Sunday, October 13, 2019

Inequality, Climate Change, And America’s Destabilization


Early this month, I began picking up on news of large-scale social collapses happening throughout the Third World and the global south as a result of our imploding global neoliberal paradigm. I heard about Iraq, where martial law has been declared amid a vast anti-government uprising. I heard about Haiti and Honduras, whose U.S.-backed regimes are under threat from growing civil unrest. I heard about Ecuador, where mass protests by indigenous people against the country’s corporatist, pro-colonialist government have been met with extreme police violence. This was wholly unsurprising to me, since I’ve known that the unrestrained capitalism and neo-colonialism which grips these countries would have to come to a head eventually. But I didn’t anticipate that within a week, a systemic collapse of at least somewhat comparable proportions would come to my own country.

I guess I was fooled by the illusion that in the United States, and in the core imperialist nations in general, the crisis of late-stage capitalism isn’t nearly as far-gone as it is in the countries I mentioned above. Widespread systemic failures and levels of scarcity that threaten the social order still feel like such distant possibilities for most people who live in the world’s wealthier areas. But for me and over two million other Californians this past week, this First World illusion of security was shattered when our electricity was shut off.

Pacific Gas & Electric acted like it was doing this because of an unavoidable fire risk. But the danger that prompted October 9th’s days-long shutoff was no naturally caused phenomena; the cause, in essence, was capitalism. PG&E was shutting off the power to avoid lawsuits against them in the event that their technology would malfunction-which is only a risk because PG&E has been spending money on enriching its shareholders and paying lobbyists instead of on improving its equipment. They punished us for their greed-driven failure to manage California’s infrastructure. Because of capitalism we were faced with a choice between likely having more people killed in a new autumn fire, and having our power turned off for long enough to put the most vulnerable people at risk of dying from lack of access to medical equipment. PG&E chose the latter for us only because it was more profitable.

This is the latest step in the destabilization of America. As the collapse of the climate and the destructive effects of economic inequality create crises around the world, wealthy people like the heads of PG&E are maintaining their status by sacrificing the safety and comfort of the lower classes. Another example of this dynamic is the situation in India, where the rich are getting richer as more and more of the population falls into desperation amid the country’s growing water crisis. Or the situation in Iraq, which has also been experiencing deep inequality and water shortages as a result of the management failures of the neoliberal government that the U.S. installed in the country after the 2003 invasion. In the case of India’s transforming Kashmir into a tightly controlled area where food and medicine are artificially scarce, or Israel’s depriving Gazans of humanitarian aid during its growing water crisis, ethnic hatred has been the deciding factor behind who’s gotten sacrificed.

This neglect of human rights speeds up the process of growing inequality, social unrest, and environmental damage, prompting the capitalist governments to respond with more repression, austerity, and militarization of law enforcement. It’s a vicious cycle where capitalism consumes itself in reaction to the falling out of the system’s foundations.

“We’re entering a climate era when there are no total solutions,” columnist Michael Coren has written in response to the California shutoff. “There are only tradeoffs. Disaster relief is becoming less about rebuilding or fixing infrastructure, and more a way to buy time or retreat from the hardest-hit areas. In low-lying and fire-prone areas, communities are already beginning to abandon their homes, from Alaska to Louisiana. As the cost of defense and rebuilding after climate-driven disasters becomes too costly, exceeding the ability of even insurers and governments to absorb, this will become the new normal.”

California’s rich have been affected by the shutoff along with everyone else. As director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University Irwin Redlener has said about the ordeal, “People with limited means are always going to do worse in initial impacts and also have a much more difficult time in the aftermath. But these [impacts] are essentially inevitable and affect the multimillionaires on Fisher Island [Florida’s richest zip code] and the poor people in Little Havana. There will be some equalization of impact.”

Despite this immediate vulnerability of the elites to these kinds of infrastructural  failures, the shutoff is a signal to the rich that it will soon be time for them to retreat into areas isolated from the threats the lower classes will be facing. The world’s richest people have been creating luxury disaster preparedness shelters for themselves in the last decade, with billionaires buying up massive amounts of empty land throughout inland areas for seemingly no other purpose than to build sustainable private living spaces within them. In 2017, successful investor Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that he estimates more than 50% of Silicon Valley billionaires have bought some level of disaster insurance. As events like last week’s shutoff become more frequent, these oligarchs will become more likely to abandon their homes on the coast and migrate to their fortified enclaves elsewhere.

What will the rest of us need to expect when things get this bad? Expect electricity to be available a lot less of the time, and for water to become less often available even in the more lush places. Expect for more social services to be cut. Expect for there to be a strengthened police presence, as happened in California this week when ICE sent Homeland Security vehicles into the town of Weed. Expect for companies to try to privatize services in the aftermath of disasters, like they did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Expect things to get worse a lot faster and with more severity than your First World upbringing might have previously made you assume. 

America is about as far along in its capitalist societal deterioration as Haiti, Honduras, Ecuador, and Iraq, and like the people in these countries, Americans must build mass movements to defeat corporate power. We can start with seizing the means of energy production from negligent corporations like PG&E. Then we can move towards creating a socialist workers’ democracy, which will make it so that the people in charge throughout the climate catastrophe are the masses instead of a small circle of kleptocrats.

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