LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

How a billionaire’s ‘attack philanthropy’ secretly funded climate denialism and right-wing causes

Barre Seid has funded climate denialism as well as a national network of state-level think tanks that promote business deregulation and fight Medicaid expansion.

Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott and Andrew Perez

September 8, 2022

SOURCEProPublica

1429554-17-20220822143403-may-biggest-political-donation-ever — Image Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

This story was co-published with The Lever.

In the mid-2000s, Barre Seid had begun thinking about how to leave a legacy. Riding the personal computer boom, the Chicago-based electronics magnate was on his way to becoming a billionaire. Seid, who considers himself a libertarian, now had the means to pursue a bold project: “Attack philanthropy.”

To Seid, that meant looking for ways to place financial bets that had the potential to make epochal change. With little public notice, Seid became one of the most important donors to conservative causes during an era that saw American politics and society shift sharply to the right.

New reporting by ProPublica and The Lever, based on emails and interviews with people who know Seid, sheds light on one of the country’s least-known megadonors, revealing how an intensely private billionaire has secretly used his wealth to try to influence the lives of millions.

Seid has funded climate denialism as well as a national network of state-level think tanks that promote business deregulation and fight Medicaid expansion. He’s also supported efforts to remake the higher education system in a conservative mold, including to turn one of the nation’s most politically influential law schools into a training ground for future generations of right-wing judges and justices.

Last month, The Lever and ProPublica as well as The New York Times detailed how Seid secretly handed a $1.6 billion fortune to a key architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority that recently eliminated federal protections for abortion rights.

Steven Baer, a longtime friend and former adviser to Seid, said the businessman has long been “the major patron” for the Heartland Institute, a small Chicago-area think tank which for decades has attacked mainstream climate science. A top executive at Seid’s former company, Tripp Lite, served as the chairman of the group. Among the recent claims on the institute’s website: “US Temperature Readings Are Junk, Negating Climate Science” and “96% of U.S. Climate Data Is Corrupted.”

“Barre did not need the quick win,” explained Baer in a recent interview. “He believes that if you take the long-odds shot and it pays off, it’s huge.” Baer said that Seid summed up his approach as “attack philanthropy.”

Seid, who turned 90 in April, is exceedingly secretive. In one email obtained by ProPublica and The Lever, he described himself as prone to “anonymity paranoia.”

Seid was so insistent on remaining in the shadows that he sometimes went by a pseudonym, variously given as Ebert or Elbert Howell. He and his staff at Tripp Lite would give the Howell name as the CEO of the company to outside salesmen and in business information registries, according to testimony Seid gave in a federal lawsuit.

“I get harassed a lot by telephone calls from security salesmen and the like and the source of it is mailing lists,” Seid said in the testimony, adding: “It’s a way of deflecting salesmen.” Seid did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

It’s impossible to know the full extent and details of Seid’s giving over the years because the law allows many nonprofits to keep their sponsors secret. But tax records previously obtained by ProPublica show that between 1996 and 2018, he made at least $775 million in donations to nonprofit groups. Almost all of that money was given anonymously.

As Seid got older, he knew that he needed a plan for what to do with his vast wealth, according to Baer. Seid, who has no children, knew that donating his billion-plus fortune could have a generational impact if put in the right hands.

“The question was,” Baer said, “how does he try to steer history?”

“He did not want to see and be seen”

Forty years ago, Seid was a little-known business executive based in Chicago who was scarcely on the radar of major political operatives and party committees. His electronics company, Tripp Lite, sold surge protectors and other gear from a cramped space in Chicago’s River North area.

As the company flourished at the dawn of the personal computing era, Seid had started to write a few checks to political groups such as the Republican National Committee. He also began donating to a local Republican group that, under Baer’s leadership, had restyled itself as a force to purge the GOP of its more moderate elements.

Baer had never heard of Seid but decided to introduce himself after he noticed the businessman’s donations to his group. Baer brought a copy of Chris Matthews’ memoir “Hardball” to an early meeting. He recalled that Seid kept the book in his office for many years afterward, taking inspiration not from an ideological perspective but as a useful primer on bare-knuckle politics.

Baer described Seid as “this quirky fellow who has a very good sense of humor and is very self-effacing.” But when he’s running his company, Baer added, “he can be terrifying to his subordinates. Not because he’s a bad person or a mean person, but because his mind works so whip-fast smart, you can be hit with a bunch of quick logic and questions, and you might be left stammering.”

According to Baer, Seid took great pains to monitor all aspects of Tripp Lite’s business. Seid would even go line by line through the company’s vast list of products, pen in hand, changing the prices of individual items. “He did not delegate that to anybody,” Baer said.

When it comes to ideology, Baer said the businessman was “a William F. Buckley, National Review, capital-C conservative but with a little tilt toward Cato Institute libertarianism.” Seid himself has referred to the “basic libertarianism” at the core of his politics, according to an email obtained by ProPublica and The Lever.

