ISBN Paperback: 978-1-7356013-6-6, eBook: 978-1-7356013-5-9

08-13-2024 ~ As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality. Oxfam, a global charity, reported that 2022’s 10 richest men together had six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth. The lack of democracy inside workplaces or enterprises is both a cause and an effect of capitalism’s unequal distribution of income and wealth.

Of course, inequality predates capitalism. Powerful feudal lords across Europe had blended autocracy with unequal distributions of wealth on their manorial estates. In fact, the largest and most powerful among the lords—the one named king—was usually also the richest. Although revolts against monarchy eventually retired most kings and queens (one way or another), similarly rich dictators reemerged inside capitalist enterprises as major shareholders and CEOs. Nowadays, their palaces imitate the grandeur of kings’ castles. The fortunes of kings and top CEOs are similarly extreme and attract the same kind of envy, adulation, and reverence. They also draw the same criticism. Inequalities that marked the economy, politics, and culture of European feudalism reappeared in capitalism despite the intentions of many who revolted against feudalism. The problem: the employer/employee relationship is far less a break from the master/slave and lord/serf relations of production than capitalism’s champions had hoped for, assumed, and promised in order to secure mass support for their revolutions against slavery and feudalism.

The employer/employee relationship that defines capitalism has created staggering inequality by allowing the employer full control over production’s surplus. In the past, inequality provoked references to rich capitalists, variously, as “robber barons” or as “captains of industry” (depending on the public’s feelings about them). Today, they’re referred to as “the rich” or sometimes “the superrich.”

Is it true that everyone is free in a capitalist system? The answer depends on what is meant by “free.” Compare the freedom of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or other rich capitalists with your freedom. Capitalism distributes some income to you and some to Musk, Bezos, and the other rich capitalists. However, to say that capitalism makes each of you free ignores the reality that capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth makes you unfree relative to Musk, Bezos, and the other rich capitalists.

Freedom was never only about keeping the government from bothering you; it was always also about being able to act, choose, and make a life. To call us all free, to use the same word for everyone, erases the very real differences in our access to resources, opportunities, and choices needed for life. Musk is free to enjoy life, going wherever he likes and doing almost anything you could imagine. He may work but need not. The financial cost of anything he might want or need is totally irrelevant to him. The overwhelming majority of Americans have nothing remotely like such freedom. To say that in capitalism, all are free, like Mr. Bezos is nonsense. His freedom depends on the resources at his disposal. You lack the freedom to undertake all sorts of actions and choices because those resources are not at your disposal.

The freedom of the rich is not just different; their freedom negates the freedom of others. Unequal income and wealth always provoke anxiety among the rich. They fear the envy their wealth excites and invites. To protect their positions as systemically privileged recipients of income and, thus, accumulators of wealth, the rich seek to control both political and cultural institutions. Their goal is to shape politics and culture, to make them celebrate and justify income and wealth inequalities, not to challenge them. We turn now to how the rich shape culture to their benefit.

Unequal access to culture is a feature of capitalism. Culture concerns how people think about all aspects of life—how we learn, make, and communicate meanings about the world. Our culture shapes what we find acceptable, what we enjoy, and what we come to decide needs changing. In European feudalism, access to culture for most serfs was shaped chiefly by what the church taught. In turn, the church carefully structured its interpretation of the Bible and other texts to reinforce feudal rules and traditions. Lords and serfs funded the church to complete the system. In modern capitalism, secular public schools undertake formal education alongside or instead of churches and other private schools. In today’s world, school education celebrates and reinforces capitalism. In turn, the state taxes employers and mostly employees to fund public schools and subsidizes private schools (which also charge students).

Writers like Howard Zinn and Leo Huberman have penned histories of the U.S. showing that much of what standard school U.S. history textbooks lacked were accounts of the many class struggles against capitalism. Instead, rags-to-riches stories about people like Horatio Alger were popularized. Examinations of the roots of revolt and rebellion against low wages, bad working conditions, and all manner of hardship imposed on the workers of America, however, were not.

In capitalism, mainstream media sources are themselves mostly organized as capitalist enterprises. They depend on, understand, and support profit maximization as the driving force of their enterprises. Their CEOs can and do make all sorts of definitive decisions about what is aired, how events are interpreted, whose careers blossom, and whose end. CEOs hire and fire, promote and demote. On mainstream radio, TV, and film, we almost never see exciting dramas about anti-capitalist revolutionaries who win the day by successfully persuading employees to join them. Rags-to-capitalist-riches dramas are, in comparison, routine storylines in countless mainstream media productions.

In capitalism, culture is constrained to reinforce that system. Even individuals who privately criticize capitalism learn early in their careers to keep such criticisms private. Periodically, ideological battles can and do break out. If and when they coalesce with anti-capitalist upsurges elsewhere in society, cultural criticism of capitalism has been, and can again be, a powerful revolutionary force for systemic change. That is why defenders of the capitalist system instinctually and ceaselessly shape politics, economics, and culture to reinforce that system.

Capitalism has often undermined democracy and equality because doing so has reinforced and actually strengthened the capitalist organization of the economy. As an example of capitalism’s corruption of democracy and equality, we consider the mid-American town of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

As in so many other U.S. cities, Kalamazoo’s corporations and its rich have used their wealth and power to become richer and more powerful. By donating to politicians, threatening to take their businesses elsewhere, and hiring better lawyers than the city could afford, the rich reduced the amount of taxes they needed to pay to the local government. The rich funded costly, broadly targeted anti-tax campaigns that found a receptive audience among the already-overtaxed average citizens. Once deprived of the tax revenue from the rich, local politicians either (1) shifted more of the tax burden onto average citizens, (2) cut public services in the short run, and/or (3) borrowed money and thereby risked having to cut public services in the longer run to service city debts. Among those they borrowed from were sometimes the same corporations and the rich whose taxes had been reduced after they funded successful anti-tax campaigns.

