The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Inconvenient Truth Behind Youth Co-optation [ACT II]

January 21, 2019

By Cory Morningstar

 

This is ACT II of the six-part series: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-profit Industrial Complex

 

In ACT I of this new body of research I opened the dialogue with the observations of artist Hiroyuki Hamada:

 

“What’s infuriating about manipulations by the Non Profit Industrial Complex is that they harvest the goodwill of the people, especially young people. They target those who were not given the skills and knowledge to truly think for themselves by institutions which are designed to serve the ruling class. Capitalism operates systematically and structurally like a cage to raise domesticated animals. Those organizations and their projects which operate under false slogans of humanity in order to prop up the hierarchy of money and violence are fast becoming some of the most crucial elements of the invisible cage of corporatism, colonialism and militarism.”

 

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

[Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [Addenda: I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

• A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

• The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

 

Volume I:

In ACT I, I disclosed that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and face of the youth movement to combat climate change, served as special youth advisor and trustee to the foundation established by “We Don’t Have Time”, a burgeoning mainstream tech start-up. I then explored the ambitions behind the tech company We Don’t Have Time.

In ACT II, I illustrate how today’s youth are the sacrificial lambs for the ruling elite. Also in this act I introduce the board members and advisors to “We Don’t Have Time.” I explore the leadership in the nascent We Don’t Have Time and the partnerships between the well established corporate environmental entities: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In ACT III, I deconstruct how Al Gore and the Planet’s most powerful capitalists are behind today’s manufactured youth movements and why. I explore the We Don’t Have Time/Thunberg connections to Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, This Is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. I also touch upon Thunberg’s famous family. In particular, Thunberg’s celebrity mother, Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero of the Year 2017), and her August 2018 book launch. I then explore the generous media attention afforded to Thunberg in both May and April of 2018 by SvD, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers.

In ACT IV, I examine the current campaign, now unfolding, in “leading the public into emergency mode”. More importantly, I summarize who and what this mode is to serve.

In ACT V, I take a closer look at the Green New Deal. I explore Data for Progress and the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”. I connect the primary architect and authors of the “Green New Deal” data to the World Resources Institute. From there, I walk you through the interlocking Business & Sustainable Development Commission, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, and the New Climate Economy – a project of the World Resources Institute. I disclose the common thread between these groups and the assignment of money to nature, represented by the Natural Capital Coalition and the non-profit industrial complex as an entity. Finally, I reveal how this has culminated in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale) which is “expected to be adopted during the fifteenth meeting in Beijing in 2020.”

In the final act, ACT VI [Crescendo], I wrap up the series by divulging that the very foundations which have financed the climate “movement” over the past decade are the same foundations now partnered with the Climate Finance Partnership looking to unlock 100 trillion dollars from pension funds. I reveal the identities of individuals and groups at the helm of this interlocking matrix, controlling both the medium and the message. I take a step back in time to briefly demonstrate the ten years of strategic social engineering that have brought us to this very precipice. I look at the relationship between WWF, Stockholm Institute and World Resources Institute as key instruments in the creation of the financialization of nature. I also take a look at what the first public campaigns for the financialization of nature (“natural capital”) that are slowly being brought into the public realm by WWF. I reflect upon how mainstream NGOs are attempting to safeguard their influence and further manipulate the populace by going underground through Extinction Rebellion groups being organized in the US and across the world.

With the smoke now cleared, the weak and essentially non-existent demands reminiscent of the 2009 TckTckTck “demands” can now be fully understood.

Some of these topics, in addition to others, will be released and discussed in further detail as addenda built on the large volume of research. This includes stepping through the looking glass, with an exploration of what the real “Green New Deal” under the Fourth Industrial Revolution will look like. Also forthcoming is a look at the power of celebrity – and how it has become a key tool for both capital and conformity.

[*Note: This series contains information and quotes that have been translated from Swedish to English via Google Translator.]

 

 

 

 

A C T   T W O

 

We Don’t Have Time Players

The We Don’t Have Time board of directors is comprised of the following people:

• Ingmar Rentzhog, We Don’t Have Time founder and CEO
• Anette Nordvall, We Don’t Have Time chairwoman/shareholder, private tech investor, works with STOAF (venture capital and private equity firm in Sweden), venture partner with Capital A Partners
• David Olsson, We Don’t Have Time chief operating officer, chairman of the Swedish climate think tank Global Utmaning
• Christian Emmertz, We Don’t Have Time co-founder, business unit director at Hewlett Packard (HP) Sweden, partner at RealCap Investment, The Climate Reality Project leader, trained by Al Gore
• Stella Diesen, “Changing the world with Microsoft tech Innofactor” (formerly Microsoft), The Climate Reality Project leader, trained by Al Gore
• Gustav Stenbeck, CEO of Mestro, founder and executive chairman of Gain Sustain (investment banking)

 

Global Utmaning, which translates to Global Challenge in English, was founded in 2005 by economist Kristina Persson, Sweden’s former  Minister of Strategic Development and Nordic Cooperation. Persson was tasked with building cooperation with Nordic countries in order to leverage strength within the international community (“together we are an actor with clout”). Her position involved the fostering of long-term development for “the green transition, jobs and distribution, and initiatives to influence the global agenda for sustainable development.” [Source] She is heir (with her siblings) to the business empire established by her father, Sven O. Persson which has a revenue of approximately SEK 3 billion USD (approx. USD 332,500,000.00) per annum. Persson is also the founder of the Freja Foundation established in 2017.

The We Don’t Have Time Foundation board of directors include:

• Cathy Orlando, national director, Citizen’s Climate Lobby in Canada
• Stuart Scott, The Climate Reality Project leader, trained by Al Gore
• Per-Espen Stokenes, researcher in behavioural economics
• Ingmar Rentzhog, founder and CEO, We Don’t Have Time
• David Olsson, chief operating officer, We Don’t Have Time
• Greta Thunberg, special youth advisor and trustee
• Jamie Margolin, special youth advisor and trustee

 

Acquisition International Magazine Issue 10, 2018 

“Citizen Climate Lobby international outreach manager Cathy Orlando, centre, is pleased with the Trudeau government’s new carbon tax plan. She’s seen here with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, husband Sanjiv Mathur, and their daughter Sophia Mathur. (Supplied)” [Source]

The We Don’t Have Time advisory board includes the following individuals:

• Daniela Rogosic, global press officer, the IKEA Group
• Tove Ahlström, CEO of Global Utmaning, affiliate of Al Gore’s The Climate Reality Project
• Anna Svahn, CEO of Feminvest, CEO and co-founder at Cygnus Capital [http://annasvahn.se]
• Andra Farhad, founder and CEO of Borshajen
• Kaj Török, chief reputation officer and chief sustainability officer of Max Burgers, co-founder of Futerra Marketing and Advertising
• Sweta Chakraborty, renowned risk and behavioural scientist (behavioural change) [Bio]
• David JP Phillips, founder of davidjpphillips.com, speakerrating.com and presentationsteknik.com. (Phillips delivers training in presentation skills in over 16 countries. His expertise is based on the latest research in neurology, psychology, and biology as a means of effective storytelling and communicating.)

The presence of Ikea on the We Don’t Have Time advisory board should be duly noted. In 2017 Ikea awarded a $44.6m grant from the IKEA Foundation to the We Mean Business coalition (founded in 2014). This grant was in fact “the second largest single donation ever made by the charitable arm of retail giant IKEA.” The We Mean Business coalition founding members include The B Team, the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), the Carbon Disclosure Project, Ceres, The Climate Group, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and the Prince of Wales Corporate Climate Group. Other We Mean Business partners include the United Nation Global Compact, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), UNEP Finance, the World Bank, and World Wildlife Fund. [Full list] [Further reading:“100 Billion for Everyone Who Signs”]

The B Team is managed by Purpose, the for-profit public relations firm run by Avaaz co-founder Jeremy Heimans, co-author of the book “New Power”. Ikea is a client of Purpose and partner to the Purpose NGO “We Are Here Now” (“Here Now”).

In the following excerpt from the January 28, 2016, Maclean’s article, Have We Hit ‘Peak Stuff?’ Ikea Says There’s Röom to Grow, the collective corporate climate fervor now sweeping the globe is demonstrated once again:

“So how to square Ikea’s “peak stuff” talk with its “buy more” actions? A spokesperson volunteered in an email that [Steve] Howard’s [head of sustainability at Ikea] comments were made as “part of a wider global context where many people still have very limited means” while Sjostrand suggested the goal was “to continue to grow our business, but grow it in a more sustainable way.” Translation: Ikea will sell you more furniture and home furnishings, but it will try harder not to make you feel guilty about it. Which explains why the company’s corporate reports are festooned with examples of sustainability initiatives, from selling only LED-compatible lighting to serving responsibly harvested fish in the cafeteria.”

Sustainability and capitalism are like oil and water. The two are incompatible. They cannot co-exist.

The “climate revolution” sought by We Don’t Have Time et al doesn’t contract mass-consumption, it delivers new products in order to expand it.

The “clean energy revolution” doesn’t threaten big oil – it secures it. It doesn’t weaken capitalism. It strengthens it. It doesn’t inspire resistance – it quells it – into oblivion.

Here we can reflect on the most simple things that shed light on the ideologies shared by the majority of those at the helm of decision making in addressing our climate crisis. In plain sight, what companies and institutions a person is most interested in are made public on one’s LinkedIn account. Selected groups to follow shared by the average non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) professional, are rarely if ever groups, institutions or people working within the realms of ecology, Indigenous rights, social justice, environmental sciences, or other critical areas associated with climate change and environmental depletion. Nor are  smaller institutions or individuals working toward small-scale local solutions of any interest.

Rather this interlocking directorate of “Ted talkers” and “thought leaders” most commonly select and follow the world’s most powerful and successful finance and tech companies, and the marketing firms that propel them to their success. Rarely are institutions, groups or people within the environmental sciences of interest, nor are  smaller institutions or individuals working toward small-scale local solutions. The most popular institutions followed, and shared by most of this crowd, are comprised of white Western leadership, predominantly male. Some of the most admired ones chosen by the many are the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Economist, the Green Climate Fund – groups and institutions they wholly identify with, and seek to assimilate/belong.

Here we must recall the fact (disclosed in ACT I) that Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project is a partner to We Don’t Have Time. (Al Gore’s priorities to be discussed in ACT III.)

“Rentzhog wants to affect ‘change within business, not against business.'” — Anette Nordvall, Chairman of We Don’t Have Time [Source]

The Sacrificial Lambs

“The same hormones and neurotransmitters can be released by a good story. These include dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins, which Phillips refers to as the “angel’s cocktail.” The effects of oxytocin make you more generous, trusting, and ready to bond. This is what is released in your blood when you hear a sad story. It makes us feel relaxed and more human as we bond to the storyteller.” — based on the TEDxStockholm Talk, “The Magical Science of Storytelling,” by David JP Phillips, We Don’t Have Time board of directors  [Source]

To begin this segment, we can look at the “WE” movement (“ME to WE”, Free the Children and WE Day). [1] The 2015 exposé  “Unleashing Voluntourism” produced by the Canadian Public Broadcasting (CBC) was originally scheduled to air on March 19, 2015. The documentary investigated the privatization of, the NGOization of, and the explosive growth of, what has morphed into a billion dollar industry – tourism masquerading as volunteerism – for privileged youth in the West.

Celebrity, fetishized in an rapidly eroding society void of meaning and culture, has resulted in such a powerful asset to capitalism and militarism, that the subject has become an active area of study by academics such as Dan Brockington and Ilan Kapoor. The power of celebrity was not lost on WE whose keynote speakers for massive gatherings and endorsements have included: Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau in 2008 (video), and again, in 2015 following Obama’s election win, former “first lady” Michelle Obama, Hollywood’s Natalie Portman, and a stream of others. Indeed, renting celebrities for galas and events has too become a niche industry.

Shortly before it was to air, the documentary was pulled after WE requested unauthorized footage be removed from the exposé. When it did air, on April 7, 2017, two scenes had been cut from the film. The following clip is one of the two deleted clips (running time: 1m:1s), “Volunteers Unleashed: suppressed Me to We clip #1″:

The controversy regarding WE is far from over as the NGO grapples to protect its million dollar brand. On January 17, 2019, WE announced they would commence legal action against a small podcast network and news outlet in Manitoba, Canada, where journalists have no explicit legal protection from SLAPP lawsuits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). This news outlet had been reporting on the WE movement since 2015.

The following images and brief commentaries are but a tiny glimpse into the world of NGOization and co-optation of both resistance and youth. Today we bear witness to what can aptly be described as the mechanisms and orchestrated movements of the non-profit industrial spectacle.

To illustrate the co-optation of youth, we will now look at the celebrity youth activists and Climate Reality leaders Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin. We focus on these two individuals as they are directly connected to the We Don’t Have Time campaign and business plan.

The Climate Reality Project and Global Utmaning. Greta Thunberg at far left. “How do we ensure that today’s decision-makers benefit and learn from young people’s commitment to the future? On September 26, the question attracted over 250 visitors to Kulturhuset Stadsteatern where Global Utmaning and Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project arranged seminars.” [Source]

Thunberg has stated repeatedly that her strike will continue “until Sweden is aligned with the Paris Agreement.” Therefore, by her own statements, this is the singular, overall purpose and goal of the strike. The foundation of the Paris Agreement is the expansion of nuclear, the financialization of nature, further privatization at an unprecedented scale, “large scale CO2 reduction” (carbon capture storage), a desperate attempt to revitalize economic growth, and more market “solutions” that will further perpetuate our multiple crises. Therefore, the Thunberg campaign is in part to create a demand upon governments across the globe to align with the Paris Agreement. (A demand to obtain what the ruling classes have already decided to unleash on us, our planet, and all life.) As adherence to the Paris Accords is a running theme in the mainstream NGO movement, the marketing campaign is helped along by 350.org, Avaaz, WWF, Greenpeace, in tandem with the UN (“Changing Together”), the World Bank (“Stepping Up“)[2], and more recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The Global Utmaning think tank cites its main asset as its network of over 90 senior advisors. From its homepage:

“The global market economy has lifted millions of people out of poverty. Meanwhile, inequality increased significantly. The financial system must be globally regulated and the current economic stagnation broken. It requires a new green, circular and inclusive growth model that creates value, labor and welfare. What is tomorrow’s new economic story?”

Global Utmaning recently announced a partnership with Global Shapers – an initiative of the World Economic Forum that brings together young leaders worldwide: “The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2019 will be held from 22-25 January in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. Over 3,000 global leaders will come together under the theme Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” [Emphasis added]

AVAAZ

Here we will make some brief observations of both Avaaz and 350.org in relation to the global “Climate Strike” campaigns. An exhaustive body of research that lays bare the function and ancestry of both NGOs, based on investigations from 2012 to present, now exists on the Wrong Kind of Green website. I encourage readers to familiarize themselves with the two entities.

On December 14, 2018, 350.org sent out a press release containing the following excerpts:

“Katowice, Poland – Today- 30 school children from three local schools in Katowice, answered the call of Greta Thunberg and brought the global #ClimateStrike into the final day of the UN Climate talks in Katowice.

 

The 30 students were granted special access to enter the UN talks and carry their message to the delegates and Polish government: with only 12 years left to get the world off fossil fuels, leaders must act now.” [emphasis in original]

On cue, the international media would publish photos such as this one:

Here is what you don’t see:

At the bottom of the 350.org press release under the heading “For more information”, the press release discloses: “NOTE that 350.Org and Avaaz are NOT organising these actions but are helping the students to spread their message.” [Emphasis in original]

And yet it certainly appears that Avaaz did in fact play a leading role in organizing the action – while orchestrating the media spotlight. [See photos in the above slider.]

On the day following the 350.org-Avaaz press release, December 15, 2018, NGOs and institutions alike scrambled to catapult the words of Thunberg into the hearts and minds of citizens all over the world.  From the UN, to Avaaz, to the World Bank, to grass roots resistance, they all clamoured to spread young Thunberg’s words. But one NGO took it upon itself to redact many of Thunberg’s words, releasing an abbreviated version (79K views on Facebook). With no disclaimer to its audience, Avaaz removed four excerpts from Thunberg’s speech. [4] The two excerpts that follow, which were cut by Avaaz, are most revealing:

Two of the excerpts that have been cut from Greta’s speech, are most revealing:

“You only speak of the green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.”