Even after he had become known in conservative circles as a major donor and an extremely wealthy man, he expressed intense aversion to attending political events.

“Barre would say, ‘I will pay you so I don’t have to go to your black-tie dinner,” Baer recalled. “He did not want to see and be seen. He was not that type of donor.”

Financing climate denial

Soon after the turn of the century, Seid began to take an intense interest in combating what he labeled “junk science,” according to Baer.

Baer, who worked as a contractor for Tripp Lite for several years, said Seid funded research and activism against the ban on the chemical insecticide DDT instituted by President Richard Nixon, which critics claimed had led to the death of millions because of the spread of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Seid also became convinced that leading practitioners of climate science are wrong when they blame global warming on the carbon emissions of human beings. Baer said he had already introduced Seid to Joseph Bast, then the head of the Heartland Institute, which challenged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Seid became “the major patron” of the organization, according to Baer.

Some donations by Seid to Heartland two decades ago were previously known, but the extent of his ties to the group have not been reported.

About a decade ago, Seid asked his close friend, Tripp Lite chief financial officer Chuck Lang, to join the Heartland Institute’s board of directors, Lang’s wife, Susan, said in an interview. Lang was elevated to chairman of the board shortly before he died in 2018.

“Barre Seid deserves his privacy, but I can say this: He is a very intelligent and generous man,” said Tim Huelskamp, a former U.S. representative from Kansas who served as the Heartland Institute’s president from 2017 to 2019.

The Heartland Institute did not respond to a request for comment.

Seid has also funded the State Policy Network, a group of influential state-level think tanks that push for deregulation and tax cuts, according to an email written by a friend of Seid’s. The head of the group once compared it to IKEA, The New Yorker reported, offering state think tanks a “catalogue” of successful projects, including opposing health care subsidies and imposing new voting restrictions. The network has also opposed efforts to expand Medicaid coverage.

A spokesperson for the State Policy Network declined to comment on the organization’s donors.

Seid, who was raised by Russian Jewish immigrants, has also been a donor to pro-Israel causes. A glimpse of those efforts came in 2010 when Bar-Ilan University in Israel awarded him an honorary degree, citing his “fervent commitment to setting forward a strong case for the State of Israel” and “support for programs which help develop the ability of Israel’s future leaders to persuasively communicate Israel’s positions and concerns.”

Bar-Ilan University also gave Seid’s wife, Barbara, an honorary degree the following year.

While Seid has long funded causes aligned with Republican orthodoxy, his company broke with the Trump administration over its trade war with China. Whether motivated by Seid’s deep libertarianism or simply Tripp Lite’s concern for its bottom line, the company sued the Trump administration in September 2020 after being hit with tariffs on electronic components it imported from China.

The sharply worded complaint attacked the administration for its “prosecution of an unprecedented, unbounded, and unlimited trade war impacting over $500 billion in imports from the People’s Republic of China.” Tripp Lite’s lawyer on the case, Ted Murphy of the firm Sidley Austin, declined to comment. The case is still pending.

At the time of the lawsuit, Seid’s business empire was in flux: He was working to convert his sole ownership of the company in Tripp Lite into what would be the biggest one-time political advocacy donation in U.S. history. He transferred the company to a dark money group created in April 2020 and run by conservative operative Leonard Leo, before it was sold for $1.6 billion in March 2021, as The Lever and ProPublica reported. The structure of the transaction allowed Seid to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes, according to tax experts.

Seid views himself as a libertarian, but he has entrusted his legacy to Leo, a staunch social conservative committed to curtailing reproductive rights. Leo, a longtime executive at the conservative legal group the Federalist Society, helped select five of the six Supreme Court justices who recently struck down federal protections for abortion rights.

Asked about Seid’s decision to give his business empire to Leo, Seid’s friend Baer explained that Seid, like the billionaire donor Charles Koch, understands the need to unite the conservative movement to change the direction of the country.

“A full-ride at Scalia Law”

As part of his long-term project, Seid has shown a particular interest in shaping colleges and universities.

Seid has funded Hillsdale College, a small Christian liberal arts school in Michigan, according to Susan Lang, the widow of Seid’s friend and Tripp Lite executive. Hillsdale is known both for its great books curriculum, which is centered on reading the classics of the Western canon, and also for being a feeder of staffers and ideas factory for the Trump administration.

He has forged a particularly close relationship with George Mason University, helping turn the school into an incubator for conservative legal scholars, lawyers and judges.

Activists have long suspected that Seid was the anonymous donor who gave $20 million in 2016 to rename GMU’s law school after the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The donation was brokered by Leo, the Federalist Society executive.

Six Supreme Court justices attended the renaming ceremony, and several have taught courses there in recent years, including Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The new emails, obtained through a public records request by ProPublica and The Lever, appear to confirm that Seid made the donation. The then-dean of the law school, Henry Butler, emailed Seid in 2019 with a personal update “on progress that we made at Scalia Law since the naming gift,” explaining that it had inspired another, larger donation. “Thank you for your generous support,” Butler added. (Butler and a spokesperson for GMU did not respond to requests for comment.)