Eventually, the city saw an accumulation of resident complaints about steadily cut public services (uncollected garbage, neglected streets, and deteriorated schools), alongside rising taxes and government fees. This litany is familiar in many U.S. cities. Eventually, upper- and middle-income residents started to leave. That worsened the existing set of problems, so even more people left. Then, two of Kalamazoo’s wealthiest and most powerful capitalists—William U. Parfet and William D. Johnston—developed a solution they promoted to “save our city.”

Parfet and Johnston established the “Foundation for Excellence in Kalamazoo.” They contributed, according to reports, over $25 million annually to it. Since such foundations usually qualify for tax-exempt status at federal, state, and local levels of government, the two gentlemen’s contributions lowered their personal tax bills. More importantly, the two could wield outsize local political influence. They would have much to say about how their foundation funded public services in Kalamazoo. In this city, the old democratic notion of everyone paying taxes to share in funding the public well-being was replaced by private charity. Public, reasonably transparent accountability was replaced by the less transparent, murkier foundation activities. Public accountability faded as the private whims of private foundations took over.

What used to be called a “company town” (when a major employer substituted its rule for any democratic town rule) often amounted, in the words of PBS, to “slavery by another name.” In their modern form, they appear as “foundation cities.” Old company towns were rejected nearly everywhere across U.S. history. But, as the Kalamazoo example shows, they have returned with names changed.

While capitalism’s general tendency is toward ever-greater inequality, occasional redistributions of wealth have happened. These moments have come to be called “reforms” and include progressive taxation of income and wealth, welfare entitlements, and minimum wage legislation. Redistributive reforms usually occur when middle-income and poor people stop tolerating deepening inequality. The biggest and most important example in U.S. history was the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New Deal policies of the federal government then drastically reduced the inequality of wealth and income distribution. Yet employers and the rich have never ceased their opposition to new redistributions and their efforts to undo old ones. U.S. politicians learn early in their careers what results when they advocate for redistributive reforms: an avalanche of criticism coupled with shifts of donors to their political opponents. Thus, in the U.S., after the end of World War II in 1945, the employer class changed the policies of the federal government. Over the past 80 years, most of what the New Deal won has been undone.

Corporations and the rich hire accountants skilled in hiding money in foreign and domestic places that evade reporting to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Called “tax havens,” those hiding places keep funds that remain untouched by tax collectors. In 2013, Oxfam published findings that the trillions stashed away in tax havens could end extreme world poverty—twice over. Yet since the revelation of this shocking statistic, the inequality of wealth and income has become more extreme in nearly every nation on earth. Tax havens persist.

Conflicts over income, wealth distribution, and wealth redistribution are thus intrinsic to capitalism and always have been. Occasionally they become violent and socially disruptive. They may trigger demands for system change. They may function as catalysts for revolutions.

No “solution” to struggles over income and wealth redistribution in capitalism was ever found. The reason for that is a system that increasingly enriches a small group. The logical response—proposing that income and wealth be distributed more equally in the first place—was usually taboo. It was thus largely ignored. The French revolutionaries of 1789, who promised “liberty, equality, and fraternity” with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, failed. They got that transition, but not equality. Marx explained the failure to achieve the promised equality resulted from capitalism’s core structure of employer and employee preventing equality. In Marx’s view, inequality is inseparable from capitalism and will persist until the transition to another system.

By Richard D. Wolff

Author Bio: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This adapted excerpt from Richard D. Wolff’s book Understanding Capitalism (Democracy at Work, 2024) was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Bangladesh – Map: en.wikipedia.org

08-12-2024 ~ On Monday, August 5, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina boarded a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J military transport in a hurry and fled to Hindon Air Force base, outside Delhi. Her plane was refueled and reports said that she intended to fly on either to the United Kingdom (her niece, Tulip Siddiq is a minister in the new Labor government), Finland (her nephew Radwan Mujib Siddiq is married to a Finnish national), or the United States (her son Sajeeb Wajed Joy is a dual Bangladesh-US national).
Army Chief Waker uz-Zaman, who only became Army Chief six weeks ago and was her relative by marriage, informed her earlier in the day that he was taking charge of the situation and would create an interim government to hold future elections.

Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh’s history. She was the prime minister from 1996 to 2001, and then from 2009 to 2024—a total of 20 years. This was a sharp contrast to her father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975 after four years in power, or General Ziaur Rahman who was assassinated in 1981 after six years in power. In a scene reminiscent of the end of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule in Sri Lanka, jubilant crowds of thousands crashed the gates of Ganabhaban, the official residence of the prime minister, and jubilantly made off with everything they could find.

Tanzim Wahab, photographer and chief curator of the Bengal Foundation, told me, “When [the masses] storm into the palace and make off with pet swans, elliptical machines, and palatial red sofas, you can feel the level of subaltern class fury that built up against a rapacious regime.” There was widespread celebration across Bangladesh, along with bursts of attacks against buildings identified with the government—private TV channels, and palatial homes of government ministers were a favored target for arson. Several local-level leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League have already been killed (Mohsin Reza, a local president of the party, was beaten to death in Khulna).

