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The Politics of Tyranny
The Politics of Tyranny
“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”
—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.
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The Green New Deal and Accursed Wealth
The Green New Deal and Accursed Wealth
Pulp mills, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Accursed Wealth! O’er bounding human laws,
Of every evil thou remains’t the cause:
Victims of want, those wretches such as me,
Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee:
Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed,
And thine our loss of labour and of bread.
Al Gore missed this memo, written at some time between 1809 and 1813, by the poet John Clare in Norhamptonshire, England. However, in his latest op-ed, It’s Not too Late – The climate crisis is the battle of our time and we can win, in the New York Times, September 22, 2019, the former Vice President helpfully notes that the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer and the second fastest- growing is wind turbine service technician. The loss of Clare’s world is un-remediated. The loss of our world, apparently, is salved by the growth of mostly low-wage ‘green-tech’ jobs. Clare, at least, identifies the cause of his loss – Accursed Wealth, or, as we might call it today, capitalism.
Gore, in his best, ever youthful, Gee-Wiz journalese proclaims that, “…we are in the early stages of a sustainable revolution that will achieve the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the digital revolution, made possible by new digital tools”. John Clare’s erstwhile bucolic freedom had been proscribed by the British parliament’s Enclosure Acts early in the nineteenth century, under which he lost his rights to the common lands that were seized for the benefit of proto-capitalist land-owners newly cognizant of the wealth generated by grazing sheep. Wool, like cotton, was a fiber fundamental to the modern capitalist ethos whereby the acquisition of wealth transcended the interests of both humanity and the natural world.
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Green Party Debates Green New Deal
Green Party Debates Green New Deal
Despite the furor over the Green New Deal (GND), many of its supporters have no idea of the wide variety of views on it, especially within the Green Party (GP), where it originated in the US. From June through August, 2019 Missouri Greens held public discussions contrasting at least three distinct GP views to those from the Democratic Party (DP).
In June, the Green Party of St. Louis hosted a forum “The Green New Deal: Promise and Problems.” It led off with Ben Eisenberg of the Sunrise Movement describing his concerns with climate change and the extreme need for political groups to demand a switch to “100% clean, renewable energy” by 2030. Local Greens had coordinated an Extinction Rebellion protest at corporate Earth Day in April and realized the widespread appeal of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AOC approach.
Henry Robertson of the Missouri Green Party followed, criticizing the popular DP perspective that climate problems require “a massive, urgent response.” He emphasized the destructiveness of economic growth and concluded “massive is not the cure for massiveness.” Robertson pointed out that “steel can’t be mass-produced without fossil fuels” and insisted that the Earth has hit its limits, meaning that production must be cut back.
Howie Hawkins, who spoke next, was the first to run for office on a GND platform as the 2010 New York Green Party candidate. He said that his original US program for a GND seeks 100% renewable energy by 2030 along with the right to single-payer healthcare, a guaranteed job at a living wage and affordable housing. It would create 20 million jobs and end destructive extraction.
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The Disaster of Negative Interest Rates
The Disaster of Negative Interest Rates
The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory. Investors were fleeing into the dollar, prompting President Trump to tweet on Aug. 30:
The Euro is dropping against the Dollar “like crazy,” giving them a big export and manufacturing advantage… And the Fed does NOTHING!
When the ECB cut its key rate as anticipated, from a negative 0.4% to a negative 0.5%, the president tweeted on Sept. 11:
The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term.
And on Sept. 12 he tweeted:
European Central Bank, acting quickly, Cuts Rates 10 Basis Points. They are trying, and succeeding, in depreciating the Euro against the VERY strong Dollar, hurting U.S. exports…. And the Fed sits, and sits, and sits. They get paid to borrow money, while we are paying interest!
However, negative interest rates have not been shown to stimulate the economies that have tried them, and they would wreak havoc on the U.S. economy, for reasons unique to the U.S. dollar. The ECB has not gone to negative interest rates to gain an export advantage. It is to keep the European Union from falling apart, something that could happen if the United Kingdom does indeed pull out and Italy follows suit, as it has threatened to do. If what Trump wants is cheap borrowing rates for the U.S. federal government, there is a safer and easier way to get them.
