Ecology, Ethics, Anarchism seen through the eyes of Noam Chomsky - by Javier Sethness

There can be little doubt about the centrality and severity of the environmental crisis in the present day. Driven by the mindless "grow-or-die" imperative of capitalism, humanity's destruction of the biosphere has reached and even surpassed various critical thresholds, whether in terms of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, freshwater depletion, or chemical pollution. Extreme weather events can be seen pummeling the globe, from the Philippines - devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in November of last year - to California, which is presently suffering from the worst drought in centuries.

As Nafeez Ahmed has shown, a recently published study funded in part by NASA warns of impending civilizational collapse without radical changes to address social inequality and overconsumption. Truthout's own Dahr Jamail has written a number of critical pieces lately that have documented the profundity of the current trajectory toward anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) and global ecocide: In a telling metaphor, he likens the increasingly mad weather patterns brought about by ACD to an electrocardiogram of a "heart in defibrillation."

Rather than conclude that such distressing trends follow intrinsically from an "aggressive" and "sociopathic" human nature, reasonable observers should likely associate the outgrowth of these tendencies with the dominance of the capitalist system, for, as Oxfam noted in a January 2014 report, the richest 85 individuals in the world possess as much wealth as a whole half of humanity - the 3.5 billion poorest people - while just 90 corporations have been responsible for a full two-thirds of the carbon emissions generated since the onset of industrialism.

As these staggering statistics show, then, the ecological and climatic crises correspond to the extreme concentration of power and wealth produced by capitalism and upheld by the world's governments. As a counter-move to these realities, the political philosophy of anarchism - which opposes the rule of both state and capital - may hold a great deal of promise for ameliorating and perhaps even overturning these trends toward destruction. Apropos, I had the great good fortune recently to interview Professor Noam Chomsky, renowned anarcho-syndicalist, to discuss the question of ecological crisis and anarchism as a remedy. Click on the link below for a transcript of our conversation.

Read more: Noam Chomsky: Ecology, Ethics, Anarchism

EU-US Relations: Obama’s Anemic Speech in Europe - by Roger Cohen

Having pivoted to Asia and done the de rigueur minimum over several years to keep the trans-Atlantic alliance off life-support, Barack Obama awakened with a jolt to Europe this week and, on his first visit to Brussels as president, spoke of “inseparable allies” with a shared mission to demonstrate that Russia cannot “run roughshod over its neighbors.”

Shaken from a view of Europe as a kind of 20th-century yawn, Obama spoke of freedom and the ideas that bind the United States and Europe still in an ongoing “contest of ideas” against autocracy and “brute force.” He rightly rejected the notion that this is “another Cold War that we’re entering into,” noting that President Vladimir Putin of Russia represents “no global ideology.”

 

He spoke in timely fashion of “our Article 5 duty” under the North Atlantic Treaty to respond with force to any attack on a NATO country, important reassurance to the Baltic states, among others. This military commitment was backed by reference to the need for “very real contingency plans” to protect NATO nations in Central and Eastern Europe. Those plans, to date, have been inadequate. Overall, the combination of sanctions against Russia, economic support for Ukraine, and the dispatch of additional military forces eastward sent a clear message to Putin — one that will not reverse Russia’s Crimea annexation but may stop him going any further.

 

Better late than never: The Russian president has benefited from the perception of a United States in full-tilt, war-weary retrenchment; of American red lines turning amber and then green; of a divided European Union; and a hollow NATO living more on the past than any vision of a 21st-century future. Obama has been making up for lost ground.

Still, his Brussels speech, presented as a capstone of his visit and one of those Obama specials designed to offset with eloquence a deficit of deeds, was a poor performance overall, a jejune collection of nostrums about binding values of free-market Western societies and their appeal to the hearts (and pocketbooks) of people throughout the world, not least Ukrainians.

The problem is not that these propositions are untrue. The United States and the European Union are still magnets to the poor and disenfranchised of the earth. The problem is not even that an argument that the Iraq war (with its myriad dead) is somehow more defensible than Crimea is impossible to win. The problem is Obama needed to be more honest. 

The fact is the Western democracies he was exalting have been failing to deliver, and autocrats of the world, bare-chested Putin included, benefit indirectly from the resulting disenchantment.

“Now is not the time for bluster,” Obama intoned. “The situation in Ukraine, like crises in many parts of the world, does not have easy answers nor a military solution.”

This is true. But nor is it a time for clichés about the wonders of democracy, freedom, open-market economies, the rule of law and other underpinnings of the West. Not when democracy seems blocked, freedom sometimes selective, open markets cruel and the law harshest on those who have least.

Read more: Obama’s Anemic Speech in Europe - NYTimes.com

Are goverments still in control or has the power moved away to the corporate world?

Some of today's power brokers

Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power.

They discovered that global corporate control has a distinct bow-tie shape, with a dominant core of 147 firms radiating out from the middle. Each of these 147 own interlocking stakes of one another and together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all. The top 20 are at the bottom of the post. This is, say the paper’s authors, the first map of the structure of global corporate control.

A journalist of the  New Scientist talked to one systems theorist who is “disconcerted” at the level of interconnectedness, but not surprised. Such structures occur commonly in biology, things like fungus, lichen and weeds. Economists say the danger comes when you combine hyperconnection with the concentration of power. The Swiss scientists warn that this can lead to an unstable environment.

A few caveats with the data set: It excludes GSEs and privately-held companies and is dominated by banks, institutional investors and mutual funds that don’t always have much in the way of control over assets. Reader danogden left an especially good comment below: “…pension plans, corporate 401(k) plans and individual funds..manage trillions in assets ultimately belonging to individuals who are predominantly not in the “1%”.

There are a number of “custodian banks” in the list — companies who hold the assets of asset managers to ensure timely processing of things like foreign dividend and bond interest, name changes (due to mergers, etc.), foreign currency conversion and the like…Again, they do not own the assets, or even really control the assets — they merely house the assets. A better list would be the actual asset OWNERS, rather than the vendors who manage, house and clear said assets.”

Apparently that list is now also available and includes just 71 people. Yes indeed, incredible, 71 people controlling the faith of billions of people around the world.

Maybe that is the answer to the question many of us have today when we see governments who talk a lot, but do very little when it comes to dealing with tax havens, tax dodging, tax evasion, tax abatements, pollution, broken labor laws, cyber spying, and all that other mayhem corporations have unleash upon us.

EU-Digest






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Corruption a pan-European problem

No country is immune to corruption and the damaging effects it has for citizens and society. Across Europe – a new report from Transparency International reveals – corruption is undermining confidence in national institutions and contributing to a sustained economic crisis.

Three-fourths of Europeans consider corruption a growing problem in their societies. And gaps in governance continue to plague European countries’ attempts to pull the region out of its ongoing economic crisis.

In a two-year project, Transparency International has analysed over 300 institutions in 25 countries. Using our tried and tested National Integrity System approach, we gauge the capacity and effectiveness of a range of institutions – from political parties, the police, and the judiciary, to the media and civil society – in their contribution to national anti-corruption efforts. These in-depth national studies carried out by our chapters formed the basis of the regional report released on 6 June in Brussels.

The report highlights strengths and weaknesses in individual states, but also points at commonalities shared by many European countries. For instance, 19 of the 25 countries surveyed have not yet regulated lobbying, while currently only ten ban undisclosed political donations. Four-fifths of the states covered in the report present obstacles to citizens seeking access to information, while 17 of the countries lack codes of conduct for their parliamentarians.

Read more: News - Features - Corruption a pan-European problem: new report