Brexit's Tectonics

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Like just about everyone else on the planet, I have been trying to sort out my reactions to Brexit—the British vote in favor of exiting the European Union. And what occurred to me even at the very time I heard it was this: maybe it’s a necessary warning sign to the neoliberal-powers-that-be that globalization, not democracy, is what’s run amuck. Far from being just a protest vote against the influx of “foreigners” and migrants—in other words, the racist reaction from the great unwashed of the British lower classes—it may well be far deeper. It may be, that is, a cry of the heart from those who do not want to be homogenized in the great likeness machine of global corporatocracy that seeks to make everyone a stamped-out cog in the consumer-exploiting Walmarts of the world. That’s what occurred to me almost instantly when I heard the news. Nationhood may be anachronistic or even dangerous in this ever-more connected world, but it’s also one of the few things that has a chance of keeping different sections of the globe unique. And what we need now is more of it not less—more distinctiveness in separate populations, more distinctiveness in dress, language, buildings, customs, ways of doing and being. Skyscrapers in Dubai, no matter how marvelous the technical skill they demonstrate, simply strike one as completely out of touch with their surroundings. We need people and populations that are more in touch with their surroundings, more unique to the particular flora and fauna in which they arise.  And this may be what Brexit and the Trump phenomenon in our own country are more deeply about.

            We hear about the chaos in the financial markets: the British pound dropping like a stone, the stock market here and elsewhere dropping similarly, the financial and economic mavens predicting more and more dire outcomes from uncertainty. And though no one wants to see another financial crash, what we need to do is understand that perhaps this is precisely what’s needed to wake these guys up. Just consider what the outcome of the financial wheeling and dealing of the past few decades has led to: conditions of inequality in both Britain and the United States that are almost unprecedented. The corporate CEOs, the banksters, the hedge fund managers are making obscene amounts of money and living like oriental potentates, while the working slobs have been going steadily backwards. More and more people lose their jobs to foreign countries whose workers slave away at wages that completely obviate competition. More and more corporations rush to have their goods made in these foreign factories, shifting them whenever another country offers yet lower wages. And the gulf between the very wealthy few running things and the masses of impoverished working stiffs racing to the bottom grows ever wider. There is a professional class which manages to stay reasonably solvent—the bank managers, the professoriat, the politicos. But they hew to the party line of whoever’s in power, conservatives or laborites, democrats or republicans, and maintain their insider edge regardless of who’s got the reins (see Thomas Frank and his recent exposè of the Democratic Party in Listen, Liberal.) Meantime, those trying to catch up find themselves always deeper in debt, even the middle classes who have to incur a lifetime of debt to afford a college education. So there’s a logic to chaos in financial markets. These usurers should find themselves in chaos. They should find themselves at the bottom of a pit. But of course, they usually don’t. And those who land in the pit are the suckers who buy into the myths of progress and globalization and trade deals making everyone richer, and all the other myths about the benefits of trade we’re constantly sold.

            What occurs to me, then, is that this isn’t about politics so much as economics. And there is a difference. I, for one, am in favor of the United Nations and attempts to keep the violence of the world under reasonable control. This requires that nation states give up some of their sovereignty, which always elicits protests and anguish from the breast-beaters on the Right. But by and large, with some notable exceptions such as Israel’s continuing occupation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the system has worked fairly well. Invasions by one aggressive state of another’s territory have pretty much been limited—though not entirely eliminated. The condemnation attaching to naked aggression such as we saw in the 1930s and before have made such ventures too costly to most nations’ global reputations. This, again, is not to say that such aggression has been totally foreclosed, but it has, for the most part, been priced too high for most nations to incur lightly. The loss of sovereignty is worth the gain in peace (or at least accommodation).

