The Privatized Internet — Entire .ORG Domain Registry Sold to Investment Equity Firm "Ethos Capital"; Registration Fee Restrictions Removed

Cover of a 2015 book glorifying the privatization of the Internet via "a unique and vibrant interplay between government and private industry." Nothing dollarable is safe.

by Thomas Neuburger

The love of money is a sickness with these people.
—Attributed to an Indian chief as he watched the Europeans move west.

Nothing dollarable is safe.
—John Muir, 1908

Buried in the recent impeachment and campaign news was this announcement from the Internet Society and Public Interest Registry (emphasis mine):

Ethos Capital to Acquire Public Interest Registry from the Internet Society

Public Interest Registry Will Continue Management and Mission of .ORG Under New Ownership

Reston, VA (November 13, 2019) – The Internet Society and Public Interest Registry (PIR) today announced that they have reached an agreement with Ethos Capital, under which Ethos Capital will acquire PIR and all of its assets from the Internet Society.  The transaction is expected to close during the first quarter of next year.

“This is an important and exciting development for both the Internet Society and Public Interest Registry,” said Andrew Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Society, the organization that established Public Interest Registry.  “This transaction will provide the Internet Society with an endowment of sustainable funding and the resources to advance our mission on a broader scale as we continue our work to make the Internet more open, accessible and secure – for everyone.  It also aligns Public Interest Registry with Ethos Capital, a strong strategic partner that understands the intricacies of the domain industry and has the expertise, experience and shared values to further advance the goals of .ORG into the future.” 

“Since the inception of Public Interest Registry, our mission has been to enable the .ORG Community to use the Internet more effectively and change the world for the better,” stated Jon Nevett, CEO of Public Interest Registry.  “That will not change. We have enjoyed a long and successful relationship with the Internet Society, and are thrilled that we will be able to continue – and expand – our important work with Ethos Capital while sustaining our commitment to the .ORG Community going forward.”

Internet names and numbers are controlled by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private non-profit corporation. ICANN has been subject to being "gamed" by corporate interests almost since its founding, especially but not exclusively with respect to trademarks versus the rights of non-corporate entities to purchase and register unused domain names.

Some top-level domain names (TLDs) — .COM is a TLD, as are .ORG and .EDU — are not administered directly by ICANN, but have been assigned to other administrators. For example, in May 2019 ICANN granted exclusive "administration rights" to amazon.com for the .AMAZON generic TLD "after a 7 year long dispute with the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO)."

This is true of the .ORG generic TLD, a TLD much used by non-profit public interest groups. .ORG has been operated by the Public Interest Registry (PIR) since 2003. PIR is a Virginia-based not-for-profit created by the Internet Society (ISOC) specifically to manage the .ORG top-level domain.

But, as you can see by the announcement above, the Internet Society — because it apparently needed the money — has sold all control of the .ORG top-level domain to Ethos Capital.

Has anyone ever heard of Ethos Capital?

Who Is Ethos Capital?

It's a little difficult to get information about Ethos Capital, since they have such a small Web presence. They appear to be these guys, an African capital investment firm:

Ethos Capital offers investors long-term capital appreciation by investing in a diversified portfolio of unlisted investments managed by Ethos Private Equity, the largest private equity firm in sub-Saharan Africa.

So what is a sub-Sarahan Africa equity investment firm doing purchasing control of the whole of the .ORG registry? How does an African firm get into position to do this at all? And why are they doing it now?

To answer these question, we turn to The Register, a UK publication, which has looked into this story:

Who's behind Ethos?

Despite stating that Ethos Capital “understands the intricacies of the domain industry” its founder and CEO Erik Brooks has no experience within that industry. The firm’s website lists only Brooks and one Nora Abusitta-Ouri – who joined the outfit last month as its “chief purpose officer” – as employees.

But there is a common thread between those two and it is Fadi Chehade, a former CEO of ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain-name system and awards the contracts to run internet registries.

It was under Chehade that ICANN radically changed its approach to internet registries, including a massive expansion of the internet namespace and a move toward a free market approach to internet addresses. Chehade’s actions as CEO led directly to the Ethos Capital buyout of .org but he is not listed as a part of Ethos Capital and the company has so far failed to respond to our questions about his connection to the firm.

More recent decisions by ICANN also had a significant bearing on the decision to sell the .org registry. At the end of June this year, in a controversial decision made despite significant and vocal opposition, ICANN decided to lift price caps on .org domains for the next 10 years, paving the way for unlimited price increases on the 10 million .org domain names. That decision massively increased the value of the .org registry from millions to potentially billions of dollars.

At the time, ICANN justified the decision by saying it was bringing the contract in line with the many new extensions that have been added to the internet in recent years. And this week, ICANN’s chairman Maarten Botterman told The Register in a statement that:

“The renewal agreement for .org removed the price cap and includes pricing provisions that are consistent with the base form registry agreement that is published and has been in public view for some time, essentially removing the role of ICANN in pricing restraints, where possible.”

So the order of events is:

• ICANN, under Fadi Chehade, in a highly controversial move, massively expands top-level domain names, greatly multiplying profit opportunities for registrar and middlemen.

• PIR, a non-profit entity tasked with managing the .ORG top-level domain, removes the price cap on .ORG registrations, meaning any price can be charged by any registrar.

• A few months later, Ethos, an investment firm, buys the .ORG operation by purchasing PIR, the non-profit entity that controls it.

Sounds like a neoliberal wet dream come true to me.

The article emphasizes that so far no connection between Chehade and Ethos has been established or acknowledged, but note well that Ethos has not responded to requests for information on the connection — when a simple denial would have sufficed. I think The Register is right to smell a rat.

In the meantime, any poor, cash-strapped non-profit with a .ORG domain name — for example, sierraclub.org, to pick just one of literally millions — is best advised to renew its registration for the maximum time allowed, and do it now.

After all, there's no telling when our noble billionaire job-creators will seize this new opportunity to milk yet another cow completely and utterly dry.
  

Are New Fungal Superbugs Emerging Thanks to Climate Change?

Candida auris fungus (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Normally humans are not much troubled by fungal infections (as opposed to bacterial and viral diseases, which are far more common). There are several reasons for this — a healthy human's immune system being one — but another is that the temperature of the human body is simply too high to support most fungal life.

That seems to be changing, however, and the cause seems to be climate change — that increased global temperatures are forcing certain strains of fungi to adapt to warmer environments than they would normally find tolerable, thus making persistent fungal life in human and animal hosts much more possible.

An added wrinkle is that at least one of these fungi, Candida auris, is highly drug-resistant.