 

“But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilisation is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.”

It is not surprising Avaaz would strike Greta’s comments considering a primary function of Avaaz is to promote market solutions that accelerate “green” economic growth – in servitude to “a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.”

In the following Avaaz campaign, the NGO employs Thunberg’s face to place pressure on Sweden for corporate non-solutions, such as in this instance, “large scale CO2 reduction”. This is holistic framing for carbon capture storage technologies.

Here it is imperative to refer to the August 24, 2017 press release “Bellona seminar on Nordic CCS cooperation”. From the release:

“Now politicians have to go ahead so that we can build full-scale CO2 capture facilities as quickly as possible,’ said Tandberg. Three full-scale facilities in Norway are planned, but not yet granted, with a preliminary price tag of NOK 12.6 billion (EUR 1.28 billion)…

 

Norway is leading in capture, transportation and storage technologies, and can export the knowledge and facilities. There is potential for a completely new industry to be built. However it depends on whether Norway is able to keep its position. It is urgent to build the CCS plants, develop the technology further and get full-scale CCS infrastructure, and a Nordic cooperation can facilitate this process.”

This is a prime example of one of the main functions of NGOs. To generate popular demand from the citizenry that will in turn support the legislation required for projects that serve to benefit industry, rather than people and planet. Prior to the contracts being signed or a shovel breaking ground to build the infrastructures that will comprise the “global architecture in the age of the fourth industrial revolution” – legislation is required. And just like a proverbial snowball turning into an avalanche, the legislation begets money for a budget with bidding and construction to commence shortly thereafter.

What better way to create a demand for something detrimental to both the environment and the populace, than to package it under climate change solutions, with the lovely and innocent face of Greta.  With reality turned on its head,  industry doesn’t have to impose its will on the people – the people will impose it on themselves, via Avaaz et al. The people are thus engineered to  demand the very false solutions that the corporations have had up their sleeves for years and even decades.

Hence, the non-profit industrial complex and the media, both financed/funded by the word’s power elite, are amalgamated with and by corporate power. Together they work in unity, toward one common goal: economic growth. Hence, market solutions are always THE solutions. It is not simply a matter of placing the economy first before everything else. Rather, its placing the economy first at the EXPENSE of everything else. And everyone else. And all life on this planet.

To look at the scale of such so-called solutions, one need look no further than the 2013 Carbon Tracker “Unburnable Carbon Report” – page 12:

“Given that the average annual rate of storage in 2015 is projected by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (2012) to be about 2.25 million tonnes for 16 CCS projects, a total of nearly 3800 CCS projects would need to be operating by 2050 under the idealised scenario.”

The idealised scenario “offers about an 80% chance of not exceeding a warming of more than 2°C.”

May 14, 2015:

“As with all the shaping of our shared futures by the elite, the pathway to CCS is clear in the 2008 Green Alliance paper, A Last Chance for Coal, with contributions from Ben Caldecott while at the Policy Exchange think tank. The paper notes that it is critical Europe’s commitment to CCS be realized before 2020; 12 short years away from the paper’s publication date. The year 2020 is a critical date of vast significance – a recurring deadline for all environmental market solutions to be in place.”

[Further reading: AVAAZ: The Globe’s Largest & Most Powerful Behavioural Change Network]

[Further reading: McKibben’s Divestment Tour – Brought to You by Wall Street]

Jamie Margolin – Zero Hour

Jamie Margolin is the teenage founder of This Is Zero Hour and “one of the 13 plaintiffs suing Washington State for its failure to take adequate action on climate change.” (As disclosed in ACT I of this series, Margolin – and her NGO Zero Hour – accounted for two of the six accounts tagged by We Don’t Have Time on the very first post reporting Greta Thunberg’s school strike.) Margolin attended Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps (a three-day conference) that took place in Seattle on June 27-29, 2017. [Source] In July 2017, Margolin began organizing for a youth climate march in Washington, D.C. and launched Zero Hour. On February 27, 2018, exactly eight months after her first day at the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, Margolin would be featured in Rolling Stone magazine. Prior to her meteoric rise to stardom, Margolin interned  in Hillary Clinton’s campaign office in Seattle. The following passage demonstrates what has now become the normal corporate promotion of youth:

“The youngest speaker at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this week is Jamie Margolin of Seattle, who founded the Zero Hour youth climate march this past July and led its flagship action in Washington, D.C. At 16, Margolin presents a youthful contrast to most of the GCAS leadership, like California Governor Jerry Brown (80); former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (76); and China’s top climate diplomat, Xie Zhenhua (68).” [Source]

In the 21^st century manufactured movements and revolutions, today’s “leaders” (fabricated by corporate owned and funded media) are no longer enemies of the establishment. Rather, they  do events together – with establishment figures such as New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio adulating over our new “revolutionaries” while tagging them and tweeting their praises.  When the establishment itself loves our movements and our “faces of the future” – we know we have already lost tomorrow.

“Donate”: Jamie Margolin, teenage founder of This Is Zero Hour | Climate Reality Project webpage banner

On cue. On December 5, 2018, Time Magazine voted Greta Thunberg as one of the most influential teens (now the most sought after and targeted demographic by corporations) of 2018 while Jamie Margolin, founder of Zero Hour, Climate Reality leader and teen influencer, was lauded over by Teen Vogue. [July 19, 2018, Climate Change Puts the Future at Risk, So I’m Taking Action; November 5, 2018, 21 Under 21: Jamie Margolin Knows Climate Justice is the Key to All Justice; December 1, 2018, The Teen Vogue Summit 2018]

December 5, 2018, Teen Vogue: “15-Year-Old Activist Greta Thunberg Schooled World Leaders on Climate Change at a United Nations Summit”

In the above image, Margolin lends her celebrity status to prop up the brands Global Citizen and Johnson & Johnson. Global Citizen is perhaps the most egregious NGO in the non-profit industrial complex with its grotesque model of shallow, hollowed-out “activism” and corporatization. Recently Global Citizen has introduced “points” that can be accumulated by clicking on actions. In a blatant emulation of credit cards (the more money you spend, the more points you acquire), the more actions you click, the more points you acquire. These points can then be redeemed for access to celebrity events and concerts.

This is the social engineering of unquestioning compliance and  instantaneous acquiescence. In order to receive the reward, one must perform the action requested. If you do not comply, you simply do not receive the points.  Here, the encouragement for critical thought and debate is deliberately and strategically erased from the equation.

 

NGOs are not the only entities to exploit youth. Corporate partners that finance their endeavours also provide lofty sums of money to have their toxic legacies greenwashed. In July 2018, Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay “nearly $4.7 billion US in total damages to 22 women and their families after they claimed asbestos in Johnson & Johnson talcum powder contributed to their ovarian cancer, in the first case against the company that focused on asbestos in the powder… Six of the 22 plaintiffs in the latest trial have died from ovarian cancer. … Mark Lanier, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that Johnson & Johnson had covered up evidence of asbestos in their products for more than 40 years.” [Source]

Par for the course, partnerships and endorsements for corporations inflicting violence upon both children and planet are a hallmark of the non-profit industrial complex. This is not the only lawsuit that has been launched against Johnson & Johnson nor will it be the last. There are also 1200 pending lawsuits in the US alone against this corporate entity. Johnson & Johnson is not the exception – it is the norm.

“Global Citizen – Movement Makers. In This Photo: (L-R) Ladan Manteghi, Jamie Margolin, and Afroz Shah speak onstage during Global Citizen – Movement Makers at The Times Center on September 25, 2018 in New York City.” Source: Noam Galai/Getty Images North America

Bill Gates (Breakthrough Energy, Mission Innovation) with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for Global Citizen. Montreal, Quebec, Canada, September 17, 2016. REUTERS/Geoff Robins/POOL

June 30, 2017, Twitter: Jamie Margolin – teenage founder and executive director of This Is Zero Hour, founded in 2017

Jamie Margolin, speaking via Skype at the Climate Emergency Plan presentation, (We Don’t Have Time, Global Utmaning, the Club of Rome), November  24, 2018:

“We don’t just think about, oh there’s carbon in the air and we need to lower it, we think of how did the carbon get there?, like how did we allow a system that could lead us to such destruction?”

The system that Margolin refers to is that of global capitalism, an economic system that is devouring everything in its path. A promise to destroy the planetary ecosystems of our shared futures. And it’s not as though Margolin has not begun to understand the glaring systems intersecting at the nexus of our multiple crises, such as capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy.

Rather, Margolin does in fact possess the basic building blocks of knowledge that are required for the long road ahead of instilling and inspiring the revolutionary changes that are required amoungst the youth. Yet, by positioning herself with those that bring into fruition and profit from everything Margolin touches upon, she tragically denigrates her own analysis by merely calling for better cups for Starbucks rather than the elimination of Starbucks altogether. Hence, on her current path, Margolin does more harm than good for the very systemic issues she articulates so well.

With “crude capitalists“, such as Gore, de Blasio and others, now capturing the last vestiges of youth that even have such awareness (an awareness that is slowly dying out), soon the systemic structures that allow capitalism and oppression to flourish will have no opposition whatsoever. We are reaching the point where there is no distinction between our “movements” and the coalitions created to further our oppression and servitude. The fact that Margolin serves as a face for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project – when saving capitalism is Gore’s number one priority (as we will learn in ACT III), grinds all of Margolin’s articulate words – and actions – to dust. Gore uses Greta, Margolin and all the youth they mobilize – by destroying the very futures these youth are hoping to save – all in servitude to economic growth and capitalism for the world’s power elite.

Also of relevance to the Thunberg campaign is the race to capture the Millennial and Generation Z. With increasing frequency, this capture is primarily achieved by the manufactured and heavily funded youth “movements”. “Movements” teeming with potential consumers, fully exploitable by those that benefit from, and in many cases contribute to, the steady stream of funding. The title Generation Z has been applied to those connected from birth to online media, to whom “instant gratification is the norm.” Today, this demographic is the most powerful and sought after audience in North America. As an illustration of the terms popularity, Zero Hour’s Margolin actually refers to herself as “Generation Z.”

The November 8, 2018 Barclays article, Gen Z: Step Aside Millennials reports that this demographic (children born between 1995 and 2009), the same demographic that youth leaders like Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin belong to, appeal to and influence, are quickly becoming the new “consumer giants” and “mega influencers”:

“By 2020, Generation Z will be the largest group of consumers globally. They will account for 40% of consumers in the US, Europe and BRIC countries and 10% in the rest of the world. Companies that don’t engage with Gen Z successfully could rapidly lose market share. Some of them may only be 9 years old, but Gen Z already have huge spending power. In the US, Gen Z currently have $200 billion in direct buying power but $1 trillion in indirect spending power by influencing household spending*. Gen Z’s advanced digital knowledge and ability to assess factors such as price and availability from a young age make them increasingly influential in family spending decisions.”

In the eyes of bankers and capitalists, this group of youth are mere consumers. Dollar signs. Not children, youth or even people.

Faux activism comes with many perks inclusive of six-figure salaries, jet-setting, and “Ted Talks”. Plus, the best hipster eco-brands money can buy. Perhaps the most enticing perk – is access. Access to the halls of power. With the media fawning all over every reformist word, the faux activist can fall in love with his/her/x own image all over again. Everyone wants to be a star. Everyone wants to live the luxurious life. Everyone wants to belong to the champagne circuit.

All on the backs of the most oppressed. All on the backs of the most vulnerable. Yet the paradox is this – we are their vehicle. Our resistance captured and channeled directly back into the very systems crushing us.

A Coupe De Grace

Greta Thunberg is being strategically exploited by the World Bank, the UN, and the non-profit industrial complex that serves the ruling classes. They are using her to advance their own self-interests and objectives – that are in direct opposition to everything this young woman brilliantly articulates. This is being presented as a “leaderless movement” – very much the “New Power” methodology and religion for the capitalists – theorized by Jeremy Heimans (Avaaz/Purpose) for mass movement building – that serves the most powerful and destructive forces on the planet.

The manipulation of young, malleable minds is at the foundation of Western indoctrination in order to insulate a failing system and mask the market solutions being designed to address it. Market “solutions” that benefit the rich at the expense of  the environment. Hence, the youth are always the sacrificial lambs of the non-profit industrial complex.

 

 [Further reading: From Stable to Star – The Making of North American “Climate Heroes”]

[Further Reading: Targeting Millennials: The 30 Trillion Dollar Jackpot]

[Further Reading: The Pygmalion Virus in Three Acts [2017 AVAAZ SERIES, PART II]

 

End Notes:

[1] “According to WE.org, ‘WE is made up of WE Charity and ME to WE. Both are part of the WE Movement, also known as ‘WE’ and ‘We.'” – “WE Charity used to be called Free The Children, and before that, Kids Can Free The Children. ME to WE is a private, for-profit business, but WE prefers to call it a ‘social enterprise.'” [Source] [2] The COP24 Stepping Up Climate Action is a campaign initiated by the UN with Connect4Climate. The campaign of “global leaders, thinkers, activists and influencers” includes Greta Thunberg. “Connect4Climate is a global partnership program under the Communication for Climate Change Multi-Donor Trust Fund of the World Bank Group. The Trust Fund was initiated by the Italian Ministry of Environment, and in 2014 it was joined by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.”

[3] Video: Greta & Svante Thunberg – Straight Talk, Dec 9, 2019 [ 15:31 in]; Grist, December 5, 2018: “I will sit there every Friday until Sweden is aligned with the Paris Agreement,” she told a packed auditorium in Katowice.

[4] 1) “You only speak of the green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.”

2) “But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet our civilisation is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.”

3) “Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.”

4) “We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.”

 

[Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

Edited with Forrest Palmer, Wrong Kind of Green Collective.

 

 

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex [ACT I]

By Cory Morningstar

January 17, 2019

 

“What’s infuriating about manipulations by the Non Profit Industrial Complex is that they harvest the goodwill of the people, especially young people. They target those who were not given the skills and knowledge to truly think for themselves by institutions which are designed to serve the ruling class. Capitalism operates systematically and structurally like a cage to raise domesticated animals. Those organizations and their projects which operate under false slogans of humanity in order to prop up the hierarchy of money and violence are fast becoming some of the most crucial elements of the invisible cage of corporatism, colonialism and militarism.” — Hiroyuki Hamada, artist

 

1958: “17-year-old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail, and dances on wine bottles. Her performance was based on a dream and she practised for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance.”

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

[Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [Addenda: I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

• A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

• The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

 

Volume I:

In ACT I, I disclosed that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and face of the youth movement to combat climate change, served as special youth advisor and trustee to the foundation established by “We Don’t Have Time”, a burgeoning mainstream tech start-up. I then explored the ambitions behind the tech company We Don’t Have Time.

In ACT II, I illustrate how today’s youth are the sacrificial lambs for the ruling elite. Also in this act I introduce the board members of and advisors to We Don’t Have Time. I explore the leadership in the nascent We Don’t Have Time and the partnerships between the well-established corporate environmental entities: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In ACT III, I deconstruct how Al Gore and the planet’s most powerful capitalists are behind today’s manufactured youth movements and why. I explore the We Don’t Have Time/Thunberg connections to Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, This Is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. I also touch upon Thunberg’s famous family. In particular, Thunberg’s celebrity mother, Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero of the Year 2017) and her August 2018 book launch. I then explore the generous media attention afforded to Thunberg in both May and April of 2018 by SvD, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers.

In ACT IV, I examine the current campaign, now unfolding, in “leading the public into emergency mode”. More importantly, I summarize who and what this mode is to serve.

In ACT V, I take a closer look at the Green New Deal. I explore Data for Progress and the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”. I connect the primary architect and authors of the “Green New Deal” data to the World Resources Institute. From there, I walk you through the interlocking Business & Sustainable Development Commission, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the New Climate Economy – a project of the World Resources Institute. I disclose the common thread between these groups and the assignment of money to nature, represented by the Natural Capital Coalition and the non-profit industrial complex as an entity. Finally, I reveal how this has culminated in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale) which is “expected to be adopted during the fifteenth meeting in Beijing in 2020.”

