Thomas Fazi: Climate hysteria helps no one

 

Climate hysteria helps no one 

Plus great links and comments about Ukraine, China, socialism/capitalism and greedflation 

THOMAS FAZI JUL 18 ∙ PAID

SHARE

These days the news is filled with stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” heat waves sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe (and especially Italy). Rome — my hometown — has been redubbed the “infernal city”. I appreciate the global concern for us poor Romans but I can assure everyone that we’re actually doing okay. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by famine, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change. Such sensationalism is revealing of the climate hysteria that has gripped the West — and the way in which it is seriously hindering our ability to devise rational solutions. It is also completely distorting our perception of the world, and pushing us to make increasingly irrational — and ultimately very dangerous, if not deadly — choices for poor and marginalised people everywhere, in the developing world as well as in rich countries. Read the rest of the article here. 

https://unherd.com/2023/07/climate-hysteria-has-no-class/...

And now, for paying subscribers only, here’s a selection of some of the best articles I’ve read this week. If you enjoy my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid. Plus, you’ll also get access to my newsletter with the top reads of the week and other exclusive stuff. 

Subscribed

Let’s start off with the always-brilliant Michael Brenner on the growing cognitive dissonance in American society caused the by widening gap between the country’s decadent reality — both at home and abroad — and its mythologised self-image: 

Fading prowess is one of the most difficult things for humans to cope with — whether it be an individual or a nation. By nature, we prize our strength and competence; we dread decline and its intimations of extinction. This is especially so in the United States where for many the individual and the collective persona are inseparable. No other country tries so relentlessly to live its legend as does the US. Today, events are occurring that contradict the American narrative of a nation with a unique destiny. That creates cognitive dissonance. Americanism acts as a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive. Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality. A drive to revalidate on presumed virtue and singularly now impels what America does in the world. Hence, the calculated stress placed on slogans like “democracy vs autocracy”. That is a neat metaphor for the uneasy position in which Uncle Sam finds himself these days. The US proudly pronounces its enduring greatness from every lectern and altar in the land, pledges to hold its standing as global No. 1 forever and ever; yet, it constantly bumps its head against an unaccommodating reality. Instead of downsizing the monumental juggernaut or applying itself to a delicate raising of the arch, the US makes repeated attempts to fit through in a vain effort to bend the world to fit its mythology. Evocation of the Concussion Protocol is in order — but nobody wants to admit that sobering truth. 

As readers of mine will know, I’ve been making a similar argument for a long time, see here for example: “How Russia and China overtook the West”. 

Brenner’s reflection is particularly disturbing when read in conjunction with Andrew Doran’s article in Compact, “America Is Sleepwalking Into Nuclear War”: 

A NATO-Warsaw Pact war never occurred for one reason only: nuclear weapons. Deterrence prevented conventional war, because escalation was all but certain. Now, either due to ideology or invincible ignorance, some want to scrap deterrence. Most Americans, and most of the world, as if in a deep sleep, seem oblivious to the risks. Indeed, the only government to use nuclear weapons in war, the United States, is apparently contemplating first-use options against Russia, according to a 2022 report by MIT: “The assumption is that the nuclear attack would remain limited, that parties would go back to the negotiating table, and that saner voices would prevail. However, this assumes a chain of events where everything unfolds as expected”. Even the authors’ frightening assumptions rest on a mistaken assumption: that Washington is inclined to negotiate. At the moment, for whatever reason, it isn’t. 

This is also very good from Jonathan Cook: “NATO isn’t defending Ukraine. It’s stabbing it in the back”. Cook writes: 

There is a duplicitous subtext [to NATO’s refusal to allow Ukraine to join NATO: the fact that NATO is responsible for sustaining the war it now cites as grounds for disqualifying Ukraine from joining the military alliance. NATO got Kyiv into its current, bloody mess — but isn’t ready to help it find a way out. It was NATO, after all, that chose to flirt openly with Ukraine from 2008 onwards, promising it eventual membership — with the undisguised hope that one day, the alliancewould be able to flex its military muscles menacingly on Russia’s doorstep. It was the UKthat intervened weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and presumably on Washington’s orders, to scupper negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow — talks that could have ended the war at an early stage, before Russia began seizing territories in eastern Ukraine. A deal then would have been much simpler than one now. Most likely, it would have required Kyiv to commit to neutrality, rather than pursuing covert integrationinto NATO. Moscow would have demanded, too, an end to the Ukrainian government’s political, legal and military attacks on its Russian-speaking populations in the east. Now the chief sticking point to an agreement will be persuading the Kremlin to trust the West and reverse its annexation of eastern Ukraine, assuming NATO ever allows Kyiv to re-engage in talks with Russia. And finally, it is NATO members, especially the US, that have been shipping out vast quantities of military hardware to prolong the fighting in Ukraine — keeping the death tollmounting on both sides. In short, NATO is now using the very war it has done everything to fuel as a pretext to stop Ukraine from joining the alliance. Seen another way, the message NATO has sent Moscow is that Russia made exactly the right decision to invade — if the goal, as Putin has always maintained, is to ensure Kyiv remains neutral. It is the war that has prevented Ukraine from being completely enfolded in the western military alliance. It is the war that has stopped Ukraine’s transformation into a NATO forward base, one where the West could station nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow. 

