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The Green Growth Delusion
Advocates of “Green Growth” promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future. But what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?
A tree is surrounded by solar panels in Los Arcos, Spain, on Feb. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File)
In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also an act of desperation. Our energy-ravenous culture cannot continue producing carbon without destroying the systems that are the basis of any advanced civilization, not to mention life itself. Something must be done, and quickly, to moderate the pressure on the atmospheric sink while powering the economic machine.
The consensus on the need for scaling up renewable energy is rarely disturbed by a disquieting possibility: What if techno-industrial society as currently conceived — based on ever-increasing GDP, global trade and travel, and complex global production and distribution chains designed to satisfy the rich world’s unquenchable appetite for bigger, faster, more of everything — what if that simply cannot function without energy-dense fossil fuels? What if, despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods?
This possibility is not mentioned thanks to the dominance of “green growth.” This is the idea that the organizing principle of our civilization — endless growth of economies and populations — can be decarbonized swiftly in a way that will involve no material disruption. Green Growth holds out the promise of transitioning from fossil fuels directly into something like an earth-friendly utopia without a hitch and without meaningful sacrifice…
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How the U.S. Shattered the Middle East
How the U.S. Shattered the Middle East
Yemen is a nightmare, a catastrophe, a mess—and the United States is highly complicit in the whole disaster. Refueling Saudi aircraft in-flight, providing targeting intelligence to the kingdom and selling the requisite bombs that have been dropped for years now on Yemeni civilians places the 100,000-plus deaths, millions of refugees, and (still) starving children squarely on the American conscience. If, that is, Washington can still claim to have a conscience.
The back story in Yemen, already the Arab world’s poorest country, is relevant. Briefly, the cataclysm went something like this: Protests against the U.S.-backed dictator during the Arab Spring broke out in 2011. After a bit, an indecisive and hesitant President Obama called for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down. A Saudi-backed transitional government took over but governed (surprise, surprise) poorly. Then, from 2014 to 2015, a vaguely Shiite militia from Yemen’s north swarmed southward and seized the capital, along with half the country. At that point, rather than broker a peace, the U.S. quietly went along with, and militarily supported, a Saudi terror-bombing campaign, starvation blockade and mercenary invasion that mainly affected Yemeni civilians. At that point, Yemen had broken in two.
Now, as the Saudi campaign has clearly faltered—despite killing tens of thousands of civilians and starving at least 85,000 children to death along the way—stalemate reigns. Until this past week, that is, when southern separatists (there was once, before 1990, a South and North Yemen) seized the major port city of Yemen, backed by the Saudis’ ostensible partners in crime, the United Arab Emirates. So it was that there were then threeYemens, and ever more fracture. In the last few days, the Saudi-backed transitional government retook Aden, but southern separatism seems stronger than ever in the region.
The Global Economy Is a Time Bomb Waiting to Explode
The Global Economy Is a Time Bomb Waiting to Explode
In the aftermath of the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression, then–chief of staff for the Obama administration Rahm Emanuel made the call for aggressive action to prevent a recurrence of the meltdown of 2008.
Although the U.S. government’s system of checks and balances typically produces incremental reform, Emanuel suggested that during times of financial upheaval, the traditional levers of powers are often scrambled, thereby creating unique conditions whereby legislators could be pushed in the direction of more radical reform. That’s why he suggested that we should never let a crisis go to waste. Ironically, that might be the only pearl of wisdom we ever got from the soon-to-be ex-mayor of Chicago, one of those figures who otherwise embodied the worst Wall Street-centric instincts of the Democratic Party. But give Rahm props for this one useful insight.
But we did let the crisis of 2008 go to waste. Rather than reconstructing a new foundation out of the wreckage, we simply restored the status quo ante, and left the world’s elite financial engineers with a relatively free hand to create a wide range of new destructive financial instruments.
To cite some examples, consider the case of the UK, where England’s local councils have taken on significant risk via structural financial products known as “LOBO loans” (lender option borrower option). Financial blogger Rob Carver explains how they work:
“[Let’s] say I offer to lend you £40 and charge you 3% interest for 5 years. Some other guy comes along and offers you the same deal; but the twist is he will have the option to ask for his money back whenever he likes.
