Invisible Windrush: how the stories of Indian indentured labourers from the Caribbean were forgotten

Labourers and children of Indian heritage walking down a street in Guyana in the early 1920s. The Field Museum Library, CC BY-SA

My father never spoke to us about Guyana, the country of his birth, when we were growing up because he believed that his history had no value to his children. In doing this, he was unconsciously copying his grandparents, as well as others in his community, who had collectively chosen not to talk about their past.

Sadly, in our case, this familial silence was like a bullet that ricocheted down the generations. It was fired in 1886 when my 22-year-old great-grandfather was recruited from India as an indentured labourer to travel to British Guiana (the spelling changed to Guyana in 1966 after independence) on a ship called the Foyle. It went on to the vessel that carried my father to Britain from Guyana in 1961, before taking aim at my brothers and I – a group of disaffected and confused children who had no real understanding of what our cultural heritage was.

When my father, Surujpaul Kaladeen, left Guyana, aged 23, he joined half a million other people from the Caribbean who made the journey to a new life in the UK between 1948 and 1971. This group of people became known as the Windrush generation.

When people think about the Windrush generation the images they tend to associate with this period are the black and white photos taken of African-Caribbean people at Tilbury Docks or Waterloo train station.

Jamaican immigrants meet RAF officials after Empire Windrush landed them at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on June 22 1948. PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

They are unlikely to imagine someone like my father, who was not black but a person of Indian-Caribbean heritage. It took me many years to unpick my family history and to understand that we were not the only ones to experience this kind of cultural amnesia growing up.

When my son was born in 2013, I began to understand myself in the context of being an “invisible passenger in two imperial migrations”. Because, not only was the system of indenture generally unknown to the wider public, but as a consequence, the presence of Indian people in the Caribbean was also unknown. So, we were never recognised as part of the Windrush generation.

The fact that we did not look like we were part of a discernible community and that we were constantly faced with questions about our origins, was difficult for us growing up. I believe it was a contributory factor to the tragic outcomes that followed for my brothers.

The system of indenture was started in Mauritius in 1834 so that the British could cheaply replace enslaved Africans following the abolition of slavery in the British empire.

Under the British empire over two million people of Indian heritage were transported, through the indenture system, to countries on five different continents. While you will encounter British people of Indian-Mauritian, Indian-South African and Indian-Fijian heritage in the UK, the system of indenture that brought their ancestors to those countries is entirely absent from school curriculums and until recently, university syllabuses too.

But what has also helped Britain “forget” the creation and maintenance of the system of indenture across the 19th and early 20th centuries is the community’s own attitude to its past. Many of my great-grandparent’s generation connected their poverty and their departure from India – with its associated rupture of family ties – to feelings of shame.
Caribbean heritage, but not black

In some ways, I now look at my life as an academic as one long love letter to my older brothers. I wanted to understand the role that the absence of knowing our father’s history had played in shaping us as children, before we ever really had a chance to form questions about who we were.

In 1886 the iron ship, Foyle, carried people from India to British Guiana where they would work as indentured labourers on plantations. 

State Library of South Australia, CC BY-SA

I have dedicated my academic career to an exploration of the history and literature of indenture and my book, The Other Windrush, edited with the academic and author David Dabydeen, is about the lives of people who grew up like me: descendants of the system of indenture whose history was unknown to the wider world.

In the early 2000s I embarked on archival research for my MA and subsequent PhD on colonial writing on indentured Indians in Guyana, which sits between Venezuela and Suriname, and is the only English-speaking country in South America. Guyana is part of the mainland Caribbean region.

I was convinced that in understanding the series of events that had led my ancestors from India to the Caribbean in the 19th century, I would in turn be able to work out what had happened to my brothers: gifted, bright, and beautiful boys who had stumbled catastrophically into adulthood.

Whether expressed through prison sentences, addiction or homelessness, their existence seemed to be a rejection of anything that resembled a normal life.

We were of Caribbean heritage, but not black. We were further of mixed heritage as our mum was white, but nobody used these labels in those days and to the world outside we were simply “pakis” – the word British racists used as a pejorative slur for anyone of South Asian heritage.

What I did not understand then, and what I have come to understand only recently, is that any comprehension of the role that indenture played in our lives was incomplete without understanding my father’s journey from the Caribbean to the UK as part of the Windrush generation.

What was indenture?

Indians were taken from India to work on colonial sugar, rubber, tea and cocoa plantations in the 19th and early 20th century. By the time indenture was abolished in 1917, the system had spread from Mauritius and the Caribbean to Fiji, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and beyond.

Considering the enormity of the system of indenture, which transported over two million men, women and children from India to parts of the British empire across the globe, it is surprising that it is so rarely acknowledged in public institutions in the UK. Indeed, the silence that surrounds it perhaps indicates how troubling its presence is in British imperial history as it disrupts the idea of the British empire as an institution that did not profit from exploitative systems of unfree labour after the abolition of slavery.

When indenture was abolished it left an overseas Indian community scattered across the world.

This article is part of our Windrush 75 series, which marks the 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush arriving in Britain. The stories in this series explore the history and impact of the hundreds of passengers who disembarked to help rebuild after the second world war.

A few facts unite the stories of those Indian communities: most never returned to India, despite their right to a free passage on completion of their indenture and a period of residence in the colony; and they spoke rarely or selectively about the past and what had led them to agree to travel so far.

Undoubtedly, many Indian indentured immigrants were duped into making the journey. It was common, for example, for recruiters to lie about the type of work and the amount of pay involved. But we also know that others made decisions to indenture based on an understanding that it could offer an escape from familial or societal pressures, famine and poverty.

In Guyana and Trinidad, the system itself sought to encourage Indian workers to remain in the country by offering a bounty or a plot of land to those that re-indentured. When considering the power of the plantation economy in individual countries and its ability to encircle workers, it is perhaps unsurprising that people made the decision to stay in their new homes, particularly in cases where they had left challenging family circumstances.

The population of the Caribbean was transformed by the system of indenture and not only from Indian labourers. Chinese indentured labourers arrived in Guyana and Trinidad in 1853 and to Jamaica in 1854. By the time the indenture system had been abolished in 1917, close to 18,000 Chinese and almost 450,000 Indians had been brought to the British Caribbean.

‘Collective amnesia’

I remember a scene in a BBC documentary about indenture, from 2002, called Coolies: How Britain Reinvented Slavery. In that scene my colleague, David Dabydeen, is standing among paper fragments and neglected records in an old post office in Guyana.

Whispering, so that no one will hear him and be offended, he speaks to the camera in his beautiful Berbice-to-Tooting-to-Cambridge drawl: “I believe that people don’t want to remember the past,” he says.

It’s a past of shame it’s not something they want to preserve in the way that in England you would preserve castles or Arthurian legend.

