How can we take it back?

Skarekrow said:
hE19C9C65
Click to expand...

Also large numbers of them inherit their wealth (and money makes money)

The big banking families behind all this economic turmoil have been trading for generations....they pass the wealth on to the next generation
 
muir said:
Also large numbers of them inherit their wealth (and money makes money)

The big banking families behind all this economic turmoil have been trading for generations....they pass the wealth on to the next generation
Click to expand...
I suppose that could fall into the “luck” category...I dunno.
It’s sad when you really have an understanding of how few people there are screwing it up for a huge group of people.
 
10 x Stronger Than Steel In The 1940′s: Henry Ford’s HEMP Car.


url-22-300x225.jpeg


When we think of cars we think of gasoline, steel, pollution, etc. Well, maybe you don’t, but that’s what comes to mind for me. Even though we have some innovative and visually pleasing cars on the road today, it is difficult to ignore the sheer environmental impact that modern cars create. What if cars didn’t have to be the way they are today? If you are a researcher of any kind of alternative information, you already know this to be true -especially given that the technology already exists today to make cars smarter, safer and more eco-friendly (no fossil fuels necessary.)

But did you know that Henry Ford spent more than a decade researching and building his Model-T car which was not only constructed from hemp but was also designed to run off hemp bio-fuel? Whatever happened to this idea?According to Popular Mechanics, Henry Ford’s first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONSTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, ‘grown from the soil,’ had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel.To think that even one of the founders of a major car manufacturer was trying to give the world a vehicle that was safe, strong and clean for the environment, yet his invention was so suppressed that it is somewhat disheartening.

How did we go from such an obvious and intelligent discovery, to using gasoline, steel and other non-harmonious materials? It’s important to remember, not only do we need to look at the pollution factor of a material while in use, but also in the manufacturing and creation of it from raw materials. Looking at hemp, it complies with every eco-standard that exists today; in fact, it blows them out of the water. The suppression of this technology is largely due to the fact that hemp was outlawed in the US in 1937 due to the potential damaging effect it would have on many powerful industries at the time. I highly recommend you check out the the full story on how hemp became illegal to get a better understanding.

Here are a couple of videos showing the sheer strength of Ford’s hemp vehicle as well as the possibility of hemp based vehicles and fuels. Hemp has a bright future. The prohibition of it certainly won’t last forever given the amount of awareness being raised around the subject.


[video=youtube;ryO2JLzFPTY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ryO2JLzFPTY[/video]
 
The Ballad of Cliven Bundy...the racist joke of America.

[video]http://www.hulu.com/watch/627025[/video]
 
Skarekrow said:
I suppose that could fall into the “luck” category...I dunno.
It’s sad when you really have an understanding of how few people there are screwing it up for a huge group of people.
Click to expand...

There are a few people screwing it up for everyone

But the masses also need to take responsibility. The few can only do what they do for as long as we all cling to our ignorance
 
muir said:
There are a few people screwing it up for everyone

But the masses also need to take responsibility. The few can only do what they do for as long as we all cling to our ignorance
Click to expand...

So incredibly true...but I also think years of social manipulation, and probably physical manipulation (with things like anti-depressants, etc.) have put blinders on the masses.
 
Skarekrow said:
So incredibly true...but I also think years of social manipulation, and probably physical manipulation (with things like anti-depressants, etc.) have put blinders on the masses.
Click to expand...

Absolutely

The ego defences come up if their perceptions are challenged

They are the sentries manning their own prison
 
10 Things I Learned About the World from Ayn Rand's Insane "Atlas Shrugged'

By Adam Lee

If Rand were still alive she would probably say, "Thank you for smoking."



arand.jpg



Over the past year, I've been reading and reviewing Ayn Rand's massive paean to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged. If you're not familiar with the novel, it depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends, and basically everyone else — journalists, legislators, government employees, the poor — are the villains trying to drag the rich down out of spite, when we should be kissing their rings in gratitude that they allow us to exist.

Rand's protagonists are Dagny Taggart, heir to a transcontinental railroad empire, and Hank Rearden, the head of a steel company who's invented a revolutionary new alloy which he's modestly named Rearden Metal. Together, they battle against evil government bureaucrats and parasitic socialists to hold civilization together, while all the while powerful industrialists are mysteriously disappearing, leaving behind only the cryptic phrase "Who is John Galt?"

Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, but as far as many prominent conservatives are concerned, it's sacred scripture. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner circle, and opposed regulation of financial markets because he believed her dictum that the greed of businessmen was always the public's best protection. Paul Ryan said that he required his campaign staffers to read the book, while Glenn Beck has announced grandiose plans to build his own real-life "Galt's Gulch," the hidden refuge where the book's capitalist heroes go to watch civilization collapse without them.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like entering into a strange mirror universe where everything we thought we knew about economics and morality is turned upside down. I've already learned some valuable lessons from it.

1. All evil people are unattractive; all good and trustworthy people are handsome.

The first and most important we learn from Atlas Shrugged is that you can tell good and bad people apart at a glance. All the villains — the "looters," in Rand's terminology — are rotund, fleshy and sweaty, with receding hairlines, sagging jowls and floppy limbs, while her millionaire industrialist heroes are portraits of steely determination, with sharp chins and angular features like people in a Cubist painting. Nearly all of them are conspicuously Aryan. Here's a typical example, the steel magnate Hank Rearden:
The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice — then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair — then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five.

​
2. The mark of a great businessman is that he sneers at the idea of public safety.

When we meet Dagny Taggart, Rand's heroic railroad baron, she's traveling on a cross-country train which gets stuck at a stoplight that may or may not be broken. When the crew frets that they should wait until they're sure it's safe, Dagny pulls rank and orders them to drive through the red light. This, in Rand's world, is the mark of a heroic and decisive capitalist, rather than the kind of person who in the real world would soon be the subject of headlines like "22 Dead in Train Collision Caused by Executive Who Didn't Want to Be Late For Meeting."

Dagny makes the decision to rebuild a critical line of the railroad using a new alloy, the aforementioned Rearden Metal, which has never been used in a major industrial project. You might think that before committing to build hundreds of miles of track through mountainous terrain, you'd want to have, say, pilot projects, or feasibility studies. But Dagny brushes those concerns aside; she just knows Rearden Metal is good because she feels it in her gut: "When I see things," she explains, "I see them."

And once that line is rebuilt, Dagny's plan for its maiden voyage involves driving the train at dangerously high speed through towns and populated areas:
"The first train will... run non-stop to Wyatt Junction, Colorado, traveling at an average speed of one hundred miles per hour." ...

"But shouldn't you cut the speed below normal rather than ... Miss Taggart, don't you have any consideration whatever for public opinion?"

