by Danbert Nobacon.
Current day disasters abound and multiply. The underlying recipe that binds the stew of these concurrent and worsening disasters in common is the current operating system i.e. the omnipresent force that constrains much of our lives, what we know as capitalism. For clarity, the specific capitalism-for-disaster refered to here means, ‘late-stage capitalism’ or ‘neoliberalism,’ or the gas-lighting that calls itself ‘trickle-down economics.’ This is an oligopoly, by any other name. It is the corporate capture of government, by means of legalized corruption, that began to assert its primacy in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and has been with us ever since. Its mission, which has been spectacularly successful over the last four decades, has been the polar opposite of an equitable society, with a transfer of wealth from bottom to top.
Integral to its continued existence has been the building and the maintenance of a firewall, to shield and safeguard the economic conservatism at its core. That is what we might call the economic conservative consensus con or the econ-con-con-con. Already we are knee deep in—intentionally seeded—confusion: liberal economics that are conservative? Like calling ‘the market’ ‘free’, to hide the fact that for most people it is the very opposite of actually free. Call the recipe capitalism. And call the daily 180 degree propaganda it disseminates on its own behalf what it is: smart lies and projection.
We all know this in our bones, literally as capitalism pushes most of us to do more with less, for less pay, leaving us with less free time at the end of the day. In another sense ‘you wouldn’t even know it’, from the simultaneous newsreel that plays 24-7-365 with a myriad array of soporific dominarrs (dominant narratives) provided by the corporate owned mainstream media, designed to mesmerize and misdirect us every which way from following our gut feelings. Rather, we are primed from childhood to accept capitalism as a beneficial force in our lives. The imposition of this societal cognitive dissonance or long capital-ovid, is all part of the firewall, designed to stop us focusing in on the underlying recipe that fuels the multiple and overlapping disasters that impinge on our daily lives with ever-worsening effects. Perhaps this is nowhere more calamitous than in current day USA, where the most dangerous and degraded forms capitalism continue to proliferate.
DROWNING IN A SEA OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALESE
Naomi Klein identifies the recipe in her 2007 book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, as the methods by which the American brand of ‘free market” capitalism have come to dominate the world “through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people.” In effect, the class war launched in the 1970s by the elites against everyone below them, has intensified in recent years, and certainly since the crash of 2008, meaning that
those of us on the receiving end have all felt some of the effects, as this war has come home with a vengeance.
We all know—or have it rammed down our throats at every opportunity —that America is the greatest country in the world. It is exceptional no less. Except …
Exceptional at numbers of people killed by the police. In 2002, at least 1176 people were killed by law enforcement (the highest total since 2013), ie an average of more than 3 people a day, or around 100 people per month.
Exceptional at having 647 mass shootings in 2022, and 93 (as of March 1st) so far in 2023. More than one a day. The US is so very exceptional in this respect that there are now people, like Jackie Matthews, who have been traumatized not once, but twice. She survived two mass shootings, firstly at her Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, and now aged 20 as a senior at Michigan State University, this year on February 13th.
Exceptional in that one survivor of the mass shooting in Half Moon Bay in California, in January of this year, told CA Governor Gavin Newsom “that he wanted to leave hospital as quickly as possible to avoid high medical costs.” Meanwhile, Common Dreams reveals that: in “December (2022), one insured survivor of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs received a bill for $130,000, while another person who was among the 27.5 million Americans who lack health insurance was billed $20,000 for spending a night in the emergency room where doctors stitched a bullet wound in his leg. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study last May showing that the average initial hospital charge for mass shooting survivors between 2012 and 2019 was nearly $65,000 per person.” In a country where wages have remained pretty much static since the 1970s, these are costs so exceptional, that when faced with them people are forced to declare bankruptcy.
Exceptional at having 530,000 families file annually for bankruptcy due to medical debt, because family members face exorbitant medical bills or are unable to work as a result of their condition, and have no other sources of income. Exceptional because anywhere between 25,000 and 45,000 people die annually in the US because they lack health insurance.
