With Greta Thunberg officially hitting rock star status by speaking to the UN General Assembly yesterday, maybe it's time to talk about the people behind the throne.
It's sad, but not surprising, to see Jacobin and Liza Featherstone, a hardcore leftist Democratic Party supporter along with hubby Doug Henwood, trotting Greta Thunberg up the flagpole and saluting her.
Jacobin, after all, in its own delusions, tries to shove everything left of Elizabeth Warren into one of two pigeonholes — it's "gotta" be either Democratic Socialists of America Democrats stuff, or else quasi-Marxist socialism. On environmental issues, it ignores the Green Party's ecosocialist Green New Deal, continuing to focus on, and criticize, the Dems' weak tea version without going further.
Anyway, what I am talking about?
Featherstone recently wrote a simplistic piece called "
Why Greta is Good." But it's not just her and Jack in the Bin. Counterpunch felt the need to channel The Intercept and
repost a Thunberg interview video.
Worse yet? Jill Stein, who comes off as less and less of an in-depth thinker or even close to it all the time, channeled "brave support" for Thunberg as a way to bash Obama, quote-tweeting Dear Leader meeting Thunberg. In turn, I quote-tweeted HER:
So, what is the reality?
Well, let's go to Wrong King of Green. Its focus is monitoring international NGOs who are pimping for a neoliberal-driven attack on climate change. It's occasionally a bit harsh for me, but much of it is spot on. (It also can write LONG for a blog at times; you're forewarned.)
WKOG recently wrapped up not two blogs, but
one, then
two whole series of blog posts about who's behind co-opting Thunberg. And co-opting it is. Per one person who responded back to me about using the "alleged," I said I was writing from Thunberg's point of view. I honestly don't think she recognizes she's being co-opted, even though she is.
And, the truth hurts.
Hurts enough that WKOG has gotten a lot of pushback, enough that another of its writers has done a
follow-up piece, defending Cory Morningstar's original work and noting CLEARLY that it is an attack in the NGOs co-opting Thunberg and in the words of Noam Chomsky, "manufacturing consent."
So, let's look further at Hiroyuki Hamada's defense of Morningstar.
The series does not attack the 16-year-old activist at all. It points out those organizations and individuals which closely surround her in forming a momentum for their agenda. It delineates how the mobilization fits within the larger framework of corporate “environmentalism”, colonialism, global capitalism and imperialism. The trickery of the accusation that the work attacks a child and smears the youth-led activism follows the same pattern of lies and deceptions unfolding against serious journalism for some time. It reflects how the establishment successfully dominates our minds as it dominates the hierarchy of money and violence.
The NGOs know this. So why are the Featherstones of the world not digging deeper? Let alone the Jill Steins of the world, as Thunberg's backers surely (I hope) do NOT like many elements of Howie Hawkins' explicitly ecosocialist Green New Deal.
Hamada next notes that, to the degree the NGOs and their plutocrat backers have a long game within modern capitalism, they're in it for the long game.
Morningstar’s series meticulously documents how powerful
global organizations seek ways to cultivate a consensus for their trajectory.
And it carefully states, with facts, why the trajectory does not lead to
achieving their promises—preventing climate change and other environmental
calamities. The illustrated mechanism has been revealed over and over through
their past crimes—the co-ordinated actions of industries, bankers, politicians,
NGOs, UN, global financial institutions and media have culminated into colonial
wars, cover-ups of nuclear disasters, regime change, and other corporate,
colonial and imperial policies.
Again, there you go.
That's versus this from Featherstone:
As for the idea that Thunberg is embraced by elites and the
media, what is the implication? That she’s trying to distract us from joining
the more radical, grassroots environmental movement that would otherwise be
bombing ExxonMobil headquarters and kidnapping the Koch brothers? To anyone who
has been watching closely as the mainstream environmental movement cozies up to
the worst companies and politicians, fundraising off the plight of the cutest
endangered animals while entire ecosystems are imperiled, that’s a darkly
laughable fantasy.
This is itself naive at best, disingenuous at worst. And, given both some of Featherstone's other writings on other issues and what I said about Jacobin above, I'm more and more inclined to be less charitable.
No, Liz, it's NOT that "she’s trying to distract us from joining the more radical, grassroots environmental movement," it's that the NGOs behind her are trying to do exactly that. Seriously? You actually wrote this? GACK!
And, the last sentence is a head-fake. It's those NGOs, as well as the plutocrat funders, that Morningstar calls out. Many of us have known fair chunks or more of the truth about Gang Green environmental groups for a decade or more.
And it's not just climate change. David Rieff
wrote a whole book about the international capitalist investment world and the NGOs they fund mucking around in the world of international hunger and food needs.
As Rieff notes, it's an uphill battle fighting these forces.
I am convinced that the truly powerful revolution that
is occurring today is not in (these) insurrectionary episodes ... but rather in
what Jon Cray has called 'the emancipation of market forces from social and
political control.'
It's more uphill when the Jacobins of the world and the Featherstones and others who write for them won't take a closer look at whose side they may be on. And Counterpunch? I think it posted that video from The Intercept as a bit of knee-jerk anti-American exceptionalism it still indulges at times.
Think about what Featherstone wrote, and if NGOs found a "Thunberg of world hunger," and if Featherstone would write the same. SMH.
Back to Hamada.
Moreover, I must say that it is extremely odd and
disingenuous that the series has been portrayed as a refusal to take any
action, instead insisting on ideological purity. Such an attack has been coming
from those who have been pointing out the same moneyed network in forwarding
corporatism, colonialism and militarism by manipulating popular opinions.
