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Chris Hedges gave this speech Sunday at a Santa Ana, Calif., event sponsored by the Green Party of Orange County.

We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace has failed. The promised prosperity that was to have raised the living standards of workers through trickle-down economics has been exposed as a lie. A tiny global oligarchy has amassed obscene wealth, while the engine of unfettered corporate capitalism plunders resources, exploits cheap, unorganized labor and creates pliable, corrupt governments that abandon the common good to serve corporate profit. The relentless drive by the fossil fuel industry for profits is destroying the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human species. And no mechanisms to institute genuine reform or halt the corporate assault are left within the structures of power, which have surrendered to corporate control. The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are paramount.

History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of power by a tiny cabal, whether a political party or a clique of oligarchs, leads to despotism. Governments that cater exclusively to a narrow interest group and redirect the machinery of state to furthering the interests of that group are no longer capable of responding rationally in times of crisis. Blindly serving their masters, they acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail out corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with stagnant or declining wages, crippling debt peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the millions left destitute and often homeless by deceptive mortgages and foreclosures.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Finance Capital—and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics

September 11, 2015

The Age of Finance Capital—and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics

Despite the fact that the manufacturers of ideas have elevated economics to the (contradictory) levels of both a science and a religion, a market theodicy, mainstream economics does not explain much when it comes to an understanding of real world developments. Indeed, as a neatly stylized discipline, economics has evolved into a corrupt, obfuscating and useless—nay, harmful—field of study. Harmful, because instead of explaining and clarifying it tends to mystify and justify.

One of the many flaws of the discipline is its static or ahistorical character, that is, a grave absence of a historical perspective. Despite significant changes over time in the market structure, the discipline continues to cling to the abstract, idealized model of competitive industrial capitalism of times long past.

Not surprisingly, much of the current economic literature and most economic “experts” still try to explain the recent cycles of financial bubbles and bursts by the outdated traditional theories of economic/business cycles. Accordingly, policy makers at the head of central banks and treasury departments continue to issue monetary prescriptions that, instead of mitigating the frequency and severity of the cycles, tend to make them even more frequent and more gyrating.

This crucially important void of a dynamic, long-term or historic perspective explains why, for example, most mainstream economists fail to see that the financial meltdown of 2008 in the United States, its spread to many other countries around the world, and the consequent global economic stagnation represent more than just another recessionary cycle. More importantly, they represent a structural change, a new phase in the development of capitalism, the age of finance capital.

A number of salient features distinguish the age of finance capital from earlier stages of capitalism, that is, stages when finance capital grew and/or circulated in tandem with industrial capital.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence

September 2, 2015

Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: The concept of “disposability” frequently returns in your writing, whether speaking of youth, politics, the future, etc. Why do you insist on this theme?

Henry Giroux: Global capitalism has taken on a range of characteristics that demand a new language for understanding such shifts along with the effects these economic, political, and pedagogical registers are having in different degrees upon those that bear the weight of its oppressive forces. Not only have we seen a separation of power, which is global, from politics, which is local, but we have seen a full-fledged attack on the social state, the rise of the punishing state, and the emergence of what might be called an authoritarian culture of cruelty. Under such circumstances, I have tried to capture the current savagery of various regimes of neoliberal capitalism by developing a paradigm that focused on the intensification of what I have called the politics of disposability.

Under neoliberalism, politics becomes an extension of war and those populations that do not contribute or buy into the notion that the only value that matters is exchange value are viewed as either useless or a threat to the ruling elites. One consequence is that within this new historical conjuncture, the practice of disposability expands to include more and more individuals and groups who have been considered redundant, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and mass incarceration.

Disposability is no longer the exception but the norm. As the reach of disposability has broadened to include a range of groups extending from college youth and poor minorities to the unemployed and members of the middle class who have lost their homes in the financial crisis of 2007, a shift in the radicalness and reach of the machinery of disposability constitutes not only a new mode of authoritarian politics, but also demands a new political vocabulary for understanding how the social contract has virtually disappeared while the mechanisms of expulsion, disposability, and state violence have become more integrated and menacing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina

August 31, 2015

Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina

(Photo: Eric Gay/AP)

For me, the road to This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate begins in a very specific time and place. The time was exactly ten years ago. The place was New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The road in question was flooded and littered with bodies.