"But I do. If it weren't for public opinion, an average speed of sixty-five miles per hour would have been quite sufficient."
​
The book points out that mayors and safety regulators have to be bribed or threatened to allow this, which is perfectly OK in Rand's morality. When a reporter asks Dagny what protection people will have if the line is no good, she snaps: "Don't ride on it." (Ask the people of Lac-Megantic how much good that did them.)

3. Bad guys get their way through democracy; good guys get their way through violence.

The way the villains of Atlas Shrugged accomplish their evil plan is ... voting for it. One of the major plot elements of part I is a law called the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, which forces large companies to break themselves up, similarly to the way AT&T was split into the Baby Bells. It's passed by a majority of Congress, and Rand never implies that there's anything improper in the vote or that any dirty tricks were pulled. But because it forces her wealthy capitalist heroes to spin off some of their businesses, it's self-evident that this is the worst thing in the world and could only have been conceived of by evil socialists who hate success.

Compare this to another of Rand's protagonists, Dagny Taggart's heroic ancestor Nathaniel Taggart. We're told that he built a transcontinental railroad system almost single-handedly, which is why Dagny all but venerates him. We're also told that he murdered a state legislator who was going to pass a law that would have stopped him from completing his track, and threw a government official down three flights of stairs for offering him a loan. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, these are noble and heroic acts.

Then there's another of Rand's heroes, the oil baron Ellis Wyatt. When the government passes new regulations on rail shipping that will harm his business, Wyatt retaliates by spitefully blowing up his oil fields, much like Saddam Hussein's retreating army did to Kuwait in the first Gulf War. In real life, that act of sabotage smothered much of the Middle East beneath clouds of choking, toxic black smoke for months, poisoning the air and water. But as far as Rand sees it, no vengeance is too harsh for people who commit the terrible crime of interfering with the right of the rich to make more money.

4. The government has never invented anything or done any good for anyone.

In Rand's world, all good things come from private industry. Everyone who works for the government or takes government money is either a bumbling incompetent or a leech who steals credit for the work of others. At one point, the villainous bureaucrats of the "State Science Institute" try to sabotage Rand's hero Hank Rearden by spreading malicious rumors about his new alloy:
"If you consider that for thirteen years this Institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which, I believe, is not so good as the old ones — you can imagine what the public reaction will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful!"
​
Of course, in the real world, only minor trifles, like radar, space flight, nuclear power, GPS, computers, and the Internet were brought about by government research.

5. Violent jealousy and degradation are signs of true love.

Dagny's first lover, the mining heir Francisco d'Anconia, treats her like a possession: he drags her around by an arm, and once, when she makes a joke he doesn't like, he slaps her so hard it bloodies her lip. The first time they have sex, he doesn't ask for consent, but throws her down and does what he wants: "She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his."

Later on, Dagny has an affair with Hank Rearden (who's married to someone else at the time, but this is the sort of minor consideration that doesn't hold back Randian supermen). The first time they sleep together, it leaves Dagny bruised and bloody, and the morning after, Hank rants at her that he holds her in contempt and thinks of her as no better than a whore. Almost as soon as their relationship begins, he demands to know how many other men she's slept with and who they were. When she won't answer, he seizes her and twists her arm, trying to hurt her enough to force her to tell him.

Believe it or not, none of this is meant to make us judge these characters negatively, because in Rand's world, violent jealousy is romantic and abuse is sexy. She believed that women were meant to be subservient to men — in fact, she says that "the most feminine of all aspects" is "the look of being chained" — and that a woman being the dominant partner in a relationship was "metaphysically inappropriate" and would warp and destroy her fragile lady-mind.

6. All natural resources are limitless.

If you pay close attention to Atlas Shrugged, you'll learn that there will always be more land to homestead, more trees to cut, more coal to mine, more fossil fuels to drill. There's never a need for conservation, recycling, or that dreaded word, "sustainability." All environmental laws, just like all safety regulations, are invented by government bureaucrats explicitly for the purpose of punishing and destroying successful businessmen.

One of the heroes of part I is the tycoon Ellis Wyatt, who's invented an unspecified new technology that allows him to reopen oil wells thought to be tapped out, unlocking what Rand calls an "unlimited supply" of oil. Obviously, accepting that natural resources are finite would force Rand's followers to confront hard questions about equitable distribution, which is why she waves the problem away with a sweep of her hand.

This trend reaches its climax near the end of part I, when Dagny and Hank find, in the ruins of an abandoned factory, the prototype of a new kind of motor that runs on "atmospheric static electricity" and can produce limitless energy for free. Rand sees nothing implausible about this, because in her philosophy, human ingenuity can overcome any problem, up to and including the laws of thermodynamics, if only the government would get out of the way and let them do it.

7. Pollution and advertisements are beautiful; pristine wilderness is ugly and useless.

Rand is enamored of fossil fuels, and at one point, she describes New York City as cradled in "sacred fires" from the smokestacks and heavy industrial plants that surround it. It never seems to occur to her that soot and smog cause anything other than pretty sunsets, and no one in Atlas Shrugged gets asthma, much less lung cancer.

By contrast, Rand informs us that pristine natural habitat is worthless unless it's plastered with ads, as we see in a scene where Hank and Dagny go on a road trip together:
Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin's hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky.

... "What I'd like to see," said Rearden, "is a billboard."

​
8. Crime doesn't exist, even in areas of extreme poverty.

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, the only kind of violence that anyone ever worries about is government thugs stealing the wealth of the heroic capitalists at gunpoint to redistribute it to the undeserving masses. There's no burglary, no muggings, no bread riots, no street crime of any kind. This is true even though the world is spiraling down a vortex of poverty and economic depression. And even though the wealthy, productive elite are mysteriously disappearing one by one, none of Rand's protagonists ever worry about their personal safety.

Apparently, in Rand's view, poor people will peacefully sit and starve when they lose their jobs. And that's a good thing for her, because accepting that crime exists might lead to dangerous, heretical ideas — like that maybe the government should pay for education and job training, because this might be cheaper and more beneficial in the long run than spending ever more money on police and prisons.

9. The only thing that matters in life is how good you are at making money.

In a scene from part I, the copper baron Francisco d'Anconia explains to Dagny why rich people are more valuable than poor people:
"Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard."
​
You'll note that this speech makes no exceptions for work whose product is actively harmful to others. If you burn coal that chokes neighboring cities in toxic smog, if you sell unhealthful food that increases obesity and diabetes, if you sell guns and fight every attempt to pass laws that would restrict who could buy them, if you paint houses with lead and insulate pipes in asbestos — relax, you're off the hook! None of this matters in the slightest in Rand's eyes. Are you good at your job? Do you make money from it? That's the only thing anyone should ever care about.

10. Smoking is good for you.

Almost all of Rand's heroes smoke, and not just for pleasure. In one minor scene, a cigarette vendor tells Dagny that smoking is heroic, even rationally obligatory:
"I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips ... When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind — and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."
​
It's no coincidence that Atlas Shrugged expresses these views. Ayn Rand herself was a heavy smoker, and she often asserted that she was the most rational person alive; therefore, she believed, her preferences were the correct preferences which everyone else should emulate. Beginning from this premise, she worked backward to explain why everything she did was an inevitable consequence of her philosophy. As part of this, she decided that she smoked tobacco not because she'd become addicted to it, but because it's right for rational people to smoke while they think.