Exceptional at having obscenely price-gouged prescription drugs that dwarf the cost of those same drugs to consumers in other countries.
Exceptional at having just 4% of the worlds’ population but 20% of the entire planet earth’s Covid-19 deaths.
Exceptional at having more than 45 million people struggling with burgeoning student debt. In 2005 Senator Joe Biden, along with 17 other Democratic Senators, backed a GOP bill that mostly stripped private student loans from bankruptcy protections, causing student debt to triple in the decade that followed. President Joe Biden’s very moderate student relief remains mired in lunatic GOP court cases that have landed in front of the exceptionally conservative and exceptionally pro-corporate Supreme Court.
Exceptional at having an average of 1,705 train derailments a year, since 1990. In 2019, The US had 1338 derailments for the 777 million train kilometers recorded as traveled by trains in the US that year. By comparison, the EU comprising of 27 countries, saw only 73 derailments whilst recording 4.5 billion train-kilometers. Japan had 9 derailments with over 2 billion train-kilometers recorded.
Exceptional at having a Defense budget, signed into law in December 2022, for the current year 2023, for a staggering $858 billion; up from $816.17 for 2022; up from $800.67 billion for 2021; up from $778.4 billion for 2020, and on and on, generally trending upwards since the 1970s, and generally totaling more than the combined total of the next 9 or 10 top defense spending countries (depending on the year). None of the US annual budgets include so-called ‘black budget’ expenditure, which is dedicated to the classified operations, and research projects undertaken by the Pentagon and which, even by the most conservative estimates, would take the total annual budget to in excess of $1trillion a year.
WE ARE ALL POTENTIAL COLLATERAL DAMAGE NOW
All this and more is before even addressing the exceptional ways that the major American fossil fuel corporations have led the world (along with Shell and BP) in pushing the very habitability of the planet by humans and many other species, to new and worsening levels of precariousness. Not only does the fossil fuel industry over-exploit, over and over, and benefit fabulously from, the overkill of still being granted the privilege to dump its waste products for free, our governments still grant them subsidies, tax breaks and perks for doing so.
The list goes on and on and is getting worse, and trending upwards on many fronts. In short, America, across a wide spectrum of metrics, is exceptional at failing the very people its constitution was purportedly designed to protect.
WHEN IS A DISASTER NOT A DISASTER?
WHEN IT IS THE PRODUCT OF A RAMPANTLY CAPITALIST ECONOMY
The common thread in all of the above? And in the added detail that follows is that we as ordinary people are living the disasters, whilst corporations profiting from our misery and deaths, project a smokescreen that would have us believe none of the disasters are in any way remotely connected to their business model. Call this the manufacturing of a mirage of consent, like the proliferation of the idea that wealth magically trickles down from the top and benefits everyone. In plain sight we know that is does no such thing, yet the mirage persists.
The number one reason for this is that the mainstream media is owned by corporations who have a vested interest in protecting other corporations, not least in order to continue to receive advertising revenues from those other corporations, and so act the mainstream media acts as the marketing arm of the oligopoly.
*Rampant inflation: blame the workers for demanding higher wages, and fail to mention that many corporations, especially those in the big oil sector, made record breaking profits in 2022. Protect and serve the oil corporations and take their advertising revenue.
*A mass shooting: offer thoughts and prayers and then blame the mental health of the shooter, but avoid all mention of the fact that the US is awash in guns and military grade weaponry, and that the ease of access to such weapons of death might have something to do with it. All countries have insane people, but only one, the has the scale of mass shootings that the US does. Protect and serve the gun manufacturing corporations and take their advertising revenue.