The layperson's version of the story comes from CNN ("Climate crisis might be behind the rise of mysterious superbug C. auris, study suggests"), but let's turn instead to this press release from the American Society for Microbiology, published at EurekAlert (emphasis added):

Washington, DC - July 23, 2019 - Global warming may have played a pivotal role in the emergence of Candida auris, according to a new study published in mBio, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. C. auris, which is often multi-drug resistant and is a serious public health threat, may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change.

"The argument that we are making based on comparison to other close relative fungi is that as the climate has gotten warmer, some of these organisms, including Candida auris, have adapted to the higher temperature, and as they adapt, they break through human's protective temperatures," said Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, Chair, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland. "Global warming may lead to new fungal diseases that we don't even know about right now."

C. auris emerged independently on three continents simultaneously, with each clade being genetically distinct. "What is unusual about Candida auris is that it appeared in three different continents at the same time, and the isolates from India, South Africa, and South America are not related. Something happened to allow this organism to bubble up and cause disease. We began to look into the possibility that it could be climate change," said Dr. Casadevall. "The reasons that fungal infections are so rare in humans is that most of the fungi in the environment cannot grow at the temperatures or our body." Mammalian resistance to invasive fungal diseases results from a combination of high basal temperatures that create a thermal restriction zone and advanced host defense mechanisms in the form of adaptive and innate immunity.

Dr. Casadevall concludes, "What this study suggests is this is the beginning of fungi adapting to higher temperatures, and we are going to have more and more problems as the century goes on. Global warming will lead to selection of fungal lineages that are more thermally tolerant, such that they can breach the mammalian thermal restriction zone."

The underlying study is here — "On the Emergence of Candida auris: Climate Change, Azoles, Swamps, and Birds" — and it's worth reading, especially the Abstract, introduction and conclusion.

The study's dry language, when parsed for its actual meaning, is frightening: "Widening of the geographic range of innately thermotolerant pathogenic fungi and the acquisition of virulence traits in thermotolerant nonpathogenic environmental fungi may shape the 21st century as an era of expanding fungal disease for both the fauna and flora of the planet."

Could a multidrug-resistant, hitherto unknown group of deadly superfungi reshape the 21st century? Hard to imagine it wouldn't.

Even those who expect to escape, via their great wealth and mobility, the climate crisis they have created may have a hard time escaping the pathogens their own pathology has spawned.

There's a kind of awful, symmetrical irony in that.
  

Paul Krugman Probably Doesn’t Realize He Just Summarized What Joe Biden Has On Offer

On Saturday Paul Krugman wrote in his NY Times column that this week he will be “participating in an Economic Policy Institute conference on ‘excessive wealth disorder’— the problems and dangers created by extreme concentration of income and wealth at the top.” Notes On Excessive Wealth Disorder— How Not To Repeat The Mistakes Of 2011 deals not so much with the 1 percent but with “the role of the 0.1 percent, or maybe the 0.01 percent— the truly wealthy, not the ‘$400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff’ memorably ridiculed in the movie Wall Street. This is a really tiny group of people, but one that exerts huge influence over policy.”

Where does this influence come from? People often talk about campaign contributions, but those are only one channel. In fact, I’d identify at least four ways in which the financial resources of the 0.1 percent distort policy priorities:

1. Raw corruption. We like to imagine that simple bribery of politicians isn’t an important factor in America, but it’s almost surely a much bigger deal than we like to think.

2. Soft corruption. What I mean by this are the various ways short of direct bribery politicians, government officials, and people with policy influence of any kind stand to gain financially by promoting policies that serve the interests or prejudices of the wealthy. This includes the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.



3. Campaign contributions. Yes, these matter.

4. Defining the agenda: Through a variety of channels— media ownership, think tanks, and the simple tendency to assume that being rich also means being wise— the 0.1 percent has an extraordinary ability to set the agenda for policy discussion, in ways that can be sharply at odds with both a reasonable assessment of priorities and public opinion more generally.

Of these, I want to focus on item (4), not because it’s necessarily the most important— as I said, I suspect that raw corruption is a bigger deal than most of us can imagine— but because it’s something I think I know about. In particular, I want to focus on a particular example that for me and others was a kind of radicalizing moment, a demonstration that extreme wealth really has degraded the ability of our political system to deal with real problems.

The example I have in mind was the extraordinary shift in conventional wisdom and policy priorities that took place in 2010-2011, away from placing priority on reducing the huge suffering still taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and toward action to avert the supposed risk of a debt crisis. This episode is receding into the past, but it was extraordinary and shocking at the time, and could all too easily be a precursor to politics in the near future.

Let’s talk first about the underlying economic circumstances. At the beginning of 2011, the U.S. unemployment rate was still 9 percent, and long-term unemployment in particular was at extraordinary levels, with more than 6 million Americans having been out of work for 6 months or more. It was an ugly economic situation, but its causes were no mystery. The bursting of the housing bubble, and the subsequent attempts of households to reduce their debt, had let to a severe shortfall of aggregate demand. Despite very low interest rates by historical standards, businesses weren’t willing to invest enough to take up the slack created by this household pullback.

Textbook economics offered very clear advice about what to do under these circumstances. This was exactly the kind of situation in which deficit spending helps the economy, by supplying the demand the private sector wasn’t. Unfortunately, the support provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act— the Obama stimulus, which was inadequate but had at least cushioned the effects of the slump— peaked in mid-2010 and was in the process of falling off sharply. So the obvious, Economics 101 move would have been to implement another significant round of stimulus. After all, the federal government was still able to borrow long-term at near-zero real interest rates.

Somehow, however, over the course of 2010 a consensus emerged in the political and media worlds that in the face of 9 percent unemployment the two most important issues were … deficit reduction and “entitlement reform,” i.e. cuts in Social Security and Medicare. And I do mean consensus. As Ezra Klein noted, “the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit.” He cited, for example, Mike Allen asking Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles “whether they believed Obama would do ‘the right thing’ on entitlements— with ‘the right thing’ clearly meaning ‘cut entitlements.’”

So where did this consensus come from? To be fair, the general public has never bought into Keynesian economics; as far as I know, most voters, if asked, will always say that the budget deficit should be reduced. In November 1936, just after FDR’s reelection, Gallup asked voters whether the new administration should balance the budget; 65 percent said yes, only 28 percent no.

But voters tend to place a relatively low priority on deficits as compared with jobs and the economy. And they overwhelmingly favor spending more on health care and Social Security.