The situation in Bangladesh remains fluid, but it is also settling quickly into a familiar formula of an “interim government” that will hold new elections. Political violence in Bangladesh is not unusual, having been present since the birth of the country in 1971. Indeed, one of the reasons why Sheikh Hasina reacted so strongly to any criticism or protest was her fear that such activity would repeat what she experienced in her youth. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), the founder of Bangladesh, was assassinated in a coup d’état on August 15, 1975, along with most of his family. Sheikh Hasina and her sister survived because they were in Germany at that time—the two sisters fled Bangladesh together on the same helicopter this week. She has been the victim of multiple assassination attempts, including a grenade attack in 2004 that left her with a hearing problem. Fear of such an attempt on her life made Sheikh Hasina deeply concerned about any opposition to her, which is why up to 45 minutes before her departure she wanted the army to again act with force against the gathering crowds.

However, the army read the atmosphere. It was time for her to leave.

A contest has already begun over who will benefit from the removal of Sheikh Hasina. On the one side are the students, led by the Bangladesh Student Uprising Central Committee of about 158 people and six spokespersons. Lead spokesperson Nahid Islam made the students’ views clear: “Any government other than the one we recommended would not be accepted. We won’t betray the bloodshed by the martyrs for our cause. We will create a new democratic Bangladesh through our promise of security of life, social justice, and a new political landscape.” At the other end are the military and the opposition political forces (including the primary opposition party Bangladesh National Party, the Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, and the small left party Ganosamhati Andolan). While the Army’s first meetings were with these opposition parties, a public outcry over the erasure of the student movement forced the Army to meet with the Student Central Committee and listen to their primary demands.

There is a habit called polti khawa or “changing the team jersey midway through a football match” that prevails in Bangladesh, with the military being the referee in charge at all times. This slogan is being used in public discourse now to draw attention to any attempt by the military to impose a mere change of jersey when the students are demanding a wholesale change of the rules of the game. Aware of this, the military has accepted the student demand that the new government be led by economist Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s only Nobel Prize winner. Yunus, as the founder of the microcredit movement and promoter of “social business,” used to be seen as primarily a phenomenon in the neoliberal NGO world. However, the Hasina government’s relentless political vendetta against him over the last decade, and his decision to speak up for the student movement, have transformed him into an unlikely “guardian” figure for the protesters. The students see him as a figurehead although his neoliberal politics of austerity might be at odds with their key demand, which is for employment.

Students
Even prior to independence and despite the rural character of the region, the epicenter of Bangladeshi politics has been in urban areas, with a focus on Dhaka. Even as other forces entered the political arena, students remain key political actors in Bangladesh. One of the earliest protests in post-colonial Pakistan was the language movement (bhasha andolan) that emerged out of Dhaka University, where student leaders were killed during an agitation in 1952 (they are memorialized in the Shaheed Minar, or Martyrs’ Pillar, in Dhaka). Students became a key part of the freedom struggle for liberation from Pakistan in 1971, which is why the Pakistani army targeted the universities in Operation Searchlight which led to massacres of student activists. The political parties that emerged in Bangladesh after 1971 grew largely through their student wings—the Awami League’s Bangladesh Chhatra League, the Bangladesh National Party’s Bangladesh Jatiotabadi Chatradal, and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir.

Over the past decade, students in Bangladesh have been infuriated by the growing lack of employment despite the bustling economy, and by what they perceived as a lack of care from the government. The latter was demonstrated to them by the callous comments made by Shajahan Khan, a minister in Sheikh Hasina’s government, who smirked as he dismissed news that a bus had killed two college students on Airport Road, Dhaka, in July 2019. That event led to a massive protest movement by students of all ages for road safety, to which the government responded with arrests (including incarceration for 107 days of the photojournalist Shahidul Alam).

Behind the road safety protests, which earned greater visibility for the issue, was another key theme. Five years previously, in 2013, students who were denied access to the Bangladesh Civil Service began a protest over restrictive quotas for government jobs. In February 2018, this issue returned through the work of students in the Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Forum). When the road safety protests occurred, the students raised the quota issue (as well as the issue of inflation). By law, the government reserved seats in its employment for people in underdeveloped districts (10 percent), women (10 percent), minorities (5 percent), and the disabled (1 percent) as well as for descendants of freedom fighters (30 percent).

It is the latter quota that has been contested since 2013 and which returned as an emotive issue this year for the student protesters—especially after the prime minister’s incendiary comment at a press conference that those protesting the freedom fighter quotas were “rajakarer natni” (grandchildren of war traitors). British journalist David Bergman, who is married to prominent Bangladeshi activist lawyer Sara Hossain and was hounded into exile by the Hasina government, called this comment the “terrible error” that ended the government.

Military Islam
In February 2013, Abdul Quader Mollah of the Jamaat-e-Islami was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity during Bangladesh’s liberation war (he was known to have killed at least 344 civilians). When he left the court, he made a V sign, whose arrogance inflamed large sections of Bangladesh’s society. Many in Dhaka gathered at Shahbag, where they formed a Gonojagoron Moncho (Mass Awakening Platform). This protest movement pushed the Supreme Court to reassess the verdict, and Mollah was hanged on December 12. The Shahbag movement brought to the surface a long-term tension in Bangladesh regarding the role of religion in politics.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman initially claimed that Bangladesh would be a socialist and secular country. After his assassination by the military, general Ziaur Rahman took over the country and governed it from 1975 to 1981. During this time, Zia brought religion back into public life, welcomed the Jamaat-e-Islami from banishment (which had been due to its participation in the genocide of 1971), and—in 1978—formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) on nationalist lines with a strong critical stance toward India. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who took control after his own coup in 1982 and ruled until 1990, went further, declaring that Islam was the state’s religion. This provided a political contrast with the views of Mujib, and of his daughter Sheikh Hasina who took the reins of her father’s party, the Awami League, in 1981.

