Leftist Presidential Candidate’s Landslide Promises Clean Sweep of Pinochet’s Fascist Legacy

BY DAVE LINDORFFFacebook

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Ever since the 9-11 attack on the US, people here had this mantra that 9-11 “changed everything.” It’s a gross overstatement of course. The country has been moving steadily into becoming a “national security” state since President Harry Truman launched it with the creation of the CIA and the National Security Agency. Since then, like a ratchet, we’ve had a gradually metastasizing police state and ever more intrusive central government, with both political parties supporting more military spending, more wars, more domestic spying, more militarized policing, and more attacks on media independence.

Now we have a shining example of what needs to be done, in a country that had its own 9-11, but has finally turned things around.

Chile, in fact, was the scene of a far more brutal and deadly 9-11 event that occurred on September 11, 1973, when the country’s military, under the direction of a fascist military leader named Augusto Pinochet, in a coup backed if not orchestrated by the US under President Richard Nixon and his then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, overthrew the democratically elected and hugely popular Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens, murdering him in the presidential palace and launching a reign of terror that saw thousands of Allende supporters murdered or disappeared.

Pinochet tore up the country’s constitution and imposed a fascist replacement document that has been in place long after his death, limiting the country’s ability to recover its freedoms.

That all ended this past weekend, as Chileans turned out in large numbers in a dramatic run-off election between a hard-right open admirer of Pinochet named Antonio Kast and a 35-year old leftist and veteran of a decade of protest actions against the government, Gabriel Boric, who has vowed to wipe away the almost half-century legacy of the country’s own 9-11 horror.

Unlike recent elections of leftist leaders in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, which have been so close that it’s difficult for the new left leaders to make changes, Boric’s win in Chile was decisive. After coming in a close second with 25% of the vote in a crowded presidential field that included various left candidates and some centrists during the initial election, behind Kast, who got 28% of the vote, with 99% of the ballots counted in the Sunday run-off voting by the end of the day Monday, Boric had won 56% of the vote to Kast’s 44% — a 12% margin of victory.

While the solid left didn’t win an outright majority in the country’s bicameral Congressional election which took place in November, it appears that between leftist, “soft” leftist and indigenous deputies in the 155-member lower house and in the 40-seat senate, Boric should be able to pass most of the measures he is proposing to bring the country out of its decades of repressive darkness. In a good demonstration of what may be expected from the new Congress with which Boric, who assume the Presidency on March 11, passed a law establishing marriage equality for same sex individuals — a big step for such a conservative mostly Catholic country.

Meanwhile, a second body, an constitutional assembly established two years ago to write and approve a whole new truly democratic Constitution for the country, has a strong left majority.

This is all worth cheering about.

Under Pinochet, who led the country from 1973 through 1990, besides enduring a brutal military/police repression, Chile became a laboratory for right wing economic experiments by a gang of acolytes of capitalist economic theorist Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago professor and Economics Nobel Prize winner who claimed that unregulated capitalism was essential for democracy. Chileans paid the price for these ludicrous ideological experiments with soaring income and wealth disparity, deepening poverty, collapsing education, privation of all kinds of services including by foreign private investors, and even the privatization of the country’s social security system.

Boric has vowed to reverse all these disasters.

Chile is showing the way. It can be done, if the people will it to be so!

We in the US, especially on the left, need to study what the left in Chile has accomplished, and of course to support their struggle to clean away the toxic sludge of decades of fascist rule and rules.

We need also to be alert to efforts by our own government and its nefarious imperial agencies from the CIA to the Pentagon, the Drug Enforcement Agency, State Department, Alliance for Progress and National Endowment for Democracy to undermine progressive governments like Chile’s. The history of US subversion of left governments in Latin American goes back centuries and is alive and well in Washington.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

How Public Workers Can Stop The Privatization of Everything

BY STEVE EARLYFacebook

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Several years ago, Don Cohen, a former central labor council staffer from San Diego, appeared on a panel discussing the privatization threats faced by union members across the country. He and other speakers were addressing a conference of state, county, and municipal workers represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a group which did not include any federal employees. When Cohen described propaganda campaigns that proponents of privatization conduct to pave the way for out-sourcing local government or state university jobs, audience members immediately recognized that kind of employer behavior and its adverse impact on them. However, when another speaker—a campaigner against privatization of services for veterans–did some quick polling on what CWA activists had heard or read about the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), their attitude toward that federal agency was largely negative.