The rich, however, are different from you and me. In 2011 the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright managed to survey a group of wealthy individuals in the Chicago area. They found striking differences between this group’s policy priorities and those of the public at large. Budget deficits topped the list of problems they considered “very important,” with a third considering them the “most important” problem. While the respondents also expressed concern about unemployment and education, “they ranked a distant second and third among the concerns of wealthy Americans.”

And when it came to entitlements, the policy preferences of the wealthy were clearly at odds with those of the general public. By large margins, voters at large wanted to expand spending on health care and Social Security. By almost equally large margins, the wealthy wanted to reduce spending on those same programs.v
So what was the origin of the conventional-wisdom consensus that emerged in 2010-2011— a consensus so overwhelming that leading journalists abandoned the conventions of reportorial neutrality, and described austerity policies as the self-evident “right thing” for politicians to be doing? What happened, essentially, was that the political and media establishment internalized the preferences of the extremely wealthy.

Now, 2011 was an especially dramatic example of how this happens, but it wasn’t unique. In their recent book Billionaires and Stealth Politics, Page, Seawright, and Matthew Lacombe point out the enduring effects of plutocratic political influence on the Social Security debate: “Despite the strong support among most Americans for protecting and expanding Social Security benefits, for example, the intense, decades-long campaign to cut or privatize Social Security that was led by billionaire Pete Peterson and his wealthy allies appears to have played a part in thwarting any possibility of expanding Social Security benefits. Instead, the United States has repeatedly come close (even under Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama) to actually cutting benefits as part of a bipartisan ‘grand bargain’ concerning the federal budget.”

And here’s the thing: While we don’t want to romanticize the wisdom of the common man, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the policy preferences of the wealthy are based on any superior understanding of how the world works. On the contrary, the wealthy were obsessed with debt and uninterested in mass unemployment at a time when deficits weren’t a problem— were, indeed, part of the solution— while unemployment was.

And the widespread belief among the wealthy that we should raise the retirement age is based, literally, on failure to understand how the other half lives (or, actually, doesn’t). Yes, life expectancy at age 65 has gone up, but overwhelmingly for the upper part of the income distribution. Less affluent Americans, who are precisely the people who depend most on Social Security, have seen little rise in life expectancy, so there is no justification for forcing them to work longer.

Where do the preferences of the wealthy come from? You don’t have to be a vulgar Marxist to recognize a strong element of class interest. The push for austerity was clearly linked to a desire to shrink the tax-and-transfer state, which in all advanced countries, even America, is a significant force for redistribution away from the wealthy toward citizens with lower incomes.

You can see the true goals of austerity a couple of ways. First, by comparison with other advanced countries the U.S. has low taxes and low social spending, yet almost all the energy of self-proclaimed deficit hawks was expended on demands for reduced spending rather than increased taxes. Second, it’s striking how much less deficit hysteria we’re hearing now than we did seven years ago. The full-employment budget deficit now is about as large, as a share of GDP, as it was in early 2012, when unemployment was still above 8 percent. But this deficit, although far less justified by macroeconomic considerations, was created by tax cuts— and somehow the deficit hawks are fairly quiet.

No doubt many wealthy backers of tax cuts for themselves and benefit cuts for others manage to convince themselves that this is in everyone’s interest. People are in general good at that sort of self-delusion. The fact remains that the wealthy, on average, push for policies that benefit themselves even when they often hurt the economy as a whole. And the sheer wealth of the wealthy is what empowers them to get a lot of what they want.

So what does this imply going forward? First, in the near term, both during the 2020 election and after, it’s going to be really important to ride herd on both centrist politicians and the media, and not let them pull another 2011, treating the policy preferences of the 0.1 percent as the Right Thing as opposed to, well, what a certain small class of people want. There’s a fairly long list of things progressives have recently advocated that the usual suspects will try to convince everyone are crazy ideas nobody serious would support, e.g.

• A 70 percent top tax rate
• A wealth tax on very large fortunes
• Universal child care
• Deficit-financed spending on infrastructure

You don’t have to support any or all of these policy ideas to recognize that they are anything but crazy. They are, in fact, backed by research from some of the world’s leading economic experts. Any journalist or centrist politician who treats them as self-evidently irresponsible is doing a 2011, internalizing the prejudices of the wealthy and treating them as if they were facts.

But while vigilance can mitigate the extent to which the wealthy get to define the policy agenda, in the end big money will find a way— unless there’s less big money to begin with. So reducing the extreme concentration of income and wealth isn’t just a desirable thing on social and economic grounds. It’s also a necessary step toward a healthier political system.

Documenting the Train Wreck: Atmospheric CO2 Is Now Higher Than Ever in Human History, and Rising

Atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached 415 ppm. The last time humans experienced levels this high was... never. Human didn't exist.#climatecrisis #climatechange pic.twitter.com/xtRSF2ScGC

— Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) May 13, 2019

by Thomas Neuburger

The Kochs and their carbon-lobby friends have essentially won.
     –Wen Stephenson (source)

Our betters chose another path for us, and the rest, I'm afraid, will merely be consequences, the train wreck mentioned above, easily foreseen.
     –Yours truly (source)

I wrote the sentence above in January 2018 as part of a backward look at 2017, the first of the years of consequences to follow the crossroads year 2016 — the year when Bernie Sanders was not elected president, was not even allowed to be a choice.

One of the train wrecks I foresaw is a consequence of our already-started revolt against the super-rich who rule us. The other is the coming climate catastrophe.

About the latter, the planet has recently passed a milestone back to which it may not return in our lifetime, or even in the lifetime of our species. For the first time since humans walked the earth — and perhaps since Australopithecus, our earliest post-chimpanzee ancestors, did as well — daily atmospheric CO2 crossed above 415 ppm to 415.26 as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. (As you can see from the chart at the top, CO2 for the previous 800,000 years stayed within a tight range, between about 180 and 300 ppm. It's now well above that range and rising fast.)

Not only that, but every daily reading at Mauna Loa from May 11 through May 18 was above 415 ppm:

Hourly and daily averages for atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory for the week ending May 18, 2019 (click to enlarge)

Small dots are hourly averages; large dots are daily averages. Note that the chart's hourly peak, just before noon on May 15, crossed above 417 ppm.

May is usually the peak month for atmospheric CO2 — there's a yearly rise and fall — but each yearly peak is inexorably higher than the last one. It appears that humans, as ruled by its fossil fuel–financed politicians, won't stop burning carbon until they can't — until they're pre-Industrial at best, functionally extinct at worst. The train wreck.

Exxon Predicted This in 1982

Back when Exxon Corporation was studying climate change seriously, its scientists produced papers predicting atmospheric CO2 and global warming under a number of scenarios, including a "high case" scenario in which fossil fuel burning would increase and previously unavailable carbon resources, from shale for example, would become extractable.

