Emotion is at the heart of politics — the Left must remember that
The Indian historian Vijay Prashad emphasises the essential difficulty of people in imperialist countries to grasp the experience of those who suffer the diverse consequences of imperialism. I want to complement this difficulty by relating political change to emotions and football.
I could draw from the emotion of football to show how contagious politics can be to the masses. But this is not the lesson I want to draw from it.
For the past 15 years, I have engaged in discussions about social change. The need for change is easily recognised by many of those who aren’t in positions of privilege. However, this isn’t as common among people who are privileged. For the privileged few in Latin America, and the most “progressive” in the US-Europe, there is an intrinsic difficulty to grasp politics and to push for social transformation.
Sometimes reality appears to be so obliviated that it gets reduced to the perception of individuals. On the one hand, these individuals recognise that the “world” needs change, but on the other hand claim that nothing could be done because there is no real alternative. The vicious circle is completed.
This narrow view of the world comes from the notion that the individual shapes the world by himself. Western ideology has gone full-throttle towards irrationalism.
Two important aspects of reality cease to exist. First, the dialectical relation between quality and quantity. Something so crucial and basic that one can find not only in political arrangements but also in microscopic nature. Think for instance of the water molecule (H2O). Separated, hydrogen and oxygen are highly flammable, but together represent one of the most important elements of inorganic nature concerning the existence of organic nature.
Second, the difference between coordinated, collective action, and individual actions. The complexity of the former requires more than a mere agglomeration of people to determine strategy, tactics and goals. And here is where football comes into play. Social change and politics are similar to football, insofar as the division of labour is crucial for any achievement. In football, one player can be the advantage for a team, but alone he achieves nothing.
In football, eleven play against eleven. But as soon as these numbers become uneven the game changes completely (eleven against ten, or eleven against nine, etc.). Social change requires a coordinated, cooperative, collective effort in order to achieve goals, or at least to stand closer to them.
Social action requires laying down long-term strategies and suitable tactics to go through the maze of reality and its concrete ever-changing contexts. Random social acts do not constitute the transformation of the social body. Instead, they represent its opposite: a submission to purely casual relations.
This banal, simple, notion has been banned from western ideology, with the world appearing as the representation of the individual’s will. As if the best footballer in the world could alone, single handedly, by the force of his/her will, outmatch the opposing team.
Complex political action requires division of labour. Such illusion about reality increases simultaneously with the augmentation of social nihilism, which pushes social annihilation as the only rational alternative to us all.
However, knowing this is not enough. Politics is not only about information. It is not only about what is known, but also about what is understood, what one feels. Information alone does not move people. One needs to be touched in his inner soul in order to be moved, in order to move himself.
Political action needs not only reach the minds but the hearts and souls of people. Emotion is the essence of any political connection. It represents both the weakness and the strength of a people. Emotional connection can be the impulse that connects the mind with the body – and the social body – but it can also simply become a destructive force. However, emotion should not be deified, nor eluded as the quintessence of politics. It is a necessary condition, though not a sufficient one.
Since 2008, capitalist elites have been regrouping and reframing themselves through the discourse of emotions, detaching it from any real content of knowledge. Instead of taking responsibility for neoliberal policies and the financial collapse, which they profited from, they blamed immigrants, other countries and the ‘other’.
These post-modern elites resemble the elites from the beginning of the 20th century, with their continued focus on mythology. They point out the existence of real problems, acknowledging people’s pain, while simultaneously avoiding characterising their cause and, accordingly, any solution.
On the other hand, over 70 years of destruction of the anti-capitalist Left in western societies has created an immense gap between left-wing discourse and the existential conflicts endured by the masses. The western intellectual Left capitulated its social role and retreated to the realm of knowledge – artistic and academic – meanwhile leaving the path open, first, to neoliberal discourse, and, then to the extreme right-wingers, to shape people’s understanding of reality.
While the intellectual Left tried to purify itself from the “dirt” of politics, it placed itself on an unreachable pedestal, abandoned the masses to their own fates, forfeited any real emotional connection, calling it, pejoratively: populism.
However, populism is the basis of western democratic politics. The bashing of it reveals how far the Left has steered away from reality. The role of the Left should be to create mass political consciousness, to meddle in the affairs of power and to provide not only the knowledge, but also the understanding of reality.
The Left keeps neglecting the emotional connection between political praxis for change and the reality of the masses. Meanwhile, the elites reorganise themselves, creating an emotional connection with the masses through its apparatus of social control: state, education, justice, media, military, production, distribution, etc.
Photo by Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash
Star Trek versus Imperialist Doctrine – Project Syndicate
America’s liberal imperialist doctrine has been responsible for appalling carnage in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Central America. But America has also produced a liberal anti-imperialist doctrine that remains ensconced in a TV series that has been captivating US audiences since 1966.