With no VA union members present, and only a few veterans or VA patients in the crowd to present an alternative view, the initial consensus of the group was that public provision of veterans’ healthcare was inferior to private sector treatment—a perspective clearly shaped by corporate media coverage of the VA and an ongoing conservative push for its partial privatization. Before the end of the session, participants had a far better understanding of the inter-relatedness of political attacks on public services and jobs, at all levels of government, and the need for greater labor-community solidarity to fend them off. As Cohen and his co-author Allen Mikaelian make clear in The Privatization of Everything: How The Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press), any private sector incursion into the public sector is not just somebody else’s problem, it’s an injury to all.

In their new book, Cohen and Mikaelian, describe and debunk the vast array of privatization schemes that now litter the landscape, from private prisons and charter schools to for-profit water treatment and trash collection. “Corporations entrusted with public goods have been given the power to lock people up, force them into a parallel justice system, deny them life-saving treatments, place vital information behind paywalls, divert money from poverty programs to wealthy investors, tie the hands of governments, and undermine our constitutional rights.” There are now 2.6 times as many federal contract employees as there are direct employees of federal agencies.

Privatizing Cuts Pay and Benefits

As private companies have grabbed a bigger share of the $7 trillion spent every year on public services, the impact of privatization on pay, benefits, and income inequality has become more pronounced. In their many case studies, the authors show how contracting out has been a win-win for the rich and powerful, but rarely anyone else. The cost-savings promised by privatizers have been achieved at the expense of living wage jobs, with decent benefits, in the public sector. Food service workers, custodians, nursing assistants, and housekeepers have seen their wages cut and benefits stripped, leaving them eligible for food stamps or Medicaid. White collar professionals, like teachers and librarians, are targets as well, when privatization leaves them without union protection or job security but covered by charter school employment contracts with draconian “non-compete” clauses, that limit job mobility.

The authors provide a useful history of privatization as a bi-partisan political strategy, tracing its roots to the theories of free-market economist Milton Friedman and attempts to implement Friedman’s ideas during the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan. In the late 1980s, Reagan’s White House Commission on Privatization came up with plans to privatize “public housing, federal loan programs, air traffic control, education (through vouchers), the Postal Service, prisons, Amtrak, and Medicare.” As the authors note, “privatization got a huge boost from racism,” in the aftermath of legal victories, won by the southern Civil Rights movement from the 1950s through the 70s.

“When African Americans won voting rights, access to segregated spaces, and public benefits, a racist core of the American public reacted by vilifying public goods,” which has led to everything from underfunded schools to water systems laced with lead and profiteering from welfare case management and food stamp administration. The authors also show how Democrats have been complicit with Republican office holders in “treating us as mere consumers of public services rather than citizens.”  President Bill Clinton “found privatization useful for precisely the same reasons that Reagan Republicans had—it gave the appearance that government could be cut without cutting services.”

In the 1990s, Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative, directed by Vice-President Al Gore, helped set the tone with its spurious offer of a “customer service contract with the American people.”  Drawing on the work of historian Lizabeth Cohen and others, the authors argue persuasively that, when market relationships became the basis for how citizens relate to their government and private interests start peddling formerly public goods, “the free market can’t avoid creating exclusions.” Soon, “school choice devolves into segregation. Public parks and highways are divided into general versus premium services. In the midst of a national health crisis, ventilators go to the highest bidder.”

Turning Back the Tide

Privatization of Everything is not just an invaluable critique of corporate America’s fifty-year campaign to turn public goods into private profit centers, it also includes reproducible examples of successful anti-privatization fights. As the authors note, public library users in Pomona, California turned out in large numbers to block the privatization of municipal libraries, a development that would have left library employees at risk of losing jobs, pensions, and other benefits. In Atlanta, a coalition of public transit users, transit workers, and other public employees helped save the city’s bus system from a private take-over. Voters rallied by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and its allies rejected a heavily-funded attempt by the charter school industry to expand school privatization in Massachusetts.