In response, Seid said he would “discuss this with Leonard shortly,” apparently a reference to Leonard Leo. He then asked the dean for a personal favor: helping his nephew get into law school.

“Separately, do you still have useful connections at Northwestern Law? I have Nepot with LSAT 167,” Seid wrote, using an archaic term for nephew.

“Happy to try to help at Northwestern. I have several good friends on the faculty at Northwestern,” Butler wrote, then added: “Please tell him that he has a full-ride at Scalia Law where he can take courses from Justices Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanagh [sic]. Onward and Upward!”

A February 2019 email exchange between businessman Barre Seid and Henry Butler, then the dean of the George Mason University law school. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica

At GMU’s law school, one of Seid’s longtime influences is Frank Buckley, a law professor and conservative columnist, and the two have a long-running breezy email correspondence. In August 2020, Seid wrote to Buckley: “You need to keep being a public intellectual for the U.S.”

This year, Buckley had to take a step back from the public realm, deleting his Twitter account after he referred to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a “stupid Latina.” (Buckley later apologized, writing, “I regret that my foolish remarks have caused great sadness.”)

Buckley did not respond to a request for comment.

Buckley, who had written Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 Republican convention speech, confided to Seid in an August 2020 email: “Btw just between us girls I’m writing Don Jr’s convention speech again.” That speech, delivered in the wake of the George Floyd protests, claimed: “Small businesses across America — many of them minority owned — are being torched by mobs.”

In a November 2021 email to Buckley and others, Seid expressed interest in the University of Austin, the education project started by former Times opinion writer Bari Weiss.

Seid wrote a stream-of-consciousness take comparing the new effort to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, and referencing his longtime interest in great books curricula.

“Not U of C, Not enough $$$, High profile names, President from great books,” Seid wrote. “Can it succeed, and make a difference???”

EXCERPTS

From the “Introduction” to Capitalism in the Anthropocene

EXCERPTS

The Anthropocene Epoch, according to the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences can be seen as having begun in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, or else in the 1950s. The stratigraphic markers most commonly referred to are radionuclides from hundreds of nuclear tests (and two nuclear bombings) and the development of plastics and petrochemicals. These developments are seen as having introduced a new “synthetic age.” Yet, this was also the time of the Cold War, the consolidation of global monopoly capitalism, and what is often referred to as capitalism’s “golden age.” The immediate post–Second World War period saw what environmental historians have referred to as the Great Acceleration of economic impacts on the earth to the point that planetary boundaries were being crossed, or in danger of being crossed. The Anthropocene Epoch can thus be seen as having its origins in the post–Second World War era, with monopoly capitalism at a high level of globalization as its principal driver.

Since each geological epoch is divided into geological ages, the first age of the Anthropocene Epoch can be referred to as the Capitalinian Age, describing its social origins, now dominating over the stratigraphic indicators of geological change. To designate the present as a particular age of the Anthropocene Epoch is to point to the temporary, historical character of the geological age in which we now reside, which will lead either to a new geological (and social) age, stabilizing the human relation to the earth, referred to here as the Communian, or to an end-Anthropocene extinction event resulting in the destruction of civilization and quite possibly humanity itself.

Indeed, the notion of the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, expressing how human society, via capitalism, has proceeded to foul its planetary nest, has not been the revelation of a moment. Rather it can be seen as a product of a century-long discussion on the growing human impacts on the earth environment. In his Kingdom of Man in 1911, E. Ray Lankester, the leading British zoologist in the generation after Charles Darwin and a close friend of Marx, insisted that humanity as a result of capitalism had become a “disturber” of the ecology of the earth to such an extent that it undermined its own environment, giving rise to “nature’s revenges,” including new zoonotic diseases threatening humanity.

…For many, willing to resign humanity to its “fate,” the idea of a way out of our current dilemma, fundamentally altering society in order to avoid the socioecological chasm before us, will undoubtedly sound utopian. But utopia, a pun coined in the sixteenth century by Thomas More meaning both “nowhere” and “good place,” and therefore often seen as representing a kind of dream state or wishful projection into the future, loses its idealistic connotation in the context of a planetary dystopia where catastrophe, measured against historical precedents, has now become normal and threatens to become irreversible on a planetary scale, due to the inherent apocalyptic tendencies of the current mode of production. Under such circumstances, only the reconstitution of society as a whole, and thus of the human relation to the earth, holds any realistic hope for the future of humanity….

Marxism and the Universal Metabolism of Nature

…Beginning in the 1850s, based on the work of his close friend and comrade, the physician and scientist Roland Daniels, as well as on Justus von Liebig’s agricultural chemistry, Marx incorporated the notion of metabolism into his general analysis, introducing a conception of production (or the labor and production process) as constituting the “social metabolism” of humanity and nature.57 This conception was developed further in Capital, particularly in the analysis of ecological crisis, with the social metabolism standing for what we today call human-ecological relations. Here it is important to note that today’s ecosystem and Earth System analyses, and all form of systems ecology, have the concept of metabolism and flows of energy as their logical bases. Marx saw the social metabolism introduced by human beings in production as part of what he called the “universal metabolism of nature.”

