin to doubt their own ability to rule, any serious future threat – from peak oil and climate change to the inability to further redistribute income and reduce earning volatility – can be time-transformed into an immediate collapse.

Warning Signs?

This threat perhaps explains, at least in part, the growing literature on systemic collapse: Why do complex systems implode? Is the disintegration patterned? And if so, is there a clear “writing on the wall”? Can we find warning signs to help us anticipate and perhaps prevent the calamity?31 Analytical and empirical modeling of natural phenomena suggests that “collapse” – formally defined as a rapid or quantum-like shift of the system from a high to a low level of complexity – tends to have fairly clear patterns. Moreover, very often collapse is preceded by quantitative warning signs: the key variables of the system may begin to flicker between alternate states; they may become slow to recover from small perturbations; they may exhibit a surge of path dependency in the form of rising auto-correlation; and they may display rising cross-correlations between different components of the system. Most remarkably, through, these warnings signs seem to be generic – i.e., they tend to occur independently of the concrete features of the system in question.32

However, identifying similar warnings signs in complex social system is far more difficult. There are two reasons for this difficulty. First, until capitalism, most modes of power generated very little quantitative information, so it is hard to see how universal warnings signs can be constructed in the first place. Second, unlike natural systems, society contains an inescapable entanglement: its actual trajectory is inextricably bound up with its dominant dogmas, ideologies and theories.33 Under normal circumstances, the latter seems useful in describing and even “predicting” the former. But as the system approaches collapse, so do its leading dogmas, ideologies and theories – and at that point, prediction and even description based on these dogmas, ideologies and theories becomes difficult if not impossible. Let’s unzip these reasons, staring with quantities.

Quantification

As the dismal record of apocalyptic prophecies warns us, predicting collapse before it happens is much harder than explaining it afterwards. One stumbling block is that, until recently, historical societies simply didn’t provide the kind of quantitative information with which physicists, biologist and environmentalists make their predictions. It is true that nowadays we may know quite a lot about these historical societies. But the data we posses commonly come from ex-post excavation, research and estimates. Most were unavailable and in many cases inconceivable when these societies existed, leaving the art of social prediction to astrologers and oracles.

The arrival of capitalism abolished this scarcity. For the first time in history, social quantities became abundant to the point of being virtually free. The price system quantifies everything that can be owned – from tangible and intangible objects, to human beings, to social structures – and the application of probability and statistics shapes these quantities into an infinitely complex numerical structure. This is the quantitative context from which political economy, the first mechanical science of society, came into being; it is the bedrock on which social sciences could subsequently flourish, and it is the raw material that gives contemporary students of society the confidence that they can scientifically articulate its future.

Entanglement

The most successful, at least in their own opinion, are the economists. Their quantitative models, large and small, track the regularities of production, consumption, prices and finance, and they provide certain boundaries within which future economic events – such as growth, inflation and government deficits – are likely to unfold.

However, this quantitative scheme, which mimics the natural sciences, has an important weakness: it takes it for granted that there exists an underlying “model” that regulates the economy/society, and it further assumes that this model is unchanging. This dual assumption may seem adequate for complex natural systems, whose various states – whether stable, gradually changing or leaping into collapse – are believed to be governed by the same heteronomous rules. But unlike in nature, the rules of society are autonomous. They are created not by an external logic, but by society itself.34 And that autonomy implies that the collapse of society and the disintegration of its rules, by definition, are one and the same.

The flip side of this implication is that, until the collapse actually begins and the dominant ritual of capitalization crumbles, capitalists are more or less compelled to deny what is in front of their nose:

[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue…. [T]he frightening facts can exist some where or other in [...] consciousness, simultaneously known and not known…. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality… (Orwell 1946)

However, because capitalism is deeply entangled with its dominant ideology, as long as that ideology prevents capitalists from accepting the demise of their society, the “solid reality” remains fluid and the collapse indeterminate.

