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There will be no jobs on a cooked planet

15 Apr

What is it with union and political ‘leaders’ who treat their members as if they were children not old enough to deal with reality?

Across Canada for the past three days the right wing media has been attacking the NDP for passing a resolution agreeing to “discuss” over the next two years the Leap Manifesto, a common sense document that calls for taking global warming seriously, actually doing what is necessary to prevent our planet from being cooked and trying to create a better world while we attempt to ensure our collective survival.

Of course condemnations from the Tyrannosaurus Rex Murphys (a right wing commentator who likes to use big words) of the media were to be expected, but the surprise has been the animated defence of the status quo by supposedly social democratic union leaders and politicians.

“The government of Alberta repudiates the sections of that document that address energy infrastructure,” said Rachel Notley, the NDP Premier of a province that has been hard hit by the fall in the price of oil. “These ideas will never form any part of policy. They are naive. They are ill-informed. They are tone deaf.”

Notley particularly objected to the lines in the Manifesto that oppose any new oil pipelines.

“You can’t just come out with a statement that says we are going to eliminate all the use of fossil fuels, there is going to be a major reduction by this date and we’re going to be fossil fuel-free in 2050,” Jerry Dias, the president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union was quoted as saying by Huffington Post. “All I know is that when I left the [NDP] convention, I hopped in a taxi, then I hopped on a plane, and then I hopped in a taxi to get home. And I would suggest so did pretty well everybody else. I don’t believe that there is going to be solar panels propelling 747s anytime in the future.”

As well as justifying his carbon-heavy lifestyle, Dias seemed particularly incensed by the notion that anyone would tell his auto plant or refinery members that their jobs are at risk because of global warming.

Duh?

Do you understand the threat our planet faces or not? Are you in favour of doing what is necessary to save the lives of our grandchildren or not? (‘Yes, but not if it means I must get a new job or give up my car,’ is a chickenshit answer.)

As a retired Unifor member and someone who first worked on an Alberta NDP election campaign in 1971, I am embarrassed by what Dias and Notley are quoted as saying.

There will be no jobs if our planet is cooked. In fact I heard Dias say almost those exact words at a union meeting not long ago. The people who live in both Calgary and Edmonton will be at serious risk if all the glaciers in the Rockies disappear. Notley understands this. So, why are they pandering to the right wing climate change deniers and the media pundits who have always hated the NDP and unions?

Because the Leap Manifesto states the obvious: To prevent our planet from being cooked we need to stop burning carbon, which means stop building pipelines, which means abandoning car-dominated transport, which means refineries and auto plants will be shut down. And that scares people, especially the ones who work in these industries.

But real leadership means confronting the right wing media attacks head on, not scurrying around talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Real leadership means saying: Corporate capitalism burned too much carbon, causing global warming and threatening our planet’s future. We need to stop it. Significant change will be required. Some people will be forced to get new jobs, but we will advocate for retraining and other support.

As a former leader of a union local that represents newspaper workers I know how hard it is to tell members their jobs are disappearing. But real leadership requires telling the truth, discussing that reality with members and coming up with collective solutions.

Ignoring the truth will never set you free.

Gary Engler

End capitalism, build a green economy

19 Apr

For capital in Canada and the United States, the sudden drop in oil prices is a disaster. For humankind it is a signal that fossil fuel use must decline.

Thirty years ago scientists pointed out that the burning of fossil fuels was causing global warming. To prevent catastrophic climate change, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would have to be kept below 350 parts per million, a level that could be maintained only if three-quarters of the known reserves of conventional fossil fuels were left in the ground.

Corporate capitalism in Canada responded by investing tens of billions in tar sands, fracking, and oil pipelines. U.S. capital invested even more in off-shore drilling and fracking. Governments provided fossil fuel corporations with tax breaks and subsidies. By 2014 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over North America on some days exceeded 400 parts per million.

In the 1980s when science first drew attention to global warming, it was to be expected that some would claim this was merely an idea. Now, the hypothesis of human-caused climate change has been tested and measured. Increases in global temperature continue to be historically unprecedented.

As predicted, glaciers and polar ice caps are shrinking. Sea levels are rising. Droughts and floods have become more frequent. Storms, rainfall, and hurricanes have become more severe. Carbon dioxide raining down from the atmosphere increases ocean acidity; crustaceans from coral reefs to microorganisms are losing the capacity to reproduce, undermining the ocean ecosystems on which all sea life depend.

Climate change deniers may have been eased to the fringes, but corporate capitalism continues to ignore the impact of carbon emissions. For capital, profits from the exploration, development, and transportation of coal, oil, and natural gas are just too important. Profits in the automobile industry, air travel, agribusiness, and global trade depend on plentiful fossil fuels. Major financial institutions are heavily invested, directly and indirectly, in fossil fuels. In a time when most global markets for consumer and producer goods are stagnant and low interest rates have reduced the base return on capital, capital generally is dependent on profits from fossil fuels.

Unwilling to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, corporate interests in the United States and Canada insist that green energy is not a realistic alternative. They’re wrong, and at this point they probably know it.

To undermine green energy expansion, they have persuaded federal governments to impose punitive tariffs on solar panels made abroad. They have persuaded states, counties, and utilities to deny local solar producers access to grids. Meanwhile, in China, India, Africa, Brazil, and even in some U.S. states, wind and solar power is a growing source of electricity. Electricity from wind power will double by the end of this decade. With present technology solar power alone could replace all the electricity now provided by fossil fuels at no additional cost. As investments on wind and solar increase, the technology will advance, further reducing the cost and efficiency of green power.

To drive a wedge between industrial workers and environmentalists, corporate shills present green power as touchy-feely, less industrial, less masculine than energy from fossil fuels. Yes, solar and wind are cutting-edge technologies. Many highly educated professional and technical specialists will be required in basic research, development, and administration. Still, most employees will be engaged in manufacturing, transportation, installation, and maintenance — traditional blue-collar occupations that can be equally done by men and women. Work will be widely dispersed in all regions. By boosting employment, income, and markets, the massive expenditures required to convert to green energy will end the austerity promoted by capitalist interests. Employment and income will rise. Markets will revive.

The shift to green energy, motivated by human well-being, will have to be pushed from below. Although capitalist interests now have a death grip on political agendas, people acting together for the common good can counter capitalist influence. We are the vast majority. Industrial and service workers, professionals and technical specialists, students, the unemployed, and pensioners all share a common interest in the continuation of the environments on which humankind depends. No more than 5 per cent depend on marginal increases in profits.

Strikes, protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience can help speed up the shift away from fossil fuels. Community-owned utilities, cooperatives, and local capital can take initiatives. Electoral mobilizations can push federal, provincial, and state governments to shift to green energy and to provide funding for public transportation. Cities could be reconfigured to make it practical for people to walk and cycle to employment, services, entertainment, and commerce. Publicly supported local food production could replace dependence on transnational corporate imports.

The funding required could in part come from excise taxes on fossil fuels, perhaps $50 a barrel, equivalent to the recent drop in the price of oil. Since capitalist profit is at the root of the problem, most of the revenues should come out of additional taxes on corporate income and private capital.

Al Engler

 

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Raise taxes on capital and the rich

24 Feb

In the 1940s, following decades of booms, busts, unemployment, disorder, wars and destruction, rigid free market policies were abandoned. Governments began to deliberately act to maintain employment and market demand. This shift was identified with J.M. Keynes, a prominent British economist and government adviser who had made the case that classical economics was wrong. Depressions, he wrote, were not caused by a decline in the supply of capital but by a fall in demand caused by declining wages and rising unemployment.

During Keynesian times, until the late 1970s, economies and employment grew steadily. Democracy came to mean that governments had a responsibility to protect and advance the interests of common people. Keynesian policies, including increased access to higher education, public health care and income support were funded by taxes on those with the means to pay. The marginal tax rate on the highest income was 80 per cent. Taxes on corporate income were 50 per cent and higher.

Humankind now faces global crises. Widening disparities in income, opportunities and control are provoking disorders, militarism and wars. Emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels threaten the climates on which human well-being depends. Private capital, focused on short-term profits, systemically aggravates these problems. Prevailing ideology is now aggressively hostile to government action. Tax cuts for corporations and the super rich have reduced the public funds required.

Since 1980 taxes paid by corporations and the rich have been methodically reduced. During Keynesian times, the richest one per cent got ten per cent of total income. The richest one percent now gets twice as much, twenty percent. Ten per cent of total income has been transferred from public revenues to private capital.

Neoconservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan claimed that giving capitalists more money and freeing corporations to maximize profits would be generally beneficial, trickling down to the masses. Instead disparities widened. Tax cuts not only provided private capital with more funds to invest; it gave the super rich more money to manipulate political agendas. Regulations on corporate finance and industry were weakened. Union rights were curtailed. Corporations were freed to move capital to countries with lower taxes, and jobs to places with lower wages. Real wages fell. Unemployment rose.

With consumer markets stagnant, investors awash in funds turned to speculation in stocks, bonds, futures and real estate, to derivatives, index funds, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Capital markets became casinos, adding little to real production. Gains for a few came out of the losses of many others.

Meanwhile as taxes on capital were reduced, public deficits and debt increased. Concerned that capital would lose value, the rich demanded austerity. Although governments were more than willing to spend more on prisons, intrusive surveillance, militarism and war, social programs and infrastructure spending were frozen and cut. Public assets were privatized. Here in Canada, while courts were confirming rights of indigenous people, governments used deficits as an excuse to disregard Treaty obligations.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continued to rise. In 1995 countries meeting at the Kyoto Conference agreed to voluntarily reduce carbon emissions. Science had concluded that carbon dioxide levels had to be kept below 350 parts per million. But corporate capitalism preoccupied with profits from existing industry did not act. Declining public revenues and corporate opposition prevented government action.

By 2014 carbon dioxide levels exceeded 400 parts per million.  If green energy had replaced two percent of fossil fuel energy each year since 1995, as the Kyoto Accord proposed, carbon emissions would already have been reduced by half. Instead, corporate capitalism responded by spending hundreds of millions to deny that carbon dioxide emissions were a problem. Hundreds of billions were spent to develop, produce and transport more fossil fuels.

Everyone not blinded by capitalist dogma or the prospects of immense profits now knows that fossil fuel emissions are melting polar ice caps and glaciers, raising sea levels, flooding coastal communities, acidifying oceans, and generating more frequent and more destructive weather events.

Now that denying climate change is no longer credible, capital simply disregards the threat, claiming that there is no technologically realistic alternative to energy from fossil fuels. Yes, the technology to efficiently store and distribute alternate energy on the scale required has yet to be developed. But the needed technologies would already be available if solar, wind, wave and geothermal power had received the investments, tax breaks and subsidies provided for offshore drilling, fracking, tar sands and oil pipelines.

Technology is not the problem.  With relatively small expenditures Denmark in 2014 got 40 percent of its electricity from wind power. Renewable energy, mostly solar, is providing Germany with 25 percent of its electricity. Solar power is providing China, India, Brazil, and African countries with expanding shares of electricity.

Capitalism is the problem. So long as major shareholders and top corporate executives are entitled to make major economic decisions in their private interests, capitalist profits will continue to trump employment, labor income and public services. Environmental costs will continue to be externalized—passed off to communities and future generations. Replacing capitalist title with human entitlement begins with deliberately transferring income from private capital to the public.

In his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty makes the case that corporation taxes should return to 1950s levels. Marginal tax rates on personal incomes over $500,000 should be raised to 80 percent. He proposes an annual tax of 0.1 percent of private wealth over half a million dollars rising in steps perhaps to 2 percent on wealth over three or five million dollars.  Homes are already taxed annually.  Why should stocks, bonds, and other wealth be excluded?  Piketty adds a progressive estate tax on inheritances over one million dollars and a tax of 0.1 percent on financial transactions. He argues that more transparency in income records and better statistics gathering would make it practical for countries to cooperate in preventing income and wealth from being hidden in offshore accounts.

Of course, the super rich will aggressively object. But nearly everyone else would gain. Taxing capital could provide local governments with funds to reduce disparities and expand social services. Public spending on green infrastructure would provide more employment and increase market demand. Public spending to reconfigure cities could make it practical for people to live their daily lives without cars. Public spending on solar, wind, wave and geothermal power and public transit would reduce carbon emissions and generate more jobs.

