green capitalism

By Tyler Zimmer - Socialist Worker, October 1, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

IT'S ONLY been a week, but it's already being dubbed one of the biggest-ever corporate scandals.

Volkswagen, the world's largest auto manufacturer, was recently caught rigging millions of its cars to cheat on emissions tests. Software known as "defeat devices" was installed in more than 11 million cars that enabled the vehicles to pass emissions tests they would otherwise have failed. The illicit devices detect when a car is being tested and direct the engine to pump out far less pollutants--98 percent less--into the air than they ordinarily do when on the road.

The fallout has been swift and profoundly damaging for the company. In a single week, more than a quarter of the company's total value of shares has been completely wiped out. Governments in Germany and the U.S. are already promising to impose heavy fines--some sources say the total amount could add up to as much as $10 billion to $20 billion. Executives have resigned, sales have been suspended, and a massive recall of rigged cars looms large.

Of course, if you were to take the VW brand's self-image at face value, these revelations would come as something of a severe shock. Volkswagen has spent the last several years cultivating a public image that evokes precision, efficiency and ecological sensitivity--VW's are "clean, quiet and powerful" as a recent advertisement put it.

The company has courted millennials with talk of "clean diesel technology." Indeed, before the scandal broke, VW was held up by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index as the "greenest," most environmentally conscious carmaker in the world. This is only one of many awards that the company has racked up over the years for its supposed commitment to ecological sustainability.

No doubt much of the public outrage directed at VW owes to the contradiction between the company's "green" reputation, on the one hand, and its systematic engagement in fraudulent polluting, on the other. As more and more information about the company's decision-making comes to light, the easier it becomes to see the matter in purely ethical terms, as a case where greed blinded those at the top.

The public will be encouraged to conclude that this scandal is the result of cynical, deceptive actions on the part of a few corporate executives--"a few bad apples"--at the top of Volkswagen. But thinking about the issue in this way would be a mistake, since it would lead us to overlook the larger, systemic problems with capitalism that this scandal reveals.

By Nafeez Ahmed - Medium.Com, September 4, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

At the end of this month, the UN will launch its new 2030 Sustainable Development agenda for “people, planet and prosperity” in New York, where it will be formally adopted by over 150 world leaders.

The culmination of years of consultations between governments, communities and businesses all over the world, there is no doubt that the agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an unprecedented vision of the interdependence of global social, economic and environmental issues.

But records from the SDG process reveal that insiders at the heart of the UN’s intergovernment engagement negotiations have criticised the international body for pandering to the interests of big business and ignoring recommendations from grassroots stakeholders representing the world’s poor.

Formal statements issued earlier this year as part of the UN’s Post-2015 Intergovernmental Negotiations on the SDGs, and published by the UN Sustainable Development Division, show that UN ‘Major Groups’ representing indigenous people, civil society, workers, young people and women remain deeply concerned by the general direction of the SDG process — whereas corporate interests from the rich, industrialised world have viewed the process favourably.

By Out of the Woods - The New Inquiry, January 7, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

This Changes Everything is a book capacious enough to allow Naomi Klein two positions at once. But a real climate-justice movement will at some point have to make choices.

Naomi Klein’s success pulls her in two directions. To some, her decades-long failure to produce “proper” theory as well as writing scintillating and successful books has been an affront. On her Reddit AMA she’s said her writing “will never be enough for hyper-sectarian Marxists, and I’m cool with that.” Perhaps it was her bad luck that Slavoj Žižek had begun to use the phrase “shock therapy, in the Naomi Klein sense.” Both No Logo, published just after Seattle’s WTO conflagration in 1999, and 2007’s The Shock Doctrine, which named “a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation,” were seminal, highly readable accounts of consumerism and neoliberalism, and (primarily) vindications of mostly unvictorious struggles against their encroachment across the globe, in which she participated. The anglophone world is now just beginning to digest her latest, an ecological magnum opus, and its eagerly anticipated castigation of the mainstream environmental movement.