            In the economic sphere, however, the situation is almost diametrically opposed. And it is not nations that are at issue so much as trans-national corporations. This tends to be the result mainly of trade agreements like NAFTA and the still-not-ratified TPP. In other words, in the economic sphere, it is not nation-states that are the major offenders, but corporations and the aptly-named ‘vulture capitalists’, many of which have simply transcended national boundaries. Indeed, the terms of trade agreements in a globalized world have meant that national sovereignty has become subservient to corporate rights—the right to make a profit. One example says this loud and clear: the recent lawsuit filed by TransCanada. The corporation that had planned the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada through the United States has just filed suit demanding $15 billion as compensation for its losses from the “expected profits” it stood to make if the deal was approved. This accords with the boilerplate agreement in such trade deals: corporations have been essentially granted the right to “expect” profits from planned ventures in any nation they choose, and if such plans come into conflict with a nation’s determination to prevent the despoliation of its territory or people, then too bad. The corporation has prior rights here—a right to sue for damages to its profit—while a nation has no right to prevent damage to its land or water or environment—or the globe itself in the case of global warming. This, to me, is about as outrageous as capitalism gets. The underlying notion is that profit is sacrosanct, and takes precedence over considerations of human health or the health of the nation and planet itself.

            This, I think, is what is really at issue in the Brexit vote and the Trump/Sanders phenomenon in the United States. The people who are being crushed by the depredations of big corporations—which pursue profit anywhere and everywhere, no matter the damage to the nations in which they reside—have begun, if only dimly, to catch on. Perhaps they don’t see beyond the slogans and xenophobia. Perhaps they can’t or won’t articulate what is really at the heart of their malaise. But on some level they understand. This is why they want to “take back their country.” What they want is some control, or someone they elect to control the monsters called corporations and financial institutions that seem able to roll over anything in their way with no consequences. What they want is some control over the obscene redistribution of wealth upwards that has taken place in the past half-century. What they want is something like fairness in the way their lives are disbursed, some more direct connection to what they know, to what they can see, rather than some distant insider decision-making that is invisible to them. What they want is some indication that their vote can have some effect on the levers of power despite the fact that they are not mega-rich. Brexit  for once gave many in England that indication. And my guess—and my hope—is that more Brexits are on the way—especially if the powers that be do not wake up to the earthquake that has just struck them.

Lawrence DiStasi

           

Inmates Control the Asylum

Now that a week has passed since the November 4 election, it may be time to assess the damage and the prospects for the next two years. And of course it’s easy to attribute the debacle to Republican money made possible by Citizens United. For example, everyone on the left knows that the Koch Brothers contributed untold millions to super-pacs that bought tons of TV ads making the Republican victories possible. But what we may not have known until recently is that these same brothers, some of the biggest and dirtiest oil men in the nation, actually have leases on about 1.1 million acres of Canada’s tar sands land, the biggest non-Canadian leaseholder in Alberta (see Washington Post, 3/20/2104). If they can get the Keystone pipeline built (the issue Republicans say is first on their agenda), they stand to double their fortune—from about $100 billion they have now to about $200 billion in a few years. That’s why they’re willing to invest millions into political support for tea-partiers and conservatives in general. (Someone without money, like myself, would have thought that $100 billion might be enough; it could support me and everyone I’ve ever known for a lifetime in unimagined luxury; but not for these guys.)

            But of course it wasn’t just money that the Repugnants used to win the election. They also did everything they could to mess with the vote, suppressing it here, making it impossible to unseat their candidates in safe districts there. In general, this means targeting cities and urban areas (where minorities live) in order to enable rural and suburban areas (where whites live) to dominate the vote. Several methods have been used to achieve this. First, by taking over state houses in key states, they’ve managed to gerrymander voting districts to such an extent that even were the Democrats able to get out their vote, it wouldn’t matter. All the Dems power has been limited to urban zones, while suburban and rural zones have been crazy-quilted in such a way as to vote-proof their conservative candidates. Then these clever fellows instituted voter ID laws that made it almost impossible for minorities to comply—either because getting birth certificates and other IDs were too difficult or expensive, or by making common forms of ID ineligible. Though Republicans routinely allege massive voter fraud, studies in recent years have all given the lie to this dodge; there has been almost no voter fraud in recent years (one study found only 31 incidents nationwide between 2000 and 2014), especially compared to the millions of voters who have been disenfranchised. And finally, some clever lawyer type came up with the scheme known as Crosscheck. Used by 27 states, Crosscheck involves going through huge voter rolls in various states and trying to find name matches—which often occurs with common minority names like Jackson or Kim or Garcia or Patel. Then they claim, on no other basis than a name match, that a Jackson or Lee or Garcia has voted in two different states—an obvious violation of law—and succeed in getting the names thrown off the rolls. In Georgia, this worked to throw 40,000 voters off the state rolls, thus disqualifying a huge percentage of voters that had been newly registered as a result of a campaign by Atlanta’s Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church. (For a summary of these methods, see Juan Thompson’s piece for The Intercept, reprinted 9 Nov. in Reader Supported News [http://readersupportednews.org], where he notes that overall turnout in this election was 36.6%, a modern low.)