Between 2003 and 2019, more than seventy U.S. communities were able to take control of local water systems away from private contractors. In Felton, California, city officials created a public co-op to take their local water infrastructure back from the investor-owned California Water Company. In Missoula, Montana, concerned citizens and city leaders waged a long but successful battle to buy its waterworks from the Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity funds in the world. In Baltimore, a proposed water system take-over by Veolia, another global giant, was “stopped in its infancy after a sustained public outcry,” generated by community organizations which exposed Veolia’s secret meetings with city council members to win their support for privatization.

Cohen and Mikaelian conclude with a six-step strategy for “regaining public control over public goods” in other places. One key element of that strategy is political education and action, that public sector unions and their members must play a central role in. While the authors believe that “the public mood is turning against privatization,” they warn that pandemic created “economic devastation” has created new fiscal constraints on state and local government that could lead to more contracting out of essential services and more short-sighted selling of public assets to the highest bidder. No one has a bigger stake in preventing that from happening than the 20 million workers who provide these services, benefit from them, like their fellow citizens, and help fund the public sector, through their own tax dollars. Public employee union activists, engaged in anti-privatization campaigns, will find that The Privatization of Everything contains plenty of ammunition useful now and in the future.

Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was an organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com

30 Years Ago, the Soviet Union Collapsed, But Socialism Was Worth Saving

BY GLENN SACKS

 DECEMBER 24, 2021
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Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union dissolved. On a superficial level, events vindicated the longtime American assertion that socialism “doesn’t work”–Soviet consumer goods lacked both quality and variety, Soviet agriculture was a continual disappointment, and, in the USSR’s later years, labor discipline grew very lax, and corruption flourished.

Yet Soviet socialism had more economic successes than failures. The US-USSR comparison used to demonstrate “capitalism good, socialism bad” was apples-to-oranges, and should never have been accepted.

British economist Angus Maddison estimates that in 1913 the US’ Gross Domestic Product per capita was the highest in the world at $5,301 (in 1990 dollars). That of the Russian Empire—the future USSR—was only $1,488–17th in world, less than Mexico. Sixty years later, the US figure had risen to $16,689 and the USSR’s to $6,059, the USSR narrowing the gap by 23%–a considerable achievement considering the extremely different circumstances faced by each nation.

The US entered World War I late and lost 115,000 men. By contrast, between WWI (1914-1918), the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), and the consequent famine, Russia/USSR lost over 10 million citizens. The country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. This is the starting point of Soviet socialism.

During World War II the USSR faced Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa–the largest military action in human history–and suffered a staggering 27 million deaths, 70 times America’s WWII losses. The USSR lost 1/3 of its national wealth and ended the war with millions starving and 25 million homeless.

By contrast, the US came out of WWII physically unscathed with 6% of the world’s population and 50% of its GDP. To have expected the USSR to catch up–all the while matching the US in military spending and in aid to Cold War allies–was never realistic.

Nonetheless, what the Soviet economy did achieve was still considerable:

+ During the 1930s the USSR industrialized faster than any nation in history. This remarkably rapid transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was accomplished despite the destruction and chaos of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s murderous purges and farm collectivization.

+ The USSR inflicted 85% of Germany’s wartime casualties and was principally responsible for Nazi Germany’s defeat.

+ Despite the massive loss of the young men critical for industrialization and heavy industry, the USSR re-industrialized rapidly during the 1940s and 1950s, and retained robust economic growth rates into the 1960s. It is only then that the Soviet economy–under the weight of bureaucracy and mismanagement–began to slow down. One study noted that while between 1950 and 1976 the advanced capitalist economies grew 4.4% annually and the poorer capitalist economies grew 5% annually, the centrally planned economies of the USSR and the Eastern bloc grew 7.7% annually—75% and 54% higher respectively (Scientific American, September 1980).

The USSR’s large Muslim regions, once as poor and backward as neighboring Afghanistan, saw tremendous progress in improving living standards, eliminating illiteracy, and reducing infant mortality. The Soviets also achieved a remarkable rise in the status of women, and women came to make up a significant portion of the region’s doctors, engineers, and teachers.

The USSR also managed to keep up with the US in both the nuclear arms race and the space race, as the comprehensive list of Soviet space “firsts” is as impressive as the US’.

The USSR’s main problem was not its economic system but the ruling bureaucracy’s mismanagement, corruption, parasitism, and cynicism, all of which sapped Soviet working people’s morale and work ethic. But what if the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s–during its “Era of Stagnation”–had been an open society such as ours?