In the final act, ACT VI [Crescendo], I wrap up the series by divulging that the very foundations which have financed the climate “movement” over the past decade are the same foundations now partnered with the Climate Finance Partnership looking to unlock 100 trillion dollars from pension funds. I reveal the identities of individuals and groups at the helm of this interlocking matrix, controlling both the medium and the message. I take a step back in time to briefly demonstrate the ten years of strategic social engineering that have brought us to this very precipice. I look at the relationship between WWF, Stockholm Institute and World Resources Institute as key instruments in the creation of the financialization of nature. I also take a look at the first public campaigns for the financialization of nature (“natural capital”) that are slowly being brought into the public realm by WWF. I reflect upon how mainstream NGOs are attempting to safeguard their influence and further manipulate the populace by going underground through Extinction Rebellion groups being organized in the US and across the world.

With the smoke now cleared, the weak and essentially non-existent demands reminiscent of the 2009 TckTckTck “demands” can now be fully understood.

Some of these topics, in addition to others, will be released and discussed in further detail as addenda built on the large volume of research. This includes stepping through the looking glass, with an exploration of what the real “Green New Deal” under the Fourth Industrial Revolution will look like. Also forthcoming is a look at the power of celebrity – and how it has become a key tool for both capital and conformity.

[*Note: This series contains information and quotes that have been translated from Swedish to English via Google Translate.]

 

 

A C T   O N E

 

“How is it possible for you to be so easily tricked by something so simple as a story, because you are tricked? Well, it all comes down to one core thing and that is emotional investment. The more emotionally invested you are in anything in your life, the less critical and the less objectively observant you become.” — David JP Phillips, We Don’t Have Time board of directors, “The Magical Science of Storytelling”

 

 

October 26, 2018, Facebook: Greta Thunberg, We Don’t Have Time

 

August 2018, Finance Monthly: co-founder of We Don’t Have Time, Ingmar Rentzhog

We Don’t Have Time

As this term is quickly becoming the quote du jour as a collective mantra to address the ongoing environmental disaster that can best be described as a nod to the obvious, it’s true that we don’t have time. We don’t have time to stop imperialist wars – wars being the greatest contributor to climate change and environmental degradation by far – but we must do so. Of course this is an impossible feat under the crushing weight of the capitalist system, a US war economy, and the push for a fourth industrial revolution founded on renewable energy. Yet, inconvenience has nothing to do with necessity in regards to addressing a particular situation. What is never discussed in regard to the so-called “clean energy revolution” is that its existence is wholly dependent on “green” imperialism – the latter term being synonymous with blood.

But that’s not what this series is about.

This series is about new financial markets in a world where global economic growth is experiencing stagnation. The threat and subsequent response is not so much about climate change as it is about the collapse of the capitalist economic system. This series is about the climate wealth opportunity of unprecedented growth, profits, and the measures our elite classes will take in order to achieve it – including the exploitation of the youth.

What is We Don’t Have Time?

 

“Our goal is to become among the biggest players on the internet.” — Ingmar Rentzhog, We Don’t Have Time, December 22, 2017, Nordic Business Insider

On August 20, 2018 a tweet featuring a photo of “a Swedish girl” sitting on a sidewalk was released by the tech company, We Don’t Have Time, founded by its CEO Ingmar Rentzhog:

“One 15 year old girl in front of the Swedish parliament is striking from School until Election Day in 3 weeks[.] Imagine how lonely she must feel in this picture. People where [sic] just walking by. Continuing with the business as usual thing. But the truth is. We can’t and she knows it!”

Rentzhog’s tweet, via the We Don’t Have Time twitter account, would be the very first exposure of Thunberg’s now famous school strike.

Above: We Don’t Have Time tweet, August 20, 2018

Tagged in Rentzhog’s “lonely girl” tweet were five twitter accounts: Greta Thunberg, Zero Hour (youth movement), Jamie Margolin (the teenage founder of Zero Hour), Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and the People’s Climate Strike twitter account (in the identical font and aesthetics as 350.org). [These groups will be touched upon briefly later in this series.]

Rentzhog is the founder of Laika (a prominent Swedish communications consultancy firm providing services to the financial industry, recently acquired by FundedByMe). He was appointed as chair of the think tank Global Utmaning (Global Challenge in English) on May 24, 2018, and serves on the board of FundedByMe. Rentzhog is a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Organization Leaders, where he is part of the European Climate Policy Task Force. He received his training in March 2017 by former US Vice President Al Gore in Denver, USA, and again in June 2018, in Berlin.

Founded in 2006, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project is a partner of We Don’t Have Time.

The We Don’t Have Time Foundation cites two special youth advisors and trustees: Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin. [Source]

Mårten Thorslund, chief marketing and sustainability officer of We Don’t Have Time, took many of the very first photos of Thunberg following the launch of her school strike on August 20, 2018. In the following instance, photos taken by Thorslund accompany the article written by David Olsson, chief operating officer of We Don’t Have Time, This 15-year-old Girl Breaks Swedish Law for the Climate, published August 23, 2018:

“Greta became a climate champion and tried to influence those closest to her. Her father now writes articles and gives lectures on the climate crisis, whereas her mother, a famous Swedish opera singer, has stopped flying. All thanks to Greta.

 

And clearly, she has stepped up her game, influencing the national conversation on the climate crisis—two weeks before the election. We Don’t Have Time reported on Greta’s strike on its first day and in less than 24 hours our Facebook posts and tweets received over twenty thousand likes, shares and comments. It didn’t take long for national media to catch on. As of the first week of the strike, at least six major daily newspapers, as well as Swedish and Danish national TV, [1] have interviewed Greta. Two Swedish party leaders have stopped by to talk to her as well.” [Emphasis added]

The article continues:

“Is there something big going on here? This one kid immediately got twenty supporters who now sit next to her. This one kid created numerous news stories in national newspapers and on TV. This one kid has received thousands of messages of love and support on social media…. Movements by young people, such as Jaime Margolin’s #ThisIsZeroHour that #WeDontHaveTime interviewed earlier, speaks with a much needed urgency that grown-ups should pay attention to…” [Emphasis in original]

Yes – there was, and still is, something going on.

It’s called marketing and branding.

“Yesterday I sat completely by myself, today there is one other here too. There are none [that] I know.” — Greta Thunberg, August 21, 2018,  Nyheter newspaper, Sweden [Translation via Google]

The “one kid immediately got twenty supporters” – from a Swedish network for sustainable business. What is going on – is the launch of a global campaign to usher in a required consensus for the Paris Agreement, the Green New Deal and all climate-related policies and legislation written by the power elite – for the power elite. This is necessary in order to unlock the trillions of dollars in funding by way of massive public demand.

These agreements and policies include carbon capture and storage (CCS), enhanced oil recovery (EOR), bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), rapid total decarbonisation, payments for ecosystem services (referred to as “natural capital”), nuclear energy and fission, and a host of other “solutions” that are hostile to an already devastated planet. What is going on – is a rebooting of a stagnant capitalist economy, that needs new markets – new growth – in order to save itself. What is being created is a  mechanism to unlock approximately 90 trillion dollars for new investments and infrastructure. What is going on is the creation of, and investment in, perhaps the biggest behavioural change experiment yet attempted, global in scale. And what are the deciding factors in what behaviours global society should adhere to? And more importantly, who decides? This is a rhetorical question, as we know full well the answer: the same Western white male saviours and the capitalist economic system they have implemented globally that has been the cause of our planetary ecological nightmare. This crisis continues unabated as they appoint themselves (yet again) as the saviours for all humanity – a recurring problem for centuries.

Source: WWF

+++

“Our goal is to become at least 100 million users. It is an eighth of all who have climbed on social media. Only last month we managed to reach 18 million social media accounts according to a media survey that Meltwater news made for us. At Facebook, we are currently seven times the number of followers among the world’s all climate organizations. We are growing with 10,000 new global followers per day on Facebook.” — Ingmar Rentzhog interview with Miljö & Utveckling, October 15, 2018

We Don’t Have Time identifies itself as a movement and tech start-up that is  currently developing “the world’s largest social network for climate action”. The “movement” component was launched on April 22, 2018. The web platform is still in the progress of being built, but is to launch on April 22, 2019 (coinciding with Earth Day). “Through our platform, millions of members will unite to put pressure on leaders, politicians and corporations to act for the climate.” The start-up’s goal to rapidly achieve 100 million users has thus far attracted 435 investors (74.52% of the company’s shares) via the web platform FundedByMe.

The start-up intends to offer partnerships, digital advertising and services related to climate change, sustainability and the growing green, circular economy to “a large audience of engaged consumers and ambassadors.”

We Don’t Have Time is mainly active in three markets: social media, digital advertising and carbon offsets. [“In the US alone estimated market for carbon offsetting amount to over 82 billion USD of which voluntary carbon offset represents 191 million USD. The market is expected to increase in the future, in 2019 estimated 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions to be associated with any kind of cost for offsetting.”] As the company is a niche organization, social networks are able to provide services tailored to platform users. The start-up has identified such an opportunity by offering its users the ability to purchase carbon offsets through the platform’s own certification. This option applies to both the individual user of the platform, as well as to whole organizations/companies on the platform.

One incentive of many identified in the start-up investment section is that users will be encouraged to “communicate jointly and powerfully with influential actors.” Such influencers are Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin who both have lucrative futures in the branding of “sustainable” industries and products, should they wish to pursue this path in utilizing their present celebrity for personal gain (a hallmark of the “grassroots” NGO movement). [Further reading: The Increasing Vogue for Capitalist-Friendly Climate Discourse]

The tech company is banking on creating a massive member base of “conscious users” that will enable “profitable commercial collaborations, for example, advertising”:

“Decision makers – politicians, companies, organizations, states – get a climate rating based on their ability to live up to the users’ initiative. Knowledge and opinion gather in one place and users put pressure on decision makers to drive a faster change.”

 

“The main sources of revenue come from commercial players who have received high climate rating and confidence in the We Don’t Have Times member base.[2] … The revenue model will resemble the social platform of TripAdvisor.com’s business model, which with its 390 million users annually generates over $ 1 billion in good profitability…We will work with strategic partners such as Climate Reality leaders, climate organizations, bloggers, influencers and leading experts in the field.”

Video: We Don’t Have Time promotional video, published April 6, 2018 [Running time: 1m:38s]

A “state of conscious and permanent visibility assures the automatic functioning of power.” — Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

Comparable to other social media endeavors where “likes”, “followers”, and unfathomable amounts of metadata determine financial success, the fact that the business is virtual enables high profit margins. The return on investment, best described as mainstream acquiescence and desirability by way of exposure, will be obtained through future dividends. In anticipation of this projected success, the tech company plans to take its business to the stock exchange in the near future (think Facebook and Instagram.) The most critical component to the success of this start-up (like its predecessors) is achieving a massive member base. Therefore, according to the company, it “will work actively with both enlisting influencers and creating content for various campaigns linked to the hashtag #WeDontHaveTime.”

 

 

On April 18, 2018, the crowdfunding platform FundedByMe (utilized by We Don’t Have Time to enlist investors) acquired Ingmar Rentzhog’s Laika Consulting. Excerpts from the press release are as follows:

“FundedByMe today announced that they acquire 100% of the shares in the established financial company Laika Consulting AB, a leading communications agency in financial communications. As a result, the company doubles its investment network to close to 250,000 members, making it the largest in the Nordic region. The acquisition is a strategic step to further strengthen FundedByMe’s range of financial services…

 

[Ingmar Rentzhog] will continue to work on strategic client projects for FundedByMe and Laika Consulting in part-time. Moreover he takes a role in the company’s board. The majority of his time he will focus on climate change through the newly established company, “We Don’t Have Time”, as a CEO and founder.” [Emphasis added] [Source] [3]

 

We Don’t Have Time Software App: The Latest Wave of Western & Corporate Ideology at Your Fingertips

 In October 2016, Netflix aired the third season of Black Mirror, “a Twilight Zone–esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures.” The first episode “Nosedive” posits a shallow and hypocritical populace in which “social platforms, self-curation and validation-seeking” have become the underpinning of a future society. [Black Mirror’s third season opens with a vicious take on social media]. The disturbing episode shares parallels to the concept behind We Don’t Have Time. The difference being instead of rating people exclusively, we will be rating brands, products, corporations and everything else climate related.

Acquisition International Magazine Issue 10, 2018 

The not unintended results will be tenfold. The corporations with the best advertising executives and largest budgets will be the winners. Greenwashing will become an unprecedented method of advertising as will the art of “storytelling” (no one ever said a story has to be true). Small or local businesses with little financial means will more than often be the losers. Especially hit, will be migrant entrepreneurs whose cultures differ from ours in the West – where “Western democracy” is the only democracy that is valid.

Adding to the conversation as to who is ultimately benefiting from this endeavor from a cultural, social, geographical and ethnic perspective is the fact that “subconscious biases about race or gender, is a proven problem on many crowdsourced platforms.” [Source] Ultimately, this means that in order to acquire the needed support as a multimedia platform, the self-interest of the Western world must be at the fore with no concern for the Global South – other than what we can continue to steal from her.  The inconvenient truth is that all roads lead to the same collective (if even subconscious)  goal: the preservation of whiteness.

Rentzhog assures his audience that “our core, though, will remain, namely to empower our users to put pressure on world leaders so that they move faster towards an emission-free world and environmentally sustainable solutions and policies.” [Acquisition International Magazine Issue 10, 2018]

An “emission-free world” sounds enticing – yet there are no plans whatsoever to retract our growth economies. “Environmentally sustainable solutions” … according to who? According to a tribal elder who upholds the principles of “the seventh generation” (the Indigenous belief that humans must properly provide for its descendants by ensuring that our actions in the present allow the Earthly survival of seven succeeding generations – not to be confused with Unilever’s Seventh Generation acquisition) – or according to the World Bank? (We all know the answer to this rhetorical question.)

Another inconvenient truth, regarding the above premise, is that there is growing pressure on governments to increase Federal research and development funding to develop and deploy “deep decarbonization” technologies as one of the primary “solutions” to climate change. This was proposed at the Paris Climate Accord with Bill Gates’ “Mission Innovation” initiative which committed to doubling government investment in energy technology.

“We want it to cost more, in terms of revenue, public support and reputation, to not work on lowering emissions and improve environmental sustainability, whereas those that lead the way should be recognized for this. Our vision is to create a race towards environmental sustainability and CO2 neutrality, making it the core priority for businesses, politicians and organizations worldwide.” — Acquisition International Magazine Issue 10, 2018 

Here again, we must look closely at language and framing. Who are “those that lead the way”? Are they referring to Western citizens who can fit all their belongings in a duffle bag? [Here it must be said that the environmental heroes in the West are NOT the Richard Bransons or Leonardo DiCaprios of the world. The real heroes for the environment, due to their almost non-existent environmental footprint, are  the homeless – despite the scorn they receive from society as a whole.] Are they referring to the African Maasai who, to this day, literally leave no trace? Or are “those that lead the way” Unilever and Ikea (represented on the We Don’t Have Time board)? This is another rhetorical question we all know the answer to. Notice the mention of CO2 “neutrality” rather than a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions. Convenient language when one of the main pillars of the business model is the sale of carbon offsets – rationalizing a continuance of the same carbon-based lifestyle by constructing a faux fantasy one, that anyone with monetary wealth, can buy into.

As online reviews and ratings systems have become a Western staple of determining the worthiness of a person, group or corporation,  the internet presently is a primary source of determining the quality of an entity. One example of this type of system is the online site Trip Advisor, which utilizes user feedback as a measuring stick of a hotel, airline, car rental, etc.  As the Trip Advisor rating system is the revenue model We Don’t Have Time seeks to emulate, we will explore this particular rating system.

Whereas a reputable and established website such as Trip Advisor is based on an actual experience – We Don’t Have Time evaluations are more geared toward promises into the future regarding a green technology revolution and/or the effectiveness of advertising in making people believe the veracity of these promises. By utilizing fake accounts (think Twitter and Facebook), strategically orchestrated campaigns will effectively allow the app to break political careers and demonize people and countries based on the numbers of ratings (“climate bombs”). These bombs can be administered against any foe that does not embrace the technologies (sought by the West to benefit the West) of this so-called revolution, regardless if the reason for doing so is justifiable or not.

The word “bomb” itself will become reframed. Rather than associating bombs with militarism (never touched upon by We Don’t Have Time) the word bomb will eventually become first and foremost associated with ratings, bad products, bad ideas and bad people. Such is the power of language and framing when combined with social engineering. Here, the behavioural economics of hatred can be weaponized – a virtual new form of soft power. The Nicaraguan Sandinista government who did not sign onto the Paris Agreement because it is too weak (and serves only Western interests) could quickly become a pariah on the global stage – as the West controls the stage. Already a target for destabilization, the soft power app would be applied as the ruling class sees fit.