The Real Reason the ECB Has Gone to Negative Interest Rates
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The Illusion of Saving the World
The Illusion of Saving the World
At the end of this month, as you probably know by now, an extraordinary hoopla event will descend on Manhattan in the form of a “Climate Action Summit,” summoned by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, to get the nations of the world finally to take seriously the threat of “global warming” and pledge to actually take serious action to save the world from catastrophe.
The chances of that happening are nil.
Oh, yes there will be speeches and promises. Under increasing pressure from alarmed citizens, led by the enlightened youth of the world who know they will be the primary victims of the coming environmental disaster, most national leaders will toss around ideas like carbon taxes, bans on coal mining and nuclear energy, building “retrofitting,” renewable solar fuels, carbon dioxide entrapment, and “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions. Some will be willing to start doing something about one or another, while simultaneously asking for somebody else to pay for the astronomic costs.
But the whole thing is an illusion. The problem is too big, the solutions too imperfect, and the timing, even if everything got fixed in a decade, is too late.
Most scientists believe, with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that if the earth’s temperature should increase by 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Farenheit) the rise in sea levels would engulf 280 million people, earthquakes could wipe out 17.6 million, and subsequent droughts and famines would like result in another 231 million, not to mention uncontrolled worldwide migrations, the collapse of many fragile states, and the threat of civil disorder throughout the developed world.
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Pesticides in the Dock: Ecological Apocalypse But Business as Usual
Pesticides in the Dock: Ecological Apocalypse But Business as Usual
In a new paper published in King’s Law Journal – ‘The Chemical Anthropocene: Glyphosate as a Case Study of Pesticide Exposures’ – the authors Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hale Hendlin state:
“As the science against glyphosate safety mounts and lawsuits threaten its chemical manufacture’s profits, the next generation of GMO crops are being keyed to the pesticide dicamba, sold commercially as XtendiMax® – and poised to be the next glyphosate. Regulatory agencies have historically been quick to approve products but slow to reconsider regulations after the decades of accumulated harms become apparent.”
They add that the entrenched asymmetries between public and ecological health and fast-to-market new chemicals is exacerbated by the seeming lack of institutionalised precautionary policies.
According to environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason, these ‘entrenched asymmetries’ result from the corporate capture of key policy-making bodies and their subversion by agri-food oligopolies.
In her new report, ‘Why Does Bayer Crop Science Control Chemicals in Brexit Britain’, she states that Bayer is having secret meetings with the British government to determine which agrochemicals are to be used after Brexit once Britain is ‘free’ of EU restrictions and becomes as deregulated as the US.
Such collusion comes as little surprise to Mason who says the government’s ‘strategy for UK life sciences’ is already dependent on funding from pharmaceutical corporations and the pesticides industry:
“Syngenta’s parent company is AstraZeneca. In 2010, Syngenta and AstraZeneca were represented on the UK Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Foods, Consumer Products and the Environment. The founder of Syngenta, Michael Pragnell CBE, was the Chairman of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) from 2011-2017. CRUK started by giving money (£450 million/year) to the Government’s Strategy for UK Life Sciences and AstraZeneca provided 22 compounds to academic research to develop medicines. AstraZeneca manufactures six different anti-cancer drugs mainly aimed at breast and prostate cancer.”
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Strike for the Environment, Strike for Social Justice, Strike!
Strike for the Environment, Strike for Social Justice, Strike!
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A very large chasm exists between those in power, including most of the 2020 presidential candidates, and environmentalists and scientists intent on acting now to resolve growing environmental crises. To reiterate what is known, the United Nations, through its IPCC and the IPBES committees, has provided comprehensive evidence that little time remains to avert catastrophic global warming. And the world is already in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.
Given that oligarchs, corporate executives and politicians are at least in theory physical beings as dependent on a livable world as the rest of us, it is incompatible views of the world that are illustrated by this indifference. Some people care more about wealth and power than they do about the environment, the planet and the rest of us. Lest this be confused with the human condition, the power to destroy the world has only existed for about seven decades.
The conclusion of the UN committees, considered conservative by many environmentalists, is that the opportunity to make incremental changes to industrial practices has passed. There is no way to achieve necessary goals without quickly and radically reorganizing Western political economy. And the alternative isn’t to continue on the current path. Doing nothing will alter the world in ways that will put hundreds of millions of people’s lives and livelihoods at risk.