Factory managers and political leaders responsible for the shoddy consumer goods offered to the Soviet people would’ve been skewered alive in the media, and they or their successors would quickly have whipped production into shape. Working people–benefitting from both an economy planned to meet people’s needs and from democratically controlling their workplace and their society–would have seen their creative energies unleashed.

Competing economic plans with varying priorities would have been debated and dissected, and passed democratically, instead of being imposed from above. With popular buy-in, there would have been much more popular commitment to meeting the targets and fulfilling such plans.

For decades the alleged failure of the Soviet economy has been used to shut down any substantive questioning of the necessity of the free market economic system. The performance of the USSR’s economy instead shows that a planned, socialist economy—if built in a free society with democratic institutions—is a viable alternative model.

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was recently recognized by LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner for “exceptional levels of performance.”

What is a Wilderness Without Its Wolves?

BY FRANZ CAMENZIND

COUNTERPUNCH

DECEMBER 24, 2021
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Wolf in greater Yellowstone. Photo: Franz Camenzind.

For millennia, wolves have occupied nearly all the lands now designated as Wilderness in the western US, with the exception of coastal California. Yet today, fewer than two score of the approximately 540 Wildernesses west of the 100^th meridian (not including Alaska’s 48) can claim some number of wolves as residents and only a dozen or so harbor wolves in numbers sufficient to be considered sustainable—in either the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Central Idaho Wildlands or Montana’s Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Arguably, the long-term sustainability of wolves in other Wilderness areas is at risk due to the limited security provided by those smaller, often isolated landscapes.

The Wilderness Act defines Wilderness as a place where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by humankind, retains its primeval character and where natural conditions are preserved. Simply stated, Wilderness is meant to exist with minimal human interference. Yet within the vast majority of Wilderness areas, the wolf, the apex species with profound ecosystem influence, is now absent—an absence due entirely to the relentless killing by humankind.

We need look no farther than Yellowstone National Park to witness the influence wolves have on an ecosystem. The park’s wolves were exterminated by the early 1900s, ostensibly to protect the park’s favored elk herds. What followed was not surprising—an overabundance of elk which led to deleterious impacts to vegetation, particularly lower elevation riparian and willow communities.

Since the reintroduction of wolves to the park in the mid-1990s, elk numbers have dropped to levels most ecologists agree resemble something near carrying capacity. Similarly, park wolf numbers stabilized around 100, after initial highs of 150-170. With the wolf’s return, the park ecosystem is showing signs of reaching a dynamic equilibrium beneficial to all components. It’s not an exaggeration to say that wolves were instrumental in returning the park’s wildlands nearer to their primeval conditions.

Wolves hold apex status, in part, because of their far-ranging hunting behavior. Yellowstone-area wolf packs hunt in territories ranging from 185-310 square miles. Besides being smaller, the Yellowstone elk herd is more dispersed and spends less time in the lower elevation meadows and riparian-willow communities.

Most ecologists agree that the wolf’s collective impact on elk is contributing to the resurgence of the willow communities, which in turn is witnessing an increase in avian biodiversity and density. The revitalization of Yellowstone’s northern range willow communities has also enabled an increase in the beaver population, leading to positive changes to stream ecology, thus benefitting aquatic invertebrates and the fisheries.

Many of the ecological changes brought about by the wolf’s return may take years if not decades to recognize and fully understand. But one thing is clear, today’s Yellowstone and the Wildernesses harboring robust wolf populations more closely resemble their primeval character than those lacking wolves. Wolves may just be nature’s best wilderness stewards.

Three states now account for the majority of the west’s wolves: Idaho (1,556), Montana (1,220) and Wyoming (347). Another 351 are tallied for Washington (178) and Oregon (173). Mexican Gray Wolves occur in two states: New Mexico (114) and Arizona (72). Combined, approximately 3,660 wolves currently reside west of the 100^th meridian—a number that pales to the 250,000 to 2 million estimated to have resided in the entire United States before the European invasion. However, the current numbers are better than the few dozen residing in northwest Montana three decades ago, which were a result of wolves immigrating from Canada.

Today’s bad news is that wolves in Idaho and Montana are once again facing the vigilante actions of the 1800s. Both state legislatures recently passed draconian legislation with the stated objective of reducing wolf numbers to near 150—the number at which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) will take over wolf management as per the states’ wolf management agreements in effect since Endangered Species Act protections were taken away from wolves.

