Andre Vltchek
Itinerant Philosopher and Journalist

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENTS XI JINPING AND VLADIMIR PUTIN

Dear Mr. President Xi Jinping,

Dear Mr. President Vladimir Putin,

The re-emerging specter of nuclear catastrophe is once again haunting the world.

The West is trying to isolate and provoke two great, proud, powerful and sovereign countries; China and Russia. It appears that the pathological desire to gain (or more precisely, re-gain) full control over the entire world is fully restraining all remaining flickers of rationality and humanism inside the brains of the politicians and business ‘elites’ in Washington, London and elsewhere.

The danger is real. It is enough to take a brief look at the map depicting the world at the beginning of the 20th Century, to realize that the West is capable of enslaving almost the entire Planet, by forcing through its colonialist and imperialist designs.

Western imperialism has already exterminated hundreds of millions of human beings, in all corners of the globe. And even now, it is still murdering millions, directly and indirectly.

Both China and Russia experienced the horrors of Western invasions. On several occasions, both nations had to turn to steel, in order to resist and to survive. And both nations are now, once again, standing tall, proudly facing those who are trying to break them, to force them into submission.

It is becoming clear now that China and Russia will not back off. It is because they both want, above all, peace and justice for this world. They suffered terribly from the invasions and wars. They know how high the price of freedom and independence is. But if attacked, they will not yield. They will fight, no matter how high the cost. They would fight to defend their own people, and to defend humanity, as they already have done on several occasions, losing millions, but in the end always defeating evil!

*

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hina and Russia are not alone! They have allies all over the world. Some allies are simple people in the oppressed countries; others consist of entire countries like South Africa, Iran, Syria or Cuba.

Until very recently, almost the entirety of Latin America stood by China and Russia and vice-versa. Great changes were taking place in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and elsewhere. Politically and economically, many South American countries began moving close, closer, towards Beijing and Moscow. The war against imperialism (re-) gained its new front.

Attempts to destabilize Latin American revolutions arose almost immediately. The West began ‘organizing’ and then supporting the ‘opposition movements’; funding hostile NGO’s, plotting and financing coups, demonizing new governments through propaganda and indoctrination campaigns.

Treasonous and morally corrupt local ‘elites’ quickly joined forces with Washington; their loyalties were, for centuries, with Europe and then with North America, as well as with multi-national companies.

I have been living and working in Latin America for many years. I know some of the continent’s greatest thinkers and revolutionaries, but I am also familiar with their oligarchs and feudal rulers. South American elites have no mercy for the common people of their nations. They cannot even be called “nationalists”. Just like the Western imperialists, they would easily sacrifice millions of innocent “un-people” (to borrow Orwell’s definition), in exchange for maintaining their privileges.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s happened in Chile before the 1973 US-sponsored coup against the socialist President Salvador Allende, the local elites are now, once again, determinedly ruining the local economies all over South America. They are ‘creating shortages’, organizing and mobilizing right-wing unions, while withdrawing billions of dollars from their countries. For them it is no longer about business or making profits (they have plenty of money stored abroad), but about retaining control over their countries, often on behalf of the West.

Recently, Argentinian socialism collapsed, and the neo-fascist President Macri gained power. Brazil was hit by a coup, which gave corrupt, mostly evangelical, and right-wing pro-Washington politicians, de-facto control over the country. Both Argentina and Brazil began dismantling their social policies, signing ludicrous deals with the North, including those that will soon allow the United States to build military bases in Tierra del Fuego and elsewhere.

The West is achieving its goals; to torpedo BRICS, to weaken the anti-imperialist global alliance, and to discredit the Latin American model through its indoctrination channels.

Almost overnight, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba had lost two of their economically most powerful Latin American allies.

And the West will not stop. Venezuela is next on its mafia-style hit list, as well as Ecuador, most likely followed by Bolivia!

I have just returned from South America. Argentina is waking up to a horrible nightmare. The Brazilian people feel that they were swindled, fooled. There are protests shaking Argentinian and Brazilian cities. But many feel almost hopeless, faced by such Machiavellian, complex and ‘perfectly’ organized operations fielded by the collusion between the West and local ‘elites’.

I have also worked, recently, in Ecuador, where I became convinced that the West would never give up its attempts to destroy all progressive governments and regain full control over what it believes is its ‘backwater’.

The tactics used to destabilize entire countries are the same everywhere. For many years I have been traveling to virtually all corners of the world, wherever the Empire has been trying to break the will of the people: from Ukraine and China, to Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Iran, South Africa, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, to mention just a few of the most ‘obvious’ places. My latest book: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”, is more than 800-pages ‘heavy’, and full of examples of how those tactics are applied on all continents.

But in South America, the West is now attacking almost the entire continent, and it does it openly, with no shame.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]efending the independence of this continent – South America – is essential for the survival of humankind.

This is the frontline now! But it is the frontline where one nation after another is collapsing under the terrible pressure of destructive, mainly foreign forces collaborating tightly with each nation’s own Fifth column—its national oligarchy. It goes without saying that if the Empire wins here, it will try ‘not to lose momentum’; it will immediately move to another part of the world that is still standing. The destructive work will continue, (while hundreds of millions lives get ruined) until the Empire’s final victory, or until it gets decisively confronted and stopped!