Al Engler

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Top 10 Ways to Save Ourselves From Global Warming

7 Oct

My fellow lobsters, we are being cooked.

I know some of you don’t believe it and others have come to the conclusion there is nothing we can do, but the simple truth is the gas has been turned on, the fire lit and the temperature is slowly rising. There is no significant disagreement amongst our lobster pot scientists about these basic facts. In fact the latest study argues the water is much hotter than previously thought. Our only way of avoiding the rolling boil is to come up with a plan to turn the gas off and then take the steps necessary to implement that strategy. But, as individuals we cannot claw our way to a solution. Lobsters of the world we must join together.

Here are 10 things we can do to start:

10. Read Naomi Klein’s new book This Changes Everything — Capitalism vs. the Climate. This is a great way to become informed about the problem and what to do about it. Klein offers a comprehensive, thoughtful, witty and sometimes personal analysis of how we can still save the planet, if enough people put their minds and bodies into the project. The book is an absolute must-read for every environmentalist and everyone who has ever challenged the status quo.

9. Help create and strengthen local food systems. Build and participate in self-sustaining regional economies. Demand governments get rid of “free trade” agreement language that prevents this or limits measures that would reduce global warming.

8. Escape the clutches of the private automobile. Walk, take public transit, ride a bike, join a car share and demand cities that thrive on human energy in a sustainable relationship with nature. Understand there is a better, healthier life waiting if we evolve beyond homo automotovis. Read Stop Signs — Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Environmental Decay by Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi, an entertaining and enlightening road trip through a car-crazy world.

7. Spread the word that human beings are part of nature and do not have dominion over it. Learn from aboriginal peoples around the world about our place in the environment.

6. Support alternative energy sources. We must quickly replace all carbon-based energy with alternatives, a project that is doable. The barrier is not technological but rather economic and political. The only reason burning fossil fuels is currently cheaper than wind, solar or geothermal is because the carbon-based fuel sector does not pay for the real cost of its emissions.

5. Assert the principle that polluters must pay for all the negative consequences of what they put into the environment. We must calculate the price of repairing the damage caused and add this to their cost of production. Not paying the true cost of production is, in effect, a subsidy. Ending that subsidy will leave most of the fossil fuel industry uneconomic.

4. Get off the consumption treadmill. Every time you think about acquiring more stuff or buying more services ask yourself these questions: Do we really need this? Is this good or bad for the environment? To answer these questions objectively we must understand and combat the marketing/advertising system that twists our emotions and desires to mould us into the sort of consumers that make the most profit for multinational corporations.

3. Elect and support governments that take global warming seriously. Without that we have little hope of success. To ensure that the governments we elect really do what is best for people and our planet rather than what is good for the rich and powerful, we must end the power of money to control politicians.

2. Work to change our current economic system, which is the ultimate source of the problem. We must construct an economy based on human need rather than capitalist greed. The foundation of this new economy must be an understanding that our most basic human need is a safe and healthy environment. To ensure that our economy works for the benefit of all it must be democratic and inclusive, rather than run by and for a wealthy minority.

1. Become part of a mass movement to make all of the above happen. We must come together to say no to any further expansion of carbon extraction. We must blockade the carbon industry into extinction. To succeed we must build a grand coalition of all those who are fighting for a better world. This means environmentalists finding common cause with the union movement, First Nations, poor people, poor nations, liberation movements, anti-capitalists, and with all those who do battle against the many forms of inequality.

Lobsters of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but the chains that keep you on the stove.

Gary Engler

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Top 10 ways we can build a better economic system

26 Aug

For the numerous readers who asked: “But what can we do?” after reading my Top 10 Reasons to Hate Capitalism:

  1. We can elect governments that represent people rather than corporations. This will require serious electoral reform and include laws to make it clear corporations are not people and therefore cannot participate in the political process. A government representing all the people would regulate corporations to ensure socially responsible behaviour and transform psychopathic capitalist monstrosities into democratic, social enterprises that benefit all.
  2. We can build communities and organizations that encourage solidarity, compassion and altruism. These will include worker, consumer, housing and producer cooperatives, as well as institutions of government. People must always remain vigilant, especially while capitalism continues to exist, about the pervasive power of greed to destroy these communities and organizations.
  3. We can promote and build a democratic economy in which social ownership replaces private ownership of communities’ means of livelihood. The people who work in them and the communities in which they are located should control economic enterprises.
  4. Since authentic freedom for any of us can only come when all of us are free we must create enterprises, communities, forms of governance and institutions that respect the rights of everyone and encourage the creativity of all. Socially useful individual enterprise should be encouraged but everywhere people work together we must create effective forms of democratic decision-making to promote creative input from all involved.
  5. Everywhere we work we can organize in ways that become the building blocks of a new, democratic economy. Sometimes this will be through existing unions but often we will create new organizations that defend our day-to-day interests while self-consciously preparing to replace capitalist minority rule with democratic social control of all enterprises.
  6. We can work to undermine capitalist, consumerist propaganda whether it masquerades as news, entertainment or advertising. We can create forms of newsgathering and information-exchange that challenge capitalism while building the self-confidence of people everywhere to democratically manage our economy. Rather than spend countless empty hours consuming mindless advertising-driven ‘entertainment’ we can relearn the myriad forms of healthy social interaction that brought joy and solidarity to generations past. Millions of us can discover the fun in making a better world.
  7. We can rebuild a progressive taxation system in which people with extreme incomes pay very high levels of taxes. We can promote a one person, one vote system of decision-making everywhere we work together, whether in the political, social or economic realm. The means of bringing about such fundamental change may, in part, come through existing political structures, but will also include diverse forms of mobilization as workers, residents, concerned citizens, producers and human beings supporting a healthy planet.
  8. We can speak up for our planet as one community with intertwined interests that can only be satisfied through mutual respect and cooperation. We can learn from indigenous communities to respect the earth. We can act on the principle that an injury to one anywhere and everywhere is an injury to all. At a minimum this requires an end to war and environmental destruction of every sort. We can work together in enterprises and organizations that exist in local communities, but which also connect with like-minded regional, national and international groups to accomplish the changes we need.
  9. Through our words and actions we can demonstrate that the realistic alternative to capitalism is an expansion of democracy. In order to build the peaceful, ecologically sane world we desire, our tactics are non-violent, but we understand that people under attack have a right to self-defence.
  10. We can replace capitalism with a system based on social ownership, equal human entitlement and workplace democracy. Building an economic democracy is the key to human survival. We can exist in harmony with our environment if we get rid of capitalism and promote respect for nature and understanding the interdependence of all forms of life.

Gary Engler

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Top 10 reasons to hate capitalism

13 Aug
  1. Capitalist corporations suffer from a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and are rewarded by shareholders for acting that way. If corporations could be sent to a criminal psychologist’s office they’d be diagnosed as psychopaths and locked away forever.
  2. Capitalism encourages greed. But greed is only good for capitalists. For normal people it is anti-social and soul destroying, not to mention very bad for our communities, which rely on altruism, compassion and a generalized concern for others.
  3. Capitalism is a system of minority privilege and class rule based on the private ownership of means of livelihood. This gives a few rich people the power to buy and sell jobs, which means they can build or destroy entire communities that depend on those jobs.
  4. Capitalists praise freedom and individualism, but they destroy freedom and individualism for everyone but themselves. The vast majority of us who work for a living are daily asked to uncritically follow orders, to act as if we are machines, and limit our creativity to what profits our bosses.
  5. Capitalists denigrate cooperation and collectivism, but create mass production processes that rely on both from workers. Their system requires us to be cogs in a giant profit-making machine, but because they fear the power this gives us we are told working together for our own interests is illegitimate and bad. Thus capitalists undermine unions and other organizations that encourage workers to cooperate with each other and act collectively.
  6. Capitalism requires the largest propaganda system the world has ever known to convince us it is the only system possible. It turns people into consumers through advertising, marketing, entertainment and even so-called news. Millions around the world are employed to use their creativity to twist our feelings of love, desire, human solidarity and fairness into tools of manipulation, so that ever more profits can flow into the hands of a tiny minority.
  7. Capitalism is a system in which the principle of one dollar, one vote, dominates that of one person, one vote. Those who own the most shares (bought with their dollars) control giant corporations, many of which are more powerful than all but a few governments. Rich people also use their money to dominate the elections that are supposed to give us all one, equal vote. Under capitalism those with the most money are entitled to the most goods and services as well as the most say in directing our governments and our economy.
  8. Capitalism proclaims the virtue of naked self-interest, but self-interest without regard for morality, ecology or common sense leads to environmental degradation, destruction of indigenous communities, colonialism, war and other forms of mass destruction. Self-interest leads capitalists to seek profit absolutely everywhere, regardless of the damage done to other people and the health of the planet’s ecosystem. Self-interest leads capitalists to destroy any rival economic system or way of thinking (such as indigenous communal land use and respect for nature) that can be a barrier to their endless quest for profit.
  9. Capitalism is not a friend to democracy but ultimately its enemy. When pushed, capitalists choose capitalism over democracy. If people use democracy to weaken the power of capitalists the rich and powerful turn to various forms of fascism in order to keep their privileges.
  10. Capitalism is a cancer taking over our planet. Capitalists make profits from global warming, from destroying our oceans, from pumping ever more chemicals into the atmosphere and from patenting everything they can, including life itself. Only by getting rid of capitalism can we rescue our environment

Gary Engler

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Corporate organized crime

23 Jun

“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” is one of the most famous lines in cinematic history. It is the set-up for the scene in Godfather where a big shot Hollywood producer wakes up with a bloody horse’s head in his bed.

In less than 10 words it also perfectly sums up how the rich and powerful get their way. Use of the tactic has certainly never been limited to Mafiosi.

In fact, countries possessing military might have made “offers they can’t refuse” all through history to less powerful nations or regions.

But today’s ultimate practitioners are giant corporations that dominate the world economy. The 0.1% wealthiest people on the planet use their control of these corporations to impose their will on the rest of us.

Their “offers we can’t refuse” go something like this:

“Cut pensions, chop government jobs, privatize everything you can, or we will start a run on your currency and sink your entire economy.”

“Sign this ‘free trade agreement’ or we will pull all our investments from your country and move them to places that have agreed to everything we want.”

“Cut our taxes or we will fund a political party that will.”

“Build this pipeline if you want jobs.”

“We don’t care about democracy, satisfying us is more important that satisfying the will of the majority.”

“Weaken unions, or we’ll take our money and run.”

“Ignore global warming, or we’ll make sure you regret it.”

“If we don’t like your response or you protest too much, maybe even at all, we will use the violence at our disposal, including that of the governments we own, to crush you.”

But it’s not just threats. Like Don Corleone, the corporations also have politicians, judges, journalists, academics, lobbyists, personalities and many others on their payroll to lie, obfuscate, corrupt, manipulate and who knows what else in order to get their way. Both the wise Mafia Don and the effective corporate CEO understand that power comes in many forms. The use of violence needs to be minimized. Better to save it for when there is no other way to impose your will, or it loses its effectiveness. And too much looks bad. (Witness Iraq and Afghanistan.)

But here’s the thing with both organized crime and our economic system in general. There’s always some competitor — be it a long established rival or neighbourhood punk/upstart capitalist — willing to employ whatever means necessary to steal your territory. If you get soft you risk losing everything. If your profit margins are less than your competitors their power will grow while yours stagnates.

As the movie (and its sequels) vividly shows, there can be no Mr. Nice Guy Mafia Don. The logic of organized crime makes it impossible. To be successful — to survive — lying, cheating, bribing and ultimately violence is necessary.

The same is true of our wider economic system. While violence is usually confined to governments that the corporations control, in both worlds hands get dirty doing whatever it takes to succeed because the system demands it.

This is why environmentalists who look for capitalist solutions to global warming are either extremely naïve or in the pay of corporations. This is why union leaders who fail to see the fundamental contradiction between workers’ and capitalists’ interests often sell out to the bosses. This is why in the long run there can be no capitalism with a human face.

If the 0.1% who own and control most of our economy want to keep their power they will act as capitalists have always acted. They will grab as much profit for themselves as they can and pass the environmental costs onto the rest of us while doing so. They will try to reduce wages to increase their profits. They will manipulate democracy to get their way. They will attempt to overthrow democracy if it threatens their existence. They have no choice. Greed, self-interest and a relentless drive to increase profits are the foundations upon which the capitalist economic system is built.