Here's a chart from one of those papers (pdf). It projects both projected atmospheric CO2 and global temperature increase from a 1980 baseline:

Chart from this Exxon paper. Annotation by Brian Kahn at Earther (source)

The Exxon prediction was startlingly accurate, at least so far. It put atmospheric CO2 (upper line) just below 420 ppm in 2019 and global warming (lower line) above 1.2°C after we add in the amount of global warming, 0.4°C, that occurred between the pre-Industrial low and 1980 [Hansen, 2018] — about where we are today, in other words.

Fossil fuel CEOs, including and especially those at Exxon, the global moneyed class in general, and their bought politicians — meaning almost all of them — are the reason we're in this mess. They're also the reason we may not get out of it, since I don't see the revolt against death by fossil fuel, even at this late date, happening any time soon.

Which leaves us where we are today. Barring miracles, which do occur, we already know what's coming. The Kochs and their carbon-lobby friends have essentially won. The train is approaching. All that's left is to document the wreck.
  

The Climate Fight Has Clear Villains. It's Long Past Time to Name Them

Herman Goering on trial in Nuremberg, 1946 (source)

Slobodan Milošević on trial in The Hague, 1999 (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

"Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced."
—France et. al. v. Goering et. al., 22 IMT 411, 466 (Int'l Mil. Trib. 1946), aka the Nuremberg Trials

"Let's call this what it is: an atmosphere of impunity for atrocity."
—Kate Aronoff (source)

Encore un cri de coeur. Contrary to frightened and popular belief, there are actually a number of avenues to success in the battle to repair an increasingly unfriendly climate — or relative success, given that much of the damage that will be done is irreversible.

All of those avenues, however, require the use of force.

What counts as force? Legal action against fossil fuel companies counts as force. Financial attacks on their assets count as force. But most importantly, criminalizing and punishing the behavior of fossil fuel executives — the individuals themselves — counts as force.

The last option is the most promising.  As was aptly and correctly stated at the Nuremberg Trials, "Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced."

If Rex Tillerson's ex-company, Exxon, is punished and stripped of its assets, wealth and business, and yet its executives go free, the fight will be a long one; those executives will fight until they die, or we do, or both.

But let one fossil fuel CEO sit where Slobodan Milošević sat, a criminal in the Hague on trial for his life — an act that splits the criminal from the enterprise, separates the interests of the CEO from the interests of the destructive operation — and we will suddenly see company after company sacrificed to save the lives of those that run them.

The good news is that the first part of this effort — criminalizing CEO-suite behavior — has already been done. Their actions are already and clearly criminal by the standards of the International Criminal Court. The only thing left to do is to deliver the trials and the punishment.

Less Than 1000 Humans Are Personally Killing Our Climate

Kate Aronoff has considered all this. Near the beginning of her seminal essay "It’s Time to Try Fossil-Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity," this appears:

Just one hundred fossil fuel producers — including privately held and state-owned companies — have been responsible for 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988, emissions that have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide.

When one first reads this sentence, what's most striking is this part: "Just one hundred fossil fuel producers ... have been responsible for 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988". A stunning statistic.

Yet Aronoff's sentence also can be reduced to this: "Just one hundred fossil fuel producers ... have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide." Nothing short of mass murder.

To see the extent of our climate problem — not our problem with the climate, but our problem with the climate problem — one must look at both of the ideas above and note both of those facts.

First, just one hundred fossil fuel–producing companies — captained by perhaps five key people at each — have filled our air with 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, a year in which most of us were alive. This is not ancient history, going back centuries or even a few generations. This is historically yesterday, a year alive in living people's memories. This was done as we watched.

Second, it's inescapably true that these 500 people, the "individuals at the helm of fossil-fuel companies" are, as Aronoff puts it, murderers. As she makes clear, these executives are guilty of a specific and heinous crime under international law — not genocide, as one might expect, but "crimes against humanity" as defined by Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court.

Aronoff writes that "the fossil industry’s behavior constitutes a Crime Against Humanity in the classical sense: 'a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,' including murder and extermination. Unlike genocide, the UN clarifies, in the case of crimes against humanity, 'it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed…The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.'"

Here's what a prosecution would look like in the case of Shell, which is headquartered, ironically, in The Hague:

[W]hat might trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity actually look like? Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, is based in the Netherlands — in the Hague, in fact — and is a party to the Rome Statute. In order for their executives to be tried for crimes against humanity, the ICC prosecutor would need to open an investigation to determine whether domestic courts in the Netherlands had not done enough to hold the offending parties accountable. The prosecutor could then use their proprio motu power to bring an indictment before the ICC, which would then hear the case.

Alternately, the Dutch government could refer the case to the court itself. Plenty of countries have crimes against humanity statutes, however, so a trial wouldn’t necessarily have to happen under the auspices of the ICC. And because companies like Exxon have operations all over the world, they could theoretically be tried in any country that has such statutes on the books, or that is a party to the Rome Statute. Options abound.

Aronoff's piece is rich in detail. I'll leave you to discover that for yourself.

The "Ask" Is Not to Ask, But to Tell

Let's close with this. The people of the world, all seven billion of us, have put our fate in the hands of perhaps 500 of our wealthiest and most pathological contemporaries. If that fate is not already sealed, it shortly will be, especially if any Republican — or any but the climate-fiercest Democrat — is elected in 2020.

But that does not leave us helpless. We are seven billion; they are less than a thousand. The world is already starting its descent into chaos, just barely perhaps, but noticeably enough that even right-wing voters fear what's ahead. The people are now awake.

That humans will end fossil fuel emissions is inevitable. In less than 100 years, humans will no longer produce enough fossil fuels to add to the damage already done. The only questions left are these:

1. Will the end of human-produced emissions be managed or chaotic?

2. Will the end of human-produced emissions occur in time to matter?

If the process of de-industrialization is chaotic — via collapse of our culture and our numbers — it will continue to its natural end. That is, it will stop when (a) not enough humans are left alive to add appreciably more carbon to the air than their predecessor have already done, or (b) those humans who are left, in whatever numbers, are mainly pre-industrial.

The path to this end, the chaotic one, leads through war and disease; invasion and mass migration; extreme nationalism and tribal self-defense; decadal droughts and famines; brutality, retribution, bloodshed and despair; to extinction. 

If the process is managed, however, especially if it is managed by the wise and determined among us — in the U.S. that means finding and empowering our next FDR, our latter-day Lincoln — the end of fossil fuel burning can preserve as much life and culture as it can, not serve to destroy it totally.

