Wednesday, August 07, 2024

‘No evidence’ of Venezuela vote hacking, says Carter Center mission chief


ByAFP
August 7, 2024

Venezuela's CNE president Elvis Amoroso shakes hands with the Carter Center's principal advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean Jennie Lincoln in Caracas in April 2024 - Copyright AFP/File Juan BARRETO
Javier TOVAR

There is no evidence that Venezuela’s electoral system was the target of a cyber attack during elections last month, the head of the Carter Center’s observation mission told AFP, confirming figures that give the opposition candidate a victory.

On election night, the president of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, declared a win for President Nicolas Maduro without providing data from polling stations, stating that the CNE had been the victim of a computer attack.

“We have no evidence of that whatsoever,” Jennie Lincoln, head of the Carter Center delegation that was invited to monitor the Venezuela election, told AFP.

The CNE has not published detailed results from the vote and claims the delay is due to a hack, while Maduro has denounced what he calls a “criminal cyber-fascist coup d’etat.”

“There are companies that monitor and know when there is a denial of service, that there was no denial of service in Venezuela on an election day or election night,” Lincoln said, speaking from Atlanta, Georgia where the center is located.

Meanwhile transmission of voting data “is done over telephone lines and satellite phones. So that’s not even done with the computer,” she said.

Opponents and many observers believe that the delay is meant to help avoid giving actual results that would show opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia won.

The CNE ratified Maduro’s victory Friday with 52 percent of the vote, still without making public the polling station numbers.

Meanwhile the opposition has uploaded voting records onto a website which it claims show that Gonzalez Urrutia won with 67 percent.

“Even though the playing field was very uneven, the Venezuelan people went to vote,” Lincoln said.

“The big irregularity of the election day was the lack of transparency of the CNE and the blatant disregard for their rules of the game in terms of producing the true vote of the Venezuelan people,” she said.

The center “ran the same numbers” from the available data that the opposition used and — along with other organizations and universities — confirmed Gonzalez as the winner with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Maduro and Jorge Rodriguez, his close aide who is Venezuela’s National Assembly president, have claimed the figures are false, with Rodriguez even showing documents that he says prove so.

“I think that was theater,” Lincoln said.

Multiple countries, including the United States and several Latin American nations, have recognized Gonzalez Urrutia as the winner, and have called on Venezuela to publish election data.

Brazil, Colombia and Mexico — which have maintained good relations with Maduro’s government — urged an “impartial verification” of the result.

Climate change is fuelling rise in hot nights: analysis


ByAFP
August 7, 2024


This year has seen heat records tumble, with the four hottest days ever observed by scientists etched into the history books in July - Copyright AFP DAMIR SENCAR

Human-induced climate change is significantly increasing the number of hot nights for nearly one in three people around the world, a global analysis said Thursday.

High nighttime temperatures can become dangerous if they prevent the human body from cooling off and recovering from daytime heat.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends keeping room temperature at or below 24 degrees Celsius during the night — a threshold above which sleep can be uncomfortable.

This is especially important for vulnerable people, such as babies, the elderly and people with chronic health conditions, according to the WHO.

But burning coal, oil and gas which releases climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere is fuelling a rise in nights above 25C, according to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists and climate communicators.



– ‘Cascading impacts’ –



Around 2.4 billion people experienced at least two additional weeks on average per year over the past decade when the thermometer didn’t fall below 25C at night, it found.

“Warmer nighttime temperatures, particularly during hot times of the year, can harm sleep and can reduce physical recovery from hot daytime temperatures, both of which can have cascading impacts on health outcomes,” Nick Obradovich, a chief scientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, told AFP.

This year has seen heat records tumble, with extreme temperatures gripping vast swathes of the world from India to Saudi Arabia and Mexico, often staying high at night.

The analysis compared the annual average of hot nights between 2014 and 2023 with a counterfactual world without human-caused climate change based on a peer-reviewed methodology using models that incorporate historical data.

Long-term historical data being patchy or missing for many countries, researchers decided to compare their findings with an imaginary world where the only thing that has changed is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

The Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago experienced the largest increase of any country, with an extra 47 nights per year above 25C. The Indian city of Mumbai endured an additional two months of hot nights.

The 25C threshold “isn’t some hard-and-fast number below which health is fine and above which health is harmed,” Obradovich, who was not involved in the analysis, explained.

“Hotter nighttime temperatures, on average, are worse for health,” he added, but the impacts on people vary.

However, when heat is coupled with high humidity levels, the consequences can turn deadly.

Several studies have shown that nocturnal temperatures above 25C deteriorate the quality and length of sleep — which is vital for humans to function — and increase the risks of strokes, cardiovascular conditions and mortality.

The elderly and people on lower-income are disproportionally affected, researchers previously found.

Chile’s largest steelmaker suspends production, blames China


By AFP
August 7, 2024

The Chilean government described the Huachipato plant's decision as 'irresponsible' - Copyright AFP GUILLERMO SALGADO

Chile’s largest steel plant announced on Wednesday that it had suspended operations because it could not sustain itself financially, despite new tariffs on Chinese steel meant to protect local production.

The Chilean government described the Huachipato plant’s decision as “irresponsible,” with at least 2,700 workers directly affected and as many as 20,000 jobs indirectly linked to the plant.

The company’s board of directors said the decision to “indefinitely suspend” operations was made because it was impossible to competitively price its steel in the face of “the intensification of Chinese dumping,” even with the tariffs in place.

The decision came after the finance ministry in April imposed temporary tariffs on Chinese imports of steel bars and balls of 24.9 percent and 33.5 percent respectively.

Both products are key inputs in copper production, in which Chile is the world leader.

“Almost four months after the measure was implemented, market behavior has made it impossible to correct the imbalances and to transfer these tariffs to the price,” the company said in a statement.

Huachipato’s board of directors concluded that the application of surcharges would not be enough to generate structural changes in the market to ensure the financial viability of the steel business in its current form.

The suspension of the steel company’s activities will be gradual, with the process to be completed in September, the company said.

Huachipato, located in Talcahuano, about 310 miles (500 kilometers) south of Santiago, had earlier suspended operations in March, demanding the imposition of the new tariffs on Chinese steel to continue operations.