When one contemplates the non-profit industrial complex, it must be considered the most powerful army in the world. Employing billions of staff, all inter-connected, today’s campaigns, financed by our ruling oligarchs can become viral in a matter of hours just by the interlocking directorate working together in unity toward a common goal to instil uniform  thoughts and opinions, which gradually create a desired ideology. This is the art of social engineering. Conformity and emotive content as tools of manipulation has been and always will be the most powerful weapons in the Mad Men’s  toolbox. If 300,000 people have already voted with “climate hearts” on a “trending” topic in under 48 hours – it must be a great idea.

“Nobody wants to be bottom of the class.”  Ingmar Retzhog, We Don’t Have Time, December 22, 2017, Nordic Business Insider

To be clear, the West is in no position to “teach” (nudge/engineer) the “correct” value system regarding sustainability to the world, when the biggest polluters on the planet are manufactured into “climate leaders” and “climate heroes”. This is reality turned on its head. A reality we are conditioned to accept. Institutions such as the United Nations in tandem with the media, spoon-feed this insanity (that defies all logic) to the global populace, in servitude to the ruling classes.

“Nudging”: Acquisition International Magazine Issue 10, 2018 

Finally, this behavioral science platform lends itself to the continued devolvement of critical thinking. With virtually everything and everyone to rate all day long – who has time to look in depth at any given policy or product that after all, sounds, looks and feels simply amazing due to sophisticated marketing coupled with behavioural change tactics? It is vital to keep in mind that social engineering – and massive profit – are the key merits and purpose of this application.

 

End Notes:

[1] TV 2 Danmark Danish public service, SVT Swedish public service, TV 4 News, Metro TV, Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet (August 20, 2018), Sydsvenskan, Stockholm Direkt, Expressen (August 20, 2018) , ETC, WWF, Effekt Magazin, GöteborgsPosten,Helsingborgs Dagblad, Folkbladet, Uppsala Nya tidning, Vimmerby Tidning, Piteå Tidningen, Borås Tidning, Duggan, VT, NT, Corren, OMNI, WeDontHaveTime CEO viral FaceBook post that mention it first. [Source] [2] Click-based advertising based on highly rated companies that want to drive traffic to their websites; Targeted web advertising for companies that want to reach out to environmentally aware users in different segments; Business subscriptions where companies and organizations have the opportunity to interact with the members and get the right to use the We Don’t Have Times brand and the company’s rating in their marketing [Source] [3] “Laika Consulting was one of the first companies in Sweden to work with crowdfunding when we established the brand in 2004. I look forward to follow the company’s growth closely. A combination of Laika’s expertise in listed companies, together with FundedByMe with its international and digital presence, can create new opportunities for growth.”says Laika’s CEO, Ingmar Rentzhog.” [Source]

 

[Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

Edited with Forrest Palmer, Wrong Kind of Green Collective.

 

 

Philanthropic Capitalist Foundations and Corporate Environmentalism

Le Partage

January 2019

By Nicolas Casaux

 

 

Translation from French to English via DeepL Translator

 

The two examples below of funding from Jane Goodall’s NGO (Jane Goodall Institute) and 350 (.org) are quite representative of how mainstream ecology works. The leading figures and organizations in the field of ecology, those that are often reported in the media, are rarely, if ever, revolutionary. Their discourse is often limited to various platitudes, encouraging all kinds of false solutions and stating relatively hollow proposals, or worse (ending poverty/developing green energy and technology/developing organic/go to work by bike/developing sustainable development/vote for the good guys/etc.). And their actions are palliative (which can, however, in some cases, be really important).

Jane Goodall’s NGO funding

*

NGO 350.org funding

The same reasons that push the mass media (which, on the whole, belong to[1] – and broadly convey the ideology of – the same class of individuals found behind philanthrocapitalist foundations) to promote the ecologism of large NGOs and some subsidized personalities (by the private or public), push private philanthrocapitalist foundations and/or public organizations to finance these NGOs and individuals: they are harmless for today’s capitalist industrial society.

Thus the NGO 350.org was created and continues to be financed by the Rockefellers and many other ultra-rich capitalists; thus the Jane Goodall Foundation is financed by various philanthrocapitalist foundations and even directly by a few corporations, including an airline company; and thus WWF, which is financed by and collaborates with various multinationals (Coca-Cola, HSBC, etc.).) and foundations; and thus Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s , “founded with the support of three banks […] : BNP Paribas, the Swiss bank Lombard Odier, and Cortal Consors, BNP’s subsidiary specialising in online trading for individuals”, which collaborates with Total[2] and is “financed in particular by donations from companies such as Casino, Suez or BNP[3]”; thus Cyril Dion’s film Demain was subsidised by AFD and co-produced with France Télévisions, as well as his documentary film Après-Demain ; etc.

Ultimately, these heavily subsidized, funded and mediated NGOs and personalities are a kind of ecological guarantor of capitalist industrial society. They make it possible to channel and control popular concerns about the fate of the natural world. Their ecologism is to ecology what modern electoral systems are to democracy. A fraud. About these general public ecologists, Jaime Semprun’s Encyclopedia of Nuisances wrote in its Address to all those who do not want to manage nuisances but remove them, in June 1990, that they:

“are in the field of the fight against nuisances what trade unionists were in the field of workers’ struggles: intermediaries interested in preserving the contradictions for which they regulate, negotiators dedicated to bargaining (the revision of standards and harmfulness rates replacing the percentages of wage increases), advocates of the quantitative as economic calculation extends to new fields (air, water, human embryos or synthetic sociability); in short, new brokers of an economic subjection whose price must now include the cost of a “quality environment”. We are already seeing the establishment, co-managed by “green” experts, of a redistribution of the territory between sacrificed and protected areas, a spatial division that will regulate hierarchical access to nature goods. As for radioactivity, there will be something for everyone.

 

To say that the ecologists’ practice is reformist would still do it too much credit, because it is directly and deliberately in line with the logic of capitalist domination, which unceasingly extends, by its very destruction, the field of its exercise. In this cyclical production of evils and their aggravating remedies, ecologism will have been only the reserve army of an era of bureaucratization, where “rationality” is always defined far from the individuals concerned and any realistic knowledge, with the renewed disasters that this implies. […]

 

It is therefore not a kind of extremist purism, let alone “politics of the worst”, that invites us to stand out violently from all the ecological planners of the economy: it is simply the realism about the necessary future of all this. The consequent development of the fight against nuisances requires clarifying, through as many exemplary denunciations as necessary, the opposition between ecolocrats – those who derive power from the ecological crisis – and those who do not have interests distinct from all dispossessed individuals, nor from the movement that can enable them to eliminate nuisances through the “rational dismantling of all commercial production”. If those who want to suppress nuisances are necessarily on the same ground as those who want to manage them, they must be present as enemies, otherwise they will be reduced to figuring in the spotlight of the directors of spatial planning. They can only really occupy this ground, i.e. find the means to transform it, by asserting without concession the social criticism of nuisances and their managers, installed or postulated. »

Their criticism of nuisance management, which is also a criticism of the management of popular concerns and disputes, is in line with the denunciation of the NGOization of resistance formulated, among others, by Arundhati Roy:

The NGO-ization of Resistance, Arundhati Roy, August 16, 2004

Gil Scott-Heron had sung it, the revolution will not be televised, and the collective INCITE! rightly adds that it will not be subsidized either.

 

End Notes:

1. https://www.bastamag.net/Le-pouvoir-d-influence-delirant-des-dix-milliardaires-qui-possedent-la-presse ?
2. https://www.zonebourse.com/TOTAL-4717/actualite/Total-accord-avec-la-Fondation-GoodPlanet-25542889/?iCStream=1 ?
3. https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2015/09/16/l-empire-yann-arthus-bertrand-en-5-chiffres_4759524_4355770.html ?

 

[Nicolas Casaux is a member of the international organization Deep Green Resistance.]

PODCAST: Brazil and the US Left’s Imperial Blindspot

Brasil Wire

December 28, 2018

Interview with Brian Mier

 

 

In an interview on the WNUR Chicago radio show This is Hell, which aired on Saturday, December 22, 2018, Brasil Wire co-editor Brian Mier explained what Jacobin and the Western / Northern left media at large got wrong about politics in pre-coup Brazil – focusing attacks on the country’s leading left PT party and ignoring both voices from the PT itself, and the broader threat of US imperialism as the right set the stage for a takeover. The following are the transcripts, edited for readability:

Chuck Mertz: The US Left, hell all the western and global north left, abandoned Brazil’s left when they were needed most during a fascists coup that overthrew their democratically elected leader. Here to hopefully figure out why this happened and how to make certain it doesn’t happen again is our correspondent in São Paulo, Brazil, Brian Mier, co-author of the article How the US Left Failed Brazil: Why did the US left media bash a successful democratic socialist party during a right wing coup?Brian wrote that article with Sean T. Mitchell and Bryan Pitts.

Welcome back to This is Hell Brian. You write that after an electoral defeat to the far right Jair Bolsonaro fueled largely by fake news and blatantly partisan judicial measures against the PT, the Workers Party, Brazil’s largest leftist party, is now often extolled on the US left for its democratic socialist successes. Yet it is easy to forget what a transformation this was for north American leftist outlets. Before we get to their criticisms, the left’s criticisms of the PT and Jacobin Magazine’s criticisms of the PT, what explains, to you, why it took these leftist magazines and organizations so long to not recognize how unfair the impeachment of Dilma was, how unfair the charges against Lula were, how far right the alternative to Dilma and Lula and the PT was and now is in the form of Jair Bolsonaro and his new government that includes other former members of the military junta? PT aside, Brian, why didn’t the leftist publications you researched realize how justice was corrupted in a strategy by the far right to unfairly put those behind the dictatorship back in control of Brazil?

Brian Mier: I think that there was some mention – a little bit – that what was going on against Dilma Rousseff was unfair but I think that Brazil is just a very big and confusing country that is not that easy to understand and the media in general, journalism, tends to deal with these kinds of mind stopping cliches to try to break down issues into binary things like, ‘either they are left or they are right’, or ‘either they are good or they are bad’. There is always one simple cause for everything in most of what you read in journalism and that just didn’t work to explain what was happening against Dilma Rousseff. I really don’t know why, I just know that it happened. You’ve been listening to me talking about this for years. When the coup was launching against Dilma Rousseff I remember a listener wrote in and said “why is Brian defending someone like Dilma Rousseff?” I guess the way things have played out it’s pretty obvious now. But I just know what happened – I can’t really explain why. I have different theories which I can get into in more depth as this conversation progresses.

CM: We’ve had conversations where you’re ripped on the New York Times’ coverage of Brazil. Last week we had Cole Stangler on the show, live from Paris, about how we get the yellow vest movement wrong and Cole and I talked about recent New York Times coverage of the yellow vests, framing it as being those who support fighting climate change against those who want lower taxes, which the person who started the movement, on social media, explicitly said the movement was not about in the very beginning in his very first announcement online. As Cole pointed out in Jacobin and the Nation, the yellow vest movement is about the wealthy getting tax cuts while the rest of France has to pay higher taxes, it’s about fiscal fairness, it’s about class. So I asked Cole if that is why the Times gets the yellow vests wrong, because reporting on issues of class is, at the very least, challenging to the Times. How much in what you see wrong in the reporting of the mainstream news media, again before we get to the left, of the paper of record, the New York Times, when it comes to Brazil is the problem because Brazil is a story of class? Is the problem that the Times has problems with reporting on class whether it is in France or Brazil or anywhere for that matter?

BM: No, not at all. The problem with the Times and the Guardian and the Washington Post is that they are just voices for the expanded US State, in the Gramscian, Marcusian sense of the term, which includes the corporations, the government, the political parties and the media which supports all of this mess. So what you are getting in the New York Times is straight up corporate and government propaganda in favor of the coup. The New York Times rarely strays from the State Department line in any country in Latin America and you see that with their reporting on Venezuela and Nicaragua. There is no investigative work being done whatsoever – it’s all just PR favoring corporate interests and the US government and state department interests.

September 30, 2018: “Women in Brazil marches against far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, social organizations demonstrate in support of the Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad.” [TeleSUR]

CM: So for you it’s not an inability or an unwillingness to talk about class, it’s a willingness to promote US interests?

BM: Well if you look, they just hired Juliana Barbassa as their Latin America desk editor and she came straight from this Rockefeller founded corporate think tank named AS/COA (Americas Society/Council of the Americas), which was directly involved in the Chilean coup – at one point they offered half a million dollars to Chilean senators in 1970 to block Salvador Allende from taking power, and they’ve been involved in almost every coup in Latin America and they are funded by all the big oil companies, by Boeing, by Microsoft, and they have this corporate PR publication called Americas Quarterly which has a revolving door with the New York Times, so Juliana Barbassa was the assistant managing editor of Americas Quarterly, and now she is the New York Times Latin America desk editor. So what does that mean? It means that the New York Times is simply parroting corporate PR about Latin America in general. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure – I would say they understand what the class issues are, but they have poor intentions. They are not actually doing journalism they are doing PR.

CM: You write that you focus mostly on Jacobin Magazine because it is the publication perhaps most associated with the rise of electorally competitive democratic socialism in the United States and because it so clearly exemplifies the broader trend we identify, so Jacobin, the publication that is the best example of the rise of democratic socialism in the US, is too highly critical of the Brazilian left, and here you are as a member of the Brazilian left being critical of Jacobin. Why is there this kind of disconnect between the US left and the rest of the left or maybe more accurately Brian, it’s the left of the global north and the left of the global south. What explains their disconnect and can there actually ever be international unity or are those two different kinds of leftists existing in two different kinds of environments so the chances of unity are very small?

BM: I think there are all kinds of chances for solidarity and unity in the international left. The whole point of the First International was to foster this, right? I think it´s possible. And I think that in the 1980s, before the internet, we had these publications like NACLA and Covert Action Quarterly which was founded by Phillip Agee, the CIA Diaries author, and there were some really interesting magazines and zines which you could buy in these cool bookstores and the subject number 1 in writing about the leftist struggle in Latin America was always US imperialism. I think it is outrageous that the American left stopped talking about US imperialism in Brazil and in other countries in Latin America. Me and my colleagues Sean and Bryan did a systematic reading of all 38 articles that Jacobin published between 2014 and the end of 2017 about Brazil and none of them mentioned US imperialism. None of them mentioned American petroleum companies. What is the point about even writing about Latin America as an American, or presenting articles by others as an American publication, if you are not going to talk about the elephant in the room which is the fact that the US held 44 successful coups in Latin America over a 100 year period. Hilary Clinton admitted to supporting the 2009 coup in Honduras in her own autobiography last year, and obviously, after Brazil discovered huge amounts of petroleum and developed new technology for deep water drilling that no one else had, obviously the US would be interested in the petroleum, so why would you run 38 consecutive articles that don’t mention US imperialism? Because when you fail to mention US imperialism, all that is left for you really is to just talk about what kind of mistakes the Brazilian left made. “Look, they failed”… This is why the article is ironically called the Failure of the US Left, you know, because you can’t talk about failure of the PT party or the Brazilian left without talking about who they were fighting and what the power differential was. You are talking about a political party that controlled 22% of Congress, never controlled the military, never controlled Congress or the Senate, or the Judiciary, fully, going up against the petroleum interests of the most powerful imperialist nation in the World. So you have to look at who they were fighting if you are going to talk about what they failed to do. But even so, wouldn’t it be better to start by listening to them talk about what they think they did right and what they think they did wrong? Because in all 38 of these articles they didn’t talk to anyone from the PT party once, or the CUT, the largest labor union federation in Brazil which has 7 million members and is the flesh and blood of the PT party really, the base that has been supporting it all along – that Lula came out of. Or even the Landless Peasants Movement [Landless Rural Workers Movement/MST] which is, by far, the largest and most important social movement in Brazil. The one time they ran an interview with someone from the MST, it was a 7 year old interview from a year in which the MST was supporting a candidate from a different political party, PSOL, in the Presidential elections. But in 2017, they were fully behind the PT party. So why would they run a 7 year old interview at that point? Just to build this narrative that the PT is no longer left, the PT is a neoliberal party, it´s failure, its sellout is what caused the coup- all of this kind of line of thinking that permeates all 38 of these articles. And what is ironic is the entire U-Turn that they did in 2018, which I attribute to Bhaskar (Sunkara) visiting Brazil and actually seeing what was going on down here and saying, ‘hey, slow down, we’ve got to give some solidarity to the PT party.’ They are the most powerful left political party in Latin America. They had 47 million votes this year even though they lost, and the party that Jacobin was pumping up as the future of the Brazilian left, which is the PSOL, got 500,000 votes. They were less electorally significant than the American Green Party.

