As we watch , huge criminal corporations, governments, and their lemming environmentalists race to the cliff edge in Paris, refusing to grapple with the reason they are racing…. They refuse – in any meaningful way – to challenge The One Per Cent head on, which is where effective solutions to climate change begin.
While a flood of information pours out of Paris about poor nations and rich nations and island nations drowning … and the undeniable fact of Global Warming, The One Per Cent grows richer and takes more of planetary wealth as a function of misusing populations, wasting raw materials, selfishly exploiting technology, destroying the biosphere and buying governments like picking up so many stock options.
The One Per Cent make up the people behind “Free Trade Treaties” that, in fact, remove national sovereignty, erase conditions for middle nation independence and climate viability, and lash huge populations – like galley slaves – to the profit machines of imperial nations owned by The One Per Cent and working (‘as if ‘democratic and/or “fair” societies) to funnel more and more of the world’s wealth into the pockets of a very few.
Behind all the (sometimes really intense and well-meant) negotiations and trade-offs in Paris operates the mafiosa hand of The One Per Cent. And until it is addressed as what it is with a demand that (to use the language of Pope Francis) “the downtrodden change the world economic order” the game of make-believe will go on.
One of the few truth-tellers, Pope Francis has spoken of “savage capitalism” and called money and modern capitalism “dung of the devil”. He doesn’t pretend the present world order is, somehow, unrelated to the descent of huge populations into poverty and the globe moving ever-closer to climate Break Down.
In all the flood of information from Paris, The One Per Cent is never named as the Central Issue to be dealt with – for that would mean, as the Pope suggests, a reconstruction of power relations in the world. And so, sad as it is to say, the nice, caring people in Paris (from Canada, too) are living in a land of make-believe. They refuse to ‘grasp the nettle’, to name the Elephant in the Room, to set out positions that demand the redistribution of wealth (and power).
They refuse to speak of a global reorganization of work and of production for use rather than for profit in a process that completely removes the employment of destructive climate pollutants. By ignoring the broad papal hints, the Paris negotiators bring two inevitable things closer: (1) crisis in climate conditions and (2) the absolute certainty of major, wide-spread wars of “revolutionary” and “repressive” kinds: of social chaos amidst a crumbling and humanly destructive ecosystem.
The corrective doesn’t need (or want) name. Because the general road is clear. The Ninety-Nine Per Cent can quite easily eliminate The One Per Cent in its character as a grossly wealthy force putting human existence at risk. Liberated from The One Per Cent burden, many of its members might become useful agents in constructing a new society. The language has to be about human survival and the absolutely necessary reconstructions of human work, human creativity, human administrative talent, the meaning of wealth, and the human power necessary to effect what is, in fact, revolutionary change in the modes of administering publicly responsible power in the world.
What They Don’t Talk About In Paris
How much, just for instance, has the horrendous, unnecessary, lunatic-driven war in the Middle East – since 1980, contributed to climate change? Thousands of polluting aircraft, millions of polluting weapons and explosives, numberless polluting fires raging without letup, millions of polluting corpses lying in the desert sun. The U.S.- backed Iraq invasion of Iran is said – alone – to have cost a million lives. And then there was the U.S.-instigated demolition of Iraq… and then Libya … and now Syria…. (“Bomb them some more”, says the morally challenged British prime minister, David Cameron, while his representatives in Paris negotiate to prevent climate change.)
Do the Paris environmental experts have a way of computing the number of human murders and increases of warfare created climate pollution in direct relation to the increase in Capitalist wealth? In direct relation to the growing wealth of The One Per Cent?
Plainly, The One Per Cent – made up of acceptable environmentalists, co-operating governments, and Capitalists masquerading as concerned ‘leaders’ – are going to have to be confronted as never before on Climate Change. They are going to have to be moved over by the people… as a start, if anything meaningful is going to get done. They are going to have to be moved over to make room for brilliantly staged reconstructions of power and wealth by peaceful means. If that doesn’t happen … welcome CHAOS.
There is a lesson here, ‘Writ Large’, as they say. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see it. Canadians must really challenge the present inaction (called “action” and “new targets” and “hopeful goals” and “real assessments”). Canadians must move “acceptable” environmental “experts” right out of the picture. Canadians must insist governments act upon solutions that directly address, directly seize, redirect, and put to constructive environmental use the wealth of The One Per Cent – wealth that has, heretofore, been gained cruelly and often brutally through demonic instruments of human and ecological destruction operated on massive scales. That is wealth which, now, must have a completely different character and function.
If Canadians don’t face that reality, if they don’t face The One Per Cent, and act, directly, for change, then it’s all over. Then it’s Cultural Suicide without a good aspect to be found anywhere in the process.
Contact: Robin Mathews
1 comment:
Canucks have their prejudices: many would not disagree that Germans are arrogant, the French snooty, Yanks jingoistic, Italians melodramatic, et cetera, with Canadians most often presumed as simply "good," and amalgam of nice, friendly, polite, apologetic, and helpful. The laws that keep this order of things are assumed to be equally good. Strip away the subjectively privileged POV, and this "innocence" buckles under the weight of abuses akin to those our military once mobilized to defeat, including the worst crimes known to human kind.
Misconceptions are mostly unexamined, but are held very dear like, for example, the notion that the "invisible hand" of the market is akin to natural law that operates automatically and impartially. Adam Smith, author of the iconic "Wealth Of Nations"---whence the nick-named agency--- did himself conclude that sovereign interests must perforce intervene in the operation of markets, but, the conclusion is printed on the last pages of his book where it may be easily and unnoticeably torn out; he would doubtless be disappointed to find his theory had been subsequently twisted into, among other things, a rationalization for commodifying and monetizing, say, breathable air by the cubic unit (as the Fraser Institutes Michael Walker once infamously proposed). A basic fallacy underpins the idea that found wealth like, say, virgin forests, is an "investment" to be capitalized (such an idea rationalized the BC Liberals' attempt to "compensate" loggers for the "loss" of timber due to the mountain pine beetle, even though all these stands were natural, cost nothing to grow, and were the lowest-valued timber species in the region---the main reason why there was so much of it available at the most susceptible age for beetle attack).
But no government is happy about monetizing the pollution caused by the monetization of, say, tar-sands, at least not without begrudging acceptance of a capitalist "nature."
Well-travelled buddy once told me Canadians are generally deluded about the planet's predicament, how many natural ecosystems have been exterminated, how many billions of people are now scraping and scrapping for that dollar-bill. Can just see it yet in the big Canadian cities: immigrants arriving from all parts of the globe, automobiles burning gas, climate crises, homelessness and flashing wealth, but there's still an overriding illusion caused by the vastness of our settling-ponds and clear-cuts---hey! we got oodles of room. It's an "innocence" he predicted we would inevitably be "rudely awakened from."
Naomi Klein's trying to wake us up to some glaring discrepancies in the recent Paris Plan: the celebratory noise almost looked like it was trying to drown out recognition of these discrepancies. At the very least it'll give innocence pause to sigh in relief. We got a plan! We're okay! Well, we will be if we acknowledge these discrepancies exist. Ms May was quick to admit it--- in words spoken too quickly to be intelligible. Naomi (during the CBC radio interview) was, of course, polite in bringing it up. Plainly we're gonna need more than just tigresses, at least Canadian ones.
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