Indeterminacy

This indeterminacy is evident in accounts such as Korowicz’s Tipping Point. Reduced to its bare essentials, the critical assumption underlying his collapse scenario is a temporal mismatch between the hard facts and mass psychology: the development and implementation of alternative energy sources, he says, is simply too slow to prevent investors from plunging into terminal pessimism. Korowicz does not deny that there are existing alternatives to oil, and that other options might be discovered or invented. The problem is that, barring a scientific-technological miracle, there isn’t enough time to develop and implement these alternatives on a sufficiently large scale.35 Most energy observers believe that oil production has already peaked or that it will peak within the next twenty years.36 In other words, whatever the alternatives to oil, they are too little, too late. And since the increase of alternative energy sources will lag the drop of oil, he says, it is virtually certain that overall energy production will peak sometime within the next few decades. Moreover, if peak energy ends up triggering social collapse, there is little chance of the alternative energy infrastructure ever growing beyond its pre-collapse levels.

This sequence, though, isn’t as tight as it may seem. Note that, according to Korowicz, the collapse is triggered not by peak oil per se, but by a decisive psychological change in investors’ expectations regarding that reality. Now, for the latter to follow from the former, investors must come to believe all of the following: (1) that peak oil has already happened or is imminent; (2) that peak oil will be followed by an irreversible decline in overall energy production; and (3) that the drop in capitalization caused by the decline of energy will not be offset by opposite forces that Korowicz does not discuss – for instance, by further pecuniary redistribution in favor of capitalists, by greater concentration of ownership in favor of leading capitalists, etc.

Although possible, none of these changes in expectations is imminent, or even necessary. After all, theories of resource scarcity date back to Malthus if not earlier, and the inevitability of peak oil was spelled out already in the 1950s – and, yet, rationally or not, so far investors have chosen to ignore or deny these forward-looking pronouncements. Moreover, even if peak oil were imminent (which it may well be), and even if at some point investors do come to accept it (which isn’t far fetched), they might still shy from immediately concluding that the overall production of energy is about to decline. And if the latter conclusion is postponed for long enough, alternative energy sources might have sufficient time to replace falling oil production, thus removing the specter of immediate capitalist collapse, and perhaps even of a drawn out decline. Finally, even if these aggregate processes cannot be stopped, capitalists may still bank their hopes on forceful redistribution to offset the aggregate loss of social energy.

Systemic Fear and the Future of Capitalism

In sum, capitalism is the first mode of power to be truly quantified, and it is definitely the most complex. These intertwined features suggest that, when faced with adverse social and ecological circumstances, its structure is susceptible, perhaps more than earlier modes of power, to sudden systemic collapse. And judging by the scholarly and popular attention, there seems to be a growing feeling that such a collapse may be in the offing. But despite the heightened interest and sophisticated analysis, nobody has been able to say how likely the collapse is and when it may happen.

The reason for the difficulty is that the science of complex natural systems may not be readily applicable to complex social systems. The amount of comparative quantitative data on most historical systems remains too limited to draw meaningful generalizations; and even in the capitalist mode of power, where the data seem limitless, the entanglement of society-as-an-object with society-as-a-subject, particularly during periods of deep crisis, creates an infinite regress that cannot be disentangled.

However, while the likelihood and timing of capitalist collapse is impossible to foretell, some of the preconditions for such collapse may be readily observable. In this paper, we have argued that in order for a mode of power to collapse, the ruling class must lose its confidence in obedience. This confidence, articulated and enforced by the dominant ideology, is the glue that holds the mode of power together; and it is only when the ruling class is struck by systemic fear and the glue disintegrates that collapse becomes possible.

Historical analyses of social collapse tend to ignore this factor, and perhaps for a good reason. History tells us very little about confidence in obedience, and the little that we do know is rarely if ever quantitative and therefore difficult to analyze systematically. But capitalism is very different. Unlike earlier modes of power, it is quantified to the teeth, and that quantification includes the mindset of the ruling class.

The chief form of quantification is the universal ritual that all capitalists are conditioned to perform: capitalization. Under normal circumstances, the performance of this ritual quantifies the way capitalists expect their power to unfold: the earnings they hope to redistribute, the risk they try to minimize and the normal rate of return that secures their rule as natural and their command as eternal. But during times of systemic fear, when the very future of their power is put into question, discounting cannot be properly performed, and the capitalization ritual, which otherwise embodies their confidence in obedience, breaks down.

This breakdown is readily visible, but only indirectly. Looking at the stock market alone doesn’t help. Equity prices may fall sharply or even collapse; but if the observed decline properly discounts the change in investors’ expatiations, it actually serves to confirm that the ritual of capitalization is fully operational and that the capitalist class, however uneasy in the short term, retains its long-term confidence in obedience.