All that stands in our way ... as always ... is the pathology of the very very rich, and the power we allow them over our lives.

Remember though: It is not their organizations that stand in our way; organizations are merely force extenders for mere people. It's the people who use that force. It's long past time to remove those people from the power to destroy us.

Asking them to change won't do the job; nor will deploying logic or science. We're tried those paths since the 1970s, and they've shown us in every way possible that they will not walk away from the power to destroy. The ask must now be a tell — they must be made, with sufficient force, to leave, or the fire that fed our species through all of our past will consume our future entirely as we watch.

Using the International Criminal Court to send this generation's mass murders to their reward — before they send us to ours — counts as sufficient force.  

Encore un cri de coeur. 
 

How Much Will It Cost to Address Climate Change? Pennies Compared to the Alternative

Economic growth and global warming, Figure 1 from a paper studying "Global non­linear effect of temperature on economic production" (link below). "Non-linear" in this case means "at what warming point do economies tend to 'fall off a cliff'"? It's not the same point for all economies, but the non-linearity is obvious. (For conversion in charts a, b, and c, 20°C = 68°F, and 30°C = 86°F. Click to enlarge.)

by Thomas Neuburger

The cost of addressing climate change is much in the news these days, thanks to the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal (GND) proposal. Everyone seems to want to know how much it will cost. Too much, according to the editors at Forbes. "The Green New Deal Would Cost a Lot of Green," they warn us, and the editors at Bloomberg want us to know that "The Green New Deal Is Unaffordable."

These headlines tell you they measure cost in terms of lost profit, not lost wages, since no one at Forbes or Bloomberg wants to see wages rise. Nor do they consider lost lives.

Green New Deal advocates assure us that indeed we can pay for it, partly because of increased productivity (it will put a lot of people to work, FDR-style) and partly because the economy can simply absorb the influx of new money without the need for high "pay for it" taxes, just as the economy is absorbing the multi-trillion cost of the Iraq War and President Trump's tax cuts. When elites and the wealth they serve want something expensive, they get it, and no one bothers to make them "pay for it" later. 

See this Huffington Post article, "We Can Pay For A Green New Deal," by Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal and Greg Carlock for the gist of the "yes, it's affordable" argument.

Both statements are true, of course. Any attempt to really mitigate climate change — make the damage less, as opposed to merely adapting to the crisis — will cost "a lot of green." And yes, the economy can absorb the additional spending, allowing taxes to be used only as an economic cooling device (if and as needed), not as a prohibitory "pay for it" device.

Measuring the Wrong Variable

But few are focusing on the real measurable — not what it will cost economically to address the problem, but what it will cost economically to not address the problem. "Cost economically" here means exactly and only what the people at Forbes and Bloomberg think it means — How does economic activity slow when atmospheric temperature rises? How are profits and wealth affected? This analysis looks at no other factors affecting the economy, such as the cost of recovery from super-storms.

One of those who did address the economic cost of not dealing with climate change is Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and coauthor of a little-noticed 2015 paper, "Global non­linear effect of temperature on economic production." A link to the Nature abstract is here; a link to the paper itself is here (pdf).

The abstract begins this way (notes are linked in the original):

Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies (1,2), but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear [jerky or stepwise] responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries (3,4). In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries [aggregate economic activity of whole nations] is reported not to respond to temperature (5), while poor countries respond only linearly (5,6). Resolving this conflict between micro [i.e. labor] and macro [nationwide] observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems (7,8) and to anticipating the global impact of climate change (9,10).

The language of the abstract is a little confusing for a lay reader, so let me explain. In essence, the question they're studying is this: Are macroeconomies (economies of whole nations) affected by atmospheric warming, contrary to what is reported? If so, are those effects linear (gradual and along a straight line) or non-linear (sudden and precipitous at certain thresholds)?

In other words, do national economies "drop off a cliff" at certain levels of increased atmospheric heating? The graph at the top, taken from the paper, shows the answer is yes.

The authors conclude (my emphasis):

We show that overall economic productivity is non-linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 °C [56°F] and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries.

Note that this is a study of the past, not the future. In other words, the study looked at real-world consequences of warming that has already occurred, not projected consequences using economic models only. Thus this forward-looking conclusion: "If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change."

Widening global wealth inequality means that some nations will do better than others — at first. An article covering a subsequent talk by Dr. Hsiang put it this way:

That decrease in economic output will hit the poorest 60 percent of the population disproportionately hard, said Hsiang. In doing so, it will surely exacerbate inequality, as many rich regions of the world that have lower average annual temperatures, such as northern Europe, benefit from the changes. Hotter areas around the tropics, including large parts of south Asia and Africa, already tend to be poorer and will suffer.

A graph printed with the article indicates the eastern seaboard of the United States and northern Europe, among other places, will have improved economies (click through to see it).

But the conclusion that the East Coast and northern Europe will thrive economically is deceptive, since the study was limited to the economic effects of warming. What about the physical effects? For example, the population of the East Coast of the U.S. will at some point suffer numerous super-storms, sea level rise and the shoreline erosion that always accompanies it.

Put simply, at some point cities on both coasts will have to be moved inland as the land they sit on erodes into the ocean. How far inland? I wouldn't want to be the planner that has to figure that out, since you only want to have to do it once.

The East Coast is home to about 120 million people. The total U.S. population is between 300–350 million people. More than a third of all U.S. citizens will be forced to relocate away from the Atlantic shore. What's the cost of that?

As to northern Europe, if the thermohaline current (the Gulf Stream) is drastically altered by fresh water melt from Greenland, northern Europe — England, for example — will freeze like Canada in the winter, whose latitude it shares. Will England thrive economically in that scenario?

How Much Will It Cost Not to Mitigate Climate Change? $17 Trillion Per Year in Economic Loss Alone

So what's the economic cost of not responding to global warming? According to the paper, the bottom line is this. Global GDP (called Global World Product, or GWP) was estimated between $70 and $80 trillion about five years ago. Thus, by this paper's (highly conservative) estimates, the economic loss that results from willfully ignoring climate change will be roughly $17 trillion per year by 2100, a sum that doesn't include the additional cost of wars, famines, droughts, plagues, epidemics, and "national emergencies" of various flavors and stripes.

Can we afford, economically, not to address climate change now? The answer, of course, is no.

Yet once more the pathological among us have us asking the wrong questions. All they want to know is, will their own wealth be affected? Will they still keep their billions? Will they die poorer than they are today?