ATHENS – On February 9, 1967, hours after the US Air Force pounded Haiphong Harbor and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC television screened a politically momentous episode of Star Trek. Entitled “The Return of the Archons,” the episode marks the debut of the Prime Directive – the supreme law of the fictional United Federation of Planets, and its Starfleet, banning any and all purposeful interference with alien people, civilizations, and cultures. Devised in 1966, as President Lyndon B. Johnson was sending another 100,000 troops into Vietnam, the Prime Directive constituted a direct, though well-camouflaged, ideological challenge to what the US government was up to.
Having remained central to the Star Trek series to this day, the Prime Directive is even more pertinent now. Military escapades always entail a variety of separate issues, making it hard to have a rational debate about their merits. For example, were the US invasions of Vietnam or Afghanistan motivated by good intentions, whether containing totalitarianism or saving women from radical Islamists? Or were those intentions invoked to provide political cover for cynical economic or strategic motives? Were they wrong because the US forces were defeated? Or would they have been wrong even in victory?
The beauty of the Prime Directive is that it cuts through this labyrinth of confusion and deception: the invader’s motives, good or bad, matter not one iota. The Prime Directive bans the deployment of superior technology (military or otherwise) for the purposes of interfering with any community, any people, or any sentient species. It is, in fact, quite drastic: Starfleet personnel must respect it even if it costs them their lives.
In the words of Captain James T. Kirk, “a starship captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive.” To which his successor, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, adds: “The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy … and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes … no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”
Entrenching such a philosophy in a mainstream American TV series, and in the midst of the biggest escalation of the Vietnam War, was a bold move. There can be little doubt that it was an intentional critique of US foreign policy. In the episode “Patterns of Force” (1968), Star Trek’s screenwriters conjured up a Federation social engineer who tries to help a primitive planet develop by instilling in its people a humanist attitude while also building a state with the efficiency that only an authoritarian regime can muster. His well-meaning intervention soon unravels as the patterns of authority he introduced beget institutionalized racism, and the humanism he tries to nurture is crushed by a regime espousing genocide.
Star Trek’s writers were not naive moralists or isolationists. They understood that, as with all rigid moral imperatives, their Prime Directive could not be applied straightforwardly. Simply turning up in a foreign land, or on another planet, meant interfering in some way. Although Starfleet officers are shown prepared to die rather than violate the Prime Directive, in plenty of situations their moral outrage causes them to bend or even ignore it. In “A Private Little War” (1968), they encounter a planetary civil war where one of the two factions has been supplied with advanced weapons by the Federation’s arch foe, the Klingons. How could they respect the Prime Directive when the competing superpower is not?
Deciding that the best way to respect the Prime Directive is to violate it, they attempt to level the battlefield by providing almost identical weapons to the other faction. The result is an out-of-control arms race and a rare unhappy ending.
But not all violations of the Prime Directive lead to disaster. “A Taste of Armageddon” (1967) depicts a bizarre war between two planets whose leaders had agreed to simulate their battles on a computer in order to stop the endless destruction of infrastructure. But the people “killed” in the computer simulation are later taken to death chambers. Convinced that risking a return to full-blown war is preferable to letting the callous simulated-cum-actual killings continue, Kirk violates the Prime Directive by blowing up the death chambers.
Nonetheless, the screenwriters went to great lengths in such cases to show that good consequences resulted despite violations of the Prime Directive, not because of them. Or, more precisely, it is the belief, etched into the minds and souls of Starfleet personnel, that the Prime Directive is good and proper which makes it possible for violations of it sometimes to work out. Likewise, Western soldiers can occasionally do good in some far-flung war-torn country precisely because they do not believe it is sensible to try to build a coherent civilization at the barrel of a foreign gun.
Star Trek’s Prime Directive deploys popular culture to highlight the irrelevance of whether the stated good intentions used to justify imperialist escapades are real or bogus. It dramatizes brilliantly the manner in which top-down high-tech invasions planned in advance to save an “inferior” people from themselves can only lead inexorably to the nauseating lies, crimes, and cover-ups of the sort we encounter in the Pentagon Papers or Wikileaks.
The Prime Directive is also a necessary and useful reminder of the contradictions of American society – in particular, how it has produced not only the liberal imperialist doctrine responsible for so much carnage in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also a liberal anti-imperialist doctrine which remains ensconced in a TV series that has been captivating US audiences for longer than most Americans have been alive.
This article was originally published by Project Syndicate. Click here to access it.
Paramount PicturesSunset BoulevardCorbis via Getty Images
Lessons from this summer’s calamitous Greek forests inferno – The Guardian
After the second world war, Greece’s countryside experienced two debilitating human surges – an exodus of villagers, then a most peculiar human invasion of its fringes. These two surges, aided by a weak state and abetted by the climate crisis, have turned the low-level drama of naturally redemptive forest fires into this summer’s heart-wrenching catastrophe.
After heatwaves of unprecedented longevity, wildfires across the summer months have so far destroyed more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of ancient pine forests. They have blackened swathes of Attica, scorched parts of ancient Olympia and obliterated north Evia’s magnificent forests – whose rural communities lost their homes, not to mention their livelihoods and landscapes.