In case you were wondering, Rand did indeed contract lung cancer later in life, and had an operation to remove one lung. But even though she eventually came to accept the danger of smoking, she never communicated this to her followers or recanted her earlier support of it. As in other things, her attitude was that people deserve whatever they get.

I-finished-Atlas-Shrugged.-Here-it-is-IN-ONE-CHART.png


Adam Lee is a writer and atheist activist living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter, or subscribe to his blog, Daylight Atheism.

 
 
Everything You Hate About Advertising In One Fake Video. This Is Amazingly Real

If I were asked to describe the majority of what is produced by pop culture and the media in one phrase I would have to say: cookie cutter. We go to the movies and are most often delivered one of maybe ten core stories, such as the main character being on the brink of death at the hands of their nemesis when just in the nick of time they are saved by another character they previously disputed with.

We listen to music and find ourselves singing along to one of maybe ten overused lyrics, such as the perfect girl that he let get away and only realized that she was perfect once she was gone. I may be over-exaggerating a bit to get my point across, but I’m sure we can all agree that a lot of what we see and hear these days is pretty similar to what we saw and heard a couple of years ago.

The only things that have changed are the titles and faces, which in most cases is enough to make it seem new.This creative commercial put together by Dissolve Footage, shows us that advertising is not an exception to the cookie cutter craze, and instead it may just be the best example of it. The commercial is composed completely of stock clips that Dissolve Footage offers on their website and is narrated by Dallas McClain.

Perfectly led by the insightful yet monotone narration, this video, in my opinion, is awesome at showcasing the incredible amount of repetition found in modern advertising. A repetition so obvious that I’m sure with a quick logo slap at the end, a handful of companies could use this exact commercial footage to deliver an end product that we would happily watch.

The thing that is even more interesting, is that these companies can elicit a level of trust, progress, interconnectedness and so much more without the use of any original footage. I don’t make this statement as an attack against stock footage, which can definitely be a great tool, but instead as a reminder to all of us to think a little more critically when we watch advertisements. It’s important that we always fully look into a product or company before making them a part of our regular life.

Trust me, I enjoy watching movies and listening to music as much as anyone else, and a good portion of what I tend to enjoy can easily fall under the cookie cutter bracket. I just found this video to be a great reminder to also support outside of the box/ alternative media, and to think just as critically towards what is popular, as we would towards something new.

Check it out:

[video=youtube;2YBtspm8j8M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2YBtspm8j8M[/video]
 
[video=youtube;0782P6m5cX0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0782P6m5cX0[/video]
 
Leonard Pitts Jr.: U.S. justice hypocritical


It swallowed people up.
That’s what it really did, if you want to know the truth. It swallowed them up whole, swallowed them up by the millions.

In the process, it hollowed out communities, broke families, stranded hope. Politicians brayed that they were being “tough on crime” — as if anyone is really in favor of crime — as they imposed ever longer and more inflexible sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. But the “War on Drugs” didn’t hurt drugs at all: Usage rose by 2,800 percent — that’s not a typo — in the 40 years after it began in 1971. The “War” also made America the biggest jailer on Earth and drained a trillion dollars — still not a typo — from the treasury.

Faced with that stunning record of costly failure, a growing coalition of observers has been demanding the obvious remedy. End the War. The Obama administration has been unwilling to go quite that far, but apparently, it is about to do the next best thing: Declare a cease-fire and send the prisoners home.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the government is embarking upon an aggressive campaign to extend clemency to drug offenders. Those whose crimes were nonviolent, who have no ties to gangs or large drug rings and who have behaved themselves while incarcerated will be invited to apply for executive lenience to cut their sentences short.
Nobody knows yet how many men that will be.

Easily thousands.

Combined with last year’s announcement that the government would no longer seek harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, this may prove the most transformative legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, excluding the Affordable Care Act. It is a long overdue reform.
But it is not enough.

As journalist Matt Taibbi observes in his new book “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Holder’s Justice Department has declined, essentially as a matter of policy, to prosecute the bankers who committed fraud, laundered money for drug cartels and terrorists, stole billions from their own banks, left taxpayers holding the bag, and also — not incidentally — nearly wrecked the U.S. economy. But let some nobody get caught with a joint in his pocket during a stop-and-frisk and the full weight of American justice falls on him like a safe from a 10th-story window.

For instance, a man named Scott Walker is 15 years into a sentence of life without parole on his first felony conviction for selling drugs. Meantime, thug bankers in gangs with names like Lehman Brothers and HSBC commit greater crimes, yet do zero time.

We have, Taibbi argues, evolved a two-track system under which crimes committed while wearing suit and tie — or pumps — are no longer considered jailable offenses. Taibbi said recently on “The Daily Show” that prosecutors have actually told him they no longer go after white-collar criminals because such people are not considered “appropriate for jail.”
Who is “appropriate”?

Do you even have to ask?

Black people. Brown people. Poor people of whatever hue.
Thousands of whom are apparently coming home now. One hopes there will be a mobilization — government agencies, families, churches, civic groups — to help them assimilate into life on the outside. But one also hopes we the people demand reform of the hypocritical system that put them inside to begin with.

These men and women are being freed from insane sentences that should never have been imposed, much less served. Contrary to the pledge we learned in school, it turns out we are actually one nation divided, with liberty and justice for some.

So yes, it is good to see the attorney general dismantle the War on Drugs. But while he’s at it, let him dismantle the War on Fairness, too.
 
[h=1]Watch: The Mainstream Media's Top 3 Biggest Blunders This Week[/h]
The New York Times, MSNBC's Meet The Press, and CNN all screw up colossally.






​


Editor's note: Each week, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) takes on the media's biggest blunders. This week on FAIR TV, they take a look at how The New York Times printed inaccurate photos concerning Russians in Ukraine — and then failed to correct it. They also take on MSNBC's Meet The Press' assertion that Obama is 'weak' on foreign policy and CNN's complete insensitivity to drone victims.
Watch their new episode below:




[video=youtube;iSDu-7mtPJg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iSDu-7mtPJg[/video]
 
How the Obscenely Wealthy Are Strangling Our Democracy


The wealthiest interests can veto any government initiative.



A new academic paper by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page has made national headlines by concluding that wealthly Americans almost always get what they want from the political system regardless of what middle-class and working-class people seek from the government.
AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld spoke with Benjamin Page about this research and the prospects for political change and a progressive agenda.

Steven Rosenfeld: Tell us what you mean when you say that the U.S. is no longer a democracy in the way most people perceive it, or think they understand what a democracy is?