In this he is supported by the Guyanese historian, Clem Seecharan, who frequently refers to a type of “collective amnesia” affecting the first generation of Indian indentured immigrants to the Caribbean, who internalised both the shame of being part of a system that subjugated them and, in many cases, also carried the burden of a complicated past in India.

When I was growing up the term Windrush generation had not yet been coined and work in universities on the idea of “Indian-Caribbean” as an identity and a diaspora, had not yet begun. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why there was no vocabulary to express who we were.

David, the ‘true child of Windrush’

My oldest brother David was born in 1965 and was a true child of Windrush and when I say that I mean it in the sense that he experienced the worst of the prejudice of this period. Born when my parents were living in a rented room that they had struggled to find, he accompanied them on their journey to flat rental and eventual home ownership.

There is a photo of David standing outside our family home around 1974, he is just about smiling I think, and squinting because the sun is in his eyes. To me, he appears to be looking out at an unknown future that perhaps, because of this new house, seems a little brighter than before.

The author’s older brother David in 1974. 

Author provided (no reuse)

When David died in his early forties in 2008, having lived much of his adult life as a rough sleeper, my father was haunted by the decisions that he had made when we were children, believing that if he had just acted at a particular moment, David’s life could have been completely different.

He focused particularly on an occasion when David was racially attacked at school and another boy had hit him with a cricket bat. The incident had been serious enough to cause his head to bleed badly and my dad lamented that he had not immediately removed him from this school, which was famous in our area for being somewhere you survived rather than attended. Each of us have stories about David like this.

For my mum it was the night that David was stopped by the police and subjected to a humiliating strip search in a police van, despite explaining to the police that his house was 100 metres away and that if they knocked on the door, my mother would happily explain that the bike he was wheeling was not stolen: it was his.

I was a little girl at this time, perhaps only nine or ten years old, but I remember that even my mum, who famously “didn’t get” why we had a problem with racism, was angry. Like a million white women before her she had crossed the colour bar with certain misconceptions intact – the justice and the fairness of the British police was one of them.

Nobody asked us initially to identify his body because in typical David fashion he had always slept with his birth certificate on his person, in a plastic wallet, safe from the elements. My youngest brother, Eddie, who was born in 1973, refused to believe that the body in the hospital mortuary was David’s. As my father and I stood at the edges of the room, Eddie broke free and ran to his brother, touching his face as he repeated his name in disbelief.

Eddie, ‘the centre of my life growing up’

Two years ago, I cradled the scatter tube that held Eddie’s ashes in my arms as my husband drove me to the crematorium where we had left David 13 years before. Found dead in his flat in the middle of the pandemic, he had survived longer than anyone who loved him thought that he might.

In my eyes, his life since adolescence had been a long flirtation with death and each of us had made dashes across London to various hospitals where he had been taken after overdoses or as a result of being sectioned. In my mind, when I enter our childhood house and wander around the rooms looking for pieces of our story, I inevitably find Eddie, who was the centre of my life growing up.

The author in a school photo with older brother, Eddie, in the early 1980s. 

Author provided (no reuse)

Two years older than me, Eddie was the person in my childhood who I admired most. He was a strong, athletic boy who could draw, programme computers, skateboard like a demon and write incredible stories. I looked up to him enormously and refused to consider any of the accumulating evidence that he was lying to me regularly, right up until the point that a local drug dealer arrived on our doorstep demanding to see him.

Perhaps there is no intimacy like that of a sibling relationship. There are parts of ourselves that are known exclusively to the people who watched us when we were in formation. I am aware that in losing David and Eddie, I have also lost parts of myself; memories that are irretrievable without them.

It is of course impossible to know if my brothers’ lives would have been different if they had a better sense of our father’s history and heritage. But the void we felt as children and the way in which this absence of familial history affected them, motivated my studies.

Who was my father?

As I progressed through my PhD my father, and his siblings who had moved to Canada after his migration to the UK, shared what they knew about their parents and grandparents with me. My father, who was born in 1938, in particular remembered his maternal grandfather, who unlike his paternal grandfather had come from the south of India and with whom he spent every summer growing up. Among the stories about this grandfather that he and his older brother shared with me were those of the Kali Mai Puja, an important religious celebration for South Indians in Guyana.

A minority within a minority: the passport of Surujpaul Kaladeen from 1961. 

Author provided (no reuse)

I understood that much of my father’s reluctance to speak about the past was connected not only to his parents’ and grandparents’ omissions, but also the ideas he had garnered throughout his childhood that his history did not have the same value as that of his colonisers.

The superiority of everything British was an idea that had been absorbed throughout his boyhood in Guyana which remained a colony until 1966. Every aspect of his education was connected to Britain, and he spoke to me often, after he had retired, about a textbook that he remembered with great affection called the Royal Reader. It was in this book that he had encountered one of his favourite poems by Tennyson called The Brook.

In an echo of the silence of our childhood, I discovered, after my mother’s death in 2019, that he had managed to hide an early diagnosis of dementia from both her and us for over four years. In the remaining time we had left, as his illness worsened, he would share a story with me about his daily journey to Peter’s Hall primary school, the school that served the children of the sugar estate of the same name. In this tale he would recall his first teacher and the walk home from school where he would pass his uncles who were working as canecutters on the sugar estate.

He spoke often of his South Indian grandfather, Swantimala, and I remembered a story that his older brother had told me many years before, about how my father had nearly died as a toddler, but that Swantimala had come to the house and asked his daughter, my grandmother, for permission to take care of him during his illness. He returned with him only once he had recovered.

To me this story represented everything that we had lacked growing up in London: the wonder of an extended family and the security of being born into a community of others like you.

I imagined this handsome, dark-skinned, grey-haired man striding off down the road with my dad in his arms and his daughter, looking on, safe in the knowledge that he could make everything right.

The author’s South Indian great-grandfather, Swantimala. 

Author provided (no reuse)

I hoped that if my father, who died earlier this year, lost other memories, some trace of this sensation he would have had as a toddler could remain. That he was the beloved grandson of a man who loved his daughter, and a daughter who in turn trusted her father. A child who was in that moment safe in the land of his birth – peaceful and unaware of all that he would one day leave behind.

Any sound is better than silence

I was in the middle of my doctorate when David died in 2008. For over a year I was unable to write or do any research. In the face of his death the recovery of our history seemed a pointless practice that would change nothing for him. I revisited these emotions in 2021 when Eddie died in the build-up to the launch of The Other Windrush.

In the same documentary that features David Dabydeen’s search for his great-grandfather’s indenture records in Guyana, the late Indian-Fijian historian Brij Lal speaks of the dedication of his entire adult life, to the study of indenture. He says he is “haunted” by the “ghosts of the past”. He adds: “It’s very emotional because I am not talking about a group of people in the abstract, I’m talking about people from whom I’m descended.”