In the mid-nineteenth century a soil crisis occurred in the new industrialized agriculture. Soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, contained in the food and the fiber, sent hundreds and even thousands of miles to the new urban industrial centers where the population was now concentrated, ended up as pollution in the cities rather than being returned to the land, with the result that these vital “constituent elements” of the soil were lost to the soil. Marx saw this as a manifestation of a contradiction between the alienated social metabolism of capitalist production and the “universal metabolism of nature,” generating a “rift in the . . . social metabolism” or metabolic rift, which constituted the main structure of ecological crisis under capitalism.60 The triad of concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, the social metabolism, and the metabolic rift thus gave to Marx’s understanding of the ecological nature of production a complex, historically grounded conceptual structure, encompassing both Earth change and social system change, and their coevolution within the historical process. Exploring this problem in his later works, Marx engaged in extended analyses of ecological crises, or the metabolic rift, some of which were embedded in his ecological notebooks. Although Marx wrote of the metabolism of nature and society, this was not, as some critics have charged, a “dualistic” conception, since his emphasis was on how the social metabolism, rooted in changing relations of production, historically mediated the dialectical relation between humanity and earth.

Fundamental to this whole framework, emanating from classical historical materialism (in which Frederick Engels, as we shall see, also played a crucial role), is the notion that economic and environmental crises are two sides of a single coin associated with capitalism’s exploitation of labor, on one side, and its expropriation of people and the earth, on the other. Capitalism is not only an alienated economic regime, but also, as a precondition of this, an alienated ecological regime. Industrial capitalism requires as its basis, as Marx argued, the removal of the population from the land and thus from the organic means of production. It was the expropriation of the commons as well as whole populations on a world scale (including chattel slavery) that led to “the genesis of the capitalist farmer,” on the one hand, and the “genesis of the industrial capitalist,” on the other.62 This alienation from nature constituted the basis on which the alienation of human being from human being and between classes was established. This twofold alienation from nature and other human beings constitutes the source of capitalism’s continuing creative destruction of the conditions of existence of humanity itself…..

The origin of the “Western Marxist” tradition, in this sense, is usually traced to Georg Lukács’s criticism in History and Class Consciousness (1923) of Engels’s conception of the dialectics of nature. In footnote 6 of chapter one on “What Is Orthodox Marxism” Lukács inserted a short comment in which he stated:

It is of the first importance to realise that the method is limited here to the realms of history and society. The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’s account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels—following Hegel’s mistaken lead—extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics—the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc.—are absent from our knowledge of nature. Unfortunately it is not possible to undertake a detailed analysis of these questions here.

This footnote by Lukács, consisting of less than ten lines altogether—the last line of which says, “It is not possible to undertake a detailed analysis of these questions here”—has often been exaggerated, treated as a full-blown critique, rather than a mere aside…

From Chapter 1:

…The remarkable discovery in the Soviet archives of Lukács’s manuscript Tailism and the Dialectic, some seventy years after it was written in the mid-1920s (just a few years after the writing of History and Class Consciousness), makes it clear that this critical shift in Lukács’s understanding, via Marx’s concept of social and ecological metabolism, had already been largely reached by that time. There he explained that “the metabolic interchange with nature” was “socially mediated” through labor and production. The labor process, as a form of metabolism between humanity and nature, made it possible for human beings to perceive—in ways that were limited by the historical development of production—certain objective conditions of existence. Such a metabolic “exchange of matter” between nature and society, Lukács wrote, “cannot possibly be achieved—even on the most primitive level—without possessing a certain degree of objectively correct knowledge about the processes of nature (which exist prior to people and function independently of them).” It was precisely the development of this metabolic “exchange of matter” by means of production that formed, in Lukács’s interpretation of Marx’s dialectic, “the material basis of modern science.”

Lukács’s emphasis on the centrality of Marx’s notion of social metabolism was to be carried forward by his assistant and younger colleague István Mészáros in Marx’s Theory of Alienation. For Mészáros the “conceptual structure” of Marx’s theory of alienation involved the triadic relation of humanity-production-nature, with production this way human beings could be conceived as the “self-mediating” beings of nature…. Lukács and Mészáros thus saw Marx’s social-metabolism argument as a way of transcending the divisions within Marxism that had fractured the dialectic and Marx’s social (and natural) ontology. It allowed for a praxis-based approach that integrated nature and society, and social history and natural history, without reducing one entirely to the other. In our present ecological age this complex understanding—complex because it dialectically encompasses the relations between part and whole, subject and object—becomes an indispensable element in any rational social transition.