In the last two decades, China has increased its share of the world steel market from 15 percent to 54 percent, according to the Latin American Steel Association (Alacero).

Source: Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai Bukharin Imperialism and the Accumulation of capital. Edited with an Introduction by Kenneth J. Tarbuck. (Allen Lane The ...


Op-Ed: Markets finally get it — Recession inbound, Main Street on bread and water


ByPaul Wallis
DIGITAL JOURNAL
August 5, 2024

Wall street: — © Digital Journal

It’s taken two years for the Masters Morons of the Universe to see the obvious. Heavily indebted birdbrained corporations and maxed-out bad debt have no level of resistance to reality. They’ve just noticed.

2008 could well have been just the entrĂ©e to what’s possible now. They haven’t learned a thing. Big capital could get vaporized.

This will be the World’s Dumbest Recession, or perhaps depression. This is what happens when you talk yourself into believing that “debt is good” and borrow your way into bankruptcy for a few decades with help from an illiterate, irresponsible credit sector that doesn’t know its own business.

The finance sector must have the combined IQ of an empty KFC bucket. Nothing in there except the memory of a smell. The sector usually notices nothing, particularly its own self-inflicted disasters. Real money is vanishing in huge amounts in “adjustments” to a situation that never needed to exist.

It’s come to this. The world’s stock markets have just wiped out a lot of money in a fit of uncharacteristic realism. That’s a lot of money people thought they had, gone in a day or so. You can expect that to turn into a stampede if things get worse.

Also remember those investments were already losing money in real terms due to real-world price increases. Not “inflation”, which is an averaged-out euphemism. Real costs and prices have spiked, and any averages are irrelevant.

Let’s clarify, bozos – Every single price rise means your money is worth less.

Every price rise impacts the costs of the entire supply chain. Your buying power, the only real measure of wealth, decreases. These bigger numbers can never be “great numbers”.

Unemployment, that other unconvincing excuse for everything, is rising. Given that interest rates supposedly reflected anti-inflation measures because of higher employment, what now?

It’s hard to figure out the rationales. Is the logic that because people don’t have jobs you can make money cheaper for rich corporate lenders? So the millions of struggling people can borrow for a bit less?

If so, it’s another disaster in progress. If people with no money have to borrow, a booming market in bad personal loans and fake credit is the more likely scenario. It’ll take at least 5 years for these vacuous financial geniuses to figure it out.

Of course, all the other uncompromised capital is getting very reluctantly dragged into the black hole as costs rise. Prices rise anyway. Credit gets more expensive. None of that solves anything. It just makes it worse. More debt is self-destructive. Getting a few bucks extra means nothing when you need more bucks than you’re making.

Interest rates at central bank level are the least of the issues. It doesn’t matter if the rates go up or down by a few basis points. It doesn’t affect your financial reality directly, if at all. Your bills and costs don’t go down by a few basis points.

The problem is that people have no money coming in. It’s all going out on expenses only a ghoul could have predicted. Nor does anyone seem to know where more money can come from.

Nor are there any controls in place. You’d have to go back to COVID economics to make this house of cards stand up again.

The property sector, the big support beam of the capital market, is trapped in itself by itself. Cash buyers are OK. Everyone else is trying not to go broke and avoid losing money if they can. Mortgage defaults have been escalating for at least a year. There are a few lazy trillions that nobody needs, right?

You have rental properties that nobody can afford to rent. Maintenance and other overheads are getting more expensive. You have condos nobody can afford to buy because of charges. Property taxes are gnawing the bones. Forced sales, if you can actually sell anything, are inevitable.

In the commercial environment, this has translated dollar for dollar into a choice of lousy and truly tough calls. You have no customers because they have no money. Inventories are turning into stale money going nowhere.

Nor is there much actual “management” of the macroeconomic disasters in process. A totally unfocused, constipated, and effectively irrelevant political chaos created this mess.

The worst damage is to the credibility of investment as a whole. What are the incentives for investment? Nostalgia? Because that’s about all that’s on the table right now. Who’s going to believe this collection of train wrecks is a good investment environment? Who’s going to believe a word, whether the information is good or not?

On the purely domestic level, there are no excuses. Pew Research did a survey years ago that found that American households couldn’t handle a $400 hit to the monthly budget. Since then, costs of living have exploded.

Simple auto loans and other mainstream credit defaults are at plague levels. They can’t get better until the heat goes out of price rises. That fictional money is evaporating faster than anything else and it’s already hitting the books hard. Portfolios are going to start looking bad soon enough.

What are the solutions, you ask from your palatial twig?

Deflation. These costs can never work.

Writedowns. Unavoidable anyway.

Debt regulation enforcement. Like you’ve got a choice.

Lose the “buy a degree” idiots and hangers-on. These guys couldn’t run a dunghill.

Ditch those damn debts before they kill you. Your debts are who you are. They’re also be who you will be, if you’re not careful.

Get some really good sales guys to invent courses for kids in grade school for financial management.
X’s AI chatbot spread election misinformation, US officials say


ByAFP
August 6, 2024

The Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, is seen as a hotbed of misinformation in a major election year. - Copyright GETTY IMAGES/AFP Apu Gomes
Anuj CHOPRA

Five US states sent an open letter Monday to Elon Musk, urging him to fix his social media platform X’s AI chatbot after it shared misinformation about the upcoming presidential election.

The letter comes as researchers express concern that the influential site, formerly named Twitter, is a hotbed of political misinformation, while Musk — who has endorsed Donald Trump — appears to be swaying voters ahead of the November election by spreading falsehoods on his personal account, which has nearly 193 million followers.

Hours after President Joe Biden stepped down from the presidential race last month and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, the chatbot called Grok churned out false information about ballot deadlines, which was amplified by other platforms.

“We are calling on you to immediately implement changes to… Grok to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year,” the letter said.

The letter was signed by the secretaries of state of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, and New Mexico. In some American states these officials are responsible for overseeing elections.

The chatbot wrongly told users that the ballot deadline had passed for nine states. The message effectively implied that Harris was not eligible to replace Biden on the ballot.

“This is false. In all nine states the opposite is true,” the letter said.

“The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of president and vice president of the United States.”

X did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.

The letter added that Grok continued to repeat this false information –- which was amplified by multiple posts, reaching millions of people — for more than a week until it was corrected on July 31.