The question we should be asking is, will the rest of us die poorer — and sooner — if our first priority is protecting the wealth of the wealthy?

The answer, of course, is yes.
 

World Without Us: Death of Insects and the Third Great Tsunami

by Thomas Neuburger

I've written in the past about "twin tsunamis" approaching the U.S. and the world — the chaos caused by out-of-control climate change and the blossoming of pre-revolutionary America, the America that elected Trump and almost elected Sanders, into revolutionary America, the America fed up here with life under the predatory rule of the very very rich and the corporations they control.

But there's a third great tsunami as well, one related to the destruction of our habitat, the environment of the world we depend on for physical sustenance, and only partly the consequence of climate change itself.

Put simply, we're destroying our world. Or rather, remaking it so it's uninhabitable by ... us. This radical transformation takes many forms, from acidification of the ocean, which will alter for millions of years what kinds of species it supports, to destruction of our soil and food supply so that a single, politically powerful company can prosper.

We're also killing off the world's insects:

Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'

Exclusive: Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

A world without insects, or dramatically stripped of them, is a world without us. This is the path we're on. This is the third tsunami, and like the others, its mist is wetting our faces as we speak.

This doesn't change the implications for the 2020 election, which I'll return to later, but it certainly adds to them.
 

The Elephant In the Room: Addressing Climate Change Means Rationing

World War II rationing posters. If no one questions the goal, no one will question means like these.

by Thomas Neuburger

I could make this complicated or simple. Let's make it simple. We've dithered so long in addressing climate change, that to address it effectively means not just a radical restructuring of the entire economy, it also means energy rationing.

A few writers are starting to get this fact, and get at it in their work. Some "rationing will be needed" articles are of the "let me prove it to you with data" type. I'd like to take a different approach in this piece. This will be an "if you've got a massive water leak, you're going to get wet" type of piece — an appeal to the obvious, in other words. Either approach will have the same result — it will arrive at the r-word despite (and because) of the reaction that word causes.

After all, it's entirely likely that one of the chief reasons people are not addressing climate change effectively — aside from the political and propaganda power of corporate America — is that once people start thinking about the problem, they quickly conclude what we're about to conclude, that a crash conversion to zero-carbon energy means "goodbye big-screen lifestyle," at least for a while.

Let's look at something written in 2016 by Stan Cox, "If There’s a World War II-Style Climate Mobilization, It has to Go All the Way—and Then Some." His intro, which I won't quote, states the obvious: that the climate is deteriorating at an accelerating pace, and addressing this problem will take a "World War II"-style mobilization.

This is true as far as it goes, but the UN and most climate scientists also say that the rate of decarbonization required is greater than can be achieved with just a simple (and comfortably paced) retrofit of the energy economy.

Consider this contradiction, from the Greenpeace info sheet on the latest IPCC Special Report (quoted here: "IPCC Releases Climate Report — First Thoughts").

• With countries’ current climate targets we are heading for well above 3°C.
• To get below 1.5°C global CO2 emissions would need to be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by mid-century at the latest, with substantial reductions in other gases.

According to Dr. Michael Mann and others, our business-as-usual behavior will push global atmospheric warming beyond +2 degrees Celsius in the mid 2030s (my own estimate is much more pessimistic), while UN Paris agreement "promises," or targets, have global carbon emissions rising throughout that period.

As a result, the IPCC Special Report calls for global carbon emissions to, in effect, "fall off a cliff" — end, or at least start to end, almost immediately. This, of course, means ending the fossil fuel industry completely and forever.

But let's forget about the unlikelihood of that happening. Let's say we actually tried to do this — that in 2021 a radical, FDR-style president and an awakened and, yes, panicked public committed to an actual crash conversion to 100% renewable energy. What would that mean for the consumer economy? Would that big screen, smart phone lifestyle, the one the energy industry ads say is at risk, actually be at risk?

This is where the answer gets obvious. Of course it will be at risk. If protecting people's ability to spend endlessly on consumer products is society's highest priority, then a crash-course energy conversion will be slowed to whatever speed it must be. But if averting the global climate crisis is the highest priority, of course the consumer economy will take a back seat, to whatever extent it must.

Which is exactly what occurred during World War II.

Stan Cox on what that implies:

The necessity for the consumer economy to get by on a lower input of energy and other resources while achieving sufficiency for all brings us back to the World War II model. If we’re to emulate the “Greatest Generation,” we can’t do a halfway job of it, focusing solely on “green” production; we have to build a fairer economy as well.

So far, I have seen only one effective strategy for doing that: a “Victory Plan” recently drawn up by Ezra Silk, a co-founder of The Climate Mobilization movement. (It can be downloaded here.) The document, radical and at the same time realistic and practical, calls for reworking the government and economy even more thoroughly than during World War II, in order to cut America’s net greenhouse emissions down to zero by 2025 while also reversing degradation of ecosystems and halting the mass extinction of species.

Necessary steps will include phasing out fossil-fuel use within a decade; directing a large share of our energy, materials, and labor toward building a renewable energy sector and a high speed rail network; restoring our forests, grasslands, and croplands so that we are putting more carbon into the soil and less into the atmosphere; deeply cutting meat and dairy consumption; and converting a large portion of the U.S. military into a kind of climate mobilization force.

All of that will require a national reallocation of resources among sectors of production, one that diverts a significant share of a necessarily declining resource budget into building green infrastructure and leaves the consumer economy a lot less to work with.

And the kicker (emphasis added):

We know from wartime experience that with resources diverted away from the consumer economy, shrinking supply will collide with still-high demand, bringing the threat of runaway inflation. Price controls will be essential, but with goods in short supply at reasonable prices, we will have to move quickly to prevent severe shortages, hoarding, and “rationing by queueing.” As in the 1940s, that will require fair-shares rationing.

I'll let you read the article to see the implications of that last sentence.

The bottom line, of course, is that these are indeed the options — comfort for us now, followed by death and misery for all generations to come. Or rationing and planning now, to secure a safer future for our children and grandchildren. This is the choice this generation is facing, and I firmly believe, in the back of their minds, people do know.

This is a profound moment in human history. What we face today is not just a practical, existential choice, but a deeply moral, almost Dantesque one as well. We're on the verge of committing mass murder, this generation. And for what?
  

The Latest Corporate Obamist to Be Touted for President by Big New York Media — Deval Patrick

Bain Capital's corporate logo: Vultures, rampant, on a field of bones

Bain Capital's managing director and the Obama circle's choice for next president. "We get the government we deserve in a democracy," Deval Patrick unironically said, according to the original caption (Photograph by John Trotter/MAPS for The New Yorker).

by Gaius Publius

Yet another agent of wealth is being touted as a Democratic Party candidate for president — it seems there's no end of them. This time the candidate is no Mike Bloomberg, with his suspect past, his narcissistic sense of entitlement, and openly limousine lifestyle, but an under-the-radar Democratic governor named Deval Patrick.

