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BlackRock says we’re all doomed. It’s being optimistic
BlackRock says we’re all doomed. It’s being optimistic
The world’s largest asset manager has forecast systemic economic chaos. The reality is even worse
EU fails to reduce dependency on fossil fuels amid soaring energy bills
EU fails to reduce dependency on fossil fuels amid soaring energy bills,
As the global energy crisis intensifies, the EU is renewing its commitment to fossil fuels instead of investing in green energy
European Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson speaks about European solutions to the rise of energy prices for businesses and consumers at the European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France October 6, 2021.
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Jean-Francois Badias/Pool via REUTERS
Pandora Papers Show True Face of Global Britain
Pandora Papers Show True Face of Global Britain
Through its network of tax havens, the U.K. is the fulcrum of a system that benefits the rich and powerful writes Adam Ramsay.
Cherie and Tony and Blair in 2003. The former U.K. prime minister and his wife are among those mentioned in the Pandora Papers. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Perhaps more than anything else, the Pandora Papers — the tranche of documents published Sunday night, which reveal the secret wealth of the world’s rich and powerful — tell a story about Britain.
There’s the role, for instance, played by the British Virgin Islands, an overseas territory of the U.K. that functions as a tax haven. Czechia’s multimillionaire prime minister used the territory to hide his ownership of a chateau in France. Others, including the family of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and Vladimir Putin’s PR man, have made similar use of the islands to conceal wealth — while Tony and Cherie Blair reportedly saved £312,000 in stamp duty when they bought a London property from a company registered in the British Virgin Islands in 2017.
Then there’s London itself. The leaked documents show how the King of Jordan squirrelled personal cash away in the capital’s property market, as did key allies of Imran Khan, Pakistan’s president.
More details will emerge in the coming days. But one thing is already clear. This isn’t a story about countries on the periphery of the world economy. It is a story about how the British state drives a global system in which the richest extract wealth from the rest.
British Through & Through
Cayman Islands government administration building. (Kmanian345, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
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Global transformation: the precariat overcoming populism
Global transformation: the precariat overcoming populism
A contribution to debate urging the mainstream left not to be distracted by populism. Aim instead for what we know about the near Future.
Toulouse delivery men from Uber Eats or Deliveroo protest against precarity. December, 2020. Alain Pitton/PA. All rights reserved.
Those included the days-of-rage phase that culminated in the mass protest in Peterloo in 1819, brutally suppressed by the state, and the Luddites, misrepresented ever since as being workers intent on smashing machines to halt ‘progress’, when in fact what they were doing was protesting at the destruction of a way of living and working being done without a quid pro quo.
In my A Precariat Charter written in 2014, sketching a precariat manifesto for today’s Global Transformation, I concluded by citing the stanza from Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, written in reaction to the Peterloo massacre. Jeremy Corbyn was later to cite it in his campaign speech of 2017, which James Schneider recalls in his contribution to this debate. Shelley expressed it in class, not populist terms, as I did, in my case signifying that the precariat was evolving as a class-in-the-making. Corbyn seems to have expressed it in support of a left populism.
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Preparing for the end of the world as we know it
Preparing for the end of the world as we know it
For many Indigenous people, the collapse of our current system is not necessarily bad news.
Image: Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, all rights reserved
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a collective of researchers, artists, educators, activists and Indigenous knowledge keepers from the Global North and South. Our collective focuses on how artistic and educational practices can gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures. We work at the interface of questions related to historical, systemic and on-going violence and questions related to the unsustainability of “modernity-coloniality”. We use the term modernity-coloniality to mark the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides.
Drawing on Indigenous critiques and practices from the communities we collaborate with in Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Canada, we propose that a decolonial future requires a different mode of (co-) existence that will only be made possible with and through the end of the world as we know it, which is a world that has been built and is maintained by different forms of violence and unsustainability.
There is a popular saying in Brazil that illustrates this insight. It states that, in a flood situation, it is only when the water reaches people’s hips that it becomes possible for them to swim. Before that, with the water at our ankles or knees, it is only possible to walk, or to wade. In other words, we might only be able to learn to swim – that is, to exist differently – once we have no other choice. But in the meantime, we can prepare by learning to open ourselves up to the teachings of the water, as well as the teachings of those who have been swimming for their lives against multiple currents of colonial violence.
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Pandenomics: a story of life versus growth
Pandenomics: a story of life versus growth
The clash between business-as-usual economics and the pandemic shows what we really need from our economy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about breathing, recently: how our organisms take life-supporting oxygen from Earth’s clement atmosphere, and exhale waste carbon dioxide back out. I’ve been thinking about how pleasant and normal each breath is, and about the victims of COVID-19, now dying at the rate of thousands every day, their lungs destroyed, gasping desperately for their share of breath. Breath denied.
