Thursday, November 23, 2017

Imagine If We Decided Not to Lose. Imagine If We Decided to Fight Back.



We're at war. It's a war you sense more than feel. You read about it almost every day and most reports are very discouraging. We seem to be losing.

It's a war on many fronts - social, political, economic, environmental. It's a war for our survival and at stake are our people, our society, our culture, our civilization, perhaps even our existence. It's an "all in" war.  Oddly enough, with so much, everything, at stake we choose to be bystanders, to watch from the sidelines, to argue and grumble and do next to nothing.

We're conditioned, tamed, whipped. Ours is a learned and nurtured docility. We have been taught so many things that we are intellectually addled, unable to discern fact from fiction, fact from belief.

We have been taught to want without need. For many the greatest delight on Christmas morning is to find under the tree something that didn't even exist last year, the latest and greatest something, that, by its invention, manufacture and marketing consigns the last great thing to obsolescence. Who wants an iPhone 5 when there are iPhone 8s to be had?

I took some electronics to the recycling depot the other day. My discards had, to my dismay, gone on the fritz. Some component broke down that was nowhere to be had. The manufacturers no longer supported products of such vintage and seemed annoyed that I even asked. I even found a capable repairman (talk about an endangered species) but he was powerless to help. At the recycling yard I spoke with a worker about pallets of shrink-wrapped flatscreen TVs and other electronics that were awaiting a truck to some other destination. He told me that once, for an experiment, he and his co-workers took one load, plugged the stuff in and found that most of it still worked. The owners wanted something better, something newer. Want without need.

Few may realize it but that is a war we're losing, the war of over-consumption. We know that humankind is using the Earth's resources at 1.7 times the rate the planet can replenish them. We're running at 1.7 times the Earth's carrying capacity and that number worsens every year. We're depleting our planet's life-sustaining resources to feed our insatiable appetite for crap.

The real curse of that 1.7 times factor is our sheer and mortal dependency on it. We are dependent on more resources than the planet can furnish. As humankind grows in numbers, grows in reach and swells at the beltline we've become the civilizational equivalent of a back-alley heroin junky.

The environment. There's another front where we're taking a pounding. Fortunately and unfortunately, most of us are REMFs, a pejorative Vietnam war acronym for "rear echelon mother-f#@kers", the guys who fought the war from the air-conditioned comfort of some supply hangar.
We're REMFs. We're not at the really ugly end of climate change, at least not yet. That's for little people of dusky hue. For the time being we get to be bystanders - oblivious, indifferent bystanders - socially concerned but not really willing to sacrifice to any significant degree. We even recoil angrily at the idea of having to pay a few cents more for a litre of gasoline.

REMFs

Our wants cannot be restrained. We will fight, fang and claw, for ever more of steadily less. We will squeeze blood from this orbital rock. We've taken everything bequeathed us by our parents and grandparents. We added to that everything our technology and enterprise could deliver. And then we topped it all off by wanton, unrepentant plundering of our children's and grandchildren's future. We did everything "because we could" with no regard to "whether we should." Our larceny was always out of sight/out of mind.

How did we steal from our grandkids? You could begin by asking Edmund Burke or Theodore Roosevelt, both fine conservatives.  Both men wrote of every generation's fundamental and solemn responsibility to leave the world a better place for their heirs and successors. Our iteration of humanity, particularly the generations that comprise the era of neoliberalism, have chosen not to do that. To use Roosevelt's words, we have opted to "skin the earth." We have fouled this place - earth, sea and air - and have relentlessly depleted it without the slightest regard for those who will have to bear the burdens of our profligacy.

A new report from the Credit Suisse research institute stands as a damning indictment of the neoliberal order.  The study found that wealth grew in the first half of 2017 by 6.4 per cent and even outpaced population growth. Despite this abundant wealth, millennials will face the worst inequality of any generation yet.

In an economic climate where the top 1% own half the world’s wealth, a new analysis by Credit Suisse suggests that millennials in several advanced economies are likely going to face the worst income inequality of any generation in recent memory. The report, which focuses on the US, Germany, France, and Spain, shows that millennials are generally saddled with more student debt, less inherited money, and stricter mortgages than previous generations. At the same time, a lucky few are set to become spectacularly wealthy, widening the already large gap between rich and poor. Why?
...

While millennials who go into high-demand fields, like tech and finance, reap the rewards of an expensive education, many earn no more than their parents, and at a higher price. Analysis of Federal Reserve data by the group Young Invincibles shows that the median millennial household earns around $40,500, 20% less than boomers at the same point in their lifetimes.
...

In the US, France, and Germany, only 10-15% of people in their twenties and thirties have inherited wealth. While it’s possible some will come into wealth later on (by 70, 30% to 40% of adults have inherited some wealth in these countries), survey data from Credit Suisse suggests that no more than 50% of any generation inherits during their lifetimes.

The millennials that have already inherited money, however, have inherited a lot. People from the US, France, Spain, and Germany who inherited wealth in their thirties reported that it made up 40% of their total assets. In the future, millennials will likely receive substantial amounts, as their parents’ generation has experienced healthy gains from a strong stock market and, of late, high house prices.

This boon will come as the US is planning to roll back estate taxes, reinforcing disparities in income.


So we're skinning future generations economically but they too will be the first generations to pay for our destruction of the environment. That's already coming home to roost in the poorest and most vulnerable regions of the planet but it will be here in due course.