Patrick ticks all the boxes. He's loved by the Obama organization, he has that next-Obama feel on the stump, and he's a "moderate" (meaning corporatist) in a year when Third Way organizations are searching hard for a "sounds progressive, serves the donors" candidate to throw against the Donald Trump or Mike Pence wall in 2020.

And now he has the the big New York media pushing his candidacy, firing his big opening salvos for him. Jeffrey Toobin, not a no-name writer, has an absolutely glowing piece about Patrick in The New Yorker. Let's take a look (emphasis mine throughout):

Toobin open this way:

On Election Night last week, Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, went out to dinner with his wife, Diane, near their apartment, in Boston’s Back Bay. They propped up their iPads on the table, trying to synchronize their schedules after a hectic couple of months. On weekdays, Patrick had been on the road for his job, as a managing director at Bain Capital, the investment firm founded by his predecessor as governor, Mitt Romney. On weekends, he had travelled to a dozen states, to campaign for Democratic candidates in the midterms, and, in the process, to generate the kind of good will and name recognition that could help him if he chooses to run for President in 2020. Diane, meanwhile, had been winding down her law practice, as a management-side labor lawyer at the major Boston firm Ropes & Gray, where she had recently given up her partnership after working there since 1995. Back at home, after dinner, Patrick took a quick look at the election results, and then turned in early, rising, as is his custom, at dawn, to take stock.

Notice, among the down home details of this warm portrait, these critical facts: Deval Patrick is managing director of Bain Capital. His wife Diane is a labor lawyer, but on the management side, meaning she helps corporations fend off unions.

Toobin clearly doesn't see any of that as a minus, but he should. Bain Capital, worth nearly $100 billion in privately held assets, is an acquirer and destroyer of companies:

In his 2009 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, Josh Kosman described Bain Capital as "notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses," being the first large private-equity firm to derive a large fraction of its revenues from corporate dividends and other distributions. The revenue potential of this strategy, which may "starve" a company of capital, was increased by a 1970s court ruling that allowed companies to consider the entire fair-market value of the company, instead of only their "hard assets", in determining how much money was available to pay dividends. In at least some instances, companies acquired by Bain borrowed money in order to increase their dividend payments, ultimately leading to the collapse of what had been financially stable businesses.

A classic "leveraged buyout" company, a vulture capital operation. Here's what Bain did to Toys 'R' Us in 2018:

Just a few years ago, Toys 'R' Us was an iconic American retailer. Six months ago, it filed for bankruptcy. Two days ago, it announced that all 800 of its American stores, and all 100 of its British ones, are closing or being sold. As many as 33,000 workers could lose their jobs.

What happened to America's biggest toy store?

Simply put, vulture capitalists ate it.

One of those vultures was Bain Capital. Deval Patrick was its managing director, the man in charge, when this occurred.

So why is Jeffrey Toobin writing about him? Maybe because Patrick is much loved by the Obama inner circle:

Patrick would enter the race with one significant distinction: he is a kind of political heir to Barack Obama, and enjoys broad support from people close to the former President. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s former senior adviser and still a close friend, told me, “Deval would make an outstanding President. He’d make a terrific candidate.” She added, “President Obama and Deval are very much alike in terms of their core values, what drove them into public service, their willingness to lend a hand, the responsibility to give back. I think they share a basic philosophy about what it means to be a good citizen.” Obama and Patrick also have in common roots in Chicago, Ivy League educations, and complicated relationships with largely absent fathers (which both men have chronicled in memoirs that feature youthful pilgrimages to Africa). They espouse a politics of unapologetic idealism, with a largely moderate, center-left orientation. On the stump, both are part teacher and part preacher. “Deval is a very genuine person, a very empathetic person,” David Axelrod, who has been a strategist for Patrick as well as for Obama, told me. “He is a guy who makes people feel comfortable. He’s very principled, you can see that—just like Obama.”

Ignore the adoring prose layered into that paragraph — "They [Obama and Patrick] espouse a politics of unapologetic idealism, with a largely moderate, center-left orientation. On the stump, both are part teacher and part preacher" — and focus on the endorsements. Patrick's "unapologetic idealism" is just not true; both Obama and Patrick are corporatists who serve wealth first. Being "part teacher and part preacher" just means he, like Obama, is a good Elmer Gantry.

As for Patrick being "principled," indeed he is; he's principled "just like Obama," though I'm sure Toobin doesn't mean this as ironically it sounds to any real student of Obama.

Most of the piece is like that — painfully praising, and painfully revealing in a way unintended by Toobin. For example, here's Toobin on why Patrick was opposed to Brett Kavanaugh's nomination:

That afternoon, Patrick and I sat down at a diner in Asbury Park. In Washington, Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, and Patrick explained his opposition to the nomination. “Some of it is very personal,” he said. ... In 1993, Patrick’s brother-in-law was convicted of raping Patrick’s sister, and Diane has talked openly about being a victim of domestic abuse during her first marriage. “I can confirm that the experience of not being believed or having the experience not taken as seriously or treated as seriously is extremely painful,” he said. He spoke with sorrow and emotional distance, and [Toobin couldn't bring himself to write "but"], notably, didn’t denounce Kavanaugh directly, or Trump for choosing him.

Note in this passage the compelling verbal portrait of a man whose sister had been raped, speaking "with sorrow and emotional distance," followed immediately by the lack of condemnation of either the rapist, the radical who nominated him, or the destructive agenda the Kavanaugh court will enact. Toobin's personal access to Patrick ("That afternoon, Patrick and I sat down at a diner in Asbury Park"), his front-and-center self-placement as the writer picked to roll out Valerie Jarrett's front-runner, also stands out. The piece is a paint job, and deaf to its ironies.

None of this means that Patrick won't be a force to be reckoned with in 2020. Both Toobin and David Axelrod attest to Patrick's preacher power on the stump. Toobin: "Soon after Patrick started to campaign, Axelrod got a phone call from his sister Joan, who lives in Massachusetts ... “She had never done anything like this before, but she gets on the phone and says she’s just met Deval and he is incredible. ‘He’s the real deal. You have to come here and work for him.’” ... Patrick beat Reilly by twenty points in the primary."

As a sleeper, Patrick is well positioned to surprise. Be prepared to find him in the running as the race evolves, with both money and power behind him and yes-we-can media angels at his shoulder.