“As tens of millions of voters in the US seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the letter said.

In what is widely billed as America’s first AI election in November, researchers warn that AI-enabled misinformation could be used to manipulate voters, stoking tensions in an already hyperpolarized environment.

Last week, Musk faced a firehose of criticism for sharing with his followers an AI deepfake video featuring Harris.

In it, a voiceover mimicking Harris calls Biden senile before declaring that she does not “know the first thing about running the country.”

The video, viewed by millions, carried no indication that it was parody — save for a laughing emoji. Only later did Musk clarify that the video was meant as satire.

Researchers voiced concern that viewers could have falsely concluded that Harris was deriding herself and sullying Biden.

X, which researchers say has scaled back content moderation efforts and reinstated once-banned accounts of known misinformation spreaders, has also faced criticism for stoking tensions during recent far-right riots across England.

On Sunday, Musk triggered fresh criticism for posting that “civil war is inevitable” in response to another user blaming the riots on “the effects of mass migration and open borders”.



Elon Musk’s X sues advertisers over boycott


By AFP
August 6, 2024


Elon Musk bought Twitter, now known as X for $44 billion
 - Copyright AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV

Elon Musk’s X sued an advertising group and several large corporations on Tuesday accusing them of causing billions of dollars of losses by “illegally” boycotting the social media platform.

“We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX said on X, which he acquired in late 2022.

The antitrust suit, filed in a federal court in Texas, targets the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Uniliver, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted, a Danish energy company.

It accuses WFA, through an initiative known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), of conspiring with the companies and others to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from X, formerly Twitter.

A number of advertisers left Twitter following Musk’s takeover amid concerns about the level of content moderation under the new ownership and Musk’s own controversial musings on the site.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino, in a video posted on the platform on Tuesday, said X was the victim of a “systematic illegal boycott.”

“They conspired to boycott X which threatens our ability to thrive in the future,” Yaccarino said. “No small group of people should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.”

X is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages.



Elon Musk’s X filed an antitrust lawsuit against an advertising group accusing it of engaging in an ‘illegal boycott’ – Copyright GETTY IMAGES/AFP Apu Gomes

The lawsuit was filed one day after Musk filed suit in California against OpenAI, accusing its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of betraying the artificial intelligence company’s founding mission.

Musk invested in the San Francisco-based OpenAI in 2015 but left three years later.

He is accusing OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of fraud, conspiracy and false advertising.
Health experts urge Olympics to cut ties with Coca-Cola


By AFP
August 7, 2024

Coca-Cola has been sponsoring the Olympics since 1928 - Copyright AFP/File Chris DELMAS

Two health experts on Wednesday urged Olympic organisers to cut ties with Coca-Cola, saying the current big money sponsorship deal allows the US company to “sportswash” unhealthy sugary drinks.

The plea comes on top of criticism over the amount of plastic bottles used to serve fans at the Paris Games.

Events in the French capital have been lined with advertising for the ubiquitous fizzy drinks of Coca-Cola, which has been sponsoring the Olympics since 1928.

But these sugary drinks “offer little or no nutritional value” and promoting such unhealthy products has no place in sport, according to Trish Cotter and Sandra Mullin of global health group Vital Strategies.

Sugary drinks are a “key driver” of a range of serious health problems affecting people across the world, including obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, the pair wrote in a commentary in the journal BMJ Global Health.

Coca-Cola’s products also contribute to global plastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and use up a huge amount of water, they added.

“By continuing its association with Coca-Cola, the Olympic movement risks being complicit in intensifying a global epidemic of poor nutrition, environmental degradation and climate change,” the authors wrote.

“It’s time for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to cut ties with Coca-Cola in the interest of athletes, spectators and the planet.”

Coca-Cola did not respond to a request for comment.

– A ‘responsible approach’ –

The IOC defended its partnership with the soft drink company, noting that it also offers sugar-free options, including water, tea and coffee.

“We’re incredibly proud of almost 100 years of partnership with the Coca-Cola company,” Anne-Sophie Voumard, the IOC’s television and marketing services managing director, said at a daily press conference.

“From an IOC perspective, Coke is taking a responsible approach to supporting athletes’ families, fans and is taking an integral part in the delivery of the Games,” she said.

In 2020, the US food and drink giant signed a joint deal worth a reported $3 billion to extend its sponsorship of the Olympics.

The partnership will last until at least 2032.

Cotter and Mullin noted that last year Coca-Cola had more sports sponsorships than any other brand, including sportswear companies such as Nike.

“This strategy culminates in a gold medal opportunity to ‘sportswash’ an unhealthy product,” they wrote.

The World Health Organization has called for countries to tax sugar-sweetened beverages.

A petition launched ahead of the Games called “Kick Big Soda Out of Sport” has more than 109,000 signatures, and been backed by a range of public health organisations including the World Obesity Federation.

– Plastic bottles –

Environmental NGOs have also criticised the amount of plastic used to serve drinks at the Paris Games.

The Coca-Cola Company in May said nearly 10 out of 18 million refreshments served at the Olympics would be “without single-use plastic”.

Fanta, Sprite and Coca-Cola bottles have been served into reusable cups at Olympic venues, a practice some say runs counter to the Games’ pledge to be the greenest in history.

The Atlanta-based giant said it has had to use plastics due to “technical and logistical constraints”.

While 700 drink fountains have been deployed across the competition, plastic bottles are being used where glass alternatives are not an option, said Georgina Grenon, the head of sustainability for the Paris Games.

This year’s Paris Games should still achieve the goal of cutting single-use plastic by 50 percent compared to the 2012 London Games, Grenon said.

Expect more product placement at Olympics, says IOC



By AFP
August 7, 2024

Winners of the women's hammer throw take a selfie with a Samsung flip phone - Copyright AFP/File Chris DELMAS
Adam PLOWRIGHT

The Olympics is set to feature more and more high-profile product placement in a major departure from the past when brands were kept away from the sport, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said Wednesday.

The Paris Olympics, which wrap up on Sunday, have been notable for the prominent branding opportunities given to French luxury giant LVMH and phone maker Samsung.

“It’s really the direction we want to go in,” Anne-Sophie Voumard, managing director for television and marketing at the IOC, told reporters on Wednesday.