Marx and the Universal Metabolism of Nature

…Since the Grundrisse in 1857–58, Marx had given the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel)—first developed in the 1830s by scientists engaged in the new discoveries of cellular biology and physiology and then applied to chemistry (by Liebig especially) and physics—a central place in his account of the interaction between nature and society through production. He defined the labor process as the metabolic relation between humanity and nature. For human beings this metabolism necessarily took a socially mediated form, encompassing the organic conditions common to all life, but also taking a distinctly human-historical character through production.

Building on this framework, Marx emphasized in Capital that the disruption of the soil cycle in industrialized capitalist agriculture constituted nothing less than “a rift” in the metabolic relation between human beings and nature. “Capitalist production,” he wrote,

collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-greater preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. . . . But by destroying the circumstances surrounding this metabolism . . . it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race. . . . All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. . . . Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.

…In the twentieth century the concept of metabolism was to become the basis of systems ecology, particularly in the landmark work of Eugene and Howard Odum. As Frank Golley explains in A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology, Howard Odum “pioneered a method of studying [eco-]system dynamics by measuring . . . the difference of input and output, under steady state conditions,” to determine “the metabolism of the whole system.” Based on the foundational work of the Odums, metabolism is now used to refer to all biological levels, starting with the single cell and ending with the ecosystem (and beyond that the Earth System). In his later attempts to incorporate human society into this broad ecological systems theory, Howard Odum was to draw heavily on Marx’s work, particularly in developing a theory of what he called ecologically “unequal exchange” rooted in “imperial capitalism.”

Indeed, if we were to return today to Marx’s original issue of the human-social metabolism and the problem of the soil nutrient cycle, looking at it from the viewpoint of ecological science, the argument would go like this. Living organisms, in their normal interactions with one another and the inorganic world, are constantly gaining nutrients and energy from consuming other organisms or, for green plants, through photosynthesis and nutrient uptake from the soil—which are then passed along to other organisms in a complex “food web” in which nutrients are eventually cycled back to near where they originated. In the process the energy extracted is used up in the functioning of the organism although ultimately a portion is left over in the form of difficult to decompose soil organic matter. Plants are constantly exchanging products with the soil through their roots—taking up nutrients and giving off energy-rich compounds that produce an active microbiological zone near the roots. Animals that eat plants or other animals generally use only a small fraction of the nutrients they eat and deposit the rest as feces and urine nearby. When they die, soil organisms use their nutrients and the energy contained in their bodies. The interactions of living organisms with matter (mineral or alive or previously alive) are such that the ecosystem is only lightly affected and nutrients cycle back to near where they were originally obtained. Also on a geological time scale, weathering of nutrients locked inside minerals renders them available for future organisms to use. Thus, natural ecosystems do not normally “run down” due to nutrient depletion or loss of other aspects of healthy environments such as productive soils.

As human societies develop, especially with the growth and spread of capitalism, the interactions between nature and humans are much greater and more intense than before, affecting first the local, then the regional, and finally the global environment. Since food and animal feeds are now routinely shipped long distances, this depletes the soil, just as Liebig and Marx contended in the nineteenth century, necessitating routine applications of commercial fertilizers on crop farms. At the same time this physical separation of where crops are grown and where humans or farm animals consume them creates massive disposal issues for the accumulation of nutrients in city sewage and in the manure that piles up around concentrations of factory farming operations. And the issue of breaks in the cycling of nutrients is only one of the many metabolic rifts that are now occurring. It is the change in the nature of the metabolism between a particular animal—humans—and the rest of the Earth System (including other species) that is at the heart of the ecological problems we face.

Despite the fact that our understanding of these ecological processes has developed enormously since Marx and Engels’s day, it is clear that in pinpointing the metabolic rift brought on by capitalist society they captured the essence of the contemporary ecological problem. As Engels put it in a summary of Marx’s argument in Capital, industrialized-capitalist agriculture is characterized by “the robbing of the soil: the acme of the capitalist mode of production is the undermining of the sources of all wealth: the soil and labourer.” For Marx and Engels this reflected the contradiction between town and country, and the need to prevent the worst distortions of the human metabolism with nature associated with urban development. As Engels wrote in The Housing Question:

The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage-workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically than Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he receives from it….

From Chapter 10:

The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange

Just as unequal economic exchange theory postulated the exchange of more labor for less, unequal ecological exchange theory had as its basis the exchange of more ecological use value (or nature’s product) for less. Unequal ecological exchange was first raised as a major issue in the work of Liebig and Marx. From the 1840s to the 1860s, the great German chemist Justus von Liebig introduced a critique of industrial agriculture as practiced most fully in England, referring to this as a condition of “Raubbau” or the “Raubsystem,” a system of robbery or overexploitation of the land and agriculture at the behest of the new industrial capitalism emerging in the towns. In Liebig’s view, the elementary soil nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, were being removed from the soil and sent to the cities in the form of food and fiber, where they ended up contributing to pollution rather than being recirculated to the soil. The result was the systematic robbing of the soil of its nutrients. English agriculture, then, tried to compensate for this by importing bones from the catacombs and battlefields of Europe and guano from Peru. “Great Britain,” Liebig wrote,

deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility. It has raked up the battlefields of Leipzig, Waterloo, and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for future generations of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood.

