Consequences of capitali.., p.19
Consequences of Capitalism, page 19
October 1962 was when the missiles were sent to Cuba.
Meanwhile, terrorist attacks continued: speed boat attacks on Cuban seaside hotels where Soviet military technicians were congregating, killing many Russians and Cubans; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; contamination of sugar shipments. Lots of other atrocities and sabotage. When this brutal campaign is discussed in US commentary, it’s almost always dismissed as silly CIA shenanigans, like plans to make Castro’s beard fall out. It was far more severe than that.
Dan Ellsberg was then on the inside, close to the center of analysis and planning. He’s reviewed the Cuban missile crisis in extensive detail in his recent book. In personal communication, he has said that in his opinion the invasion threat was the primary reason for Khrushchev’s sending the missiles. Notice that that’s a case where large-scale terror came very close to ending the human experiment. It’s worth thinking about. The terror was very serious. The first book that explores the effect on the victims recently appeared. By a Canadian scholar, Keith Bolender, Voices from the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism.
There is still more, which was suspected but recently became known. Turns out that right at the peak of the missile crisis, late October 1962, the US was carrying out high-altitude nuclear explosions in order to test some ideas about a defense shield. These were, of course, detected by the Russians, who carried out high-altitude tests in response, which were detected by the Americans. Either side could have easily assumed that it’s an attack. Luckily, we escaped. By luck. Again, the security of the population is scarcely even a concern.
Well, the crisis did end with Khrushchev backing down. Just how is an important story that I’ll skip. But it’s all worth close attention.
It’s getting late so I won’t go through other cases. But, in fact, there’s case after case of very near disaster. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped. And you can’t count on miracles to continue.
Let’s move quickly to the end of the Cold War. In 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were two conflicting visions of the post–Cold War global order. One was Mikhail Gorbachev’s. He proposed a Eurasian security system in which there would be no military blocs at all. It would be a common security system from Brussels to Vladivostok. That’s one idea.
The other was the US position. That’s George H. W. Bush, the first Bush, and his secretary of state James Baker. Their position was that the US had won the war and was going to extend its dominance. Bush and Baker wanted Gorbachev to agree to let Germany be unified inside NATO—a serious threat to Russia if you think about it, particularly in the light of recent history. They told Gorbachev that if he agreed, the US would not move—the phrase was “one inch to the East,” which meant to East Germany. No one was even dreaming about anything beyond—at least they weren’t talking about it.
But this was never put in writing, and when Gorbachev agreed to unification of Germany, NATO immediately moved to East Berlin. When Gorbachev complained, he was told in effect, if you’re dumb enough to trust a gentleman’s agreement, it’s your problem.
Then Clinton came along and extended NATO far to the East, right to the Russian border. In 2008, there were proposals to bring Ukraine into NATO, that’s the Russian geostrategic heartland. There have been lots of provocative acts on both sides. Obama introduced a trillion dollar modernization program of nuclear weapons, some scaled down to battlefield use. That brings us to today.
I mentioned earlier that 1962 was an important year in other respects. In 1962, Kennedy changed the mission of the Latin American military. Of course we can do that. It was changed from “hemispheric defense,” which was a holdover from the Second World War, to “internal security.” Internal security is a euphemism for war against the population. That was the official change, and it had consequences. These are described vividly by Charles Maechling, who was the head of counter-insurgency in the US through these years, 1961–1966, under Kennedy and Johnson.
Maechling describes Kennedy’s 1962 decision as “a shift from toleration of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military [to] direct complicity” in their crimes, to US support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads” (Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1982).
That’s the head of US counterinsurgency describing the 1962 decision and its aftermath. Pretty strong, and regrettably not inaccurate—though without tarnishing the Camelot imagery among liberal intellectuals.
What followed was a huge plague of repression. It began with the military dictatorship in Brazil, the most important country in Latin America, in 1964, overthrowing a moderately reformist parliamentary government. The coup seems to have been pretty much set up with the support of the Kennedy administration, though it took place a couple of weeks after Kennedy’s assassination. This was the first of the neo-Nazi national security states that spread through South America, bringing with them mass slaughter, bitter repression, torture, “disappearance,” and tight ideological controls. Chile, which we discussed, was one such case.
Like the Suharto coup, the Brazilian coup was welcomed in liberal circles. For example, by Kennedy-Johnson ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon, who then went on to become president of Johns Hopkins University. He described the happy event as “the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century,” not least because the Brazilian generals, the “democratic forces” now in charge, should “create a greatly improved climate for private investment” (Parker 1979).