The new legislation authorizes the state commissions to allow wolf-killing by pretty much any means imaginable: the use of traps and snares, unlimited quotas, extended hunting and trapping seasons, and in Idaho, night time hunting, aerial gunning and killing pups in dens. Idaho also designated $200,000 dollars to “cover expenses incurred” by private individuals while killing wolves—essentially imposing a bounty on wolves.

Idaho’s and Montana’s aggressive wolf-killing legislation has been temporarily dampened a bit by the states’ wildlife commissions which have some leeway when setting annual wolf hunting and trapping regulations. For instance, this season, Montana is limiting the open-ended quotas written into their legislation. But the intent and goals remain unchanged—it may just take a few more years to achieve those goals. Ironically, that means more wolves will be killed because each year the survivors will produce young, thus replenishing their numbers, resulting in “a need” to kill more wolves to reach the 150 goal.

State wildlife agencies manage wolves by the numbers, ignoring the fact that wolves are one of the most social species on the planet, and function and survive not as individuals, but as members of highly structured packs. Consequently, intense, random killing can cause packs to break up, resulting in diminished hunting efficiency and pushing wolves toward easier prey, such as livestock.

Today, wolves and the wilderness ecosystems they inhabit are imminently threatened by these irresponsible state efforts to kill upwards of 90 percent of their wolf populations, including within Wilderness. A weakened or removed apex species inevitably results in a weakened ecological system. If this barbaric killing is allowed to proceed, ecosystem function and wilderness protection will be pushed back decades.

Wilderness Watch continues to fight for Wilderness and its wolves. On December 6, Wilderness Watch and a dozen allies filed a lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order/preliminary injunction against the State of Idaho over its barbaric new wolf-killing laws. This followed a June 2021 Notice of Intent to sue Idaho and Montana for their new anti-wolf statues. We’ve petitioned the US Department of Agriculture to promulgate rules or issue closure orders preventing certain killing methods, hired killers, and paying bounties in Wilderness. Wilderness Watch also joined a petition authored by Western Watersheds Project to relist wolves under the Endangered Species Act in light of the new, aggressive wolf-killing statutes. In response, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it will undertake a status review of the gray wolf over the next 12 months.

A Wilderness denied of its wolves is a wounded Wilderness. If wolves can’t be allowed live in Wilderness, where can they live? Wilderness Watch will continue to do all it can to protect this critical, symbiotic relationship and the ecological integrity of Wilderness itself.

Warnings from the Far North

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER

COUNTERPUNCH

DECEMBER 27, 2021
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“Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.”(Source: Susanne Rust, Unprecedented Die-offs, Melting Ice: Climate Change is Wreaking Havoc in the Arctic and Beyond, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2021)

“Breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures” is horrific to contemplate. It sends a powerful signal of trouble dead ahead. In that regard, scientists agree that what happens up North signals what’s in store to the South, and what’s happening up North is a gut-wrenching reality of life on a knife’s edge of catastrophe.

It’s never been more urgent and timely for the world to change its ways and abandon the current economic maelstrom that haunts all life on the planet. The pros and cons of capitalism’s experiment with neoliberal tendencies that enrich the few and bury the many should be debated in the context of strained resources throughout the biosphere, including all life forms. The GDP-to-infinity paradigm is barreling towards a wall of impending extinction. It’s already on a fast track.

In the aforementioned LA Times, aka The Times, article: “Kuletz, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who has been observing birds in Alaska since the late 1970s, said she’s never before seen the large-scale changes of recent years. In 2013, the dead birds did not show signs of being emaciated, but in 2017, hundreds to thousands more began to wash up dead on beaches with clear signs of starvation.” Ibid.

A team from The Times traveled to Alaska and spoke with dozens of scientists conducting field research in the Bering Sea and the High Arctic from whence they describe the harsh reality of a vastly/rapidly changing climate system that threatens basic food resources for marine life, as well as for humanity.

The fingerprints of anthropogenic global warming are all over the discernable shifts of sea life and/or loss of species captured in a whirlwind of unpredictability. According to boots-on-the-ground scientists in the far north, these radical shifts in the ecosystem have… “ramifications that stretch far beyond the Arctic. Moreover, the Bering Sea is one of the planet’s major fishing grounds.”