Marx developed Liebig’s approach into a more systematic ecological critique of capitalism by designating the robbery of the earth as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” or metabolic rift. Such conditions were, for Marx, the material counterpart of the capitalist organization of labor and production. It constituted the alienation of the “metabolic interaction” between humanity and the earth, that is, of the “universal condition” of human existence.

The metabolic rift under capitalism was connected to unequal ecological exchange. England, as the leading capitalist country at the center of a world-system, Marx stated, was “the metropolis of landlordism and capitalism all over the world,” drawing on the resources of the globe, with nations in the periphery often reduced to mere raw material providers. “One part of the globe” is converted “into a chiefly agricultural [and raw material] field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a preeminently industrial field.” Thus a whole nation, such as Ireland, could be turned into “mere pasture land which provides the English market with meat and wool at the cheapest possible prices.” Indeed, Ireland was reduced by imperialist means to “merely an agricultural district of England which happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle and industrial and military recruits.” The resulting “misuse” of “certain portions of the globe” in the periphery of the system is thus determined by the accumulation imperatives of the center. Marx illustrated the absolute robbery involved in the appropriation of the natural wealth of the one country by another by stating, “England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing the cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.” Like Liebig, Marx pointed to the fact that England was forced to import guano in massive quantities from Peru (in a world-system of exploitation that also involved importing Chinese labor to dig the guano) in order to make up for the loss of nutrients in English fields.

Marx saw production as a flow of both material use values and exchange values or, simply, values. He used the term “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel) to refer to the material exchange (the exchange of matter-energy) that always accompanied monetary exchange of value….

They burn witches don’t they?

Get rid of those broomsticks left leaning folks. They'll soon be coming after us!

Philip Farruggio

June 28, 2022

SOURCENationofChange

Well, not quite yet. Not so much are we referring to actual witches, rather us Americans who believe in true equality and fairness. This current ultra right wing culture that has seeped into our Supreme Court is terribly dangerous. They have most of the churches throughout this republic ( no play on words) in ‘ Lockstep’ with their mania. Not stopping with abortion, this fascist cult has mimicked the Germany of the 1930s and gone after the really vulnerable, meaning gay and transgendered Americans. For their proverbial ‘ Strike Three’ they have allowed just about anyone to carry a concealed weapon. New York’s Sullivan Law, which had been on the books for 111 years, made it a felony to be caught doing so without a license. Even in Dodge City, during the Wild West days, people had to ‘ Check your guns with the Sheriff when entering town.’. Not anymore. Imagine being on a rush hour NYC Subway and perhaps arguing over a seat. Before you know ,BOOM!

I knew things were moving in this Neanderthal direction when the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 decision in 2018 on the ‘ Colorado Baker Case’. A bakery owner had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple’s upcoming marriage. The owner said it went against his ‘religious view’s, even though the same court ruled in favor of same sex marriages just three years previous. Imagine if the bakery owner belonged to a ( so called ) religious sect that believed whites and blacks should live separate, so he refused to serve a black customer. Parroting once again those wonderful Nazis, what if the bakery owner belonged to a ( so called) religious sect that felt their type of Christianity saw Jews as beholden to Lucifer AKA ‘ Devil worshippers’. NOW we are getting closer to those fine folks in Salem.

So, we have this trifecta that actually goes even further down the rabbit hole of reason. Justice Clarence Thomas now wants to ‘ Revisit’ the Griswald ruling of 1965, which protected married couples who chose to use contraceptives from being ( no kidding ) arrested. Do you still think that 1984 was just a book and film? This is the same Clarence Thomas that Anita Hill, who once worked in his office in 1981, accused him of sexually harassing her in their workplace. Did he refer to himself then, to her, as ‘ Long Dong Silver’ from the porno star’s character? Thomas and Hill at the time were both single, and, as with the teenager Bret Kavanaugh, is it something about male Supreme Court Justices who share sexual aggressiveness? We will never know for sure will we?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his close cabal have still not been charged with ‘ Inciting Insurrection’ when the proof is floating out there like seagulls at the beach. George W and Tricky Dick Cheney ( sorry Nixon haters) and their cabal have never been charged as war criminals for their lying us into the most horrific action by our government EVER: The illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. Matter of fact, Junior Bush has become a ‘ Kinder, gentler’ ex president and dear friend of Bono and Ellen Degeneres. Tricky Dick Cheney has passed his genes onto his daughter Liz ( whose only saving grace is her disgust of Trump) as she marvels at the great Supreme Court rulings.

Get rid of those broomsticks left leaning folks. They’ll soon be coming after us

How Barbara Ehrenreich exposed the ‘positive thinking’ industry

We can thank the late economic justice warrior for her groundbreaking contribution in showing that “positive thinking” is part of a whitewashing of economic inequality.