The plague then swept through the hemisphere. We won’t run through it, merely noting here how little changes over the years. Thus, Gordon’s celebration of the destruction of Brazilian democracy by the military dictatorship was echoed by Obama’s ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, who praised the elections held under military rule as “a great celebration of democracy,” isolating the US once again from Latin America and most of the rest of the world, which, unlike Obama-Clinton, refused to welcome the overthrow of Honduran democracy and the expulsion of the elected president, and to endorse the “elections” that restored the bitter rule of the Honduran oligarchy and military.
The US-backed plague reached Central America in the Reagan years, with massive state terror, hideous torture, every imaginable kind of horror. The US was overwhelmingly the agent of violence. The US was even condemned by the World Court for “unlawful use of force”—aka international terrorism—and ordered to pay substantial reparations to Nicaragua and to call off its terrorist war. Of course, that was disregarded, and the terror was escalated. The World Court was dismissed by the New York Times as a “hostile forum,” so we don’t have to pay any attention to it. A few years earlier the same Court was lauded as a noble institution when it ruled in favor of the US in a case involving Iran. It all continues right to the present. I mentioned one case, Honduras. Well, that’s “our little region over here.”
As discussed earlier, the decade of the 1980s was framed by the assassination of Archbishop Romero at the beginning of the decade and the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989—shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, throughout the post-1962 period there were many religious martyrs. That had to do with another significant event of 1962. Pope John XXIII called Vatican II, the second major Vatican conference. Its theme was to return the Catholic Church to the basic message of the Gospels, which had largely been forgotten ever since Roman Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, adopted Christianity as the state religion and converted Christianity from “the persecuted church” to a “persecuting church,” in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng in his history of Christianity. Vatican II, he continued, “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,” restoring the teachings of the Gospels (Küng 2001).
The message of Vatican II was taken up by Latin American bishops, who adopted the “preferential option for the poor.” Priests, nuns, and laypersons brought the radical pacifist message of the Gospels to the poor, helping them organize to ameliorate their bitter fate in the domains of US power, to take affairs into their own hands, and to be ruled by “countrymen like ourselves who know the people’s sores.” The founding ideas are called liberation theology.
That, of course, is the kind of heresy that has to be stamped out without mercy or delay. The United States and its local clients launched a war against the Church. That’s why there are so many religious martyrs. And they’re proud of it. There is a famous branch of the Pentagon called the School of the Americas—since renamed, when the exploits of its graduates became too well known. The School of the Americas trained Latin American killers and torturers, including many of the worst ones. It advertises itself differently of course, with “talking points,” which are presented to the public to show how wonderful the work of the school is. One of the talking points is that the liberation theology that was initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the assistance of the US army,” which trained those who brought victory in the war against the Church.
Chapter 4
CAPITALISM VERSUS THE ENVIRONMENT
Waterstone Lecture, February 5, 2019
Before I get into the main topic, which is capitalism versus the environment, I just wanted to say a couple things by way of preface and to respond to some things that I’ve been seeing both in people coming in, in office hours a little bit, and also the little bit of lurking I’ve been doing on the discussion boards and a little bit on voice threads, so I just want to say a couple things about that.
First, this issue of why the tie again to capitalism, and I want to repeat this and make it clear what this set of connections is about. As I’d said, a main objective of the course is to identify the common root causes of today’s most pressing problems. That’s instrumental to something else, and the something else is to demonstrate the ways in which these problems are necessarily related to each other, and then, in order to be able to see the bases for solidarity and unified, rather than divided, political cohesion and action. The usual notion of these issues being siloed and differentiated from each other, I think, can’t emphasize enough that they really are connected to each other in very fundamental ways and that this may be the basis for a unified set of political actions.
The second thing I wanted to just say a word about because I’ve seen some things on this and people have been asking about this, is a word about capitalism and its alternatives. The alternative to late-stage capitalism, which is what we’re describing here, sometimes termed really existing capitalism, which, as we’ve begun to discuss already, often actually means socialism for the rich and brutal or gangster capitalism for the rest. The alternative to this is not a planned economy run by an authoritarian state, which is often portrayed in the obverse sort of mythology as communism or really existing socialism.
For example, in the former USSR or Russia today, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and so on, virtually all of those experiments, many of which were Marxist or socialist inspired, were really a state capitalism in a slightly different inflection than the state capitalism we see elsewhere in the world. That’s not the alternative.
The alternative that we’re thinking about is an economy that’s run by the producers, that is the workers themselves, through a democratization of the workplace. We say we value democracy very highly and yet we don’t institute it in the places where we spend most of our lives. That is, the workplace is a very authoritarian kind of environment and we don’t really question that.
