{"id":25360,"date":"2017-09-08T06:43:40","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T11:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25360"},"modified":"2017-09-08T06:43:40","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T11:43:40","slug":"capitalism-the-state-and-the-drowning-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25360","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism, the State and the Drowning of America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Capitalism, the State and the Drowning of America<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photograph Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As Hurricane Harvey lashed Texas, Naomi Klein<\/a> wasted no time in diagnosing the \u201creal root causes\u201d behind the disaster, indicting \u201cclimate pollution, systemic racism, underfunding of social services, and overfunding of police.\u201d A day after her essay appeared, George Monbiot<\/a> argued that no one wants to ask the tough questions about the coastal flooding spawned during Hurricane Harvey because to do so would be to challenge capitalism\u2014a system wedded to \u201cperpetual growth on a finite planet\u201d\u2014and call into question the very foundations of \u201cthe entire political and economic system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the two choices, I vote for Monbiot\u2019s interpretation. Nearly forty years ago, the historian Donald Worster<\/a> in his classic study of one of the worst natural disasters in world history, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, wrote that capitalism, which he understood as an economic culture founded on maximizing imperatives and a determination to treat nature as a form of capital, \u201chas been the decisive factor in this nation\u2019s use of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Care must be taken not to imagine capitalism as a timeless phenomenon. Capitalism has a history and that history is important if we are to properly diagnose what happened recently in Texas and is about to happen as Hurricane Irma bears down on Florida. What we need to understand is how capitalism has managed to reproduce itself since the Great Depression, but in a way that has put enormous numbers of people and tremendous amounts of property in harm\u2019s way along the stretch from Texas to New England.<\/p>\n

The production of risk began during the era of what is sometimes called regulated capitalism between the 1930s and the early 1970s. This form of capitalism with a \u201chuman face\u201d involved state intervention to ensure a modicum of economic freedom but it also led the federal government to undertake sweeping efforts to control nature.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Capitalism, the State and the Drowning of America Photograph Nathaniel St. Clair As Hurricane Harvey lashed Texas, Naomi Klein wasted no time in diagnosing the \u201creal root causes\u201d behind the disaster, indicting \u201cclimate pollution, systemic racism, underfunding of social services, and overfunding of police.\u201d A day after her essay appeared, George Monbiot argued that no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[111,5493,2327,2328,13937,15920,15921],"class_list":["post-25360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-capitalism","tag-counterpunch","tag-finite-planet","tag-infinite-growth","tag-state-intervention","tag-ted-steinberg","tag-the-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25361,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25360\/revisions\/25361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}