276) Day 37 -- Reason #37 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism: FREEDOM, Part 2 -- Wealth = Power
The single biggest problem with Predatory Capitalism is rooted in the fact that wealth = power. Which has always been true. The problem is, the system of Predatory Capitalism that now has been centrally organized around this. As a result, the very foundation society is built upon is a foundation of wealth. This wealth, in turn, is far too often rooted in corruption, in war, in the pillaging of Indigenous lands for their “resources”, and in profit and a disregard for human freedom and well-being. This is “The Big Problem”.
While this has been true since basically forever, now, in the 21st century, after decades of living in the neoliberal trickle-down lie that is our economic system, the wealth gap between the haves and have-nots, between us and the ultra-wealthy, is so profound it is virtually impossible to imagine. The truly wealthy live like gods, their lives qualitatively different than the rest of us humans, with the entire world available at the whim of their unlimited Platinum whatever-the-fuck card or corporate expense account. Nothing is off limits to them.
They can buy people, lands, rights, even elections, buffered from the consequences in their private mansions, private jets, private estates, private luxury yachts, armies of private security forces, and most disturbingly, the PUBLIC’s security forces, i.e., the police, who instead of keeping the public safe as they are supposed to, are employed much of the time protecting the interests of the wealthy and ensuring that their corporate conglomerates get to do whatever they want, despite protests, despite human rights, despite labour movements, and despite Indigenous resistance. It’s one thing to have to go against private security forces in order to stand up to the excesses of The Powerful; it is quite another to find yourself also fighting the taxpayer-funded police and the entire justice system that is SUPPOSED TO protect the public, not work against it.
This damn near inconceivable wealth = inconceivable Power. While the rest of us volunteer, post on social media and try to use our influence to get two more of our friends to vote on election day, the ultra wealthy simply buy politicians through bribery, called “campaign donations”, through back-room deals and favours, and in the end, whichever party gets into power, the ultra-wealthy control the legislation they pass and the policies they write anyway.
This bastardization of democracy is perhaps clearest when public opinion runs up against the preferences of the Kings (and Queens although mostly Kings) of Industry, such as with climate change and the oil economy. Despite 50+ years of citizens’ movements, school kids running paper saving campaigns in their schools or convincing their parents to turn off the lights at home, all those college students with their Meatless Mondays and energy saving campaigns, NONE OF IT MATTERED. It would take untold numbers of vegans living their entire lives as “ethical consumers” to offset the carbon emissions of a single family, like the Trump family, who do whatever the fuck they want, to whoever they want, whenever they want. They buy whatever they want, fly whenever they want, eat whatever they want. And you think they worry about turning the lights off and “saving electricity”??
How many individual households, reducing their energy consumption through personal lifestyle changes, would it take simply to offset the grotesque consumption of, say, Mar-A-Lago?
This was driven home in undeniable starkness one day, when I was filling up the little gas tank of a 9.9 HP motor on a little fishing-rowboat. Talking to the guy who monitored the gas pumps about the rising price of gas, I pointed out into the bay, at the dozens of relatively modest luxury boats (i.e., these were not super-yachts, just the average yacht that cruises down the Severn River for the summer).
“How much does it cost to fill up one of those suckers?”
He laughed, shaking his head, “Depends on their size…a couple thousand bucks or more for sure.”
I was astonished. “They burn a COUPLE THOUSAND DOLLARS OF GAS IN A SUMMER!!!???”
He laughed again, “The summer? Hell no, that lasts them maybe…a week? Depends how much they use it.” He pointed to one of the larger yachts in the bay. “See that one? $20 000. And there’s boats a lot bigger than that.”
I was completely stunned, my mind struggling to grasp the sheer scale of pollution that came JUST FROM BOATING. One, single, relatively-modest boat, of which there are tens of thousands, at least, in this province alone, invalidated every single thing I had ever done to reduce my “carbon footprint”. What a goddamn farce, telling people to cut back on their personal consumption and “save the world”. Honestly what a sick joke.
It was that day that the entire decades-long environmental movement collapsed for me. My whole life, from trying to conserve paper to trying to conserve electricity, driving less, turning down the air conditioning, reusing my coffee cups, eating “down the food chain” — all of it was bullshit.
It made me wonder why the public had ever had so much exposure to all these messages in the first place. And then it hit me — the reason this messaging was so effective was that it was corporate-sponsored. Because the Captains of Industry know full well that if the public FEELS like they’re making a difference, they’ll stay complacent, they’ll keep participating in a system that guts the Earth and makes the insanely wealthy, insanely wealthier, while we run around burning up our life energy trying to cut back on “waste” in our personal lives.
I stopped being “an environmentalist” that day, in the classic sense of the word, and started being an anti-corporate activist. Because in the end it doesn’t matter one goddamn bit what the average person eats for dinner or how many lights are burning in their house or whether they stand in the shower for a few extra minutes or keep themselves a bit more comfortable in the summer. These are just distractions from what really matters. In fact, it’s worse than that — they are STRATEGIES for redirecting most people’s energy from what will actually make a difference, to what will keep the system intact and the people just hopeful enough to keep from getting sufficiently angry to truly collectively, confront the abusive institutions of power that “govern” us.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of carbon emissions, species extinctions and everything-else-that’s-bad, is because of a few dozen gigantic companies, the military, and the ridiculously wealthy. If we don’t change those things, nothing else we do matters, in terms of “saving the Earth”. Your own personal lifestyle will never “offset” the environmental impact of an aircraft carrier, or Israel’s campaign of bombing Gaza and its citizens into rubble and corpses. It’s like trying to get healthier by eating some broccoli, while also drinking glasses of poison. The broccoli just ain’t gonna do it.
People who are steeped in environmental thinking sometimes get upset at me when I say these things. But they are true. We are wasting our time, fighting the wrong battles. And losing the overall “war”, so to speak. Sure, it makes us feel better if we think we’re “dong the right thing” and sure it does “make a difference” like taking a single drop of poison out of the ocean “makes a difference”. But we still lose. And the Earth and everything we love, loses right along with us.
In the end, the ultra wealthy have controlled, indeed constructed, the political and economic systems to such a degree, that government after government, whether Left or Centrist or Right, for decades, gave more and more money to the oil companies, overlooked pollution and public health problems, minimized regulations, bulldozed Indigenous rights whenever they were able to, and instead of cutting the multi-billion-dollar SUBSIDIES to oil companies, governments cut social programs, health care, social security, and education instead.
And why did we do this? Because of the lie of trickle-down economics. Which is the topic of Part 3.