Capitalism is Killing the Planet

The White House released its most comprehensive global warming report to date last week, warning of increased sea-level rise, flooding, drought, heat-waves and other ominous forms of climate disruption. The National Climate Assessment report urges lawmakers and policymakers to take meaningful action now to halt the most destructive effects of climate change.

The report, which comes on the heels of a similarly bleak summary by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released earlier this year, is notable for being one of the first to dispel the widely believed myth that climate change is a "future threat," the effects of which will not be seen for decades to come. Global warming, the authors note candidly, is not a "looming threat." It is happening right now.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future," they write, "has moved firmly into the present."

This, of course, is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention. One need only glance at the morning headlines to understand we are already experiencing the effects of climate change.

California is experiencing the worst drought in decades. Over half of the Arctic sea ice has melted. The previous decade was the warmest on record, while 2012--the year "Superstorm" Sandy wreaked havoc on New York and New Jersey coastlines--was the warmest in history. And last year, the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached a dangerous 400 parts per million (ppm)--an amount not seen since prehistoric periods. According to esteemed climatologist and former Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief, James Hansen, any CO2 level above 350 ppm is not compatible with a "planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted."

The planet is hurtling toward a two-four degree rise in temperature. While that may not seem like a lot, given the Earth's delicate natural balance any rise in temperature, no matter how modest, can have devastating repercussions for the climate. The Washington Post, meanwhile, puts the overall temperature rise at an unfathomable 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Maine and the rest of the Northeast can expect to see more flooding from sea-level rise; greater damage to coastal homes and communities; increased threats to fisheries; and a greater prevalence of Lyme disease-carrying ticks.

Yet Congress is all but incapable of meaningfully responding to climate change. Our lawmakers have been bought-off by the very coal, oil, and gas companies responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The best "solution" Congress can offer is a woefully inadequate cap-and-trade bill, which basically allows corporations to pay to continue polluting the atmosphere. Not only does cap-and-trade do nothing to lower greenhouse gas emissions but, like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations, it puts the very corporations that created the climate crisis in charge of "fixing" it.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the corporate press (indeed, a failure of design) when it comes to global warming is its inability to clearly and frankly denounce the root cause: Capitalism.

"[U]nfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force," writes Chris Hedges in his book, Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2010), "that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself" (17).

It is not just the supposed "excesses" of the system that are to blame, as many liberals would have us believe. It is the system itself. Capitalism is predicated on the concept of unceasing, infinite growth on a planet of finite resources--one with tangible physical limits.

Not only is such a concept unrealistic, it borders on the psychotic. When energy companies view the newly opened land in the rapidly melting Arctic as another business opportunity rather than a frightening sign of environmental destruction, something is horribly wrong. Little wonder then that the directors of the 2003 documentary film, The Corporation, using the physicians' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), determine a corporation is essentially a psychopath.

Like a psychopath, a corporation--a legally defined "person"--displays a callous disregard for the feelings of others, an inability to make and sustain enduring relationships, and an incapacity to experience guilt among other characteristics. (In fact, new research confirms something I have long suspected: The majority of successful bosses, managers, and CEOs routinely display more than a few psychopathic tendencies.)

In essence, the business model of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and B.P.--whether or not their executives realize it--is to literally destroy the planet. The profit-motive of capitalism necessitates that they do no less.

And contrary to the claims of current "Go Green" campaigns, climate change cannot be solved by individuals alone. Even if every single American got rid of her car tomorrow and committed to walking or biking everywhere, the effect, in terms of reducing global CO2 emissions, would be negligible. Like the hippie counterculture and punk-rock before it, the current phase of "green" marketing merely represents the latest corporate co-option of what was originally a genuine grassroots artistic movement.

"We have to do away with the word 'environment' itself," writes Stefanie Krasnow in the latest issue of Adbusters magazine ("Blueprint for a New World, Part II: Eco," May/June 2014),

along with all the campaigny phrases--"reduce your footprint," "care for the planet," "live sustainably" and "go eco-friendly"--they're all just a cheap ticket to a clear conscience. This language has convinced a whole generation that you can 'buy into' saving the world, as if you can consume your way to sustainability.

As author and philosophy professor Clive Hamilton notes in his sobering book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (Earthscan, 2010), responding to climate change will not only require collective, rather than individual, action. It will also necessitate forming a radically new relationship with the natural world.

Invoking the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, Hamilton writes:

Climate change is intimately linked not just to the transformative powers of the scientific-industrial revolution, or even the political and cultural forces of growth fetishism and consumerism; it arises from the reshaping of human consciousness. Disconnection from Nature led inexorably to a stronger orientation towards the personal self. The shift is by no means complete and has met resistance along the way, but its extent renders an adequate response to climate disruption much more difficult. For if we are mired in an existential crisis because Prometheus was unbound, salvation requires the shackling of Prometheus once more (158). 