I am unable to give these memories of Swantimala and the comforting roots they provide to my brothers. It is of course too late for that.

But in those moments where it has felt nothing can counter the pain of their loss, that this work does not matter, I am reminded that the research itself is an act of resistance and that in advocating for the history of the “ghosts of the past”, any sound I can make is better than silence.

Published: June 6, 2023 12.33pm EDT
Author  

María del Pilar Kaladeen
Associate Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

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Beatrix Potter’s famous tales are rooted in stories told by enslaved Africans – but she was very quiet about their origins


‘I’m always delivering food while hungry’: how undocumented migrants find work as substitute couriers in the UK

AND THEY ARE ARMED

'Disturbing': 12 Million US Adults Think Violence Is Justified to Put Trump Back in White House

"We're heading into an extremely tumultuous election season," said one expert. "What's happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream."


Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. 

on January 6, 2021.
(Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL
Jun 09, 2023

COMMON DREAMS

More than two years after the deadly January 6 insurrection, 12 million people in the United States, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe the use of violence is justified to restore former President Donald Trump to power, The Guardianreported Friday.

This percentage has declined from nearly 10% in 2021, when the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST) first began conducting its Dangers to Democracy surveys of U.S. adults. But April data the University of Chicago research center shared exclusively with The Guardian reveals that a treacherous amount of support for political violence and conspiracy theories persists nationwide.

In the two and a half years since Trump's bid to overturn his 2020 loss fell short, Republican state lawmakers have launched a full-fledged assault on the franchise, enacting dozens of voter suppression and election subversion laws meant to increase their control over electoral outcomes. Due to obstruction from Republicans and corporate Democrats, Congress has failed to pass federal voting rights protections and other safeguards designed to prevent another coup attempt ahead of November 2024.

"We're heading into an extremely tumultuous election season," Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor and CPOST director, told The Guardian. "What's happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream."

Several right-wing candidates who echoed Trump's relentless lies about President Joe Biden's 2020 victory lost in last year's midterms. But more than 210 others—including at least two who participated in the January 6 rally that escalated into an attack on the U.S. Capitol—won congressional seats and races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, underscoring the extent to which election denialism is now entrenched in the GOP and jeopardizes U.S. democracy for the foreseeable future.

The CPOST survey conducted in April found that 20% of U.S. adults still believe "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president," down only slightly from the 26% who said so in 2021.

"What you're seeing is really disturbing levels of distrust in American democracy, support for dangerous conspiracy theories, and support for political violence itself," Pape told The Guardian.

According to the newspaper, Pape compared "sentiments about political violence" to "the kindling for a wildfire." While "many were unaware that the events on January 6 would turn violent, research shows that public support for violence was widespread, so the attacks themselves should not have come as a surprise."

"Once you have support for violence in the mainstream, those are the raw ingredients or the raw combustible material and then speeches, typically by politicians, can set them off," said Pape. "Or if they get going, speeches can encourage them to go further."

Pape pointed out that there was chatter among far-right groups and on online forums about potentially using force to prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden's win, but Trump's January 6 address at the White House Ellipse was the spark that ignited the mob to storm the halls of Congress.

CPOST's latest findings are based on polling completed before Trump was federally indicted Thursday night on seven criminal counts in the special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents. The charges, including willful retention of national defense secrets, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, could carry years in prison for the GOP's leading 2024 presidential candidate.

In response to the indictment, several Republican lawmakers rallied to Trump's defense, parroting his dismissal of the probe as a "witch hunt." Fox News personalities also denounced what they called the "weaponization" of the U.S. justice system, while commenters on Breibartopined that "this is how revolution begins."

The menacing language mirrored what was said after the FBI in early August 2022 searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and removed boxes of documents as part of the federal probe into his handling of classified materials.

At the time, many anonymous and some well-known reactionaries called for "civil war" on Twitter, patriots.win, and elsewhere. Soon after, Ricky Shiffer, a Trump loyalist with suspected ties to a far-right group and an unspecified connection to the January 6 insurrection, was shot and killed by police following an hourslong standoff. Shiffer, wielding an AR-15 and a nail gun, allegedly attempted to break into the FBI's Cincinnati office and fled to a nearby field when he was unsuccessful.

Afterward, Trump continued to lie about the Mar-a-Lago search on Truth Social, sparking an "unprecedented" surge in threats against FBI personnel and facilities. In March, just before he was hit with a 34-count felony indictment in the Manhattan district attorney's investigation into alleged hush money payments made during the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump called on his supporters to "protest" and "take our nation back," though right-wing violence did not materialize in that instance.

The Guardian on Friday observed that "it's important to track public sentiment about political violence regularly," noting that CPOST plans to release data from its Dangers to Democracy survey every three months from now until the 2024 election. "The instigating event, usually a speech or comment by a person in power, is unpredictable and can set people off at any moment, but the underlying support for violence is more predictable and trackable."

The research center's most recent survey found that "almost 14%—a minority of Americans, but still a significant number—believe the use of force is justified to 'achieve political goals that I support,'" the newspaper reported. "More specifically, 12.4% believe it's justified to restore the federal right to abortion, 8.4% believe it's justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing, 6.3% think it's justified to preserve the rights of white Americans, and 6.1% believe it's justified to prevent the prosecution of Trump."

Citing Duke University political science professor Peter Feaver, The Guardian noted that "while public support for political violence might seem extreme, a confluence of factors is necessary for actual violence to occur—which is still rare. On January 6, there was a time-sensitive action, an already existing rally, and inciters including Trump who encouraged others to commit violence."

According to Feaver, "You needed all of that at the same time to turn what would have been latent sentiment of the sort that this survey captures into actual violence."

On top of broad support for Trump's "Big Lie," the survey found that one in ten U.S. adults think "a secret group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is ruling the U.S. government," meaning QAnon had roughly the same percentage of adherents in April as it did in 2021. The survey also found that a quarter of U.S. adults agree that "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World," revealing an alarming amount of ongoing support for the white nationalist "great replacement" theory.

More optimistically, the survey found that over 77% of U.S. adults want Republicans and Democrats in Congress to issue a joint statement condemning any political violence.

"There's a tremendous amount of opposition to political violence in the United States," Pape remarked, "but it is not mobilized."

Sanders-Led Panel Exposes Big Pharma for 'Ripping Off' Americans With Publicly Funded Meds

"It is unacceptable that half of new prescription drugs invented with the help of NIH scientists now cost more than $111,000," said the HELP Committee chair, urging action by the Biden administration to cut prices.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a news conference to announce the reintroduction of the Medicare for All Act outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C. on May 17, 2023.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT

COMMONG DREAMS
Jun 12, 2023

"What makes the greed of the pharmaceutical industry so reprehensible is the fact that the American people are paying twice for some of the most expensive prescription drugs on the market: First through their taxes and a second time at the pharmacy counter."