Graph: the IPCC estimated that the world has twelve years from one year ago to cut carbon emissions in half or adverse consequences will rise at an increasing (exponential) rate. Many environmental scientists view this window as too conservative. They argue that adverse consequences are already assured by carbon releases to date. The American political class remains unbowed. Climate science believers in congress have joined deniers to assure that no environmental legislation of consequence will be passed. Source: c2es.org.
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Extinction Via Rugged Individualism
Extinction Via Rugged Individualism
Black-tailed Prairie Dog, Greycliff, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
I was recently amused by a train of thought on Twitter excoriating Henry David Thoreau for his experiment in self-sufficient living. True, he was on the land of his wealthy neighbor, his mother did his laundry (and brought him old-timey donuts to eat), but it was rugged, dammit. Okay, it was something akin to a 10 year old living in a tree-house in the backyard with mom sending up sandwiches in one of those nifty rope and bucket contraptions, but this was a white man doing something and writing about it so of course it’s monumental and imbued with all sorts of significance. This to me, is a perfect analogy for America and its early beginnings. Never mind the back-breaking labor provided by the women, the horrendous slave trade and lethal work that made the infrastructure possible–the convenient clearing (genocide) of the already here peoples through illness and murder……. the narrative is that it was magically produced by powdered wig donning men who weren’t just all about a self-serving course correction. This fallacy has permeated the psyche of most Americans, and doesn’t allow for adequate self-reflection or improvement, and I would say is a path to eventual extinction if a new narrative and belief system isn’t adopted.
Nature gives us ample metaphor to realize the interconnectedness of our lives. I can never look at an Aspen grove and not consider the exquisite synergy of the system. All tethered together in an interlocking root system—what affects one tree, manifests in the whole. The 80,000 year old Pando grove in Utah has managed this interplay. For perspective, the last Neanderthals in Europe seem to have been around about 40,000 years ago. Working together has its benefits. We’ve managed to do incredible harm in only about 300 years. We could be gone rapidly and take Pando with us at this rate.
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Extinction Rebellion: What is it?
Extinction Rebellion: What is it?
The climate crisis is turning average law-abiding people into raging law-breaking eco rebels, by boatloads. Extinction Rebellion (ER) is at the forefront, demanding that governments declare climate emergencies and take urgent action.
In that regard, ER, which started in the UK, says government must reduce carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025, or else! Social chaos will spring loose from within the darkened shadows of a raging climate, bringing civilized society to its knees and within current lifetimes. For proof, read the science, which says it all. We’re doomed without taking action to cut greenhouse emissions to Net Zero.
In that regard, in November 2018 ER activist extraordinaire Jenny Shearer super glued herself to a railing outside the glorious golden-trimmed gates of Buckingham Palace in expectation that: “This will get the Royal family to come and join us.” Meanwhile, another 2,000 ER activists brought a coffin, which symbolized a “sure-fire death sentence” facing the “next generation” vestiges of the present-day crisis.
For ER warriors, the climate crisis is like a freight train with failing breaks barreling down a mountainside headed for a massive wipeout of society. Regrettably, it’ll happen way too soon to take comfort today.
This coming October 31st marks the one-year anniversary of ER from beginnings on Parliament Square on October 31st 2018 when the ER leaders announced a Declaration of Rebellion against the UK government, expecting a couple hundred people to attend. Surprisingly, 1,500 showed up to exercise their right to peaceful civil disobedience whilst breaking the law and getting arrested.
Shortly thereafter, 6,000 ER activists peacefully blocked five major bridges across the River Thames. They planted trees in the middle of Parliament Square, and dug a hole for a coffin. Additionally, they lie down in streets or at entryways to public buildings, bringing parts of London and other UK cities to a standstill.
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Freedom of the Press? Not in the U.S.
Freedom of the Press? Not in the U.S.
The United States ranks 48th among nations for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders. Since few other countries have the equivalent of our First Amendment, learning that we rank below Botswana and Slovenia may come as a surprise.
Mostly the organization pins this dismal state of affairs on Trump’s attacks on the news media. They reference the White House’s revocation of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press card, the president’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” jibes and his tacit approval of the grisly murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by the government of Saudi Arabia. “At least one White House correspondent has hired private security for fear of their life after receiving death threats, and newsrooms throughout the country have been plagued by bomb threats and were the recipients of other potentially dangerous packages, prompting journalism organizations to reconsider the security of their staffs in a uniquely hostile environment,” reports RWB. (Cry me a river! I’ve received hundreds of death threats.)