“You wouldn’t borrow money from him because it’s clearly a worse deal. …
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Goodbye to the Dollar
Goodbye to the Dollar
The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire—the abandonment of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. Nations around the globe, especially in Europe, have lost confidence in the United States to act rationally, much less lead, in issues of international finance, trade, diplomacy and war. These nations are quietly dismantling the seven-decade-old alliance with the United States and building alternative systems of bilateral trade. This reconfiguring of the world’s financial system will be fatal to the American empire, as the historian Alfred McCoy and the economist Michael Hudsonhave long pointed out. It will trigger an economic death spiral, including high inflation, which will necessitate a massive military contraction overseas and plunge the United States into a prolonged depression. Trump, rather than make America great again, has turned out, unwittingly, to be the empire’s most aggressive gravedigger.
The Trump administration has capriciously sabotaged the global institutions, including NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, which provide cover and lend legitimacy to American imperialism and global economic hegemony. The American empire, as McCoy points out, was always a hybrid of past empires. It developed, he writes, “a distinctive form of global governance that incorporated aspects of antecedent empires, ancient and modern. This unique U.S. imperium was Athenian in its ability to forge coalitions among allies; Roman in its reliance on legions that occupied military bases across most of the known world; and British in its aspiration to merge culture, commerce, and alliances into a comprehensive system that covered the globe.”
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The CIA’s Masterful Use of Fake News
The CIA’s Masterful Use of Fake News
In early 1954, writing in the magazine Encounter, F.R. Allemann slammed the ex-prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, for alleged abuses. In a “Letter from Teheran” titled “Persia: Land of Unrealities,” Allemann referred to Mosaddegh’s aborted term as a “pseudo-revolutionary pseudo-dictatorship” and claimed Mosaddegh could only cram laws through Iran’s Parliament by summoning thugs to street protests—that is, through demagoguery.
Allemann depicted Mosaddegh’s rallies as “terror campaign[s] of the political-religious secret societies” whose vocal support gave only the impression of a genuine mass movement. Lest the London-based magazine’s white, European readership miss these subtle cues to revile the out-of-office politician, Allemann, a Swiss journalist, offered his readers a buffet of Orientalist buzzwords. Rather than a rational leader elected by his people, Mosaddegh instead was a charismatic “dervish,” and “nobody was more inclined toward Munchausen escapades [like those of Mosaddegh’s incumbency] than the Oriental in general and the Persian in particular.”
Decades later, one must ask, where were Encounter’s fact-checkers? Contrary to the article, Mosaddegh was legally elected during a period of robust Iranian democracy, and he was known as a beloved leader and a fiery speaker. His was such an iconic voice for his people that he was voted Time magazine’s Man of the Year after being named prime minister. It was strange that such venom as Allemann’s should describe a popular democrat once praised by President Harry Truman. Was Allemann signaling some conflict between the respective interests of Mosaddegh and Encounter?
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Your Complete Guide to the N.Y. Times’ Support of U.S.-Backed Coups in Latin America
Your Complete Guide to the N.Y. Times’ Support of U.S.-Backed Coups in Latin America
On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.
A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.
Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.
More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There. When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:
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Crucifying Julian Assange
Crucifying Julian Assange
Julian Assange’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the process of being revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical care. His efforts for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules, including Ecuadorian orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside the embassy in fighting revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf of Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in Ecuador, led by Lenín Moreno—who calls Assange an “inherited problem” and an impediment to better relations with Washington—is making the WikiLeaks founder’s life in the embassy unbearable. Almost daily, the embassy is imposing harsher conditions for Assange, including making him pay his medical bills, imposing arcane rules about how he must care for his cat and demanding that he perform a variety of demeaning housekeeping chores.
The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political asylum and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so unpleasant he will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British and extradited to the United States. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, whose government granted the publisher political asylum, describes Assange’s current living conditions as “torture.”
His mother, Christine Assange, said in a recent video appeal, “Despite Julian being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the public interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain—silenced in solitary confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of London.
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The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom
The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom
The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher—the maniacal goal of the U.S. government—would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason. It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites. If Assange is extradited to the United States and sentenced, The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other media organization, no matter how tepid their coverage of the corporate state, would be subject to the same draconian censorship. Under the precedent set, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court would enthusiastically uphold the arrest and imprisonment of any publisher, editor or reporter in the name of national security.