Benjamin Page: Most people in a democracy think that the government pays a lot of attention to average citizens. And what we found was when average citizens disagree with more affluent people and more organized interest groups, the average citizens lose out almost always. In other words, they have almost no independent influence.

SR: How were you able to determine that?

BP: It took a ton of work, mostly by [Princeton University professor and co-author] Marty Gilens and his people. It took him about 10 years to assemble the data, which consists of information about 1,775 different policy-making cases in which he found survey questions in which he found what average citizens want, and also what higher income citizens want. Then he put together information about interest groups, both for and against; business groups and mass-oriented groups. And he used those different preferences and alignments to predict policy outcomes.
It turned out, as I say, that the interest groups, especially business groups and affluent individuals, have a lot of effect on what policies are adopted, but average citizens have no independent effect at all.

SR: One of the most interesting findings in your research was there are times when the interests of more average people and wealthier people align, and then Congress or government will move forward. But where they don’t align, they won’t: bills will be killed or policies won’t be adopted. It’s almost as if there is an invisible veto, if you will.Would you put it that way?

BP: I think that’s a good way to put it. Yeah. That’s right.

SR: Your research has gotten lots of attention and is part of the rising discussion of inequality. What do you think people should take from this?

BP: It is a very interesting moment because a lot of people have concluded that there’s something terribly wrong with American politics. I think it’s not just us. There’s the Thomas Piketty book about capital in the 21st century, [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman hammering away about inequality, many people talking about these things have led to a point where I can imagine some political change occuring.

SR: How will that occur? I have covered money in politics since the late 1990s. The Supreme Court has slowly made it safer and safer for the wealthy to have more power and influence. Congress is more of a rich person’s club where the concerns of average or lower-income people get short shrift. It’s almost as if, if you haven’t figured out how to make a million, you are not deserving.

BP: Yes, there is a definite paradox. If you want to change the political system and make it more democratic you have to overcome the undemocratic influence that’s already there. But we know historically that that can sometimes happen.
The Progressive Period at the beginning of the 20th century is a very interesting analogy. Something that fits right in with our analysis is the end of the Gilded Age, the first Gilded Age of huge inequality, there was a very broad rebellion to give more ordinary people a greater voice in politics: direct election of U.S. senators, and many other changes. And a lot of that was led by upper-income people.
And I think something similar is possible today. There’s a lot of grassroots upset but also some leadership from affluent people who are worried about the whole system breaking down. So we might see change.

SR: I know a lot of wealthier people don’t like to get fundraising calls.

BP: Absolutely. That’s absolutely right.

SR: And lots of businesses would like a leveler playing fields; not competitors who have obtained state or federal subsidies to their bottom lines.

BP: Yes.

SR: But do you really see currents of change bubbling up?

BP: I would look a little different place for people who actually are enthusiasts of change. I think you are explaining why moderate business people could be persuaded to go along with it, but the larger engine is much more likely to be upper-middle-class professionals. In our survey of wealthy people around Chicago we found that the professionals are really pretty different from business owners. Even if they have eight or 10 million dollars, they don’t think the same way. And a fair number of them–those are the people who were very important in the Progressive Period–a fair number of them want political reform right now.

SR: What can you tell me about their views or what they’d like?

BP: Well, we need to kearn more about that. We just did a little pilot survey. But it’s pretty clear that these people really don’t like the idea of institutionalized corruption. The point is not that the politicians are crooks, it’s that the system is corrupt because it so much favors money givers. And a lot of people basically believe in clean politics and democratic politics.

SR: What do you suggest that people do as they consider all this?

BP: I think there are things that average people can do that are very important. One is don’t give up. Krugman is right. You don’t want to get cynical and sort of give up and let money rule. What you want to do is fight back. One of the ways is to make sure you vote. The congressional elections next fall are going to be very important. Off-year elections are stacked against average people. The turnout is low. Money and activists tend to control a lot of what goes on. But if there are organized social movements, that’s not a given. So that’s one branch of action.
Another is to really push for reforms of various sorts: the simplest being disclosure of political contributions of all kinds. It’s really very strange to have no accountability, no awareness. Beyond that, regulating lobbying better. Andf figuring out how to reduce the power of money in elections. Some of that the Supreme Court has made harder. But some of that can be done by public financing, which reduces the power of private money by substituting public money.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, the low-wage economy, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

 
Cashiers and Customers Shouldn't Judge Me When I Grocery Shop With Food Stamps


"There is the twin sense of stigma and solidarity that comes along with shopping with state benefits."


grocery_shopping.jpg

This article originally appeared on Waging Nonviolence, and is co-published withopenDemocracy.

The girl behind the checkout counter at Shop Rite sighed deeply and pushed her manager call button. A slightly older girl shuffled over wearily.
“WIC,” the checkout girl said, turning the three letters that stand for Women, Infants and Children – the government-funded supplemental nutrition program – into a long whine.

The manager mumbled, moved her out of the way and proceeded to look over my special WIC checks.
“You can’t get that brand of tuna fish,” she admonished.
“I know,” I said. “But you are out of the store brand.”
Another long sigh and she was gone.

“Sorry everyone,” the checkout girl addressed the line forming behind me. “She’s got WIC.”
The word sounded like a curse, a logjam, a headache. While the manager was gone, the girl swiped my groceries. Store brand peanut butter, a gallon of 2 percent milk, $10 worth of fresh vegetables and fruits, bags of rice and beans, a loaf of whole wheat bread, two boxes of cereal, and four pounds of tofu.
“You can’t get this with WIC,” she said sharply, like she had caught me trying to game the system.
“I can actually. I get tofu instead of some of my milk. See it’s right there on the ticket.”

“I’ve never seen anyone get this before,” she responded.
“It’s right there on the ticket. See: four pounds of tofu.”
She looked, not really believing it was going to be there, but it was and eventually she swiped it through. Shopping with government benefits is always an adventure. You can’t be anonymous and you definitely can’t use the self checkouts. Every purchase is scrutinized and questioned before being approved.

“I have my own bags,” I said brightly, trying to stuff everything into my cloth sacks and telegraph apology and contrition to the people behind me. Luckily, I have a gorgeous and effervescent son who flirts with everyone. A smile and a wave from Seamus dissolved the impatience and judgment from people in the line. The manager returned with six cans of StarKist tuna.

“We’re out of our brand. I’ll override and you can ring these up,” she told the checkout girl. I smiled my thanks and a few minutes later, I was out.
I should not have felt so bad, and I’m not alone. In fact I am one of 8.5 million Americans who use WIC benefits each month. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture which is responsible for the program, WIC serves 53 percent of infants born in the United States. So, my children, Madeline and Seamus, are part of the majority!

I have since learned that employees at another nearby grocery store are older, better trained and more respectful of customers using WIC, especially because many of them are mothers from the local submarine base. Now, I try to avoid the teenage checkout girls.
There is the twin sense of stigma and solidarity that comes along with shopping with state benefits. I feel a little naked and judged when I am standing in line, and taking extra time. But along with that minor discomfort comes a large helping of empathy when I see a woman looking utterly lost in the cereal aisle.