Like most other mainstream analyses of the state of press, RWB focuses on how easy it is for large, corporate-owned media conglomerates with establishmentarian political orientations to do their jobs.
Independent journalists, especially those whose politics are left of the Democrats or right of the Republicans, have much bigger problems than deep-pocketed mega-conglomerates like CNN.
No consideration of freedom of the press in the U.S. is complete without a hard look at the case of Julian Assange. The founder and publisher of WikiLeaks is rotting in an English prison, awaiting extradition to the United States for possession and dissemination of classified information—exactly what The New York Times did when it published the Pentagon Papers and the Edward Snowden revelations.
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The War on Nature
The War on Nature
Ancient Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese and Indians respected or worshipped several gods. Those gods were usually forces of nature, which opened the mind, eyes and hearts of human beings to the mysteries, beauty and truth of the natural world.
The vast human majorities of the ancient world were peasant farmers and shepherds who cultivated the land and raised food and tended animals.
The winds, rains and the snow, the trees, the different plants and grasses growing for their sheep and goats and cattle, were not abstractions but real manifestations of nature affecting them daily and giving them clues about life and their own fortunes. They noticed the different birds living near them and flying to the water of the creeks, lakes and rivers, according to the seasons. And soon they figured the appropriate time of the year, season, for growing wheat and caring for the olive trees for the life-saving olive oil and grape vines for their sweet wine.
Ancient people tried to make sense of the gigantic forces of the natural world. They looked at the sky and saw countless stars lighting the evening heavens. They were dazzled and sometimes frightened by these flickering bodies in the sky so far away from them. They usually associated these slowly moving stars with gods who influenced their lives.
People saw the gigantic Sun “rising” in the East and “setting” in the West. They noticed the Moon was close to the Earth and, in fact, moved around the Earth, linking it to their monthly calendar.
The priests of the gods were students of nature. They often gave meaning to phenomena difficult to comprehend like rain, snow, lightning and thunder. The priests explained and familiarized nature to those celebrating the gods. They made them confident that humans and other animals and the natural world were related and lived in the same world.
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Neoliberalism and Environmental Calamity
Neoliberalism and Environmental Calamity
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Current conditions represent a political emergency of sorts, meaning that ways of solving environmental and social problems will either be worked out or circumstances, led by the environment, will assume a life of their own. Given that these conditions are the result of historical processes that were decades and centuries in the making, understanding how we got here is crucial to resolving them.
The relevant ‘we’ here is being redefined through the relation of late-stage capitalism to the world. Climate change and species loss are shifting boundaries, shrinking the universe of arable land, breathable air and drinkable water. Fortress America, previously a conflation of place with one’s status in the imperial order, is largely the source of this vengeful gravity. Political geography is about to get interesting.
In this regard, the IPCC just won’t quit issuing proclamations. Joining climate change and mass extinction is dead and dying land. It seems that you can’t just denude a few hundred million acres of arable land, destroying the ecosystems to which it belongs, without consequences. What mystical clairvoyance could have imagined such an outcome? And more to the point, what can be done about it?
With updates on the breadth and depth of environmental calamity coming fast and furious, still missing is the political path to salvation. The only certainty— as offered by the authors of said calamity, is that we, the little people who add up to 90% or thereabouts of the demos, want— nay demand, calamity. The proof: we still eat, live indoors, wear clothing and find our way to and from work.
However, this is but mere paraphrase. The direct proof is that we consume. And we do so through the social mechanisms— stores, the internet, etc., that have been provided. From this slim foundation the certainty is built that we ‘demanded’ state corporatism, a/k/a neoliberalism, a/k/a rule from above. Markets are the transfer mechanism through which the purchase of a bag of rice becomes support for industrial agriculture.
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Farm Rot is Eating America Alive
Farm Rot is Eating America Alive
American politics covers up the bleeding of nature
Listen to the Democratic presidential candidates Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They promise a more democratic, equal, just, compassionate and civilized America. But the statistics they cite are numbing. Millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Additional millions have no medical insurance. Three billionaires own as much as 150 million Americans. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless.