Klein’s Twitter bio now claims “they say I’m polarizing.” In fact, the responses to This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, have been unequivocally enthusiastic. The New York Times published one such, which asked only: “what’s with the subtitle? (…) Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global overthrow.” Even the right-wing Telegraph was content to praise someone it clearly saw as “no advocate of socialism.” Opening This Changes Everything, Klein says that “this is the hardest book I’ve ever written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such radical responses.” Yet these radical responses have been warmly embraced by the center. The establishment, if it is trembling, is hiding it well.

Indeed, her difficulty writing it seems to have led to apparent contradictions. Klein supports proposals to create millions of green jobs and liberate people from work. She advocates rapid fossil fuel abolition and a welfare state funded by taxes on fossil fuel profits. She takes aim at the profit motive and endorses small local businesses as the fabric of the community. Rather than make accusations of confusion or hypocrisy, let’s take seriously her claim to have been pushed into radical positions by the urgency and severity of the climate crisis, and propose that, instead, two divergent Naomi Kleins have been formed who together make up the author of This Changes Everything.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, July 27, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• Reports of capitalism’s death have been greatly exaggerated - By Kate Aronoff, Waging NonViolence, July 22, 2015
• Capitalism, Green or Otherwise, Is "Ecological Suicide" - By David Klein, TruthOut, July 21, 2015
• Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity - By Stefano B. Longo and Brett Clark, CounterPunch, July 21, 2015

Bread and Roses:

• Slave in the Fields: A Reporter Goes Undercover in the San Quintin Valley - By Kau Sirenio Pioquinto, Truthout, July 25, 2015
• For Illinois Farmers, Damage From Coal Mines Can Span Decades - By Lizz Giordano, TruthOut, July 22, 2015
• New report reveals retiring toxic farmland would save water, money - By Dan Bacher, IndyBay, July 20, 2015
• Imagine farming that actually heals the earth - By Sami Grover, Tree Hugger, July 21, 2015; and Could better soil management reverse global warming? - By Sami Grover, Tree Hugger, February 12, 2015

An Injury to One is an Injury to All:

• Mining, militarization and criminalization of social protests in Latin America - By Cesar Padilla, Papua New Guinea Mine Watch, July 23, 2015
• Talvivaara Mine Environmental Disaster - By Mike O'Brien, Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities, and Trade, July 23, 2015
• An Open Letter to Warren Buffett: Put Public Safety Before Profit and Prioritize Oil Train Regulation - By Mike O'Brien, Huffington Post, July 22, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Anglo American to axe 53,000 jobs, put 15 assets up for sale - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, July 24, 2015
• Weatherford takes “brutally realistic” approach to U.S. job cuts - By Jordan Blum, FuelFix, July 23, 2015
• Weatherford to boost job cuts to 11,000 - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, July 22, 2015

Just Transition:

• Don’t leave clean energy tax credits blowing in the wind - By Staff, BlueGreen Alliance, July 24, 2015
• The EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Jobs, and Labor - Labor Network for Sustainability, July 24, 2015
• Yancoal job cuts follow expansion approval: systemic adjustment needed - By Georgina Woods, Lock the Gate Alliance, July 24, 2015
• What Happens After the Coal Plant Closes? - By Christopher Flavelle, Bloomberg View, July 22, 2015
• The Problem With the Fight for 15 - By Boots Riley, Creative Time Reports, July 20, 2015
• Cooperative/Solidarity Economics and Advancing the Development of Worker Co-ops - By Michael Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing, July 2015

Other News:

• Inspectors find dozens of rail bridges need repair - By Dan Gunderson, MPR News, July 23, 2015
• Kropotkin on the Hudson - By Polly Howells, In These Times, July 22, 2015
• We may have already committed ourselves to 6-meter sea-level rise - By Systemic Disorder, Systemic Disorder, July 22, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW

By Andrea Bunting - Green Left Weekly, June 20, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The federal government is keen to cut the age pension. Its latest proposal to double the taper rate on the assets test has been supported by the Greens on the basis that this measure will reduce government support to those with significant wealth.