No, Congress and "enlightened" consumer-spending cannot solve the climate crisis.

And, while many of the Big Environmental organizations--Greenpeace, 350.org, The Sierra Club, etc.--are made-up of well-meaning, environmentally-conscious activists, their questionable sources of funding and refusal to operate outside the corporate two-party duopoly (routinely supporting Democratic candidates that share none of their environmental concerns), render them virtually impotent as well. When it is impossible to tell a 350.org Keystone XL Pipeline protest from an Obama campaign rally, it is worth asking if this is, indeed, the best use of environmentalists' resources.

Rebellion is our only hope. Only through mass acts of peaceful yet defiant civil disobedience can we hope to fend off the worst aspects of climate change. And it is going to take more than merely getting arrested outside the White House lawn. Ultimately, if we are to maintain a planet that is habitable for human life, capitalism must go. It really is as simple as that.

Fawzi Ibrahim, author of the eco-socialist book, Capitalism Versus Planet Earth: An Irreconcilable Conflict, sums it up best:

"Today, humanity faces a stark choice: Save the planet and ditch capitalism or save capitalism and ditch the planet."


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Antiwar Opportunists

Political bumper-stickers are funny things.

Drivers who adorn their vehicles with numerous stickers can sometimes inadvertently convey contradictory messages. For example, I often see cars with peace symbol stickers or phrases like, "Don't Attack Iran!" next to one for "Obama/Bidden, '12." I shake my head and wonder if the driver is aware the former sentiment is essentially cancelled out by the latter.

Point being, President Barack Obama is not a peace president. In fact, as I have detailed many times on this blog, he has been more of a military hawk than George W. Bush--who once bragged to the late Tim Russert that, "I'm a war president."

The U.S.'s overall military-spending as well as our troops' global presence have increased dramatically under Obama. We currently maintain military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq (yes, we are still in Iraq), along with daily drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And Obama has all but codified the Bush administration's criminal policy of "preemptive" war under the interminable "War on Terror."

Yet try to point any of this out to a room full of liberal Obama supporters, and you will be greeted as though you are from Mars. The fact that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in the fall of 2009--while he was currently planning his escalation of the Afghanistan War, now the longest military conflict in U.S. history--has only further cemented liberals' conception of Obama-as-peacemaker.

But go back and listen to Obama's Nobel acceptance speech. The president used the occasion to invoke the nonviolent actions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., only to then summarily dismiss their antiwar views as naively unsuitable for "the world as it is" today. ("Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms," he claims, despite the fact that the U.S., under both Bush and Obama, has rejected al-Qaeda's every offer for peaceful negotiations.)

What is that quote again about truth being the first casualty of war...?

The biggest misconception about liberals is that they are ideologically opposed to war whenever it can be avoided. They are not.

Liberals only express antiwar sentiment when it is a Republican president that is advocating the war. When the man in the White House is a Democrat liberals have no problem dutifully falling in line to "support the troops." This is why the antiwar movement has essentially shutdown under Obama.

Case in point, hundreds of thousands of liberal Americans protested Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. Indeed, these were some of the largest antiwar demonstrations in history and they were not relegated to the United States. Yet there have been no comparable protests against Obama's continuation of the very same war or the conflict in Afghanistan (which Obama campaigned on expanding as a candidate in 2008). And there has been even less discussion--never mind critique--of Obama's covert "dirty wars" in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar women's group, Code Pink, describes her firsthand account of the antiwar movement's evaporation even before Obama was elected president in a recent interview on the online Real News Network ("Media Benjamin on 'Reality Asserts Itself'," 04/16/2014).

"What happened to that [antiwar] upsurge?" RNN host, Paul Jay asks Benjamin.

"Well, you said it," she replies. "It's a one word answer: Obama."

"We had a huge movement," Benjamin continues.

You just look at one group like Code Pink: We came out of nowhere, and suddenly we had over 300,000 people on our mailing list. And we had over 300 groups around the country and, really, around the world... When Obama started to gain steam as a candidate, those started fizzling out. And when he won the election we had half the numbers of people we had before on our mailing list. And most of the groups started to disintegrate.  

The antiwar movement, in other words, is the victim of simple partisanship.

This is precisely the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Michigan and Indiana University in a Sept. 2013 study. The researchers surveyed 5,300 antiwar protesters from 2007-2009 and found that the majority of protesters who identify themselves as Democrats, "withdrew from anti-war protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success" in the 2008 presidential election ("What Happened to the Anti-War Movement?", Truthdig.com, 09/05/2013).

Summing up the researchers' findings, reporter David Sirota writes, "...during the Bush years, many Democrats were not necessarily motivated to participate in the anti-war movement because they oppose militarism and war--they were instead 'motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments'."