That's according to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee and on Monday released a report revealing how Big Pharma is "ripping off" Americans with medical treatments that publicly funded experts helped create.

Sanders' staff tracked the prices—generally set by private corporations—of medical treatments developed with the help of scientists from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) over the past two decades.

"It is unacceptable that half of new prescription drugs invented with the help of NIH scientists now cost more than $111,000," said Sanders, a longtime advocate of policies to reduce healthcare costs, including a nationwide shift to Medicare for All—the focus of a bill that the senator introduced last month with Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.).



The new report states that "U.S. taxpayers virtually always pay more than people in other countries for treatments that NIH scientists helped invent."

For example, a trio of Johnson and Johson's HIV treatments—Prezcobix, Prezista, and Symtuza—cost from $25,000 to $56,000 annually in the U.S., while patients in various other countries can get them for $4,000 to $10,000 per year.

"The price of some of these taxpayer-funded drugs is now over $1.9 million," Sanders highlighted, referring to Myalept, which is manufactured by Amryt Pharma to treat leptin deficiency and costs $580,000 a year in France.

Tecartus and Yescarta, manufactured by Gilead Sciences to treat cancer, both cost $424,000 in the United States, while the price for Tecartus in Germany is $306,000 and Yescarta is $212,000 in Japan.

Yescarta is one of two case studies included in the report. The other is Hemgenix, used to treat hemophilia B. As the document details:
The world's most expensive medicine—with a $3.5 million price tag—is the culmination of major scientific breakthroughs led by researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and NIH. However, NIH appears to have handed over taxpayer technology while obtaining vanishingly little in return. Licensing agreements reveal that NIH negotiated royalties of around 1% on sales, without any pricing constraints. Meanwhile, the company behind Hemgenix, uniQure, quietly disclosed that the price was "significant" and "most patients and their families will not be capable of paying for our products themselves."

"Congress provided nearly $54 billion for biomedical research across the U.S. government this year" and NIH alone has a $47.5 billion budget, "making it the largest biomedical research funder in the world," the report notes, stressing that "the federal government sets the stage for new medicines with its substantial investments."

"At the earliest stage, the federal government plays a role in pushing forward research for virtually all new medicines," the publication explains. The U.S. government also "directly funds the invention of some medicines," and sometimes helps with testing.

There are even cases in which the government financially backs getting medicines through the Food and Drug Administration approval process and scaling up manufacturing, the report adds, pointing out that "many Covid-19 products developed as part of Operation Warp Speed benefited from this kind of support."



The report draws from U.S. history to offer a solution, highlighting that "after a pharmaceutical company launched an AIDS drug developed with the help of NIH scientists at $10,000 per year, NIH responded in 1989 by inserting a 'reasonable pricing clause' into contracts when taxpayers supported new drugs. The clause was withdrawn six years later after industry pressure."

"The average price of new treatments that NIH scientists helped invent over the past 20 years is now more than 10 times the price that led NIH to first introduce a reasonable pricing clause in 1989," the document continues. "The federal government should reinstate and strengthen a 'reasonable pricing clause' in all future collaboration, funding, and licensing agreements for medical research."

Sanders argued Monday that "now is the time for the Biden administration to take executive action to substantially lower the price of prescription drugs and to take on the unacceptable corporate greed of the pharmaceutical industry."

Why Billionaires Hate Social Security

The real goal of billionaire-funded Social Security rhetoric is to prevent the public from drawing a connection between Social Security’s finances, the working-class retirement crisis, and the ludicrous amounts of wealth held by America’s billionaires.

Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder and CEO of Blackstone, speaks at a summit on November 5, 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal.
(Photo: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images)

RICHARD ESKOW
Jun 08, 2023

Common Dreams

Consider the billionaire.

I’m not talking about people who were born into wealth; they have their own issues. Let us specifically consider the so-called “self-made” wealthy person, the driven CEO or investor. He (and it is almost always a “he” in our society) is likely to share some characteristics with other billionaires and members of his cohort. Social science and simple observation tell us that these powerful figures are more likely than other people to be:

●greedy

●addicted to making money (which is psychologically distinct from greed)

●obsessed with making money, which leads to bad behavior

●surprisingly worried about the money they have

●less empathetic and more self-interested than other people

●breakers of certain laws and social norms

●less charitable on a percentage basis

●very politically influential

●and, determined to cut Social Security.

About that last item: While there may be exceptions here and there, the billionaire class overall is overwhelmingly opposed to Social Security. Most wealthy people would, in fact, like to see its benefits slashed. A 2013 study compared the political opinions of the wealthy with those of voters as a whole and found “major disagreement” between the two groups regarding Social Security. Among all voters, there was a 46 percent gap in favor of expanding its benefits rather than cutting them. The wealthy had the opposite take; they favored cuts, rather than expansion, by a gap of 33 percent.

The tax question surely accounts for some of the billionaires’ antipathy toward Social Security but, even so, their feelings seem to run unusually high on the subject.

Strikingly, the richer someone was, the likelier they were to want Social Security cuts. Each additional $10 million in personal wealth added measurably to the desire for Social Security cuts. The authors note that “this finding may help explain why cutting these popular programs has remained on the political agenda.”

Ya thinks?

Billionaires pay for think tanks and news outlets which fill the airways with lurid talk about the program’s costs. Billionaires and corporate CEOS have more political influence than any other part of society. That’s why, despite the outcome of the recent ‘debt ceiling’ crisis, they still represent an existential threat to Social Security.
Distraction

The real goal of billionaire-funded Social Security rhetoric is to prevent the public from drawing a connection between Social Security’s finances, the working-class retirement crisis, and the ludicrous amounts of wealth held by America’s billionaires.

We are supposed to be horrified, for example, by the gap between Social Security’s income ($1.244 trillion for this year) and its cash outlays ($1.237 trillion). We are not supposed to notice that Michael Bloomberg’s wealth gain since September of last year ($17.7 billion*) would cover almost the entire 2023 shortfall of $22 billion all by itself, or that the entire amount could be recouped by throwing in Bill Gates’ gains during the same period.

That’s right: the nine-month income of two billionaires alone would erase Social Security’s entire actuarial imbalance for a full year. (And 2022 was a bad year for billionaires; “bad,” of course, being a very relative term.)

A trillion-plus dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But the personal wealth of just ten Americans would cover Social Security’s entire budget for an entire year. Not that it would, at least under current law. The law dictates that Social Security’s costs be covered by a payroll tax levied for that purpose alone. But a wealth tax, or something like it, could be a popular option if the program faces a real funding crisis.

There are already sound proposals to “scrap the cap” on income that is taxed for Social Security, and to include investment and other sources of income in that tax. Billionaires would face a tax hike under these proposals, although their total taxes would still be well below mid-20th century norms.