My research is on the social science side of climate change: trying to understand how we can live better lives using less energy and natural resources. How to protect ourselves and our life support systems at the same time – and what kind of economics would allow us to do this. There are many lessons that translate to the current pandemic-induced economic crisis. Welcome to my crash course in pandenomics: the economics we need in a time of pandemic. Rather fortunately, the lessons also apply to our larger time of climate crisis – this is a revolution we must win now, but from which we will reap benefits far into the future.
Our time of need
The clash between business-as-usual economics and the pandemic demonstrates what we really need from our economy. As businesses and leisure activities grind to a halt, specific categories of jobs are protected. Work and workers we once took for granted now appear clearly as the titans underpinning our daily lives: nurses, doctors, healthcare workers in general, hospital cleaners, grocery store cashiers, stackers and delivery drivers. Somehow, stockbrokers and airline magnates failed to make the list.
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Development: a failed project
Development: a failed project
It’s time to abandon development and think about postdevelopment instead.
“They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. […] I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted – harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population – about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.”
– Aime Césaire (1950): ‘Discourse on Colonialism’
Let’s not beat around the bush: to understand the problems with current ‘development’ discourse and practice there is no alternative other than situating ‘development’ as a construct that has resulted from colonialism and that continues to perpetuate itself within this legacy. Nothing illustrates this better than the above quote from Aime Césaire’s powerful essay on the ‘Discourse on Colonialism’. It almost reads like a contemporary critique of failed development interventions, sharply dissecting extractivism, fetishism of economic growth, the global division of labour and the marginalisation of non-Western worldviews, cosmovisions, imaginaries. The text is almost 70 years old, yet its relevance today could not be clearer.
What are the problems with ‘development’?
I only write about ‘development’ in inverted commas. The word, the concept, the practice has been (ab)used for such a broad variety of specific agendas, all of them structured by power hierarchies and asymmetries. Depending on fashionable fads, ‘development’ has come to be conceptualised as development-as-growth, development-as-progress, development-as-empowerment and many more. Fundamentally, ‘development’ has become what Gustavo Esteva calls an ‘amoeba’ term – one lacking any real meaning.
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False hopes for a Green New Deal
False hopes for a Green New Deal
If the ‘Green New Deal’ is our best answer to the climate crisis, then we have no answer to the climate crisis.
In recent months the ‘Green New Deal’ has given hope to many on the Left as a promising solution to climate breakdown. Having been championed by the Sunrise Movement and figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in the US, excitement for the Green New Deal has spread to the UK with the launch of the ‘Labour for a Green New Deal’ campaign.
Successive local Labour Party branches have passed motions in support of the programme, and the UK Labour Party itself has launched consultations for a ‘Green Industrial Revolution.’ Recently, the progressive think-tank Common Wealth published a ‘road map’ for implementing sweeping reforms for a greener and fairer economy, providing the most detailed description yet of what a Green New Deal might look like.
The Green New Deal promises everything. Its advocates anticipate a green industrial revolution led by workers, forging a power-grid run on renewables, a new and luxurious electrified transport system and affordable homes retrofitted for energy-efficiency. Our economy will be one of ethics and environmental stewardship, producing only what is socially-useful, with low-carbon lifestyles for all and with investors investing for sustainable ends. We will see employment for all, workers on shorter hours enjoying high-paid green jobs and a democratised workplace. Equally as important, the UK will enact this great renewable transition without perpetuating colonial resource extraction abroad. It all sounds too good to be true.
That’s because it is. Basic enquiry into the details of the Green New Deal reveals a failure to confront the political and economic realities leading to climate breakdown.
Capitalism’s dilemma
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The open Amazon and its enemies: a call for action and optimism
The open Amazon and its enemies: a call for action and optimism
The Amazon, now on fire, has become the central political and geopolitical hot spot for humanity’s right to its own future. Optimism is the gasoline that must feed the fight.
June and July have been the hottest months on record in the Western Hemisphere as the climate crisis escalates. This summer, the ice in Greenland has been melting at an unseen rate under an unprecedented heat wave. Droughts and wildfires are on the rise ravaging significant forest surfaces, and the role of the rainforest as a carbon dioxide absorber is being jeopardized by a substantial acceleration in deforestation efforts.
The Amazon basin, which contains 40% of the world’s rainforest, plays a very complex yet central role as a buffer of climate change. It functions as a cooler of the atmosphere through moisture evaporation and it produces its own rainfall in the dry season while also capturing carbon and acting as the Earth’s lungs.