In order to see that something is systemically wrong, we need to think not positively, but negatively. Specifically, we need to look for market patterns that are inherently inconsistent with forward-looking capitalization. The manifestation of such patterns would then prove, by negation, that the ritual is broken. The specific pattern emphasized in this paper is one in which stock prices, instead of looking into the deep future, nervously trace the ups and downs of current and past earnings. This backward-looking pattern goes against the very gist of forward-looking finance. And when it emerges – as it did during the crisis of the 1930s and again in 2000 – we can be fairly certain that capitalization has broken down and that the ruling class has lost its confidence in obedience.

A shrewd academic might have leveraged this apparent anomaly into a full-blown mechanized model, complete with a universal taxonomy of “fear-of-death” eras, a sliding scale of price-profit correlations alerting investors when to switch and reswitch between forward- and backward-looking postures, and an easy-to-follow list of “how to profit” from both. And judging by what is on sale in the analysis market, this model could end up having plenty of paying followers.

We prefer to forego this investment opportunity and instead keep our speculations tentative and free. Capitalism may survive this systemic crisis, as it survived that of the 1930s. As before, this survival may require a significant transformation – one that restructures the entire architecture of power, including its material technology and dominant ideology – and such transformation is certainly possible. But there is also a very real possibility that the current crisis will prove too much for the capitalist class to handle. “The history of all hitherto existing society,” write Marx and Engels in the opening paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto, “is the history of class struggles.” And that struggle can end “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes (Marx and Engels 1884: 57-58).

So far, the capitalists’ loss of confidence in obedience hasn’t elicited significance opposition – but that can change quickly. However, if the opposition fails to establish an effective and hopefully progressive alternative – an alternative that so far seems absent – it is not impossible for the reverberations of the clash, amplified by the high complexity of capitalism, to culminate in systemic collapse and collective ruin.

A shorter version of this paper first appeared in Dollars & Sense (Nitzan and Bichler 2009b). The basic concepts in this article, along with their significance for the modern capitalist epoch, are articulated and explored more fully in Nitzan and Bichler (2009a).