Today I am posting, for the first time, the entire section on Hurricane Katrina from my last book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Rereading the chapter 10 years after the events transpired, I am struck most by this fact: the same military equipment and contractors used against New Orleans’ Black residents have since been used to militarize police across the United States, contributing to the epidemic of murders of unarmed Black men and women. That is one way in which the Disaster Capitalism Complex perpetuates itself and protects its lucrative market

This material is free for reproduction.

From the Introduction:

I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African-American Southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Alternatives to Capitalism

August 28, 2015

Alternatives to Capitalism

It is said that capitalism believes in competition but hates competitors. With this thoughtful book, Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright aim to strengthen the resources of anti-capitalist politics against the charge that ‘there is no alternative’. While there is a debate on the left over the value of engaging in utopian planning of the kind represented by this book, Hahnel and Wright present their approach as supporting radical politics, building confidence rather than distracting from current struggles. The thinking and action inspired by real-world examples (such as participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre) underlines the point. We need concrete inspiration; we need to believe that ‘another world is possible’. In Erik Wright’s words, ‘We need … utopian longing melded to realist thinking about the dilemmas and constraints of building viable alternatives to the world as it is.’

The book sets out two approaches to anti-capitalist utopian thinking, taking the form of a dialogue between the two authors (embedded in a shared commitment to radical conceptions of equality and democracy). Each sets out a position and provides a constructive and reflective commentary on the other’s contribution, and a response to the points raised about their own.

Hahnel’s proposal is for a system of participatory economics, originally developed with the US activist and radical economist Michael Albert. This is essentially a bottom-up method of production and consumption planning. In this book, he focuses on the mechanisms by which individual producers and consumers would collectively elaborate an agreed annual plan, without the need for markets or hierarchical central control. A little more detail on the content of the proposed system at the outset of his dialogue with Wright would have been helpful, although he does provide useful references to his extensive writing on participatory economics elsewhere.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Capitalism Cause Poverty?

August 23, 2015

Does Capitalism Cause Poverty?

Capitalism gets blamed for many things nowadays: poverty, inequality, unemployment, even global warming. As Pope Francis said in a recent speech in Bolivia: “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”

But are the problems that upset Francis the consequence of what he called “unbridled capitalism”? Or are they instead caused by capitalism’s surprising failure to do what was expected of it? Should an agenda to advance social justice be based on bridling capitalism or on eliminating the barriers that thwart its expansion?

The answer in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is obviously the latter. To see this, it is useful to recall how Karl Marx imagined the future.

For Marx, the historic role of capitalism was to reorganize production. Gone would be the family farms, artisan yards, and the “nation of shopkeepers,” as Napoleon is alleged to have scornfully referred to Britain. All these petty bourgeois activities would be plowed over by the equivalent of today’s Zara, Toyota, Airbus, or Walmart.

As a result, the means of production would no longer be owned by those doing the work, as on the family farm or in the craftsman’s workshop, but by “capital.” Workers would possess only their own labor, which they would be forced to exchange for a miserable wage. Nonetheless, they would be more fortunate than the “reserve army of the unemployed” – a pool of idle labor large enough to make others fear losing their job, but small enough not to waste the surplus value that could be extracted by making them work.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/does-capitalism-cause-poverty-by-ricardo-hausmann-2015-08#ZHmOTir0drCVm34s.99

Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?

August 14, 2015

Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?

QUESTION: Marty, you have written many times how everything is connected and how in Asian culture that is the foundation of all understanding. Why is it so hard in the West to comprehend this fundamental concept?

All the best

ANSWER: I think it is all part of the idea that we can alter society forcing it to do as we desire. Politics is based upon this. Socialism is all about robbing one class to benefit the other. There is no comprehension that everything is connected and this permeates analysis as well. This is not my personal discovery for many have seen these connections in Eastern Philosophies. I think in economics, politicians are not interested in such realizations for it means they are not the masters of the universe.