*Ignore the fact the lack of adequate medical insurance, or complete absence of it for many people, causes premature deaths by the tens of thousands: ignore the plight of ordinary Americans by dismissing calls for Medicare for All, by pontificating ‘how could we possibly afford it?’, whilst ignoring the fact that every other major country does afford it. Protect and serve the for-profit Health Insurance corporations who exist solely as middle men creaming off money that could otherwise be spent saving peoples’ lives and livelihoods, and take their advertising revenue.
* A train loaded with toxic chemicals, derails and explodes into flame within the town limits of East Palestine Ohio (February 3rd 2023): Initially, ignore the story completely and when forced to cover it, blame the rail-workers, whilst shielding the corporate malfeasance of the Rail corporations. Norfolk-Southern the owners of the disaster train, have in recent years doubled the length of trains, whilst cutting the number of staff supervising said trains from 5 to 2 (3 in the case of this train and a trainee happened to be onboard), all the while lobbying Congress to reduce the number of workers down to one, with the ultimate goal of replacing human train operators altogether with AI driverless trains. Protect the Railroad corporations and take their advertising revenue.
The ongoing East Palestine train wreck disaster is at present proving to be the exception that proves the rule. The corporate media did ignore the disaster for two weeks, as did Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The story only gained traction because of the dogged persistence of independent investigative reporting, broke by The Lever (founded by David Sirota co-screenwriter of the movie “Don’t’ Look Up”), which is funded by reader contributions and is thus able to exist as an (albeit fledgling) independent news outlet, free from corporate control or influence. The Lever revealed that the depth of corporate and congressional corruption (on both sides of the aisle) leading up to the disaster was so obviously flagrant that it became a race for the corporate news organizations to jump on board the story and spin it along their respective culture war lines.
NOT FOLLOWING THE MONEY
How do they get away with it? The clown car culture war news pioneered by the Rupert Murdoch corporation, has evolved and proliferated since its roots in the 1970s to engulf the whole of the corporate owned mainstream media in a model which provides news-as-entertainment, rather than actual news.
The mainstream media networks, fan and fuel the accentuated culture wars, and in so doing perpetuate they myth of a bitterly divided country, a) to meet their bottom line because the high exaggerated drama of news as entertainment sells, b) to deflect us from seeing that corporations exist to rob us blind, and c) because it serves the hidden agenda of the corporate owners of said media and their pals to divide and rule ordinary people so they do not band together to challenge corporate rule. This latter scenario would be there worst nightmare, which is telling the rest of us it should be our primary goal. Also known as solidarity.
The entertainment as news-scape is but on the sanitizing of history, to create a pretense, a like Watergate never happened model of filling the airwaves with anything and everything, that distracts and deflects from who really wields power in the US, or seeing how that power is deployed. The current multi-million-dollar salaried hosts and their predecessors have increasingly adopted a standing operating procedure that can be best summarized as ‘NOT following the money’. Corporate mainstream media has become and continues to exist as a firewall promoting and defending corporate rule by a variety of means.
Underpinning everything, this shared modus operandi across The New York Times, who agree with OAN, and MSNBC who agree with Fox and CNN, is the bi-partisan consensus in defense of the conservative economics of neoliberalism. This econ-con-con-con works primarily by the unspoken but mutual agreement of bi-partisanship on economic issues that shields capitalism from ever being seriously questioned, or ever letting the mechanics behind it be accurately identified.
Corporate mainstream and legacy media rarely allow the capitalist model, with all of the above resultant real life and death consequences, to be questioned at all. Period.
By way of perennial and pertinent example, as we approach the twentieth anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, primarily by US and UK military forces, many of its chief architects and proponents are regularly wheeled out as ‘experts’ to answer the difficult questions regarding current foreign policy conundrums. In fact, we are offered a parade of retired generals and former politicians et al, who are lauded as ‘experts’ in foreign policy. They are the definition of failing upwards, that is being financially rewarded for sharing their ‘expertise’ from having participated in the failed ‘forever wars.’ They then fail again, to declare, or are never even asked about, their conflicts of interest, which often means they sit on the boards of major defense contractors, or that they hold positions and shares in, or work as lobbyists for those for-death corporations.