“We want to remain very, very unique in the sense that we are a property where there is no (advertising) visibility on the field of play.

“But we want to work with our partners to enable them to integrate their products in the most organic way into the delivery of the Games… It’s a conscious and desired direction and we will have changes in the next Games in this area,” she added.

The IOC has long had a lucrative corporate sponsorship programme with brands such as Toyota, Coca-Cola and Visa.

But no advertising has been allowed on sports fields or at venues, depriving the Switzerland-based IOC of extra revenue.

During the July 26-August 11 Paris Olympics, LVMH-owned Louis Vuitton is highly visible during the podium presentations when trays with its branding are used to carry the medals.

The company’s logo and trunks also featured during the opening ceremony, including in a lengthy video segment.

In another innovation in Paris, a Samsung flip phone is carried to winning athletes as they stand on the podium so that they can take a selfie.

“Athletes are not allowed to bring personal belongings or phones onto the field of play,” Voumard explained. “By partnering with Samsung, we’re able to capture that very unique moment for them.”

Coca-Cola also succeeded in placing golden bottles with some athletes during the July 26 opening ceremony along the River Seine.

Michael Payne, a former head of IOC marketing, told AFP last week that the IOC would face a delicate balancing act in finding opportunities for its sponsors, as well as those that team up with host cities.

“The direction of stylish sponsor product placement may not be wrong but needs exceptionally careful management,” he told AFP.

He said LVMH “got a massive free global ad” during the opening ceremony and “other partners are all going to be asking, how did that work?”

Voumard added that the IOC was still searching for its first premium sponsor from India.

“We would love to welcome a first new top sponsor from India. I’m sure that this is going to happen very soon,” she said.
Canada’s stagflation presents investor concerns


ByDr. Tim Sandle
DIGITAL JOURNAL
August 7, 2024

City of Toronto. — Image by © Tim Sandle.

Why are traditional 60/40 investment portfolios at risk as the Canadian economy enters a prolonged period of economic stagflation? To answer this question, Stephen Johnston, a private equity manager and director of Omnigence recently wrote a white paper along with solutions for investors to mitigate risk and grow their portfolio.

Stagflation refers to an economic situation in which the inflation rate is high or increasing, the economic growth rate slows, and unemployment remains steadily high.

A new report from Royal Bank of Canada has found that the economic momentum that propelled the country through the 20th century has faded in the 21st, and appears to have worsened since the pandemic. Canada will likely see the lowest real growth of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the next three years.

Higher interest rates have slowed per-capita output since 2019, but the problems run deeper. Johnston states: “The Canadian economy is now smaller than it was in 2019 when adjusted for inflation and immigration, and pretty much in the same place it was a decade ago.”

Drawing out an international comparison, Johnston reports: “According to the report, anyone who invested $1,000 in Canada’s main stock index in 2000 would have $4,400 today; the same investment in the U.S. S&P 500 index would be worth $6000—a more than 35 percent difference.”

Johnston believes that the Canadian economy has entered into a prolonged period of economic stagflation that could spell even more trouble for Canadian investors if they do not begin to allocate capital differently.

The problem and solutions can be distilled down to two important economic questions, which Johnston answers.

How might stagflation affect investments?


Johnston assesses: “A reasonable starting point is to understand that the approaches that worked in the last twenty years during above trend growth and below trend inflation are less likely to work over the next decade if Canada’s economy enters a prolonged period of low growth and above trend inflation, also known as stagflation.”

What investments will generate better returns?


in terms of solutions, Johnston suggests: “Stagflation traditionally benefits real asset investments, which are colloquially known as “hard assets.” This includes Canada’s large and competitively priced agriculture industry, which is heavily reliant on foreign markets rather than Canada’s own domestic consumption.”

He also adds: “Stagflation may also benefit investments that are less linked to the growth of Canadian GDP such as low cost casual dining and automotive maintenance because both sectors do well when the middle class struggles.”


 

Let’s Think About How to Build a More Peaceful World

Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?

Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”

It was not only a relevant idea, but one that seemed to have a lot of potential. The new UN General Assembly would provide membership and a voice for the world’s far-flung nations, while the new UN Security Council would assume the responsibility for enforcing peace. Furthermore, the venerable International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) would issue judgments on disputes among nations. And the International Criminal Court―created as an afterthought nearly four decades later―would try individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. It almost seemed as if a chaotic, ungovernable, and bloodthirsty pack of feuding nations had finally evolved into the long-standing dream of “One World.”

But, as things turned out, the celebration was premature.

The good news is that, in some ways, the new arrangement for global governance actually worked. UN action did, at times, prevent or end wars, reduce international conflict, and provide a forum for discussion and action by the world community. Thanks to UN decolonization policies, nearly all colonized peoples emerged from imperial subjugation to form new nations, assisted by international aid for economic and social development. A Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, set vastly-improved human rights standards for people around the world. UN entities swung into action to address new global challenges in connection with public healthpoverty, and climate change.

Even so, despite the benefits produced by the United Nations, this pioneering international organization sometimes fell short of expectations, particularly when it came to securing peace. Tragically, much international conflict persisted, bringing with it costly arms races, devastating wars, and massive destruction. To some degree, this persistent conflict reflected ancient hatreds that people proved unable to overcome and that unscrupulous demagogues worked successfully to inflame.

But there were also structural reasons for ongoing international conflict. In a world without effective enforcement of international law, large, powerful nations could continue to lord it over smaller, weaker nations. Thus, the rulers of these large, powerful nations (plus a portion of their citizenry) were often reluctant to surrender this privileged status.

Symptomatically, the five victorious great powers of 1945 (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) insisted that their participation in the United Nations hinged upon their receiving permanent seats in the new UN Security Council, including a veto enabling them to block Security Council actions not to their liking. Over the ensuing decades, they used the veto hundreds of times to stymie UN efforts to maintain international peace and security.

Similarly, the nine nuclear nations (including these five great powers) refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Behind their resistance to creating a nuclear weapons-free world lies a belief that there is much to lose by giving up the status and power that nuclear weapons afford them.

Of course, from the standpoint of building a peaceful world, this is a very short-sighted position, and the reckless behavior and nuclear arrogance of the powerful have led, at times, to massive opposition by peace and nuclear disarmament movements, as well as by many smaller, more peacefully-inclined nations.