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1. Note that this conviction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. For modern accumulation to exist, many other conditions have to hold as well.
2. Given the extent of the crash, some strategists had already started to speak of an imminent bull run in late 2008. But the bulk of the pack remained in watchful waiting, and it was only in mid 2009, after the market had finally turned, that run-of-the-mill analysts started to claim they had anticipated it all along. For a historical examination of major bear markets and subsequent bull runs, see Bichler and Nitzan (2008).
3. “A long-unheard phrase was on the lips of many equity traders during this week’s market rally – panic buying. Even after two months of steady gains for stocks, there were few signs of investor fatigue – indeed, the overriding sense was the fear of being left behind. . . . ‘You could say there was an element of panic about it – there were a lot of underweight players driving the market higher out there,’ said Tony Betts, senior sales trader at CMC Markets in London. ‘We clearly reached a situation where the bears felt they had suffered enough punishment’” (Shellock 2009).
4. In the second half of 2009, while the market was still booming, prophet-of-doom Nouriel Roubini, whose claim to fame comes from accurately predicting the recent crisis, listed no less than seven reasons why the ongoing recovery was likely to be U-shaped rather than V-shaped, and two additional reasons why it might end up being W-shaped, accompanied by either deflation or stagflation (Roubini 2009). With the 2010 onset of the Euro crisis, his pessimism has been reproduced and amplified by numerous other experts.
5. Graham and Dodd were very critical of the early “New-Era Theory.” They thought it was dangerously optimistic and logically incomplete, and that it had to be supplemented by proper valuation, cool-headed research and sufficient diversification. But they wholly endorsed the theory’s most important feature: the need to look forward.
6. This early financial history is told with great insight and much fanfare in Matthew Josephson’s classic tale of The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (1934).
7. For a critical historical and theoretical analysis of capitalization, along with an outline of its role as the capitalist architecture of power, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: Part III).
8. “The forming of a fictitious capital,” writes Marx, “is called capitalising. Every periodically repeated income is capitalised by calculating it on the average rate of interest, as an income which would be realised by a capital at this rate of interest” (1909, Vol. 3: 548).
9. For a careful reconstruction and extension of Marx’s analysis of capitalization, see Perelman (1990). Subsequent Marxist approaches to finance include Rudolf Hilferding’s notion of finance capital, which focuses on the institutional and political takeover of industry by financial interests and on the accompanied authoritarian transformation of domestic and foreign policy (Hilferding 1910); Baran and Sweezy’s notion of finance as a form of absorbing the rising surplus of industry (Baran and Sweezy 1966; Foster 2007); and the view of Arrighi and others who speak about the transition from industry to finance and on the so-called process of financialization that eviscerates the productive base of society (Arrighi 1994; Williams et al. 2000; Froud et al. 2002; Epstein 2005; Krippner 2005). These interpretations, although different in their details, share one key assumption: they all presume the existence of “true” productive capital – an entity from which the monetary appearance of finance deviates and which it distorts.
10. The notion of abstract labor was first articulated by Marx (1859). The term util was coined by Fisher (1892). For a review and critique of both concepts, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: Ch. 8).
11. The S&P 500 index splices the following three series: the Cowles/Standard and Poor’s Composite (1871–1925); the 90-stock Composite (1926–1957); and the S&P 500 (1957–present).
12. A logarithmic scale amplifies the variations of a series when its values are small and compresses these variations when the values are large (note that the numbers on the scale jump by multiples of 10). It also has the convenient feature that the slope of a series is proportionate to its temporal rate of change. These two properties make a logarithmic scale particularly suitable to visualizing exponential growth.
13. The Pearson correlation coefficient ranges between +1 and –1. A value of +1 denotes perfect positive correlation, 0 denotes no correlation and –1 denotes perfect negative correlation.
14. Note that until 1926, monthly earning data are interpolated from annual rather than quarterly reports, which probably serves to force down the measured correlation.
15. Computed from data in Robert Shiller’s website, retrieved on May 20, 2010.
16. For more on the beliefs, rituals and behavior of equity investors before the First World War, see the summary in Graham and Dodd (1934: Ch. XXVII).
17. For the mathematical derivation of Equation 2, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: 153-155) or consult any text on infinite series. As noted, Equation 2 holds only if the rate of growth of earnings g is lower than the rate of interest r. Otherwise, we get the Bernoullian Petersburg Paradox: the price becomes infinite (if g = r) or negative (if g > r), the ritual breaks down, and the equation has to be patched with auxiliary assumptions (for the first systematic account of this annoying glitch, see Durand 1957).
18. For a detailed political economy of discounting, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: Ch. 11).
19. The concept of the megamachine was invented and articulated by Lewis Mumford (1967; 1970). Its relevance to capitalism is developed in Nitzan (1998) and Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: Ch. 12).
20. The Aymara language, spoken by Indians in Southern Peru and Northern Chile, reverses the directional-temporal order of most languages. It treats the known past as being “in front of us” and the unknown future as lying “behind us.” To test this inverted perception, just look up at the stars: ahead of you you’ll see nothing but the past (see Núñez and Sweetser 2006).
21. The argument in the remainder of this section highlights long-term themes that we are currently developing for a forthcoming publication.
22. Note that market capitalization can also increase due to the public listing of new or previously private firms, and that this increase is independent of the overall income of capitalists. The overall effect on capitalization of new listings was positive till the late 1970s, but with massive buybacks since then, the impact has become negative (Nitzan 1996).
23. The data for equity market capitalization are net of foreign holdings by U.S. citizens and are taken from the U.S. Federal Reserve Board (FL893064105 for market capitalization; FL263164003 for foreign equities held by U.S. citizens). Pretax corporate profits, interest, and the effective corporate tax rate are from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
24. We use inverted commas to highlight our objection to the theoretical notion and empirical measurements of the so-called “real economy.” However, since capitalists take the concepts and measurements of the real economy for granted, we refer to them here “as is.” For a critical assessment of these issues, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: Ch. 8).
25. The growth data are from Angus Maddison’s vertical file, retrieved on June 1, 2010.
26. The first to elaborate the concept of strategic sabotage and its importance for the power of rulers in general and for capitalists in particular was Thorstein Veblen (1904; 1923). For further theoretical and empirical development of this association, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009a: Ch. 12).
27. See Biggs (2008), Buffett (2008) and Wolf (2008).
28. When we prepared the earlier version of this paper (Nitzan and Bichler 2009b), stock prices had already begun to rise, but the aggregate earnings numbers, which are calculated from firm-level data with a few months’ delay, were still unavailable. Doubtful that the coming rally marked the end of systemic fear, we wrote that “the early 2009 increase in prices could end up being correlated with a yet-to-be reported rise in current earnings” – a projection that subsequent data proved correct.
29. Although there is no single definition of “complexity,” there can be little doubt that capitalist society is more temporally and spatially integrated than any prior mode of power; that it comprises many more “relationships”; that these relationships have many more nonlinearities; that differential information plays a more crucial role; etc.
30. Jay Hanson was one of first to emphasize and bring to public attention the social consequences of peak oil. For an abstract of his views, along with an annotated bibliography, see Dieoff. Similar expressions of concern can be found in the many discussions on The Oil Drum.
31. See for example, Tainter (1988; 2000), Diamond (2005), Kambhu, Weidman and Krishnan (2007), May, Levin and Sugihara (2008), Orlov (2008) and Scheffer (2009).
32. For a succinct summary of these findings, see Scheffer et al. (2009).
33. This entanglement has been long recognized, with its most recent application being George Soros’ “reflexivity” (1998).
34. The notions of heteronomy and autonomy, traceable to the ancient Greeks, are developed in the social and philosophical writings of Cornelius Castoriadis (see, for instance, 1991).
35. On the limits of renewable energy, see for example Ted Trainer (2010).
36. Korokwicz shows that, cumulatively, 30% of the experts think that the decline has already begun, 50% feel it will happen before 2015, and 95% believe it will occur before 2030 (pp. 51-52).