Only when the vast majority of us, the 90% who work for a living, come together to use our collective power to create a new democratic economic system will anything change.

Only greater power can overcome the might of the Mafia Don or the corporate CEO: The power of the people who actually do all the work that makes up our economy.

Gary Engler

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An impertinent question

21 May

Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?

This question came to me as the left side of my brain was reading Thomas Piketty’s important new book Capital in the 21st Century while the right side of my brain watched the news.

There was an item about the B.C. government chopping money from university arts’ programs to fund apprenticeships because it would produce more taxpayers, which would be good for the economy, followed by a commercial touting the Northern Gateway pipeline, which also would be good the economy. As my right brain soaked in the TV images my left brain was digesting statistics that demonstrated conclusively most wealth is owned by a few people and this inequality is growing.

Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?

When the two sides of my brain began acting together I realized this is not merely a rhetorical question. Rather, even raising the issue is subversive, or at least impertinent to those who maintain the status quo.

At its most basic level the economy is the sum total of the things people do to provide themselves food, shelter and other things that enhance life, such as recreation, healthcare, entertainment and art. So, the answer to our question should be clear-cut: The point of an economy is to serve people.

But the reality for most of us is exactly the opposite.

We are told the economy demands this or that as if it were some sort of primitive deity to be appeased.

Raising the minimum wage is bad for the economy. Expanding the tar sands and building pipelines to ship bitumen around the world is good. Public daycare or increased pensions are not affordable. Mass layoffs and wage rollbacks are necessary. But consume anyways (the more disposable the better), because that’s what makes the economy go round and round.

Politicians, corporate executives and the media all send us the message that our lives only attain meaning in so far as we contribute to the economy as consumers or taxpayers.

Rather than serving us, “the economy” has become an excuse to treat many people badly, to create unhealthy products, to damage our environment, to justify exploitation, to steal from other people and even to wage war.

Why?

The primary reason is that too much of the economy is run by and for a small minority of people. As Picketty’s statistics show, actual existing capitalism (as opposed to the phoney idealized system taught in school) concentrates ownership of wealth in the hands of a few people. This wealth produces both income and power, so much of which has gone to the richest 1% that any effective democracy is threatened.

Many of us feel powerless in the face of this inequality. Our unions have been undermined and delegitimized. The system tells us our only valid participation in the economy is as consumers, but getting to choose between Coke and Pepsi hardly inspires a sense of engagement.

We certainly get no vote in directing the economy, unless we are shareholders, and in that realm decisions are made by one-dollar-one vote, so billionaires hold sway. Moreover, for at least the past 30 years, the prevailing wisdom has been that governments are incompetent and therefore must keep their hands off the economy. We are told any sort of democratic control is bad because it creates distortions in the natural working of the system, as if there was some divine order that was being interfered with.

But it is not god’s will that is being challenged when democratic control is asserted. Rather it is the will of the 1% who currently own a vast proportion of the economy and direct it (and us) in their self-interest. There are no mysterious natural forces deciding what gets built, what gets shut down, who loses their jobs, how much to invest in green energy versus the tar sands; there are only very wealthy people and the managers who work for them.

Given that, it is really no surprise that the economy seldom serves the interests of the majority — it serves other masters. The economy follows the orders of the people who own it. And it gives the biggest rewards to the ones among them who are the greediest, the most willing to grab huge profits for themselves while making the rest of us pay for the pollution, ill health and other forms of destruction their industry causes. Then they spend some of those vast profits to buy politicians, think tanks and media pundits who work to convince us that this form of minority rule is good for us — the natural order — and trying to create a better system is hopeless.

But what if, despite all that, we demanded an economy that served all of us? What would we do?

Piketty argues for a tax on wealth and that might be a good starting point, but if we really want to fix this we must go further. When the problem is too much power in the hands of a few the obvious solution is to distribute that power more widely.

We should take away control of the economy from the greedy minority and share it amongst all of us. A good name for such a system is economic democracy.

The exact form such a system might take would probably depend on a country’s history, culture and level of development. But essential elements would be: one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote decision making in all aspects of the economy; workplace democracy instead of master-servant relations and community control instead of corporate control.

If we want an economy that serves all people we must create a system of democratic governance to ensure that happens.

 Gary Engler

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Global warming is caused by capitalist greed

30 Apr

Humans have caused climate change by pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we must quickly cut these emissions.

True, but what has this got to do with unions?

Well, at their core unions are organizations that bring people together to fight for the common good. This essential truth is reflected in the structure, philosophy and history of most unions.

But exactly whose “common good” a union is fighting for can vary widely.

Is it narrowly defined as immediate job interests of local union members? Is it the common good of all those working in a particular trade? All union members in one industry?

Or is it more widely defined as the common good of every union member? Every worker in a particular country? Of all Canadians? All the workers of the world? Every person in the world? Or even wider as the common good of all life on the planet?

The truth is every thoughtful union member, and especially every union leader, must consider the common good from many different perspectives. Everyone has more than one self-interest and therefore more than one common good.

No one is solely a pipefitter, nurse, front desk clerk; or employee of General Motors; we are also children, parents, residents of a city or town, citizens of a country, inhabitants of a planet who are dependent on a common environment, and much more besides.

But unions often find it easiest to fight for the narrowest common good, the immediate self-interest of workers in a particular trade, industry, or company. Higher pay, improved benefits, better job security — members almost always cheer if a union achieves these things. Fighting for all life on the planet or against inequality is a bit more complicated.

But there is another reason as well why unions find it easiest to fight for the narrowest common good. “Looking after No. 1” is what capitalism tells people to do. You are a consumer. Buying more is what life is all about.

In fact, proponents of capitalism argue there is no such thing as the common good, that we are all simply individual consumers and therefore unions are an illegitimate intrusion into the free market. Still, if workers are going to unite for any purpose it had better be limited to stuff like higher pay, something that allows people to buy more and does not challenge capitalism.

So, here’s the reality we face: In so far as a union, its leadership and members have bought into capitalism, the greater the likelihood that union will choose to focus on a very narrow self-interest and ignore such issues as climate change or inequality. Some unions do buy into capitalism despite the fact it does not like workers joining together to fight for any common good, whether narrowly or broadly defined. If it were up to capitalists there would be no unions at all. Capitalists — the bosses — are not our friends. The more people buy into their system the weaker unions are.

And the opposite is also true. The more people come together to fight for the common good, the stronger unions are. The more unions fight for the widest common good, the more people will be on our side and the stronger unions will be. The more unions fight the existing system the stronger unions are.

History shows that the periods of greatest growth in unions were times when capitalism faced widespread challenges and the periods when unions have shrunk, like during the past 20 years, were times when opposition to capitalism was weak.

History also shows that unions have been willing to fight for the widest common good despite opposition from the rich and powerful. Unions were part of the struggle to end slavery and child labour; unions helped win universal voting rights, public education, equal rights, Old Age Pensions, Medicare, the 40-hour work week, paid vacations and numerous other social programs that have benefited society as a whole.

It won’t be easy to stop global warming. Many brothers and sisters earn their living extracting oil, building private automobiles and mining coal, industries that must shrink or disappear to save our planet. Of course this raises difficulties inside the labour movement because it pits narrow self-interest against the wider common good.

But progressive unions were not deterred by similar internal problems in the struggle for civil rights or against sexism and homophobia. As in those battles we must do what is necessary and right. We must demand jobs that do not harm the environment. We must not shy away from battling climate change because there is no more important common good than the health of our environment. We must learn from and work with environmentalists.

But environmental activists must also learn an important lesson from the long history of the labour movement: Capitalism is the problem and certainly not the solution.

The capitalist drive to maximize profits explains the externalizing of environmental costs. Capitalism is a system of small minorities profiting at the expense of others. Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood allows capitalists to make decisions that pass the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Capitalism requires growth. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with less stuff?

If a capitalist economy shrinks for a sustained period the system goes into a crisis. Banks crash, unemployment rises and wars suddenly make sense to rich people in order to get their system growing again.

Supporters of capitalism claim the system is based on freedom and choice, but when it comes to the environment for many people this amounts to the freedom to choose between destroying the planet or having a job. The promoters of tar sands, fracking, coal mining and pipelines are explicit about this. The business pages are full of stories quoting the captains of the carbon-industrial complex as telling us: “You must choose between economic prosperity and what is good for the environment, because you can’t have both.”

With capitalism they are correct.

Yet someenvironmentalists, as well as some union members, look to capitalism for solutions. That’s like expecting Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to tell the truth. A sustainable, democratic economy is incompatible with a system run in the interests of a tiny minority that constantly demands more profit.

Science leaves little reasonable doubt that the burning of currently known reserves of coal, oil and natural gas will push atmospheric carbon dioxide levels past a tipping point, after which rising global temperatures will irreversibly undermine the conditions on which human life as we know it depends.

Despite the evidence, today’s capitalism rests on the expansion of fossil fuel production and use.

In Canada capitalist investment is focused on expanding tar sands production. The promoters claim that these developments will create jobs. But every analysis shows more jobs would be produced if equivalent investments were made in solar, wind and geothermal power. Far more jobs could be produced by investing in domestic employment for domestic markets, in the production and distribution of sustainable local agriculture, clothing, etc. Even more jobs would be created by investments in childcare, elder care, social housing, public transit and other green infrastructure.

More jobs but less profit. Capitalists invest in fossil fuels because corporate profits now largely depend on cheap fuel. Equivalent profits cannot be made meeting actual human needs.

So, unions and environmentalists share a common enemy: an economic system run by and for the wealthiest people in the world.

Together we can fight for a different sort of economic system that will prosper in harmony with the environment. Or apart we can fiddle with capitalism as our planet burns.

Gary Engler

From a speech given on the weekend at the Peoples’ Social Forum Assembly on Climate and Oil & Gas in B.C.

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‘The Sixth Extinction’ and our looming catastrophe

24 Apr

Carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, raising sea levels, causing more destructive hurricanes, floods, and droughts and increasing ocean acidity. So far corporations, governments, electoral parties and the media are largely indifferent.

When presented with the evidence, profit-seekers may concede that perhaps something should be done. The claim that climate change is just a theory is used to justify inaction: no particular storm, hurricane or flood can be directly blamed on the burning of fossil fuels; perhaps the sun or tides or other natural cycles are to blame. Anyway, the threat is in the distant future — long beyond normal quarterly or annual financial reports, beyond the four or six year terms of most governing parties.

In The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert points to a direct, indisputable connection between rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the increasing acidity of oceans.

A third of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere rains into seas. Carbon dioxide dissolved in water becomes carbonic acid. As aquatic acidity rises, the shells of crustaceans weaken and dissolve. Billions of micro-organisms along with lobsters, oysters and coral reefs can no longer survive. As crustaceans disappear so do the creatures that depend on them as food sources, fishes and land animals like human beings.

Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker who earlier published, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. As its title indicates, The Sixth Extinctionfocuses on epochal species extinctions. Current science records six major extinctions. The Fifth Extinction, the most widely known, wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It is attributed to a massive meteor strike off Yucatan. The immediate shock wave caused wide destruction. Clouds of dust then enveloped the planet, altering climates and vegetation.

Scientists call the current extinction, the Sixth, the Anthropocene, the human-caused extinction. The capacity of human beings to alter environments can be traced back at least 11,000 years when large animals, like mammoths, began to disappear. Since then, humans have leveled great forests, altered and blocked the flow of major rivers.

For the last 500 years global exchange and industrial capitalism have dramatically transformed flora, fauna and micro-organisms everywhere. Humans have added massive amounts of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to soils and waterways. Our dependence on fossil fuel energy has increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels not seen in millions of years.

How much of a threat is rising carbon dioxide levels? The past may give us a glimpse of what could happen.

The Third Extinction, the End-Permian, 250 million years ago, was triggered by a massive release of carbon dioxide — from causes not yet understood. Temperatures soared. The chemistry of the oceans changed dramatically. As waters acidified, reefs collapsed; dissolved oxygen levels fell; aquatic organisms that relied on oxygen suffocated. They were replaced by others that used sulfur as an energy source. These gave off hydrogen sulfide, a toxin to most organisms on land and sea. “Glassy purple seas released poisonous bubbles that rose to a pale green sky.” Ninety per cent of land and ocean species disappeared.