But lately, the Amazon’s vulnerability has become apparent, as fires have been spreading at an unprecedented rate. As Leonardo DiCaprio put it to his 34 million Instagram followers in a post: “the lungs of the Earth are in flames.” Data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research shows that from January to July, 4.6 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon went ablaze, a 62 percent increase over last year. We are facing a full scale ecocide case here.
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One hundred years after World War I, are we heading back to the abyss?
One hundred years after World War I, are we heading back to the abyss?
On the anniversary of the Great War’s end, we should reflect on its causes, consequences and lessons for the future.
Today we live in a world that is not dissimilar to the pre-WWI world, when a few emperors and their families controlled the fate of the vast majority of the world’s population. In 1914, all it took to trigger the Great War was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a nationalist Serb. The assassination took place on June 28. Five years later to the day, on June 28, 1919 – almost exactly 100 years ago – the Great War formally came to an end, but at the cost of approximately 40 million lives.
There are no empires in the old sense now, but there are self-centered leaders who are just as powerful as any emperor in history. Some of these leaders are the kind of bullies who would not think twice before making potentially catastrophic decisions, merely to keep up the appearance of ‘strong men.’ Consider this list: Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro. What do they all have in common? They have too much power and display autocratic tendencies when exercising it.
Whether you are a genius scientist in the United States, a peace-loving poet in Brazil, or a great philosopher in Iran, the truth is that your fate is, to some degree, in the hands of a man who, in a more rational world, would not even be allowed to care for a pet. Whatever we tell ourselves about the elite who control politics nationally, regionally, and globally, there is one embarrassing fact we need to face: we have surrendered our destiny, and the well-being of the planet, to a bunch of bullies. This should be disturbing for everyone.
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Degrowth as a concrete utopia
Degrowth as a concrete utopia
Economic growth can’t reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation. Español
“My Visit to the Mountain Homestead.” Credit: Flickr/Eli Duke. CC BY 2.0.
The emergence of interest in degrowth can be traced back to the 1st International Degrowth Conference organized in Paris in 2008. At this conference, degrowth was defined as a “voluntary transition towards a just, participatory, and ecologically sustainable society,” so challenging the dogma of economic growth. Another five international conferences were organized between 2010 and 2018, with the latest in Malmo in August.
This year also saw the publication of Giorgos Kallis’ landmark book Degrowth,which opens with three bold statements. First, the global economy should slow down to avert the destruction of Earth’s life support systems, because a higher rate of production and consumption will run parallel to higher rates of damage to the environment. Hence, we should extract, produce and consume less, and we should do it all differently. Since growth-based economies collapse without growth we have to establish a radically different economic system and way of living in order to prosper in the future.
Second, economic growth is no longer desirable. An increasing share of GDP growth is devoted to ‘defensive expenditure,’ meaning the costs people face as a result of environmental externalities such as pollution. Hence, growth (at least in rich countries) has become “un-economic:” its benefits no longer exceed its costs.
Third, growth is always based on exploitation, because it is driven by investment that, in turn, depends on surplus. If capitalists or governments paid for the real value of work then they would have no surplus and there would be no growth. Hence, growth cannot reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation.
The growth paradigm.
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Seven ways to build the solidarity economy
Seven ways to build the solidarity economy
We can transform capitalism by encouraging the ‘better angels of our nature.’
Credit: Flickr/Cogdogblog. CC BY 2.0.
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The solidarity economy is a global movement to build a post-capitalist world that puts people and planet front and center, rather than the pursuit of blind growth and profit maximization. It isn’t a blueprint but a framework that includes a broad range of economic practices that align with its values: solidarity, participatory democracy, equity in every dimension including race, class and gender, sustainability and pluralism, which means that it can’t be a one-size-fits all approach. Nevertheless, the notion of buen vivir, or living well and in harmony with nature and each other permeates everything the movement does.
Some of these practices are old and some are new; some are mainstream and others are ‘alternative.’ Solidarity economy practices exist in every sector of the economy: production, distribution and exchange, consumption, finance and governance/state. People often think about cooperatives and credit unions which are collectively owned and managed by their members, but they are just one example. Others include community land trusts, participatory budgeting, social currencies, time banks, peer lending, barter systems, gift exchange, community gardens, ideas around ‘the commons,’ some kinds of fair trade and the sharing economy, and non-monetized care work.
The idea of the solidarity economy is to build on and knit together all of these practices in order to transform capitalism by lifting up and encouraging the ‘better angels of our nature.’ Rather than making a virtue out of the pursuit of calculated self-interest, profit maximization, and competition—the things that underpin capitalism—this economy nurtures our capacity for solidarity, cooperation, reciprocity, mutual aid, altruism, caring, sharing, compassion and love. Increasingly, research across many disciplines has shown that we are hard wired to cooperate—that in fact, the survival of the human species has depended on our ability to work together.