The stage was set for a long-term contest between Sheikh Hasina’s centrist-secular Awami League and the BNP, which was taken over by Zia’s wife Khaleda Zia after the General was assassinated in 1981. Gradually, the military—which had a secular orientation in its early days—began to witness a growing Islamist mood. Political Islam has grown in Bangladesh with the rise of piety in the general population, some of it driven by the Islamization of migrant labor to the Gulf states and to Southeast Asia. The latter has steadily reflected growth in observance of the Islamic faith in the aftermath of the war on terror’s many consequences. One should neither exaggerate this threat nor minimize it.

The relationship of the political Islamists, whose popular influence has grown since 2013, with the military is another factor that requires much more clarity. Given the dent in the fortunes of the Jamaat-e-Islami since the War Crimes Tribunal documented how the group was involved on the side of Pakistan during the liberation struggle, it is likely that this formation of political Islam has a threshold in terms of its legitimacy. However, one complicating factor is that the Hasina government relentlessly used the fear of “political Islam” as a bogeyman to obtain U.S. and Indian silent consent to the two elections in 2018 and 2024. If the interim government holds a fair election on schedule, this will allow Bangladeshi people to find out if political Islam is a dispensation they wish to vote for.

New Cold War
Far away from the captivating issues put forward by the students which led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina are dangerous currents that are often not discussed during these exciting times. Bangladesh is the eighth-largest country in the world by population, and it has the second highest Gross Domestic Product in South Asia. The role it plays in the region and in the world is not to be discounted.

Over the course of the past decade, South Asia has faced significant challenges as the United States imposed a new cold war against China. Initially, India participated with the United States in the formations around the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy. But, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has begun to distance itself from this U.S. initiative and tried to put its own national agenda at the forefront. This meant that India did not condemn Russia but continued to buy Russian oil. At the same time, China had—through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—built infrastructure in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, India’s neighbors.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that four governments in the region that had begun to collaborate with the BRI have fallen, and that their replacements in three of them are eager for better ties with the United States. This includes Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power in Pakistan in April 2022 with the ouster of Imran Khan (now in prison), Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly came to power in Sri Lanka in July 2022 after setting aside a mass uprising that had other ideas than the installation of a party with only one member in parliament (Wickremesinghe himself), and KP Sharma Oli, who came to power in July 2024 in Nepal after a parliamentary shuffle that removed the Maoists from power.

What role the removal of Sheikh Hasina will play in the calculations in the region can only be gauged after elections are held under the interim government. But there is little doubt that these decisions in Dhaka are not without their regional and global implications.

The students rely upon the power of the mass demonstrations for their legitimacy. What they do not have is an agenda for Bangladesh, which is why the old neoliberal technocrats are already swimming like sharks around the interim government. In their ranks are those who favor the BNP and the Islamists. What role they will play is yet to be seen.

If the student committee now formed a bloc with the trade unions, particularly the garment worker unions, there is the possibility that they might indeed form the opening for building a new democratic and people-centered Bangladesh. If they are unable to build this historical bloc, they may be pushed to the side, just like the students and workers in Egypt, and they might have to surrender their efforts to the military and an elite that has merely changed its jersey.

By Vijay Prashad

Author Bio: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Source: Globetrotter

James K. Boyce – Photo by Matthew Cavanaugh

08-12-2024 ~ Carbon dividends, public investment, and binding carbon-emissions reductions to commensurate reductions of toxic air pollutants from fossil fuels are three policies that narrow inequality rather than widening it.

Our planet is warming up at a record rate. Scientists believe that the climate is warming up as a consequence of the increase in greenhouse gases. Studies have also shown that there is a link between climate change and inequality. Yet, the global economy continues to be overly dependent on fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal—which are by far the largest contributor to global warming. What does all this say about current climate policies and the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050? And how do we address the twin challenges of inequality and climate change?

In the interview that follows, progressive political economist James K. Boyce sheds light on the above questions. James K. Boyce is a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and recipient of the inaugural Global Inequality Research Award. He is the author, among many other works, of The Case for Carbon Dividends and Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change.

C. J. Polychroniou: Over the past several years, climate records have been repeatedly broken. Last year was the planet’s hottest by a huge margin since global records began in 1850, and 2024 is on course to break that record again. Are climate policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions working, especially when we have wars going on that contribute significantly to climate change? Indeed, with everything going on, which includes increased demand for oil, is it at this point even realistic to expect that we can achieve climate neutrality by 2050?

James K. Boyce: You’re right, it’s getting hotter year by year. This is no surprise: it’s exactly what we can expect until the world reaches climate neutrality (net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases). Some climate policies are working better than others—it is not as if nothing is happening. Renewable energy from solar and wind has become cost-competitive more quickly than most people expected. But we are not on track to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. To do so we would need to phase out the use of oil, natural gas, and coal. Instead, global consumption of all three fossil fuels is at an all-time high.