In Caracas, Quito and La Paz, we are now witnessing an epic fight for the entire continent, but also indirectly for Moscow, Beijing, as well as for those still defenseless countries scattered all over the world.

It is because this fight is essentially for the survival of the basic principles of humanism, decency and solidarity. It is a battle against the most cynical and oppressive forces on Earth! In short, it is a battle against ‘imperialism’, which is synonymous with ‘fascism’!

*

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]enezuela is still standing, but it is screaming, suffering, and in terrible pain.

It cannot go on like this for too long; it cannot survive alone.

It either receives some substantial help, or it will eventually collapse.

The economic scavengers are already encircling its weakened body; even speculating and betting on its foreign debt. The ‘opposition’ is so sure of its upcoming macabre victory that it is already allocating posts in future governments to its members.

The point has come when Venezuela cannot defend itself alone anymore. For years it topped the hit list of the Empire. For years no effort to ruin it was spared: coups, assassinations, economic blackmail, and a constant, ferocious media war!

And still, for so many years, Venezuela has been showing great solidarity with the rest of the world. It has stood at the vanguard of the fight against imperialism. It was spreading foreign aid all over the world, while it was flying (via TeleSUR) those optimistic and inspiring voices of the Latin American revolution, to all corners of our Planet. (I made five documentary films for TeleSUR, in several conflict zones of the world, under almost impossible circumstances; something that makes me, to this day, immensely proud).

Like China and Russia, Venezuela refused to crack even under tremendous pressure.

It began building a new, great and united South American fatherland, returning optimism, zeal and hope to the people of the continent that has been, for centuries, tormented and continuously raped by the West/North.

Not everything was done ‘perfectly’, but nothing in this world is or should be expected to be perfect. The Venezuelan (Bolivarian) Revolution is called the process; it is a long and complex journey, but a breathtaking journey nevertheless – from slavery to freedom, to internationalism and social equality.

The Venezuelan people are now paying an immense price for not abandoning their principles. They are castigated mercilessly by the Empire, for making their own choices, for defending their freedom, and for refusing to return to subservience. But above all, they are punished for returning hope to others, for inspiring others, millions of others, all over the world!

Because hope is what the Empire tries to strangle, mercilessly, everywhere.

Venezuela clearly demonstrated that a different world is possible, that solidarity is still alive, and that the revolution can serve the people.

If Venezuela dies, at least it will die standing.

“Here, nobody surrenders!” These were words of Hugo Chavez, printed on the iconic election poster, after his death. Here Chavez, already gravely ill, with his face covered by raindrops, was defiantly clenching his fist.

When the poster appeared, I was in Caracas. I stood there, in front of it, for at least one hour, in the middle of the square, unable to move. I thought, as many others most likely did: “A true revolutionary should go all the way! If he doesn’t dare to, he should better stay where he is and go nowhere at all.”

Chavez went all the way and Venezuela followed him – a true revolutionary and his remarkable Bolivarian motherland.

Yes, if it would have to die, Venezuela would die standing. But it should never be allowed to perish!

*

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have both Russian and Chinese blood in my veins. I was born in Russia. And I spent many years in Latin America, writing, making films, covering wars and then revolutions. And followed then, by the Western subversions!

For me an alliance, and even some sort of unity between China, Russia and South America, is the essential pre-condition for the survival of humanity.

The West knows that such an alliance would break its monopoly on power; that all three models are now inspiring billions of people all over the world. These models may be different to some extent, but the bottom line is always the same: putting the people first, while trying to deter neo-colonialism and imperialism.

If that bottom line were to prevail, that would mean the end of a long and bloody period of Western global dictatorship. It is that simple!

The West would rather murder billions than to accept its defeat. Because ‘defeat’ would mean that its countries would have to finally behave as equals towards the rest of the world, something culturally and psychologically unacceptable to most North Americans and Europeans.

The world has to finally defend itself. It has to defend its people. Too many lives have already been lost, too many nations plundered and ruined. Now countries under the attack should embrace each other, help each other, and not to allow each other to fall.

The Western propaganda machine is spreading sinister but very effective lies that “all large countries are the same, that they have identical imperialist tendencies”.

The only way to contradict such fabrications is to offer concrete and bright examples to the contrary.

The world has been drowning in the cynicism and nihilism administered by the Empire. In order to snap out from depression, in order to erect the great flags of the resistance again, people need a substantial dose of emotions, optimism, poetry, and human warmth. They also need true leadership.

They need big and powerful countries like China and Russia to show the way.

To inspire the world, it is not enough to do “economically well”, or to be “strong” (although those are essential pre-conditions for progress and even for survival). What people all over the world are longing for, are solidarity, social commitments and internationalism.

Both China and Russia are offering exactly those, and have been for many decades. But it is often done in a subdued and modest way. Therefore, for the lackey Western mass media, which still controls the flow of information in most parts of the world, it is still easy to omit, and even to deny the truth.

To bail out, to rescue Venezuela, would send a powerful message to both the Empire and to the rest of the world.

It would be a truly positive message, full of optimism, decency and pride.

In Russia, a country that suffered immensely from countless foreign invasions, there is one important term – “наши” (“ours”). The world is clearly divided between those who are “ours” (our loved ones, our comrades, compatriots, friends and allies), and enemies.

By nature, the Russian people are immensely loyal to those whom they have already accepted as their close ones, as “ours”. They are loyal to their comrades to the point that they would, without even blinking, die defending them or give them their last shirt or a piece of bread. There is no limit to the generosity towards those that Russian people love.