CM: And you mention the difference between the two parties. One is that the PT has had a lot of success and that the other party hasn’t had a lot of success, but also PSOL, they kind of embrace the academic purity of the left, while the PT embraces the more populist left. Is that the delineation that we might be seeing when it comes to the US left criticism of left movements overseas, that they side with the more academic purist left and don’t like the populist left. Is that the big division that is happening within the left more generally, that it is academic left vs populist left?

BM: You know, Chuck, I can’t really talk authoritatively about the rest of the world’s left. What I do know a lot about is Brazil and so I will limit my comments to this and you can generalize accordingly. It is true that the PSOL party is dominated by academic leftists. And you would think that that would naturally appeal to American academic leftists and some of these publications like the Nation and Jacobin and whatever – I don’t know what they pay but they get writers who are grad students who are kind of academically orientated. But the PT party also has a huge and rich intellectual and academic tradition. Paulo Freire was one of the founders of the PT, and if you look at their presidential candidate this year, Fernando Haddad, he is a [Political Science] professor at the best university in Brazil [USP], and they have a lot of congressmen and senators who came out of academia because they were teachers union leaders, like Margarida Salomão, who is a Congresswoman from the PT [Minas Gerais], who has a doctorate and a post-doctorate in linguistics from UC Berkeley and was a teachers union leader, so just saying that it is because they sided with academia against the working class on this left divide in Brazil is not really that accurate. And I think they also missed a lot of nuance which is that the PSOL is a faithful ally of the PT in Brazil. They provide a lot of really needed and good criticism of the PT but when push comes to shove, in Congress, they vote together in over 90% of the issues. After the first round of elections was over this year, the PSOL supported Fernando Haddad in the second round. But if you read these 38 Jacobin articles, that nuance is kind of lost as well.

CM: So, Brian, just a few more questions for you. Does the PT simply not reflect the left that Jacobin supports? What’s wrong with applying ideological purity? Why shouldn’t our allegiance and concert be toward and about ideology first above and beyond everything else including the amazing outcomes that PT has had? Why shouldn’t we focus on ideology and ideological purity first?

BM: Well,first of all, Jacobin has been supporting the PT for the last year- they have done a 180 on the PT. But ideological purity is needed. It’s like how Gramsci said these small political parties serve educational and moralist purposes. I think that they are important for pulling the bigger parties farther to the left. Just as in the US we have these parties like the Libertarians who never get any votes but they pull the Republicans farther to the right, these small parties have an important role. But when you are not from that country, when you are from the country that just caused the coup, whose corporations are benefiting from the coup, for example through the [USD] $300 Billion tax cut that was made after the 2016 coup to US petroleum companies operating in Brazil, you know, then it begins to look like taking this pure left posture is actually just a very non-threatening thing to do that doesn’t threaten State Department objectives or capitalist institutions. In fact, it performs a validating role so that the conservatives can say, “we have a democracy in Brazil because we have these guys”, you know, who never threaten power. So I think it is a complex issue but I don’t think that, in the middle of a coup, adopting a far left ideological posture to attack the one party that has the base and the size and strength to try to counter fascism in a country is very helpful. In fact its like one of the leaders of the MST told me, sometimes this vanguard left posture is not revolutionary, it’s anti-revolutionary. Because if the main reason that the PT didn’t win the election this year was several years of anti-PTism in the media coming from the right, why would anti-PTism on the left help anything? If anything it just feeds farther into the conservative narrative. And you see talking points from Jacobin and from other left American publications being used in corporate media like the Guardian and the New York Times now, saying things like, “the PT has to be more humble. It has to publicly apologize for its mistakes.” And things like that. I believe that issue originated in Jacobin.

CM: Another thing that you point out is the Landless Workers Movement, the MST, another key actor in the Brazilian organized left. It was influential in the legalization of homesteading on unproductive or stolen land and despite constant media opposition and agribusiness violence, has obtained deeds for around 400,000 small farms since the 1980s. When we began This is Hell in 1996, this was the first aspect of Brazilian life that really grabbed my interest, the MST, and I know we had several interviews in the 1990s with members of Friends of the MST and other groups. You say that in contrast to their disdain for CUT, the Labor Union Federation that works, kind of, with the PT (but they are totally two different organizations), Jacobin authors seldom directly criticize what David Harvey, in a personal conversation with one of the authors, called, “the most perfect social movement in the world.” Rather they generally ignore the MST. In your opinion what doesn’t attract the US left in the form of Jacobin or anyone, to the most perfect social movement in the World, the MST.

BM: Well, first of all I worked with the MST for five years and they are much farther left in practice than anyone I’ve ever met from Jacobin. Because they actually squat on land that’s been stolen by ranchers and loggers and start farming on it, and resist, sometimes at gunpoint, to hold on to this land. And they are socialists, they have deep connections with the world left and the Cuban government, they developed a critical adult literacy methodology with direct help from Paulo Freire and they are real leftists who actually practice what they preach and they support the PT. So this puts these ideological purity measurers in an very uncomfortable position when they have to explain that the MST has been supporting the PT all these years.

CM: Just one last question for you Brian. You write that to their credit US left media have unequivocally condemned Bolsonaro and Jacobin is helping lead a solidarity campaign for the PT and Brazilian left, but what if the US left had moderated its criticism earlier to defend the PT against the developing coup. “Would there have been greater solidarity with Dilma Rousseff? Greater resistance to the Temer government’s attack on the working class? An earlier recognition of the threat of Bolsonaro? There is no way to know but perhaps it’s time for the US left to turn its critical gaze back on to itself.” What do you hope the US left would see when it reexamines itself following the way in which it reacted to the rise of Brazil’s right and to what happened to Brazil’s left?

BM: First of all I want to say that we took Jacobin as an example and gave it a high level of scrutiny. And I know Jacobin publishes a lot of good stuff in the US. But regarding your question, I think that these people on the American left who write about Latin America and other places should reflect about what the role of an American leftist really should be in this situation. Does it help to go and tell people in other countries that they are wrong? Or should they be looking at what their country is doing and how its actions are affecting these other countries, especially in the 3rd World. Because if you are just going to be bad mouthing people in another country because their left isn’t pure enough, what is the point? Why not talk about what your country is doing? It takes a little bit more courage to do that. But I think that is what the American left should be asking in terms of how it deals with issues in Latin America. What’s happened since the 1980s when left publications have just stopped talking about US imperialism? Is it because of grant funding? Is it due to all these foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation who are funding magazines that used to be really hard left like NACLA? I just don’t understand what is going on. What is even the point of doing it if you are not talking about what your country is doing to screw everybody over in the rest of the world? The US is the biggest imperialist country in the World. It’s stealing everybody’s oil, it’s killing people all over the place. And instead of talking about what it’s doing in Nicaragua or Venezuela or Brazil, you are just going to write about the mistakes that Brazilians or the Nicaraguans made? I think that is the question they should be asking themselves. Why aren’t we talking about our own country?

Listen to the interview here:

[Brian Mier is an editor at Brasil Wire and a freelance writer and producer.]

Nicaragua and the Corruption, Cooptation of Human Rights

Tortilla Con Sal

January 5, 2019

By Stephen Sefton

 

 

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, almost 30 years ago, abuse and debasement of human rights concerns have served increasingly to create pretexts promoting Western dominance around the world. From former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to Iraq and Sudan, to Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria, to Myanmar and Ukraine, Western governments have used non governmental human rights organizations and abuse of the United Nations system to attack countries resisting the demands of US and allied elites and the governments they control. In Latin America, that dynamic has long targeted Cuba, more recently Venezuela, now Nicaragua and will soon attack Bolivia and probably Mexico too, if the new progressive government there shows too much independence. The US and European elites have stepped up their efforts at regime change in Latin America and the Caribbean so as to guarantee access to and control of the region’s abundant natural resources, because Chinese and Russian influence is blocking their accustomed control of the majority world in Eurasia and Africa.

Like Venezuela previously, Nicaragua has been targeted by the US dominated Organization of American States using local US and European funded non-profit proxies inside Nicaragua and Western corporate dominated non-governmental organizations. They have manipulated international and regional human rights institutions so as to violate fundamental precepts of international law like self-determination and non-intervention. Just as in the 1980s in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, and now both Venezuela and Nicaragua again, violent armed non-governmental actors have been used to destabilize the country and create a context allowing false reporting of human rights concerns so as to discredit revolutionary governments.

As independent US writer Max Blumenthal pointed out in an interview in July last year, “…how I know that there was a regime change operation afoot – and when I say “regime change operation,” I mean an attack not just on a government but on the nation-state, a plan to reduce a country to a failed state like Libya – is that Ken Roth surfaced after the Nicaraguan government had essentially won and removed the roadblocks, allowing the economy which had bled $500 million to start functioning again, allowing citizens to start moving around. Ken Roth, the dictator of Human Rights Watch, who has been in the same position for 25 years, catering to a small cadre of billionaires and elite foundations with almost no constituency base, blamed the government for every single death.  Meaning that zero Sandinistas died according to Ken Roth.”

Blumenthal’s insight into the inextricable relationship between human rights NGOs and Western corporate elites suggests a series of points which categorically undermine glib acceptance of false human rights accusations against Nicaragua. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are all guilty of extreme bad faith, non-compliance with basic norms and adherence to long discredited theoretical nostrums. In effect, they are themselves all accomplices to very serious human rights violations by Nicaragua’s US supported armed opposition. Four main considerations apply.

Firstly, on technical grounds none of these organizations have adhered even to the Huridocs guidelines, a tool created by and for Western government and corporate funded human rights organizations. The guidelines propose concepts and good practice in relation to fact-finding, documentation and monitoring of human rights violations. The IACHR, the UNOHCHR. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have categorically failed to comply with  the HURIDOCS guidelines. In terms of fact finding, they systematically omit sources and facts that contradict or exclude their preferred finding. In terms of documentation, they systematically exclude abundant documentation from Nicaraguan government ministries, from the public prosecutor’s office, from the legislature’s Truth and Justice Commission, from the Institute of Legal Medicine and from the Office of the Procurator for Human Rights.

All that information to a greater or lesser extent contradicts the bogus fact finding of the OAS, the UN and foreign NGOs. In terms of monitoring the situation in Nicaragua, all those institutions and organizations depend exclusively on virulently politically biased local media, NGOs and opposition activists. So even on their own terms, their methodology does not comply with basic concepts and standards and, thus, the kinds of cases they have built to justify their findings would never stand up to impartial legal scrutiny. One farcical aspect of their approach has been to accuse the Nicaraguan government of repressing local media when their main sources by far are abundant citations of false reports from those same local media, relayed via dishonest local human rights NGOs.

Secondly, in theoretical terms, the approach of the IACHR, the UNOHCHR and foreign NGOs like Amnesty International has been to exclude violations by non-State actors, exactly the same faithless alibi they all used during the Cold War. But that theoretical framework has been outdated since 1993 when the UN Human Rights Convention in Vienna explicitly recognized the role of non-State actors in human rights abuses (thus recognizing how the US government and its allies used irregular forces, like the Contra in Nicaragua, RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, to apply systematic terrorism against civilian populations). As Carlos Emilio Lopez a leading Nicaraguan human rights activist and legislator has pointed out:

“In 1993, with the approval of the Vienna Declaration of Human Rights, the subject of respect for human rights was re-conceptualized. For many years it was considered that only States should respect human, rights but that understanding is already out of date. The reconceptualization of human rights is that States must respect human rights but companies, churches, organizations must also do so, social organizations, oligopolies, the media, people as individuals. In other words, we are all obliged to respect human rights, not only State institutions.” Thus, every time Amnesty International or the IACHR claim their remit excludes non-State actors, they are appealing to a theoretical framework 30 years out of date deliberately so as to wash their hands of abuses by political actors with whom they sympathize.

Thirdly, specifically with regard to Amnesty International, their organization has been corrupted and co-opted over many years now by corporate influence via links through their senior personnel with corporate globalization advocates whose explicit aim is to undermine and diminish the role of sovereign nation states. Amnesty International’s Secretary General and senior directors, their International Board and its Secretary General’s Global Council freely advertise their background working either directly with multinational corporations, or with corporate funders  or with other heavily corporate funded non profits. In this, Amnesty International, like Human Rights Watch, is very similar to the Purpose/AVAAZ corporate human rights conglomerate. Their human rights activities are guided by emphatic neoliberal hostility to nation-State governments, such that their reporting deliberately sets out to exclude or discredit information from government or other official sources. More broadly in Latin American and the Caribbean, accompanying the encroaching cooptation of NGOs by corporate predators like Purpose, the overtly political Atlas network supports NGOs promoting extreme right wing policies across the region, thus facilitating the ascent to power of fascists like Jair Bolsonaro.

Above: Par for the course marketing. No expense is spared by in the multitude of Amnesty International demonization campaigns targeting leaders that defy US foreign policy. This 2011 ad was created by the advertising firm Euro RSGC (Havas Creative), co-founder of TckTckTck (GCCA).

Fourthly, that corporate corruption and cooptation of Sean MacBride‘s original vision of the role and work of Amnesty International and similar organizations, is clearly manifest in their demonstrable bias in favor of US and allied countries’ foreign policy priorities. In that regard, Professor Francis Boyle, among many others, has been an authoritative and trenchant critic of Amnesty International’s role in Palestine and elsewhere, whereby it downplays or minimizes violations by States allied to NATO countries. On the other hand, institutions like the IACHR and the UNOHCHR and organizations like Amnesty International, systematically exaggerate and even invent violations in countries targeted by NATO member country governments. Thus in Latin America, the current horrific record of human rights violations in Colombia and, until AMLO, in Mexico, has been played down and minimized, while events in Cuba, Venezuela and now Nicaragua have been systematically misrepresented.

All these concerns about the practical bad faith, theoretical dishonesty, corporate co-optation and outright political bias of human rights institutions and organizations should give any intellectually honest person of progressive views pause. People genuinely concerned about human rights should reassess what they think they know about Nicaragua and about Venezuela too. The US and allied country corporate elites are determined to use the governments, institutions and NGOs they have bought, to destroy resistance to their domination in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the 60th anniversary this year of Cuba’s revolution, together with the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the 20th anniversary of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution suggest they will not have things all their own way.

 

[Stephen Sefton lives in Nicaragua and is a founder of Tortilla con Sal.] 

The Right’s New Clothes – Are the Latin American Youth

A network of Conservative Think-tanks & Foundations from the United States, such as Koch, Cato & Templeton, are financing young Latin Americans to fight Left Governments and defend old positions with a new language

Brasil Wire

June 15, 2015

By Marina Amaral

 

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” – John Kenneth Galbraith.

 

Original version in Portuguese at Agência Pública. English Translation for Brasil Wire by Angela Milanese. Republished under Creative Commons license.

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“Our body is the first private property we have. It is up to each of us to decide what to do with it,” says a young blonde woman in Spanish with a firm voice while moving gracefully across the stage at the Liberty Forum, which is adorned with the logos of the event’s official sponsors: Tobacco company Souza Cruz, Gerdau Group, Petróleo Ipiranga and the RBS Group (a local Globo TV affiliate).  A sold out crowd at the 2000-seat auditorium of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre (PUC-RS) bursts into laughter and applause for Gloria Álvarez, a 30-year-old Guatemalan daughter of a Cuban father and a mother descended from Hungarian immigrants.

Glória Álvarez, a star of the Latin American youth. Photo: Fernando Conrado

Gloria, or @crazyglorita (55,000 followers on Twitter and 120,000 on Facebook) rose to stardom among Latin American rightwing youth at the end of last year, when a video shot at the Ibero-American Youth Parliament held in Zaragoza (Spain), in which she attacks Latin American “populism,” went viral. At the Liberty Forum, the most high profile event promoted by Brazil’s rightwing, Gloria and the former Republican governor of South Carolina, David Bensley, are the only two people – among the 22 Brazilian and foreign speakers – scheduled to deliver keynote speeches at the three-day event, called “Roads to Freedom.”