You are right, too, that wars exacerbate the problem. They distract attention and resources from addressing the climate crisis, and they add to greenhouse gas emissions. In just the first two months of the war in Gaza, for example, carbon emissions (mostly from Israeli warplanes and U.S. weaponry supply flights) exceeded the annual emissions of 20 countries, according to a team of U.K. researchers. Postwar reconstruction, once this latest round of bloodshed ends, is likely to release much more.

You ask whether it is “realistic” to expect that we can achieve climate neutrality by 2050? Obviously not if we continue on this path.

Yet it is realistic to say that it is possible to achieve it. There is no technical reason it cannot be done: the obstacles are political. To do it, each country would need to set a hard ceiling on the quantity of fossil fuels entering its economy, a cap that declines year-by-year on a path to net zero. Restrictions on the supply of fossil fuels would raise their price—possibly a lot. But instead of the money going to into the bank accounts of oil producers, as happens when OPEC and oligopolistic corporations restrict their output to boost prices, the money could go directly back to the public on an equal per person basis with a cap-and-dividend system. This would maintain the real incomes of working people in the face of rising fuel prices, and it would make a modest contribution to addressing the other great challenge of our time, curbing rampant inequality.

I wish I could tell you this will happen sooner rather than later. But the political stars do not seem to be favorably aligned at this moment. That said, the climate crisis is not going to disappear. Pretending it’s not real doesn’t make it any less real. It will keep worsening unless and until we achieve climate neutrality.

Think about that: it will keep getting worse. Climate change is not like a cliff, where once we fall off the edge it is too late to do anything. Instead, it is a cascade of damages, with costs that grow exponentially over time. To proclaim that before long it will be “too late” to do anything about it would be irresponsible and misleading. Each ton of carbon is more harmful than the one that came before. Each day we delay, the need for action becomes more urgent, not less.

C. J. Polychroniou: There is a global backlash on climate action. The pushback against climate policies comes from the fossil fuel industry and major corporations, Europe’s far right, and the Republican Party in the U.S. But this wrecking-ball strategy seems, unfortunately, to be paying off as we still lack sufficient public and political will for bold climate action. Could things be different if plans to combat climate change effectively addressed environmental and social concerns? Indeed, where do things stand with regard to just transition and environmental justice?

James K. Boyce: Denial of the reality of climate change was the first line of defense of the fossil fuel lobby. But this could work for only so long. As the results of climate destabilization become ever more apparent, denial becomes ever more untenable. Of course, there are some who will cling to it. There are still people who insist the world is flat. But most people cannot be persuaded to keep their heads in the sand most of the time.

So today the industry has fallen back on its second line of defense: the claim that cost of moving away from fossil fuels would be unacceptably high, undermining the living standards of working people at home and abroad. The distinguished economist John Kenneth Galbraith anticipated this tactic more than 50 years ago. In his 1972 presidential address to the American Economics Association, he observed that in pursuit of private profits, corporations seek to persuade the public that pollution is “palatable or worth the cost.”

It is an open question how the costs of the transition to a net-zero economy will be distributed across the population. This is a policy choice rather than a foregone conclusion. With the right policies, the clean energy transition can raise living standards for working people rather than lowering them. What is certain is that climate change, left unchecked, poses a grave threat to human well-being, above all to the well-being of working people who cannot afford to buy private shelter from the approaching storm.

The groundwork for this line of defense was prepared when oil corporations launched a concerted effort to shift the blame for the climate crisis onto consumers. It is a twist on the classic scoundrel’s stratagem of blaming the victim. Two decades ago, BP (the former British Petroleum) propagated the notion of individual “carbon footprints,” complete with a handy online calculator and then a phone app to tell you how much carbon is released when you drive to the grocery store or eat a hamburger. The underlying message was evident: Our customers are the real problem, not us. In orthodox economic theory, this ideological buck-passing has a fancy name: “consumer sovereignty.”

Environmentalists often fall into the same trap when they, too, blame consumers rather than the corporate and government power brokers who dictate the playing field for consumer choice. The claim that ordinary people must “tighten their belts” and endure sacrifices to save the planet appeals to a finger-wagging element in the environmental movement, but it is antithetical to building the broad public support we need for climate action.

Could things be different? You bet they could. Climate policy, if done right, will bring large and tangible benefits to people around the world. As with any addiction, weaning ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels will free us from the grip of pushers masquerading as benefactors. It will open the door to cheaper and more reliable sources of energy. It will end toxic air pollution from burning fossil fuels that annually causes millions of premature deaths. Because investments in energy efficiency and clean energy are more labor intensive than fossil fuel production, it also will create lots of new jobs. All this is on top of preventing further exacerbation of the climate crisis.

For this to happen, however, policies must be designed with these benefits firmly in mind. Just transition policies are needed to ensure that communities that have depended on the fossil fuel industry in the past are not only cushioned from the costs of the transition but actually gain new and better economic opportunities. Environmental justice policies are needed to ensure that communities that have experienced disproportionate costs from fossil fuel pollution are first in line to benefit from cleaner air and water. And as I already mentioned, a carbon price-and-dividend policy is needed to protect and raise the real incomes of working people even in the face of rising prices for fossil fuels as their supply is phased out.

None of these policies are impossible. But none of them will happen as long as the fossil fuel lobby and its cronies are calling the shots.

C. J. Polychroniou: You are one of the very first economists to address the political economy of the environment. Climate change seems to be deeply intertwined with global patterns of inequality. What specific measures do you propose for addressing the twin challenges of inequality and the climate crisis?