And Chinese solidarity is legendary as well. Otherwise, how could this enormous country lift almost all of its citizens out from poverty?

If Venezuela is defended and saved, the message to the Empire and to the world would be powerful and clear: “Do not touch ‘our’ brothers and sisters! If you harm them, you will be confronted.”

*

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n Russia, during the old days, the rallying cry, the call to battle was often “they are beating our people!”

And this is exactly what is happening now. “They are beating our people!” Venezuela, our beautiful and proud sister, our comrade, our ally, is being tortured, humiliated and devastated!

Let us stand up. Let us not allow Venezuela to be violated.

I have lost all my hope for the hypocritical, toothless Western “Left”. With some bright exceptions, it will do nothing, absolutely nothing practical to help! As it did nothing to rescue Cuba when Cuba was bleeding. It had to be China, after all, which extended its powerful hand across the seas towards Havana saving the revolution!

And now, again, only Beijing and Moscow would be able to make that decisive and powerful epic gesture!

As was demonstrated when China rescued Cuba, and is now being shown where Russia is fighting for Syria; these two great and brave nations are willing to get engaged when the time is ripe, and therefore capable of saving Venezuela!

*

President Xi Jinping, President Vladimir Putin, I am writing this letter with great respect for both of you personally, and with profound admiration for your countries. In many ways I also belong to both Russia and China, despite my determined internationalism, and my perpetual lack of “home”.

I also write this with great hope.

I do not know how to resolve the situation practically – how to save Venezuela in a sensible but also truly determined way. I cannot offer any practical political advice to the two of you – great leaders of two enormous countries.

I have merely outlined the global situation, the murderous drive of the Empire and the plight of Latin America, the continent, which is so deeply engraved in my heart.

And I am stating the obvious: now it is only China and Russia that can save Venezuela. And I am also repeating what we all already know, in South America, in China and in Russia: “Only if united, we will never get defeated!”

 

With great respect,
Andre Vltchek

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=By= Claire Bernish

Thankfully there is one sane place left on the planet. Shall we all move to Scotland?

In one fell swoop, Scotland banned fracking — permanently — when parliament narrowly voted in favor of cementing the country’s temporary moratorium on the controversial practice.

With the original intention of conducting full health and environmental impact assessments before continuing with all unconventional oil and gas extraction — including fracking — Scotland implemented a temporary halt to all such procedures in January 2015.

Members of the ruling Scottish National Party abstained from the vote, which passed 32 to 29, though SNP Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse claimed the government remains “deeply sceptical” of fracking and none would be allowed to proceed unless distinct evidence proved the practice ‘causes no harm,’ the Guardian reported.

Scottish Labour Party environment spokesperson, Claudia Beamish, said following the vote,

The SNP government must now clarify whether or not they will respect the will of parliament and introduce an outright ban on fracking. It would be outrageous for this important vote to be ignored.

While ignoring the will of lawmakers could potentiate serious divisions — and, as the Guardian noted, represents a “significant defeat” for the new parliament — SNP has no explicit obligation to follow the non-binding vote.

“There is no doubt about the science,” Beamish continued, “to meet our climate change goals and protect our environment we need to develop low carbon sources of energy, not another fossil fuel. Labour’s position is clear: no ifs, no buts, no fracking.”

Opposition Conservative Party members expressed frustration over the fracking defeat, as the unconventional extraction method could boost jobs and the country’s economy.

In sharp contrast to the vote in Scotland, the U.K.’s North Yorkshire County Council recently gave the go-ahead to resume drill tests for shale gas — after five years of being frack-free — despite significant protest.

One council planning officer claimed 36 letters supported restarting fracking — while 4,375 had opposed the move.

Friends of the Earth and Frack Free Ryedale issued a joint “People’s Declaration” condemning the decision, which stated, in part:

We, as people united across Yorkshire and across Britain, declare that we remain opposed to fracking in Yorkshire, in Britain, and across the world. We know that fracking carries serious risks to local people, to our health, our water, our wildlife, and contributes to climate change.

We are extremely disappointed that North Yorkshire County Council has not listened to the overwhelming wishes of the locally elected representatives of Ryedale and local people and has approved Third Energy’s application to frack our county.

This decision is not in our name.

On the Scottish vote, Lothian MSP and Land Reform spokesperson for the Scottish Greens, Andy Wightman, introduced a successful amendment calling for “radical and ongoing reform to democratise land.”

Following the vote, he said, “With the notable exception of the Tories, there is clearly an appetite for radical land reform in this session of parliament and tonight’s vote puts the pressure on government to deliver on that expectation” the Guardian reported.

Activists within the SNP agitating for bolder action on land reform should question their party’s decision in chamber today.

 

 

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This article (Scotland Just Banned Fracking Forever) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

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=By= Shane Burley

There is a shift across the country to arm campus security. This is intertwined with the growing militarization of police. Portland State University (Portland, Oregon) is one of those places and there is an active student push back against this shift. One of the implications of arming campus security obviously shifts more college finances out of the academic arena, and student services are one of the first things on the budget chopping block. – rw

As the student leaders of the Portland State Student Union, or PSUSU, began leading chants to “disarm” the university, hundreds of students and community leaders had already begun circling the steps of the library. The rally was the meeting point for a planned student and faculty “walkout” on May 10, where more than 400 students promised to leave class to protest the Board of Trustees’ decision to arm campus police officers — which organizers see as just a piece of the larger trend towards the militarization of police officers around the country.