Instead, the talk is flush with jingoistic dominarrs, high on claims of propagandistic American exceptionalism, and rich with baiting a host of would-be foreign adversaries in the frame—most currently with regard to China—all of which are existentially imperative to the continued and expanding existence of the US military-industrial-fossil-fuel-complex. All the while, the talking heads never reveal the great personal financial benefit and perks that comes from being paid to be subservient to those corporations who profit from war, and the threat of war. They do what they are paid to do which is to normalize the exceptionally obese Pentagon budget, which increases year on year, in effect manufacturing the mirage of consent that the US bent for a militarized capitalist economy is the norm. I say mirage because regularly polling shows that most ordinary Americans, across party lines—who are never asked to join the panel of experts, and are thus purposely invizibilized—favor drastically reducing the military budget.
DARK MONEY WITH A PLAN
The economic ideology which underpins current day free market capitalism (capitalism-for-disasters), is taken from neoliberal ‘thinkers’ such as Fredrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises et al and Milton Friedman in the USA. Emerging as a crank philosophy in the mid-twentieth century—not least in the US as a reaction to FDR’s New Deal—the twisted magical thinking of these ‘free market’ purists began to bear fruit in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. not least with the election of neoliberal champions, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US.
Perhaps the closest we can come to finding an actual written out recipe for all of the above disasters, is the now infamous Powell Memo written, in 1971, by the pro-defender of the tobacco industry, corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. at the behest of his close friend and neighbor, Eugen B Sydnor Jr., education director at the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo was initially a confidential document circulated amongst the upper echelons of the US business community.
The memo quoted Milton Freidman et al, and not least, lamented that because: “business men have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system,” meaning the likes of Ralph Nader and what Powell considered to be the rabid rabble of the left who comprised the protest movements of the 1960s. In Powell’s rarified world, these were the people ruining America for everyone, but ruining it especially for the business class with their demands for clean air and clean water. Indeed, Powell titled his memo “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Joining a long line of proponents in the now century long American hate affair with socialism, or anything even mildly approaching socially beneficial programs, Powell suggested that “business … (should) assiduously learn the lesson that political power must be cultivated … and used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment.”
The argument, peddled by the pro-business defenders of Powell’s ideas, was that the memo was never meant as a blueprint, and that it’s importance had been over-exaggerated. What is undeniable is that Powell did capture the zeitgeist of the emerging activist business community, and his ideas have come to pass, in ways that are probably beyond his wildest imaginings in terms of the extraordinary success of an organized and active business community achieving the regulatory capture of government of, by and for corporations.
Powell was rewarded a year later for his service to business by being appointed to the Supreme Court under Richard Nixon’s watch, where he solidified the pro-corporate bent of judges sitting on the highest court that it has had ever since. Notable in this respect was Powell’s written opinion on First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti 1978 (building on the SCOTUS Buckley decision of two years prior, that opened up mechanisms for corporations to funnel money into US elections,) that established that the corporate financial influence of elections be given the same First Amendment protections that individual political speech has.
Recent SCOTUS nomination hearings have largely revolved the public stances of would-be judges to culture war issues. Notably, all three of former President Trump’s choices, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, swore to uphold Roe v Wade if appointed to the court, and then on ascending to the bench for life appointments, promptly ruled against a women’s right to choose. However, the real reasons the right-wing Federalist Society (financed not least by the Koch Brothers)(see below) hand-picked Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett to be nominees, and why they showered their respective campaigns with millions in dark money donations, was above all, for their economically conservative, pro-corporate positions.