James K. Boyce: Political economy is about the allocation of scarce resources not only among competing ends—that is the textbook definition of economics—but also their allocation among competing people, competing individuals, groups, and classes. In other words, it is about who as well as what.

Whenever we encounter environmental degradation, we can pose three questions: Who benefits? Who bears the cost? And why are those who benefit able to impose this cost on others? Inequalities of wealth and power are deeply implicated in answers to the last question. Much of the cost of climate change will fall upon future generations who are not here to defend themselves. The only way to redress this inherent power imbalance is to develop an ethic of intergenerational responsibility. But significant costs are imposed on people alive today, too. This has long been the case for frontline communities polluted by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Now the costs are spreading to people everywhere who are suffering from more frequent and more intense droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves.

The ability of those who capture the lion’s share of the benefits from fossil fuels—big corporations and rulers of petrostates—to impose enormous environmental costs on others is a symptom of stark inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power. Anything we can do to rectify this inequality will make it easier to address the climate crisis. And anything we can do to address the climate crisis will make it easier to rectify this inequality.

Reducing the inequalities within and among countries cannot be achieved with the snap of a finger. It requires action on many fronts, including taxation, trade, investment, and international finance, some of which we have discussed before.

But in the meantime, we can implement climate change policies that narrow inequality rather than widening it. Let me elaborate a little more on three of these policies.

Carbon dividends would return money to the people from putting a price on carbon emissions by means of either a tax, a cap with auctioned permits, or a combination of the two (in which the tax serves as the floor price in permit auctions, combining downside price certainty with upside emissions certainty). A carbon dividend policy is already in place in Canada. The Canadian policymakers made an initial blunder, in my view, by rebating the carbon revenue to the people via an income tax credit, rendering it practically invisible to most people. Fuel prices, on the contrary, are advertised in foot-high numbers at gasoline stations around the country. The fossil fuel lobby and its political allies have tried to paint higher fuel prices as an awful burden on working families, while ignoring the money coming back to them as dividends. To debunk these predictable efforts, carbon dividends must be as visible as the price of gasoline at the pump. Paying dividends via direct, stand-alone payments—the proverbial “check in the mail” or clearly labeled direct deposits into personal bank accounts—is crucial for this reason. The Trudeau government belatedly realized this and changed to direct payments. But whether Canada’s policy survives will depend on the outcome of the upcoming national elections.

A second climate policy that can also be a vehicle to reduce inequality is well-targeted public investment. This was a focus of the Biden administration in the United States. Public investment can be directed so as to reduce inequalities between regions and communities. Just transition investments in fossil fuel-dependent localities and environmental justice investments in the communities hardest hit by fossil fuel pollution are examples of this. More generally, investment can and should be steered to rural and urban areas that in recent decades have experienced collapsing incomes and shrinking economic opportunities.

A third way in which climate policy can reduce inequality is to bind carbon emissions reductions to commensurate reductions in emissions of toxic air pollutants from fossil fuels—sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and so on—by means of an “environmental justice guarantee.” Such a guarantee would mandate that overall reduction in carbon emissions is matched by reductions in co-pollutant emissions in communities disproportionately impacted in the past. Such a guarantee is included explicitly in the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act of 2022 introduced by U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)

None of this will happen without popular mobilization. Democracy was not handed to us on a platter. The abolition of slavery was not delivered on a platter. Neither were women’s suffrage, civil rights, or environmental protection. Throughout history, pro-people change happens only when ordinary people demand it. That is what needs to happen now.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/tackle-climate-crisis-inequality

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

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-7356013-6-6, eBook: 978-1-7356013-5-9

08-10-2024 ~ Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.

When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.”

The anti-democratic organization of capitalist firms also conveys to employees that their input is not genuinely welcomed or sought by their bosses. Employees thus mostly resign themselves to their powerless position relative to the CEO at their workplace. They also expect the same in their relationships with political leaders, the CEOs’ counterparts in government. Their inability to participate in running their workplaces trains citizens to presume and accept the same in relation to running their residential communities. Employers become top political officials (and vice versa) in part because they are used to being “in charge.” Political parties and government bureaucracies mirror capitalist enterprises by being run autocratically while constantly describing themselves as democratic.

Most adults experience working at least eight hours for five or more days per week in capitalist workplaces, under the power and authority of their employer. The undemocratic reality of the capitalist workplace leaves its complex, multilayered impacts on all who collaborate there, part time and full time. Capitalism’s problem with democracy—that the two basically contradict one another—shapes many people’s lives. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family (descendants of Walmart’s founder), along with a handful of other major shareholders, decide how to spend hundreds of billions. The decisions of a few hundred billionaires bring economic development, industries, and enterprises to some regions and lead to the economic decline of other regions. The many billions of people affected by those spending decisions are excluded from participating in making them. Those countless people lack the economic and social power wielded by a tiny, unelected, obscenely wealthy minority of people. That is the opposite of democracy.

Employers as a class, often led by major shareholders and the CEOs they enrich, also use their wealth to buy (they would prefer to say “donate” to) political parties, candidates, and campaigns. The rich have always understood that universal or even widespread suffrage risks a nonwealthy majority voting to undo society’s wealth inequality. So, the rich seek control of existing forms of democracy to make sure they do not become a real democracy in the sense of enabling the employee majority to outvote the employer minority.

