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Capitalism

We Can Solve The Climate Crisis!

Climate change is unfolding at an increasingly rapid rate with more severe droughts, storms, wildfires and floods impacting the globe. Yet, the capitalists continue to plunder the planet and extract fossil fuels, destroying ecosystems and increasing warming. The 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that we have 12 years to avert runaway catastrophe. That call to action becomes more urgent by the day while the majority of governments globally take limited actions that fail to meet the urgency of the crisis.  The very system of capitalism itself is the cause of climate change with the Global North holding the majority of responsibility due to earlier development and consumer lifestyles.

Scheer Intelligence: Capitalism Killed The Rock-and-Roll Star

Jonathan Taplin may not be a household name, but he has been behind the scenes of some of the most influential moments in 20th century American music. As the description of Taplin’s latest book notes, the University of Southern California professor emeritus has made waves in every one of the past several decades: “he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the ’60s, producer of major films in the ’70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium.” Taplin joins Robert Scheer on this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss his fascinating career as well as his friendships and encounters with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,  Martin Scorsese, Eric Clapton, and many others, all of which is captured in his new memoir, “The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock-and-Roll Life.” 

The Myth Of Black Buying Power Is Robbing Black People Of Their Power

The myth of black buying power - that black people collectively hold trillions of dollars in wealth and that they could improve their economic status if only they 'spent their money more wisely' - has been used for more than a century to take the focus off the systemic racism and uphold capitalism. Dr. Jared Ball, author of "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power," explains what is behind this myth and why it is still actively embraced today despite evidence to the contrary. He talks about what power is and what we must do to build it.

On Contact: Emergence Of The Global Police State

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the emergence of the global police state with Professor William I. Robinson. Robinson’s new book, The Global Police State, uses shocking data to reveal how far capitalism has become a system of repression. He argues the emerging megacities of the world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the oppressed face off against the global police state. Robinson is Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies, at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Among his many award-winning books are Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (CUP, 2014) and We Will Not Be Silenced (Pluto, 2017).

Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry For The Future’

The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020) is a magnificent novel but also an especially welcome resource for thinking about ecosocialist initiatives for a near-future global Green New Deal. Could not be more timely! This was my initial impression upon reading it last week. After some reflection, I am somewhat more critical but still highly recommend this novel for its inspiration and provocation — particularly because of how Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) concretely addresses the radical transformation of real existing capitalism dominated by its militarized fossil legacy. Ministry should certainly be subject to critique, but KSR has his heart in the left place! After reading KSR’s novel 2140 in 2019, I sent him an email suggesting that his scenario for this post–climate catastrophe New York City would be more relevant to the near-future pre–climate catastrophe early 21st century.

Manifesto: Draft Proposal For The Founding Of The International Working Peoples Association, 1979

Lorenzo Kom’boa  Ervin is probably best known for Anarchism and the Black Revolution, a fifty-six page manifesto that was arguably the first work to systematically apply the principles and theories of anarchism to the history of Black struggle and the question of Black liberation. First published in 1979, Anarchism and the Black Revolution  was written while the Chattanooga-born Irvin was incarcerated in the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois serving a life sentence for hijacking . Ervin was first introduced to anarchism during an interim stint in the Federal Detention Center in...

Money Is Made Up

Have you ever noticed how online capitalism cultists who condescendingly tell socialists they "just don't understand economics" are always unable to lucidly defend their own understanding of economics? If you've never pressed such a character to clearly and concisely explain what it is you "don't understand" using their own words, I highly recommend that you try it, because it's one of the funniest things in the world. If you keep interrogating them about each aspect of their belief system, demanding that they explain exactly what it is they know and how they know it, they will invariably end up getting frustrated and telling you to listen to this or that economist if they don't rage quit on you altogether first.

Carbon Offsets Offer A Fantasy Of Capitalism Without Crises

Governments, companies and sometimes entire sectors are increasingly proposing to use carbon offsets in response to the deepening climate crisis. In theory, offsetting allows organisations to compensate for their own emissions by paying towards low-carbon projects elsewhere, but the practice has been mired in scientific problems and scandals, and it has been widely critiqued in the social sciences. With the UK government now seeking to turn London into a global hub for the carbon offset trade, it’s worth asking why it is still so prominent. My research on what I have called the fantasy of carbon offsetting helps explain the situation. Carbon offset credits are created when a standards organisation declares that a project has reduced or avoided greenhouse gas emissions (a solar farm that “replaces” a coal power plant, say) or instead has removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored it somewhere (by planting lots of trees, for instance).