Thanks to this resistance and to a widespread desire for peace, possibilities do exist for overcoming UN paralysis on numerous matters of international security. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to abolish the Security Council veto outright, given the fact that, under the UN Charter, the five permanent members have the power to veto that action, as well. But Article 27(3) of the Charter does provide that nations party to a dispute before the Council must abstain from voting on that issue―a provision that provides a means to circumvent the veto. In addition, 124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities, while the UN General Assembly has previously used “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to act on peace and security issues when the Security Council has evaded its responsibility to do so.

Global governance could also be improved through other measures. They include increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and securing wider ratification of the founding statute of the International Criminal Court (which has yet to be ratified by Russia, the United States, China, India, and other self-appointed guardians of the world’s future).

It won’t be easy, of course, to replace the law of force with the force of law. Only this May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court took a bold step toward strengthening international norms by announcing that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials and Hamas commanders for crimes in and around Gaza. In response, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” legislation requiring the U.S. executive to impose sanctions on individuals connected with the ICC.

Despite the nationalist backlash, however, the time has arrived to consider bolstering international institutions that can build a more peaceful world. And the current U.S. presidential campaign provides an appropriate place for raising this issue. After all, Americans, like the people of other lands, have a personal stake in ensuring human survival.Facebook

Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press). Read other articles by Lawrence, or visit Lawrence's website.

 

Sacred Economics: Shylock as Anti-Christ

Money vs the gift
Sacred Economics 100
Deconstructing the Story of Self/ the World
Life without prisons

Marx’s ‘death knell’ of capitalism, revolution, was the first answer to capitalism’s ills, after which the state would wither away, and we would live in a utopian bliss. The 20th century put paid to that vision, as revolution, as most revolutions do, disappointed, mostly unravelled, and predatory capitalism took hold again. Are we stuck with a system that’s quickly leading us to the cliff edge with seemingly no turning back?

Happily, no, and happily no need for messy revolution, though there is already growing hardship from (and growing resistance to) our economic system’s gross injustices, insanities. The transition to a new economic logic is already underway, and we can all help nurse it into reality. In Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition (2021), Charles Eisenstein draws on anthropology and the prophetic writings of 20th century social critics to provide the way, hidden in plain sight. To return to the gift economy, to get rid of usury, debt money. For 90% of human history, that was how we lived, not in a mindset of artificial scarcity, where even the wealthiest pinch pennies, but one of abundance, where selfishness was despised, and ‘trade’ was a way of fostering peace, not ‘war by other means’.

Basically an ecological communism, where moneyS are based on real wealth and prices include all the environmental costs of your product. We have to make most of nature (land, water, air) a ‘commons’ again, as in feudal times when most land was commons, under the authority of lords but not an alienable commodity to be bought or sold.

Eisenstein picks up where Marx left off, or rather he takes out the rhetorical flourishes and puts the economy back into ecology, and in the process, establishes the underlying laws of the human-nature nexus. The Law of Return the most fundamental: Everything you consume is consumed somewhere else in nature. The uroboros. Pioneer species pave the way for keystone species, which provide microniches for other species and circle back to benefit pioneer species as they move into new territories. Actually a tautology but one that we’ve ignored until violating its logic has brought us to the brink of catastrophe.

Uroboros vs Sorcerer’s apprentice
Money vs the gift

First, chuck out your guns-and-butter Eco 101 text. We must look at not-so-innocent words like money, interest, profit, investment, goods&services, and put them to work for us and the world, not against us and the world.

The real human economy for at least 100,000 years was a gift economy, with daily life needs, division of labor, ensured through tradition rather than a punch-clock and cash. Money was originally used ceremonially, in a complex system of exchange to ensure trust between tribes, and as tribute. Social currencies were for consolidating relations (marriages, funerals, blood money, intertribal peace).

With the rise of agriculture, money transformed, secularized, as a form of credit (tallies of loans denominated in common unit of account, periodically settled by deliver of commodities). This conflation quickly led to debt peonage i.e., slavery, and the demotion of women. Behind every ledger is a man with a sword/gun. The world was no longer sacred, and man part of it, worshipping it. Our spiritual connection with nature was sundered, our spirit thin and now identified with gold-as-fetish, not with God. A king-god must be carried aloft, high above lowly earth. Man became divorced from nature, culminating in Descartes’ lonely ‘I’. We were already transforming nature 4,000 years ago, creating empires, replacing ‘sinless’ God with ‘sinless’ gold, a lethal case of misplaced concreteness.

This ushered in the Age of Separation – spirit-matter, mind-body, human-nature. This Story of Self/ World, the Ascent of Humanity,1 as Eisenstein called his earlier book dealing with this separation. It starts with the farming virtues of hard work, thrift, accumulation, but also the darker master-slave relation where slaves were often debtors who would never be able to pay. That isn’t in the Storybooks. Instead we have the story of isolated individuals rationally maximizing ‘utility’ (pleasure, which is still unmeasurable).

This Story as depicted in economics textbooks makes a bizarre kind of sense in a scientistic, timeless Newtonian world of atoms, but it has nothing to do with how we live our lives. What is it but a denial of spirituality, embodied mind, humanity itself? So the ‘ascent’ is a delusional one from the start, actually the opposite, as we see all around us today. If this is the crowning achievement of science, we would be healthier, happier in some (almost any) precapitalist society, absent money, certainly absent money as a hoarded store-of-value, and interest, a pointless and dangerous attempt to annihilate time-space. Of course, this is impossible. We live in space-time. You can’t go back in time, and the ‘space’ is already taken. We are long overdue for a Story that reflects us-in-the-world. Heidegger calls that dasein.

Reimagining our economy means first of all gaining control over our simple, elegant, now global money system which lets you do everything, everywhere, all at once. i.e., the antithesis of ceremonial money, which was attached to time, place, giver and receiver, as part of reinforcing that traditional way of life, with money as a sacred binding force. Now, instead of a simple, functional broom, we have the sorcerer’s apprentice. A hammer to kill a fly. Unnecessary power over everything, everywhere, all at once, which imprisons us in unreal fantasies and requires prisons for trigger-happy types.