THE FOUR DECADES LONG CLASS WAR FROM ABOVE
This mixture of ingredients from hell that allegedly bring all this greater freedom to ordinary people, but truly fail spectacularly in this respect, is actually a concoction of anti-social, anti-trade union, anti-worker, pro-cutting social programs, pro-imposing austerity, pro-corporate moves designed to vacuum wealth from the bottom in a vast spiraling torrent upwards to the top. Many of its adherents espouse the ‘small government’, privatize anything that moves ideology, which has resulted in much of the aforementioned American exceptionalism characterized by failing its people.
Take the health care situation in the US. Multiple studies have shown that privatized health in the US is significantly more expensive and less efficient at providing actual care than a public health system would be. When we pause to think about it, how could it be any other way, when the for-profit health insurance industry and for-profit health providers, have to serve the fiduciary responsibility to their owners and shareholders to well … deliver a profit. In this way anywhere from 10-30% of available revenues is regularly siphoned off before any actual health care is delivered.
The other, much undisclosed reason why the oligarchs have bribed politicians to defend the existing private healthcare system, is because they do not want the US to go down the road of, for example, Canada, where every adult has a medical insurance card, which can also be used as voter ID. Universal voter ID would prevent the same bribed representatives in the US passing effective laws that disenfranchise large chunks of the population, which with changing population demographics in the US, remains one of the only ways they can ensure their man can continue to win elections.
Don’t take my word for it.
Warren Buffett, currently the fifth richest person on earth with a net worth of $106 billion, ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ to The New York Times in 2006, effectively took the glove off the invisible hand to reveal a fist: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Buffet in effect, identified the crucial factor missing from nearly all dominarrs regarding capitalism. That elite power exists, never sleeps, and that it exists to manipulate the market to perpetuate and extend its own power and benefits. In other words, the actual invisible hand of the market is the elites having all the wherewithal in the world to put their collective invisible thumb on the scale to leverage their wealth and power to secure them a favorable tax code and a deregulated economy, whilst actual freedom for the many nowhere to be seen. In effect the corporate overlords took it upon themselves to sabotage the social contact and be damned.
Robert Reich put the numbers on it, saying, “Trickle-down economics was invented by conservatives in the 1980’s to justify massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. It has been nothing short of a disaster … the upward redistribution of wealth over the past 40 years has shifted $50trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans.”
The burgeoning oligopoly we have today in the United States has further been documented, and scientifically too. In 2014, Gilens and Page published their study Testing Theories of American Politics, reviewing over a thousand policy choices in the social arena going back to the early 1980s finding that:
“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy … When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
DO THE KOCH MATH
Notable in putting Lewis Powell’s guerrilla class warfare into practice, and inadvertently providing some of the data for Gilens and Page to examine, has been Charles Koch. Koch pioneered the Dark Money model by creating a network of innocuously named think-tanks, fake front groups, supported by army of lobbyists, to inform the positions of the now-available-for-sale politicians. The Koch brothers inherited a fortune from their father and Charles Koch along with his brother David (now deceased) turned the already fabulously wealthy Koch Industries oil refining business into the ever-growing multi-billion enterprise it has become over the last four decades. For multi-billionaires, The Koch Math is a simple formula: invest the chump change of millions of dollars, to make billions of new dollars in return (to add to existing billions), by way of delivering legislation that gives more tax cuts to the rich, more government subsidies and perks, and by the passing of laws that roll back or remove regulations that would otherwise cut into Koch Industries profits.
Charles Koch’s further ‘genius’ in this respect was to convince his rich friends at other corporations to do the same. By way of hosting twice annual fill-the-war-chest donor-jamborees, since 2003, Koch and his minions oversee this dark money machine: that is, active 24/7/365 paying whole industries of agents, with operating budgets to die for, whose only goal is to making even more money for their taskmasters.
The political machine has been dubbed the Kochtopus due to its labyrinthine reach across the country in politics from the election of school boards, to the state level and gubernatorial elections all the way up to the federal level. Whilst largely operating, away from the public glare, it is still perhaps the best documented dark money operation, though there are other billionaires who operate in similar ways as cash cows, to fuel campaigns that work for the continuation and expansion of transfer of wealth from poor to rich.