The fact is mainstream liberals have never been the knee-jerk pacifists Fox News makes them out to be. Historically, liberals have a long tradition of supporting military intervention--especially when it is the name of "humanitarianism." (See: Bosnia, Kosovo, the Gulf War, Iraq War I--hell, even World War II was fought for "humanitarian" reasons. And yes, it is perfectly legitimate to question the justifications for the United States' involvement in "The Good War.") Indeed, this liberal thirst for interventionism dates back to WWI, during which a Democrat--Woodrow Wilson--was president.

As if further evidence of liberals' penchant for war, a recent cover story in that bastion of elite liberal opinion, the New York Times, illustrates recent military recruits' frustration--even disappointment--over the lack of any current major (declared) military conflict in which to build their careers on ("In New Officers' Careers, Peace is No Dividend," 04/14/14). "[F]or the [West Point Academy] class of about 1,100 cadets," the article laments, "there may be few, if any, coveted combat patches on their uniforms to show that they have gone to war.

Reinforcing the mythic national narrative of war as a glorious, noble pursuit where boys become brave men of valor and courage and similar nonsense, the Times' story continues, "Many of them may not get the opportunity to one day recall stories of heroism in battle, or even the ordinary daily sacrifices--bad food, loneliness, fear--that bind soldiers together in shared combat experience."

Then again, what should one expect from one of the leading publications that successfully sold readers the lies and deceptions that launched the Iraq war?

(Ironically, all of the young soldiers interviewed for the story express a desire to transfer to the Special Operations forces, the elite mercenary unit primarily involved in the U.S.'s covert missions in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. The military careerists claim that is where "the real action is.")

It is the Left--the radicals, anarchists, socialists, and communists--not liberals, that have consistently been the staunchest opponents of war.

The outspoken Socialist leader and perennial presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1918 under the Espionage Act for passionately denouncing World War I. "Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder," Debs spoke to a massive crowd in Canton, Ohio. ".... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles..."

Yet contemporary liberals have little connection, both to the history of this nation's radical left-wing movement, and to the socialist ideals many of its members like Debs advocated. The truth is, liberals tend to support empire (they call it "neoliberalism"), which is inextricably linked to capitalism. Liberal acolytes like Katrina vanden Heuvel, Van Jones, Todd Gitlin, and Rachel Maddow may correctly decry capitalism's excesses or foibles from time to time. But by definition, liberals are only interested in reforming the system. Radicals want to overthrow it.

As a result, liberals are not necessarily opposed to war as a means of foreign policy. Like Obama, they are merely opposed to "dumb wars," as he famously referred to the war in Iraq. And this is why the antiwar movement has atrophied under Obama. Liberals do not want to challenge war and mass killing when it is "their guy" in the White House.

Glenn Greenwald is right: Obama is not the "lesser evil." He is the "more effective evil."

 

 

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Class Dismissed

Portland has, in recent weeks, become the latest case study in the ongoing corporatization of higher education.

Last month, The University of Southern Maine laid off 15 full-time faculty members--the majority of which belong to the humanities and liberal arts department--in order to make up for a $14 million budget shortfall. All of the laid off professors are tenured, but have been "retrenched," which, as the Portland Phoenix's Nicholas Schroeder explains in a recent cover story ("Crisis at USM," 03/28/2014), is a "jargony term for eliminating specific programs without appearing to violate faculty union contracts."

The departments cut include Music, Theater, English, Sociology and Women and Gender Studies, along with Geosciences, Recreation and Leisure Studies, and New England Studies. And this is only the first round of cuts to as many as 50 total positions across the University of Maine System. The USM administration, currently headed by President Theodora Kalikow and Chancellor James Page, cites declining enrollment and tuition freezes as the need for the cuts.

Kalikow says she wants to remake the sprawling, multi-campus college as a "Metropolitan university." With all due respect to both Portland and USM, the words "metropolitan," and "Maine" really do not belong in the same sentence.

But students and faculty are fighting back.

The anti-austerity activist group #USMFuture--which consists of current and former USM students, faculty, members of the Portland Green Independent Committee, the Southern Maine Workers' Center, and Occupy Maine--staged a rally and march against the layoffs in Portland's Monument Square on April 10.

Andy Moxley, one of the rally's participants from the organization Socialist Alternative, drew comparisons between the ongoing corporatization of education and the nationwide drive for a higher minimum wage (the "Fight for $15," as it is being called).

"These issues are absolutely related," said Moxley. "They are both issues that affect working-class young people. We keep belt-tightening until we have no room anymore. This sort of austerity is not working. I think people are realizing that. And the fight for $15 is definitely a part of this [larger] struggle."

Many protesters carried signs that read, "Students Are Not Customers," and "Education is Not a Business Transaction." Yet, that is increasingly how colleges are treating both.

More and more, college recruiters and administrators, parents, employers, and even a few professors, are pushing students away from the liberal arts courses, traditionally the backbone of higher education. They insist these disciplines are not "practical" and will not lead students to a career. Courses in the humanities (Music, Philosophy, Creative Writing, Literature) are considered "superfluous" because they will not make anyone (monetarily) rich. And this has perverted the entire purpose of education which is inherently self-critical, political, and even, at times, subversive.