Key reforms immediately suggest themselves:

  • Return us to localized, ritualized methods of exchange. Reinvent the fly swatter to deal with fly problems. That looks ridiculous to our individualistic mindset, captivated by the supercharged power of money, gold-as-god. Most precapitalist societies worshipped the sun as god, or all of nature. What we can call ‘the collective West’, formerly the imperialist power, latched on to gold as the ideal money by the 15th century, when Europeans travelled the Earth, invading and stealing wealth, especially gold, wherever it was found. That obsession marks the great divide in human history, total war of conquest of the planet, fittingly symbolized by gold. Inert, eternal, beautiful, heavy (i.e., important).
  • Following on the Law of Return, internalize all costs of whatever you produce/ consume. Right down to working conditions in the DVD factory in Bangladesh if that’s where your DVD player is made. Immediately it is clear that the majority of what we now produce and consume won’t make sense anymore. You will produce and consume more and more locally as the Age of Transition gets under way.

Eisenstein (and Keynes) argue that the short reign of gold as THE currency (1870–1932 and 1944–1971) was perhaps a necessary stage in our maturing as a species, but that it has outlived its purpose and, as we have witnessed over the past century, has already been replaced, though it is still a totem, a fetish that we secretly worship, many convinced that a return to the gold standard would solve all our problems. The fetishism is now secularized and represents the vast fortunes of Wall Street as if in a separate, disembodied realm. We need to take money off its pedestal, to invent new forms of money that will encourage good hoarding (of the commons) not the bad version (destruction of the commons).

The conquerors laughed at the cowrie shells that Polynesians carried thousands of miles by canoe to ‘trade’, seemingly senselessly, with other tribes. Or the wampum beads of Turtle Island natives. Even the most warlike tribes lived more or less peacefully, with their interactions centered on this ritual giving, before ‘we’ arrived with guns and declared total war of conquest on the world, inspired by gold.

It proved easy to unravel the complex, ritualistic societies outside Europe, once the Europeans launched their world war in search of gold for their very special and lethal money. ‘We’ ruined the complex web of world culture (just like we destroyed the anti-capitalist Soviet Union), and are quickly ruining what’s left of nature and now humanity itself, with total all-out war (not our low-grade ‘cold wars’) threatening like a Damocles sword over all our heads. And it is our very bloody form of money, or rather its pretend substitute, electronic money) that now governs a godless, global reality on the brink. Goethe’s (and Disney’s) sorcerer’s apprentice.

But our neurotic fetish is also responsible (everything is connected and money has been our hammer for everything) for the explosion of knowledge in the past five centuries. As we clear-cut the precious legacy of the our social evolution, the dazzling mini-civilizations everywhere on Earth, our scribes, anthropologists (or better, morticians) document(ed) the fast-dying remains of precapitalist civilizations, their (to us) bizarre customs, revealing discoveries about precapitalist societies every bit as marvelous as the potato, rubber trees and other gifts. ‘We’ quickly adopted the potatoes etc as they were profitable, ‘produced’ more gold, adapted to our industrial ‘civilization’, and wiped out the giver, the keeper of that miracle food.

As for the cultural wealth of those other civilizations, who cares? If they don’t make more gold, they are the enemy to be conquered or eliminated. Even the great thinkers of the 19th century, Hegel, Darwin, Marx assumed that these ‘primitive’ societies would be wiped out. But thanks to our morticians, we have salvaged some of what we realize now are precious gifts from the past. Most important of these human cultural artifacts is the gift culture, the social glue that let humanity prosper for millennia with destroying their world, Earth.

We must return to the gift, our traditional way of relating to nature and each other, but at a higher level. Thatcher’s TINA. There is no alternative. Just as tribes and nations have a cyclical rise and fall and, transformed, rise again as a new civilization, so does mankind’s trajectory from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to industry to information age, also have a grand overarching cycle, returning to the natural order after our spectacular but lethal bursts of creative innovation, which took us so far from the natural order.

Sacred Economics 100

LawEverything is sacred. In the first place, money. Money has magical qualities, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. The simplest way to inspire belief is to appeal to our instinct of self preservation, ‘me first’. So ‘greed’ is a kind of default attribute for money, a lowest-common-denominator money, supposedly appealing to our natural state. Like a person stuck at the level of a two-year-old, ‘ME!’ is then our belief system, which our money reflects, urging us to hoard, take by force.2 And what better than using an inert metal that never decays? So gold.

But this was much later. Hunter-gatherers actually grew up without gold, not stuck at the ‘terrible twos’, never ‘greedy’. Their money was constantly exchanged as part of their foreign relations. They couldn’t hoard anything and didn’t need to. Any accumulation was seasonal. They lived in abundance and shared everything, treated everything as a gift, promoting generosity and gratitude, not greed and war. So they had no need of this base money, our money.

We have learned that early humans did not see themselves as apart, above nature. They were part of a complex world of man-nature, matter-spirit, where everything is sacred. Everything. including our consciousness is a gift. For Muslims this is our God-given nature, fitra. We dismiss this worldview of the world as a huge gift as a charming metaphor, but the gifters were serious.

For atheists this is a problem. Who to thank? For me, my existence alone is enough proof of a higher order reality. If I’m right, then I should be thanking God every second of the day and night. Sufis strive for that mindset. For Muslims, praying 5 times a day is a religious duty. And the implication is you must treat every gift with respect. Use it and leave nature as rich and beautiful as it was before. So the Alberta tarsands, a huge toxic wound on the beautiful gift of the land and resources, is sacrilege. The guilty parties are traitors to our heritage and deserve the highest punishment. Instead, we laud them and give them billions of dollars to poison more of our gifts. ARGH.

Some things are more sacred than others (thunderstorms, waterfalls, rainbows, orchids), that were there to remind us of the sacredness of all things. With the rise of agriculture and greed money, we became progressively more divorced from nature, culminating in our modern economy, where gold is valued above all else, though, apart from sitting in vaults, hoarded for its magically quality, it is useful only as ornament. Ditto mankind as a kind of secular embodiment of gold, the supreme living creature as ‘golden boy’, is valued above all else to the point of destroying all else.

The rot really set in with Descartes’ disembodied soul, divorced from the body, observing but not participating in the world, which is run by a robotic Newtonian watchmaker god. As if Descartes was intuiting what the best Story of the Self was for our Story of the World, modern capitalism, governed by the abstract, now secular spirit, money. Your soul, mind is outside of science and not that interesting in a materialist, secular world anyway.