I step out of my supermarket somnolence to point out the little WIC symbols below some of the price tags and tell her that she can mix and match among the WIC-approved cereals (no Fruit Loops or Count Choculas allowed), as long as the total weight is 38 ounces. Seems easy, right?
Not so. The number of times I have added up incorrectly and held up the checkout line as a result is embarrassing. Being a WIC shopper also helps me stay patient and friendly when someone ahead of me hits a snag with their benefits.

I still mess up sometimes, even though I have been using WIC since I found out I was pregnant with Seamus more than two years ago. I put the wrong kind of cereal or eggs on the conveyor belt or grab the wrong brand of peanut butter. In one recent trip to the grocery store, WIC checks purchased $30.32 worth of staples for our family and then I bought another $35.41 items not covered under the program, including potatoes, vanilla extract, spaghetti, ingredients for granola and some fish sticks – something I never expected to buy, but they are quick, full of protein and not very expensive.

WIC takes a lot of work. Every two months or so, I have an appointment with a nutritionist who asks questions about what Seamus and I are eating and how the checks are working out. When I was pregnant, they weighed me on each visit and kept track of my weight on a chart, causing me no small bit of anxiety when I went above the curve of what was supposed to be acceptable. Periodically, we have to submit forms from Seamus’ pediatrician and my doctor to WIC so they can track his weight gain and both of our general health.

What’s more, WIC can be downright confusing. Sweet potatoes are allowed but white potatoes are not. Garlic and fresh herbs do not count as vegetables. WIC shoppers have to pay very close attention to the weights of their selections – 16 ounces of peanut butter is not allowed. The jar has to be 18 ounces. You can get brown eggs, but not organic eggs. You can buy reduced price vegetables and fruit, but in most instances you’ll have to walk the checkout person through the process. You must buy everything on your check at once, even if you know you can’t use two gallons of milk before it goes bad.

The choice of products covered by WIC is not random or haphazard. The U.S. Department of Agriculture just released a 104 page report along with an announcement that for the first time in 34 years, the WIC package would be changed. Yogurt, canned mackerel and whole wheat pasta have been added to the list of acceptable foods, and the allotment of fresh, canned and frozen vegetables has been increased. The powers that be also loosened the rules for who can purchase soy based milks, and under what circumstances. We get the tofu, extra cheese and peanut butter because I am breastfeeding. Women who aren’t breastfeeding can get formula through WIC, which is a really good thing because formula is expensive and it goes fast.

We just updated our WIC enrollment to add Baby Madeline, and now we are getting eight gallons of milk each month. That’s a lot of milk! I grew up on powdered milk and don’t really drink the real stuff. Nor does Seamus. Rosena, my seven-year-old stepdaughter, will sit down to a cup of milk, but she is the only one in the family and is only with us half of every week. So we pour milk on our cereal and make yogurt from whatever is left over. Then we make yogurt cheese from the yogurt, and cheesecake or veggie dip from the yogurt cheese. We also give away a lot of milk and yogurt to friends and family.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. WIC helps us to stretch our limited budget for food, and it fills our pantry with staples. And being part of the program is a way of deepening my understanding of my community. I connect with people in the WIC waiting room and the grocery store checkout line in a way I would not otherwise.

WIC is credited with decreasing obesity and instilling healthy eating habits in young children. In many cases the program makes the difference between full bellies and empty ones. WIC nutritionists and case workers are all trained lactation consultants and they are informative, upbeat and relentless in pushing breast feeding as best for mother and baby. And they get results. Education, encouragement, enthusiasm, resources and support get women breastfeeding. According to a new USDA report, “Among WIC state agencies that reported breastfeeding data for 2012, 67 percent of all 6- to 13-month-old infants were currently breastfed or were breastfed at some time, compared with 63 percent in 2010.”

There is still a long way to go though. Save the Children ranked the United States last in policies that support breastfeeding among 36 high-income nations – policies like paid maternity leave, nursing breaks at work and the percentage of hospitals that are “baby friendly.” The United States pays for these failings. Low rates of breastfeeding add an estimated $13 billion to annual medical costs and they led to 911 extra deaths in 2010, according to a study in Pediatrics.

There are lactivists who organize nurse-ins at airports, restaurants and corporate headquarters to make the point that breastfeeding in public should be considered normal. But having spent lots of time in WIC waiting rooms, supermarket checkout lines and neighborhood play groups with mothers who are not breast feeding, I know it’s not just about modesty or not having the right kind of cover up.

It is definitely not that these women want to shortchange their children. The slogan “breast is best” is just alliteration if you are working a 10-hour shift at minimum wage with no place to use a breast pump or take a nursing break. All the education and support in the world can’t change these conditions – it takes societal transformation too.

Let’s lactivate on that.

Frida Berrigan is a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and serves on the National Committee of the War Resisters League. She lives in New London, Conn., with her husband Patrick and their three children.





​
 
Screen-Shot-2014-04-16-at-1.24.25-PM.png


‘A way out of no way’: The Nonviolence Handbook




The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action – a new volume by long-time peace and nonviolence scholar Michael Nagler published this month by Berrett-Koehler – offers the reader a crisp articulation of the dynamics, principles and contemporary application of Gandhian nonviolence that is both brief and clear.

A scant 84 pages, including footnotes and an index, this publication really is a handbook in the classic sense: a short compendium of concise information about a particular subject, a type of reference work, a collection of instructions, and something “small enough to be held in the hand.” Nagler’s new book is, in this sense, a handy summary of the workings of nonviolent change and how it can transform our lives and our world.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say from the outset that I was Nagler’s teaching assistant years ago and he, in turn, served on my degree committee in graduate school. I have always found his work a powerful contribution to nonviolent studies. I have used his publications in my teaching, including The Search for a Nonviolent Future, which I consider to be one of the best books ever written on the power of nonviolence. Even before meeting Nagler, though, his work influenced me strongly. As a neophyte activist in the 1980s I happened upon his America Without Violence, which opened up for a social change newbie a vision of nonviolence grounded in humanity’s potential. It helped strengthen my hope that enduring nonviolent transformation was possible.

The current book reinforces my regard for Nagler’s work and, though I see some places where this slim volume could be strengthened, it nonetheless is a major contribution to the growing movement for nonviolent change, precisely because it is so succinct. Nagler’s recent exertions have tended to move in the opposite direction – for example he teamed up with Marc Pilisuk a couple of years ago to produce a sprawling, 1,100 page three-volume set on peace movements – and he is currently at work on Roadmap, a far-reaching, long-term initiative of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education to nurture a culture of nonviolence.