In other words, not that you would ever know it from the six o’ clock news, there is a right-leaning pro-corporate mega machine that has manipulated and maligned the political process in the US since the 1970’s SCOTUS rulings, and even more so since the 2010 Citizen’s United ruling (talk about innocuous sounding names), that basically opened the floodgates to dark money in US elections.
The heavily Koch funded ALEC (American Legislative Executive Council) has its staff and lawyers write ‘model legislation’, which is then effectively spoon-fed to the politicians, along with talking points, with the goal of getting the bills, often verbatim, to the floor of State legislatures around the country. Many of the bills go on to become law. This throw-shit-at-the-wall and see-what-sticks, has become a staple of the donor-to-GOP-lawmakers-pipeline around the country, is evidenced in the authoritarian moves to roll the clock back in terms of social progress, targeting any and every minority, in the tsunami of laws tabled to outlaw abortion, LBGTQ+ communities, voting, black history, teachers and public education in general etc.
Meanwhile, the pro-Corporate Democrats throw their hands up in dismay, but instead of passing legislation at the federal level, even to defend people’ basic rights to exist as who they are, they use the occasion to fund-raise, as has been their business model since Bill Clinton. By backing both horses, the dark money donors can exert enough pressure on enough Democratic lawmakers to stymie any moves to actually pass meaningful legislation that would actually improve the lives of ordinary people.
It was not only Joe Manchin (Democrat) and Krysten Sinema (then Democrat) who voted against the $15 dollar minimum wage in 2021, but six other Democratic Senators, including the two from Joe Biden’s old senatorial stomping ground in Delaware, meaning that despite his campaign promise to pass a minimum wage, that Joe Biden did not actually want to follow through on that.
And remember that Obama at a Planned Parenthood rally on the campaign trail in 2007, promised to codify Roe v Wade as the first thing he would do if elected into office, and then when actually elected despite having a super-majority to do just that, he did nothing, leaving us in the situation we are in today,
CAPITRICKALIST FREE MALARKERTY
Charles Koch remains the perennial champion of the ‘pure’ natural law of the free market working its magic. Looking at it another way, he is also perhaps its most deluded proponent. Armed with such wherewithal, financing and ideologically priming the invisible hand to do his bidding makes it a very fixed fight. If one needs to continue fueling a political machine to the tune of millions of millions of dollars a year, to buy and influence politicians and judges, and to sway a political base to elect these clowns, then the free market is not doing anything remotely like it says it does on the can. In a fair election, where big money, corporate donations and dark super-PAC money was banned, as Charles Koch well knows, the chosen horses, amongst both corporate Republicans and Democrats, and the pro-corporate judges, would not continue win.
There are a million epiphanies blasting across the news-as-entertainment-scape, as homage to the wealth of the free market naturally trickling down, but they are all are false. The money patently does NOT trickle down. In other words, the magical thinking that underpins late-stage-capitalism, that the market is benevolent, naturally self-correcting, and solves everyone’s problems all at once—that it is a recipe for success—is actually founded on the ongoing Big Lie. The smart lie supreme: that capitalism is in no way connected to the ongoing disasters all around us, when in fact, capitalism is the mother recipe of recipes for disaster.
An essential part of the lie is that corporations are your new best friend and are always looking out for you, which would seem true, if you believed the content of their multi-million spending sprees to burnish their own image in the form of marketing and advertising. The tendency to be seduced by such corporate fairy tales may be a result of a default in human evolution which gives us our love of narrative and story. It may be a symptom of long capital-ovid , where in moments of exhaustion and a lifetime of being exposed to such messaging, we all become prone, given the omnipresence and rapaciousness of the smart lies that underpin such propagandizing.