Today rising carbon dioxide levels are measurably increasing the acidity of oceans. Coral reefs are shrinking in the Caribbean, off Australia and elsewhere. Other sea life is already under threat. In early 2014, Vancouver Island scallop producers reported that ten million scallops had failed to mature. British Columbia oyster stocks have also declined dramatically.

The Sixth Extinction leaves no doubt that carbon dioxide emissions are a looming catastrophe, far more serious than the profit-seeking establishment would have us believe. The problem is capitalism, a system that entitles major shareholders and top corporate executives to direct economies in their private interests. Capitalist competition drives corporations to maximize profits. Corporate control of the media makes people believe that profits are more important than employment, decent wages and the environment.

The Sixth Extinction makes it clear that action to cut reliance on fossil fuel energy is needed urgently. It is also a popularly written sketch of the evolution of scientific revolutions. Its many anecdotal asides make it an easy read.

Al Engler

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
 by Elizabeth Kolbert
(Henry Holt and Co.,
 2014; $28.00)

 

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Rebuilding the commons through economic democracy

5 Apr

Who runs your workplace?

For most of us the answer is a boss, who reports to a higher boss, who reports to an even higher boss, who reports to a … all the way up to the “owner” of the enterprise. This is called a chain of command.

The words “chain” and “command” are both suggestive of a fundamental truth: Today’s rules about the power of bosses and workers evolved from a time of masters, servants and slaves. While many norms and expectations have changed over the years the fundamental truth that bosses give orders and workers are required to obey remains the same.

This explains the use of the term “wage slavery” by some who oppose capitalism. It suggests that working for wages is similar to being a slave. The Wikipedia entry on wage slavery offers a good introduction to the subject, pointing out the concept is much older than capitalism and that even ancient Romans argued accepting wages for work put one into a slave-like position. The idea that giving up your free will for any reason or length of time makes you a slave is as old as wage work itself.

Interestingly, the usage of the term wage slavery has diminished as a greater and greater proportion of us work for wages. The notion that most of us are effectively slaves is probably too uncomfortable to contemplate. And, of course, not talking about this serves the interests of those who profit from our labour.

But I’d like to suggest there’s another reason as well.

As more and more of us work for wages it becomes more and more normal and we lose the sense of an alternative. I was reminded of this while reading Peter Linebaugh’s stimulating new book Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, a series of 15 essays “written against enclosure, the process of privatization, closing off, and fencing in.”

Contrary to the mythology of a modern, progressive and democratic capitalism replacing backward feudalism, most ordinary people had more say in their day-to-day work life before our current economic system came along. In fact, the rights and privileges of “commoners” (the majority of people, whose independent livelihood depended on the shared commons) were destroyed as part of capitalist expansion. To this day, everywhere capitalism goesthe rights and privileges of indigenous people disappear as the commons are enclosed (become private property) so that rich people can steal their profits.

When commons were common, through tens of thousands of years, people mostly developed technology and systems of usage that respected the land, ocean, river, forest, grassland and creatures that lived there. They did this because it was in their collective self-interest to do so. This was reflected in their religions and how their societies were organized, including the ways people thought of themselves.

Mutual respect, independence, collective responsibility, reciprocity, community and what we would now call a sense of ecology were encouraged because all served a society that held its resources in common.

As Linebaugh points out in Stop Thief, 200 years ago poets bemoaned the loss of these values as well as the ugliness created when capitalism enclosed the land and resources that people depended on for their livelihood. Capitalism waged war on the rights, privileges and ideology of commoners. Enclosure of the rest of the world (colonialism) was the logical next step. That war has continued ever since, with today’s military interventions, as well as the mass marketing of never-ending consumption and individualism just the latest in a long line of assaults.

But this is not just interesting history. People who work for wages today can learn important lessons from those who resisted, and continue to resist,the enclosure of the commons.

We should learn that:

  • Every enclosure of the commons is an assault on the environment. The point of capitalism is to exploit nature and other human beings for private profit.
  • Our strength is always collective; it flows from the commons. As individuals we are weak and defeated.
  • We must insist that everywhere people work together be transformed into a commons. The factories, the shops, the distribution systems, all the places of our employment — the entire means of production — are a commons enclosed by capitalists in order to profit at our expense.
  • To create an environmentally sustainable, healthy, nurturing economy requires we no longer accept being wage slaves. We must take responsibility for what we do. We must understand that our world is a commons, not private property, and begin to act collectively to protect the resources that belong to all of us.
  • We must re-learn the values of mutual respect, independence, collective responsibility, reciprocity, community and living in harmony with the environment that were once the hallmarks of commoners.

During most moments of sudden, great change in human history people have been motivated by rights that were lost, insisting they be restored.

To accomplish the great change necessary today let us demand that which requires social labour be recognized for what it is, the common property of all. Let us rebuild the ways of thinking, the social relations, as well as the rights and responsibilities that were lost when our commons were enclosed.

The term that best describes what we would be fighting for is economic democracy. The commons was always an economic democracy.

The term also helps explain a key flaw in our current so-called democracy — power flows from control of the economy, which is “owned” by a tiny minority.

The most successful social movements in the past two centuries have all pushed for an expansion of democracy. The fight for economic democracy would be a continuation of these movements.

Let’s build an economic democracy to rebuild the commons!

Gary Engler

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Sustainability and capitalism: Can we have it all?

30 Jan

From a speech given at the One World Week Forum at the University of Warwick on January 30, 2014.

Can capitalism solve the problems of global warming and growing inequality?

It seems to me this is like discussing the issue of inappropriate hyper-sexual imagery bombarding 11-year olds and then asking: Can Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga fix the problem?

Real capitalism, not the theoretical version taught in school, is a system of minority rule in which a few people profit at the expense of others.

Real capitalists are always trying to cut their costs and increase their profits, which leads to unemployment, falling wages, rising economic disparity and not paying for the environmental damage they cause.

Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood produces incentives for capitalists to pass along the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Private ownership makes growing inequality inevitable. A system can proclaim itself democratic, but if a minority holds most of the economic, and therefore social and political power, that minority will inevitably reward itself, its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will be the result.

Capitalism is sociopathic. Its ideologues, like the late Margaret Thatcher, reject the social, claiming only individuals exist. Yet capitalism has driven individual producers to the fringes of economies. Most people, ninety per cent in the U.K., depend on wages or salary, working with others in cooperative, coordinated labour — social labour, but directed by wealthy minorities for their own profit.

Capitalism promotes greed. It boasts of this. So why would we be surprised when a small minority with most of the power looks after itself, in effect telling the rest of us: “Screw you and the planet you live on! We don’t care about global warming because we have the money to buy a nice place regardless of how high the oceans rise.”

Capitalism requires constant growth to satisfy its need for more profit. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with less stuff?

History shows capitalism reacts badly to declining markets. When the economy shrinks for a sustained period the system goes into crisis. Banks crash, unemployment grows and capitalists often turn to war to get their profits rising again.

The truth is a sustainable economy is incompatible with a system that constantly demands more profit.

To quote the greatest living English political philosopher, Russell Brand: “I know what the fucking system shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t destroy the planet and shouldn’t create massive economic disparity.”

Like Russell we know what we don’t like. That’s the easy part. But how can we get rid of capitalism and what is the alternative?

To answer we must go back to the issue of power and how to distribute it in a way that promotes the common good, a key element of which is a healthy environment. The best way is through more democracy. REAL democracy. Economic democracy.

Do you want an equitable, sustainable economy? Then help overthrow capitalism and create an economic democracy.

What exactly does this mean?

Let me give you an example: With the one pound one vote system that governs corporate capitalism, Richard Branson, with a net worth of 3.5 billion pounds get 3.5 billion votes. In comparison you (pointing) get 147 and you get 58. Most of you poor buggers owe more than you own so you get no votes at all. Economic democracy means giving everyone the right to a voice and an equal vote in their communities’ economic decisions. When everyone has an equal right in decision-making, economies will be motivated by general wellbeing, not private profit. Economic democracy means eliminating the divide between workers and owners by making everyone an owner. Economic democracy means multiple owning communities  — local, regional, national, international — so that power does not become concentrated in the hands of a single central state. It means that wherever social labour occurs a system of democracy manages the enterprise.

Imagine companies that are democratically run by workers together with a local, regional, national or international government, whichever is appropriate to that enterprise; companies whose mandate it is to promote the common good, rather than the narrow self-interest of rich shareholders; companies that no longer have incentives to destroy the planet, but rather face real penalties for harming the environment.

Now, I know what at least some of you are thinking. This is not realistic. Your ideas are just pie in the sky. But the truth is capitalism has already created what one might call “objective conditions” that do indeed make economic democracy possible. Most people in most countries already depend on social labor. Most of you, if you find paid employment, will be salaried or wage workers. If we choose to fight for it, we can expand one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is most of our economy. If we elect governments committed to it we could pass laws that limit private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others. We could create a system of social ownership with multiple democratic owning communities.

If we accomplish these three things — replacing corporate ownership with social ownership, replacing capitalist entitlement with equal human entitlement and replacing master-servant relations with workplace democracy — the system that drives enterprises to maximize profits, regardless of the consequences, would no longer exist.

Capitalism and sustainability, can you have it all? No. But there is a much better alternative: Economic democracy, a system that will offer authentic jobs, a nourishing work-life balance, your fair share of power and a healthy environment. This sounds like the essentials of a good life to me.

Gary Engler

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Video: Understanding Capitalism — Idiocy

5 Jan

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Workers and their unions must fight climate change

24 Dec

For those of us in the labour movement, tis the season to ponder what good our unions can do in the upcoming year and to renew our commitment to a key principle: What we desire for ourselves we wish for all.

At this time of year, while many of us focus on gifts, it is easy to desire the latest gadget, that new car or even a remodelled bathroom. But, most of us would agree, in the grand scheme of human priorities, certain fundamentals are more important than simply acquiring more things.

For example, decent housing, nutritious food, public education, a safe and loving atmosphere to nurture every child and access to quality healthcare would all be understood by most union members as essential, rather than as simply “stuff” that would be nice to possess. In other words, when we come together in a union we acknowledge certain basic social priorities. Thus the first unions fought for a living wage, the eight-hour day, public schools, pensions etc., not simply more money. Without the basics of life, being able to buy more things is meaningless.

And that’s how we need to think about our environment and especially global warming.

There is nothing more important than a healthy environment. Without that, all the other fundamentals — food, housing, education, family, leisure, pensions etc. — are at risk. If human activity, in the pursuit of accumulating more stuff, destroys the liveability of our planet, we will have done a great wrong to all creatures, including ourselves.

And the best evidence we have is as categorical as science gets. Humans have caused climate change by pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we must quickly cut these emissions.

Here’s how one leading climate change expert put it earlier this month:

“We need a radical plan for cutting emissions to avoid the radical repercussions of climate change,” said professor Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre, based at the University of Manchester in England. “To do this, industrial countries have to cut energy use by around 8-10% each year or 60-70% over the decade, and we have to start now.

“Low-carbon supply and incremental reductions are no longer sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change. We have to have early, rapid and deep reductions in emissions and this can only be achieved in the short term through reductions in energy use.”

Will corporations that dominate the world economy provide us with the “rapid and deep reductions in emissions” that scientists tell us must happen soon to avoid environmental catastrophe? No.

Rather than cutting back on emissions we see corporations invest billions in the tar sands, fracking, offshore drilling and digging up more coal, because all are profitable.

Our current economic system requires ever expanding profit. As a result, if corporations were people they would be diagnosed as psychopaths. They are ruthless in the single-minded pursuit of profit. Psychopaths feel no empathy for their victims. They do not care if the consequences of their actions could soon be the overheating of our planet to the degree that our grandchildren no longer have a habitable environment.

So who will fight to protect our planet?

For 175 years unions have fought for justice, democracy and to make life better for all. We helped end child labour and slavery. We fought for universal franchise and equal rights for all. These battles required enormous sacrifices to overcome opposition of the rich and powerful.

Sacrifices will be necessary as well to stop global warming. Many brothers and sisters earn their living extracting oil, building cars and mining coal, industries that must shrink or disappear to save our planet. This raises difficulties inside the labour movement.

But progressive unions were not deterred by similar contradictions in the struggle for civil rights or against sexism and homophobia. Similarly we must not shy away from battling climate change.

Unions must defend our common interests. There is no more important common interest than the health of our environment.

Gary Engler

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Do we have enough time to fix global warming?