Universities are becoming glorified vocational training mills, emphasizing job skills over actual learning.

"Education," W.B. Yeats famously wrote, "is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

John Branson, a Portland attorney who served as the pro-bono lawyer for Occupy Maine, echoes Yeats's sentiments. In a recent Op-Ed to the Portland Daily Sun ("In Defense of the Liberal Arts," 04/03/14) Branson recalls the benefits of his own liberal arts education at Yale.

"We [Branson and his classmates] were to become lifelong learners," Branson writes, "equipped with the intellectual ability and moral courage to contribute meaningfully not only to our future employers but society itself."

He continues:

Unfortunately, instilling our young people with the moral courage and intellectual ability to think for themselves is directly at odds with both the dominant paradigm of indoctrination and the corporate model for modern education reform. .... The goal of the modern corporatocracy... is to develop linear thinkers devoted to the absorption and acceptance of conventional knowledge, wisdom, and opinions; to mold pliant workers reluctant to rock the boat; and to create an army of malleable consumers easily influenced by modern advertising and marketing.

Let's be honest: The UMaine public schools have never been outstanding. They are average at best. (The truly excellent schools--Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin--are financially out of reach for most students and their families.) USM is a glorified commuter school, and the system's flagship college, The University of Maine in Orono, suffers from perpetual understaffing of faculty. Like most major colleges, UMaine overly relies on graduate students and part-time adjunct instructors to teach most of its courses.

But these budget cuts only threaten to make mediocre schools even worse.

And this dumbing down of education is not limited to our universities. The national trend toward austerity has led to a defunding of public schools, teacher layoffs, and a lack of adequate resources and learning spaces. Lawmakers complain they "do not have the money" to properly fund K-12 education, yet seem to have no problem with mega-retailers like Walmart and McDonald's basically living off of taxpayer expense.

And the emergence of charter schools in recent years--privately owned, for profit schools that are still publicly funded--threatens to usher in a future in which all education is privatized and commercialized.

The Kennebunk school district (RSU 21) where I teach as an Ed Tech recently finished implementing the new Common Core learning standards, which 46 states plus the District of Columbia have essentially been forced to adopt. (Adoption of the Common Core curriculum is tied to federal "Race to the Top" funding--some $4.35 billion. States not on board with Common Core are not eligible for the funding.)

These new standards mean more student learning will be "measured" by standardized tests and mandated educational outcomes. It also means more teacher salaries--and, in some cases, continued employment--will be based on their students' test scores. Indeed, this brave new world of corporatized education, in which the so-called "bad teachers" are those whose students do poorly on standardized tests, forgets that teaching is, as radical educator Paulo Freire observed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a reciprocal endeavor. Even the most talented and engaging educators can only lead students to the metaphorical fountain of knowledge. They cannot force students to drink from it.

Yet the corporate forces--including the "philanthropic" Gates Foundation--that are pushing curriculum like Common Core do not understand this. They only understand one thing: How to make a profit. They see money in public education and they want it. All of it. And if we do not stop them, these corporate forces will destroy not only our nation's education system, but the very concept of an informed, engaged citizenry along with it.


UPDATE, 04/11/2014:

President Kalikow announced Friday afternoon that all faculty layoffs have been rescinded. According to the Portland Press Herald, Kalikow made the decision just minutes before the USM Faculty Senate Meeting and claims the student-led protests "did not play a role" in her reversal. This, of course, seems highly unlikely. However, Kalikow made clear the university must still account for the budget shortfall and is "open to alternative plans."

So, is this a win for us? It is hard to say. As Maine Green Independent Party chairman and state senate candidate, Asher Platts points out, this is, at best, a temporary victory. There are still structural changes needed to the University of Maine System's administrative board in order to change the ever increasing Business-orientation of higher education. Platts writes on the Maine Green Party's website:

While it's great that the faculty layoffs have been rescinded, we must keep our eyes on the prize of reforming the UMaine system to allow for more democratic means of making decisions, review funding models, and [to improve] the state of Maine's relationship to the UMaine system or we will be fighting this same battle over and over.

Bedtime for Democracy

In the wake of 2010's disastrous Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) and now this week's equally game-changing, McCutcheon v. FEC, which lifts the cap on campaign contributions from rich donors, it might be time to start asking the obvious question we are all too afraid to pose:

Do we even still live in a representative democracy, anymore? Or has the United States become a sort of oligarchic plutocracy where only the very wealthy have any ability to influence government?

(Let's put the broader question of whether the U.S. has ever truly been a democracy, aside for the time being. For the sake of argument, let's assume America was founded as a democratic nation. I'll let readers fight this one out in the "Comments" section.)