There are growing signs that the Ecuadorean government of Lenín Moreno is preparing to evict Assange and turn him over to British police. Moreno and his foreign minister, José Valencia, have confirmed they are in negotiations with the British government to “resolve” the fate of Assange. Moreno, who will visit Britain in a few weeks, calls Assange an “inherited problem” and “a stone in the shoe” and has referred to him as a “hacker.” It appears that under a Moreno government Assange is no longer welcome in Ecuador. His only hope now is safe passage to his native Australia or another country willing to give him asylum.
“Ecuador has been looking for a solution to this problem,” Valencia commented on television. “The refuge is not forever, you cannot expect it to last for years without us reviewing this situation, including because this violates the rights of the refugee.”
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The Coming Collapse
The Coming Collapse
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics.
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The Tragic Record of American Regime Change
The Tragic Record of American Regime Change
We used to call him “Mookie.” God, we hated him. Back in 2006-07, while patrolling the streets of east Baghdad, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia was our sworn enemy. These impoverished, slum-dwelling Shiite youths hit us with sniper fire and deadly improvised explosive devices day after day. They killed and maimed American troops daily, including my boys—Alex Fuller and Mike Balsley—who died Jan. 25, 2007. We’d patch up our wounded, call in a medevac helicopter, then roll back into those city streets the very next day. As we patrolled, Sadr’s ubiquitous face would taunt us, plastered as it was on billboards, posters and flags throughout the neighborhood.
Now, in a truth stranger than fiction, Sadr’s political party has won the recent Iraqi elections. The former warlord and killer of Americans may now play kingmaker in Iraq. Of course, mine is only one—highly biased—side of the story. From Sadr’s perspective, we were occupiers, a foreign military force with no legitimacy in his country. Perhaps he had a point. Still, Sadr’s victory demonstrates just how far off the rails America’s project in Iraq has gone, and it epitomizes the unintended consequences of offensive war and regime change.
When the United States uses its impressive military machine to topple a tyrant—in this case, Saddam Hussein—it’s impossible to predict the course of the chaos that follows. Fracture a society, it seems, and the most nefarious (and well-armed) actors often rise to the top: militiamen, criminal elements, Islamists and sociopaths of various stripes. Sadr is just one example.
Still, Washington never seems to learn. Since October 2001, our military has been ordered to topple at least three sovereign governments—those of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya—and is theoretically seeking to overthrow another regime in Syria.
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America the Pariah
America the Pariah
We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a Shining City on a Hill.
—President Ronald Reagan, 1984
I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.
—President Barack Obama, 2014
It has become obligatory. To be taken seriously in American politics, one must kneel before the altar of “American exceptionalism”—the messianic notion that the United States is a constant source for good in the world with a unique mission to spread its particular values.
At times, this manifests itself in absurdist minutiae, such as then-presidential candidate Barack Obama sparking controversy when he was seen without the requisite American flag pin on the lapel of his suit jacket. Gasp. Lambasted in the press for this unpatriotic symbolic gaffe, Obama soon sported the compulsory pin. He sported it safely through the presidency.
Both major political parties have long since reached a consensus of sorts on extolling America’s messianic global mission. To even question the contours of that crusade—despite 17 years of failing military quagmires—is to commit political suicide and be relegated to the margins of public life.
For once, the mainstream politicians might be right. A rigorous look at the United States of 2018 (or 2002, or 1850, for that matter) indicates that America may well be exceptional—only not in the ways most of its citizens think. On many issues and several levels, America’s culture of militarism (both at home and abroad) stands out as the unique dark side of the exceptionalist project. We are, in fact, extraordinary among the family of nations. Unfortunately, that which makes us exceptional is the dogged militarism that consistently brands the U.S. as an international pariah.
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Lies We Tell Ourselves
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
— A. E. Housman, 1859-1936
Seven of my soldiers are dead. Two committed suicide. Bombs got the others in Iraq and Afghanistan. One young man lost three limbs. Another is paralyzed. I entered West Point a couple of months before 9/11. Eight of my classmates died “over there.”
Military service, war, sacrifice—when I was 17, I felt sure this would bring me meaning, adulation, even glory. It went another way. Sixteen years later, my generation of soldiers is still ensnared in an indecisive, unfulfilling series of losing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Niger—who even keeps count anymore? Sometimes, I allow myself to wonder what it’s all been for.
I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who sees it. Nonetheless, you hear few dissenting voices among the veterans of the “global war on terror.” See, soldiers are all “professionals” now, at least since Richard Nixon ditched the draft in 1973. Mostly the troops—especially the officers—uphold an unwritten code, speak in esoteric vernacular and hide behind a veil of reticence. It’s a camouflage wall as thick as the “blue line” of police silence. Maybe it’s necessary to keep the machine running. I used to believe that. Sometimes, though, we tell you lies. Don’t take it personally: We tell them to each other and ourselves as well.