            This brings us to the underlying point of this election. Yes, it is surely to get Republicans elected to control the Congress. And yes, it is surely to allow billionaires like the Koch Brothers to control the government. But it’s more specific than that, and it’s not just a bunch of scared white males trying to maintain their positions of privilege, though it’s that too. This is about the deeper fear among conservatives that demographics as well as scientific truth is turning against them and could upend the huge victory they’ve achieved in recent years—convincing the world that free trade, deregulated free market capitalism and globalization are divine edicts from nature and hence the only game in town. I addressed this in a previous blog called Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes’ brilliant summary of the conservative battle to undermine the science of cigarette smoke, CFCs, acid rain, and global warming. Beginning to read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate has buttressed the case even more. Because what Klein does is not simply to cite all the reasons that the science of global warming has become definitive, compelling and truly urgent; she makes clear that the massive threat to human civilization posed by global warming cannot be stopped short of a massive change in our economic system. This is the sense in which she titles a chapter with the counterintuitive slogan, “The Right is Right.” Oreskes actually made a similar point in her book. That is, the right, the tea partiers, the conservative nut jobs who continually make apparently lunatic statements equating liberals with socialists and communists who intend to impose collectivist social controls on freedom-loving individualists like themselves—they actually have a point. And that point is simple. The world has allowed global warming to get so out of hand that amelioration measures that might have worked two or three decades ago can no longer work now. Globalization and its resultant export of the West’s industrial base to Asian countries like Korea and Bangladesh and China and India have exacerbated the problem to the point where now only large, cooperative planetary measures can work. And by “work” is meant keeping global warming below the 2^o Celsius target internationally-agreed upon recently. So, if we are to keep overall temperature rise to that 2^o C mark or less—and Klein makes clear that the International Energy Agency warns that if we don’t do this by 2017, a mere three years away, our fossil fuel economy will “lock in” truly dangerous, runaway warming—then the measures feared by the right will become mandatory. The CO₂-producing methods we’ve been so profligate with until now (indeed, even more profligate since the 1990s when scientists began their dire warnings about the perils involved in continuing to burn fossil fuels) will force governments to impose measures that could well end up ending capitalism and free markets and so-called “free” trade as we know it.

            In truth, Klein makes the case in her book that this result is all but demanded and assured. Here is how she puts it in her Introduction:

…our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate (Klein, 21-22).

Now we know why the Koch Brothers and Crosscheck and all that Republican energy was put into the recent election. These are the people who know that if the truth about global warming is allowed to reassert itself (Klein points out that as recently as 2007, a Harris poll found 71% of Americans believing that burning fossil fuel alters the climate), they and their whole economic system, their whole wealth system, their whole belief system, their entire worldview, is doomed. As Klein puts it beautifully a bit later, “Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests” (41). And it does; because the threat of global warming demands one thing above all: collective action by the world’s nations, especially the nations that have profited most from burning fossil fuels, Great Britain, Europe in general, and the United States of America. And collective action, regulation, environmentally-based action to preserve the planet from the massive changes to life that excessive warming will unleash, is already unleashing, goes against everything conservatives purport to believe.

            So we understand why Mitch McConnell and John Boehner announced what their preferred agendas would include: putting an end to EPA interference in coal and other energy production (like fracking), passing the laws to enable the Keystone pipeline to bring all that tar sands sludge into the U.S. and through New Orleans, and fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All are intended to energize the energy-wasting, globalized capitalist system which fuels their wealth and success. Naomi Klein is particularly revelatory about how trade rules and the WTO (World Trade Organization) fits into this diabolical system. Recently, a case came before the WTO relating to both trade and solar panels produced in Ontario, Canada. The solar company was/is run by Paolo Maccario, an Italian businessman who moved his solar factory to Ontario in 2010 due to its Green Energy and Green Economy Act to promote the production of renewable energy there. Besides providing subsidies to green companies, the Act ensured that a percentage of the workers and the materials (between 40% and 60%) companies used were local to Ontario. This made sense, especially after the economic crisis that had earlier devastated the province. The plan worked quite well, and by 2012, Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada, with only one coal-fired plant left.  There was a fly in the ointment, though: the WTO rules about discrimination against outside producers. Japan and then the European Union brought claims against Ontario’s requirement for those percentages to be sourced locally, saying that this requirement would “discriminate against equipment for renewable energy generation facilities produced outside Ontario.” That is, by Japan and the Europeans. And the WTO agreed, ruling against Canada that the buy-local rules were illegal. Ontario then had no choice but to void the local-content rules that were the heart of the program, and Maccario’s solar operation—by common consent producing the best solar panels anywhere—had to pull back and suspend all its plans for expansion.