The tax question surely accounts for some of the billionaires’ antipathy toward Social Security but, even so, their feelings seem to run unusually high on the subject.

What They Say

The billionaires’ vituperation toward Social Security can be seen in Elon Musk’s ill-informed tweet about it (which The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz ably dissected). It can be found in CEO conclaves like “Fix the Debt,” where the heads of corporations like JetBlue, Bridgestone, and Microsoft, as well as government largesse recipients like Honeywell, GE, Boeing, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs assembled to attack programs “entitlements.”

It oozes through op-eds like this one from predatory billionaire Steve Schwarzman, who magnanimously promised to “share the pain” of financial sacrifice with elderly Social Security recipients living on a few hundred dollars a month. (5.5 million seniors reportedly faced food insecurity in 2021; Schwarzman “took home a record $1.27 billion for 2022”.)

The goal is to frame Social Security cuts in false, technocratic terms as the inevitable outcome of simple arithmetic. They want it to look as if the decision to cut benefits made itself. That way, they leave no fingerprints on the corpse of retirement security.

It’s reflected in Mitt Romney’s bitter words at a 2012 fundraiser, when he told a roomful of fellow rich people that “they”—it’s always “they,” not “us”—"they believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, that they are entitled: to health care, to food, to housing, you name it.”

Added Romney, “That's an entitlement."

Most of all, it can be seen in works of the late billionaire Peter G. Peterson, a conservative hedge funder and former Nixon cabinet member who lavished money on politicians from both parties in pursuit of his curious obsession: to reduce government spending, with a special focus on cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The foundation, astroturf groups, and think tanks Peterson created have worked for decades to elevate the national debt above all other policymaking concerns, regardless of the effect on working Americans, with a special focus on cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The goal is to frame Social Security cuts in false, technocratic terms as the inevitable outcome of simple arithmetic. They want it to look as if the decision to cut benefits made itself. That way, they leave no fingerprints on the corpse of retirement security.

Why They Hate

But why? Why do the ultra-wealthy hate Social Security so much? It’s not just self-interest, although there is certainly that. The answer lies in the anthropology, as well as the accountancy, of the billionaire class. Social Security represents everything the typical billionaire loathes, including community, solidarity, and the empowerment of the working class.

Social Security isn’t charity, and that galls them. Social Security is run for working people – people who know they have earned those benefits.

Billionaire CEOs belong to a group whose membership is earned through obsession, greed, competitiveness, and lack of empathy. It is a population self-selected for sociopathy and work-life imbalance. It’s hard to make a billion dollars without cheating people, and it’s hard to cheat people when you see them – really see them, through the eyes of understanding and emotion. That’s why someone like Schwarzman can equate his own “sacrifice” (of what, a fifth or sixth yacht?) with the suffering of an ailing grandmother trying to get by on $75 per week.

It's impossible to bargain with them by telling them they already have enough money to live like an emperor. At that level, money works the way social media likes work for some other people: it doesn’t affect their lives in any material way, but it boosts their sense of worth and validation. That’s why they’ll never quit. That’s why they’ll never say, “I have enough.” There is always someone else who is gaining on them every time they stop to eat, sleep, make love, express an emotion ...

Sure, they’ll write a check to charity from time to time. That’s good for the ego. It brings applause, praise, black-tie dinners, and fawning requests for more money. But Social Security isn’t charity, and that galls them. Social Security is run for working people – people who know they have earned those benefits. Pay a tax, with no effusive speeches or stroking of the ego for America’s 0.001 percent? The idea offends their sense of self-importance.

This is why they love to hear politicians like Alan Simpson insult Social Security recipients by calling them “greedy geezers.” They think they’ve won life’s race. People who have lived other kinds of lives – filled, perhaps, with love and kindness rather than competition and exploitation – are losers to them. In their minds, people like that are nothing. For them to ask anything of the wealthy is, well, impudence.

Controlling the Discourse

Unfortunately, the billionaire class increasingly controls US news outlets. Their obsession has warped the national discourse for decades. It has wormed its way into the media ecosystem, as billionaire-funded think tanks, lobbying groups, and politicians flood the airwaves and newspapers with false talking points about the “unaffordability” of such programs. “Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process,” ABC’s Martha Raddatz once told the national audience for a vice presidential debate. (Neither half of that statement is true.)

Their obsession is reflected in a news industry that has been increasingly centralized under billionaire control. Media elites sometimes sounded like jilted lovers when they reported that neither party pushed for Social Security or Medicare cuts in the debt ceiling deal.

The Washington Post, which often channels billionaire views on Social Security, ran a must-read article under the headline, “How a billionaires boys’ club came to dominate the public square.” As Michael Scherer and Sarah Ellison note,

“Technological change and the fortunes it created have given a vanishingly small club of massively wealthy individuals the ability to play arbiter, moderator and bankroller of not only the information that feeds the nation’s discourse but also the architecture that undergirds it.”

The billionaires’ obsession is also reflected at non-profit outlets like NPR—which, despite the word “public” in its name, relies heavily on corporate and billionaire donors for survival.

Dialing for Dollars

What the billionaires say, usually goes. “... (E)conomic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” a 2014 study found, “while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Things have only gotten worse since then. Billionaires poured nearly $1 billion ($881,000,000) into the last round of congressional elections. How does this affect policy? Politicians who carry out the wishes of billionaires, corporate CEOs, and lobbyists raise more money, of course. But there is also a process of acculturation, where elected officials become so steeped in the world of elite consensus that they come to believe in it themselves.

Consider, for example, the infamous slide deck which advised incoming Congressional Democrats to spend four hours a day on “call time” and one hour per day on “strategic outreach,” both of which involve raising money for their next campaign. Imagine spending four to five hours a day calling people who despise Social Security, and it soon becomes clear that only a miracle has protected Social Security so far—and miracles don’t last forever.

It would be a mistake to assume that the recent “debt ceiling deal” means that Social Security is safe.

Unless you’re a candidate with mass support like Bernie Sanders, campaign fundraising requires constant immersion in the anti-Social Security mindset of the ultra-wealthy—which, when combined with the GOP’s longstanding hostility to the program, means that the people who make our laws are steeped in a worldview that considers “entitlement programs” expensive and superfluous.

That’s why it would be a mistake to assume that the recent “debt ceiling deal” means that Social Security is safe. Neither party wanted to take the unpopular step of calling for benefit cuts in this round of negotiations. But the billionaires and corporations who drive our political system won’t stop trying. That’s how they got where they are; by persisting until they win.

Previous attempts to cut Social Security have come in the form of ‘bipartisan commissions’ whose role was to obscure the process and shield both parties from blame. (Mitt Romney’s TRUST Act would follow the same playbook, as would other billionaire-backed proposals.) The White House has correctly called these commissions “death panels,” which may be one reason why billionaires primarily contributed to Republican candidates in the last election cycle. But public opinion must be mobilized to prevent any further softening of President Biden’s position on Social Security, before the billionaires let their money do the talking in the 2024 race.