Consider just three:
1. Soldiers don’t fight (or die) for king, country or apple pie. They do it for each other, for teammates and friends. Think Henry V’s “band of brothers.” In that sense, the troops can never be said to die for nothing.
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Elites ‘Have No Credibility Left’: Interview With Journalist Chris Hedges
Elites ‘Have No Credibility Left’: Interview With Journalist Chris Hedges
On Monday, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North interviewed Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, lecturer and former New York Times correspondent. Among Hedges’ best-known books are War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, The Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he co-wrote with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, and Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt.
In an article published in Truthdig September 17, titled “The Silencing of Dissent,” Hedges referenced the WSWS coverage of Google’s censorship of left-wing sites and warned about the growth of “blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of ‘fake news.’”
Hedges wrote that “the Department of Justice called on RT America and its ‘associates’—which may mean people like me—to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent.”
North’s interview with Hedges began with a discussion of the significance of the anti-Russia campaign in the media.
Chris Hedges: It’s as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. It is an absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation—critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
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William Perry Interview: Former Defense Secretary Who Negotiated With N. Korea Warns Civilization Is at Risk
William Perry Interview: Former Defense Secretary Who Negotiated With N. Korea Warns Civilization Is at Risk
William Perry has had a long career in government, serving in the Pentagon under Presidents Carter and Reagan before becoming President Clinton’s secretary of defense in 1994.
“We stand today, I believe, in greater danger of nuclear catastrophe than we faced during the Cold War,” Perry tells host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in this week’s episode of KCRW’s “Scheer Intelligence.” This interview was conducted Aug. 9, the 72nd anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack on Nagasaki.
Since his time in the Pentagon, Perry has founded the William J. Perry Project, which aims to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons. He has also written a book, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink.”
Perry and Scheer discuss how the expansion of NATO in the 1990s factors into the rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia. Perry calls this expansion “the first step” in escalating tensions. The “second step,” he says, was “installing ballistic missile defense systems in Eastern Europe.”
“Our response to Russia on the objections to these various actions we were taking basically was, ‘What can you do about it? You’re an insignificant power today,’ ” Perry says. “The reason Putin is so popular today is that he has taken actions that, in [Russians’] view, allow Russia to stand as a great power and overcome this humiliating position they were in … so we stand today in a position of hostility between the United States and Russia, comparable to where we stood in the Cold War. In the meantime, we still have many thousands of nuclear weapons.”
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Chris Hedges on Trump’s ‘Naked Kleptocracy’
Chris Hedges on Trump’s ‘Naked Kleptocracy’
Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges recently made an appearance on the RT show “Watching the Hawks” to analyze the future of American politics under President Trump. Right off the bat, Hedges is asked what he sees as “the most compelling or intriguing aspect of this election.”
“Utter blindness of the Democratic Party,” he answers. “And I would have to add the Republican elites, epitomized by Jeb Bush and others.”
Hedges, who once characterized the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a choice between neoliberalism and fascism, expands upon the ideological forces at play behind Trump’s popularity.
The Americans who voted for Trump “picked a faux-populist,” Hedges says. “They picked a figure who’s a con artist, who told them what they wanted to hear.”
As for the incoming Trump administration, Hedges believes it will be “a naked kleptocracy.”
Hedges, referencing his Truthdig column “Con vs. Con,” notes that Trump is a con man—but his way of deceiving the American public is more “naked” than that of the political establishment.
Hedges states that, moving forward, he doesn’t believe the Democratic Party will recognize its blind spots. He argues, for instance, that Sen. Chuck Schumer “is the go-to guy if you want Wall Street money in the Democratic Party” and that Schumer “epitomizes all the characteristics that the electorate turned against.”
President-elect Trump, Hedges continues, won’t be able to stand up to these establishment forces because Trump is “malleable and easily manipulated.”
“I just don’t see him having either the experience or the fortitude to stand up against the deep state,” Hedges says. “And let’s be fair, Obama didn’t either.”
He also discusses the faux-threat of Russia and the growing “new McCarthyism” here in the United States.
Finally, Hedges is questioned about the future of the American political system: Is there anything to be hopeful for?
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