In contrast to these immense efforts, The Nonviolence Handbook places before us a short, carefully constructed presentation that conveys the essentials. Drawing on his longer works – and a series of shorter booklets that Nagler has produced over the years – this handbook has succeeded in clarifying the power and potential of nonviolence in simple and direct terms. I came away from reading it with the sense that every word was considered, weighed and deliberately chosen – and that this elemental precision was the result, not simply of scrupulous editing, but of a lifetime of reflection and experimentation.

In the short space of this book, Nagler lifts up many dimensions of the nonviolent life.
Here are only a few of them.

Nonviolent change is possible because it is the human default, not the exception. Nagler holds with Gandhi that “nonviolence is the law of our species,” which means that, even deeper than our tendencies toward violence and the scripts that reinforce it, we have a profound unity from which flows our capacity for cooperation, collaboration, and well-being for all. But it also means that we have constructed cultures and societies that upend this potential – privilege and reinforced violence, separation and domination. The fact that “human beings have the potential to be nonviolent – and to respond to nonviolence when it’s offered – implies a much higher image of the human being than we are presented with in the mass media and throughout our present culture,” Nagler writes, “but because of that very culture, we can’t expect our nonviolent potential to manifest by itself.”

To tap our nonviolent power means challenging a system of domination by neither flight nor fight – to identify a third way of proceeding, or what civil rights movement activist Andrew Young called “a way out of no way.” For Nagler, this involves unleashing what Kenneth Boulding calls our integrative power and what Gandhi dubbed satyagraha (“clinging to truth,” “soul-force” and “active nonviolent resistance”). In exegeting these increasingly familiar notions, Nagler stresses a number of key points.

First, though it is natural, nonviolence does not come easily. It often involves struggle. Though this is not a new idea (it is a common enough experience for those who try to live the nonviolent life or make social change) his explanation is illuminating: This very struggle is the source of nonviolent power. To confront injustice – everything that is not nonviolent – often unleashes anger and fear. Nonviolent struggle does not suppress our anger or fear but transmutes them into what Gandhi called “a power that can move the world.” Or, as Nagler puts is, “Nonviolence is the power released by the conversion of a negative drive.”

Second, the person is not the problem. Nagler puts this Gandhian and Kingian point forward very clearly: “It is not me against you but you and me against the problem; there is a way both of us can benefit and even grow,” he writes. “This ability to turn an argument into a problem-solving session, a dispute into a learning experience, and eventually a feeling of alienation into an awareness of unity benefits all parties and creates a strong attractor toward creative resolution for all.” Here, too, is a potential source of power: “The more you respect the humanity of your opponent, the more effectively you can oppose his or her injustice.”

Third, “the sooner we can respond to a conflict actively and nonviolently, the less we will have to suffer to resolve it.” Here Nagler presents a graph he developed years ago entitled “The Three Stages of Conflict Escalation” – namely, conflict resolution,satyagraha, and sacrifice. We are called to transform conflict before it becomes intractable – and to be equipped to take action, including risky action, when it does.

There are many more themes in this book, as well as suggested practices and directions for going forward. Most of all, Nagler provides a coherent framework for understanding the dynamics and possibilities of nonviolent power.

There is an advantage to having such a short volume in one’s back pocket, ready for the next conflicts along the way. Nagler highlights this accessibility by adding a list of key ideas and principles we can review on the run.

But something this short also has its drawbacks, including a dearth of deeply analyzed stories or examples that are the foundation for such ideas and principles. I am reminded of something I heard from a long-time activist in a workshop where we were studying Martin Luther King’s six principles of nonviolent resistance. He said we really can’t understand these guidelines without also reading “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which provides both the context and keys to them. Similarly, while Nagler does make reference to numerous cases of nonviolent action, we don’t engage strenuously with the deep, and deeply troubling, realities embedded in the challenges and breakthroughs of lived experience that more detailed story-telling would offer.

This, of course, is not Nagler’s purpose here. It is up to us to engage with these stories on our own, which Nagler encourages by providing a select bibliography and a list of websites – including this one.

Nagler’s volume refers extensively to social movements and campaigns, but most of the breakthrough dynamics of nonviolence are largely couched in terms of impacts on individuals involved in that process (policy-makers, police officers, troops) and less on the role of nonviolence in moving an entire society or mobilizing broad people power for change. A more explicit focus on the role of nonviolence in educating, winning and mobilizing the populace – as the late Bill Moyer framed it in his bookDoing Democracy – would strengthen this volume.

The closest we get to this here is in the marvelous foreword by Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel who resigned from her posting at the U.S. State Department on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has been crisscrossing the country and the world ever since then working for peace and putting these principles into practice. She is working relentlessly to build the people power that we so sorely need to make the fundamental changes the world requires to survive and thrive. Toward this goal, the insights of Nagler’s handbook are critical. As she puts it: “Courage, complemented by the knowledge of skillful nonviolence, as provided in this handbook, is a recipe for a world of peace and justice.”

I agree with Ann Wright. We need both our fearlessness and the dynamics of nonviolence laid out in Michael Nagler’s handbook to help build a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.
 
The High Price of Materialism

[video=youtube;oGab38pKscw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oGab38pKscw[/video]​
 
Are Oil Companies 21st Century Slaveowners?


Fossil fuel companies' business model means planetary disaster. And we must force them to give up at least $10 trillion in wealth.






composite_hammondcalhoun.jpg



​
Photo Credit: The Special Education Squad (L, James Hammond); Mathew Brady (R, John Calhoun); Composite Screenshot / Wikimedia Commons​

​


Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money.
So much goddamn money.

​
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.

Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological question – property or persons? – that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.

In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets – that is, all the wealth – in the entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.

Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”

* * *​
In 2012, the writer and activist Bill McKibben published a heart-stopping essay in Rolling Stone titled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” I’ve read hundreds of thousands of words about climate change over the last decade, but that essay haunts me the most.

The piece walks through a fairly straightforward bit of arithmetic that goes as follows. The scientific consensus is that human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable form a temperature increase this century more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Given that we’ve already warmed the earth about 0.8 degrees Celsius, that means we have 1.2 degrees left – and some of that warming is already in motion. Given the relationship between carbon emissions and global average temperatures, that means we can release about 565 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere by mid-century.
Total.
That’s all we get to emit if we hope to keep inhabiting the planet in a manner that resembles current conditions.

Now here’s the terrifying part. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world’s energy companies and major fossil fuel—producing countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is in the ground that we can, with present technology, extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is ... 2,795 gigatons.

Which means the total amount of known, proven extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is almost five times the amount we can safely burn.
Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate movement is to find a way to force the powers that be, from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into your stocks? You can’t have it.

Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.
The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865 – and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.

It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel.

More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.

* * *​
The connection between slavery and fossil fuels, however, is more than metaphorical. Before the widespread use of fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy (if not the main source) for societies stretching back millennia. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all energy to power societies flowed from the natural ecological cascade of sun and food: the farmhands in the fields, the animals under saddle, the burning of wood or grinding of a mill.
A life of ceaseless exertion.