Janet Duffy-Anderson, a marine scientist who leads surveys of the Bering Sea for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center said: “Globally, cold-water ecosystems support the world’s fisheries. Halibut, all of the cod, all of the benthic crabs, lobsters, this is the majority of the food source for the world.”

She emphasized the fact that the ripple effect of what’s happening in the far north could shut down fisheries as well as leave migrating animals starving for food, which, in fact, is already omnipresent. And, of concern: “Alaska is a bellwether for what other systems can expect.”

The top of the marine food chain is in deep trouble. Since 2019 hundreds of gray whales have died along North America’s Pacific coastline. Many of the whales appeared skinny or underfed.

Addressing the whale issue, another scientific study from a year ago stated: “It is now the third year that gray whales have been found in very poor condition or dead in large numbers along the west coast of Mexico, USA and Canada, and scientist have raised their concerns. An international study suggests that starvation is contributing to these mortalities.” (Source: Mary Lou Jones and Steven Swartz -Aarhus University- A Large Number of Gray Whales are Starving and Dying in the Eastern North Pacific, ScienceDaily, January 22, 2021)

When the top of the marine food chain (whales) starve, it’s only too obvious that the lower levels are failing. This one fact is cause for serious concern and thus demands action by the leaders of the world to commit to a series of international studies of marine life and ocean conditions with recommendations on how to solve the anthropogenic cause of excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, it appears that as some species in the far north struggle, some do adapt and even thrive. Thus, there may be some tradeoffs on a slightly positive note, but still, it’s the emaciated animals en mass that cannot be overlooked. The fact of the matter, stated in The Times: “Data from a Bering Sea mooring shows the average temperature throughout the water column has risen markedly in the last several years: in 2018, water temperatures were 9 degrees above the historical average.”

It should be noted that if overall global temperatures averaged 9 degrees above average, it would be “lights out” for terrestrial life.

Warmer waters appear to be at the heart of the problem, e.g., as the planet warms both humans and wildlife become more vulnerable to infectious diseases that were previously confined to certain specific locations and environments. Additionally, toxic algae that kills marine life thrives in warmer waters. Plus, marine animals do not naturally mature, and reproduce as waters warm far above historical averages. Furthermore, ocean acidification, caused by excessive CO2, is already threatening sea life by reducing carbonate, a key building block in seawater.

Only recently, a death march of extreme heat hit the Pacific. A study in Canada showed the enormous impact of heat, as an estimated one billion sea creatures off the coast of Vancouver died because of excessive ocean heat. According to professor Christopher Harley, University of British Columbia: “”I’ve been working in the Pacific Northwest for most of the past 25 years, and I have not seen anything like this here. This is far more extensive than anything I’ve ever seen.” (Source: Heat Wave Killed An Estimated 1 Billion Sea Creatures, And Scientists Fear Even Worse, NPR Environment, July 9, 2021)

The oceans are suffering a triple whammy, and as a result scientists believe it is distinctly possible that life in the wondrous blue seas could be gone by mid century, unless humanity changes course. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change are battering the oceans. It’s all human-caused. The question then becomes, if humans have caused the onslaught, can they reverse it, or at least stop?

In all, it’s becoming only too apparent that to maintain life on the planet, the world economy needs to stabilize by massive reduction of greenhouse gases accompanied by flat-line economic activity, forget the death wish of GDP up and up “whatever percent every quarter,” which runs roughshod over the planet’s ecosystems. Worshipping GDP growth is akin to idolatry, and its moral corollary is greed. Maybe try worldwide socialism and see how that works for the planet’s life-sourcing ecosystems.

Not only that, but plain and simple, we’re running out of nature’s resourcefulness. “Today’s seas contain only 10% of the marlin, tuna, sharks and other large predators that were found in the 1950s… Overfishing puts the whole ocean ecosystem out of balance.” (Source: Katie Pavid, Will the Ocean Really Be Dead In 50 Years? Natural History Museum, London)

Of additional interest, the documentary Seaspiracy/Netflix by Disrupt Studios, March 2021 is an eye-opener on the goings-on of marine life, what’s left of it, in the oceans.

Museum scientists have studied past periods of climate change: “Research leader Prof Richard Twitchett says, ‘We have a really good idea of what oceans look like when the climate warms. It has happened to Earth many times before, and here in the Museum we have collections of fossil animals and plants that date back millions of years, so we can see how they responded. The rocks and fossils show us that as temperature increased in the past, oxygen levels fell and huge areas of the seafloor became uninhabitable,” Ibid.