“Our incarceration system is a continuation of slavery,” said Portland Jobs With Justice coalition organizer Andrea Lemoins. “It targets people of color. It targets people in the LGBTQ community. It targets people who are traditionally oppressed, and we are here fighting oppression.”

Portland Jobs With Justice, which is an action coalition of over a hundred community groups and unions, was only one of the dozens of community sponsors that endorsed PSUSU’s campaign to confront the use of lethal armaments on the urban campus for the state university.

The Disarm PSU campaign is just the most recent organizing drive in a sequence of campus movements around the country to confront the increased use of lethal arms on college campuses. According to a U.S. Department of Justice survey of the over 4,000 campus police departments in 2011-2012, around 92 percent of public universities have armed police, as opposed to 38 percent of private schools.

Walking out

One of the first high-profile incidents of campus police violence was the fatal shooting of 43-year-old African American Samuel DuBose on the University of Cincinnati campus in July 2015. While stopped for a missing license plate, DuBose started his engine and put the car in drive. Ray Tensing — a sworn police officer — opened fire, erroneously reporting that the vehicle was dragging him. Tensing was later indicted for murder and manslaughter charges by an investigating grand jury, and a $4.5 million dollar settlement was issued to the DuBose family from the university. This included free college tuition for each of DuBose’s 12 children.

The shooting also prompted the formation of Irate 8 — a University of Cincinnati campus group whose name refers to the percentage of African American students on the campus. The group has instituted a 10-point set of demands on the university, including calling for extra scrutiny on campus police officers and for the university to address the racial disparity in curriculum and staffing.

The arguments against the arming of campus security are based largely on the disproportionate use of force that organizers say has become increasingly common among police departments across the country.

“It poses a disproportionate threat to students of color, people who are houseless, people who suffer from mental illness,” said Olivia Pace, a PSUSU organizer with the Disarm PSU campaign. “They have been criminalized and talked about as people who we need to be protected against, when — in fact — they are a part of our campus community. So, really, [the arming of campus security] poses a threat of violence and fear to those students.”

Critics also argue that the types of crimes committed on campus are not ones where armed police need to intervene. According to the U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security, burglary was the leading crime by a wide margin at PSU between 2011-13. Student groups like PSUSU call for campus security to find alternative solutions that do not rely on lethal force and criminalization to solve issues of safety on public university campuses.

Organizers at the University of California’s Davis campus were among the first to challenge their school’s use of fully-sworn police officers — with access to weapons and the ability to make arrests — following an infamous November 2011 incident, where police pepper sprayed Occupy UC Davis protesters. An August 2015 incident pushed the issue even further, as UC Davis campus police used force to detain a black alumni who was using campus facilities. A campus march called “Divest, Disarm: Davis for Black Lives” was held in November, linking the campaigns to disarm campus police and divest from private prisons with the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.

Similarly, the Campaign for Equitable Policing in Chicago has united students from the University of Chicago and nearby residents, who were troubled by the apparent overreach of campus police into their neighborhoods. In October, they held a community forum to bring together people from the surrounding community to discuss what many call a systemic level of racial profiling.

A student uprising

With its growing and diverse membership of nearly 50 active student organizers — not to mention community and labor support — Disarm PSU is becoming a leader in the movement against campus militarization.

The fight went into high-gear in 2013 when a report from the university’s Presidential Task Force on Campus Safety was published, outlining public safety issues on campus, along with recommendations on how to address them. Even though the report listed violent person-to-person crimes as only a small fraction of campus crimes, the recommendations included bringing sworn police officers to campus that contract with the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau. This would mean that beyond the non-sworn security officers, PSU would bring on fully-registered police officers who carry guns and have the right to arrest. This was recommended despite the fact that PSU is in downtown Portland, where it already has direct access to both of the contracted police departments. Not surprisingly, for many of the concerned students, the task force was comprised of many PSU staff, but only two student delegates.

The Board of Trustees, which student activists say is not directly accountable to staff or students, passed the recommendations and put them into effect last July. The plan went ahead despite overwhelming opposition by two-thirds of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers members on campus, as well as opposition from numerous college departments, such as the Chicano Latino Studies and Black Studies departments.

“The task force recommended having officers who are trained in using firearms because certain situations require them: serving search warrants and performing off-campus welfare checks, to name a few,” said the administration through an FAQ created during the implementation of the police force. It went on to say that in the previous situation, with the campus being tied to the larger cityscape without a barrier, it was unable to meet threats if they were to happen.

In opposition, PSUSU and other campus activists disrupted Board of Trustee meetings by overwhelming the discussion session, forcing trustees to leave the building rather than confront the opposition. Tying together issues like inflated administrative salaries and tuition increases to board decisions, students are calling for the long-term project of dissolving the board in favor of a decision making body that is more accountable to stakeholders.

The May 10 student eruption on campus came after the decision to use armed police was implemented. Over 500 people began a roaming march and speak-out that brought together a diverse set of voices from the campus and surrounding community.