            Thus, the “national treatment” rules in almost all free-trade agreements (and they will operate in the Trans Pacific Partnership that the Congress wants to vote on right away, and which Barack Obama is even now trying to facilitate on his Asia trip) work directly against local laws that are intended to support green manufacturing to help and heal the environment. It is an absurdity. But that is what the free-marketeers—i.e. the multinational corporations who rule the world these days—have worked day and night to achieve. Trade trumps the planet. That would seem to be their motto. And it is happening in every nation, all the time. Klein cites another example from 2012, when an oil company decided to use NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement so beloved of our politicians) to challenge Quebec’s fracking moratorium, “claiming that it robbed the company of its right to drill for gas in the province” (72). As Klein sums it up,

To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future, is a special kind of madness.

            And it is. Madness. But then, what is one to think of another outcome of the recent Republican victory in the Senate: that, since the majority party selects committee chairmen from its members, the new head of the Senate’s Committee on the Environment and Public Works will be none other than the chief denialist in the U.S. Congress, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe is the author of the book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. He has said things like “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous;” and that the temperature increases from global warming “may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives.” In any country but the United States, putting such a person at the head of such a critical committee would be considered madness indeed. But here we are, with Inhofe poised to take over from Senator Barbara Boxer as head of the committee most responsible for laws related to our environment and the greatest threat to the planet in history.

            So that’s the ultimate skinny on the last election. The most deranged inmates are now in control of the asylum.

Lawrence DiStasi

Global Warming's Big Three Numbers

Recent news stories and photos of air pollution in Harbin, a northern Chinese city of 11 million, no doubt shocked and nauseated most Americans. They showed air pollution so bad that some people compared it to a snowstorm, with the “snow” being particulate matter from coal-burning plants that provide Harbin with heat—the heat just having been turned on for the winter by the Chinese authorities. The air pollution level was 30 or 40 times what is considered tolerable, with 25 parts per million the acceptable level and Harbin’s at over 600 parts per million, and in some places 1,000 ppm!

            But we should neither be shocked—global warming, after all, means global—nor comforted that it’s ‘only China.’ Because, again, carbon in the air knows no boundaries. A recent reading of Bill McKibben’s new book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist (Holt: 2013), reinforces that realization in several ways. First is his account of the civil disobedience battle he led (and still leads) against the Keystone Pipeline. Second is his account of his latest initiative, to induce colleges across the country to divest their endowments of any financial earnings from fossil fuel companies. The third, and what I’ll focus on here, are his elucidation of three key numbers in the fight against global warming. McKibben likes using numbers as symbols, as his major organization 350.org makes clear— the number 350 standing for 350 ppm of carbon in our air, a level which is high, but which most breathing beings can probably live with. Of course, earth has already overshot that mark, our current level being around 400 ppm—a number the 350 highlights nicely.

            McKibben’s other three numbers, though, are even more significant. The first is: 2, for 2 degrees Celsius. That’s the maximum rise in temperature that most scientists agree is the upper limit of temperature rise that humans can survive with. Most would prefer a lower number, 1.5 degrees or less, but 2 degrees is the limit. We’ve already raised the temperature 0.8 degrees, but anything over 2 degrees and it’s “game over.” The second number is 565. That stands for 565 gigatons of carbon in the air—the maximum amount, by midcentury, we can put into the air and still have a reasonable chance to keep the temperature rise at or below that limit of 2 degrees Celsius. The third number and the scariest is 2,795 gigatons—“the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal, oil, and gas reserves of the fossil fuel companies and countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil fuel companies” (146). As McKibben notes, this represents the carbon load from the fossil fuel we’re on target to burn. If you compare 565, the maximum, with 2,795, the amount we’re on target to burn, you realize that those who control fossil fuels are planning to add five (5) times as much carbon as the earth can take and remain viable for the kind of life humans have led for the past several thousand years. The point is simple: these are proven reserves (and the number could be far higher) still in the ground, but since the reserves are what companies use to establish their worth, borrow money, and budget around (and what stock prices are based on), there is no doubt that these fossil fuel companies plan to use all they’ve got. As McKibben points out,

“These are their assets, the holdings that give their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or to frack the Appalachians—the value of ExxonMobil is, more or less, the value of those reserves. If you told ExxonMobil that they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of the company would plummet…” (148).