Toobin, closing on a note of swelling church-organ glory, emphasizes Patrick's chosen theme, "hope and kindness":

"It struck me that something is so wrong when we learn to shout our anger and whisper our kindness,” he went on. “We have got to learn to stop being ashamed of being kind." In the church and elsewhere, Patrick left a message of hope and kindness. The question, for Patrick and everyone else, is whether there is a wider audience for it in this fierce and broken political moment.

Is there a place for "hope and kindness" in this "fierce and broken moment"? Let's ask the broken employees of Toys 'R' Us before seeking kindness from Deval Patrick, their destroyer.

GP
 

Pathology, Khashoggi, Capitalism & Climate Change

The sons and daughters of the uber-rich

by Gaius Publius

Capitalism is an economic system that encourages people to act from the most pathological individual motives and promises the best social outcome.

Noam Chomsky said that our current ideology is producing a nation, a world, of psychopaths. From an interview with Rob Kall:

R.K.: Okay, so you have written and I am going to quote you here,

“if you care about other people that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people you might try to organize or to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school or afford food to eat or things like that. In the United States that’s called libertarian for some wild reason. I mean it’s actually highly authoritarian but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.”

Now, since we last spoke I have been doing a series of articles on psychopathy, psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists and it sure sounds like you’re describing them when you describe people who don’t care.

N.C.: Well there is a huge propaganda effort that we are all aware of to try to turn people into psychopaths who don’t care about anyone but themselves. That’s not new actually. They go back a hundred and fifty years, the early days of industrialization in the United States. Working people were bitterly condemning the industrial system that was being imposed, the way it was taking away their freedom, and one of the things they condemned is what they called the new spirit of the age– ‘Gain wealth forgetting all but self,’– Exactly what you’re describing. That’s a hundred and fifty years ago and ever since then there have been enormous efforts to drive these sociopathic attitudes into people’s heads. [emphasis added]

About this, Chris Hedges adds from his personal experience:

At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich. Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.

It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the uber-rich. Friendship for them was defined by “what’s in it for me?” They were surrounded from the moment they came out of the womb by people catering to their desires and needs. They were incapable of reaching out to others in distress—whatever petty whim or problem they had at the moment dominated their universe and took precedence over the suffering of others, even those within their own families. They knew only how to take. They could not give. They were deformed and deeply unhappy people in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism.

I would take statements like that last one literally. We're ruled by people "deformed and in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism." Note: This isn't just Trump he's talking about.

Corporations As Force-Extenders for the Pathology of the Rich

Hedges' observation certainly explains why executives at the Ford Motor Company would use a cost-benefit analysis to decide how much safety to put into the Ford Pinto, a car prone to explode from a simple rear-end collision. As one law student at Wake Forest University bloodlessly put it, "Should a risk/benefit analysis be used in situations where a defect in design or manufacturing could lead to death or seriously bodily harm, such as in the Ford Pinto situation?"

That cost-benefit analysis goes like this: Which is more expensive, to settle lawsuits resulting from death claims, or to upgrade the product so fewer people are killed? Human executives at Ford weighed the options and chose to settle the death claims instead.

See what I mean? Psychopaths.

Hedges generalizes the situation this way: "It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power." He goes on to characterize rule by the super-rich as observed by such varied writers as Aristotle, Sheldon Wolin and C. Wright Mills. "Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution. They do not know how to nurture or build. They know only how to feed their bottomless greed."

Keep "tyranny or revolution" in mind; we'll come back to it.

In today's world the wealth-producing engine of the super-rich is corporate capitalism. As I wrote some years ago, big corporations loot the wealth of the world so their true owners, the CEO class, can loot their corporations and buy anything else on earth they want or need. When only the rich have money, the whole of the rest of the world is always for sale.

Now that the super-rich have bought the U.S. political system, the last piece, their last lock on power, is in place. Tyranny or rebellion: if the political system can't be recaptured in an orderly, electoral way, nothing but withdrawal of the "consent of the governed" can change course we're on.

The Ubiquity of Assassination

Which leaves us where? Not in a good place. For another example of rule by psychopaths, consider the Khashoggi murder, but from a different perspective:

Tech executives withdrew in scores from a high-profile Saudi investment summit amid the uproar over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — but top Silicon Valley companies show no signs they plan to unwind their lucrative business ties with the country.

The oil-rich kingdom, with its long history of human rights violations, is the single largest funding source for U.S. startups — and a financial pipeline for companies like Uber, Twitter and Tesla.

It's not just the Trumps of the world that live by death. Our liberal gods as well are steeped in blood (including the blood of cheered-on, murderous intent). The pathological desire to murder to gain wealth, to kill to retain power, is everywhere we look. To quote an old commercial, we're soaking in it.

The Pathology of the Climate "Debate"

Which brings us round at last to the climate catastrophe we're about to face, the single greatest world-historical issue in the world. As Dave Roberts pointed out here, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation are not the same, either morally or in their results.

Mitigation is a collective and widespread effort by a society to lessen climate damage by collectively addressing the causes. Where will the money come from? The society as a whole.

Adaptation, on the other hand, is intensely local: What one town or state will need to adapt to climate disasters will be different, and differently expensive, than what another town or state will need. Where will the money come from? That too will be local.

A program of mitigation is collective and deeply moral; also deeply effective, to the extent that good choices are made, since the force of the tsunami itself, as it were, is lessened. A program of adaptation-only, however, is a program of abandonment, a program of "each to his own and look out below." 

Needless to say, we're on the path of adaptation only, of not really acting until disaster is at the door, and have been for decades. And when the moment occurs when the waters do rise, the super-rich will only protect themselves, the poor being left to fend as best they can. "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" said the CEO of Home Depot about anyone not like him. You can see this attitude as well in the discussions they have amongst only themselves.

Rule by psychopaths takes us to this place. So long as we're frozen to inaction on our twin disasters, climate and wealth, this is what waits for us. We're ruled by these people until we choose not to be, or events overtake us all.

Exxon On the IPCC Report

But let's not close on that somber note. Let's close instead with a humorous quote, with Exxon's response to the latest IPCC report:

ExxonMobil CEO Depressed After Realizing Earth Could End Before They Finish Extracting All The Oil

..."Just think, one day soon, we’ll all be gone and that oil will still be there in the Earth, never to be removed, [said CEO Darren Woods]. It’s a travesty.” At press time, Woods announced ExxonMobil’s plans to quadruple its oil production in an effort to extract it all from the Earth while there was still time.

Ok, that was the Onion, but they're never really wrong, are they?

GP