A decision by Israel’s Supreme Court to double a 15-month jail term for a policeman who shot dead an unarmed Palestinian driver suspected of stealing a car has provoked denunciations from police commanders and government officials.

Yitzhak Aharonovitch, the internal security minister, condemned the judges for “sending a terrible message to police officers”.  

On the advice of police lawyers, the accused policeman, Shahar Mizrahi, had appealed his conviction last year in the expectation that the ruling would be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Mr Aharonovitch and Dudi Cohen, the police commissioner, said they would immediately seek a presidential pardon for Mizrahi. “I won’t merely support a pardon bid, I’ll lead it,” Mr Aharonovitch said.

But groups representing Israel’s large Palestinian Arab minority said the outrage at the doubling of the 15-month sentence for Mizrahi reflected the reality that the police force expected impunity when it used violence against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population.

At Mizrahi’s original trial last year, the district court judge, Menachem Finkelstein, ruled that the policeman had acted “recklessly” during an operation to stop car thefts in the Jewish town of Pardes Hanna in 2006.  

Despite his life never being in danger, Mizrahi had used the butt of his gun to smash the window of a car in which Mahmoud Ghanaim, 24, was seated and shot him in the head from close range. The court also noted that Mizrahi had changed his testimony several times during the investigations.  

According to Mossawa, an advocacy group, 40 Palestinian citizens have been killed in suspicious circumstances by the security forces over the past decade. Mizrahi is the first policeman to be convicted in such a case.  

As of yesterday, an online petition calling on the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, to pardon Mizrahi had attracted more than 5,000 signatures in a few days, and a Facebook page supporting the policeman had 1,300 fans.  

Gideon Levy, a columnist with the liberal Haaretz newspaper, warned yesterday that those “siding with Mizrahi are eager to have a police force that kills — but just Arabs, of course”.  

Jafar Farah, the director of Mossawa, said: “The atmosphere of racism in Israel is being used to destroy the legal system from the inside, using the justification that Arabs are being killed.

“The reality today is that the police can kill an Arab citizen in any circumstances and know that there is almost no chance they will pay a price. The safeguards are being stripped away.”  

Relations between Israel’s Palestinian minority and the police have been marked by profound distrust since late 2000, when police shot dead 13 protesters and wounded hundreds more during largely non-violent demonstrations in the Galilee at the start of the second intifada.

A subsequent state commission of inquiry found that the police had a long-standing policy of treating the country’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens “as an enemy” and recommended that several officers be prosecuted for their role in the 13 deaths.

After a long delay, state prosecutors announced in 2008 that no one would be charged.

In several speeches since he took over as security minister last year, Mr Aharonovitch has promised measures to restore the minority’s faith in the police, including recruiting more police officers from the Palestinian population and fighting high rates of crime in Arab communities.  