Sonali Kolhatkar

September 12, 2022

SOURCENationofChange

Although the late Barbara Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which chronicled the real-life impacts of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, she made an equally great contribution to economic justice with her subsequent book exposing the cult of positive thinking.

Ehrenreich, who passed away on September 1, 2022, at age 81, had started her professional life with a PhD in cell biology. She didn’t relegate her journalism to mere facts. She delved as deep as she could—to a microscopic level—to make sense of the world. We concluded from Nickel and Dimed that people were not making it in America. But we realized through her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America that the economy was proceeding unimpeded by this fact because we were putting a smiley face on inequality.

The Great Recession began in 2007. Two years later, in 2009, Ehrenreich published Bright-Sided. Two years after that, in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began in New York’s Zuccotti Park and spread throughout the country. OWS participants called damning attention to the stark economic split between the haves and the have-nots, in this case the wealthiest “1 percent” of Americans and the rest of us—the “99 percent.” There was no putting a smiley face on the economy in that moment.

It was during this period that I had the honor of interviewing Ehrenreich. She explained that “there is a whole industry in the United States that got an investment in this idea that if you just think positively, if you expect everything to turn out alright, if you’re optimistic and cheerful and upbeat, everything will be alright.”

Ehrenreich, who survived cancer, said she began her investigation into the ideology of positive thinking when she had breast cancer, roughly six years before Bright-Sided was published. That’s when she realized what a uniquely American phenomenon it was to put a positive spin on everything, even cancer.

When she looked for online support groups of other women struggling with cancer, what she found was, “constant exhortations to be positive about the disease, to be cheerful and optimistic.” Such an approach obscures the central question of, “why do we have an epidemic of breast cancer?” she said.

She applied that idea to how positive thinking was obscuring questions of economic inequality. And she found that there was an entire industry built up to assure financially struggling Americans that their poverty stemmed from their own negative thinking and that they could turn things around if they simply visualized wealth, embraced a can-do attitude about their bleak futures and willed money to flow into their lives. Central to this industry are “the coaches, the motivational speakers, the inspirational posters to put up on the office walls,” and more, said Ehrenreich.

She also connected the rise of the American megachurch to the rising cult of the positive-thinkers. “The megachurches are not about Christianity. The megachurches are about how you can prosper because God wants you to be rich,” she said.

Joel Osteen, the pastor of a Houston-based megachurch, is perhaps one of the best-known leaders of the so-called prosperity gospel. In one of his sermons—conveniently posted online as a slick YouTube video to reach a maximum audience—Osteen claims that according to “the scripture,” “the wealth of the ungodly is laid up for the righteous,” and that “it will be transferred into the hands of the righteous.” His congregants may be tempted to imagine bank transfers from wealthy atheists magically pouring into their accounts.

Osteen has been the beneficiary of serious wealth transfers from his own congregants into his pockets, so much so that he can afford to live in a $10 million mansion. There’s no conundrum here, for Osteen is living proof to his followers that the power of positive thinking works.

Ehrenreich pointed out that the whole point of these churches is to create a positive experience for their congregants and to project a notion of exciting possibilities. The megachurch phenomenon is centered on “the idea that the church should not be disturbing. You don’t want to have a negative message at church. So that’s why you won’t even find a cross on the wall.”

Perhaps this is because the image of a bloodied, half-naked Jesus Christ nailed by his hands and feet to a wooden cross is just too painful to bear and might detract from dreams of future Ferraris and private jets. “What a downer that would be!” exclaimed Ehrenreich.

Where did the cult of positive thinking originate? “American corporate culture is saturated with this positive thinking ideology,” especially in the 1990s and 2000s, said Ehrenreich. “It grew because corporations needed a way to manage downsizing, which really began in the 1980s.”

Businesses that laid off masses of employees had a message that Ehrenreich encapsulated as, “you’re getting eliminated… but it’s really an opportunity for you. It’s a great thing; you’ve got to look at this positively. Don’t complain, don’t be a whiner, you’re not a victim, etc.”

Such sentiments percolated into the mainstream. Americans internalized the idea that losing one’s job has got to be a sign that something better is coming along and that “everything happens for a reason.” The alternative is to blame one’s employer, or even the design of the U.S. economy. And that would be dangerous to Wall Street and corporate America.

Another purpose of fostering positive thinking among those who are laid off is, as per Ehrenreich, “to extract more work from those who survive layoffs.” Indeed, we have an ugly culture of overwork in the U.S., with corporate employees having normalized the idea that they need to work insanely late hours, work on the weekends, and take on exhaustive amounts of responsibilities. After all, those who remain employed, unlike their laid-off former colleagues, ought to feel lucky to have a job—more positive thinking.

There may be a breaking point now, one that Ehrenreich thankfully lived to see, as a newer set of phenomena began emerging since the COVID-19 pandemic began. They include the “great resignation,” a term for masses of Americans quitting thankless jobs. And, more recently, “quiet quitting,” which is a new name for an older union-led idea of “work to rule” as workers are starting to only put in the hours they are paid to work and no more. How novel!