Imagine if, as a society, we resolved not to let this happen, not to permit the economic and environmental devastation of our future generations. Imagine if we found the courage to rouse ourselves from this lethal torpor. Imagine if we decided to fight back and tried to win at least part of this war. What would that even look like? Let that thought rattle around in your mind for a while.

I can obviously speak only for myself but, to me, it would look revolutionary. Ask yourself this. Can you see any way for us to get out from under neoliberalism that doesn't arise from either collapse or revolt? Can you see a culture of groomed bystanders winning the day?

I can see this neoliberal contagion ending in collapse or revolt and I'm realistic enough to understand that collapse is the default option and very much the odds on bet. There's no guarantee that even revolt, if such a thing were possible, could set things right at this point but isn't it worse not to at least have tried?



13 comments:

  1. What is wrong with us, Mound, that we are either too blind or too indifferent to try to stop what is happening? Is it a fundamental flaw in our natures? Did our evolution stop once we achieved a certain level of comfort, however delusional, a sense of security may be?

    I am disgusted by our species, and I don't exclude myself from that disgust.

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  2. I vote for collapse. It seems to be more easily accomplished and we little to no effort required. The

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  3. One percent of the population owns 50% of the wealth? We'e insane.

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  4. How true Mound
    “The manufacturers no longer supported products of such vintage ........pallets of shrink-wrapped flatscreen TVs and other electronics that were awaiting a truck to ????? .....plugged the stuff in and found that most of it still worked. The owners wanted something better, something newer. Want without need.”

    This kinds stuff makes me totally sick. I will admit to having piles of electronic 'stuff' that is old (by modern standards) that works fine but does not support all the newer bells and whistles, that much of it cannot be used due to our reliance on internet compatibility (and my reliance on such connection) really annoys me! Having been dragged reluctantly throughout several decades from one “better” system to another, from a 64k to a 64 mb and beyond I at times wonder if this is progress or planned obsolescence? NOTHING is built to last anymore, we are a throw away society and those of us who try and fight the trend are doomed to have a basement full of 'unrepairable' stuff.
    Now to find a good 'used' laptop to replace my 10 year old outfit that’s starting to die........

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  5. Anonymous ffibs said...
    I vote for collapse. It seems to be more easily accomplished and we little to no effort required.

    I agree..


    FWIW.
    Both the UK and the USA are bordering upon anarchy others closely follow.
    It's early days yet but events have a history of quickly snowballing.
    The concentration of power and money are making it extremely difficult to counter this.
    Consolidated media, concentration of finance ,extremist politics and a dumbed down electorate makes a science fiction dystopian future look inevitable.
    Even the science fiction inspired Anonymous have gone silent as too has the caged ( which breeds insanity) Julian Assange.


    Yes!! collapse it will be.

    Best we can do is make life friggin difficult for the enablers....

    TB

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  6. I suppose collapse it is then. It is the default option and the odds-on bet, I suppose. If only there was some way to muster the support to force our political caste to change course but I see none.

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  7. It just dawned on me that, of all the threats our species had to surmount over 200 thousand years, the one that might lead us to our destruction is us - our complacency and incredibly short vision. We very much brought this on ourselves and we can't even claim that we didn't know any better. We did, we just chose to look the other way.

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  8. It's not really that much of a contribution, but my Pioneer 727 continues to outperform any of the wonderful conveniences moving through or sitting in those junkyards. I only had to deal with a direct-coupling issue once. That was over twenty years ago. My Toshiba Blackstripe seems to be biting it at long last - turning into a widescreen of sorts. I admit that it's more a matter of frugality than social consciousness.

    Rising inequality may pose a threat in the long term to the value of my real estate and rental income. A minimum-wage economy may prove inadequate to the fulfillment of my expectations. That's why it's so important now to encourage the presence of foreign-sourced capital in this market rather than burdening it with excessive regulation.

    Somebody help me.

    ...

    If you don't know where you are, you might just be confused. But if you don't know and have no interest in determining how you got there, then you're lost. Market libertarianism has been creeping up on us from the flanks ever since somebody left the door unlocked at the institute sometime after WW2. I've been screaming at and about the lying frauds that promote it and the deluded fools that listen to them since I first encountered its organizational efforts forty years ago, but I'll admit that I haven't punched anyone.

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  9. @John B
    That's why it's so important now to encourage the presence of foreign-sourced capital in this market rather than burdening it with excessive regulation.

    As i see it; foreign capital seems to come with it's own rules, not ours!

    The USA is do as I say not as I do and China seems to use Canada as a place to park money not to use it.

    Re somebody help me..
    Me too.
    Real Estate is the new savings bank for world wide 'investors' be they tax evaders , loan sharks, money launderers or what have you!
    The super rich evade paying taxes .

    There seems to be little investment in any country unless they offer tax discounts or access to resources with no environmental consequences.
    I guess this is what happens when we have a multinationals that are more powerful than governments.

    Perhaps our future would be better with a few more Jeremy Corbyn's ??
    I really don't know but I feel it's worth a discussion.
    The West has not had a truly socialist government in power for a long time!

    TB

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  10. That's right. When foreign money (whether of shady origin or not so) that purchases real estate is referred to by people with straight faces as an "investment" in Canada, it's time to get out the barf bags.

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  11. Anyong...8:10....so true and very sad.

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  12. The Japanese like the Japanese for their lack of transparency.
    Koreans like Koreans for their hard work six days a week and protection of their newly developed democracy.
    The French like the French because of their wine.
    Brits like the Brits because of all their castles.
    Americans like Americans for their money and their nukes.
    Canadians like Canadians because they are NICE.

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