According to a police report submitted to the parliament earlier this year, only 382 of more than 21,000 police officers are Muslim — or less than two per cent.

At the appeal hearing last week, the Supreme Court increased Mizrahi’s jail sentence after ruling that Judge Finkelstein had not given enough weight to the victim’s life and the value of deterring similar police behaviour in the future. Under police regulations, Mizrahi was entitled only to shoot out the car’s tyres or fire at Ghanaim’s legs.

Immediately after the ruling, Mr Aharonovitch reported that he had called Mizrahi to tell him: “Your fight has become all of our fight.”  

He was backed by several retired police commanders and a Likud MP, Danny Danon, who said he would submit a bill barring the indictment of police officers who open fire when they believe they are in danger.  

In a sign of the mounting pressure from police groups on the Supreme Court, it issued a rare “clarification” statement of its judgment, pointing out that Ghanaim’s car was travelling too slowly to have ever put Mizrahi in any danger.  

Mr Farah added that Mossawa’s investigations had revealed that, despite police claims, Ghanaim was the documented owner of the car he was driving.  

The police, Mr Farah added, had supported Mizrahi throughout the case and had continued paying his police salary after his conviction.  

The court’s decision to increase Mizrahi’s sentence came in the wake of strong suspicions that police officers executed a Palestinian driver in East Jerusalem last month, shooting him twice in the head from close range as he lay on the ground.

Moments earlier, Ziad Jilani, who was married with three children, had fled on foot after driving into a detail of police, injuring several officers, in the Wadi Joz neighbourhood. Witnesses said a stone had smashed his windscreen seconds before he swerved.  

In one of the few other recent prosecutions of a policeman for killing a Palestinian citizen, Rubi Gai was acquitted last year of the manslaughter of Nadim Milham, who was shot in the back during a police search of his home for weapons. Witnesses testified that police had beaten Milham and that he was shot as he fled.  

A survey published last month by Haifa University found that only one in five Palestinian citizens expressed faith in the police.  

Mr Aharonovitch upset the Palestinian minority last year during an inspection of undercover narcotics agents in Tel Aviv. He was caught on camera telling one detective dressed as a drug addict he looked like “a real Araboosh”, a derogatory Hebrew term for Arabs.  

The minister, who is a member of Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right party Yisrael Beiteinu, apologised but added that the comment was a “moment of banter”.  

Mahash, the justice ministry’s police investigations unit, has been harshly criticised for the small proportion of complaints against the police it agrees to investigate. It rarely prosecutes officers.  

The police have also refused to cooperate in imposing official sanctions on wayward officers, with critics saying that officers found to have acted negligently or violently towards Palestinian citizens are often rewarded with promotion.  

The state commission of inquiry into the killing by police of 13 Palestinian protesters in October 2000 recommended that several officers be dismissed from service or denied promotion. The recommendations were disregarded.  

In one notorious case, the commission found that Benzi Sau, a northern Border Police commander, had acted with gross negligence in allowing snipers to shoot at stone-throwing demonstrators. Despite suggesting a ban on his promotion for four years, he rapidly rose through the ranks, becoming head of the Border Police in Jerusalem in 2001 and national head of the Border Police in 2004.

Actor Sean Penn, who is helping manage a camp of displaced earthquake victims in Haiti, is making pointed criticisms of journalists for dropping the ball on coverage of Haiti. He’s wrong. I’ve been on the ground in Port-au-Prince working as an independent journalist for the past ten months. I’m an earthquake survivor who’s seen the big-time reporters come and go. They’re doing such a stellar job and I want to help out, so I’ve written this handy guide for when they come back on the one-year anniversary of the January quake!

For starters, always use the phrase ‘the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.’ Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti’s exceptional poverty. It’s doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact.

You are struck by the ‘resilience’ of the Haitian people. They will survive no matter how poor they are. They are stoic, they rarely complain, and so they are admirable. The best poor person is one who suffers quietly. A two-sentence quote about their misery fitting neatly into your story is all that’s needed.

On your last visit you became enchanted with Haiti. You are in love with its colorful culture and feel compelled to return. You care so much about these hard-working people. You are here to help them. You are their voice. They cannot speak for themselves.

Don’t listen if the Haitians speak loudly or become unruly. You might be in danger, get out of there. Protests are not to be taken seriously. The participants were probably all paid to be there. All Haitian politicians are corrupt or incompetent. Find a foreign authority on Haiti to talk in stern terms about how they must shape up or cede power to incorruptible outsiders.