It’s also, of course, why these companies have spent so much to cast doubt on the idea that carbon burning by humans causes global warming. So if you told the CEOs of any of these companies—the Koch Brothers, Shell, Exxon, Chevron, British Petroleum, not to mention Saudi Arabia—that they should keep about 80% of their proven reserves in the ground, and write off trillions of their assets, they would laugh at you. Capitalism simply doesn’t work that way.

            This is why McKibben and those who have joined him in jail have decided that a new way of fighting global warming is necessary. If we continue to rely on the so-called market to keep us from burning 5 times as much fossil fuel as the planet can withstand, it’s really “game over” for the planet we once knew. So McKibben and his cohorts have, in their latest initiative to save the planet, targeted the companies themselves with their divestment campaign.

            One other element has come up in recent days to add to the plausibility of what McKibben writes in Oil and Honey. Last week, Al Gore made headlines when he said publicly that the next “bubble” slated to collapse is the one in the fossil fuel industry. Gore, basing his prognostication on the same figures McKibben uses, claimed that these fossil fuel companies are heavily overvalued. Why? Because there is no way they can make use of what they count as their assets, since to do so would push the world into catastrophe from global warming. In other words, to burn the reserves producing that 2,795 gigatons would push us over the brink into a global warming nightmare—rising sea levels, changes in plant and animal life, immense changes in weather and storms like Hurricane Sandy. Therefore, they will have to refrain from using their reserves, and hence are worth far less than what their current stock value, based on using those reserves, indicates. The fossil fuel bubble will have to burst—or the planet will.

            And to give us an idea of what is already happening in one little corner of the ecosystem, McKibben tells us of the effect of our already-warming temperatures on the lives of that most wondrous animal, the moose. Moose are perfectly adapted to the climate they normally inhabit, their heavy coats able to keep them warm in sub-zero temperatures. However, if the temperature gets above 20 degrees Fahrenheit, as it has recently in places like Minnesota, the moose are in trouble. It’s not that they faint from the heat. It’s that warmer temperatures allow ticks to proliferate (deep cold used to kill them off), and the proliferating ticks drive the moose crazy. One moose could normally tolerate about 10,000 ticks, but with proliferation, moose now harbor as many as 70,000 ticks! This makes them so crazy that they scratch incessantly and tear away most of their fur. But fur is their protection against cold, so when a cold snap occurs, moose devoid of fur tend to freeze to death. The result is that the moose population in Minnesota has dropped by about half. Nor has tick proliferation stopped in Minnesota. In McKibben’s home state of Vermont, ticks have now begun to proliferate as well, leading to alarming increases in Lyme disease. Vermonters who used to love their woods are now reluctant to venture there for fear of ticks and Lyme disease—which has become almost pandemic.

            This is only one example of a subtle ecological change caused by warming temperatures that has deep and lasting consequences. It makes you wonder what is going through the minds of those who would continue to support denialists, and continue plans they know will plunge the earth into an unknown, and preventable transformation. One clue, though, comes from the aforementioned pollution crisis in China. A report I saw noted that many in China have begun to buy air purifiers. And which class is doing this most? You guessed it: the ruling classes who run the Chinese government, as well as the newly wealthy who can afford them. It appears that these neo-mandarins, like many of our own oligarchs, think they can ride out the global warming catastrophe they’re bringing about by buying safe havens for themselves and their families and purifying the rare air they breathe. This is the same kind of cruel indifference, rigidity and blindness that has led to civilizational collapses in the past. All that remains to be seen is whether the pattern will hold in our ‘more enlightened’ time as well. One thing is for sure, though: none of us can afford to stay on the sidelines hoping that recycling our cans or driving a prius will solve the problem; or that this time, because we’re all such nice, well-meaning people, things will be different.

Lawrence DiStasi