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Neoliberalism drives climate breakdown, not human nature
Neoliberalism drives climate breakdown, not human nature
Attempts by the New York Times to blame humanity as a whole for climate change let the real culprits off the hook.
Many zoos have an exhibit like this: a wall with a hatch, and under the hatch words like “Do you want to see the most dangerous animal in the world?”. Of course everyone does, and before they open the hatch they speculate as to what the animal behind the hatch will be. A lion? A crocodile? However, when you open the hatch there is a mirror, and you see yourself staring back. You are the most dangerous animal in the world.
Of course this is nonsense. Not everyone who opens that hatch and sees themselves looking back is equally dangerous. We are not all equally responsible for destruction of the world’s ecosystems. Some humans who open the hatch probably are responsible for a great deal of destruction. Other are not. Many people bear the brunt of someone else’s destruction.
The idea that all humanity is equally and collectively responsible for climate change – or any other environmental or social problem – is extremely weak. In a basic and easily calculable way, not everyone is responsible for the same quantity of greenhouse gasses. People in the world’s poorest countries produce roughly one hundredth of the emissions of the richest people in the richest countries. Through the chance of our births, and the lifestyle we choose we are not all equally responsible for climate change.
But we are not all equally responsible in a more fundamental way. Some people through the power they wield, have stood in the way of halting climate change. Not because they were stubborn or incompetent or failed to understand the seriousness.
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Confronting the money-power elite
Confronting the money-power elite
Those who control the creation and allocation of money are able to control every other aspect of society. Shouldn’t that be us?
Credit: Flickr/Liz West. CC BY 2.0.
The world today is controlled by a small elite group that has been increasingly concentrating power and wealth in their own hands. There are many observable facets to this power structure, including the military security complex that President Eisenhower warned against, the fossil fuel interests, and the neoconservatives and others that are promoting US hegemony around the world, but the most powerful and overarching force is the ‘money power’ that controls money, banking, and finance worldwide. It is clear that those who control the creation and allocation of money through the banking system are able to control virtually every other aspect of society.
What can be done to turn the tide? How can we empower ourselves to assert our desires for a more fair, humane and peaceful world order? I believe that the greatest possibility of bringing about the desired changes lies in economic and political innovation and restructuring.
The monopolization of credit.
I came to realize many years ago that the primary mechanism by which people are controlled is the system of money, banking, and finance. The power elite have long known this and have used it to enrich themselves and consolidate their grip. Though we take it for granted, money has become an utter necessity for surviving in the modern world. But unlike water, air, food, and energy, money is not a natural substance—it is a human contrivance, and it has been contrived in such a way as to centralize power and concentrate wealth.
Money today is essentially credit, and the control of our collective credit has been monopolized in the hands of a cartel comprised of huge private banks with the complicity of politicians who control central governments.
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Storm warnings
Image: Tom Gill, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
“The test of science is its ability to predict”
— Richard Feynman
As if governed by some deterministic law, the current debates between economists and critics follow a predictable path. Critics begin by mentioning the failure of economists to predict or warn of the crisis. Howard Reed for example recently wrote in Prospect that ‘When the great crash hit a decade ago, the public realised that the economics profession was clueless.’
Thus provoked, economists then reply by pointing out that macroeconomic forecasting is only a small part of what economists do, that their models are based on mathematics and logical consistency, and that it is critics who don’t know what they are talking about – as in the riposte by Diane Coyle, which describes Reed’s piece as ‘lamentable’, a ‘caricature’ and an ‘ill-informed diatribe’ that furthermore ignores existing guidelines on what criticism is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (the former includes ‘The criticism is by an economist’ which doesn’t seem in the multidisciplinary spirit, and would rule out this piece since I am an applied mathematician).
In a similar debate last year in Times Higher Education, Steve Keen wrote that the global financial crisis caught ‘leading economists and policy bodies completely by surprise. A decade later, economics is a divided and lost discipline.’ Christopher Auld responded that ‘Criticism of economics that relegates the field to … failed “weather” forecasting is not just misguided, it is anti-intellectual and dangerous.’
Over in the Guardian, Larry Elliott wrote that ‘Neoclassical economics has become an unquestioned belief system and treats those challenging the creed as dangerous’. A group of economists from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) appeared to confirm the latter when they called the article ‘dangerous’ and ‘ill-informed expert bashing … Like most economists, we do not try to forecast the date of the next financial crisis, or any other such event. We are not astrologers, nor priests to the market gods. We analyse data.’
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