Before fossil fuels, the only way out of this drudgery was by getting other human beings to do the bulk of the work that the solar regime required of its participants. This could be done by using accrued money to pay for labor, but more often than not – particularly in societies like the Roman Empire that achieved density and scale – it was achieved through slavery. Slavery opened up for the slave owners vast new vistas of possibility. The grueling mundane exertions demanded of everyone under a solar regime could be cast off, pushed down on the shoulders of the slave.

In this respect, the basic infrastructure of energy distribution and exploitation in the plantation South was not so different from feudal Europe or ancient Egypt. During the first half of the nineteenth century, coal, whale oil, pneumatic power and all manner of mechanization penetrated the more urbanized North, while the South remained largely mired in the pre-industrial age. In 1850, only 14 percent of the nation’s canal mileage and 26 percent of its railroad mileage ran through slave states, and the industrial output of the entire region was only one-third that of Massachusetts alone.

Not only that, but as time marched forward, the South lagged further and further behind. In Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson notes that while in 1850 slave states had 42 percent of the population, they “possessed only 18 percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity, a decline from the 20 percent of 1840.” The same holds true for the South’s percentage of railroad miles, which was declining as the war approached. In 1852, James D.B. DeBow, a vociferous advocate of diversifying the Southern economy, lamented that “the North grows rich, and powerful, and great, whilst we, at best, are stationary.” (This underdevelopment would haunt the South well into the twentieth century: in 1930, only 38 percent of residents of the former Confederate states had electricity, compared with about 85 percent in states that had been free.)

This lagging wasn’t just happenstance: many historians argue that it was, in fact, the availability of the cheap, plentiful energy resource of slavery that meant the South faced less pressure to urbanize, electrify or industrialize. Slavery, and the energy it provided, was a kind of crutch giving the antebellum South its own version of what modern-development economists now call, in a very different context, a “resource curse” – that is, an overreliance on a resource (in this case, enslaved human beings) that stunts economic diversification and development.

Crucially, as slavery became more profitable to the planter class and ever more central to the economic health of the South, the ideas about slavery grew increasingly aggressive, expansionist and reactionary. “Very few people at the time of the Revolution and the Constitution publicly affirmed the desirability of slavery,” Foner observes. “They generally said, ‘We’re stuck with it; there’s nothing we can do.’”

Even in much of the South, slavery was at first seen as a necessary evil, a shameful feature of the American experience that would necessarily be phased out over time. Many slave-owning founders shared in this consensus. Slave owner and Virginian Patrick Henry referred to slavery in a private letter as an “abominable practice…a species of violence and tyranny” that was “repugnant to humanity.” His fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee called the slave trade an “iniquitous and disgraceful traffic” in 1759 while introducing a bill to try to end it. Thomas Jefferson, at times an ardent defender of slavery and the white supremacy that undergirded it, confessed in 1779 that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”

When Jefferson wrote those words, slavery had nowhere near the economic grip on the South that it would have during the cotton boom in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1805 and 1860, the price per slave grew from about $300 to $750, and the total number of slaves increased from 1 million to 4 million – which meant that the total value of slaves grew a whopping 900 percent in the half-century before the war.

This increase in the price of slaves was due largely to two factors. In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect, permanently constraining supply. From then on, all new slaves came as the offspring of existing slaves. And then there was cotton. It’s hard to overestimate the impact that cotton had on the South during the decades leading up to the war. No place on earth produced more cotton, and the world’s demand was insatiable. Economic historian Roger L. Ransom writes that “by the mid-1830s, cotton shipments accounted for more than half the value of all exports from the United States.” So lucrative was the crop that the planter class rushed into it, leaving behind everything else. As McPherson notes, per capita production of the South’s principal food crops actually declined during this period.

All of this led to a heady kind of triumphalism. In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina plantation owner, took to the floor of the Senate to inquire mockingly:

What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.

​
It is perhaps not surprising that under conditions of stupendous profit and accumulation, the rhetoric of the South’s politicians and planter class changed to a florid celebration of the peculiar institution. “By the 1830s, [John C.] Calhoun and all these guys, some of them go so far as to say, ‘It would be better for white workers if they were slaves,’” Foner tells me. “They have a whole literature on why slavery should be expanded.” Indeed, here’s Calhoun in 1837:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good – a positive good.

​
Here’s Hammond in the same “Cotton is king” speech, playing the same notes:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.

​
“Our negroes,” according to Southern social theorist George Fitzhugh, “are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better…. [They are] the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”

So the basic story looks like this: in the decades before the Civil War, the economic value of slavery explodes. It becomes the central economic institution and source of wealth for a region experiencing a boom that succeeded in raising per capita income and concentrating wealth ever more tightly in the hands of the Southern planter class. During this same period, the rhetoric of the planter class evolves from an ambivalence about slavery to a full-throated, aggressive celebration of it. As slavery becomes more valuable, the slave states find ever more fulsome ways of praising, justifying and celebrating it.

Slavery increasingly moves from an economic institution to a cultural one; it becomes a matter of identity, of symbolism – indeed, in the hands of the most monstrously adept apologists, a thing of beauty.
And yet, at the very same time, casting a shadow over it all is the growing power of the abolition movement in the North and the dawning awareness that any day might be slavery’s last. So that, on the eve of the war, slavery had never been more lucrative or more threatened. That also happens to be true of fossil fuel extraction today.
* * *​
America is in the grip of a fossil fuel frenzy almost without precedent. By 2015, the United States is projected to surpass Saudi Arabia as the largest producer of oil in the world. After sixty years of being a net importer of fuel, we are now a net exporter, and it’s possible that we will break our 1970 record for peak oil production. This comes thanks to both deepwater drilling and shale fields like the Bakken formation in North Dakota, whose previously inaccessible reserves have been unlocked by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies, also known as “fracking.”

These same technologies have also produced an unprecedented natural gas surge, as fracking wells are sunk into the soil of ranches and parks and hillsides across the country. Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale alone produces about 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day – the equivalent of more than 2.4 million barrels of oil. Shale extraction has quadrupled in the past four years and now accounts for about 40 percent of the annual natural gas yields in the United States, which recently surpassed Russia as the world’s largest natural gas producer.

At the very same time that extraction has come to play an increasingly dominant role in the US economy, we have seen a dramatic reversal in the politics of fossil fuel and climate change. Whereas high-profile Republicans once expressed ambivalence about our reliance on fossil fuels, viewing it as a kind of necessary evil that would ultimately be phased out, in the last five years the extraction of fossil fuels has become – to steal a phrase – “a positive good.”