Many progressive pundits have lamented in recent years the state of our "beleaguered," or "weakened" democracy. But just how "weak" must a country's democratic institutions become before they finally gasp their last metaphorical breath? At what point is the transition from an open, free society, to a closed, totalitarian one complete? Have we, in fact, now reached that point? Does our democracy exist in name only?

Chilling questions, to be certain. Yet the Supreme Court's campaign-spending decision last week demands we treat them as more than academic hypotheticals.

Those Americans whose civic participation starts and ends in the voting booth once every four years might want to start paying more attention. And you might want to start contemplating alternative forms of action while you are at it, given how increasingly pointless those elections are becoming--unless that is, you happen to be rich.

Last week's McCutcheon decision--which raises the so-called aggregate limit on the amount of money an individual can directly contribute to a candidate, PAC (Political Action Committee), or political party from $2,600 to $3.5 million--maintains the Roberts-led court's trend of equating the spending of money with free speech.

While many conservatives have lauded the Justices' decision as a win for "freedom," it is a freedom only a very small, wealthy percentage of Americans can exercise. As Andy Kroll makes clear in his recent coverage of the McCutcheon decision in Mother Jones ("The Supreme Court Just Gutted Another Campaign Finance Law...", 04/02/2014), this will no doubt further the vastly disproportionate influence the extremely rich already yield in our elections.

"The decision is a boon for wealthy donors," Kroll writes, "a potential lifeline for the weakened Democratic and Republican parties, and the latest in a series of setbacks dealt by the Roberts court to supporters of tougher campaign [spending] laws." 

It is time to start thinking outside of the voting booth. Occupy Wall Street had the right idea, initially. Not only did the movement leave an indelible impact on our vocabulary, with phrases like "One percent," and "99 percent," still widely in use today. But it also made clear, to anyone who still did not understand, where the real centers of power are in this country: Not the White House, but Wall Street.

Unfortunately, the widespread emergence of "sister occupations" throughout the country (including here in Portland) kind of lost the plot. It is hard to occupy Wall Street--based in Manhattan--when you live in, you know... Maine. Had the Portland Occupiers set up camp in front of a local TD Bank or Bank of America (or even the Portland offices of Preti Flaherty, law firm of Harold Pachios, a longtime Democratic donor and strategist), that would have made sense. Instead they quixotically settled for about five months in Lincoln Park, where most of their anti-corporatist message was mistaken by passerby for "camping."

When Occupy re-emerges--and I believe it or something like it will--I hope it can move beyond these fledgling failings and coalesce a truly populist mass movement. Still, the Occupiers were on the right track. And this is why the movement was ultimately crushed by the corporate state. They knew it was a threat.

In his remarks shortly after forcibly evicting the Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park, New York's "independent" Mayor Michael Bloomberg dismissed the group's grievances as "totally unfounded."

It is increasingly clear any substantive effort at restoring our democracy and the rule of law is going to come from outside the two-party system. Real progressive change will come, as it always has, through activists, socialists, and third-parties like the Green Party. (Full disclosure: I am the Secretary for the Portland Green Independent Committee, of the Maine Green Independent Party.)

Contrary to popular opinion, Greens can win elections. We have had particular success on the local and state levels where voters are more willing to look past the bogus "spoiler" argument. And even if Greens fail to win office we can still influence the election by bringing up issues--like raising the minimum wage, or instant run-off voting--the Democrats and Republicans would not otherwise discuss.

Our democracy has been hijacked by an unfettered corporate state. It has been sold to the highest bidder. Extremely wealthy capitalists like the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Warren Buffett now own America. And the only hope we have of taking our country--and our democracy--back is by stepping outside of the system.

Do not "Keep Calm and Carry On," as the ubiquitous motivational slogan urges. It is time to get mad and f*&@ sh#! up. 

The Next Extinction

Sigmund Freud, in his highly influential 1930 work, Civilization and its Discontents, posited the existence in humans of a subconscious, self-destructive impulse--a sort of "death wish." This "death drive" impulse or thanatos is the psychical counterpart to Eros or man's subconscious desire for love and sex. The death drive, according to Freud, reveals itself in characteristics of sadism, aggressiveness, narcissism, and self-destruction. Thanatos, then, becomes another psychological constraint in the tension between civilized man and his primal, baser instincts.

This "inclination to aggression," Freud wrote, "is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man...that...constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization."

Civilization marked a significant turning point in Freud's work. Published in the wake of the unprecedented devastation of the first World War--and the subsequent emergence of the consumer culture industry--the book found Freud profoundly shaken in his view of human nature. His overall outlook for the future of human civilization was, to put it mildly, not encouraging.

Freud's theory of the death drive (which he first introduced years earlier in 1920's Beyond the Pleasure Principle) gained little support in the psychological community at the time. Some 85 years later, with the earth on the brink of incalculable ecological destruction from climate change, it seems Freud may have been on to something.