We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide

On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days after the storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it was easy enough to miss an article published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, despite its eye-catching title: “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words piling up in front of a modifier more suitable to a 1950s horror comic than a sober, academic journal. But there it was: The 17 scientists who co-wrote the article, the experts who peer-reviewed it, and the journal’s editors did not consider the word “ghastly” too sensational, subjective, or value-laden to describe the future toward which our society is advancing with all the prudence and caution of a runaway locomotive.

The Fight For Women’s Rights Is A Fight Against Capitalism

International Women’s Day was founded after 15,000 women marched through New York City in 1908 to demand three things: better hours, better pay, and voting rights. In most of the world, the last of these has been cemented – but the pandemic has thrown the former two into jeopardy. In summer 2020, the McKinsey Global Institute reported that around the world, women were at 1.8 times the risk of Covid redundancy compared to the risk facing men. Research from the University of Exeter also found that women in the UK were twice as likely to have lost their job during the first wave of the pandemic. Around 133,000 more women were furloughed during the first wave, too, meaning more are likely in line for redundancies when the scheme ends. In the UK, as redundancies have proliferated, men’s employment has now fallen more than women’s – but that women were often first in the firing line indicates qualitative divisions in work.

Racial Capitalism And The Betrayal Of Haiti

The day after his already paper-thin constitutional legitimacy completely eroded, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse gave significant amounts of the country’s land to a light-skinned tycoon working with Coca-Cola. According to most Haitian constitutional authorities and institutions, Moïse’s presidential mandate ended on Sunday, February 7, 2021. But the next day, Le Moniteur—the official journal of the Republic of Haiti—published a presidential decree gifting 8,600 hectares of the country’s agricultural land reserves to produce stevia, a main ingredient in Coca-Cola’s zero-sugar beverages. Alongside land in the Artibonite and Plateau Central regions, Moïse put up US$18 million for a new Free Agro-Industrial Export Zone run by the Apaid family. It is outrageous, notes civil society group Le Regroupement des Haïtiens de Montréal contre l’occupation d’Haïti, that the state would offer land to a firm producing for Coca-Cola rather than invest in local food production in a country where nearly 42 percent of the population, or four million people, are experiencing acute hunger.

March 8: Day Of Revolutionary And Working Women, Not Queens And Exploiters

On the 8th of March, we commemorate working women, revolutionary women. Clara Zetkin, later a founder of the German Communist Party, proposed the commemoration in a conference of socialist women in 1920, to pay homage to the struggle of women against capitalist exploitation.  We remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 26, 1911, in the US where 146 women textile workers were burned alive in a factory with the exits chained shut, assassinated by Big Capital. We commemorate the fight for social justice, for the rights of the working class, and the struggle against patriarchy and capitalism, which are inextricably linked. March 8 also stands out as a highly revolutionary date because of the events of 1917 in Czarist Russia when thousands of women came out into the streets demanding their rights, protesting exploitation and...

Capitalism And Political Violence At Home And Abroad

Question: why do both conservative and liberal governments in the U.S. install right-wing governments abroad if ‘the U.S.’ opposes right-wing political violence? While right and left politics may seem to have limited descriptive value in many current conflicts, the interests of capital, broadly considered, represent an unwavering motive for them. Why then would military conflict in the interests of capital not be considered a left / right concern within the American political frame? Part of the answer is the Cold War conceptual shift away from conflicts between nations to a battle of ideologies. Another is the way that these conflicts are sold. To be clear, there are plenty of American nationalists who support militarism outside of their direct economic interests.

Lee Camp: It’s Time For Major Wealth Redistribution

It’s time for wealth redistribution. There, I said it.  I know it’s the third rail of politics, but I’m not running for a damn thing, which makes me free to speak the truth. (Well, I am running for president of my neighborhood elementary school’s PTA, but I’m pretty sure I’ll win easily since my campaign slogan is “Extend the school day to 20 hours because we don’t want to deal with those little monsters. You take ‘em!” . . . Well, I’ll win as long as they don’t find out I don’t have a child.) Anyway, we desperately need wealth redistribution. And before anyone starts yelling something about Joseph Stalin, here’s the part that’s going to blow your mind — in the United States we’ve already had wealth redistribution for decades.

The Fake Debate Over A Minimum Wage

Capitalism’s “conservative” defenders yet again oppose raising the minimum wage. They fought raising it in the past much as they tried to prevent the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) that first mandated a U.S. minimum wage. The major argument opponents have used is this: setting or raising a minimum wage threatens small employers. They may collapse or else fire employees; either way, jobs are lost. What is conveniently assumed here is a necessary contradiction between minimum wages and small business jobs. That assumption enables opponents to claim that not setting a legal minimum wage, like not raising it, saves jobs. The system thus presents very poorly paid workers with this choice: low wages or no wages.
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