During the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Dan Quayle argued that “the greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue. It’s important for us to get the data in, to see what alternatives we have to the fossil fuels…. We need to get on with it, and in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”

That wasn’t quite the case, but in 1989, Newt Gingrich was one of twenty-five Republican co-sponsors of the Global Warming Prevention Act, which held that “the Earth’s atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and wasteful fossil fuel use, and the effects of rapid population growth in many regions” and that “increasing the nation’s and world’s reliance on ecologically sustainable solar and renewable resources…is a significant long-term solution to reducing fossil-generated carbon dioxide and other pollutants.” In 1990, President George H.W. Bush said at an IPCC event, “We all know that human activities are changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in unprecedented ways.”

While his son did little to curb carbon emissions when he took his turn at the presidency, he did at least give it lip service. Speaking ahead of the 2005 G8 Summit, George W. Bush said, “It’s now recognized that the surface of the earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” As part of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, he signed into law minimum efficiency requirements to begin to phase out the use of incandescent bulbs in 2012. (A law that would, in the Obama era, become a top conservative target, as the Tea Party rallied to support the incandescent bulb as if it were a constitutionally enshrined right.)

And in 2008, somewhat miraculously, John McCain’s platform featured support for a cap-and-trade bill that would have effectively put a price on carbon. But even by that year, you could already feel a seismic shift in the rhetoric. I sat in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul in 2008 and watched Sarah Palin lead thousands of people in a thunderous chant of “Drill, baby, drill!”

After Obama’s election, things moved quickly: McCain dropped support for his own legislation to regulate carbon pollution. In 2010, Bob Inglis, a conservative congressman from South Carolina, was soundly defeated by a Tea Party challenger in the Republican primary, due chiefly to Inglis’s refusal to deny the science on climate change. A year later, Gingrich called his appearance alongside Nancy Pelosi in a 2008 ad urging action on climate change the “dumbest single thing I’ve done in years,” recanting his acceptance of the science and embracing denialism. He was not alone – in fact, outright denialism is now more or less the official Republican line. In 2011, and again in January of this year, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to block the EPA from regulating carbon emissions and against amendments that would acknowledge that climate change is, in fact, happening.

And it’s not just denialism: extracting and burning carbon is now roundly celebrated by conservative politicians, as if plunging holes into the earth to pull out fossilized peat is a sign of the nation’s potency. In 2012, Mitt Romney said he would build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline himself. Texas Representative Steve Stockman tweeted in March 2013 that “the best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”

Remember, all of this is happening at the same time that (a) fossil fuel companies are pulling more carbon out of the ground than ever before, and (b) it’s becoming increasingly clear that those companies will have to leave 80 percent of their reserves in the ground if we are to avert a global cataclysm. In the same way that the abolition movement cast a shadow over the cotton boom, so does the movement to put a price on carbon spook the fossil fuel companies, which even at their moment of peak triumph wonder if a radical change is looming around the corner.

Let me pause here once again to be clear about what the point of this extended historical comparison is and is not. Comparisons to slavery are generally considered rhetorically out of bounds, and for good reason. We are walking on treacherous terrain. The point here is not to associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels today.

In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground.

It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy. No use trying to persuade people otherwise.

* * *​
If I’ve done my job so far, you should, right about now, be feeling despair. If, indeed, what we need to save the earth is to forcibly pry trillions of dollars of wealth out of the hands of its owners, and if the only precedent for that is the liberation of the slaves – well, then you wouldn’t be crazy if you concluded that we’re doomed, since that result was achieved only through the most brutal extended war in our nation’s history.

So here is why we’re not doomed. Among many obvious differences between the slave power and the fossil fuel cabal is this definitive one. Slaves were incredibly valuable in large part because they produced huge amounts of value with relatively little capital required. Slave owners merely had to provide food, water and shelter (often wretchedly insufficient) and maintain a system of repression and surveillance to guard against the ever-present threat of rebellion or escape. Compared with many other kinds of investments, unlocking the value of slaves required very little of the plantation owners.

Such is not the case with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel extraction is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world. While it is immensely, unfathomably profitable, it requires ungodly amounts of money to dig and drill the earth, money to pump and refine and transport the fuel so that it can go from the fossilized plant matter thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface into your Honda. And that constant need for billions of new dollars in investment capital is the industry’s Achilles’ heel.
A variety of forces are now attacking precisely this vulnerability. The movement to stop the Keystone XL pipeline is probably the largest social movement in American history directed at stopping a piece of capital investment, which is what the pipeline is. Because without that pipeline, a lot of the dirty fuel trapped in the Alberta tar sands is too costly to be worth pulling out.

The divestment movement is pushing colleges, universities, municipalities, pension funds and others to remove their investment from fossil fuel companies. So far, eighteen foundations, twenty-seven religious institutions, twenty-two cities, and eleven colleges and universities havecommitted themselves to divestment. Together, they have pledged to divest hundreds of millions of dollars from the fossil fuel companies so far.

Of course, that’s a drop in the global pool of capital. But some of the largest funds in the world are sovereign wealth funds, which are subject to political pressure. The largest such fund belongs to Norway, which is seriously considering divesting from fossil fuels.

Investors, even those unmotivated by stewardship of the planet, have reason to be suspicious of the fossil fuel companies. Right now, they are seeing their investment dollars diverted from paying dividends to doing something downright insane: searching for new reserves. Globally, the industry spends $1.8 billion a day on exploration. As one longtime energy industry insider pointed out to me, fossil fuel companies are spending much more on exploring for new reserves than they are posting in profits.

Think about that for a second: to stay below a 2 degree Celsius rise, we can burn only one-fifth of the total fossil fuel that companies have in their reserves right now. And yet, fossil fuel companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars looking for new reserves – reserves that would be sold and emitted only in some distant postapocalyptic future in which we’ve already burned enough fossil fuel to warm the planet past even the most horrific projections.

This means that fossil fuel companies are taking their investors’ money and spending it on this extremely expensive suicide mission. Every single day. If investors say, “Stop it – we want that money back as dividends rather than being spent on exploration,” then, according to this industry insider, “what that means is, literally, the oil and gas companies don’t have a viable business model. If all your investors say that, and all the analysts start saying that, they can no longer grow as businesses.”

In fact, in certain climate and investment circles, people have begun to talk about “stranded assets” – that is, the risk that either national or global carbon-pricing regimes will make the extraction of some of the current reserves uneconomical. Recently, shareholders pushed ExxonMobil to start reporting on its exposure to the risk of stranded assets, which was a crucial first step, though the report itself was best summarized by McKibben as saying, basically, “We plan on overheating the planet, we don’t think any government will stop us, we dare you to try.”

That is the current stance of the fossil fuel companies: “It’s our property, and weâre gonna extract, sell and burn all of it. What are you gonna do about it?”
Those people you see getting arrested outside the White House protesting Keystone XL, showing up at shareholder meetings and sitting in on campuses to get their schools to divest are doing something about it. They are attacking the one weak link in the chain of doom that is our fossil fuel economy.

As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” What the climate justice movement is demanding is the ultimate abolition of fossil fuels. And our fates all depend on whether they succeed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top