“I support your movement,” mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone told the crowd. “I don’t want militarized police on our campus, and I’m running for mayor right now because I don’t want them in our city.” Iannarone had been running against local Democratic politicians Ted Wheeler and Jules Bailey on a progressive platform addressing issues like the minimum wage and housing insecurity in the city, but ended up finishing third with under 10 percent of the vote.

“We need to de-criminalize poverty in this city,” Iannarone added. “We need to de-criminalize being black or brown in this city.”

PSUSU created the Disarm PSU campaign to maintain a broader look at equity and justice on campus with four key demands: disarming campus police, severing the contracts with the anti-union food service company Aramark, bringing all campus workers up to $15 per hour and lowering tuition costs by cutting the salaries of the highest paid administrative staff.

After speaking in front of the library, the campus security building, and in the Urban Plaza, the protesters moved to the Fourth Avenue Building where they staged a “die in” to confront the increased threat they say armed police present on campus, as well as the economic burden of low-wages and high tuition.

“The students, at their core, want democracy in the university, and that’s not what we have right now with the Board of Trustees model,” said PSUSU organizer Alyssa Pagan. “When we say that we want the campus to not have armed security, the Board of Trustees heard that and didn’t take any action to move in accordance with that. So there’s no system of accountability.”

With support mounting both around Portland’s progressive community to endorse the Disarm PSU campaign, as well as the growing campus movement towards alternative solutions to armed police officers, pressure is forming around the Board of Trustees to reverse its decision. While the board has said that it allowed sufficient time for student and community feedback before reaching its decision, PSUSU activists say the board represents an unelected and unaccountable decision-making body that is not representative of the constituencies comprising the bulk of Portland State University.

“The climate of activism has kind of exploded across the country,” Pace said, refering to the movement to target police violence both on and off campus. “The fight for the de-militarization of the police is something that has really come to the forefront.”

The board finally agreed to sit down with the students on May 25 to hear concerns about tuition, scholarships, diversity and campus police. While many students spoke out, the board has made no promises about changing decisions other than stating publicly that it would “discuss them.”

For the student union, this will be just a piece of a larger set of demands to reshape the college’s priorities in order to align with a more multi-racial, working-class base. This means continuing to confront the Board of Trustees, which many organizers say is the central component that is driving many of the unpopular campus decisions.

“It’s so much more than just disarming campus security,” Pagan said, regarding the growing student movement on the PSU campus. “It’s about a small handful of people who are very wealthy and [who] are serving their business interests on the backs of students.”

 

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Shane Burley is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer based in Portland, Oregon. His work as appeared in places such as In These Times, Truth-Out, Labor Notes, Waging Nonviolence, CounterPunch, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. He contributed a chapter on housing justice movements to the recent AK Press release “The End of the World As We Know It?” and has work in upcoming volumes on social movements. His most recent documentary “Expect Resistance” chronicles the intersection of the housing justice and Occupy Wallstreet movement. His work can be found at ShaneBurley.net, or reach him on Twitter at @shane_burley1.

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=By= Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk

That is, there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise. . . . nonthinking is even more dangerous. – Hannah Arendt

Wherever we turn, it seems that there is a great narrowing. Ideas that have engaged great leaders, philosophers, poets and visionaries through the ages are being boxed away as if they are obvious, and settled. What is human progress? What do we mean by ‘growth’?  What is freedom? How do we balance our wants and needs against those of future generations? These are the foundations of human life and society and yet there is ever-less interest in them in the corridors of global power.

The front edge of this wave is that mesh of political and corporate actors who wield material global power; this includes the leaders of G20 nations and Fortune 500 companies and the vast majority of parliamentarians and executives that surround them. Each of them will give you the same basic answers. They will say that progress is, first and foremost, economic growth. Everything – by which they mean everything  – else is secondary because it’s necessarily an offshoot of that growth; it’s the economy, stupid! Growth, in turn, is the increase of profit or the national equivalent, Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Ergo, GDP is progress. Freedom is the capacity of me and mine to have and to own, to progress and to grow according to the above. Our wants and needs are paramount; sacrificing an inch of that freedom is unconscionable.

And that’s if they’re moderates. It matters little, now, whether they are nominally on the left or right of any aisle; everyone with direct access to global power believes the above to be so obvious as to preclude alternatives. How else, they say, could it possibly be?

The answer to which should be, how long have you got?

This narrowing is happening at a time when what is required is a great expansion. Is this truly the best/worst system human beings can create? Does economic growth really capture who we are?  Does vast inequality represent the best humanity can do? Is destruction of our planetary habitat inevitable? To answer these sorts of questions we need more options, not more uniformity; more deep thinking, not more rote acceptance; more opposition, not more repetition of the cold, dry lie that there is no alternative.

We would like to suggest that our only absolute limitation is our collective imagination, expressed through our will to change the mythologies that hold this house of cards together. We believe there is an emergent consciousness, stretching out against this narrowing, gradually becoming aware of itself and its awesome power.

We can hear its insurgent voice in social movements as diverse as the Arab Spring, the Chilean Winter, the Idle No More Indigenous movement, the anti-corruption movements in Brazil and India, the gentle but insistent dissent of Occupy Central in Hong Kong, the furious disbelief of protestors in Ferguson and New York City, and the dozens of African Awakenings happening across the Continent. They are each different and specific, but at the heart of all of them is a voice saying that we have a system that is failing 99% of us.  As whole populations are learning to communicate and think together in order to cope with whole-world problems, it says, we can do much, much better.