Last week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released a bleak and dire report on the potential impacts of global warming titled "What We Know." The authors state in the report's introduction,

[W]e consider it to be our responsibility to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

Attempting to put to rest, once and for all, the mind-numbing anti-science dismissals of right-wing climate change skeptics, and the campaign of deliberate misinformation funded by the fossil fuel industry, the report's authors state clearly and plainly:

[L]evels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising. Temperatures are going up. Springs are arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. The patterns of rainfall and drought are changing. Heat waves are getting worse as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying.

And yet our elected leaders in government seem incapable of taking any meaningful action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. (By imposing, for instance, a gas tax.) The best measure the Democratic-controlled Senate can produce is a tepid, market-oriented cap-and-trade bill--and it could not even get that through.

And let's be clear about who bears the most blame for the climate crisis: The corporate state.

Could you and I drive less and take greater steps to reduce our individual carbon footprints? Certainly. (Though this is difficult when you live, as I do, in a state that lacks a major public transportation system.) Yet our individual contributions to climate change, while not, in of themselves insignificant, pale in comparison to those of the fossil fuel industry. According to an article in The Guardian last fall (11/20/2013), just 90 corporations have been responsible for two-thirds of CO2 emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Of those 90 companies, 83 are coal, oil, and gas producers like Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and BP.

It is as if we, as a species, are locked in an insane collective suicide pact. We march, like lemmings, toward the edge of the precipice, unable to stop ourselves. We delude ourselves with the childish fiction we can have an economy of infinite, unregulated growth on a planet of finite resources. This sort of thinking is not only illogical, it borders on the psychotic. It is a symptom of the disease that is capitalism.

Karl Marx understood that capitalism is a revolutionary force because it turns everything--including the environment, human lives, and ultimately, the ecosystem that supports all planetary life--into a commodity. Marx saw capitalism--whether we are talking about the "free-market," "laissez-faire," or "trickle-down" sort, or the more contemporary brand of "corporate capitalism"--as having an inherently self-destructive quality, which makes it ultimately unsustainable.

As Marx observed in Volume I of his three-part economic treatise, Capital, the entire concept of using money to generate more money (which he represents as the formula of "Money-Commodity-Money," an inversion of the traditional, "C-M-C") represented a fundamental shift in the structure of society.

"By virtue of being value, it [capital] has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself," Marx wrote. "It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs" (p. 255).

Using money to generate more money becomes, for the capitalist anyway, the gift that quite literally keeps on giving. That is, until it consumes itself.

Perhaps it is not so much a death-wish we suffer from, as a case of collective denial.

Clive Hamilton, in his sobering book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (Earthscan, 2010), argues anthropogenic or man-induced global warming represents such a fundamental existential crisis for humankind, we simply cannot accept the reality emotionally. Even those of us, Hamilton argues, that understand and accept the science of climate change intellectually, still have difficulty coming to terms with the worst case predictions emotionally. We simply do not want to accept that our planet could, in essence, become uninhabitable for us as a species. And this sort of emotional denial has prevented even the more rational, scientifically-literate among us from taking meaningful action to halt ecological destruction.

Like the Greek god, Icarus, mankind has flown too close to the sun on wings made of wax. In our hubristic attempts to conquer and control the natural world we underestimated the fragility of the Earth's natural homeostasis. The centuries-long crusade of human "progress"--in which the exalted Industrial Revolution and the corporate state's successful supplantation of democracy may well have been the final, terminal stages--has sowed the seeds of our own destruction.

Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith in The Matrix is correct about mankind: We are a virus.

As Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents:

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs... still give him much trouble at times. Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But... we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character. 

Help keep Guerrilla Press running by making a donation via the "Donate" button on the right. Any amount is greatly appreciated. Adam Marletta can be contacted at adamd.marletta@gmail.com.

Spies, Damned Spies! (And Other Congressional Hypocrites)



California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

In a well-known and frequently referenced scene from Casablanca, the corrupt Captain Louis Renault, grasping for a legal pretense to shutdown Rick Blaine's café, claims he is "shocked--shocked!--to find that gambling is going on here!" He no sooner makes this sanctimonious proclamation, when one of his lackeys approaches him with "Your winnings, sir," which Renault promptly pockets.

One imagines Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, striking a similarly hypocritical tone. Feinstein took to the Senate floor last week to denounce, in some of the harshest terms from a member of Congress to date, the National Security Agency's spying on the Senate chamber and her colleagues.

The CIA-Congress "spat" as many reporters are referring to it, specifically revolves around Congress's years-long effort to obtain evidence of the CIA's torture programs during (but not limited to) the Bush administration. While the CIA's use of torture--or "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the bland, euphemistic language of the "objective" corporate media--has been well established (George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have publicly admitted to and defended the illegal acts), senators like Feinstein claim the practice goes "well beyond" anything they previously knew of.