The enormous surpluses appropriated by “big business” employers—usually corporations—allow them to reward their upper-level executives lavishly. These executives, technically also “employees,” use corporate wealth and power to influence politics. Their goals are to reproduce the capitalist system and thus the favors and rewards it gives them. Capitalists and their top employees make the political system depend on their money more than it depends on the people’s votes.

How does capitalism make the major political parties and candidates dependent on donations from employers and the rich? Politicians need vast sums of money to win by dominating the media as part of costly campaigns. They find willing donors by supporting policies that benefit capitalism as a whole, or else particular industries, regions, and enterprises. Sometimes, the donors find the politicians. Employers hire lobbyists—people who work full time, all year round, to influence the candidates that get elected. Employers fund “think tanks” to produce and spread reports on every current social issue. The purpose of those reports is to build general support for what the funders want. In these and other ways, employers and those they enrich shape the political system to work for them.

Most employees have no comparable wealth or power. To exert real political power requires massive organization to activate, combine, and mobilize employees so their numbers can add up to real strength. That happens rarely and with great difficulty. Moreover, in the U.S., the political system has been shaped over the decades to leave only two major parties. Both of themloudly and proudly endorse and support capitalism. They collaborate to make it very difficult for any third party to gain a foothold, and for any anti-capitalist political party to emerge. The U.S. endlessly repeats its commitment to maximum freedom of choice for its citizens, but it excludes political parties from that commitment.

Democracy is about “one person, one vote”—the notion that we all have an equal say in the decisions that affect us. That is not what we have now. Going into a voting booth once or twice a year and picking a candidate is a very different level of influence than that of the Rockefeller family or George Soros. When they want to influence people, they use their money. That’s not democracy.

In capitalism, democracy is unacceptable because it threatens the unequally distributed wealth of the minority with a majority vote. With or without formal institutions of democracy (such as elections with universal suffrage), capitalism undermines genuine democracy because employers control production, surplus value, and that surplus value’s distributions. For capitalism’s leaders, democracy is what they say, not what they do.

By Richard D. Wolff

Author Bio: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This adapted excerpt from Richard D. Wolff’s book Understanding Capitalism (Democracy at Work, 2024) was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

08-07-2024 ~ Ancient human retrovirus DNA could be one of the markers of susceptibility to mental illness—specifically schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, a new study suggests.

Ancient human retrovirus DNA could be one of the markers of susceptibility to mental illness—specifically schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, a new study suggests.

An international team of researchers examined 732 post-mortem brain samples and identified variations in DNA associated with different psychiatric conditions, which they cross-referenced with data from large genetic studies. The research appears in Nature Communications, May 22, 2024.

In a summary of their work for a nonspecialist audience, three of the study authors report that their research is the first to show that ancient viral DNA is one of the avenues through which genetic susceptibility to psychiatric disorders may occur. They are careful not to attribute causality here, but to note that their findings “suggest” a link that deserves further exploration.

Human Endogenous Retroviruses
The ancient viral DNA is called human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs, and makes up about 8 percent of the human genome. HERVs are DNA sequences that originated as viral infections millions of years ago and evolved in mammals through genetic mutations and deletions over time. Retroviruses are those that infect cells by inserting a copy of their own genes into the cell DNA.

First identified in the 1980s, HERVs have been characterized as “viral fossils”that continue to be passed on to modern generations. At first, HERVs were considered to be “junk DNA,” with no known functions. As genomic technology advanced, scientists identified some specific roles for HERVs, such as producing RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules that lead to proteins, and possibly regulating neighboring genes.

Most HERVs are thought to be inert, but some are known to play an active role in human physiology. For example, two known beneficial HERVs are those involved in the formation of the placenta and in embryogenesis, helping to make pregnancy possible. Other HERVs have been detected in some types of cancer, and research is beginning to look at how to target and possibly control these HERVs to treat the cancer.

HERV Variations and Mental Illness
The new findings reported in Nature Communications looked at how variations in HERVs are involved in regulating neighboring neurological genes in specific, finely mapped locations in the genome known to be associated with psychiatric conditions. Their approach identified HERVs in the adult brains of Africans and Europeans who had a psychiatric diagnosis at the time of their death.

“It is not clear yet how the expression of the high confidence risk HERVs may play a role in psychiatric disorders,” the authors write. However, they found that some of the 1,238 HERVs identified in the brain were associated with “risk for complex psychiatric traits.”

The new research is important for advancing our understanding of mental illness and possibly finding new ways to treat it. Older studies dating back to the 1960s identified a link between genetics and mental illness, but no specific mechanism for heritability. Much of the research came from adoption and twin studies carried out in Denmark over a decade by a joint U.S. and Danish research team.

Led by psychiatrist Seymour S. Kety at Harvard Medical School, the Danish studies spanned 1968 to 1994. Although the studies are generally accepted in the field as supporting a genetic basis for schizophrenia, there are some who challenge this, questioning the methodology and subjective interpretation of the data. Criticisms of the Danish twin studies point to the fact that control group adoptees were placed in more favorable environments than the study subjects, that the study did not include environmental variables, and that the definition of schizophrenia and its spectrum was not rigorous.

More recently, scientists have used genome-wide association studies to analyze genetic links to psychiatric disorders. A 2023 review of these studies stressed that “…there is no single ‘disease-gene’ for psychiatric disorders, but thousands of genetic variants that act together and collectively influence the risk of illness. Given that most of these genetic variants are commonly occurring, every human being has a genetic risk to each psychiatric disorder, from low to high.”