13 Dec

Even Vladimir Lenin was surprised when the Russian Revolution began in 1917.

Is this just an interesting historical tidbit or a profound example of how fast seemingly stable political, social and economic systems can collapse?

The subject of how long lasting our current system really is comes up frequently in discussions about global warming and what we can do about it.

Usually the conversation goes something like this:

“Scientists tell us we’re getting close to the point of no return. We don’t have much time left to drastically cut our carbon emissions.”

“Yes, but corporation keep investing billions in the tarsands, in coal, in building ever more private automobiles. The oil sector, that’s where the money and jobs are.”

“Even the people who understand global warming is a problem need jobs.”

“Governments pay lip service to combating global warming, but in reality they follow the money too. Big corporations buy them off. They run everything.”

“The problem is capitalism. Capitalists require ever-expanding profits and will do anything to keep them flowing. That’s just the way the system is.”

“So what can we do about it?”

“Get rid of capitalism.”

“How likely is that?”

“I guess it depends on how many people come to the same conclusion and are willing to do what it takes to change the system.”

“In other words, it’s hopeless.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look around, people don’t care. They’re too busy shopping or worrying about their own private problems. People are too scared to join a union, let alone overthrow capitalism.”

“Things can change, very quickly.”

And that’s where the story about how the Russian Revolution surprised everyone comes up.

For those of us who understand the importance of acting quickly to reduce carbon emissions and that capitalism is incapable of dealing with this urgent problem, the question of how fast we could build a new, environmentally friendly economic system is critically important.

Is there time or are we cooked? Literally.

The answer depends, in large part, on one’s views about how “revolution” occurs.

If you believe that major change only happens after long years of organizing by dedicated, professional revolutionaries building a party that can lead the masses into a brave new future, then human beings today are probably like a lobster in a pot just before the chef turns on the burner: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. This water seems quite comfortable to me.” It’s doubtful if we have the time to develop the cadre necessary for taking over a system as complex and all-encompassing as world capitalism.

On the other hand, if you believe in the power and ability of ordinary people to rise up when confronted by a crisis that affects us all, then it is possible to be optimistic. If the system you want to build begins with working people around the world taking over the reins of the economy and replacing capitalist minority rule with economic democracy, then that could happen relatively quickly. Yes, it still requires “leaders” working hard, talking and organizing, but history offers many examples of ideas spreading quickly and then people acting upon them.

The critical element — the “objective conditions” — already exists. Capitalism itself has created an economy overwhelmingly dominated by social labour. This gives the working class the potential power to take over almost every part of the economy in the vast majority of major economies around the world.

Most people in most countries are workers. If we chose to do so, we could easily expand one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is most of our economy. We could limit private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others. We could move to a system of social ownership where multiple democratic owning communities based on the appropriate level of government — local, state/provincial, national, international — replaced corporations. If we did these three things the system of greed that propels capitalists to earn profits, regardless of the consequences to our environment, would no longer exist.

Saving the planet from global warming and ensuring a future for our grandchildren are powerful incentives for billions of working people to participate in this necessary global movement.

Can it happen quickly enough? Yes.

Will it happen quickly enough? That is up to us.

Gary Engler 

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Unions should lead the fight against global warming

4 Dec

What is working class culture?

This question arose as part of a conversation about convincing members of Canada’s newest union, Unifor, to make saving the planet from climate change a priority.

“You’ll run up against working class culture,” said a friend who considers himself an anarchist.

“What do you mean?” I responded.

“Consumerism. High paying jobs with lots of overtime to buy ever more stuff, two cars, a big house in the suburbs with NASCAR and hockey on the two big screens in the basement, plus Housewives of Vancouver on the TV in the kitchen,” he said. “And how many thousands of your members build cars, dig up the tarsands and work in oil refineries? How can people with jobs like that ever be environmentalists?”

The first response I thought of was: “Are you saying soldiers never turn against war? Because history proves they do,” which spun the argument in another direction.

But the subject of working class culture lingered. Is there one and is it defined by consumerism? Or are there many, including ones opposed to the “culture” that TV tries to convince us is how we all live?

And regardless if there is only one, or many, where does it/they come from? Does culture simply happen or is it imposed upon us? Is it something that we can consciously build?

Certainly working class movements in the past have sought to educate themselves in an attempt to create an explicitly anti-capitalist culture. Many social democratic, anarchist and communist groups, including unions, grew into mass movements precisely by challenging the dominant ideology and suggesting an attractive, believable alternative. Rather than bemoan, but accept, the culture that rulers imposed on the working class, social democrats, anarchists and communists instead talked and listened to their fellow workers, convincing them that an alternative to capitalism was desirable, possible and necessary.

Those of us who understand that capitalism is environmentally unsustainable must do the same work today. We must inform people about the importance of immediate action to slow global warming and fix other ecological rifts that threaten human existence on our planet. We must challenge the notion that capitalists will solve environmental problems when in fact they are the ones who profit from mining the tarsands and building the pipelines which threaten our children’s and grandchildren’s future. We must point out that constant economic growth (unsustainable on a finite planet) is at the core of capitalism. But most important of all, we must offer a vision of an alternative to capitalism. This system must be environmentally sustainable, more democratic, provide a comfortable life and be fun to build.

One such alternative to capitalism is economic democracy. This means replacing master-servant relations with workplace democracy, replacing capitalist title with equal human entitlement and replacing corporate ownership with social ownership. The essential ideas of economic democracy are: Expanding one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is the vast majority of our economy; Limiting private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others; Replacing corporations with multiple democratic owning communities based on the appropriate level of government, local, state/provincial, national or international.

In an economic democracy individual greed could not overrule the collective good, which would be determined by democratic means. When the majority of people understand the causes and dangers of global warming, their governments and collective enterprises would become agents of change rather than barriers. Entrenched interests who profit from spewing ever more carbon into the atmosphere would not control them. If workers and communities ran industries, such as the automobile and oil sectors that must change or disappear if we are to make the necessary drastic cuts in carbon emissions, they would be a lot less likely than profit-addicted corporations to blackmail society into supporting private interests that damage the environment. Worker and community owned enterprises would support just transition strategies to move jobs from polluting to sustainable industries. They would also be much more likely to promote an alternative culture of artistic leisure over mindless consumerism.

Environmentalists in and outside the union movement should not cite “working class culture” as an excuse to avoid raising critical issues about the jobs we do. Hundreds of millions of workers have proved capable over the past two centuries of managing the contradiction of opposing capitalism while seemingly dependent on capitalists for their jobs. Pointing out how capitalists use jobs to blackmail us into supporting their interests helps people understand why capitalism is the problem, not the solution. Rather than being a barrier to environmental understanding the fact that capitalism cannot do what is necessary to repair the damage it has already done, is a powerful argument in favour of building a working class alternative to the current system.

Strong, democratic, environmentally conscious, militant unions are one of the keys to success in this project. Such unions do not shy away from difficult but necessary discussions.

Gary Engler

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Has the NDP capitulated to the rich?

28 Oct

This past week may come to be seen as a watershed moment in the NDP’s capitulation to neoliberal capitalism. The nominally social democratic party effectively supported a major corporate ‘trade’ accord all the while opposing an International Monetary Fund call for a more progressive tax code.

Last week the NDP basically endorsed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) the Harper Conservatives have negotiated with the European Union. The accord will greatly expand the power of multinational corporations. By extending Canada’s patent protections, CETA will drive up already high pharmaceutical drug costs. It also weakens provincial and municipal agencies ability to “buy local” by giving multinational corporations greater rights to bid on public contracts. Maybe most egregious, the accord gives corporations based in Canada and the EU the power to sue governments in special investor friendly tribunals if they feel public policy impedes their profit-making.

Despite these corporate giveaways, NDP Trade Critic Don Davies released a statement saying, “New Democrats welcome progress towards a comprehensive new trade agreement with the European Union.” To justify this position Davies pointed to the social democratic credentials of Western Europe. “The NDP has long maintained that Canada should have deeper economic relations with the European Union, democratic countries with some of the highest environmental and labour standards in the world.”

Interestingly, the NDP was less fixated on democratic standards when they voted for the Canada Jordan ‘free’ trade agreement at the end of last year. In that case they were desperate to point to a ‘free’ trade agreement they had supported so the party happily turned a blind eye to the lack of independent labour unions and elections in the country as well as the Jordanian monarchy’s prosecution of individuals for “extending one’s tongue” (having a big mouth) against the King.

In another sign of the NDP’s capitulation to rule by the rich, the International Monetary Fund is proposing a more progressive tax policy than Canada’s ‘Left’ party. Last week the usually neoliberal minded IMF released a paper that noted, “tax systems around the world have become steadily less progressive since the early 1980s.” To rectify this the Fund’s Fiscal Monitor presented an argument to increase income taxes on high earners to 60 to 70 per cent and even suggested a capital levy on wealthy households.

Long a proponent of socially devastating austerity policies, the IMF basically proposes a return to the income tax levels that were common three decades ago. At the start of the 1980s Canada’s top tax bracket was over 60%, which is some 15 percentage points higher than today’s rates. (In 1948 incomes over $2.4 million in 2013 money were taxed at 80%).

A social democratic party motivated by bettering society — rather than simply taking power — would have jumped on the IMF proposal. Instead, the NDP leader was busy repudiating the party’s Toronto Centre by-election candidate, Linda McQuaig, who previously argued that tax rates should be 70% on the rich.

“Be careful, she has never said anything different from party policy [since becoming a candidate],” Thomas Mulcair told the National Post. “She is a public intellectual who has written all kinds of things. But we’re the ones who have to put an offer before the Canadian public … Personal income tax increases are not on the table.”

At some point progressive minded party members will have to ask themselves how far down the neoliberal path they are willing to travel. In the meantime they should tell the NDP leadership they oppose CETA and want substantially increased taxes on the wealthy.

Yves Engler

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Russell, the revolution’s name is economic democracy

26 Oct

In the match between comedian and journalist it was a straight sets victory for the funny guy at the Who Makes More Political Sense Grand Slam event near Wimbledon.

Hundreds of thousands have already watched the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman take on Russell Brand in an interview about the need for revolution, a sign that the subject is of more than passing interest.

While it should not be surprising that humour was more effective than earnestness, it was curious to watch how effective Brand’s self-acknowledged ignorance about politics was in scoring political points. Perhaps it was because it made him seem more like the vast majority of ordinary people who know that something is wrong with our economic and political system, but can’t articulate an alternative.

Brand hit an ace when challenged about how he would do things differently and responded by saying what the system shouldn’t do. It “shouldn’t destroy the planet and shouldn’t create massive economic disparity,” he said.

In those ten words he brought together the most important political issues facing humanity today. And they share common roots: Power. Or the lack there of.

Both growing income inequality and the inability to deal with our looming environmental crisis are a result of the concentration of economic and social power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

In our one dollar, one vote economic system that power inevitably becomes political power. In every system throughout history economic and social power always became political power (then military power).

If left unrestrained, those with more economic, social and political power will use it to get themselves an even larger share of the economic pie, regardless of the effect on the environment or other people.  That’s how the system works.

So, money is power, but it is also a result of power. More money, more power, more money, more power — a virtuous cycle if you are among the wealthiest 1%, but a vicious cycle if you belong to the 99%.

This concentration of power in the hands of the few is the enemy of democracy, which is why so many people are concerned about rising income inequality. But it is also the source of the powerful resistance to dealing with global warming and other looming environmental catastrophes. Oil and coal, for example, make money for powerful people.

Once this reality is understood the question of what to do about the problem of growing income inequality and fixing our environment needs to be reframed as: What can we do to fix the inequality of power?

Answers in the past have included: High taxes on high incomes (up to 90% in many countries); Inheritance taxes on the wealthy; Taxes on all forms of property; Nationalizing sectors of the economy to bring them under “public” control; Encouraging the growth of unions. Most people call this package of policies Keynesianism.

All of these measures do reduce the power of the very rich and have in fact worked well for ordinary people in many countries. Prosperity was the result. The gap between rich and poor shrunk. And capitalism survived, despite protestations of the wealthy and their sycophants.

Capitalists survived so well that they eventually reversed many of these reforms. They demanded and won drastic cuts in their taxes, the privatization of nationalized industries and the destruction of unions. Even in most of the countries that once proclaimed themselves socialist or communist, capitalism has returned. New capitalist classes have emerged. The result has been growing inequality.