“The same oceans that nourished human evolution are poised to unleash misery on a global scale unless the carbon pollution destabilizing Earth’s marine environment is brought to heel.” (Source: Oceans Turning From Friend to Foe, Warns Landmark UN Climate Report, Agence France Presse, August 29, 2019)

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Government Action, Not Consumer Action, Will Stop Climate Change

BY CHRISTOPHER ORLET

 COUNTERPUNCH
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 DECEMBER 27, 2021

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Pointing the finger at individual consumers has been the default strategy of powerful corporations since the 1950s. Deflect blame for smog or litter or polluted waterways or carcinogens or gun violence away from manufacturers and onto John Q. Public. Make the issue about personal responsibility. “People start pollution, people can stop it,” said the famous crying Indian ad from the early 1970s, the brainchild of a can and bottle manufacturers trade group.

The strategy has worked like a dream because Americans prize personal responsibility. Ronald Reagan was speaking for many of us when he said: “It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

Which brings us to climate change. Once again, it is individual consumers and not the fossil fuel industry who are being blamed for the potential destruction of our planet. Only this time it isn’t just powerful corporations and their trade groups wagging the finger at individuals for not doing enough to halt global warming. It is also many climate change activists, who continue to press individuals to do more, to, for instance, purchase expensive solar panels for their homes.

This shaming of individual consumers seems to be working, too; despite high start-up costs, and the fact that some public utilities are slashing the amount of credit solar users get for selling power back to the grid, while tacking on all kinds of fees to retain their profit margins, sales of residential solar is growing.

But while there have been countless government subsidies to boost residential rooftop solar, there has been less of a push to get utility companies to switch from fossil fuels to solar or wind. We saw what happened when the Biden Administration proposed the Clean Energy Performance Program as part of the Build Back Better Act. CEPP would have paid electric utility companies that switch from fossil fuels to renewable or clean energy sources, while penalizing those that don’t. Unsurprisingly, rotating villain Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the program, saying he didn’t want to pay utility companies for doing something they are already doing. But while some utility companies are making modest investments in clean energy, it is not happening nearly fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been very skeptical of this strategy of pinning our hopes on residential solar:

“Placing the responsibility for climate action on individuals, and encouraging an every-man-for-himself approach, may actually work against some energy solutions and do little to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions…[B]y focusing their considerable resources on individual empowerment rather than on systemic issues, they make global warming a matter of consumer choice rather than of political mobilization and community involvement. (Emphasis mine.)

This phenomenon, which goes by the name “consumer responsibilization,” is a close cousin to personal responsibility. The difference being personal responsibility, its current form, was created by conservatives as a way to undermine the Welfare State, while consumer responsibilization was invented by powerful corporations to allow them to continue to rake in profits while undermining people’s health and the health of the planet.

One problem with making individual consumers accept responsibility for climate change is that, because of conservative and corporate misinformation, a lot of Americans don’t believe climate change is an existential crisis. Only a little more than half of the country (57 percent) believe climate change is caused by human activity, while nearly 6 in 10 voters believe that maintaining energy independence is more important than reducing carbon emissions if the two are in conflict.

This is a recipe for disaster. As seen with guns or single-use plastics, without serious government regulation the problem only worsens.

Meanwhile, too many climate change activists continue to harp on the idea that YOU can make a difference if you just put down that cheeseburger and eat a salad instead, if YOU use a metal straw instead of a plastic one, if YOU ride your ten speed instead of driving alone to the office, all of which is a bunch of feel-good nonsense.

What is needed is a focus on systemic change, on dramatic government action, and political mobilization. I know, expecting government to do the right thing is problematic too. One of the main political parties treats climate change like a hoax. The other—thanks to a razor thin majority in Congress —cannot come together to take any decisive action.

This may be why residential solar continues to grow. Americans have given up on government doing what needs to be done.

But while it may give us the warm fuzzies to teach our children that they can save the planet if they put single-use plastics in recycling bins, or carry around a metal straw, the more important lesson we should be imparting is that we must hold powerful corporations accountable for the damage they inflict on humans, our natural resources, and our planet. And that we must learn to recognize consumer responsibilization and other corporate propaganda when we see it.