Another factor to consider is the possibility of infection from viruses or bacteria that triggers neurological, immune system, and psychological changes, in association with schizophrenia in particular.

Implications for Human History
We know the effects of severe mental illnesses and how society has dealt with those persons severely affected, often in inhumane ways. But are there any possible benefits to individuals who may have smaller numbers of genetic variants linked to a particular mental disorder?

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky has a provocative answer to this question, in his analysis of how individuals with a moderate number of genetic links to schizophrenia might have provided the ancient basis for modern religions.

Sapolsky begins a Stanford University class on the biological underpinnings of religiosity by outlining the positive adaptive value for people who have some genes linked to certain genetic disorders, but not enough to cause full-blown illness. Sickle-cell anemia, for example, conveys protection from malaria to those with some of its marker genes. Similarly, cystic fibrosis, crippling when full-blown, is associated with protection from cholera and dehydration in those who have some of its marker genes. In that lecture, Sapolsky makes the point that it’s about too much allocation/expression of the genes. Just the right amount, and you have protection. Too much, and you have a chronic health issue.

In the same way, Sapolsky says, individuals who are on the spectrum of schizophrenia may have used their particular qualities of schizophrenia—seeing visions, hearing voices, obsessive-compulsive ritualistic behavior, intrusive thoughts, anxieties, and superstitions—positively in ancient societies.

Sapolsky bases his analysis on the data from the adoption studies in Denmark by Harvard psychiatry professor Seymour S. Kety and his U.S. and Danish research team, noted above. The Danish adoption studies found that schizophrenics often had family members who were a little “off,” not severely ill, but not quite “normal”—people whom they termed schizotypical.

Religion, Good Works, and Metamagical Thinking
In the appropriate context, Sapolsky says, a schizotypical individual could play a unifying role in an ancient society. Think of the shaman or medicine man in more recent native cultures, or the founding stories and rituals of today’s Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Eastern religions, which all have similar elements.

Sapolsky reviews in detail the similarity in the outline of the ritual, numerology, and anxiety-calming behavior of religions. For all religious beliefs, the description of religious behavior—its “structural steel” and “building blocks” as Sapolsky terms it—is on the mark. How the beginnings of theology mesh with the particular qualities of schizotypicals, from the metamagical to ritualist, is eerily recognizable.

The positives for society also ring true: Good works are motivated, and ritual behaviors (think holiday celebrations) are unifying and calming. Religious believers today, Sapolsky notes, live longer and are healthier than nonbelievers.

As Sapolsky emphasizes, a schizotypical person has to get it “just right” in order to succeed, and a society has room for just one such person at a time. Failed schizotypical leaders often branch off into cults, and have bad endings, like the Manson or Waco cults.

Sapolsky also reminds us that today’s society still harbors metamagical thinking. A Gallup poll he quotes, for example, found that 25 percent of Americans believe in ghosts and 50 percent believe in the influence of the devil.

A New Frontier?
Sapolsky’s presentation on the biological underpinnings of religiosity is mesmerizing. If you have an interest in human behavior on any level, the ideas provoke more serious thinking, which is always a good thing.

This area of research and discussion is a sensitive one, with considerable history associated with some of humanity’s darkest chapters; genetic determinism in the form of eugenics and racism was an ugly feature of the World War II era.

How ancient HERVs (and modern microbial infection) influence the genetics of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is an important subject for research and a necessary one if we are to find better treatments.

By Marjorie Hecht

Author Bio: Marjorie Hecht is a longtime magazine editor and writer with a specialty in science topics. She is a freelance writer and community activist living on Cape Cod.

Source: Human Bridges

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

C.J. Polychroniou

08-02-2024 ~ Wealth taxation may sound like a good idea, but can it really address, let alone solve, the problem of inequality?

Economic inequality is the scourge of the 21st century. The rich are getting richer and faster than any other time since the onset of neoliberalism, which calls for “free-market” capitalism, regressive taxation, fiscal austerity and the rejection of the social state. They get richer not only when the economy is on an upswing but even amid crises. Billionaires more than doubled their net worth during the pandemic, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The latest analysis shows that the richest 1 percent gained $42 trillion in new wealth over the past decade, which amounts to “nearly 34 times more than the entire bottom 50 percent of the world’s population.” In the meantime, the very poor and low-income people across the globe, including the U.S., are actually getting poorer. So much for trickle-down economics which was popularized during the 1980s by the Reagan administration’s vast capital gains and income tax cuts and continues to persist to this day in spite of its major flaws. Cutting taxes on the rich not only increases economic inequality but has no effect on economic growth and unemployment.

Economic inequality is the scourge of the 21st century. The rich are getting richer and faster than any other time since the onset of neoliberalism, which calls for “free-market” capitalism, regressive taxation, fiscal austerity and the rejection of the social state. They get richer not only when the economy is on an upswing but even amid crises. Billionaires more than doubled their net worth during the pandemic, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The latest analysis shows that the richest 1 percent gained $42 trillion in new wealth over the past decade, which amounts to “nearly 34 times more than the entire bottom 50 percent of the world’s population.” In the meantime, the very poor and low-income people across the globe, including the U.S., are actually getting poorer. So much for trickle-down economics which was popularized during the 1980s by the Reagan administration’s vast capital gains and income tax cuts and continues to persist to this day in spite of its major flaws. Cutting taxes on the richnot only increases economic inequality but has no effect on economic growth and unemployment.