Yes.
Maybe it's because the hunger poverty movement never found a Thunberg. Maybe for them, Thunberg is a walking, talking, breathing version of the (made in China) polar bear plush that Sierra Club or some other Gang Green group wants to send me for a membership contribution. Students going on climate strike may just be a group-level walking, talking, breathing version of a polar bear plush;
in an earlier piece, Featherstone kind of wrote them up that way.
Or maybe it's because social media wasn't so powerful a decade ago. In a new piece, Morningstar reminds us that Thunberg's social media accounts
were created FOR her not BY her.
And, the NGOs plans — or the plans of the plutocrats who are these NGOs biggest funders — are laid clear. The game is up when Henry Paulson talks about the "investments" needed to fight climate change. Ultimately, this will be neoliberal NGOs' alternative acronym — No Governments OK. These NGOs will surely insist on capitalist business leading the charge.
But of course. It's easier to do this than to have to carve loopholes in legislation, let alone fight any government that ever get serious at a national level about a carbon tax plus a carbon tariff and is big enough for both the tax and the tariff, and their pricing level, to change the playing field.
Jacobin's simplicity goes beyond Featherstone, though.
Two days earlier, also Jack in the Bin, Aaron Eisenberg wrote a simplistic call
to ban private aircraft. Banning just private aircraft is itself a token of ideological purity that would only address a tiny slice of the world carbon emissions. In the US, it would also be an unconstitutional
bill of attainder. Bye, Aaron.
And, congrats on being co-opted, Liza.
Congrats to many others, as well.
If you want to really address climate change, try a BDS movement against the corporations backing her indirectly or directly.
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As for the yacht? It IS nice. But, the question isn't, for me, how carbon-free is it.
Rather, it's "Why weren't some NGO CEOs and plutocrat funders riding it?"
The real answer to that? Well,
another Jacobin piece supplies that. The world's richest 10 percent are responsible for 50 percent of carbon emissions. They're not going to actually sacrifice if they can help it. They're going to drum up a mix of window dressing and getting OTHERS to sacrifice.
As for the message? Well, Greta's message is nice, but what is it really, beyond, "Live up to the Paris Accord"? After all, people who know, and don't have a Gang Green stake in pretending otherwise, know that they are
A.
Toothless and
B. Too weak even if not.
That said, Greta's own message began with "don't fly" and "don't eat meat," starting with convincing her parents on both.
But, while air travel does put out carbon dioxide (and other climate and weather affecting emissions), it currently contributes just 2 percent of the world's emissions. Other parts of transportation, ie, cars, contribute more. Has Greta asked her parents to drive an all-electric vehicle? What vehicles drive her around after she arrives somewhere? And, did she ride on an all-electric train (preferably powered by renewable energy) when she went to Davos?
This, then ties back to her backers.
No air travel sounds nice if you're in a compact area like Western Europe or the northeastern U.S. What about sub-Saharan Africa? India? Is this another case where the developed world is asking the developing world to pay for its past "privilege"? I'm sure Greta isn't thinking about this. But her backers have surely been told they need to be.
And, what about manufacturing?
The US outsourced not only jobs, but pollution, to China years and years ago. China is now dragging its own feet on producing more green power. And, it never really did get started on increasing energy efficiency of older factories.
There are all sorts of small wedges that add up in the battle against climate change. Using smartphones less, anybody?
On the energy production side, how safe can nuclear power be? How efficient can "next-gen" fission plants be? This is a battle within the environmental world.
I am "accepting" of nuclear power being a part of the picture if it has to be, but am not a proactive incorporator of it.
Beyond other sympathetic backers of Thunberg (which I am for her drive) noting that the mills of justice grind slowly, sometimes they don't grind at all. China is led by an authoritarian potential president for life who is backsliding. Russia is led by such a person who's never committed to battling climate change. The Arab Gulf states are led by mono-economy sheiks who don't want to cut off money to their burgeoning populations. (Oh, and some white western leftists? Suggesting reining in population is NOT genocide, unless you're going to accuse Deng Xiaoping of genocide against his own people decades ago.)
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Sept. 26: Unfortunately,
in his newest update, Morningstar seems to be falling into the fallacious belief that native peoples are Roussellian noble savages on the environment.
Tain't so.
That's far from the only problem with WKOG, too.
One is either a moral self-blindness or something similar. Calling wind farms "Fossil Fuel+" because they expropriate indigenous people is true to the degree that's true. That said, it's no more true than it is with fossil fuels themselves. If they use this to mean we not only need to de-carbonize but de-electricize? No, you first. Shut down your website. It's just like with people pushing population reduction around the world. No, you first.
The biggest problem of WKOG is that most writers there are Marxist. Marxism, whether in its traditional form or modern spinoff, is pseudoscience within what's already the scientifically weakest of the social sciences. No, really. Hegelian dialectic is crappy philosophy and pseudoscience when used as the basis for a theory of economics.
Beyond that, I wouldn't call myself an anti-capitalist. With WKOG, I see enough problems with capitalism of today to call myself a post-capitalist, at least in my yearnings, but not an anti-capitalist.
Beyond that, what IS capitalism and when did it start? I certainly see capitalism as being centuries older than when Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations." Does it go back to when Croesus allegedly issued the first coinage? Tang China's first paper money? Medieval Italians' double-entry bookkeeping?
Or maybe, to riff on "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and some anthropologists, the invention of the triad, basically, of cultivated agriculture, settled civilization and private property.