Is this return to the past proof that capitalism and inequality are inevitable? Just the way things are? That capitalism is natural or god-ordained? That we like it? That the economic elite is better than the rest of us and deserve what they get? Or is there a better explanation?

These are questions that I would have liked to hear Russell Brand answer. And here is my suggestion for what he should say:

Minority rule is what makes growing inequality inevitable. A system can proclaim itself democratic, but if a minority holds most of the economic and therefore social and political power the result will be the same: The minority will inevitably reward itself, its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will result.

So we are back to the question of power and how to distribute it equally. The answer is more democracy. Real democracy. Economic democracy. Workplace democracy. Social democracy as it was originally conceived.

We need to experiment to find the best ways to have workers and communities democratically administer the economy, to look after our environment. We need multiple owning communities so that power doesn’t become concentrated in the hands of a central state. We need to eliminate the divide between workers and owners by making everyone an owner. Everyplace where social labour occurs — people working in coordination with others — must be governed by democratic principles. We must get rid of incentives to destroy the planet.

That’s the sort of revolution that I think Russell Brand was talking about.

Gary Engler

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Economic democracy is the solution to global warming

18 Oct

Why are greenhouse gas emissions not being drastically curtailed? As carbon dioxide levels rise, temperatures rise, oceans become more acidic, polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise, the atmosphere absorbs more water. Floods, hurricanes and droughts become more frequent and more destructive.

Science makes it clear that global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—and biofuels.

In September 2013 scientists on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their conclusion: the burning of fossil fuels at current levels will lead to devastating warming within this century. In 2012, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study reached the same conclusion. This was a surprise since it had been financed by Charles Koch and led by Richard Muller, one of the few reputable scientists who had remained a global warming sceptic. Shortly after the release of the Berkeley study, the U.S. association of meteorologists, who had not taken a position on global warming, announced that they accepted the science.

In the face of the scientific consensus and worsening natural disasters, corporate capitalism responds by investing billions in fracking, tar sands, deep sea petroleum development, and expanding pipelines.

Although some individual capitalists are alarmed by global warming, capitalists as capitalists focus on maximizing profits. In theory, green industry could be just as profitable, but profits are made on existing corporations. In resource extraction, materials processing, agribusiness, manufacturing, international trade, communications, and finance, profits are based on cheap energy from fossil fuels.

Supporters of the system claim that capitalism empowers individuals. Capitalism has actually pushed individual enterprise to the fringes of economies. No more than ten percent of populations are self-employed. In Canada and the U.S. ninety percent depend on wage and salary work. Although capitalism gives individual capitalists title to means of livelihood—title that is bought and sold for private profit—wage and salary workers are actually engaged in cooperative, coordinated social labor.

Corporations, capitalism’s dominant institutions, are minority-owned collectives that dominate markets, monopolize supplies, and control technologies. The twenty largest transnational corporations have more revenues than most governments.

Corporate governance is neither democratic nor egalitarian. Those with the most shares have the most votes. Less than one in four own any corporate shares. Most corporate shares are owned by less than five per cent of populations. Major shareholders and top executives, who combined are less than 0.1 percent of populations, control most corporations.

Under capitalism, the productivity of social labor has substantially increased. Aided by technology and expanding markets, humankind can now deforest entire continents, level mountains, dam major rivers, deplete mineral reserves, and fish sea life to extinction. Meanwhile, private title allows corporations to give priority to profits and to externalize environmental costs, to pass these on to communities, workers, future generations, and other species.

In the 1970s, neo-conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initiated what are now called neo-liberal policies. Taxes paid by corporations and the wealthy were cut. Laws and regulations were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to make gains in collective bargaining. Public utilities and services were privatized. Capital was freed to move abroad in pursuit of cheaper labor, lower taxes and weaker environmental standards. As capitalists got richer, they gained more capacity to dominate political agendas and to manipulate the media and the outcome of elections.

So long as capital-owning minorities are entitled to direct economic and political activity in their private interests, private profit will take precedence over human wellbeing. The alternative is economic democracy. With economic democracy, community ownership would replace corporate ownership. Everyone—wage and salary workers, the self-employed, the unemployed, students, and the retired—would have a right to a voice and equal vote in their communities’ economic decisions. Workplace democracy would replace master-servant relations.

When everyone is equally entitled, communities will focus on meeting human needs, on providing employment and social services, on sustaining and improving the quality of present and future life. Instead of focusing on what is the most profitable, communities—responsible to all equally—would aim to balance employment opportunities with available labor. Public revenues would be balanced with needed social services. Imports would be balanced with exports. Industrial activity would be deliberately limited to the carrying capacity of environments.

Humankind cannot afford to delay action until the system changes. We must act now to cut greenhouse gas emissions. As individuals we can walk instead of driving, live in smaller residences, travel fewer air miles, eat less meat and choose produce grown organically. But so long as capitalists are entitled to direct economies in their private interests, corporations will continue to externalize environmental costs. The corporate media will continue to identify happiness with consuming more. Most employment will continue to depend on capitalist profit.

Isolated individual action has little impact, but human activity does transform the natural environment for good and ill. Capitalists can pass on environmental costs; humankind cannot.

We can begin by acting together to reduce damage to the environment. Some action—far too little—is already being taken to cut dependence on fossil fuels. Cities can be reconfigured so that most people can walk or bike to work, to school, to entertainment and recreation.

Investment in public transit can reduce dependence on private automobiles. With current technology, wind and solar energy could be much more widely used. Geothermal and waste heat networks would further reduce fossil fuel emissions. Governments could speed up development of cheap, safe, plentiful sources of energy. Public investment—freed from nuclear weapons interests—could determine whether breeder reactors would eliminate radioactive waste, and whether thorium reactors would eliminate the danger of meltdowns.

International agreement to raise average tariffs from the current five percent to thirty percent (as in the 1950s and 60s) would increase local production in agriculture and manufacturing, replacing fossil fuels with human energy. The revenues raised would help provide governments with the funds needed to redirect social labor to more sustainable ways of meeting human needs. Substantially increasing taxes on corporations and the highest incomes would further increase public revenues and would have the added benefit of reducing the money available to promote narrow capitalist agendas.

Communities can act now to assert their right to veto damaging industrial activity. Parties and coalitions can be formed to give priority to human wellbeing. Campaigns for electoral reform can make governments more transparent and responsible to general human interest. Expanding social entitlements, the right to food, housing, education, health care, employment and basic income would reduce dependence on capitalist profit.

Al Engler

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Taking responsibility at work requires taking power

15 Oct

Something about the Canucks versus Canadiens hockey game Saturday night has stayed with me, producing a mental itch that won’t go away.

It wasn’t Dan Hamhuis scoring on his own net on a whiffed pass, double ricochet off Roberto Luongo , although that will haunt the Canuck defenceman for the rest of his career.

It was in a break from the action when my TV screen filled with beautiful images of crystal clear streams, healthy salmon and pristine British Columbia back country. A kind and gentle voice praised the incredible environment that Mother Nature has bestowed on this province. One felt a sense of soothing comfort, tinged with pride at having chosen to live in this part of the world.

It was a commercial promoting the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. An ad for a project that is an essential part of what one could argue is the greatest single environmental threat currently facing the planet.

After the initial shock at the over-the-top doublespeak of using our love for nature to promote a pipeline proposal to transport some of the most carbon intensive oil on the planet, I began to wonder who would sell their soul, along with their creative energy, to create a piece of propaganda that would have amazed George Orwell himself.

Somewhere, a group of artists, or at least reasonably creative women and men, had sat in an office discussing how best to convince a skeptical public (polls have shown well over 60 per cent of B.C. residents opposed) on the merits of building a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the west coast.

Imagine these human beings, not much different from you or me, pitching proposals, exchanging ideas and debating the merits of various creative approaches to ignoring climate science, disregarding the likelihood of breaks in any pipeline, discounting the well-reasoned fear of shipping accidents and completely overlooking the opposition of First Nations whose land the pipeline must cross.

“Let’s sell them on a pipeline by showing pretty pictures of nature,” one of them says. “And use a voice that people trust to brand the pipeline as environmentally friendly.”

“That’s it,” says another. “That’s it exactly. It’s the same as selling beer. If we can convince young men that getting drunk makes them more attractive to women, we can easily use people’s love of nature to sell a pipeline.”

“Exploit the very thing that the pipeline will destroy to sell it, that’s hardcore,” says yet another. “Deviously wicked.”

“I love it,” says the client.

And not one of them feels the least bit guilty for helping to destroy the livability of our planet. Why? Because they are just doing their jobs.

So the commercial is written, produced, directed, location scouted, lighted, costumed, filmed, acted in, edited, catered, etc. and not one of the dozens of people making it feel the least bit guilty for contributing to global warming, because after all, they too are just doing their jobs. Likewise the sales rep at the TV station, the traffic person, the director, master control operator and every other worker from Calgary to Fort Mac to Vancouver who take no responsibility — all are also just doing their jobs.

Am I the only one who is bothered by this? “Just doing my job,” sounds eerily similar to “just following orders,” a soldier’s excuse for committing a war crime. Is this where our economic system’s pursuit of ever-greater profits has led us? The sum of our individual actions is creating an environmental disaster but none of us are responsible?

I’m pretty certain most who work in Fort McMurray understand how destructive what they do is to the environment. I feel confident that the vast majority of creative people involved in selling products that are bad for us understand what they are doing. Most may prefer not to think about it, but they do understand. They believe there’s no choice. Acting like you don’t care is simply what it takes to successfully earn a living.

This is the attitude of people who feel powerless. It is the attitude of a soldier who has learned the negative consequences of ever questioning an order.

Our economic system gives the power to decide most things to a small number of people motivated by greed. Most of us must follow orders if we are to succeed. Our ability to choose is confined to decisions like Coke versus Pepsi. We feel powerless because that is our reality.

To take responsibility requires taking power.

This is the mental itch that won’t go away: How do people who feel powerless take power and build a world with a democratic economic system where we collectively decide what to produce and how, rather than let the profit motive decide all?

We better quickly figure out an answer because all the science tells us it will soon be too late.

Gary Engler

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Capitalism or a healthy environment — time to choose

4 Oct

If all you care about is making more stuff, capitalism may be the best system ever. But if you want to save the planet from environmental catastrophe our current economic system is a dead end.

I remember in my socialist youth often being told: “Your ideas sound good but that’s just not how things work in real life.”

Today, in my socialist sixties, these same words seem appropriate as an analysis of mainstream environmentalism.

Here is the harsh reality:

Capitalists make huge profits from destroying the planet. The capitalist drive to maximize profits explains the externalizing of environmental costs. Capitalism allows small minorities to profit at the expense of others. Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood allows capitalists to make decisions that pass the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Worse, capitalism requires constant growth because it always needs more profit. Making ever more profit is what motivates people to make investments. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with much less stuff?

All the evidence shows capitalism is really lousy at dealing with declining markets. Every time the economy shrinks for a sustained period capitalism goes into crisis. Banks crash, unemployment rises and wars are often necessary to get capitalism out of its crisis.

Supporters of capitalism claim the system is based on freedom and choice, but when it comes to the environment for many people this amounts to the freedom to choose between destroying the planet or having a job. The promoters of tar sands, fracking, coal mining and pipelines are explicit about this and in fact go even further. The business pages are full of stories quoting the captains of the carbon-industrial complex telling us what amounts to: “You must choose between economic prosperity and what is good for the environment, because you can’t have both.”

If we continue with capitalism they are correct.

Yes, some so-called environmentalists do look to capitalism for solutions, but that’s like asking the fox to fix the henhouse. You can’t be a serious environmentalist and support capitalism. A sustainable economy is incompatible with a system that constantly demands more profit.

Now that the human population has passed seven billion, it should be obvious that we inhabit a planet of finite resources. But population growth is not the problem. Human energy remains our most precious and underutilized resource. Once basic material needs for food, clothing, housing and healthcare have been met, human wellbeing depends less on consumption than on opportunities for education, employment, social participation and social recognition.

Science leaves little reasonable doubt that the burning of currently known reserves of coal, oil and natural gas will push atmospheric carbon dioxide levels past a tipping point, after which rising global temperatures will irreversibly undermine the conditions on which human life as we know it depends.

Despite the weight of evidence and the urgency of the problem, capitalism rests on the expansion of fossil fuel production and use.