Because, when it comes to money in politics, Bob Dylan’s words hold true: money doesn’t talk, it swears.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


RICHARD ESKOW
Richard (RJ) Eskow is a freelance writer. Much of his work can be found on eskow.substack.com. His weekly program, The Zero Hour, can be found on cable television, radio, Spotify, and podcast media. He is a senior advisor with Social Security Works.
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'Landmark Victory': New York Passes Nation's First Legislation Restricting Bee-Killing Pesticides

The Birds and Bees Protection Act would eliminate 80 to 90% of the neonics used in New York each year by banning applications that are either easily replaceable or do not give an economic boost to farmers.

A bee on a daisy flower.
(Photo: Michael Anfang on Unsplash)

OLIVIA ROSANE

COMMON DREAMS
Jun 10, 2023

New York state on Friday became the first state in the nation to pass legislation restricting neonicotinoid pesticides (neonics) that are toxic to bees and other pollinators and wildlife.

The Birds and Bees Protection Act would eliminate 80 to 90% of the neonics used in New York each year by banning applications that are either easily replaceable or do not give an economic boost to farmers.

"Every year for the past decade, New York beekeepers have lost more than 40% of their bee colonies—largely due to neonic pesticides," bill sponsor State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal said in a statement. "Today, in this landmark victory for our pollinators, economy, and farming industry, New York is working to reverse that trend."



The bill passed the New York State Senate on Wednesday and the New York State Assembly on Friday and now goes to Gov. Kathy Hochul for signature. It bans the use of neonics to coat corn, soybean, and wheat seeds as well as for lawns and gardens.

"Pollinators are vital members of healthy ecosystems and our food supply chain," New York Assemblymember Deborah J. Glick said in a statement. "Protecting them by limiting toxins that pose adverse effects and health risks is an important step forward in our work to stop poisoning the environment and create a healthier New York."



Neonics are a class of pesticides that work by attacking the nervous systems of insect pests, as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explains. A lethal dose will cause paralysis and death, while non-lethal effects include memory, immune, navigation, and fertility problems.

They are one of the deadliest pesticides out there, yet they are also the leading insecticide used in the U.S. This is a problem because about 95% of neonics used to coat seeds don't enter the plant at all, but instead spread into the environment via the soil, where they do not break down easily.

The concern is that neonics don't just harm target species but also beneficial insects like bees and butterflies.

"It's critical that we passed this bill to protect the health of humans and other living beings on our planet."

"They also harm the development of birds and mammals; and studies have linked ingredients of neoicotinoid insecticides with adverse human health outcomes as well," New York state Sen. Pete Harckham, another bill supporter, said in a statement. "It's critical that we passed this bill to protect the health of humans and other living beings on our planet."

The legislation was based in part on a Cornell University study that found that most neonic use in New York did not actually provide an economic benefit or could easily be swapped out for a safer alternative. It also comes about a month after an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessment found that three common neonic chemicals threaten 11% of the species on the U.S. endangered species list.

"The Birds and the Bees Protection Act is the first-in-the-nation to limit neonic coated seeds, which contaminate our soil, our waterways, and our bodies," Dan Raichel, the acting director of NRDC's Pollinator Initiative, said in a statement. "We've long known neonics kill bees, but we now see links between neonics and mass losses of birds, the collapse of fisheries, developmental risks in people, and vast water contamination in New York."

The U.S. has long lagged behind similar countries in regulating neonics. The EU has banned their outdoor use, and Canada has largely stopped using them to coat seeds.

The new legislation was passed a little more than a week after the Center for Food Safety and the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) sued the EPA over its failure to regulate the toxic chemicals.

"For too long, EPA has allowed pesticide-coated seeds to jeopardize threatened and endangered species across the country."

"For too long, EPA has allowed pesticide-coated seeds to jeopardize threatened and endangered species across the country," PANNA senior scientist and plaintiff Margaret Reeves said in a statement at the time. "EPA must close the regulatory loophole for toxic pesticide-coated seeds to prevent further harm to wildlife, ecosystems, and people."

While environmental groups continue to push for national regulations, they celebrated change in New York.

"Today is a great day for pollinators, clean water, and healthier communities," Caitlin Ferrante, the conservation program manager of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, said in a statement.

Climate Campaigners Urge Standard Bank to Ditch 'Alarming' East African Crude Oil Pipeline

Banks should "abandon the project and instead inject financing into safe, sustainable, community-centered renewable energy solutions to foster a just transition away from fossil fuels in Africa," said one advocate.

People gather outside Standard Bank's offices in Johannesburg, South Africa on June 12, 2023.
(Photo: StopEACOP/Twitter)

KENNY STANCIL
Jun 12, 2023

Hundreds of climate justice activists on Monday descended upon Standard Bank's offices in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they implored the financial institution to stop backing the proposed East African Crude Oil Pipeline and other harmful fossil fuel projects.

The protest, held during Standard Bank's annual general meeting, sought to draw shareholders' attention to the deleterious effects of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and persuade them to call on the bank to publicly withdraw its support for the development of such polluting infrastructure.

It was organized by the #StopEACOP coalition, which wants the bank not only to divest from EACOP and multiple liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in Mozambique but also to redirect that money toward renewables to increase regional access to clean energy.

"With a powerful collective of South African activists and community organizations raising their voices to demand Standard Bank's withdrawal of support for EACOP, it is long overdue for the bank to pause and genuinely listen," the coalition's coordinator, Zaki Mamdoo, said in a statement. "They cannot assume they can sponsor the destruction of other African nations without intervention from South Africans. Today, their misconception has been shattered—our actions against Standard Bank will only intensify until they fully abandon EACOP and all similar projects."



EACOP's aim is to transport heated crude oil nearly 900 miles through Uganda and Tanzania, where it would be shipped from Port Tanga through the Suez Canal to refineries in the Dutch city of Rotterdam and subsequently burned. As Common Dreams has reported, experts estimate that if completed, the project would generate 379 million tonnes of planet-heating emissions over 25 years, threaten biodiversity hotspots, and endanger the Lake Victoria basin on which more than 40 million people depend.

To get started, the project's developers—France-based TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, working alongside Ugandan and Tanzanian state-owned oil firms—are seeking a $3 billion loan from some of the largest commercial banks in the world.

Standard Bank, through its subsidiary Stanbic Uganda, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China are acting as the project's financial advisers. According to 350Africa.org, "These banks are expected to serve as lead arrangers, meaning that they will need to approach other banks to co-finance the deal and are actively raising funds to see EACOP constructed."