Regardless, the wherewithal that corporations have at their behest to blast their messages about themselves around the world, evidently has enough traction in an environment where people are generally overworked and underpaid, to make it worth their while to continue the practice. Coupled with the—these days—not so subtle, attacks on public education and the ways and means by which US citizens are being denied education which encourages the development critical thinking, the dominarrs that fuel the Big Lie, are having deleterious effects on our prospects for surviving and thriving as a species.
When coming across any of the above diatribes, whether issuing from the marketing department, or the lobbyist posing as financial expert, answering his own rhetorical question, in response to a progressive policy position such as Medicare 4 or The Green New Deal, with But how would we pay for it?, it is worth doing a thought experiment.
Suggested by “Master of Illusions @onyxamindelife,” the experiment consists of “replacing the words “the economy” with “rich people’s yacht money.”
—How can we respond to COVID without sacrificing rich people’s yacht money?
—Saving the environment sounds nice but what about rich people’s yacht money?
—Medicare for all would destroy rich people’s yacht money?”
THE $3BILLION A DAY CARBON BOMB
Most of us have now personally experienced some form of turbo-climate-change-charged weather disaster. Thank a millionaire. Thank a billionaire. Thank Charles Koch and his capitrickalist free malarketry.
The anti-social aspect of capitalism-for-disasters only applies in certain circumstances. In what is known in the vernacular as one law for them and another law for the rest of us, the fossil fuel companies like to privatize the profits, whist socializing the cost of doing business in a myriad of ways. As mentioned they are happy to take tax payer money in the form of subsidies and tax breaks, and then siphon of all the profit into private hands. However, if there is say an oil spill, as a result of their own negligence or incompetence the companies lobby big and hard, and often win out, to get the government to agree to the taxpayers footing the bill for the clean-up. Socializing the cost of such an ‘externality’ of doing business, enables them to siphon off even more public money to fuel their ability to continue to make a private profit.
The propaganda firewall insulates the fossil fuel industry from being actually questioned on the record profits they scarf up. In 2022, they enabled their spokesmen to blame the spiking costs of gasoline in the US on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and on inflation. Firstly, as the world’s largest oil producer, the US is ‘oil independent’ so was under no pressure from the squeezing of supply chains of Russian oil. Secondly, inflation is a measure of rising prices. Inflation is portrayed as a mysterious almost natural force beyond anyone’s control, but who is it that has the overriding power to set the prices? The corporations selling a particular product. It is then a policy choice made by corporations, often in concert with other corporations ie the oligopoly.
Further, the US oil corporations successfully lobbied for more leeway, and more perks, and in particularly for their dire need to expand drilling, and have an expedited issuing of permits for them to drill in the future on federal lands. To date more permits have been issued by the Biden administration than were during the first two years of the Trump administration. Their defense of all of the above, broadcast by their army of lobbyists and the regular financial ‘experts’ who form the cadres of the guardians of the Capitalaxy on corporate media, is that US energy security and independence depended on it. US ‘energy security’ and supposedly unfulfilled energy independence are dominarrs trotted out every time a serious question of fossil fuel practice threatens to break through the propaganda firewall, in this case the very legitimate observation that the oil companies engaged in rampant price-gouging in 2022.
In truth, much of the existing infrastructure that makes up the maze of current oil and gas pipelines in the US, plus those that are in process of being built, plus those that are being lobbied for in future proposed developments, are designed to export oil and gas. The infrastructure is not built to serve energy security or independence, rather it is primarily geared towards selling the product overseas, for profit, and greatly sucking on public funds in doing so, whilst entirely privatizing the profit made by those oil corporations
Collectively across the planet the fossil fuel industry has made $3billion a day for the last 50 years and counting. If we are looking for the primary recipe for disaster in this respect, and the prime reason why the climate crisis is barely being addressed, there it is. The actuality of vast profits to be made is simply too much for the oil corporations to ever give up. After four decades of denial, deflection and delay by these corporations, we have to shut them down.