Our system of modern capitalism is just one story; it is not the only one there is.  It’s not inherent within us.  It isn’t some inevitable expression of predefined Human Nature. It was invented by human beings and so human beings can change it.  But in order to get there, we first have to engage in some ‘dangerous thinking’.

Dangerous Thought One: Ideology  rules

Those in power have always told us to beware of ideology. There is a strong inference that it represents a warping of our pragmatic ability to get things done by whatever means necessary. But that’s just plain wrong. And a necessary distraction, of course. Ideology is the set of ideas and ideals we all must hold to operate in the world. It is not a weakness of those who don’t agree with us.

The deep irony is that by demonising ideology they are clearing space for their ideology in particular. If only bad or stupid people are ideological, the logic goes, those we vote for and buy from, who fill our TV screens and make our laptops, somehow can’t be ideologues themselves.  The ideas that bind them must be above ideology. That is their story.

But is there any way in which the US spending of $400 billion annually on the military is not a statement of ideology?  Or the subsidization of very large, very rich corporations like Exxon Mobil or GE with taxpayer’s money? Or the failure to regulate the casino banks of Wall Street? These are all active strategies for success by some measure, grounded in ideas and ideals, and so are, by definition, deeply ideological. Simply saying your ideals float above ideology doesn’t make it so. It simply turns our fear of ‘being ideological’ into a means of reinforcing the potency of the status quo. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek says, “ideology is always a background condition”.

 

The dominant ideology in the world today is called neoliberal capitalism. Some call it the Washington Consensus or Market Fundamentalism, but for the sake of this conversation, we’ll call it Neoliberalism.

Quite simply, it is a practical expression of three philosophical premises. First, that our relationship to others is best filtered through a competitive lens (am I better, richer, etc.), which inevitably leads to rigid hierarchies, zero-sum logic and a lot of unthinking dogma.

Second, it equates wealth with life success, which is then equated to virtue (e.g. rich people are good, poor people are bad, therefore poverty is a moral failing). Finally, the individual is the primary unit of power (e.g. Thatcher’s famous line “There is no such thing as society, just individuals and families”). People are responsible to themselves first, peers second, and possibly their God, in that order. Classic Ayn Rand.

The implications for this ‘moral philosophy’ are diabolical. It leads directly to the economics of the self-obsessed individual, which leads to the atomization of our society and the focus on personal consumption as salvation. It justifies the bankrupt notion of trickle down economics, smuggling in notions such as: ‘self-interest benefits everyone’, ‘there’s an all-knowing invisible hand’, ‘there is supreme efficiency in the market’, ‘the more rich people the better’, etc. And it prioritizes private property rather than the collective ownership, which in turn leads to what the late Harvard economist J.K. Galbraith called “private affluence and public squalor”.

Neoliberalism can be summarized by this equation: selfishness is rational and rationality is everything; therefore selfishness is everything.

Dangerous Thought Two: Climate change and inequality are created by our current economic system.

How many of us truly believe the old economist’s trope that the world’s major issues such as climate change and inequality are ‘externalities’ of our current system; things that have come to be entirely alongside or even in spite of what humans have been doing? It is self-evident that they are the logical outcome of a system that requires ever more consumption to drive perpetual material growth, and that is fueled by the extraction of a finite supply of natural resources.

Bloomberg recently reported that for every dollar of income created in the US since 2008, 93 cents of the income growth has gone to top 1%. So it doesn’t matter where that money is made, 93 cents is going to the top 1%. Therefore, every dollar of wealth created by definition creates more inequality. As coders would say, this is not a bug in the system, but a feature of the system.

Relatedly, the activist and scholar Firoze Manji has suggested that climate change is not man made, but capital made. Every dollar of wealth created in the world heats up our planet because we have an extractives and fossil fuel based economy.

Capitalism turns natural resources into commodities in order to attract more capital. That’s its sole purpose. As the recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has shown, we are now on course for a 3-4 degree rise in temperature by 2050, which is correlated to a 40% – 50% loss of biodiversity. In other words, half of all plant and animal life on this planet will no longer be with us in under 40 years because of the voracious human appetite for more growth. Scientists tell us that we are already in 6th great planetary extinction with 150 – 200 species dying every day. This is 1000 times the baseline rate of extinction.

The logic of neoliberalism and our current economic system locks us into this path dependency, so it feels like we can never risk slowing growth. We even subsidize our own destruction by giving more money to fossil fuel companies and expanding their ability to destroy the planet through additional infrastructure like new pipelines and oil exploration projects. Exxon made over $40 billion in profit last year, the highest profit in the history of money, while the US government gave them over $1 billion of tax payer money in subsidies in the same year. And they are paying less than 15% in tax, and paying zero federal tax.

Most of us understand these links and the logic, but with the great narrowing in the corridors of power there is seemingly no way to turn that knowledge into concerted action. At least, that is what the power elites would like us to believe.

Dangerous Thought Three: We all live in the Matrix

There are some of us who believe that we are exempt from the neoliberal operating system. That this is an American or British, or even now, a Chinese phenomenon. But we would argue that through globalization and the global rule of corporations, we have now entered a late stage of capitalism in which we effectively all live in a One Party Planet – the Neoliberal Party.

Under this party, we are connected into a virtual Matrix by a web of beliefs, laws and structures.