Shakespeare, writing at the birth of the new secular, capitalist order, made the usurer Shylock the archetype for the new man of finance: cruel, ruthless, paranoid, greedy. Shakespeare’s most compelling villain. The Merchant of Venice is the only play focusing on the economics of society, on an abstract idea, usury. Shylock loses everything including his daughter, who steals her inheritance and converts to Christianity. The play was problematic from the start, Jessica seen as a schemer betraying her father. Philosemitism runs deep in Britain, a product of the Protestant Reformation and the condoning of usury as good for business.

Shakespeare wanted us to detest the usurer, but already usury was an integral part of the now accelerating commercial and industrial revolutions. His audiences had usurers among them, and the immortal words of Shylock and Portia calling for tolerance and mercy have been emphasized, without Shakespeare’s anti-capitalist message. It took Marx and a century of anti-capitalist revolution for Jessica’s rejection of Shylock’s clear villainy to be appreciated for what it is, Shakespeare’s genius at penetrating to the heart of the new order and warning us. The answer is there in the rejection of usury, the demonetization of hoarded wealth, i.e., Jessica’s jewels revert to baubles, not capital, Christianity (still outlawing usury in the 17th century) the already ineffectual antidote to the usury of the Jew.

Paradox: Even as we realize the evil of usury/ interest, we outlaw criticism of Jewry for its adoption of usury as the basis of Jewish world power, such is the power of money. It force-feeds us illusions and forces us to spout lies to maintain the system. For all that, The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s most popular play in Israel. (Only Jews in their Jewish state are free to be ‘anti-semitic’.)

Marx argued that money has become a world power, and, as the practical Jewish spirit, has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations, which became the spirit of the capitalist age. A Jew himself, he identified the Jewish practice of usury as the source of the evils of the day, and assumed Jews would disappear as a persecuted race once usury was abolished. He wrote before the secrets of past civilizations had been documented and jumped to ‘revolution’ and a very abstract communism as the one-size-fits-all answer. Another hammer to kill a fly.

We have built our lives as autonomous individuals worshipping this secular, material god, rather than the traditional spiritual god. We see the world crumbling before our eyes, we know the culprit, but, like a druggie, we just keep looking for our next fix, our disembodied soul no help at all.

So first, rewrite our economic textbooks, demystifying money. Money’s ‘natural’ purpose is to connect human gifts to human needs. Now money is based on artificial scarcity and rationality. Nothing about gifts, abundance. Our thinking too must change, though the change is just a reversion to our naturally/ socially evolved generosity and gratitude, adult emotions that we have suppressed as we live out our ‘terrible twos’, still dressed in diapers, unable to metabolize what we take from nature in a civilized way.

Deconstructing the Story of Self/ the World

Our Story of Self as autonomous individuals governed by instinct (mistakenly called greed) breaks down with observed reality. We are all found under the proverbial cabbage leaf. Our lives are given to us. A gift. Let that sink in. We are walking miracles! So our default is gratitude. Even in our Age of Separation, we still honor our parents for the gift of life, which we can never repay in money. That is the truth of our existence.

I still need to pause and reread that. We are so totally programmed to blot out that essential truth. Our new Story of the Self and consequently our Story of the World must start there. Life as a gift, ‘the gift of life’, gratitude to parents, responsibility to pass on the gift of life and the gifts of nature to the next generation (natives think in terms of seven generations). No wonder ancient religious thinkers said God made the world, and gave it to us to enjoy, i.e., gave us reflective consciousness. So the basic ‘units of account’ in economics should be humility and gratitude not selfishness and egotism.

The Big Bang is like God’s humongous gift – everything for nothing. As if the universe was created for us to see and reflect on (and be thankful for). Does any of this sound like today’s Eco 101? It starts with separate selves competing for scarce resources to maximize self-interest. Our bankers create money and divvy it out to profit-maximizers, so that we can maximize our utility in this world of efficiency.

This turns out to be as depressing and destructive as it sounds. It is a neurosis-inducing Story of the People, robotic, defying our natural emotions. Ditto with the Story of the World, on the surface rational and profitable, but with scarcity and fear lurking at the unconscious level. Barter and comparative advantage in a Hobbesian brutish and nasty world. New stories, please!

Rule of the gift: What comes to you is not kept for oneself unless one cannot do without it.

Rule of the gift: Everything is related, so economic relations are mutual, we always owe someone/ nature for our taking. Toaripi, Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese have only one word for borrowing/ lending. The Arabic din means religion and debt. The Lord’s prayer used to be ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive other’ until capitalism got a hold of it and changed that to ‘trespasses’.

Modern money transaction are closed, no obligation, at most a ‘money-back’ guarantee, but the buck stops there. The gift is open-ended, a relationship between participants. With a gift, you give some of yourself. Now you are just sell a ‘good’, which could be bad, and which has nothing to do with you.

Even today we go all soft in ceremonies of giving presents, without the hard edge of money involved. The gift still embodies something special that money kills – the sense of uniqueness and relatedness (the self expanding to whole community) that we all know we are, not the diminished robotic self that buys and sells as the ‘greatest good’.

Law: In the money economy, more for me is less for you. Zero-sum game. In the gift economy: more for me is also more you. Positive-sum game. I.e., those who have give to those who need. Gifts cement the mystical reality of participation in something greater than oneself. Axioms of rational self-interest do not apply, as the self has expanded to include some of the other.

There is no need to distinguish between work and play, business and personal relationships. Think hunter-gatherer: you do what you have to each day which takes a few hours, all the time social networking, telling Stories. Work and play are one. Economics was linked to cosmology, religion, psyche. You, John, need x from me. So you give me wampum, which means: ‘John met the needs of others in the past and earned gratitude.’ So I can give John’s wampum later when I am gifted by someone. The Story of the gift. Now, instead of giving me wampum, I get money, which no longer satisfies the need-gratitude problem, which has no story behind it. There’s no one to thank, not even God. Today, especially not God.

When the division of labor exceeds the tribal or village level, there is the need to extend the range of our gifts. Yes, trade, progress. Comparative advantage. Eco 101. By facilitating trade, we reward efficiency in production. Money facilitates trade and should enrich life.