The Greens also hoped that by supporting these pension cuts, the government would rein in tax concessions on superannuation. However, the government has since publicly ruled out any superannuation changes.

So the deal does not reduce benefits given to the rich. It reduces benefits to those in the middle, while providing a small benefit — about $15 per week — to pensioners with modest assets. The poorest pensioners receive nothing extra.

National Seniors Australia has expressed concern that these changes will reduce pensions, while not addressing superannuation tax concessions.

The government provides support for people’s retirement through the age pension and through tax concessions on superannuation. The Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees (AIST) and Mercer have modelled the total lifetime government support for retirement incomes received by those on different levels of income.

Their modelling found that the bottom 10% of earners average about $400,000 in government retirement support over their lifetime. Meanwhile, the top 10% of earners average about $489,000. This group doesn’t even get the age pension.

But the greatest government largesse is reserved for those in the top 1% income range. The modelling showed that the richest 1% receive on average around $630,000 of lifetime government support. Under the new law, lifetime support for some middle income earners has now been slashed to $214,000.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, June 23, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Story:

• In the Global Apparel Industry, Abusive and Deadly Working Conditions Are Still the Norm - By Erik Loomis, In These Times, June 15, 2015

Bread and Roses:

• Ben & Jerry’s commits to work with Vermont dairy workers toward agreement to adopt Milk with Dignity Program in company’s Northeast dairy supply chain! - Coalition of Immokalee Workers, June 22, 2015
• Al Jazeera Documentary Shows Mexican Farmworkers’ Struggles in Historic Strike - By Rachel Luban, In These Times, June 20, 2015
• Migrant Farmworkers Ask Ben and Jerry's to Provide "Milk With Dignity" - By Jonathan Leavitt, Truthout, June 19, 2015
• California Court Ruling Could Make It Nearly Impossible for Farmworkers To Win Union Contracts - By David Bacon, In These Times, June 17, 2015
• Sri Lanka: Implement the Glyphosate Herbicide ban immediately! - By National Movement Against Poisons, La Via Campesina, June 17, 2015
• 1000 Cow Factory Farms: Milk crisis - By José Miguel Pacheco Gonçalves, Isabel Vilalba, and Victor Pereira, La Via Campesina, June 16, 2015
• Cycles of Oppression, Cycles of Liberation: The Nasa People of Colombia Are Dispossessed Once Again - By Natalia Fajardo, Upside Down World, June 15, 2015
• West Coast Grange Wars: A Reborn Farmers’ Movement Takes on Corporate Agriculture - By John Collins, In These Times, June 14, 2015

An Injury to One is an Injury to All:

• Reflections on the Miners Memorial Weekend: Cumberland, British Columbia - By Nick Mullins, The Thoughtful Coal Miner, June 21, 2015
• It’s “the President’s call”: Safer Communities or More Foot-dragging - By Taylor Smith-Hams, Greenpeace Blog, June 18, 2015
• New York State Legislators Have Just One More Day To Pass a Bill Protecting Nail Salon Workers - By Karen Gwee, In These Times, June 17, 2015
• OSHA says open-flame heater caused gas rig fire that killed three Oklahoma workers - Associated Press, June 17, 2015
• Judge Greenlights Malibu School PCB Lawsuit; District Spending Tops $6 Million in Steps to Avoid Complete Cleanup - By Kirsten Stade, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, June 16, 2015
• Campaign Victory: Full Compensation Secured for Rana Plaza Victims - By Judy Gearhart, International Labor Rights Forum, June 8, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• NOV cuts 1,500 jobs in Norway amid crude crunch - By Joshua Cain, FuelFix, June 17, 2015
• Statoil to cut 2,000 jobs, adding to Norway’s woes - Bloomberg, June 16, 2015
• What happened to 160,000 fracking jobs? Under Wolf, the numbers change - By Marie Cusick, State Impact, June 16, 2015
• The dark side of the shale bust - By Nick Cunningham, OilPrice.Com, June 14, 2015

Just Transition:

• Replacing Hazelwood is urgent, but who pays for the jobs transition? - By David Spratt, Climate Code Red, June 17, 2015
• Want More U.S. Jobs? Enforce Carbon Pollution Limits - By Farron Cousins, DeSmog Blog, June 15, 2015

Other News:

• Monument to labor activist Mother Jones rededicated in Mount Olive - By Steven Spearie, State Journal Register, June 20, 2015
• Workers clean up oil spill on California beaches by hand - Associated Press, June 20, 2015
• Could a California labor ruling drive Uber under? - By Heather Smith, Grist, June 17, 2015
• Uber must die - By David Bush, rankandfile.ca, June 16, 2015
• Workers at Chile's Collahuasi copper mine end strike - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, June 16, 2015
• Steelworkers to vote on agreement to return to work at Galveston Bay refinery - By L.M. Sixel, FuelFix, June 15, 2015
• Martial law has anti-mine protesters back at work - By Franklin Briceno, Associated Press, June 12, 2015
• Outfitters seek exemption from new federal minimum wage; Bill would allow recreation businesses to operate on federal land without paying staff $10.10 an hour - By Elizabeth Shogren, High Country News, June 12, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism

By Patrick Bond - Triple Crisis, June 17, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Who’s not heard the great African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral’s injunction, fifty years ago, “Tell no lies and claim no easy victories”? If, like me, you’re a petit bourgeois who is hopeful for social progress, then let’s be frank: this advice hits at our greatest weakness, the temptation of back-slapping vanity.

The leading framers for the 41-million strong clicktivist team from Avaaz need to remember Cabral. They over-reached ridiculously last week in praising the G7:

Many told us it was a pipe dream, but the G7 Summit of leading world powers just committed to getting the global economy off fossil fuels forever!!! Even the normally cynical media is raving that this is a huge deal. And it’s one giant step closer to a huge win at the Paris summit in December – where the entire world could unite behind the same goal of a world without fossil fuels – the only way to save us all from catastrophic climate change… Our work is far from done, but it’s a day to celebrate – click here to read more and say congratulations to everyone else in this incredibly wonderful community!!

Actually, according to The Economist: “no fossil-fuel-burning power station will be closed down in the immediate future as a result of this declaration. The goal will not make any difference to the countries’ environmental policies, since they are mostly consistent with this long-range goal anyway. Where they are not (some countries are increasing coal use, for example) they will not be reined in because of the new promises… the G7’s climate effort raises as many questions as it answers. The group seems to have rejected proposals for more demanding targets, such as decarbonisation by 2050.”

Or Time: “The results were disappointing to say the least… The G7 announced an ‘ambitious’ plan to phase out all fossil fuels worldwide by 2100. Unfortunately, they didn’t make any concrete plans to scale back their own conventional fuel consumption. That’s a big deal when 59 percent of historic global carbon dioxide emissions—meaning the greenhouse gases already warming the atmosphere—comes from these seven nations. Taken as a group, G7 coal plants produce twice the amount of CO2 as the entire African continent, and at least 10 times the carbon emissions produced by the 48 least developed countries as a whole. If the G7 is serious about tackling climate change, they should start at home.”

So what was going on, really? Here’s a talking head from the Council on Foreign Relations (an imperialist braintrust): “The United States has long pressed for a shift away from binding emissions reduction commitments and toward a mix of nationally grounded emission-cutting efforts and binding international commitments to transparency and verification. European countries have often taken the other side, emphasizing the importance of binding targets (or at least policies) for cutting emissions. Now it looks like the big developed countries are on the same page as the United States. The language above is all about binding countries to transparency – and there isn’t anything elsewhere in the communiqué about binding them to actual emissions goals.”

There is an even tougher critique from the left, e.g. from Oscar Reyes of the Institute for Policy Studies, who annotated the G7 climate communique here. He lands many powerful blows, not least of which is that you simply cannot trust these politicians. This is well known in Africa. Exactly a decade ago, Tony Blair led the (then-G8) Gleneagles Summit that made all manner of ambitious redistributive promises for the continent that weren’t fulfilled.