Inside the shareholder meeting, Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala indicated, in response to questions from Khaliel Moses of 350Africa.org, that the bank "will be providing finance directly" to EACOP. However, when asked for clarification, the bank's chair, Nonkululeko Nyembezi, responded that no decision had yet been made on financing the project. "What you are hearing perhaps is directionally how personally I am leaning," she said, confirming that the bank is still seriously considering lending to EACOP despite sustained opposition to it.

The #StopEACOP coalition said Monday that "the detrimental impacts of EACOP are already evident, even before the physical construction of the pipeline" has begun. Communities in Uganda and Tanzania "have experienced the irregular loss of land, undermining livelihoods and exacerbating land degradation," the coalition noted. "The mere presence of EACOP has caused disruption, fear, and uncertainty among local populations who rely on the land for their sustenance and cultural heritage."

"This pre-construction phase highlights the urgent need for Standard Bank to withdraw its support, as the project's continuation would only amplify these negative consequences, further jeopardizing the well-being of communities and the fragile ecosystem," #StopEACOP continued. "The bank needs to recognize the alarming implications of EACOP and take a responsible stance to protect both people and the environment."

At the shareholder meeting, meanwhile, Earthlife Africa director Makoma Lekalakala presented Standard Bank executives with a certificate of human rights violations on behalf of the communities already affected by EACOP.

"Standard Bank still doesn't get that financing EACOP poses huge risks, not just to the communities it is supposed to serve, but also to the bank itself," said Ryan Brightwell, director of communications and research at BankTrack. "This is why their co-advisers SMBC [Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation] have stepped away, and 25 other major banks have declared they won't touch the project. The bank protests outside the bank's annual meeting are getting larger yearly—they would be well advised to listen."

In addition to advising EACOP, Standard Bank has also provided $485 million in financing to Mozambique LNG in Cabo Delgado, a project led by TotalEnergies, and it has also so far refused to rule out funding Rovuma LNG, another fracked gas project in Mozambique.

"As a financier of TotalEnergies' $24 billion Mozambique LNG, Standard Bank is complicit in its devastation and fueling a war that has left thousands dead and a million displaced," said Anabela Lemos, director of environmental justice at Friends of the Earth Mozambique. "Entire communities in Cabo Delgado have been displaced and lost everything, a UNESCO Biosphere will be destroyed, and emissions just from the construction phase will irreversibly damage the climate. With the project still on pause, Standard Bank has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to stop enabling violence and pushing the country even deeper into a debt spiral by canceling its financing."

Diana Nabiruma of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance in Uganda rejected as "erroneous" Standard Bank's argument that its continued fossil fuel financing is meant "to promote economic development and address energy poverty."

"Available evidence indicates that frontline communities suffer economic setbacks due to losing their land and other economic assets, which aren't compensated adequately and fairly," said Nabiruma. "Oil-producing countries such as Nigeria also have the most number of people without access to electricity and most of the oil from Uganda and gas from Mozambique is meant for export."

In the words of Lekalakala from Earthlife Africa, "Standard Bank has to wake up to the reality that gas and oil are not and cannot be transitional fuels towards a low-carbon development."

That sentiment was echoed by 350Africa.org regional campaigner Charity Migwi, who said that "the financial institutions supporting the fossil fuel industry are fueling the climate crisis."

A recent report showed that since 2016, the year the Paris agreement took effect, the world's 60 largest private banks have provided $5.5 trillion in financing to the fossil fuel industry, flouting their pledges to put themselves and their clients on a path to "net-zero" greenhouse gas emissions as the window to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis rapidly closes.

"These institutions must reconsider their responsibility to the communities within the areas in which they work, which are on the frontlines of the climate crisis, experiencing extreme, crippling weather events," Migwi continued. "Rather than expose communities to the harmful effects of projects such as EACOP, we call on Standard Bank and other banks involved in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline to abandon the project and instead inject financing into safe, sustainable, community-centered renewable energy solutions to foster a just transition away from fossil fuels in Africa."

The Climate Crisis Will Be the Mother of All Financial Crises

Our rapidly heating planet is the fundamental crisis for humanity and will have repercussions on all human systems.

This aerial photograph taken in Pakistan's Balochistan province on August 31, 2022 shows people wading in floodwaters next to a house that collapsed due to monsoon rains turbocharged by the climate crisis.
(Photo: Fida Hussain/AFP via Getty Images)

JOÃO CAMARGO
Jun 12, 2023

Common Dreams

The criminal profits of large multinational corporations in 2022 might seem to indicate a reversal of the historical trend for global profit decline of recent decades, but they are only a hiccup and a massive assault enabled by the privileges of the monopolists of global capital. The fall in profitability continues and the climate crisis is already and will continue to be the main factor in the current and future financial crises.

The inflationary spiral we are still living in was triggered by the oil companies' choice to use their monopoly over the energy system to offset their falling profits during Covid lockdowns. This comes after decades of hooking the economy on fossil fuels in an absolute alliance with the political mainstream, with the complacency and sometimes even agreement of green and left-wing parties. All agreements have been torn up by now, only barbarism remains. However, on top of this assault produced by the imposition of unparalleled high prices, other imbalances beyond the control of the capitalist elite have begun to manifest themselves.

The economic and financial models are not designed for the climate crisis.

In 2022, Pakistan was submerged by the biggest floods in its history, with a third of the country under water, with over 30 million people displaced to other places and other countries. Pakistan is one of the world's largest producers of cotton and textiles. The prices of textiles, of almost all kinds of clothing, have soared. Parts of Pakistan are still underwater. Several of the people who have been displaced will not return to where they were. The likelihood of mega-monsoons happening again in the coming years is high. The heat wave currently ravaging the Asian continent has—in the middle of moderate temperature months such as March or April— caused record highs in China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and others. This heat wave coincides with territories with high humidity so that large-scale deaths are already occurring (directly due to the heat and indirectly to people with health problems, the very young or elderly).

The abundance of cotton and textile production on a global level has been squeezed, prices have increased and it will not necessarily be possible to return to previous levels without further disruption.

Maize, wheat, and rice crops were affected by drought in the United States, Europe, and China. In California, the smallest rice area since the 1950s was planted in 2022 and the harvest will be about half that of a "normal" year. In the United States the winter wheat harvest has fallen by 25%. The disruption of the flow of grain in the Black Sea because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine added on top of this drastic decrease in supply even more concentration, increased global prices of cereals, bread, pasta. Some of this production could recover by 2023 if we do not experience a scorching summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but so far the historic drought on the Eurasian continent and in North America continues.

Agriculture in the mega-artificialized plastic prairie of southern Spain suffers drastic production declines and drives up the price of vegetables and legumes. The Alqueva Dam in Portugal and the absurd amount of criminal crops currently grown in the Alentejo region are now at the limits of viability. Although we have experienced the worst drought in Europe since the 16th century and the worst drought in the history of China in 2022, this was a year in which the climate phenomenon La Niña contributed to a global reduction in temperature. In 2023 this will not happen, and probably during the year El Niño will form in the Pacific Ocean, leading to a global increase in temperature.