Around the planet trillions of dollars are being spent to develop massive deposits of shale oil and gas. In Canada capitalist investment is focused on expanding oil production from tar sands. The promoters claim that these developments will create jobs. But the funds required to extract and transport that fuel will create far fewer jobs than would be produced if equivalent amounts were spent on the development of solar, wind and geothermal power. Far more jobs could be produced with investments in the production and distribution of local agriculture, clothing, shoes and communications products. More jobs would be created by investments in childcare, elder care, social housing, public transit and other green infrastructure.

But capitalism prefers investments in fossil fuels because corporate profits now largely depend on cheap fuel. Equivalent profits cannot be made meeting actual human needs.

So, we have some important choices to make: Support capitalism or support the environment. Build a different sort of economic system that can prosper in harmony with the environment or fiddle with capitalism as our planet burns.

Gary Engler

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Interview with Gary Engler

18 Sep

In our final installment of the Unifor Interview Series with union leaders, staff, and rank-and-file members, we speak with Gary Engler, Vice-President of Unifor Local 2000, the Media Union of BC. Gary also recently penned two articles at Rabble.ca, “Thoughts on Labour Day” and “Unifor and the potential rebirth of militant union activism.” He recently co-authored “The New Commune-ist Manifesto: Workers of the World It Really Is Time To Unite“.

Listen here.

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Capitalism versus economic democracy

26 Aug

Capitalism is a system that gives major shareholders and top corporate executives—one per cent or less of populations—the right to direct means of livelihood in their private interests. The system’s dominant institutions are corporations. Deemed in law to be individual persons, corporations actually combine the capital of numerous shareholders with the intention of dominating markets.

Corporations are privately owned capitalist collectives. The largest control more revenues than most governments.  To maximize profits, corporations expand production and introduce labour saving machinery, cut wages, and move employment to places where labour is cheaper. A recurring result is that the income of majorities who depend on labour falls as production increases. With declining markets for consumer goods, capitalist investment turns to financial speculation. Market crashes follow. Production facilities are shut down. Unemployment worsens, more jobs are lost, wages are cut further. Individual lives are disrupted. Communities are impoverished.

To deal with disaffection, the system relies on repression, militarism, and war. Within countries, surveillance is expanded and tightened. The marginalized, the dispossessed, and the disorderly are racialized and demonized as criminals. More people are jailed for longer periods. Globally, people who actively oppose the system are demonized as terrorists; countries are bombed and occupied. Wars are highly profitable for well connected corporations and divert attention from domestic divisions. Wars also glorify the violent machismo that encourages the subjugation, abuse, and marginalization of women.

Military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya increased sales of B-52s, guided missiles, helicopter attack ships, aircraft carriers, and drones. In the invaded countries, life was made worse. Power and water plants, bridges, railways, communications systems, schools, neighborhoods and entire towns were destroyed. Tens of thousands have been killed. Millions have become refugees. Invading countries gain no tangible benefits, but for politically influential aircraft and munitions corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing profits did rise substantially.

Supporters of military action abroad claim it is humanitarian intervention. In Haiti the aim of “the responsibility to protect” was to make the poorest people in the western hemisphere so desperate that they would work for even less. In 2004, the U.S., France, and Canada sent troops to remove Jean Bertrand Aristide, the elected and widely popular President. Haiti was occupied in the name of the UN Security Council. Haitian government and municipal institutions were dismantled. Public workers lost their employment. The minimum wage law was abolished; so was public transit. Education was turned over to foreign aid organizations. With no functioning public institutions, Haitians were left with no means to protect themselves from hurricanes or to rebuild after major earthquakes.

Capitalism is at the root of growing environmental crises. Private capitalist entitlement allows corporations to externalize environmental costs, to pass these on to communities, workers, future generations, and other species. Science has convincingly demonstrated that rising carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels disrupt weather patterns, melt glaciers and polar ice caps, and acidify oceans. Still, major transnational corporations continue to fund campaigns of denial.

When the supporters of capitalism concede the seriousness of carbon emissions, they propose profit-making schemes (scams) like cap and trade, or they insist that consumers are to blame and should pay. Here in BC, corporate business supported the Campbell government’s carbon tax—paid by final users of gasoline and heating oil. This ostensibly green policy fits neatly with neoconservative plans to shift the tax burden from business to working people. Meanwhile, the government increased tax-breaks and write-offs for oil and gas exploration and development.

In capitalist rhetoric, unions, public sector workers, and local communities are reactionary vested interests, opposed to change. From a human perspective, capitalists are the most socially and environmentally destructive vested interest. They shamelessly use their wealth and political influence to increase their wealth by impoverishing others and blocking changes that undermine the profits made from fossil-fueled production and trade.

The working-class alternative

The working class—everyone who depends on labour not capital for their income—has the capacity to challenge the right of capitalists to direct social labour for their private profit. The working class includes wage and salary workers and the self-employed—shopkeepers, owner operators, farmers, and self-employed professionals, all whom depend on income from their labour. Those without capitalist entitlements also include most artists, artisans, full time parents, pensioners, students, the unemployed, and those unable to work.

Being the overwhelming majority—everyone but the one per cent, 0.1 percent or 5 percent who control and live off capital—the working class frees itself only by freeing all. So long as some are exploited and oppressed, the wellbeing of everyone who depends on income from labor is threatened. A world of human equality requires the replacing of capitalist title with human entitlement, corporate ownership with social ownership, and master-servant relations with workplace democracy.

With equal human entitlement, residents of owning communities will replace shareholders as the legal beneficiaries of means of livelihood. Social labour will be motivated and directed not for private profit but for general wellbeing. When all inhabitants including people whose livelihood depends on tourism and organic agriculture, berry and mushroom pickers, scientists, educators, parents, and students as well as manufacturing and resource workers have a voice and equal vote in economic decisions, communities will limit industrial activity to the carrying capacity of environments.

With social ownership means of livelihood will no longer be bought and sold for private gain. Social ownership must be distinguished from state ownership. State ownership as it exists continues the top-down command structures of corporate capitalism.  Social ownership means ownership by towns, neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations, and perhaps international communities. Social ownership means democratic and transparent planning by inhabitants for their wellbeing.

With workplace democracy workers in all occupations—machine operators, clerical workers, trades people, administrators, professionals—will have a voice and equal vote in the direction of their labour time. All occupations will be self-regulated professions. Assembly line workers will have a voice and vote in the direction of assembly-line work. Skilled trades people, clerical workers, engineers, and administrators will democratically direct their labour time. General assemblies of workers in all occupations may elect managers; owning communities will elect or appoint auditors and perhaps the directors of enterprise boards.

When capitalism is replaced with economic democracy, social labour and economies will no longer be directed in the interests of capitalist profit. When everyone is equally entitled to participate in economic decisions, communities will aim to provide acceptable employment opportunities for all available labour. No longer pressed to give priority to private profit, communities will be freed to balance industrial activity with the carrying capacity of environments.  The financial costs of social services will be balanced with revenues generated in exchange. The cost of needed imports will be balanced with exports.

Capitalism is based on market exchange, but capitalism should not be confused with the latter. Markets flourished long before capitalism. Ending capitalism does not mean abolishing market exchange. The working class has an obvious interest in democratic control of means of livelihood and labour time.  Majorities have an equally obvious interest in expanding social entitlements—employment at decent wages, education, food, housing, health care, child care,  leisure. However, people who depend on wages and salaries cannot reasonably be expected to support the abolition of market exchange. Half and more of working people are employed in the production and distribution of goods and services for exchange.

The right of individuals and communities to freely exchange goods and services with others—subject to democratically agreed taxes and regulations—is and will remain a basic human right. The widest practical access to supplies and markets is a major source of material wellbeing. Perhaps when capitalist entitlement has become a distant memory, exchange values and market forces will be anachronisms. Until then, communities from the local to the international will aim to base trade on the exchange of equivalents in labour time.

Three twentieth century dogmas have obscured the working-class alternative. The first narrowly defined the working class as blue-collar industrial workers. The second held that the alternative to competitive capitalism is centralized state control. The third is that ending capitalism requires armed revolution to seize state power.

Factory workers have a vital role in production and in mass movements against the system, but production workers alone do not provide an alternative to capitalism. The working class is far broader. It includes blue collar, pink collar and white collar wage and salary workers—service providers, skilled trades people, clerical workers, and professionals as well as assembly line workers. When the self-employed are included, the class of people without capitalist entitlement unquestionably does everything necessary to initiate, plan, produce, transport, distribute, and sustain the production of goods and services required for human wellbeing.

In the twentieth century, top-down centralized state control was generally viewed as the alternative. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s adoption of capitalist policies, did embolden corporate oligarchies. From a working-class perspective the demise of what was called actually existing socialism was not entirely negative. We no longer have to answer for external alternatives that divide people. We can look for the alternative within, in the working class, in the collective capacities and human aspirations of overwhelming majorities everywhere.

The twentieth century identification of fundamental social change with armed revolution did not inspire working-class opposition to capitalism. Violence and disorder damage immediate and long-term working-class interests, undermining employment, democracy, and human rights. Young men are maimed and killed. Women and children are victimized, terrorized, and killed.  An anti-capitalist working class will look not to armed struggle but to strategies and tactics that rely on the energy, spirit, and knowledge of men and women, on workplace organization, political action, and community mobilizations

Extremists among wealth-holding minorities may initiate or provoke violence to protect and advance their privileges. While people have an inherent human right to defend themselves and their interests, the working-class response is to look to mass support and to winning soldiers and police—who are themselves wage and salary workers—to the side of working-class majorities. Venezuela, Bolivia, Egypt, and Tunisia provide recent evidence that police, soldiers and officers can be won to the side of majorities.

From gross production to human wellbeing

So long as capitalism is unopposed, the working class appears dependent on capital, but it is capital that depends on labour. Capitalists as capitalists are drones; their function is to appropriate values produced by others. Every activity required for human wellbeing is now done by the working class—including the self-employed, as well as wage and salary workers. What the working class lacks is the understanding that capitalism is a house of paper entitlements that rests on the acquiescence of majorities.

Ideally, people who depend on labour for their livelihood would overwhelmingly refuse to accept rule by, and in, the narrow interests of a wealthy minority. Everyone would continue doing the work they now do, but instead of submitting to master-servant relations, people in all occupations—production, transportation, distribution, and sales people, professionals, managers, day care workers, service providers, teachers, accountants, nurses, and doctors—would democratically direct their labour time. Instead of working for the profit of shareholders, they would work in the interests of their communities.

Realistically, so long as capital is dominant substantial numbers will believe that their relative wellbeing and status depend on capitalism. Many will ignore capitalist privilege and see the enemy as the state, big government, foreign countries, unions, the poor, minorities, immigrants, liberals, Ivy League elites, feminists, older white men, communists, anarchists, criminals, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus.

Seeing human equality, cooperation, and democracy as a realistic alternative will encourage the disaffected to look to human solidarity, to respect diversity and each other. It will deepen opposition to a system that gives the interests of wealthy minorities priority over human and environmental wellbeing. It will encourage community mobilizations, workplace organization, and political action for gains and reforms that weaken capitalist title and strengthen human entitlement. As such gains are made, more men and women will be inspired to mobilize against the system.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a time of virulent anti-communism, Keynesian reforms that improved living conditions did dampen opposition to capitalism.  When motivated by visions of economic democracy, movements for reforms that improve the quality of life can convince more people that opposition to capitalism is practical.

The exact issues that will inspire mass mobilization against the system cannot be predicted. We can start by campaigning for steeply graduated income taxes. Rates of 75 per cent or higher on incomes over $250,000 a year could increase government revenues by an equivalent of five per cent or more of gross national income. The revenues raised would eliminate government deficits and provide needed funding for social services, health care, education, public transit, and renewal of needed public infrastructure.  Higher wealth and inheritance taxes can be similarly beneficial. Tobin taxes on financial transactions and the re-regulation of international currency and interest rates would reduce the negative impact of financial speculation and raise more public revenues. Increasing tariffs enough to encourage domestic production would further increase government revenues and weaken the power of transnational capital over markets.

Supporters of the system claim that attempts to increase taxes on the rich inevitably backfire because capital will move elsewhere. In fact, capitalists invest where it is profitable. Capital does move in response to marginal changes in profitability, but wherever we are, we are not alone. Raising taxes on capital can inspire similar movements elsewhere, potentially limiting the threat of capital flight and weakening the power of capital to play regions and countries against others for their private benefit.