We owe Ehrenreich a debt of gratitude for shining a light not only on the perversity of the U.S. economic system but also on the gauzy veil of positive thinking that obscures the obscenity. Ehrenreich may not have lived to see her ideas of economic justice be fully realized. But, as she once told the New Yorker, “The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us but that we will die trying.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

UN agency approves controversial deep-sea mining tests

“This latest decision from the ISA will have come as a shock to civil society who were shut out of the decision-making process, highlighting a lack of transparency from the authority.”

Olivia Rosane

September 13, 2022

SOURCEEcoWatch

A UN agency has granted permission for a Canadian-based company to test out deep-sea mining.

The Metals Company (TMC) announced on September 7 that the International Seabed Authority (ISA) had given its subsidiary Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI) the go-ahead to gather 3,600 tonnes of polymetallic nodules from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, beginning later this month. The announcement stunned opponents of deep-sea mining, who have long called for a moratorium on the controversial practice.

“This is a troubling development which brings us even closer to the launch of the commercial deep sea mining industry,” Greenpeace USA project lead on deep sea mining Arlo Hemphill said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “It is a threat to the ocean, home to over 90% of life on earth, and one of our greatest allies in the fight against climate change.”

Deep-sea mining is the term for removing mineral deposits from the ocean floor below 200 meters (approximately 656 feet), according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Proponents of the practice see the deep-sea bed as a potential source of important metals like copper, nickel, aluminum, manganese, zinc, lithium and cobalt that are used in cellphones but also renewable energy technology like wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries and solar panels.

However, scientists and environmentalists are concerned about the irreparable damage that mining the seabed could do to deep-sea ecosystems that are rich in unique biodiversity but still poorly understood. Just last year, the overwhelming majority of governments, nonprofit organizations and civil society groups at the world congress of the IUCN voted in favor of placing a moratorium on the practice until the environmental impacts can be fully researched and understood.

Despite this, TMC announced that the ISA had reviewed its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Environmental Monitoring and Management Plan (EMMP) and said it could move forward with a test in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. This is a swath of seafloor west of Mexico and southeast of Hawaii with an area of one million square miles, according to Quartz.

The test will involve Swiss contractor Allseas using a prototype device to collect nodules of metal from the seafloor that will then be brought to the Hidden Gem, a processing ship on the ocean surface. The trial will be assessed by ocean scientists from a dozen different institutions, whose advice will guide the ISA’s decision as to whether or not to grant the company the right to exploit the area in earnest, according to TMC’s statement. The trial should conclude before the end of 2022.

“We have a couple of exciting and no doubt challenging months ahead of us,” TMC CEO and Chairman Gerard Barron said in the announcement. “The environmental and operational data and insights from these trials will be an important step in ensuring the safe and efficient collection of polymetallic nodules to supply critical battery materials for the clean energy transition.”

Barron’s argument is a common one in favor of deep-sea mining. TMC says the deep-sea metals it has the rights to would be enough to power 280 million electric vehicles, the total number of cars in the U.S., The New York Times reported. However, a 2021 study cast doubt on the assertion that seabed mining is necessary for the clean energy transition, arguing that it was possible to avoid it by expanding public transportation, improving metal recycling and switching from lithium-ion batteries to materials in the works that don’t require cobalt or nickel.

Further, Greenpeace raised concerns about how TMC had secured ISA’s approval for the test, pointing to a recent article published by The New York Times, which detailed how TMC had spent 15 years gaining influence with the ISA, and how the UN agency shared important data with the mining company, including the locations of valuable pieces of seabed it also reserved for TMC to exploit later.

“The ISA was set up by the United Nations with the purpose of regulating the international seabed, with a mandate to protect it,” Hemphill said. “Instead, they are now enabling mining of the critically important international seafloor.”

The company has also circumvented measures designed to secure the interests of developing countries, who are supposed to see the data first to help them compete with wealthier nations. In this case, however, TMC gained the sponsorship of Nauru and Tonga after seeing the data and still holds all the rights to the potential mining projects, The New York Times explained.

“This company set out to game the system and use a poor, developing Pacific nation as the conduit to exploit these resources,” Lord Fusitu’a, a former member of the Tonga parliament, told The New York Times.

Of the approximately 200,000 square miles of seabed set aside by the ISA for developing countries, almost half is now essentially in the hands of TMC, Hemphill said.

Ordinary people who call the Pacific home have been rallying against deep-sea mining and spoke out against the ISA’s decision.

“This latest decision from the ISA will have come as a shock to civil society who were shut out of the decision-making process, highlighting a lack of transparency from the authority,” Greenpeace Aotearoa seabed mining campaigner James Hita said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “For decades, Pacific peoples have been pushed aside and excluded from decision-making processes in their own territories. Deep sea mining is yet another example of colonial forces exploiting Pacific land and seas without regard to people’s way of life, food sources, and spiritual connection to the ocean.”