You take Obama’s policy against Russia. He has effectively been disrupting everything around Europe and the consequences are pouring in refugees to Europe and his sanctions have hurt European farmers and the economy. It is not deliberate, but it is reckless for there is no recognition of how everything is connected.

Every action has a consequence. We have the Fed lowered rates to help the banks. But that crisis is over and the consequence has been to create the next crisis – the defaults of pensions and insurance companies that required high interest rates. So many regulations required pension funds to own government bonds. The regulations have set the stage for the next crisis.

We cannot escape this connectivity. Whatever action we take has a consequence. It is impossible to manipulate markets and the economy for there will always be unintended collateral damage. We are living in the era that will bring about a collapse of socialism precisely as took place in communism. Government is incapable of ever managing society for they cannot escape the inter-connectivity.

The Social Cost of Capitalism

August 12, 2015

The Social Cost of Capitalism

Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties. For example, currently 3 million gallons of toxic waste water from a Colorado mine has escaped and is working its way down two rivers into Utah and Lake Powell. At least seven city water systems dependent on the rivers have been shut down. The waste was left by private enterprise, and the waste was accidentally released by the Environmental Protection Agency, which might be true or might be a coverup for the mine. If the Lake Powell reservoir ends up polluted, it is likely that the cost of the mine imposed on third parties exceeds the total value of the mine’s output over its entire life.

Economists call these costs “external costs” or “social costs.” The mine made its profits by creating pollutants, the cost of which is born by those who had no share in the profits.

As this is the way regulated capitalism works, you can imagine how bad unregulated capitalism would be. Just think about the unregulated financial system, the consequences we are still suffering with more to come.

Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices.

If only.

Progressives have their own counterpart to the libertarians’ romanticism. Progressives regard government as the white knight that protects the public from the greed of capitalists.

If only.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gold and the Grave Dancers

August 1, 2015

Gold and the Grave Dancers

The Asset They Love to Hate …

Back in the 1960s, Alan Greenspan wrote a well-known essay that to this day is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the present-day monetary and economic system (which is a kind of “fascism lite” type of statism, masquerading as capitalism) and especially the almost visceral hate etatistes harbor toward gold. Greenspan’s essay is entitled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, and as the title already suggests, the two are intimately connected.

Alan Greenspan in the mid 1970s – although he later turned out to be a sell-out, his understanding of economics undoubtedly dwarfed that of his successors at the Fed (and we are not just saying this based on the essay discussed here).

Photo credit: Charles Kelly / AP Photo

What makes Greenspan’s essay especially noteworthy is that it manages to present both theory and history in a concise, easy to understand manner. There isn’t a word in it we would change. At one point, Greenspan provides a brief history lesson. Yes, the (relatively) free banking era in the United States in the 19^th century involved fractional reserve banking and as a result, there were frequent boom and bust cycles. However, since there was no “lender of last resort” with an unlimited money printing capacity, these business cycles were sharp and brief, and the market economy quickly righted itself every time:

“A fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not as yet been achieved. But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cronies, Polluters and Funny Money

July 31, 2015

Cronies, Polluters and Funny Money

What’s Really Killing Capitalism

VANCOUVER, Canada – Hillary is taking the bull by the horns… and putting the knife between her teeth. She is a “take-charge” candidate and aims to let us know.

Yes, earlier his week, she promised to improve capitalism. Now, it’s the climate of planet Earth that has her attention. She’s going to make it better by decreasing carbon emissions – by force, of course.

Clinton Saints preserve us! Now she wants to “save the planet” too. Ironically not even the reds and professional scaremongers are happy with her “climate change” contortions (as seen in the Guardian, a hotbed of climate alarmism and a preferred medium of assorted limousine socialists).

Photo credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Next week, presumably, she will vanquish death itself.

But let us turn to the markets. On Tuesday night as the sun set, things were looking up. From Bloomberg:

U.S. stocks rose, ending their longest losing streak since January, amid better-than-forecast earnings and as Chinese equities pulled back from a selloff.