Finally — as far as Ukraine is concerned — check out this interview with the great John Mearsheimer on how the Ukraine war could have been avoided if the West had abandoned the idea of Ukraine joining NATO from the start. 

On a related topic, the Pulitzer-winning Spencer Ackerman wrote a great piece about the hypocrisy of the so-called “rules-based international order”: 

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat and democratic socialist, is once again offering an amendment to the annual must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that terminates funding for the US military presence in Syria after a year. … For now, put aside whatever you think about the US remaining in Syria. The fact that the US is in Syria in the first place shows the divergence between the rules-based international order and adherence to international law, which is the concept that the term “rules-based international order” is meant to invoke—and which, in practice, it usurps. Stipulating the dual monstrosities of Bashar Assad and the so-called Islamic State, there is no way to square US military operations in Syria, which have occurred in the air since 2014 and on the ground since 2015, with international law. There is no UN authorization for any such US mission. Whatever Assad's hold on Syrian sovereignty in 2014, it is not seriously contested in 2023, and while the US doesn’t recognize Assad, the US has predictably done nothing to formalize the sovereignty of its partners in Rojava. … But none of that is a problem for the rules-based international order. Once the US decided it was going to operate in Syria, the rules-based international order was fundamentally satisfied. US allies who are and feel invested in the rules-based international order went along with it. … All of which indicates “a view in Washington and a few allied capitals that the Western liberal states are entitled to make up the rules they want, and other states must obey the law that is”, Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame, observes. 

Moving on to a different topic, the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has written an interesting piece about Branko Milanovic’s a new study, which some journalists have interpreted as showing that “the world is the most equal it has been in over a century”. It sounds great, but as Roberts notes, the devil is in the detail: 

According to Milanovic, from the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century to about the middle of the twentieth century, global inequality rose as wealth became concentrated in Western industrialized countries. It peaked during the Cold War, when the globe was commonly divided into the “First World”, the “Second World”, and the “Third World”, denoting three levels of economic development. But then, around 20 years ago, global inequality began to fall, largely thanks to the economic rise of China, which until recently was the world’s most populous country. … Does this mean that capitalism is succeeding in reducing inequality and there is now a great convergence?  No, because the decrease is driven by really just one country’s income growth: China. And at the same time as China’s fast growth reduced the overall global inequality index; within economies, inequality has risen in just about all the major economies. … Once you exclude China from the data, then there has been no global convergence at all. 

In short, the story of global income inequality reduction is the story of China’s rise. Of course, one may object that China did this precisely by going capitalist, as many argue. I disagree, in the sense that I believe that things are a bit more complicated than the “China is a capitalist economy” narrative. 

Very briefly, here’s why. If I had to give a personal definition (which therefore has no claim to exhaustiveness or scientificity) of the two models — capitalism and socialism — I would opt for the following: “pure” capitalism is a system in which all the means of production and the totality of national capital (including the state apparatus) are under private ownership, in which all decision-making in economic matters is entrusted to free private initiative, and in which every aspect of economic and social life is subject to market rules and to the logic of profit and accumulation; “pure” socialism, on the other hand, is a system in which there is no private property, in which there is public (collective) ownership of all the means of production and of the totality of national capital, and in which all decision-making in economic matters is entrusted to state planning and aimed solely at satisfying the individual and collective needs of society. Now, it goes without saying that neither model has ever existed (nor can probably exist) in “pure” form; any economic system is a hybrid of the two models. The question, if anything, is where a specific economic regime lies on either side of an imaginary midpoint between capitalism and socialism along the capitalism-socialism continuum. 

As far as China is concerned, I think it can safely be argued that it is a more socialist than capitalist system, for the following reasons: although it has progressively opened up to private ownership (which today accounts for as much as 70 per cent of national capital according to Piketty’s estimates), (1) Chinese land and natural resources are owned by the state; (2) the state holds the majority ownership (about 55 per cent) of Chinese enterprises and thus of the means of production; (3) the main strategic sectors (oil, telecommunications, weapons, etc.) are in the hands of a hundred or so state-owned mega-companies that are not run according to profitability criteria but according to national interest criteria; (4) the economic life of the country is largely entrusted to state planning, mainly through the presence of a massive public sector — which thus allows the state to directly determine many of the policies concerning investment, production, employment, etc. — but also through strong regulation of the private sector, as well as through price control policies, public subsidies, forced technology transfers, etc; (5) the financial and credit sector is mostly in the hands of the Chinese state (or at least heavily regulated by it); and (6) capital movements (both inward and outward) are subject to tight controls. All this leads me to conclude that the capitalist mode of production is not dominant in China. Anyway, this is a topic which I intend to return to in greater detail in the future. 

And finally, the latest OECD Employment Outlook is out and it confirms much of what I recently wroteabout inflation being largely profit-led. In short, it shows that what is driving inflation is top-down class warfare: workers and consumer being fleeced by big business via corporate profiteering, aided and abetted by their political and technocratic henchmen — which are now doubling down on workers via monetary austerity. Here’s a thread that I wrote about the report. 

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed this post, and thanks for the support. 

Subscribed

Best regards,

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomasfazi

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)