A radio broadcaster for 10 years, now hosting her own TV show, Gloria is a captivating showoman. She addresses the audience with ease, which is mostly made up of PUC-RS students, one of the best and most expensive universities in southern Brazil. “Who here calls themselves conservative or libertarian, raise their hands,” she asks the audience. When she sees a roomful of raised hands, she relaxes. “Ah, ok,” she replies. Alvarez is the young leader of the National Civic Movement (MCN), a small Guatemalan organization that sprung up in 2009 in the wake of movements that unsuccessfully demanded the impeachment of the social democrat President Álvaro Colom. Her mission, she explains, is to teach her ideological peers how to “charm and seduce people on the left and how to defeat the bearded and beret-cladded Che Guevara crowd.”

The first lesson is to use “#PopulismovsRepública,” a hashtag she created to overcome the “obsolete division between right and left.”

“An intellectually honest leftist must recognize that the only way out is employment and a modern, 21st century rightwinger must recognize that sexuality, morality and drugs are individual problems. He is not the moral authority of the universe,” she continues, amid thunderous applause.

There should be no guilt, neither moral nor social, she teaches. The message is individual freedom, youth “empowerment,” low taxes and a minimal state – the agenda of the neoliberal right (in economic terms) across the world. “Wealth is not transferred, ladies and gentlemen. Wealth is created, starting in each one of your little heads,” she says. In the same vein, Gloria also criticizes social welfare programs for the poor, affirmative action programs for women, blacks, people with disabilities, even the very concept of minorities. “There are no minorities. The smallest minority is the individual and he is best served in a meritocracy.”

“There is a truth that every human being must reach to find peace, if they don’t want to live as a hypocrite. All of us, seven-and-a-half billion human beings inhabiting this planet, are selfish. This is the truth, my dear friends in Brazil. We are all selfish. Is this bad? Is this good? No, it’s just the reality,” she says categorically. “There are people who don’t accept this truth and come up with this wonderful idea: ‘No! [Gloria shouts, imitating a man’s voice] I will build the first unselfish society!’ Be careful, Brazilians, be careful, Latin America! Those wise guys are like Stalin in the Soviet Union, or Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Fidel Castro in Cuba or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Why do we keep following those hypocrites like sheep?  Because [Gloria grimaces and imitates a frail woman elderly voice] they teach us that it’s wrong to be selfish and that to think of ourselves is a sin. How many of you haven’t heard someone say we need a good man who doesn’t care only for himself,” she says, bending as she speaks, and then standing up to regain her proud upright posture.

“Look, gentlemen, unless it’s a Martian, this man does not exist, never existed and never will exist.”

Frantic applause.

But, she explains, the “champions of freedom” also bear their share of responsibility. They do not know how to communicate their ideas, or how to use technology to “empower citizens” and “liberate” Latin America. If you keep discussing macro-economics, GDP and so on, “we will lose the battle. We need to learn with the populists and talk in a way that people understand, make them identify with what we’re saying,” she explains. “And let me give you another piece of advice. Since they say that us, conservatives are damned exploiters,” she quips ironically. “I’ve found a wonderful way to define the concept of private property, which makes the leftists go like ‘wow!’”

“Private property is what we amass in our lifetime, starting with our first properties: body and mind.” The past, she explains, isn’t the same to everyone, so this amassing is personal. She continues, “This humanizes us, gives us, disgraceful conservatives, a bit of a heart.”  Laughter. Applause.

“There are people who want the right to health care, education, work, housing. The UN even wants to establish a human right to internet access,” she scoffs disdainfully, even though she had just declared that technology is the key to changing the world. “Imagine that, in this auditorium, some of you want the right to education, others the right to health care, and others want the right to housing. So if I give you education, everyone here will pay for it, and you will be VIPs, while they will be second-class citizens. If I give them health care, everyone in this auditorium will pay for their health, and they will be VIPs. If I give them houses, I will take from you to provide houses for them, and they will be the VIPs. This isn’t social justice, this is inequality before the law,” she concludes, again amid laughter and applause.

“If everyone in Latin America is entitled to life, liberty and private property, then everyone goes after education, health care and the house they want, without the need of a super-Chávez, super-Morales and super-Correa.” Ovation. Whistles. Before closing her 40-minute speech, Gloria invites the public to challenge the “victimization of Latin-Americans” and “blaming the Yankees” worldview, which undermines self-esteem and the courage to take risks, required by the entrepreneurial spirit. The audience gives her a standing ovation.

Neoliberals and Libertarians

Gloria Álvarez does not really represent anything new. The main difference is the language she uses. The MCN movement receives “funding from some of the largest companies in the traditional business elite,” according to investigative journalist Martín Rodríguez Pellecer, who is the director of the Guatemalan online media site Nómada (an Agência Pública partner). “I came to know, from sources close to them, that one of the companies that support their public campaigns and congress lobbying is Azúcar de Guatemala, an extremely powerful cartel of 13 companies. (Guatemala is the world’s fourth largest sugar exporter). Guatemalan companies, by the way, have investments in Brazilian plants.”

The same can be said about her ideas. Despite their seductive title, libertarians are “a minority segment among the schools of thought that gained influence in the post-war era, in opposition to the Keynesian-inspired interventionist policies,” explains the economist Luiz Carlos Prado, from the Rio de Janeiro Federal University.

After the 1970s oil crisis, pro-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek (Nobel Prize 1974), monetarists from the Chicago school of economics led by Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize 1976) and neoclassicists associated with Robert Lucas, Jr. (Nobel Prize 1995) came to dominate global economic thought, and became known to the public under the single label “neoliberal.” Their concepts were brought to Latin America by the most conservative sectors of American society, represented mainly by think thanks with ties to Ronald Reagan. After losing Republican primaries in 1968 and 1976, Reagan was finally elected president in 1980, with Friedman as a major adviser. The same ideas also dominated the government of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1991) in the United Kingdom.

“The supporters of classical liberalism also supported political freedom, but this school of economic thought called ‘neoliberalism’ advocates non-intervention of the state in the economy, without demonstrating a particular concern for political freedom. In some cases, and without any shame, they allied themselves with dictatorships, such as the military regime of Pinochet in Chile,” says Prado.

Gloria Álvarez’s Guatemala is a good example of how libertarian ideas came to fruition in Latin America. In 1971, “a significant part of the Guatemalan economic elite embraced neoliberalism and adopted it as its political project. That was when they founded the Francisco Marroquin University (UFM),” explains Rodríguez.

“The University was founded by Manuel Ayau, known as El Muso, in allusion to Mussolini. Ayau adopted the fascist, anti-communist platform of the National Liberation Movement [MLN, a Guatemalan political party]. Since then, the UFM has been preparing political and academic cadres trained to discredit the very concepts of government and social justice.”

As a result, Guatemala was transformed into the Latin American country that collects the least in taxes (11% to GDP) and the one that least redistributes them,” he says.

Álvarez studied at UFM and “became a libertarian, but she is a little less conservative than her professors, who are a mix of neoliberalism and Opus Dei [a conservative religious institution]. She declares herself to be an atheist and a supporter of abortion rights. Although she has become a star on the Latin American right, she is a minor figure on the Guatemalan right. She has no political base and is not a political candidate for elected office. I see her more as a libertarian enfant terrible,” concludes Rodríguez.

Libertarians resurfaced with full force in the United States after the 2008 financial crisis (and the subsequent clamor for market regulation) and as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama.

Libertarians preach the supremacy of the individual over the state, absolute market freedom and the unfettered defence of private property. Libertarians claim that the economic crisis, which threw 50 million people into poverty, was not caused by the lack of financial market regulation, but rather by government protectionist policies towards certain sectors of the economy. They also emphatically reject the social policies promoted by the Obama administration. However, a significant portion of libertarians distance themselves from traditional rightwing positions on social issues. In the name of individual freedom, they defend positions usually associated with the left, such as the legalization of drugs and a more tolerant approach towards homosexuals. GOP Senator Rand Paul, a presidential hopeful, is one of the best known faces of the libertarian movement.

“Libertarians that are Tea Party supporters (a radical rightwing faction of the Republican Party) are also associated with think thanks such as the Cato Institute. They make up the post-modern right, represented, for example, by David Cameron in the UK, who modernized the ‘rolling back’ of the welfare state agenda,” says Prado.

“Who is John Galt?”, “Less Marx More Mises”. Photo: Instituto Liberal do Nordeste

Prado looks amused when I mention Brazilian libertarians, followers of the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. “The Austrian school is a very minor strain, even in academia,” he declares. “Who are those libertarians? In Brazil, we have sophisticated economists who follow schools of economic thought, such as the neoclassical school of Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas and other similar approaches. Rightwing politicians lacking depth, such as Ronaldo Caiado [a senator from the centre-western state of Goiás, affiliated with the Democratic Party (DEM)], and a conservative middle class that reads [popular rightwing columnist] Rodrigo Constantino of Veja magazine,” he concludes.

Senator Ronaldo Caiado. Photo: Fernando Conrado

Caiado and Constantino are veteran participants of the Liberty Forum in Porto Alegre. The novelty is that the Tea Party’s libertarians are at last able to present themselves, to Brazilian youth, as an attractive new face for the right.

Come to the Street, Citizen

On April 12, the eve of the Forum, Gloria Álvarez made a speech at the second round of nationwide demonstrations against President Dilma Rousseff. Dressed in a sequin shirt featuring the design of the Brazilian flag, in front of about 100,000 people at Paulista Avenue in São Paulo, Álvarez railed against “cursed populism.”  (see video of Gloria’s speech here).  From atop a truck, the leader of the Come to the Street movement (VPR), Rogério Chequer, introduced Álvarez as “one of the greatest representatives of the battle against the populism of the São Paulo Forum.” [The Sao Paulo Forum (Foro de São Paulo) is an annual conference of leftist political parties, social movements and organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean.]

Among those who led the anti-government protests in March and April, Chequer’s movement was one of the last to take up the cause of impeachment. That delay earned him a public rebuke from the elderly Olavo de Carvalho, a polemical rightwing pundit, who accused him of “toucan wimpiness.” Toucan is the symbol of Brazil’s main opposition party, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB).

The Free Brazil Movement (MBL), mostly known through the figure of its leader, Kim Kataguiri, which adopted the cause of impeachment from the get-go, broke up with Chequer publicly, publishing pictures of him standing next to PSDB Senator José Serra at the Aécio Neves presidential campaign. PSDB Senator Neves was dubbed a “traitor” for his hesitation in demanding the impeachment of the elected president. They reconciled after a delegation led by Neves and Caiado made a controversial visit to Caracas, Venezuela.

Incidentally, Caiado participated in the opening night of the Liberty Forum. Lacking Glorita’s irreverent grace, the conservative rural senator drew applause from the audience with sound bites against government corruption and references to the São Paulo Forum (video). Caiado also demanded the resignation of President Dilma Rousseff and attacked the Brazilian State Development Bank (BNDES).

Interestingly, his accusations were made under logos of the Gerdau Group and Ipiranga Petróleo (from the Ultra group), which are two of the largest borrowers of BNDES loans, according to data collected by one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, Folha de São Paulo. Between 2008 and 2010, both companies individually obtained more than R$1 billion worth of bank loans.

The southern entrepreneur Jorge Gerdau is one of the creators of the Liberty Forum, established in 1988 with the aim of promoting a debate between various schools of thought. The most important conservative gathering in the country, it nevertheless included, in its first incarnations, guest speakers such as former President Lula of the Workers Party (PT), former Minister José Dirceu, a minister in the Lula administration, and the late Rio de Janeiro state governor and leftist Leonel Brizola.

It was there that, in 2006, the most prominent rightwing think tank in Brazil – the Millennium Institute – was officially launched. Armínio Fraga (who would have been finance minister if Aécio Neves had been elected) is its best-known figure in the field of economics. Its backers are the Gerdau Group, publishing company Editora Abril   and Pottencial Insurance, which belongs to Salim Mattar, who also owns Localiza Rent a Car.  Suzano Papel e Celulose [paper and cellulose], Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and the Évora group (from the Ling brothers) are also supporters. In 1984, William Ling helped create the Institute of Business Studies (IEE). Comprised of young business leaders, the IEE organized the Forum from the start. His brother Winston Ling founded the Liberty Institute in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, while William Ling’s son Anthony Ling has ties to the group Students for Liberty [Estudantes Pela Liberdade (EPL)], which created the Free Brazil Movement. Hélio Beltrão of the Ultra Group is one of the founders of the Millennium Institute, though he has his own institute as well, the Mises Brazil.

Brazil’s network of neoliberal and libertarian think tanks includes two more entities: The Open Order Institute, which holds youth seminars; and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Ethics and Human Economics (CIEEP) in Rio de Janeiro, linked to Opus Dei. The jurist Ives Gandra, who wrote a controversial opinion piece stating that there is legal basis for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, is a member of its board of advisers.

Like the Millennium Institute, the majority of these organizations have been created recently. The original seed was the Liberal Institute, established in 1983 by Donald Stewart Jr., a civil engineer from Rio de Janeiro, who passed away in 1999. According to “The dictatorship of contractors: (1964-1985),” a doctoral thesis written by the historian Pedro Henrique Pedreira Campos, from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Donald Stewart Jr.’s  company, Ecisa (Engineering, Commerce and Industry S.A.), was one of Brazil’s largest construction firms during the military dictatorship. Stewart partnered with Leo A. Daly Company, a US construction business, to build schools in the northeast region of the country, funded by a regional government development agency, known as SUDENE. The participation of an American company in the project was a requirement to get financing from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which operated as a front for the CIA during the cold war era of Latin American dictatorships.

Donald Stewart was also an old friend of a crucial character in this story, Alejandro Chafuen, a 61-year-old Argentinian living in the US. Stewart and Chafuen are members of the exclusive Mont Pelèrin Society, founded by no other than the Guatemalan Hayek. Launched in 1947 in Switzerland, with headquarters in the US, the organization comprises the most committed libertarians. El Muso, the founder of Gloria Álvarez’s alma mater, the Francisco Marroquín University, was the first Latin American to chair the Mont Pelèrin Society, while the University’s current rector, Gabriel Calzada, is a board member, along with the Brazilian Margaret Tsé, the CEO of the Liberty Institute, which is the ideological backer of the Institute of Business Studies.

Meanwhile, the president of the Mont Pelèrin Society, the Spaniard Pedro Schwartz Girón, also actively fosters think tanks associated with the Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies (FAES), a foundation with ties to the Spanish Partido Popular (PP).

FAES, which is chaired by former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, promoted the Ibero-American Youth Parliament, the event that catapulted Álvarez into fame. Pedro Schwartz, Alejandro Chafuen and the Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who co-authored the book “The Perfect Latin American Idiot, ” a hit with rightwing youth, attended the Latin America’ panel at the Liberty Forum. Chafuen also took part, discreetly, in the April 12 protests in Porto Alegre. He posted a photograph of the demonstration on his Facebook page. The photo shows Chafuen, dressed in the Brazilian national team shirt, hugging the young Brazilian political scientist Fábio Ostermann. Ostermann is the coordinator of the Free Brazil Moment, which is how the Students for Liberty (EPL) decided to call their anti-government movement.

Alejandro Chafuen & Fábio Ostermann

The southerners Fábio Ostermann and Anthony Ling, and the southeasterner Juliano Torres are the founders of the local chapter of Students for Liberty, an organization that plays a crucial role in the network between American conservative think tanks – especially those that define themselves as libertarians – and “anti-populist’’ Latin American youth. Mr. Chafuen, who leads the Atlas Network since 1991, is their mentor.

The Atlas Network (the trade name for the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, adopted in 2013) is a type of meta think tank that specializes in promoting the establishment of libertarian organizations throughout the world. It receives funds from its partner libertarian foundations in the US, or from local entrepreneurial think tanks that are geared toward the fostering of young leaders, especially in Latin American and Eastern Europe. According to its Form 990, which all non-profit entities must file with the IRS, Atlas Network’s revenue in 2013 totalled $ 11,459,000. Resources allocated to programs outside the US were US$6.1 million, of which US$2.8 million were directed to Central America and US$595,000 to South America.