The US Embassy and United Nations always issue warnings that demonstrations are security threats. It is all social unrest. If protesters are beaten, gassed, or shot at by UN peacekeepers, they probably deserved it for getting out of control. Do not investigate their constant claims of being abused.

It was so violent right after the January 2010 earthquake. ‘Looters’ fought over goods ’stolen’ from collapsed stores. Escaped prisoners were causing mayhem. It wasn’t necessary to be clear about how many people were actually hurt or died in fighting. The point is that it was scary.

Now many of those looters are ’squatters’ in ’squalid’ camps. Their tent cities are ‘teeming’ with people, like anthills. You saw your colleagues use these words over and over in their reports, so you should too. You do not have time to check a thesaurus before deadline.

Point out that Port-au-Prince is overcrowded. Do not mention large empty plots of green land around the city. Of course, it is not possible to explain that occupying US Marines forcibly initiated Haiti’s shift from distributed, rural growth to centralized governance in the capital city. It will not fit within your word count. Besides, it is ancient history.

If you must mention Haiti’s history, refer vaguely to Haiti’s long line of power-hungry, corrupt rulers. The ‘iron-fisted’ Duvaliers, for example. Don’t mention 35 years of US support for that dictatorship. The slave revolt on which Haiti was founded was ‘bloody’ and ‘brutal.’ These words do not apply to modern American offensives in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today, Cite Soleil is the most dangerous slum in the world. There is no need to back up this claim with evidence. It is ’sprawling.’ Again, there’s no time for the thesaurus. Talk about ruthless gangs, bullet holes, pigs and trash. Filth everywhere. Desperate people are eating cookies made of dirt and mud! That always grabs the reader’s attention.

Stick close to your hired security or embed yourself with UN troops. You can’t walk out on your own to profile generous, regular folk living in tight-knit neighborhoods. They are helpless victims, grabbing whatever aid they can. You haven’t seen them calmly dividing food amongst themselves, even though it’s common practice.

Better to report on groups that periodically enter from outside to deliver food to starving kids (take photos!). Don’t talk to the youth of Cite Soleil about how proud they are of where they come from. Probably gang members. Almost everyone here supports ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But their views aren’t relevant. There is no need to bring politics into your story.

You can’t forget to do another story about restaveks. Child slaves. It’s so shocking. There is little new information about restaveks, so just recycle old statistics. Present it as a uniquely Haitian phenomenon. Enslaved Haitian farmworkers in southern Florida, for example, aren’t nearly as interesting.

When you come back here in six months, there will still be a lot of desperate poor people who have received little to no help. There are many big, inefficient foreign NGOs in Haiti. Clearly something is wrong. Breathless outrage is the appropriate tone.

But do not try to get to the bottom of the issue. Be sure to mention that aid workers are doing the best they can. Their positive intentions matter more than the results. Don’t name names of individuals or groups who are performing poorly. Reports about food stocks sitting idly in individual warehouses are good. Investigations into why NGOs are failing to effect progress in Haiti are boring and too difficult. Do not explore Haitian-led alternatives to foreign development schemes. There are none. Basically, don’t do any reporting that could change the system.

On the other hand, everyone here loves Bill Clinton and Wyclef Jean. There are no dissenting views on this point. Never mind that neither lives here. Never mind that Clinton admitted to destroying Haiti’s domestic rice economy in the ’90s. Never mind that Jean’s organization has repeatedly mismanaged relief funds. That’s all in the past. They represent Haiti’s best hope for the future. Their voices matter, which means the media must pay close attention to them, which means their voices matter, which means the media must …

Finally, when you visit Haiti again: Stay in the same expensive hotels. Don’t live close to the people. Produce lots of stories and make money. Pull up in your rented SUV to a camp of people who lost their homes, still living under the wind and rain. Step out into the mud with your waterproof boots. Fresh notepad in hand. That ragged-looking woman is yelling at you that she needs help, not another foreigner taking her photo. Her 3-year-old boy is standing there, clinging to her leg. Her arms are raised, mouth agape, and you can’t understand her because you don’t speak Haitian Creole.

Remove the lens cap and snap away. And when you’ve captured enough of Haiti’s drama, fly away back home.