When we go to work, we don’t expect to be able to have a bunch of choices about what we’re going to do in the day and what we’re going to produce and how we’re going to produce it and so forth, but if we really value democracy, why not start to institute that in places where we spend a great deal of our time? Why not democratize the decisions over what gets produced (and this ties into what I hope to speak about a bit tonight and we’ll speak about a bit more in the coming weeks, ties very closely to how we define quality of life or happiness or satisfaction). What gets produced is not necessarily tied solely to, or even most importantly to, profit maximization. That is, if you go back to a conversation a couple weeks ago, what if things were produced for their use value rather than for their exchange value? That might, in fact, produce a very different set of outcomes.
The way things get produced would also be democratically organized. That is, if the people who had to live with the consequences of the production process were in charge of that production process rather than those being in charge being absentee or distant owners, we might see very different kinds of effects coming out of our production processes and places, and this includes many of the impacts on the environment.
And then finally, what to do with the profits, if any, which gets to questions about income and wealth inequality, and so forth. Again, if these decisions were democratically arrived at, we might see a very different set of impacts, and so this is something that I think we should think about in terms of the issues that we’re discussing. If the production process were organized in very different ways, the kinds of things that we are discussing here, the kinds of outcomes and consequences, might have a very, very different look, and so it’s worth thinking about that. But this is typically what we’re thinking about when we think about an alternative to capitalism.
So now let’s turn to the topic for this evening because we’re stuck with this system and it’s producing some outcomes. I’m going to go through some of the issues. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but by the end of it, it might be a bit exhausting, that is, you might feel a little wearied by it so, just going to go through it, and just it’s useful to know what we’re talking about and what we’re confronting when we think about environmental impacts.
First are the kind of overt impacts that we were dealing with, beginning to deal with in a substantive way, in the late 1950s, into the 1960s, but these things like air, water, soil pollution, which were at the time quite overt, quite undeniable in many ways, as I’ll talk about in a little while, as the problems became so apparent that they simply couldn’t be ignored any longer. The problem of indoor air pollution is something that’s come a little bit later. Think about around the world, people who use solid fuels for heating and cooking and so forth, clearly indoor air pollution is an issue. In more technologically developed countries, indoor air pollutants are now being recognized as coming from a lot of the building materials that we use, insulation and so forth, but this is becoming a prevalent problem.
Over time, we’ve seen a changing nature in the pollutants themselves, from these overt, unavoidable notions of solid waste to industrial waste to toxics, which have mainly gone through a transformation in their visibility, their tangibility. That is, these early problems, as I say, were quite overt, but the later problems of industrial waste and toxins and so forth are largely out of sight and therefore largely out of mind. So we don’t see all these things, but they are becoming ubiquitous in the environment.
Plastic pollution is another, and growing, problem. You can find all sorts of interesting statistics about plastics. In this abbreviated form, I’m giving you just one that I found particularly annoying. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by weight. Okay, so if you’re interested in fishing for plastics, it’s good news, but otherwise, not so great.
Then there is the issue of antibiotics, which people have been thinking about a lot in the last couple of decades, leading to the production of these super pathogens, the super bugs, which evolve much more quickly than the pharmaceutical industry evolves to deal with them. So, people who are taking antibiotics either don’t take the full course of them, or more prominently, they’re given to animals and 30 to 60 percent of them pass through our or animals’ digestive systems unchanged, and so they simply enter the environment. They’re in the water supplies. We ingest them through the food chain and so forth, and they are producing a constellation of these pathogens that are now not susceptible to treatment by these antibiotics. So some of these were miracle drugs when they first came out in the twenties, thirties, and so forth. Penicillin, amoxicillin, a whole number of them, are now becoming ineffective, and we’re seeing the results in increasing resistance and morbidity.
Endocrine disruptors, again, things that disrupt our hormonal systems, these, again, are becoming prevalent in the environment. They’re in a wide variety of products, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT, which is an interesting pesticide. Some of you may recall the famous book by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, in which she began to document the ubiquity of pesticides in the environment and their effects, in this case, on bird species and bird habitat. DDT has been banned for use in the United States for many years, but not for production. So, we produce it and then we distribute it around the world and then it comes back to us on various products. But DDT, household cleaners, all of these things, again, are showing up in the environment in increasing concentrations and are producing these very deleterious effects.
Ozone depletion, which a lot of people get mixed up with climate change or climate disruption. But the ozone hole is a different problem. The ozone layer is very important in keeping out UV radiation. If the ozone hole persists and widens, we see an immediate, concomitant rise in skin cancers, melanomas, and so forth. We thought we had a handle on ozone depletion to a great extent in the 1980s with the Montreal Protocol, which actually outlawed some of the products that were affecting the ozone hole like chlorofluorocarbons and other things that were in propellants. Now, we’ve backtracked from that international agreement a bit. At least we had some sort of model for thinking about how to deal with this kind of international problem, the ozone depletion. I’ll come back to this in a little bit.