According to Feinstein, the NSA wiretapped senators' computers without a warrant, a claim CIA chief John "Assassination Tsar" Brennan denies. Feinstein, a longtime proponent of CIA covert actions in general, and the NSA's surveillance program in particular, denounced the agency's actions. The CIA's search, Sen. Feinstein said,

[M]ay well have violated the Separation of Powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate Clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities and any other government function.

Feinstein went on to add that the CIA's actions may also have violated the Fourth Amendment. (Gee, you think?) Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) concurred with characteristic hyperbolic flair. "This is Richard Nixon stuff," Graham declared. "This is dangerous to the democracy. Heads should roll, people should go to jail if it's true. If it is, the legislative branch should declare war on the CIA."

Feinstein, readers may recall, has been one of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's most vociferous critics. In an interview with CBS's Bob Schieffer last summer (Face the Nation, 06/23/2013), she charged Snowden with "treason," and called for his extradition to the United States. During the broadcast, Sen. Feinstein also rattled off spurious claims that WikiLeaks helped Snowden flee the country, and that China was somehow involved with his actions--claims which she offered zero evidence to back up.

(Curious side-question: Is Dianne Feinstein, herself, now guilty of treason, given that she has effectively revealed the CIA's clearly necessary and well-intended congressional spying activities to the general public? Has she not now endangered Americans and given aid and comfort to our enemies with her disclosure? Take the comments section and discuss...)

Feinstein and her colleagues' rank hypocrisy on the issue of domestic spying--and the fact that Senators Feinstein and Graham can issue such scathing condemnations of the CIA with a straight face--is so absurdly contradictory it seems more like something out of The Daily Show than an actual news item.

Indeed, the Huffington Post may have put in best in a March 11 headline which read, "Senators Okay with Spying on Citizens, but Outraged it Happened to Congress."

Given how "liberal" the media is, one would think the Beltway rank-and-file reporters would be having a field day with our government's egregious double-standards when it comes to the surveillance state. One would, alas, be wrong.

Most of the coverage of this story has approached it primarily from the torture-angle, while conveniently underplaying Feinstein and her colleagues' glaring hypocrisy on the issue of spying. While the question of whether or not the CIA engaged in torture during the (still ongoing) "War on Terror," is certainly a significant one, it is a question everyone except those in the corporate media already knows the answer to: Yes. The torture question, then, becomes a diversion from the more timely issue of warrantless wiretapping.

Exhibit A is a recent front-page story from the New York Times ("Conflict Erupts in Public Rebuke on C.I.A. Inquiry," 03/12/2014).

The story, by Times veteran reporters, Mark Mazzetti and Jonathan Weisman, reads more like a glorified profile piece for Sen. Feinstein--long an exalted and esteemed member of the Senate. The article is typical of the Times' Washington Beltway reportage, relying predominantly on insider sources, White House spokespeople, and CIA personnel. The closest the reporters come to even acknowledging Sen. Feinstein's hypocrisy on the issue of warrantless wiretapping is the following passage:

Ms. Feinstein has proved to be a bulwark for intelligence agencies in recent years: publicly defending the National Security Agency's telephone and Internet surveillance activities, the C.I.A.'s authority over drone strikes and the F.B.I.'s actions under the Patriot Act against a growing bipartisan chorus of critics.

The piece goes on to quote Amy B. Zegart, a scholar of intelligence issues at Stanford University: "Feinstein has always pushed the agency [the CIA] in private and defended it in public... Now she is skewering the C.I.A. in public. This is a whole new world for the C.I.A."

The article goes out of its way to paint Feinstein as some sort of congressional hero--a whistleblower, even. Yet, Edward Snowden's earlier disclosure of the very same illegal spying, rather than registering shock and outrage from the corporate press, instead lead to a "debate" (in which all sides agree) over whether his whistleblower actions make him a "hero," or a "traitor." It is only when the elites have their unconstitutional practices turned on them that they begin to cry foul.

But then, I suppose we should not be surprised by this sort of tepid, "objective" news coverage. After all, according to longtime NYT reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, "You can't just say the president is lying," even when he is clearly and deliberately making statements that are factually untrue. "Objective" is not the right word for this sort of reporting. Obfuscation would be more appropriate.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will end the surveillance state. It has now become such an entrenched tool in the interminable "War on Terror," that no future administration will give the power up willingly. Barack Obama had a chance to terminate the program, along with the other criminal excesses of the Bush administration. Instead, he expanded those abuses of executive power. He has proven as morally bankrupt and power-hungry as his predecessor.

It is only when the tables are turned and the ruling elites are subjected to the very same crimes they perpetuate on citizens--as the conflict in the Ukraine currently illustrates--that they start crying about the "rule of law," The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. The law exists only to be bended and twisted to serve their needs. When it does not, it can be ignored.

As the iconoclastic journalist, I.F. Stone observed, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."