Whether the rebound continues… or collapses altogether… we wait to find out. Unlike Ms. Clinton, we are a slave to God and to the markets; we are not their master.

As we reported on Tuesday, Hillary also wants to punish investors who don’t hold on to their positions for long enough. She never mentioned that meddlers like herself largely caused the problem of “short-termism” in the stock market.

In a free economy, people choose how long to hold on to their stocks, according to what suits them. Some are investing for generations. Some are retiring soon. Some are traders, looking to profit from short-term moves in the market.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Capitalism, Engineered Dependencies and the Eurozone

July 26, 2015

Capitalism, Engineered Dependencies and the Eurozone

Greece

As fact and metaphor the ongoing crisis in Greece is the vanguard of broad social disintegration across the capitalist West. IMF Director Christine Lagarde is being put forward as the voice of reason calling for writing down Greece’s debt to manageable levels. But her actual public statements have paid deference to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s suggestion, a slight variation on Barack Obama’s mortgage ‘rescue’ packages, that maturities be extended but that people be left with debts far greater than they can reasonably pay. As attractive as permanent debt servitude might appear to those demanding it, it is a form of economic extraction, a transfer of economic production from nominal borrowers to banks and bankers.

Current IMF tactics are being placed in a neo-Cold War frame with the U.S. trying to maintain European political stability on the side of the U.S. against Russia and China. But the broader tendency is toward collective suicide through imperialist revival economics, a global race to replicate Western consumption through increasingly ‘managed’ capitalism and through renewed competition for resources that led to the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century. The geopolitical frame understates the crudeness of the economic logic that gives banker / creditor ‘workouts’ the appearance of geopolitical machinations. The economic relations in play are ‘political,’ but they derive from economic ideology that preceded the Cold War by a half-century or more.

The practical problem with the neo-Cold War frame is that it takes the underlying economic relations as given when they are in fact causal. The euphemistically-called ‘trade’ agreements being pushed by the ‘developed’ West grant broad authority over civil governance to multi-national corporations, the point being that the ideology that drives corporate actions is economic, not ‘political’ in the Western liberal sense of the term.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dismal and Hopeful Future

July 22, 2015

The Dismal and Hopeful Future

One doesn’t have to be a brilliant social analyst to see that the contemporary world order is doomed, destined to start visibly crumbling within the next decade or two at the latest. The neoliberal system, in fact the corporate capitalist system, is radically unsustainable. It is too unstable, too universally rapacious, too humanly exploitative and environmentally destructive, too demoniacally self-consuming–for capitalism can profit from its self-immolation!–to last much longer.

Is it even necessary anymore to argue for these claims?

Capitalism means self-sabotage. Its profit-making interest lies in paying wage-earners as little as possible, and ideally in mechanizing and automating them out of existence, for they’re expensive and troublesome with their demands for “rights” and other such nonsense. On the other hand, capitalism needs markets; it needs entities to sell things to, for that’s how it makes profit. Any sort of entity would serve its purposes–alien creatures, super-advanced machines, genetically enhanced chimpanzees, whatever–but, tragically, capitalism has so far been forced to do business with the very beings it exploits and wants to deny income to: humans!

Cruel irony! The mass of mankind, against which capitalism wars in the sphere of production, it has to make nice to in the sphere of consumption, to blandish and cajole into buying commodities. This fusion of consumer and producer in the same being is the tragic contradiction that torments capitalism and drives it to manic-depression–exuberance followed by depression followed by exuberance. The capitalist elite revels in Romanesque orgies as it squeezes money out of the sweat and blood of the workers, but the party ends once markets have, as a result, so shrunk–or the worm of doubt has so grown in the minds of investors–that investment is cut back to the point of ending growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity

July 21, 2015

Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity

We live in an era of ecological crisis, which is a direct result of human actions. Natural scientists have been debating whether the current historical epoch should be called the Anthropocene, in order to mark the period in which human activities became the primary driver of global ecological change.^[1]