We are programmed from birth to believe in the moral philosophy of competition, individualism, the virtue of material consumption, and social status determined by the wealth hierarchy.

We are told that wealth is a sign of virtue. And it’s a short step from there to believing that those with the most money are the most virtuous, that they deserve to have power over the rest of us.

We are convinced that paying off every debt to rich corporations and people is a moral obligation – that if we can’t, there is something wrong with us and we deserve to be punished.

In reality, we all know instinctively that we are defined by our connections to each other. Our individuality is a truth within the intricate web of society. Our individuation may help us operate in the world and navigate relationships, but it is not an impermeable barrier that we should celebrate as the be all and end all of life.

It is self-evident that the richest are no less connected than anyone else, which means that they, like everyone else, rely on the society of humans around them for their wealth – on government subsidies and services, on public education and tax-funded research, and on the hard labour of people poorer than themselves.

 

 

Virtue is not the preserve of those who have hoarded the most money. If anything, the reverse is true. There is mounting scientific evidence to suggest that being so addicted to material wealth that you acquire it in the millions or billions is an unhealthy addiction that stunts moral, emotional and spiritual growth, and it can lead to highly sociopathic behaviour.

The line between sociopathic behaviour and a psychopathy is blurry at best. Just look at how large corporations, very often supported by governments, are forever coming up with even more ingenious ways to create debt, and aggressively promote ways of life and moral codes that require it so they can be confident that we will keep funneling money in their direction in the form of interest. This is a means of ensuring we remain submissive and docile as we focus all of our energy struggling to meet the obligations they have defined.

When there is potential to overturn the operating system – for example, the 2008 financial crisis – it in fact punishes the poor first and hardest as we are enmeshed in the global capital infrastructure from the food we buy to where our pensions are invested. The old trope holds true that the rich become even richer because power begets power, and money begets money – and the two are interchangeable. And this is what is most valued by the machine.

The Matrix is so powerful and adaptable that even when we do dissent, it often gets commodified and sold back to us. There were Occupy Wall Street posters being sold at Wal Mart last Christmas for over $40 USD a pop. Even techniques for spirituality are co-opted to make us better capitalists. There has been an exponential rise of Buddhism, yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic and other Eastern practices as crutches for mental burnout and spiritual ennui in capitalist countries.

The dark spider web of neoliberal belief is so powerful because it binds economic logic to a moral logic, so to question the economic logic (e.g. growth) is to question the morality of how we live and our very personhood. Since our jobs and our identities are all intertwined with that of the system, we are incapable of breaking free of the logic.

As the philosopher John Ralston Saul has said: “we assume that people of merit rise to the top of the system. But in fact, the system finds the people that are best constructed to further its own existence, and draws them to the top.” In other words, if the system values selfishness above all else, selfish people above all others will be rewarded with what the system has to offer.

We have all created our own stories in order to feel as comfortable as we can in the Matrix. People at the World Bank or the Gates Foundation believe they’re helping the poor, and in limited ways many of them are. People in advertising agencies think they’re contributing by being creative and increasing consumer choice, and at a micro-level this may be true. But by accepting and then validating the logic at the heart of the system they are in fact ensuring the murky waters of the status quo stay toxic. If we attempt to prune a tree in a rotten orchard, are we really having any impact on the health of the orchard?

 

Dangerous Thought Four: We live in false economy

So what is the root driver of all this madness? How deep do we have to dig?

The answer to that is, until we find what binds all the destructive forces. And within the current Matrix that we are all unmeshed, the root of growth is debt.

In a debt-based monetary system, the very creation of money creates debt. Therefore, growth has to exceed interest (which is the payback of debt) in order for capital to increase.

We thus get locked into perpetual debt-based growth, which creates inequality and destroys our planet. As David Attenborough has said, “If you believe in infinite growth on a finite planet, you are either a madman or an economist.”

We value the wrong thing – i.e. financial wealth – so we in turn measure the wrong thing – i.e. growth. We therefore live in a false economy.

Let’s give a concrete example. The global economy roughly grew at 3% last year (2014), which generated an additional $2.2 trillion in ‘new’ products and services. In other words, commodified natural resources and human labour to the tune of $2.2 trillion. This is equivalent of global GDP in 1970. It took us from the dawn of humanity to 1970 to achieve an annual GDP of $2.2 trillion dollars – we now require that amount just in the delta of a single year. Next year we may need 1974’s GDP, then 1990’s, etc.  Soon we’ll need to 2015’s GDP in order for the global Ponzi scheme not to implode.

The mathematical way to describe this is that we are now in a period of exponential growth. When this happens in an organism we call it cancer: uncontrollable growth of cells to the point of self-annihilation. And because we are all locked into a Matrix that serves the neoliberal ideology, we are made complicit in our own self-annihilation. Growth is couched in jobs and securing investments, and indeed that’s true, so it becomes all of our business to create further growth.

This is not a dark room conspiracy – from the survival of the most basic cell all the way up to the infinite complexity of the Internet, this is how complex adaptive systems behave. They create and emerge from matrices of energy and matter that support their existence. The logic of capital is merely the logic of a particular complex, adaptive system. As Thomas Picketty recently has proven in such detail, left to its own devices, the system will always reward capital with more capital, pulled from the sources of production it has.

And while the destruction amasses, we are sold a false idea of the economy as a necessary savior to keep us complicit.