So what happened that turned trade-as-nice-novelty into a weapon of mass destruction, destroying entire nations through boycotts, enriching others obscenely? Now money is the source of anxiety, hardship, polarization of wealth. The US boycotts, sanctions a third of the world for daring to disobey orders, killing as many as actual warfare and bombing.

Paradox. Dollar bills still show deified presidents, ‘out of many one’, ‘in God we trust’. Not. We need a true Story of wholeness and harmony, return to the hunter-gatherer, our most successfully evolved social organism, at a higher level.

Our ‘gifts’, given by God have some of Him in them. Prometheus’s fire, the Apollonian gift of music, agriculture, all ‘made in His image’. We have the desire to develop those gifts and give from them (from Him) to the world. Nothing beats the joy of giving.3 You are playing God in the best sense. Rational self-interest does not apply in our interactions with others. Just our innate generosity. You can’t live a fulfilled life without developing those gifts, sharing them with others. But our gifts are mortgaged to the demands of money, survival. We fret about the ‘cost of living’, we are ruled by the specter of scarcity.

Where did this ‘scarcity’ in a world of plenty come from? It invaded our epistemology of i/ biology with ‘selfish genes’, ii/ socio-biology with competing selves. It is more a projection of our own capitalist culture of artificial scarcity than an understanding of nature. Recent advances in biology shows that nature gives primacy to cooperation, symbiosis, merging of organisms into larger wholes, with competition playing a secondary role. And there is no stasis in nature. Everything is always in motion, evolving, living/ dying. The world is alive.

Nature is both complex and radically simple. Human nature is the same. In nature headlong growth is sign of immature ecosystems, followed by renewed interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, always returning, recycling of resources. Ditto human societies. We have lived through a few centuries of wild, uncontrolled exploitation of nature and this is coming to an end even as I write. Money is already frayed and will continue to unravel as our lives take on more and more the properties of gift, as we return to our true nature, our fitra. The economy will shrink, our lives will grow. What a rousing, cliff-hanger Story of Transition this will make.

Law: In a dynamic system, there is no equilibrium but a state of controlled disequilibrium, infinitely complex.

Life without prisons

Our Stories’ economics axioms: scarcity + rational maximization of self-interest. ResultWealth makes you greedy. We need prisons to prevent greedy people from being too greedy.

Money’s basic function is to facilitate exchange, connect human gifts with needs, from each according to his ability to each according to her needs. That’s right. Communism. But also any religion worth its salt. And ‘we’ turned money into a corrosive agent of scarcity. Starvation a constant for much of the world, though there’s more than enough for everyone, and most people want to help, but can’t because there’s no money in it.

Indigenous Turtle Islanders from the start shook their heads at their dangerous visitors. They had no problem of greedy people (though the Europeans saw their disdain for things as sacrilegious), no need for prisons. None voluntarily joined the Europeans’ cruel, arbitrary society of violence and slavery. Many whites ‘went native’, enjoying the freedom and beauty of moneyless society and had to be dragged back or killed. No room for traitors.

Basically, capitalist society was/is a system of warfare, a zero-sum game where the natives lived life as a positive-sum game. Captured debtors and thieves like POWs, requiring prisons. Natives understood that if you have a good community, you don’t need prisons, or (today) a complicated maze of private daycare at $10,000+ a year (nice prisons to control your children).

Natives were so busy enjoying life, they don’t have time to get bored. No one got ‘bored’ before the word was invented in 1760 at the dawn of assembly lines, mass production urban ghettoes devoid of community, no contact at all with nature.

‘Bedouins can sit for hours in the desert, feeling the ripples of time, without being bored.’4 Boredom, the yearning for stimulation, distraction, for something (rather than a relation) to pass the time. Life is not about things, but relations. But we are isolated automatons in our Story of Self. We don’t need relations, but as a result we are stuck with things to soothe the existential pain of separation, lack of relations. Camus.

Now we get bored in an instant. We demand to be entertained. Reality is boring, alien. Media is more real.

As for economic growth, the mantra promising greater happiness, really just means the economy, the commons, life in general, is more and more monetized, colonized, producing lots of things to soothe us. But when everything is monetized, a scarcity of money makes everything scarce, even when drown in a sea of ‘goods’. Nothing has changed in the real world, but now you starve. Magic.

‘Evergreen’ container ship blocked Suez Canal for a week in 2021

From Perpetual sacrifice

by William Wordsworth

Men, maidens, youths,
mother and little children, boys and girls,
enter, and each the wonted task resumes
within this temple, where is offered up
to Gain, the master idol of the realm,
perpetual sacrifice.

Wow. Buddhism sees spiritual value in suffering, but that’s in pursuit of enlightenment. To commit someone to ‘perpetual sacrifice’, wage slavery, in the service of profit is about as low as you can go. We have reached the physical limits of our Stories, where abundance is cloaked in artificial scarcity, where the engine of growth is greed. How did our natural impulse of giving, generosity, turn into its opposite? Greed doesn’t make sense, even in the context of real scarcity. We naturally share especially in times of danger. We need scarcity to penetrate into our minds, emotions, so we will discard, repress our higher impulses, our social instincts, honed over millennia, in favor of the more primitive self-preservation instinct we are taught to call ‘greed’. Greed must be built into our Story of Self, and taught in schools and universities, so that there are no traitors to the cause.

Contrary to Eco 101 wishful thinking, there is no biological gene to maximize reproduction of a self-interested, economically rational actor. Greed is not written into our biology, but is a symptom of the perception of scarcity. In a psychology experiment a group of poor vs rich were given $1000 to share. Guess who is more generous? That’s right, the poor. You knew that ‘instinctively’, 2 times more generous! When you’re rich, anxiety is always there, scarcity just a step away. It’s not greed makes you wealthy, but wealth makes you greedy. I.e., they are so ‘invested’ in their wealth, they can’t let go. Pity poor Midas.

ENDNOTES:

  • 1
    Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self , p21, 2007.
  • 2
    But children quickly move beyond that, naturally sharing when they’ve had enough.
  • 3
    Readers joke I intentionally get lost on my biking adventures to feast on the selfless generosity of strangers.
  • 4
    Ziauddin Sardar, Cyberspace as the darker side of the West, 2000.Facebook
Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to ImperialismRead other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.