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The Courage to Resist

An essay on man in revolt

Forbes op-ed columnist, Carrie Sheffield, joins the chorus of media intelligentsia attacking former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a "traitor."

In a piece from last December ("Edward Snowden is Not 'Person of the Year,'" 12/18/2013), the conservative Sheffield--her byline reads, "Committed to free minds & free markets,"--echoes The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, that Snowden is a "grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison."

Sheffield chastises an alleged media landscape wherein publications are practically falling over themselves to "beknight" Snowden as a "hero" or First Amendment champion. I am curious to know which specific publications Sheffield is referring to. Editorials in every newspaper I pick up have nothing but denunciatory vitriol for the 30-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton contractor.

Sheffield's claims that Snowden, "undermined trust and transparency among the ranks of public servants who protect America," and that he "did not reveal one single abuse by the U.S. intelligence community," are childish in their level of ignorance.

She, like so many of Snowden's critics, trots out the ludicrous argument that Snowden should have gone through the "traditional government channels," (in Sheffield's case a "sympathetic member of Congress,") to expose his findings.

Yet it is the traditional channels of government--i.e. Congress, the Executive Branch, etc.--that have authorized and are carrying out these illegal methods of spying. Indeed, Snowden's revelations are not at all revelatory to members of Congress. They signed off on them!

As Glen Greenwald, the former Guardian reporter who broke the Snowden story, pointed out during an interview on Democracy Now! last year (06/24/2013), had Snowden gone through the "traditional" whistleblower channels he "would have ended up having to go to the very same members of Congress who think that not only are these programs good, but that they ought to remain secret."

This is how the power elite attempts to delegitimize whistleblowers, by quibbling over tactics and "proper channels," while ignoring the actual substance of what truth-tellers like Snowden have revealed. Their approach is the same every time: Shoot the messenger--ignore the message.

But the fact remains, we would not be talking about our government's mass-scale domestic spying apparatus if it were not for Edward Snowden. The NSA was never going to publicly disclose its "PRISM" program on its own. The Obama administration--just like all previous U.S. administrations--is more than comfortable lying to the American people about its clandestine and often illegal activities.

This is precisely why we need whistleblowers, reporters, and dissidents like Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Upton Sinclair, and Seymour Hersh to act as a watchdog on government actions. These rebels make democracy possible.

As Howard Zinn once said, "Democracy is not what governments do. It's what people do."

Those who claim they have "nothing to hide," or who cynically dismiss Snowden's revelations as "unsurprising," do not understand the extent of what is happening. The NSA is currently collecting every email, text-message, Tweet, and phone conversation of every citizen. They can track our web searches, online banking activity, and Internet history. Orwell's dystopian nightmare envisioned in 1984 has become reality. Big Brother is literally watching us. Our lawmakers have obliterated the Fourth Amendment. And the NSA's surveillance is not limited to the U.S. They have spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and participants at the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

We have become Orwell's Oceania. "The Party's surveillance tactics and technology are so advanced," Orwell wrote in 1984, "that even the smallest twitch can betray a rebellious spirit."

A citizenry under this sort of oppressive, constant surveillance is not free. Privacy is not merely a luxury. It is essential to democracy. It is only when we can be alone with our own private thoughts--far from the madding crowd, as Thomas Hardy famously phrased it--that we can engage in creative thoughts or projects, indulge in art or literature, and reflect on the broad, philosophical questions of our time. (You know--the questions we are so often forbidden from asking in the arena we spend the vast majority of our waking lives: The workplace.)

Indeed, without privacy, any form of political, social or cultural dissent is impossible. And that, as Orwell understood, is ultimately the point.

Consider what Snowden has sacrificed to bring us the truth. He will likely never be permitted to return to the United States--not without facing criminal charges and potentially life in prison. Congress members like California Sen. Diane Feinstein (a Democrat; just sayin') claim Snowden is guilty of treason and should be extradited to the U.S. Maine's favorite junior Senator, "independent" Angus King concurs, telling the media last summer he is "moving more and more toward the 'treason' end of the scale," when it comes to his opinion of Snowden's actions. He too, argues with a straight face that Snowden should have gone to Congress with his findings.

The fact is, we are all better off as citizens thanks to Snowden's disclosures, as well as to the reporters that have brought those disclosures to light. Democracy cannot function when the public is in the dark of its own government's actions--especially when those actions are illegal. Snowden displayed the moral courage and personal convictions so rare in our fearful, conformist society, and yet so crucial for democracy. And that is why the corporate state is so desperate to silence and discredit him.

French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus viewed rebellion as the single greatest affirmation of our individual humanity. A proponent of the philosophy of "the absurd," Camus believed life is meaningless and our individual fates are largely out of our control. But we can still choose how we live. And it is only through a constant state of rebellion, Camus argued, that one can create meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. It is only through rebellion that one can be truly free.

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object," he wrote in his 1956 book-length essay, The Rebel. "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."


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