Written By Robin Mathews December 2015
As we watch … huge criminal corporations, governments, and their lemming environmentalists race to the cliff edge in Paris, refusing to grapple with the reason they are racing…. They refuse – in any meaningful way – to challenge The One Per Cent head on, which is where effective solutions to climate change begin.
While a flood of information pours out of Paris about poor nations and rich nations and island nations drowning … and the undeniable fact of Global Warming, The One Per Cent grows richer and takes more of planetary wealth as a function of misusing populations, wasting raw materials, selfishly exploiting technology, destroying the biosphere … and buying governments like picking up so many stock options.
The One Per Cent make up the people behind “Free Trade Treaties” that, in fact, remove national sovereignty, erase conditions for middle nation independence and climate viability, and lash huge populations – like galley slaves – to the profit machines of imperial nations owned by The One Per Cent and working (‘as if ‘democratic and/or “fair” societies) to funnel more and more of the world’s wealth into the pockets of a very few.
Behind all the (sometimes really intense and well-meant) negotiations and trade-offs in Paris operates the mafiosa hand of The One Per Cent. And until it is addressed as what it is with a demand that (to use the language of Pope Francis) “the downtrodden … change the world economic order” the game of make-believe will go on.
One of the few truth-tellers, Pope Francis has spoken of “savage capitalism” and called money and modern capitalism “dung of the devil”. He doesn’t pretend the present world order is, somehow, unrelated to the descent of huge populations into poverty and the globe moving ever-closer to climate Break Down.
In all the flood of information from Paris, The One Per Cent is never named as the Central Issue to be dealt with – for that would mean, as the Pope suggests, a reconstruction of power relations in the world. And so, sad as it is to say, the nice, caring people in Paris (from Canada, too) are living in a land of make-believe. They refuse to ‘grasp the nettle’, to name the Elephant in the Room, to set out positions that demand the redistribution of wealth (and power).
They refuse to speak of a global reorganization of work and of production for use rather than for profit in a process that completely removes the employment of destructive climate pollutants. By ignoring the broad papal hints, the Paris negotiators bring two inevitable things closer: (1) crisis in climate conditions and (2) the absolute certainty of major, wide-spread wars of “revolutionary” and “repressive” kinds: of social chaos amidst a crumbling and humanly destructive ecosystem.
Pope Francis is correct to speak of “savage capitalism”. The corrective doesn’t need (or want)
a name. Because the general road is clear. The Ninety-Nine Per Cent can quite easily eliminate The One Per Cent in its character as a grossly wealthy force putting human existence at risk. Liberated from The One Per Cent burden, many of its members might become useful agents in constructing a new society. The language has to be about human survival and the absolutely necessary reconstructions of human work, human creativity, human administrative talent, the meaning of wealth, and the human power necessary to effect what is, in fact, revolutionary change in the modes of administering publicly responsible power in the world.
What They Don’t Talk About In Paris
How much, just for instance, has the horrendous, unnecessary, lunatic-driven war in the Middle East – since 1980, contributed to climate change? Thousands of polluting aircraft, millions of polluting weapons and explosives, numberless polluting fires raging without letup, millions of polluting corpses lying in the desert sun. The U.S.- backed Iraq invasion of Iran is said – alone – to have cost a million lives. And then there was the U.S.-instigated demolition of Iraq… and then Libya … and now Syria…. (“Bomb them some more”, says the morally challenged British prime minister, David Cameron, while his representatives in Paris negotiate to prevent climate change.)
Do the Paris environmental experts have a way of computing the number of human murders and increases of warfare created climate pollution in direct relation to the increase in Capitalist wealth? In direct relation to the growing wealth of The One Per Cent?
Plainly, The One Per Cent – made up of acceptable environmentalists, co-operating governments, and Capitalists masquerading as concerned ‘leaders’ – are going to have to be confronted as never before on Climate Change. They are going to have to be moved over by the people… as a start, if anything meaningful is going to get done. They are going to have to be moved over to make room for brilliantly staged reconstructions of power and wealth by peaceful means. If that doesn’t happen … welcome CHAOS.
There is a lesson here, ‘Writ Large’, as they say. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see it. Canadians must really challenge the present inaction (called “action” and “new targets” and “hopeful goals” and “real assessments”). Canadians must move “acceptable” environmental “experts” right out of the picture. Canadians must insist governments act upon solutions that directly address, directly seize, redirect, and put to constructive environmental use the wealth of The One Per Cent – wealth that has, heretofore, been gained cruelly and often brutally through demonic instruments of human and ecological destruction operated on massive scales. That is wealth which, now, must have a completely different character and function.
If Canadians don’t face that reality, if they don’t face The One Per Cent, and act, directly, for change, then it’s all over. Then it’s Cultural Suicide without a good aspect to be found anywhere in the process.
Written by Robin Mathews
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The Straight Goods
Cheers Eyes Wide Open
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