With the exception of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Institute, all the organizations mentioned in this article are part of the Atlas Network in Brazil, along with Gloria Álvarez’s MCN, the Francisco Marroquin University and Students for Liberty (which was founded inside the Atlas Network in 2012). Furthermore, in addition to the aforementioned resources, there are much more sizeable programs operated by the Atlas Network, which are funded by other foundations.

The discreet charm of Mr. Chafuen

Sitting in the VIP room of the Liberty Forum, Mr. Chafuen rose to his feet to greet Kim Kataguiri, who made a surprise visit. The undisguised glee from this demure gentleman, a libertarian with ties to Opus Dei, was my cue to ask for an interview. The main parts are transcribed below.

Q: How did you get close to Brazil?

A: I started to work with my Brazilian friends of liberty in 1998 with Donald Stewart, and I always remember how lonely he felt in his quest for freedom. To arrive in Porto Alegre on the same day of the protest and see all these people, not all libertarians, but people from different social strata of Brazilian society, arguing things that are very consistent with the essence of a free society, it reminded me of these pioneers. Because, yes, there were so many people on the street, so many souls, it left me pleasantly surprised and wondering what will happen next, and how can we harness the enthusiasm of so many young people to produce lasting change in Brazil.”

Q: What kind of changes?

A: Coming from the outside, it’s difficult to say, it’s unique to each country. Look at Spain today, in which political parties lost ground to new movements, such as Podemos from the left, or their opposite in Catalonia, the Ciudadanos. In the United States, for instance, we have the Tea Party, a spontaneous movement that instead of founding a new party, opted to become a trend within a party, and now all but one of the major Republican presidential candidates identify themselves with the Tea Party and seek its support. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, they all come from the Tea Party and are pretty much opposed to the traditional republicans. So this is not an answer that a foreigner can give, especially in Brazil, which is a world unto itself, with so many diverse cultures. We can offer some ideas, but it’s up to them, the ones I saw on the streets, the young and the not so young, to attract more members of civil society, and to institutionalize all this.”

I mention to him that, at the Forum, people speak a lot about freedom – without basis in reality – and that they actually compare Brazil to Venezuela.

A: Yes, the situation here is very different from Venezuela, but you must be vigilant. Freedom isn’t lost just like that, from one day to another. Venezuela was one of the most prosperous countries and look what happened. Populism in Latin American weakens institutions. They let entrepreneurs feel free to invest for some time, allow freedom of expression, and then sooner or later they change the rules of the game. Chávez’s first nationalizations and expropriations happened years after he took power. Yes, you have considerable freedom here. But there are some things that pervert freedom, which is the non-compliance with laws, privilege, corruption, and crony capitalism. It’s a false freedom. It’s like putting a fox in the chicken coop and telling them, ‘you are free now.’ Then the problems start [bribery allegations], business owners are required to enter the game, and they end up taking the blame. It takes two to dance a tango, as they say in Argentina.

Q: Are the guys from the Free Brazil Movement strong enough to promote social change?

A: I developed a model to explain how things happen, which has four elements: first – ideas, since human beings think before acting, or at least we should; second – motivation, because economy is motivation; third – action, because ideas without action are just ideas; the fourth is providence or, depending on what your beliefs are, luck. So you get to work with ideas, some leaders emerge, laws change, and that affects society’s motivation…a typical change doesn’t happen overnight. This pressure builds up and suddenly something happens. And then there is a scandal, another scandal, a magazine with courage, some young men from São Paulo decide, “I’ll leave college and fight against it.” [Kim Kataguiri and Renan Haas, from the MBL, recently announced the decision to leave college to devote themselves to the movement.]  And then the movement is out there in the streets. It’s a combination of factors that we have seen at other times in history.

Mr. William Waack [a Globo TV journalist], who got an award here, said to us at a luncheon, before the opening of the Forum, that the only movement he covered that was like this was the fall of the Berlin Wall. He exaggerated a bit, but we don’t know yet what will happen with this movement.

Globo TV Journalist William Waack receiving award

Q: After the first anti-government protest in March of this year, the Atlas Network published a piece on its site celebrating the crucial role of its partner, Students for Liberty, in the protests against President Dilma Rousseff and the Workers Party in Brazil. Do you feel responsible for this movement?

A: Our role [in regard to Students for Liberty] is the power of nurturing. These human beings, we call them intellectual entrepreneurs, people with new ideas who see solutions and decide to invest their capital in them. It’s like in business. So we offer them training programs, try to support them financially, encourage them to be committed, to not be too much of a partygoer. But Atlas does not support political parties. We withdraw our support if there is any partisan interest. We don’t accept resources from the government but we can offer some guidelines, new ideas about a free society, from classical liberalism to libertarianism, from religious to atheists, but it’s up to each person to choose. Many of us in our organization have a very negative view about the top-down approach. So we try to encourage people, help them meet each other. Now, for example, all over the world, people might be asking, ‘can we emulate the Brazilians?’ So we celebrate, but we’re careful not to take credit for the results, for what happens locally.

Q: In Venezuela, an Atlas partner organization, the CEDICE Libertad, and the Cato Institute, which funds Atlas programs for students, allied with local businessmen. They were accused by the Chávez government of fomenting opposition among students.  

A: I am vice president of CEDICE, and this is not true. Every so often, some CEDICE members might have engaged in some political activity. But one thing is political life, the polis; another is to work exclusively with one political party. We have worked with-and received at CEDICE-Leopoldo López [who is in jail] and his party, the Internacional Socialista; María Corina Machado [a former congresswoman] and Antonio Ledezma [the mayor of Caracas, arrested in March amid accusations that he was involved in a coup plot]. The answer is that we cannot give up the fight for freedom and some people get into politics. But the Atlas Network doesn’t get involved in local politics. The battle is not between left and right but between right and wrong. And now if you excuse me, I have to go and get ready for my speech.

Q: One last question, please, to dispel rumours. The ties between the Koch foundation and Students for Liberty, through direct funding as well as funding from other foundations associated with the Koch brothers have aroused suspicions, since the Kochs own oil industries that could have interests in this country.

A: The Atlas Network receives 0.5% in funding from the Kochs. The Students for Liberty, I don’t know. Goodbye.

Students for Liberty and the Free Brazil Movement

The executive director of Students for Liberty (EPL), Juliano Torres, was more forthcoming about the link between the EPL and the Free Brazil Movement, a brand name created by the EPL to participate in street demonstrations without compromising US organizations that are prevented, by IRS rules, from donating funds to political activists. He told me in a phone interview that “several members of the EPL wanted to participate in the 2013 ‘Free Pass’ protests in Brazil but we receive funding from organizations such as the Atlas Networks and Students for Liberty, which are forbidden by IRS rules to get involved in political activities. So we said, ‘members of the EPL can participate as individuals, but not as an organization, to avoid problems.’ So we decided to create a brand name. It wasn’t an organization, just a brand that we could use in the streets, called the Free Brazil Movement. Me, Fábio [Ostermann] and Felipe França, who are from Recife and São Paulo, plus four, five people – we created the logo and the Facebook campaign. Then the demonstrations ended and so did the project. So we were looking for someone to take over; we had more than 10,000 likes on our Facebook page, pamphlets. Then we found Kim [Kataguiri] and Renan [Haas], who made this incredible shift in the movement, with the marches against Dilma and things like that. Incidentally, Kim is a member of the EPL, so he was also trained by the EPL. Many of the local organizers are members of the EPL. They act as members of the Free Brazil Movement, but they were trained by us, through leadership courses. Kim, by the way, will participate in a charity poker tournament that Students for Liberty will organize in New York to raise funds. He’ll be a speaker. He’ll also be a speaker at the international conference in February.”

Torres, who is paid by the EPL, tells me that he has two online meetings per week with American headquarters and that he and other Brazilians take part every year in an international conference, with expenses paid, and in a leadership meeting in Washington. The budget of the Students for Liberty for this year in Brazil should reach R$300,000.

“In the first year, we had approximately R$8,000. In the second year we had about R$20,000, and from 2014 to 2015 it grew considerably. We receive funding from other external organizations too, such as the Atlas Network. The Atlas, along with Students for Liberty, are our main donors. In Brazil, one of our major donors is the Friederich Naumann Institute, which is a German organization. They are not allowed to give money but they pay for our expenses. So there were meetings in the south, in Porto Alegre, and in the southeast, in Belo Horizonte. They rented the hotel, paid for the meeting room, lunch and dinner. There are also some individual donors who make donations to us.”

The launching of the EPL in Brazil took place after Torres participated in a 2012 summer workshop for thirty students in Petropolis, sponsored by the Atlas Network. “Right there, we made a draft, a plan, and then we contacted Students for Liberty to officially join the network,” he says.

After that, Torres went through several training programs at Atlas. “There is one they call MBA, there is a program in New York, and also online training. We recommend to all people who work in positions of a certain responsibility to also go through the Atlas Network training programs.”

The US headquarters was impressed by the results obtained by Brazilians. “In 2004 and 2005, there were about 10 people in Brazil who identify themselves with the libertarian movement. Today, the results we have, within the global network of Students for Liberty, are very good. One way to measure the performance of a region is to look at the number of local coordinators. We have more coordinators than any region, including North America, Africa and Europe, individually. The organization has existed, in the United States, for eight years; in Europe, for four years; here, for three years. So we are getting better results in less time, which provides us with a greater influence in the organization.”

There are two Brazilians (out of ten members) at the International Board of Students for Liberty. This year’s report devotes a page to the protests from the MBL in Brazil. A Brazilian, Elisa Martins, who has a degree in economics from the Santa Maria University, is responsible for international scholarships and young leadership training programs at the Atlas Network.

The programs are carried out in partnership with other foundations, especially the Cato Institute, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Institute of Human Studies, all organizations linked with the Koch family, one of the richest in the world. In the last two decades, the 11 foundations tied with the Kochs poured US$800 million into the American network of conservative foundations. Another important partner is the John Templeton Foundation, another American billionaire. With considerably larger budgets than the Atlas Network, these organizations develop fellowship programs, funded by them and executed by Atlas. An example of these projects is the expansion of the Students for Liberty Network, financed by the John Templeton Foundation, which closed 2014 with over $ 1 million budget.

Thus, even though it appears in third place among the backers of Students for Liberty, the Atlas Network, through its partner, raises a considerably larger volume of funds. All major donors of Students for Liberty are also Atlas donors. It is not always possible to know the origin of the money, despite the legal obligation to fill the IRS 990 form. American conservative organizations distribute money through several different channels, making it impossible to know the original source of the money that reaches each the recipient.

Rightwing foundations have been under scrutiny by the media and groups such as Conservative Transparency.

These investigations have exposed questionable use of resources for lobbying in Congress and state governments, and financing controversial causes such as opposition to climate change legislation. In response, in 1999 the foundations created two philanthropic investment funds, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Management. These investment funds do not require donors to disclose their names in the IRS 990 forms. Thus, the Donors Trust is the largest backer of Donors Capital Management (and vice versa). The Koch foundations are the main suspect of pouring money into these funds.

The 2014-2015 Students for Liberty report shows an impressive amount of fundraising: US$3.1 million, compared with only US$35,768 raised when the organization was launched in 2008. US$1.7 million came from foundations, according to the report, which does not detail the amount donated by each institution.

The Charles Koch Institute is listed but according to the report, it provides grants to American students only, while the Charles Koch Foundation, which distributes grants to students through a number of foundations, is not mentioned in the report.

Another Koch family foundation, the Institute of Human Studies (IHS), is a major contributor to student fellowship programs. Only in 2012, it distributed US$900,000 in grants, according to a form submitted to the IRS.

The Atlas Network is one of the IHS’ major partners. The MBL coordinator, Fabio Ostermann, for example, mentions in his résumé that he was a Koch Summer Fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.  Ostermann is an aid of Representative Marcel van Hattem, a politician from Rio Grande do Sul, affiliated with the Progressive Party (PP) and pointed out by Kim Kataguiri as the only Brazilian politician who fully embraces the MBL’s ideas. The young representative was elected with the financial backing of the Gerdau and Évora groups, the latter belonging to the father of Anthony Ling, who is a founder of the EPL. Van Hattem also took courses at the Acton Institute University, the most religious of the organizations that are part of the Atlas and Koch Foundation fellowship network.

Acton lists combatting “sin” as one of its core principles, stating that the ubiquity of sin requires the limitation of the state.

Maté Party

The Liberty Forum ended in the same way the street demonstrations that preceded it did, with a chanting of “Dilma out,” “PT out.” [PT -Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers Party].

Representative van Hattem in a passionate speech, thanked the Forum for his election.

“If I am a representative today, I also owe it to the Liberty Forum,” he said. He then made an interesting distinction between the 2013 demonstrations, which were spontaneous, disorganized and comprised multiple parties; and the 2015 protests, in which “we have an agenda.”

The program was modified to include Kim Kataguiri, who was not initially listed as a speaker. Kataguiri was embraced by sponsors such as Jorge Gerdau and Hélio Beltrão, posed for pictures with several fans, as well as his friend Bene Barbosa, who was promoting a book defending the freedom to bear arms. He then went to the auditorium, once again full of students.

Sitting on the couch, Kataguiri waited for van Hattem to list the usual litany of accusations against the São Paulo Forum, the totalitarian power of the Workers Party and “the biggest corruption scandal of the universe.”  Every soundbite and rhetorical red meat was greeted with rousing applause. Van Hattem stirred up the audience, displaying the bond he had established with them, telling them “the avant-garde today isn’t leftist, it’s libertarian.  Well-informed youth go to the streets and ask for less Marx and more Mises. They like Hayek not Lenin. They carry signs with the hashtag #Olavoisright,” [referring to the aforementioned rightwing pundit Olavo de Carvalho].

Van Hattem then left the podium and, walking across the stage, walked towards Kataguiri. “The next step is up to you, but it’s hard. The Brazilian system is averse to new ideas. Today, Kim, the communist congressman Juliano Roso called you a fascist,” he said. And finally, “I just want to conclude by saying that the streets are saying: ‘PT out!’” Applause, screams. The crowd sung in chorus, “‘Ole, ole, ole, ole, we are on the street just to overthrow the PT’.”

It was the cue for Kataguiri’s entrance. Wearing sneakers and walking around the stage, Kataguiri urged the “neoliberal institutions” to get out of “our neoliberal bubble, our libertarian bubble, our conservative bubble and take the country,” and asserted, “It is time for us to break the monopoly of the leftist youth. We have to change this image of the defender of the free market as an old uncle wearing boots who supports the military regime. We are the opposition. We want to privatize Petrobras. We want a minimal state. Brasília will not dictate the people; the people will dictate Brasília.”

Kim Kataguiri, public figurehead of MBL

Three days after the Forum, Kim Kataguiri left for his March for Freedom toward Brasília, attracting a meager turnout of people, while Gloria Álvarez embarked on a tour that took her from Argentina to Venezuela, effusively reported on her social network. In Argentina, she visited Buenos Aires and Azul, after an invitation by the Argentina Rural Society. Her speeches at the National University in Tucumán were organized by the Federalism and Liberty Foundation, which includes on its international board, the Atlas Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the CEDICE Libertad, and the Ecuadorian Institute of Political Economy.

These organizations are all part of the Atlas Network, as are the other organizations that organized Álvarez’s trip –  Students for Liberty (Bolivia and Ecuador), the CEDICE (Venezuela), and the Foundation for Progress (Chile).

The most interesting thing about Álvarez’s trip, however, was not mentioned on her social network, or even in Chilean newspapers. On April 23, she and dissident Cuban blogger Yaoni Sánchez met with the conservative former President Sebastián Piñera after they delivered speeches at the Adolfo Ibañez University in Viña del Mar.

The meeting with the ex-president was reported on twitter by a former minister of the Piñera administration, the economist Cristián Larroulet. He posted a photo – the only photo in which Álvarez and Sánchez appear together – with the caption, “President Piñera with Yoani Sánchez and Gloria Álvarez, two examples of Latin American women fighting for freedom.” Larroulet is the founder of the think tank Liberty and Development, a natural partner of the Atlas Network.

 

The Age of Natural Capital, and Why It Must Be Stopped

Global Policy Journal

January 21, 2016

By Ed Atkins

 

Atkin argues that capitalism has led to a culture of misguided prioritisation: putting efficiency and profitability above justice and environmental concern. In response to this he argues for the need to use political tools to make environmentalism and justness valuable commodities.