Public ownership of banks would direct savings away from speculative manias to socially useful investments. Reversing privatizations, renewing public ownership of utilities, transportation and communications systems, and natural resources could methodically weaken the power of capital and strengthen democratic control of means of livelihood.  Reforming political campaign finance rules, lobbying regulations, electoral laws would reduce the control capital now has over political agendas.

Local communities can take initiatives to set up cooperatives and community owned financial institutions, social housing, electrical power and communications utilities. Public support for local food production can make people less dependent on the vagaries of capitalist markets.  Environmental action can help ensure a better human future. Local, national, and international mobilizations can help reduce dependence on fossil fuel and replace automobiles with public transit and bicycles. Cities can be reconfigured so that walking once again is a pleasant, healthy mode of daily transportation.

Community and workplace mobilizations in solidarity with First Nations, racialized minorities, the marginalized, women, and immigrants will build human bonds and help expose the mean-spirited divisiveness of wealth-holders’ privilege. Support for policies that are intended to reduce disparities increase global human cooperation. These include the right of people to democratically direct their domestic markets as well as international funding with no strings attached for education, housing, health care, and infrastructure. Development should be directed not by foreign agencies but people themselves. The aim is to help provide people with capacity to help themselves.

The capacity of capitalists to use violence against working-class gains can be reduced. Vocally supporting the work police do in protecting persons and property, while exposing covert politically motivated policing, demanding public accountability of the criminal justice system, and mobilizing against police assaults on opponents of the system can help win police to the side of the people. Supporting soldiers in the sacrifices they make while opposing militarism and war can expose capitalist profiteering at the expense of soldiers as well as of people abroad.

Unions will have critical roles in movements against capitalism. Workers not represented by unions have no means to formulate their workplace interests independent of capitalists.  Unions were organizing centres of campaigns for freedom of assembly, association, speech, and the press, as well as the right to vote for men and women. Unions are largely responsible for the wages and working conditions that allow capitalism to claim it provides rising living standards. Now in a time when capitalist interests are eroding collective bargaining rights, unions have been preoccupied with conserving past gains. Still unions have provided critical support for First Nations, racialized minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and immigrants.

Revived opposition to capitalism may begin with the unemployed, marginalized, dispossessed minorities, immigrants, or students. Wherever it begins, rising opposition to capitalism will encourage workers already organized for collective bargaining to join in solidarity. As opposition to capitalism grows, more wage and salary workers will demand collective bargaining rights. Revived unionism will convince more people that a working-class alternative is practical.

Mass protests over the past few years in Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, Wisconsin, Greece, and Israel show that people will rally against repression, privatizations, public sector layoffs, cuts to social programs, rising food costs and the high cost of for-profit housing.  Immediate results may be disappointing, but as people come to see that they are not alone in opposition to a system directed by and for super-wealthy minorities, mass protests can turn into general strikes and workplace occupations as well as into electoral gains for democracy and equality.

Al Engler

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Capitalism’s complicated relationship with public debt

25 Aug

Most political parties, central banks and the corporate media insist that public debt is the most pressing problem facing governments. Meanwhile, real wages in the U.S., UK and Canada, and much of the EU continue to fall. Disparities widen. Rates of chronic unemployment are rising.  Unemployment levels for young people are at historic highs, over fifty per cent in Greece, Spain and Portugal. But capitalists—whose income comes from profits, dividends, interest, rent and capital gains—are preoccupied with public debt.

For centuries, public debt has been a driver of capitalist growth. By increasing financial reserves, government bonds and treasury bills add to the credit available to business. Most of the interest on public debt is paid to financial institutions and wealthy individuals.  Capitalists clearly benefited from the trillions in the additions to public debt to bailout financial institutions after the 2007-08 sub-prime mortgage crash.

For capitalists the only real problem with public debt is that it might not be repaid. In a time of declining government revenues, creditors have reason to worry. But additional revenues could be raised with little damage to most markets by restoring taxes on corporations and top incomes to earlier levels. This is not happening because it would be contrary to entrenched supply-side policies that have dominated political agendas for more than thirty years.

In the 1970s neo-conservatives, liberally funded by the super rich, began to stridently demand an end to Keynesian demand-side policies. They claimed that rising real wages and expanding social entitlements were lowering the income of capital, reducing the supply of funds for investment, leading to stagnation and inflation. They demanded that governments cut spending on social services, weaken unions, reduce regulations on business, and leave economic priorities to the marketplace.

The Keynesian period that preceded the neo-conservative reaction was no utopia. It was a time of paranoid anti-Communism, institutionalized racism, discrimination against women, homophobia, and genocidal imperialist wars. But in many countries laws were passed to make it easier for unions to organize and engage in collective bargaining.  Common people gained rights to public pensions, unemployment insurance, family allowances and post-secondary education. Governments made major investments in transportation infrastructure, electrical utilities, schools and hospitals. Capital movements, currency values and interest rates were regulated. International trade was encouraged, but reciprocal tariffs were kept high enough to protect domestic production for domestic markets.

To pay down heavy war debts and to increase spending on social services and public infrastructure, taxes on corporate income were 50 per cent and higher; taxes on top personal incomes were 70 and 90 percent. Although the share of total income appropriated by the richest two percent fell during Keynesian times, corporate investment rose steadily, as did markets and real wages.

The first major neo-conservative victories were the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the US in 1980. Taxes on capitalist income and corporations were cut. So were social programs. Regulations on corporations were eased and eliminated.  Laws were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and bargain successfully.  Neo-conservatives claimed that increasing the after-tax income of the rich and freeing corporations to maximize profits would increase the supply of funds for investment. They said  employment would increase, as would the supply of goods and services.

The top two per cent of income earners did double their share of total income to twenty percent. However, the rate of investment did not increase. Real wages declined. Chronic unemployment increased. Growth in markets for consumer goods slowed.

Supply-side policies—now more often called neo-liberalism or the Washington consensus—have a fundamental flaw. Individual capitalist investment has little impact on real economies. Most private investment in machinery, equipment, buildings, land, resources, and on research and development comes out of depreciation and depletion allowances and other pre-tax corporate revenues.

In a recent study commissioned by the UK government, prominent economist John Kay reported that the total capital raised by British companies in equity markets is actually negative. He concluded that financial markets serve the narrow interests of financial institutions and wealthy investors who can make quick profits by buying and selling shares, taking control of companies and stripping assets.  “In a paradoxical way, the function of equity markets today is not to enable savers to put money into companies. It’s to enable them to get it out.”

When capitalists do invest in real means of livelihood, they look to places where labor is cheaper. As more jobs move abroad, overall wage income falls, further weakening markets. Private domestic investment focuses on speculation in real estate, high tech start-ups, futures markets, derivatives, and to mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. Few of these investments add anything to real means of livelihood. In casino capitalism, excess capital drives up share prices, overvaluing assets. Financial booms are followed by busts, capital evaporates, credit dries up, real enterprises go bankrupt, more people lose employment.

Instead of the frugal savers in Adam Smith’s free market, today’s capitalists are self-indulgent gamblers. They spend extravagantly on lavish mansions, luxury condos, private jets and yachts.  They have more than enough left over to fund the political campaigns and lobbying that give them effective control of political agendas.

Letting the market decide may sound benign. In practice it means giving a wealthy minority–major shareholders and top corporate executives—free rein to direct economies for their private short-term profit. Meanwhile, tax cuts for corporations and the super rich have reduced the capacity of governments to limit the damage done by capitalist self-interest. In Canada, in the last decade, total government revenues have fallen from 43 percent of GDP to less than 38 percent.

When current governments do intervene they do so to defend capitalist interests. Public services are frozen and cut, public employment is reduced. Yes, austerity policies, by assuring creditors that they will be paid, help keep capital markets booming, but cuts to employment and consumer income weaken most other markets, discouraging investment in real means of livelihood, increasing unemployment and poverty. As disparities within and among countries widen, capitalist minorities turn to more internal repression, more surveillance, more public spending on weapons of mass destruction and foreign military intervention.

Al Engler

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The problem is too much power for the rich

23 Aug

For forty years people have been bombarded with claims that economic well being depends on private capital not on governments. Public utilities and services have been privatized. Regulations on corporations have been weakened. Taxes paid by corporations and the top income brackets have been slashed. Capital has been freed to move jobs from higher wage to lower wage countries.

Capitalist minorities — major shareholders and top corporate executives, two percent and less of populations — have increased their share of total income from ten percent to twenty percent. Capitalists have increased funds for private investment, but roads, bridges, rail lines, sewage and water systems have been allowed to deteriorate.  Capitalists also have more money to finance election campaigns, to lobby and manipulate political agendas. Public spending on schools, hospitals, medical care and other social services has fallen behind needs. Chronic unemployment has risen. More people must get by on part-time work. Unemployment levels for young people are 25 percent, 50 percent and higher.

For immense majorities who depend on income from labor and social services, the problem is not too much government; it is too much money and power in the hands of corporations and the super-rich.

Governments should be criticized for disregarding the well being of majorities. Corruption, secrecy and duplicity should be condemned. But what in government is corruption in corporations is proprietary right. Corporations legally direct resources and social labor behind closed doors for the profits of shareholders. To make it seem that this is a matter of private rights, capitalist law deems corporations to be individuals. Corporations are actually the system’s dominant institutions. The largest transnational corporations have more revenues than most governments.

Corporations are not the competitive individuals of free market theory. They dominate markets. They patent products, technologies, and processes. They buy up the most profitable sources of supply, control marketing networks, and spend millions on advertising to tie consumers to existing brands. Whenever possible, they introduce technologies that reduce employment. They outsource wage and salary work. The fewer people employed, the less paid for labor, the more profits for shareholders, the more money for executive bonuses.

As capital’s share of total income rises, the share going to labor and the needy falls. As most markets decline, capitalists turn to speculation, betting on price changes in real estate, futures or derivatives. Casino capitalism adds nothing to real means of livelihood; winners merely gain at the expense of losers. Financial bubbles are followed by crashes. As more businesses fail, capitalists hold on to what they can by demanding that debtors be punished for the sins of creditors. Austerity leads to further declines in working-class income and markets.

Governments should be opposed for supporting policies that favor capitalist minorities and acting as the agencies of militarism, wars and repression. Minority privilege rests on the force of arms. Some capitalists promote war because they believe that military action can give them access to new resources and markets. Others profit from the purchase of drones, missiles, airplanes, fuel, and the provisioning of armed forces.

Edward Snowden exposed government secrets. He also exposed the central role private corporations have in surveillance and repression. His employer, Booz Allen Hamilton is a defense, security and surveillance contractor that has 26,000 employees and revenues of $5 billion, 99 percent from the U.S. government. Just as the privatization of prisons has led to growth in numbers jailed and to the use of penal labor for private profit, the privatization of surveillance can be expected to lead to more intrusive surveillance. The internet, once hailed for democratizing information, is already a tool of surveillance for private profit.

The most ominous consequence of capitalism is global warming. Because existing profits depend on cheap energy, capitalists refuse to believe that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change. Their remarkable wealth has made them so smugly self-assured that they have convinced themselves that if they deny the obvious global temperatures will not rise; ice caps will not melt; oceans will not become more acidic; extreme weather events will not become more frequent.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, corporate capitalism increases investments in tar sands and fracking, while cutting investments in solar, wind, tidal, and biothermal energy. They invest little in alternative nuclear power technologies that could eliminate nuclear waste and the threat of meltdowns. Corporate interests that concede the threat of global warming, promote new profitable uses for industrial waste. They propose reducing heat from the sun by blasting reflective chemicals into the atmosphere, and absorbing more carbon by dumping iron filings into the ocean and plowing “biochar” — the ashes of incinerated garbage — into soils.

If governments are to act in the immediate and long-term interests of humankind, the power of capitalist minorities must be reduced; democratic rights must expand. Taxes paid by corporations and the super rich must be raised at least to 1950s levels. Privatizations should be reversed, public ownership expanded. Wherever practical, utilities and public services should be directed by local communities.  Allowing those with the most shares to have the most votes must be replaced with one person one vote. People everywhere must have a right to a voice and equal vote in directing their communities’ economic activity. Workers in all occupations must have the right to democratically direct their social labor time.

Al Engler

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