We already live on another planet, not the one where all the exploitative relations, the institutions, and the banking and financial system that sustained the growth of capitalism were created.

To fight rising inflation, central banks and battalions of economists trained in the schools of suicidal capitalism chose to do what they learned: raise interest rates, to take money out of the economy, and make it squeeze. Everyone who had a loan saw the value of their loan increase, while the prices of all goods increased too. Many companies that had loans—everyone, therefore—also saw their operating costs increase, which will increase wage compression, eventually leading to layoffs and, in some cases, bankruptcy. Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt as a result of rising interest rates and because it was a bank that specialized in debt, with a large amount invested in long-term US government treasury bonds, considered probably the safest investment in the world economy.

What happened to Silicon Valley Bank and the others will happen again and again in the future. Contagion to other banks will be more and more frequent and, with higher prices, will happen by other means as well. Household debt is increasing to combat high prices. As even the rare wage increases that do occur are below inflation, the level of debt is rising just to maintain similar living standards as before. As the likelihood of the price of fossil fuels controlled by private multinationals dropping significantly is so slim and as climate disasters such as droughts, floods and forest fires are taking away the general capacity to produce goods and services on a global scale, the climate crisis will continue to express itself directly as a cost of living crisis. This means that growing debts will, in increasing amounts, go unpaid. This means more banks going bust. But maybe it's possible to cover all this with insurance, no?

No.

Global insurance premiums are on the rise because risk is moving from being risk to certainty. The banking industry's close relationship with the insurance sector ensures that every climate catastrophe is also a financial crisis. And considering that risk is becoming or approaching a certainty in many cases, more and more insurers are refusing to insure investments, industrial projects, construction in dangerous zones, crops in flood or drought risk zones, and even general insurance on buildings, transport and other areas. They refuse because their business is to make a profit and because the previous distribution of risk is no longer the case and is only confirmed. All are much more dangerous and the risk of major climate catastrophes is widespread. Even when insurers don't refuse to do the insurance, they increase premiums and therefore both people and businesses are paying more to have insurance. If you consider an area like flood-prone Pakistan or a state like California, one of the most important agricultural areas in the United States whose annual fires are now permanently devastating vast areas and even cities, which insurance companies will ever be able to insure all the damage caused?

None.

So who will pay for these disasters? Can you imagine? Well, the people of that country through the State, the ultimate guarantor. This will happen with countries or territories where the state is rich, like California. In cases like Pakistan, the answer is that nobody will pay for these disasters in their entirety. States, to pay for these fossil industry-produced disasters, will have to raise taxes or divert revenues from activities like Education or Health for recovery. In capitalism, we can take for granted that the funding of the repressive apparatus, the police and armies, will not be touched, in particular because social discontent has no way not to increase.

The rising cost of living is already a consequence of the climate crisis, high prices are and will continue to be imposed on people because overall supply is falling. All the weaknesses that already existed before—weak health systems, energy monopolies, unavailable, poorly built housing stock, touristification of cities, lack of quality public transport, and precarious mass employment—will be exacerbated. Health systems are on the verge of collapse, people can't pay rents, can't commute to work without exorbitant costs, and stop paying bills and debts. And banks threaten, evict, sue, but there is no money to save them. The result? A financial crisis. Not paying the people directly, the states pay, again the last guarantor of the financial system, reducing public services and social capacity, increasing public debts, and being pressured to sell public assets.

And they will always tell us that it is necessary to save the banks, because otherwise the whole economy collapses. They will guarantee the collapse of society to save the banks, once again. But this time it is not the same as previous financial crises.

The economic and financial models are not designed for the climate crisis. Just look at the Nobel prize winner in economics, Eric Nordhaus, and his models and the proposition that considering the cost-benefit, we could allow a global temperature increase of up to 4°C. Right now we have a global temperature increase of 1.1 to 1.3°C and there are already global scale resource and product shortages. One more degree and not only will there not be remotely the amount of products needed to sustain billions of people, there will be no international trade as anything even remotely stable. Economists and their models don't realize what is or what will happen, they have generally been taught not to realize it.

The preponderance of the financial world in our societies means that this is also where we will see the world burn, economically and politically.

Exactly how the financial crises of the climate crisis will unfold is as diverse and multiple as the capitalist economy: bankruptcies because of high prices or interest rates, real estate crises, monetary crises when a country goes under water, debt crises when national production and tax revenues fall or banks, companies or insurance companies have to be saved, stranded assets when a government decides to bet on a failed and absurd project—we cannot help but point here to the stupidity of the project of a new Airport in Lisbon, of the cascade of dams to make an "Alqueva of the Tagus," of the thousands of imbecile projects that abound in the national and international press every day.

With a global temperature increase of 1.1ºC to 1.2ºC we are already in a general financial crisis of general lack of income from capitalism, despite the neo-liberal parroting that we live in the best of all worlds. Quality of life is in decline across the world because of the climate crisis and the system we live in, which refuses to solve it. The profitable investments of the last seven decades no longer exist. That is why we see so much excitement and hype with artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other intangible assets. They are the search for yield that today has to be based primarily on divestment and on products whose verifiability is low. The time when investing in cement, cars, factories, roads, and construction had guarantees of profit (even if brokered and favoured by the state, based on the idea of guaranteed future growth and profitability) is over. What is left is chaos and alienation.

On the other hand, alienation is widespread among the population and so it becomes very difficult to translate that the financial crises in which capitalism has always lived now also have an umbilical link to the climate crisis. It is on the basis of this understanding that some of the anti-systemic alliances essential to an ecosocialist political breakthrough can and must be made.

The climate crisis will be the mother of all financial crises, because it is the fundamental crisis of the human species and will have repercussions on all human systems. The preponderance of the financial world in our societies means that this is also where we will see the world burn, economically and politically.

The choice to design political programs that abandon the need for the urgent closure of fossil industry or that base the solution to the crisis on wage increases that do not entail any fundamental redistribution of power are proposals almost as alienated as the proposals of the capitalist elite.

We must not only know the current crises but use them at all times to propose the political programs of rupture necessary to stop the climate crisis and capitalism. This bridge is expressed in proposals like the Last Winter of Gas, which promotes a multi-tactic articulation and an alliance between different political groups in the simultaneous fight against the social, economic, and climate crisis. The break with the capitalist system and the road to climate chaos will have to be an articulated, international, and incisive process. The successive financial crises cannot be allowed to pass by as key moments for action.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


JOÃO CAMARGO is a climate activist in grassroots movement Climaximo in Portugal and in the Climate Jobs campaign. He's an environmental engineer and climate change researcher at the University of Lisbon and the author of two books: Climate Change Combat Manual (in Portugal and Spain) and Portugal in Flames - How to rescue the forests.
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