 

Welcome to the Capitalocene: a world in which our ecology is dictated by finance, and our environment increasingly seen as a monetary good to be produced, commodified and traded. This is not a new process: the mass-production of matches represented a commodification of fire. However, in recent years, a new policy has formed: one that aims to solve problems of climate by apply financial values to the planet’s natural resources. The result is the privileging of efficiency over justice; modernisation over tradition; and the placing of nature as an instrumental sub-section of political economy – rather than possessing its own intrinsic value.

With the fall of communism, and the decline of the bipolar political system that accompanied it, the dominant Western model of development reigned supreme as the route to improving lives and livelihoods (Oliver-Smith, 2010). At the centre of this economic mantra lies the normative position that production, both stimulated and managed by the power of the markets, will improve conditions of human welfare. Accompanying this model has been the promotion of large-scale infrastructure and commercial operations, from mining to agriculture – that have transformed our social and natural environments: destroying ecology, displacing many and veiling such processes within the promise of development.

In the past half century, this drive for economic growth and profits has unleashed a process of environmental degradation across the globe, via the extraction of natural resources and the failure to mitigate the resultant pollution. For many, the concept of sustainability has collapsed and we have become Homo Economicus, determined to pry open natural resources for exploitation. The commodificiation and privatisation of public and common goods has been one of the primary features of the era of neoliberal economics (Harvey, 2007). From the failed privatisation of water utilities in the 1990s to the problematic biofuels frenzy, new markets have developed, prospered and collapsed, with the environment continuing to provide an important resource of growth and profit. The result of this is the centring of climate change emissions within patterns of accumulation – with the world’s richest monopolising the majority of global emissions.

A Shift in Perceptions

Mainstream economics is characterised by a particular rationality that creates a certain paradigm – that of individualism, utilitarianism and the importance of equilibrium. The result of this is the difficulty to couple the financialisation process of mainstream economics and notions of human rights (of access, development, security etc.) – two concepts that speak very different languages (Branco, 2015). Within human rights discourse, equity must be fused with other more-quantitative concepts (such as efficiency) to create a greater conceptual apparatus that provides a route towards political capital and change. However, within mainstream economics these notions are abstracted and treated separately – with efficiency cast as a technical issue of basic mathematics, that exists a world away from competing notions of justice. This presents a serious socio-political problem: with the primacy of efficiency of resource-use resulting in the creation of institutions that often fail to facilitate a more democratic and diverse process of resource management.

The spectre of climate change is here and mitigation is necessary. However, the toolkit of classical economics, previously driving the extraction and use of natural resources, has resorted to traditional methods in an attempt to mitigate emissions and climate change. The result is the continued financialisation of nature – a process that is based upon the insistence that a resource’s (be it water, food, or carbon) financialisation provides the most viable route to the efficient allocation and usage of it when faced with the felon of scarcity. Across policy, economic instruments have been promoted as the most desirable route to meet the twinned challenges of environmental change and resource insecurity. Certificates, credits, securities and bonds are now asserted as the most-effective route to better management practice; reduced wastage and; ultimately, ecological improvement. However, this process of replacing environmental regulation with the power of markets has a more important consequence: the conversion of natural resources into commodities – to be bought and sold for a profit, or loss. Such a transition represents an important transfer of stewardship: from the community to the company; and from sustainability to profit.

This process of financialisation involves a significant ontological change. Nature is no longer just a raw commodity that we can use; it has become a resource that can be abstracted and produced in society’s image. This discursive and material production of nature as a financial entity to be traded, incentivised and managed – has allowed for a shifting of property rights to encourage the transfer of “natural capital” from one community to another, and from one use to a competing operation. Global circuits of biodiversity, carbon offsetting and reforestation have been directed and redirected from nation to nation, and community to community; often allowing the reproduction of development and injustice. The result is the understanding of the financialisation of nature as an ideological pursuit, focused on the opening of new avenues of profits – often at expense of others. Carbon, possible the most recent imagined commodity, provides an important example of this – with the process of carbon-emissions-trading often portrayed as a structurally colonialist policy that embodies the transfer of responsibility of climate change mitigation from the richest to the poorest, often at the expense of the latter’s right to economic development.

Financialisation as Injustice

The character of the financialisation of nature, the centrality of quantitative measurement and modelling – has resulted in a significant inequity between the poor and the rich. Discourses of efficiency have been used to legitimise policies that deprive local communities of their rights to resources and the related benefits (Boelens & Vos, 2012). Traditional practices deemed inefficient by mainstream economics are often alienated and demonised as restricting development and progress – as is particularly evident in the treatment of indigenous communities facing displacement by development projects.

This continued financialisation of the global environmental commons of land and water is intricately linked to wider narratives related to the securitisation of the environment and, how the world’s resources are used. Such a process results in important competition between efficiency and traditional use, with such conflict. The World Bank (2010) has previously asserted that between 445 million and 1.7 billion hectares of land across the globe that is vacant, unused and, as a result, inefficient. What this report fails to decipher however is the presence of subsistence farming, the trade of non-monetised goods and the presence of informal communities – this is particularly evident in swathes of sub-Saharan Africa (Mehta et. al. 2012). However, these narratives of underuse and inefficiency have provided the impetus of a series of resource grabs, in which traditional users are displaced by governments to pave the way for an influx of international financial interests to ensure the financially-profitable use of the resource in question. Notably, this discourse is often silent on the structural relations of power that permeate across such schemes (Swyngedouw, 2012; Sultana & Loftus, 2012).

The cases of injustices associated with processes of financialisation are both multiple and geographically diverse. From the buying up of vast swathes of land in Cambodia for food production (often by the governments of Qatar, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates) (GRAIN, 2008); to the peasants forced to fetch water from a nearby spring, as large pipes carry the water to a mine in Peru (Crow et al. 2014). Weather derivatives in Ethiopia; carbon markets in China; betting on species extinction – all are permeated by economic and environmental injustice.

The character of the financialisation of nature, the centrality of quantitative measurement and modelling – has resulted in a significant inequity between the poor and the rich. Discourses of efficiency have been used to legitimise policies that deprive local communities of their rights to resources and the related benefits (Boelens & Vos, 2012). Traditional practices deemed inefficient by mainstream economics are often alienated and demonised as restricting development and progress – as is particularly evident in the treatment of indigenous communities facing displacement by development projects. Notably, these processes often occur within official policy-responses to crises – be they of food or energy security, or climate change (Borras et. al. 2012), as well the ever-increasing needs of the hubs of global capital (Mehta et. al. 2012). Many of these policies of financialised appropriation have created significant points of conflict between local communities and the actors enabling the process itself. The result is simple: the livelihood struggles of many have become increasingly intertwined within the financialised north-south relations of climate change, and the policies of mitigation (Hopke, 2012).

In response to this process of financialisation, many opposition networks have looked to locate this policy within the wider realm of the neoliberalisation of nature – attempting to critically analyse the economic rationale that underlies the process and uncovering the injustices that it embodies. As Mitch Jones has stated: “The financialization of nature is not about protecting the environment; it is about creating ways for the financial sector to continue to earn high profits….By pushing into new areas, promoting the creation of new commodities, and exploiting the real threat of climate change for their own ends, financial companies and actors are placing the whole world at risk.”

In this writer’s mind, this provides an important route for analysis – that of the incorporation of notions of environmental justice into the study of the interplay between the international financialisation of nature and the local experiences of these processes. However contemporary processes of financialisation fail to do so: instead prioritising processes of mathematical efficiency over understandings of traditional use and equitable access – often creating serious injustice. Although the prescription of monetary value to resources may be cast as a route to increased efficiency and decreased pollution, the truth is often far from this characterisation – as has been shown in recent articles on biodiversity banking by Molly Bond and Andrea Brock.

The message for critical scholars is clear: although the financialisation of nature, its appropriation, and all the processes surrounding it may be institutionally tied to the noble cause of climate change mitigation, it also presents many problems. Displacement, degradation and continued-injustice all point to an important argument: that processes of financialisation are not necessarily beneficial in utilitarian terms but represent something deeper: the continuation of capitalism as usual. Thus, it is important to assert that nature must not become a sub-section of the political economy, as mainstream economics believe. It is vice-versa, and we cannot forget that.

 

References

Branco, M. & Henriques, P. (2010) The political economy of the human right to water. Review of Radical Political Economics. Vol. 42, 2: pp. 142-155

Boelens, R. & Vos, J. (2012) The danger of naturalizing water policy concepts: Water productivity and efficiency discourses from field irrigation to virtual water trade. Agricultural Water Management, Vol. 108, pp.16-26.

Borras, S., Franco, J., Gomez, S., Kay, C., & Spoor, M. (2012). Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Journal of Peasant Studies, 39, 845–872.

Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hopke, J. (2012) Water gives life: Framing an environmental justice movement in the mainstream and alternative Salvadoran press. Environmental Communication, 6:3, 365-382

Mehta, L., Veldwisch, G. J., & Franco, J. (2012). Introduction to the special issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources. Water Alternatives, 5(2), 193-207.

Oliver-Smith, A. (2010). Defying Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

(2014) Santa Cruz Declaration on the Global Water Crisis, Water International, 39:2, 246-261

Sultana, F. & Loftus, A. The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles edited by Farhana Sultana and Alex Loftus (eds). Earthscan, Oxon, 2012

Swyngedouw, E. (2012). UN Water Report 2012: Depoliticizing Water. Development and Change, 44(3), 823–835.

World Bank, 2010. Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? Washington, DC: The World Bank.

 

[Ed Atkins is a PhD student at the University of Bristol, and a commissioning editor at E-International Relations where this article was originally posted.]

Valley of the Sex Dolls: Our Post-Apocalyptic Future Is Grimmer Than You Thought

December 12, 2018

By Cory Morningstar and Forrest Palmer

 

“Patriarchal systems of capitalism and colonialism don’t recognize or value inherent worth in women’s bodies and the work women do, and instead commodify them. Once women’s bodies are objectified in this way, it positions violence against women as justified, embedding it into the fabric of society. Violence against women is and remains the bedrock for all other kinds of violence.” — Battered Women’s Support Services

The near-term and even more so post-apocalyptic future will be grim – a reflection of the neoliberal and patriarchal ideologies that will bring us face to face to a new form of mind pollution – a collective conditioning to the continued social degradation of women. With the rise and proliferation of plastic sex dolls and sexbots – our increasingly desecrated landscapes will soon be filling up with disposable bodies. Many dismembered and almost exclusively, female in form.

Production of sex robots Abyss Realbotix

Industrial scale production is already here. Akin to a slaughterhouse, these life-like forms hang suspended from the ceiling on chains bound to the neck. Row upon row, the headless forms represent a new era in commodification, exploitation and ultimate degradation – the socially acceptable and financially profitable desecration of the female body.

The irony of the politically correct backlash toward plastic straws in contrast to the acceptable growing tsunami of plastic waste exclusively in female form  – is lost. Silicone heads, torsos, breasts, arms, legs, removable vaginas, dirty and worn, will protrude from garbage bags and trash bins. A growing number of these forms will resemble dead children – the discarded remains of the anatomically-correct imitations of five year old girls, created exclusively for paedophiles. After all, according to the manufacturers, “It’s not worth living if you have to live with repressed desire.”

As a sign of the depravity of man, rivers, streams, lakes, oceans and all other places of waste disposal will overflow with plastic corpses that grossly mimic the female form. The sheer abundance of female bodies floating face down – or face up – will become so commonplace, an already desensitized society will become even more indifferent to the grotesque spectacle. Left solely to the machinations of men, female body parts fill up landfills by the tens of thousands – to such an extent – real women will be indistinguishable from the plastic corpses, literally lost amongst the rubbish.

Above: Sex dolls assembly in Abyss Creations laboratory. Credit: Eduardo Contreras/San Diego Union-Tribune

Above slaughterhouse image. This was the first of six “related images” suggested by Google to the sex doll assembly photo above

The line between real – and plastic – will continue to blur until it disappears all together. The need to separate real and plastic becomes at first inconvenient, to then more difficult, to then most difficult, to finally, no longer necessary. This is the beauty of social engineering – a gradual but steady progression that goes undetected – thereby ensuring it’s eventual completion and success.

“This system of violence is called patriarchy, and over the past two thousand years it has come to rule most of the world. Patriarchal civilization is based on exploiting and consuming women, living communities, and the earth itself.” — Women’s Caucus, Deep Green Resistance

An old description for vulgar terms such as “fuck”, “shit” or “damn” is to describe them as “four-letter words”.  Yet, there seems to not be a problem with one particular four letter word:  rape.  This is illustrated by the current preoccupation with sex dolls, where the object personifying the female body is sexually dominated and/or assaulted, yet can’t even speak or respond to “her” vile treatment. It demonstrates the indifference that is prevalent in most societies when it comes to rape of the female body, be it imagined – or real. Is there any greater reflection of this type of rape mindset than a man procuring a doll to have sex with whereby he can essentially control her every action without thought, participation, feeling and/or contribution to what should be a mutual act between willing partners?

And it is this mentality that has now completely enveloped the entirety of man’s existence, who has furthered his depravity by unleashing the same mentality onto the Earth herself.

The need to control, dominate and manipulate without a response from its victim is part of the euphoric experience of pilfering perpetual and increasing resources from that which he has no respect. The same euphoric feeling from raping the animated human body has extended to inanimate objects: sexbots, sex dolls and the Earth herself. She, being the Earth, provides all of the pleasures without any pangs of guilt in terms of the verbal and physical responses from an unwilling participant.

A sex doll and other rubbish litters Sincil Dike, 2018,  (Image: Bill Brown)

Yet, the primary mistake of modern man is his false belief that the ongoing structural collapse is not a reactive expression by the Earth in direct response to his misdeeds. Although the Western edifice built off this centuries long and ever expansive rape is formidable, it is not affected to the same degree as the environmental victims in the Global South who fight to survive in far more vulnerable circumstances. However, the growing yet still imperceptible fissures continue to go unacknowledged by those in the most insulated parts of the world.

Juxtaposed with a rapidly warming planet, planetary environmental collapse and accelerated resource depletion – the ramifications of this cultural arrogance – is in the midst of unfolding. Blind to the sixth extinction event, now well underway, this grotesque waste of energy and resources is no match for the grotesque human reductionism that feeds the momentum for the furthering of collective human depravity and indifference.

 

[Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

[Forrest Palmer is an electrical engineer residing in Texas.  He is a part-time blogger and writer and can be found on Facebook. You may reach him at forrest_palmer@yahoo.com.]

 

 

 

 

WATCH: The Award Winning 2007 Documentary Sultbløffen [The Famine Scam] [Niger, BBC]

“My son, there are people that say things that aren’t true. There are people who organize in order to say things that aren’t true. They do this to save themselves.”

In 2009 award winning journalists Per Christian Magnus, Robert Reinlund, Anne Marie Groth, and TV 2 received the Great Journalist Award for their 2008 documentary Sultbløffen (also known as “The Famine Scam”). The Great Journalist Award is one of Norway’s most prestigious awards for journalism.

In 2005, the BBC alerted the world of a starvation disaster in Niger. Via compelling and emotive TV reports from the region, BBC claimed an estimated 3.6 million Nigerians were impacted.

The Sultbløffen documentary posed sharp questions in the way the Norwegian authorities and aid organizations described the situation in Niger. It was also very critical of the BBC coverage, which led to vehement reactions from the British. The BBC refused TV 2 further use of archive material from BBC’s Niger reports, which made it difficult for TV 2 to distribute the Sultbløffen documentary to other countries.

Regardless of BBC’s attempts to block the film from distribution, the documentary gained international honor for journalism, including third place in the Golden Nymph Awards. The “Golden Nymph” is the most prestigious television award in Europe.

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Further reading: “In 2005 a BBC reporter made television reports about a famine in Niger. The international humanitarian organizations reacted quickly with aid. It later came to light that there had never been any famine. How did this situation arise?“ [“The Famine Scam“]

 

How Circular is the Circular Economy?

Low-tech Magazine

November 3, 2018

By Kris De Decker

[Kris De Decker is the creator and author of “Low-tech Magazine”, a blog that is published in English, Dutch and Spanish. Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. (Since 2007).]