The civilized way, as Thom Hartmann suggests is to pressure government to declare a climate emergency—something Biden has been urged to do by many pressure groups, but has thus far not come to pass—so that as president he could then unleash emergency powers to nationalize and in rapid order shut down the fossil fuel companies, in the transition to green energy. When most of the world’s scientists say we need to keep the oil in the ground this is what they mean. Biden shows no appetite for using his executive powers in this way, and as his government is riddled with corporate Democrats who take legalized bribes from the fossil fuel industry, it is not something that could get through Congress any time soon in the form of legislation to rein in big fossil fuel. The chump change from the part of the $3billion a day shared by US oil corporations is more than enough for them to keep rigging the system in their favor.
FUN CHANGE
The ultimate failing of the ‘free market’ ideology is that it is only able to sustain itself, in all the ways mentioned above, because it is effectively propped up, and when necessary bailed out. Because it has barely ever been compelled to answer for its own business practices, especially in terms of externalities with regard environmental costs, It has become blind to the fact that it is running out of road to ride over roughshod. That the planet and its resources are finite, and space billionaires notwithstanding, it can only be plundered so much before the ecosystem which is the planet earth itself, recoils yet more to the degree that it becomes inhabitable for humans. Somewhere between now and that final logical progression of business as usual, that expects year-on-year unlimited ‘rich people’s yacht money’ growth, is an opportunity for us to fight back .
As if a fracturing ecosystem were not enough to jar the oligarchy from its delusion that it can rule a burning planet, the five decades of blowback that has been building since they sabotaged the social contract may yet shock it into some form of retreat and collapse. The opportunity then is for ordinary people like ourselves to join the burgeoning social movements from below that in concert can pull away some of the props holding the oligopoly above in place, until a tipping point is reached. The movements for social justice, climate justice, and a thousand others campaigns that seek to improve our lives without harming the lives of others already exist. The resurgence and recent growth of trade unionism offers potential muscle to pressure government like the country hasn’t seen in decades.
The Black Lives Matter protests, the biggest waves of protest in US history, provide a benchmark. The reason the protests were so big, is the total outrage people felt at the murder of George Floyd, but also because so many people at that time were laid off and furloughed by the Covid pandemic. Whilst we have yet to see significant change as a result of the protests, they will not be easily forgotten and they did reveal that, when people find themselves with an unexpected opportunity of the having the time to choose what to do with our day, in an era of disasters, a lot of us will choose to protest the current system of injustice.
Despite all the systems’ best efforts to propagandize otherwise, in poll after poll when asked about policies that would improve our daily lives, most people across party political boundaries, are significantly in the majority in favoring those polices. Of course, we have to vote out the corrupt idiots who cultivate and perpetuate our current disasters, but we also have to be part of the movement from below which advocates for, and mobilizes the necessary collective muscle to push and shove at those pressure points.
Overwhelming though the odds sometimes seem, we really don’t have a choice. It may not be pretty, and it may get a lot worse before it gets any better, but judging by the way the country and the planet are currently being run there will be plenty of opportunity to apply those pressures, as the system creaks and groans, and from time-to-time grinds to a halt, as a result of whatever disasters engendered by the said recipe are currently making their way down the pipe. There are times ahead when the systemic-recipe-for-disasters-capitalist world will buckle and, with whatever helping hands we can give in one almighty push, we can lever the weight of its own hubris and excess, and tip it towards collapse … in its place we can bring the changes to the way things are done that we all so sorely need.
Danbert Nobacon (Chumbawamba) is a working musician, a published EAP author Three Dead Princes-An Anarchist Fairytale 2010), and a high school theatre teacher.
This essay is based on research for the twin works in progress:
Soundtrack from The Musical “Now That’s What I call Capitrickalism” by Danbert Nobacon and The Axis of Dissent (landing Fall 2023),
and the book of the Musical “Happy Capitrickalism is Not Just For Christmas” by Danbert Nobacon (eta 2025)
www.danbertnobacon.com