How different is this picture from the picture of France on the eve of the French Revolution? Inequality alone says not much. In contrast to the French, we “elected” king Trump. He owns several Versailles.
This distressing political reality in 2019 America is riddled with the bullets of madmen. Young Americans, desperate for meaning and a future, arm themselves for a minute in the TV Sun. They hear Trump badmouthing the non-white immigrants from Mexico and Central America and resort to the mayhem of El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio: killing innocent Americans and immigrants, the anger of the killers finding a murderous outlet.
In this condition of domestic upheaval, Americans have no time or interest for anything else. They are obsessed with survival. They see Congress and the Supreme Court and the White House taking care of the billionaire class, as Senator Sanders rightly defines the tiny minority of wealth and power behind the broken government in Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, Trump is like an extraterrestrial despot visiting Washington, DC, in order to keep the White House in perpetual chaos, play golf in his exclusive resort in Florida, and tweet his orders to the world.
This political reality could be out of a fictional best seller, but it is not. It dazzles, confuses, and angers Americans. Trivia becomes king.
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Climate Crisis Means the Ruling Class has Failed. Can the Working Class Inherit the Earth?
Climate Crisis Means the Ruling Class has Failed. Can the Working Class Inherit the Earth?
The climate crisis is proof positive that the ruling class is an utter failure — but it will not fall on its own. Can the working class rise to the challenge? It sure will help if we understand that our class interests are not merely the economic needs of working people — no matter how important that is — but the universal interests of a healthy planet for all the people. Let’s start acting like it.
The corporate solutions to the climate crisis must dodge the causes of the crisis. The ruling class uses deception and secrecy to limit public debate. When the facts become obvious and overwhelming corporate politicians simply refuse to debate it. Gag rules are back in fashion. When the people demand a Green New Deal the same politicians water it down and disarm it.
Power For Profit is Still the Prime Directive
Meanwhile, the Corporate State pursues the only agenda it has ever known: power and profit. If we accept corporate empire as normal, natural or eternal there is nothing left but better management, technical fixes, adaptation, and illusions of endless growth.
Since corporate capitalism is a “grow or die” system, it cannot consider limits even at a time when planetary limits are on display for all to see and verified by our best science. For example, there is no place in corporate plans for the conservation of energy despite the fact that energy not used is the truest form of clean energy. Instead of keeping in the ground, it’s always more and more.
Former Trump Secretary of State and former Exxon-Mobile CEO, Rex Tillerson repeats the managerial view.
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Pounding Heat Clobbers Greenland
Pounding Heat Clobbers Greenland
Photograph Source: Ralf Roletschek – GFDL 1.2
Greenland is one of the biggest targets for global warming, in part, because it’s so big it’s hard to miss. And sure enough, only recently crazy halting weather with inordinate hot temperature hit Greenland bull’s-eye, dead-on with one helluva meltdown.
That’s bad news for pretty much everybody on the planet.
On the hottest days, the melt-off could fill 3 billion Olympic-sized pools end-to-end, extending from California to Maine, back and forth, 17,000 times. Eureka! That’s only one day. It’s staggering.
What’s going on?
The easy answer: Greenland is melting because global warming is acting up, a lot. But, it’s more complicated. Part of the meltdown includes a 4-mile-wide iceberg that broke off the Helheim Glacier July 11th. That’s equivalent to a small town floating/melting along the southeastern coastline of Greenland.
In that regard, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists: “Climate Hot Map, Helheim Glacier – The glacier was stable from the 1950s to 2000.” Thereafter, rapidly rising temps jarred it loose from its stable moorings, losing five miles of ice in its first five years of the 21stcentury. Oops! So much for 50 years of stability.
In point of fact, Greenland’s glaciers, in toto, have doubled their rate of retreat this century, which is more than any historical data. That’s not only ominous, it’s indicative of the enormous power behind anthropogenic turbo-charged climate change. It’s happening fast and faster.
But still, it’s not unusual for parts of Greenland to melt every summer when the planet tilts its northern face towards the sun. Then, year-by-year with regularity about 10% of the ice sheet hits a melting point. However, this year the first big heat wave in June hit 45% of the ice sheet with melting points as air temps hovered 10°C to 15°C above normal, which is beach weather for Greenland.
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