In 2011, 110 of the 175 largest global economic entities on earth were corporations, with the corporate sector representing a clear majority (over 60 percent) over countries. The revenues of Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, were on par with the GDP of Norway and dwarfed the GDP of Thailand, Denmark or Venezuela.

In other words, more economic power is in private hands than public. Most corporations started the globalization process by exploiting human labor where it was cheapest and the rules were the most slack. They then capitalized on the lack of global governance around tax and essentially opted out of the social contract with humanity – there’s now $32 trillion sitting in tax havens and 60% of world trade happens between MNCs own subsidiaries, largely through what’s known as transfer mis-pricing. And then the kicker, they subverted our democracy. Research from Harvard’s Saffra Center for Ethics shows that corporations achieve up to a $220 ROI for lobbying Congress. Why would you ‘invest’ your money in anything else.

We are told that as the rich get richer the rest of us will get richer too.  But we know now that this is a lie. Average wages are lower today than they were in the 1960s, and household incomes are stagnating while the 1% are growing richer than ever before. Today, the richest 85 people in the world have more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion.

We are told that we can solve global poverty if rich countries give more aid to poor countries.  But see beyond the rhetoric and it’s horribly obvious that aid is flowing in the other direction.  Rich countries are rich because they grab land and natural resources, and exploit the human labor of poor countries.  We will only be able to eliminate poverty once we stop this plunder.

We believe that governments run the world, and that those governments are democratic.  But the most powerful entities on earth are corporations, not governments, run for private profit not public good.  And these corporations exercise undue influence over government policies.  In a system where money buys votes, democracy is nothing but an illusion, and the hopes and desires of the majority are rarely considered.

We believe that our media is free and impartial.  But in reality 90% of the media is controlled by only six corporations, which silence all criticism of their interests.  And our Internet – which we rely on to communicate and share ideas – is poisoned by a global network of state surveillance.

We are told to that our current way of living provides some kind of ‘order’ forgetting that the entire system has been built upon the history of colonialism, imperialism and genocide. Not to mention the constant state of war, and plunder from poorer nations, that is required to prop up the Western way of life.

The only way to change things is to change what the system itself values, and to change the very rules that articulate and maintain those values.

 

Dangerous Thought Five: Another story is possible

These myths are falling apart around us, and the story that they uphold is beginning to collapse.  The system is constructed by a set of laws and rules and beliefs constructed by human beings. As the comedian Russell Brand says, “Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.”

We yearn for a different story, a better story, a story that is truer to the values we know are right – a story that celebrates our connections to others and to our broader world.  We are eager to cast off debts, to stop being complicit in the exploitation of our brothers and sisters around the world, to cease the destructive pillage, to abandon the competition that turns friend into foe, and to recover our relationships.  We are ready for healing.

We know that there are other stories out there.

 

Anthropologists tell us that for most of human history we lived in small egalitarian societies that rewarded co-operation and sharing and punished selfishness and accumulation. No one is saying we can go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but it’s an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, we have over 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.

Just ten years ago scientists discovered what they call mirror neurons, proving that we are hard-wired for empathy.  And behavioral economists have shown that, when left to our own devices, tend to default to values of fairness and justice. These are the better, truer angels of our nature.

All we lack is the confidence to see beyond the constraints of the present story.  And we start by asking the hard questions we have been told not to ask.  People around the world are beginning to do just this.  They are rising up in response to our civilization’s crisis – from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, from protests in Brazil to the Chilean Winter, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the student uprising in Quebec, from the Idle No More Indigenous People’s movement to Transition Towns around the world – these are all expressions of a new world that is possible. They are sites of great hope for us all.  The world is beginning to heal—and we can take it farther, faster.

There are new ideas bubbling up all around the world that point to a better way. Some of these solutions are not difficult, like moving away from GDP as a measure of progress, taxing carbon at its source, creating a global wealth tax, banning certain types of advertising, putting a moratorium on rigged trade rules (like the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership), and even putting limits on how powerful corporations can become (e.g. the anti-trust laws that used to exist around the world, most notably in the United States up to the 1970s).  Others are more radical, like removing corporate money from politics, abolishing military spending, revoking corporations’ right to do business if they don’t serve our collective interest, moving to a four hour work day, providing a basic citizen’s income to every human being, devolving power to local communities governed by direct democracy, an even getting rid of our debt-based currency system altogether.

Ideas abound.  The decision is ours to reclaim our past and our future. Will we continue as soldiers of the status quo, regardless of destruction it will guarantee? Or will we stand with the world’s majority to create the better world we know is possible?

 

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Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk are founding members of /The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers and writers dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he death of Muhammad Ali strikes at the heart of what it means to lead a life of dignity, unsurpassed skill, and the willingness to step into history and call out its most insidious injustices. I am one of many, I am sure, whose heart is broken over the death of Muhammad Ali, who was a hero for those of us raised in the sixties and for whom he modelled that poetic dialectic between the body and a notion of resistance. For my working class generation, the body was all we had — a site of danger, hope, possibility, confusion, and dread — he elevated that understanding into the political realm by mediating those working class concerns into a brave and courageous understanding of politics as a site of resistance. He made it clear that resistance was a poetic act that was continually being written. He unsettled the racial order, protested the war, and danced in the ring like a butterfly — a master of wit, performance, and sheer courage. Resistance for Ali was not an option, but a necessity.

Originally published: The Hamilton Spectator

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