Initially, it was proposed that this new epoch, corresponding with the rise of modern capitalist and industrial development, began in the eighteenth century. The growth imperative of capitalism, as well as other sociocultural changes, is a primary factor generating major environmental problems that culminate in ecological crisis.^[2]

It has become increasingly clear that humans face an existential crisis. The environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben explains:

Earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived…. The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different planet…. This is one of those rare moments, the start of a change far larger and more thoroughgoing than anything we can read in the records of man, on a par with the biggest dangers we can read in the records of rock and ice.^[3]

Many modern ecological problems are referred to as a tragedy of the commons, a concept developed by Garrett Hardin in the 1960s to describe the overexploitation or despoliation of natural resources.^[4]We contend that they are actually associated with the tragedy of the commodity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is another way possible?

July 18, 2015

Is another way possible?

A roundup of news, views and ideas from the mainstream press and the blogosphere. Click on the headline link to see the full article.

Urban Gardening in Greece – a New Form of Protest
Orestes Kolokouris, Green European Journal
Guerrilla gardening and local consumer-producer networks are redefining life in today’s Greek cities. While the crisis has shifted politicians’ attention away from the climate, “transition and recovery movements” work hard to keep the environment on the agenda.
—
… Environmental politics were never well developed in Greece, but in the last years before the economic crisis the Greek environmental movement has had a short “renaissance”. First, there was the movement against the Olympic Games, which helped reinforce other local urban movements fighting to reclaim public spaces for societal use. Secondly, the massive series of forest fires in 2007 led to an increased public awareness about the causes and effects of global warming, which then led to the creation of new environmental grassroots movements (e.g. Green Attack, Bloggers, Guerrilla Gardeners etc.), and the reinforcement of the Greek Green Party that gained an MEP in the 2009 European elections. This in turn has led to the “greening” of the public discourse of other political parties (mainly Pasok and Syriza). Finally, the Greek riots of December 2008 and the participating youth movements have led to the creation of new social experiments around the social and solidarity economy, this involves the so called “transition and recovery movements” (movements aiming to transform economical activities and every-day life rather than to protest and reclaim changes from the authorities) or the theory of degrowth.

… Urban agriculture essentially did not exist until very recently in Greece. Its rapid development coincides with the rapid deterioration of living standards in Greek society in recent years due to the deep crisis. But it roots can be traced back to a few years earlier: to the first years of the 21st century, when small libertarian and alternative and ecological circles decided to experiment with this way of life.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Riots in Athens: EU’s Impending Collapse?

July 16, 2015

Riots in Athens: EU’s Impending Collapse?

People move events. The Greek people are trying to shape their own history. They aren’t there yet—even the Left hasn’t quite joined them. But a coalescence of forces is on the horizon: either Syriza radicalizes or it will be left behind. Capitalism by its very harshness is creating its own antithesis. Ideological labels are not important; what is, is a genuine people’s government. The riots in Athens, while the Greek Parliament passed the austerity measures, may be the first sign of the breakup of the EU, itself a political formation of advanced capitalism unable to meet the needs of its poorer members.

“Breakup” is too strong a term. Shrinkage, disruption, and greater transparency, the last signifying EU’s role as spearhead for US-defined globalization, the mix of market fundamentalism and militarism, would be difficult to hide and all three revealing unity as a German-inspired economic monolith for achieving an intra-Europe division of labor, nations rich (North) and poor (South), while providing political cover for NATO in its continued prosecution of the Cold War. Austerity is repression, pure and simple. It is also, as I recently pointed out, the framework for class warfare, in both cases to the extreme detriment of working people. The people in the Athens street know this, know that Tsipras and Syriza have not done right by them. The public workers’ union went out on strike Wednesday. Crowds gathered before Parliament in the evening. Tsakalotos, the new finance minister, was shaken, reluctant to approve the bailout, in microcosm, representing the many, in and out of the party, who saw the mounting pressures and if not succumbed then made a forced choice.

This was not the affirmation one expects from a basic settlement, and rather, a period of deliberation, of gathering force that, should the EU turn the screws further, might well explode, not as revolution, but a willingness to say No and from there leave the eurozone and the EU itself.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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