To these petty-bourgeois dwellings, which by the 1980s were strewn all over Attica, the mid-1990s added middle-class suburbia. Villas and shopping malls gradually invaded inland wooded areas bordering Athens, at a speed that reflected the economic growth fuelled with money borrowed from EU banks or provided via EU structural funding.
It is as if we were looking for trouble. Fire is a natural ally of Mediterranean pine forests. It helps clear the ground of old trees and allows young ones to prosper. By helping themselves to the wood daily and by employing tactical burning every spring, villagers once prevented these fires from running amok. Alas, not only did circumstances force the villagers to abandon the forests but, when they and their descendants returned as atomised urbanites to build their summer homes inside the untended forests, they did so bearing none of the traditional communal knowledge or practices.
Europe’s famous north-south economic divide has a counterpart in Greece’s forests. In countries such as Sweden or Germany, forests were intensely commodified. While this spelled the demise of ancient forests, and their replacement with arid plantations, farmland or grazing pastures, at least the countryside was not abandoned the way Greece’s was. In a sense, the sorry state of Greece’s countryside, the swift and unregulated urbanisation, and our feeble and corrupt state are all reflections of the country’s atrophic capitalism.
Greek governments had been aware of the unsustainability of our model of land use since wildfires began to take revenge on us in the 1970s. Deep down, they knew: we had, collectively, violated nature, and now nature was exacting its long and drawn-out revenge. Convinced, however, that their re-election chances were doomed if they dared tell voters that maybe they should give up on the dream of that cabin in the forest, abandon the plan to suburbanise pine forests, governments chose the easy path: they blamed warm winds, fiendish arsonists, bad luck, even the odd Turkish saboteur.
Collective responsibility was the first casualty of every inferno. On 23 July 2018, at a seaside settlement north of Athens known as Mati, a demonic fireball incinerated 103 people within minutes – including a friend. The cause was obvious to anyone willing to take a disinterested look at the way the dense settlement had been inserted into an ageing pine forest, with narrow lanes offering no realistic chance of escape from the inevitable fire.
Alas, neither the government nor the opposition dared to admit the obvious: that we should never have allowed that settlement to be built. Instead, they yelled at each other endlessly, playing a blame game that disrespected the victims, society, nature.
Even when governments tried their hand at modernising their practices, they made things worse. In 1998, in a bid to professionalise firefighting, the bush firefighting unit (hitherto run by the forestry commission) was disbanded and folded into the urban fire brigade. The resulting economies of scale came at a cost: the termination of the large-scale forest clearing effort that the bush firefighting unit used to undertake every winter and spring.
Following an urban bureaucracy’s natural instinct to favour hi-tech solutions, and to look down upon traditional practices, the unified fire brigade effectively withdrew from the forests and concentrated instead on a strategy of setting up firewalls around built-up areas, while bombarding forest fires from the air – using aircraft that more often than not cannot fly due to adverse conditions.
Then, in early 2010, came the Greek state’s undeclared bankruptcy. Soon, dozens of EU and IMF officials – the infamous troika – would arrive in Athens to impose the world’s harshest austerity programme. Every budget was ruthlessly slashed, including those aimed at citizen and nature protection. Thousands of doctors, nurses and, yes, firefighters were fired. In 2011, the fire brigade’s overall budget was cut by 20%.
In the spring of 2015, a senior fire brigade officer told me that at least another 5,000 firefighters were needed to offer basic protection in the following summer. As Greece’s finance minister at the time, I drew up plans to exact savings from other parts of the budget to rehire a modest number of firefighters and doctors (2,000 altogether). Upon hearing this, the troika immediately condemned me for “backtracking” and issued a clear warning that, if I insisted, the negotiations at the Eurogroup would be terminated – shorthand for announcing the closure of Greece’s banks.
Since then the only real change has been the steady rise of temperatures, courtesy of accelerating climate breakdown. This summer’s firestorm was utterly foreseeable – as was the inability of our state to respond effectively. And the EU? Did it send dozens of staff to micromanage events on the ground, like it had done when imposing austerity? Unlike the assistance Greece received from individual European governments, including post-Brexit Britain’s, the EU institutions were conspicuous by their absence.
The terrifying question is: what next? The spectre of a new threat to Greece’s forests is hanging over the land. It is the current rightwing government’s eagerness to subcontract reforestation to private multinational businesses. In search of a quick euro, they peddle fast-growing, genetically modified trees that have no place in the Mediterranean and are inimical to our flora, fauna and traditional landscape. Unlike the awful impact of the state’s bankruptcy on our people, which one day we hope to reverse, this assault on our native forests will be irreversible.
For the Guardian’s site click here
The results are in: here’s who was elected to lead our movement
DiEM25 members from across Europe and beyond have voted, and our renewed Coordinating Collective (CC) has emerged!
Six posts in DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective were up for elections in August 2021. You can see the full results in the member’s area here. Meet the women (3) and men (3) that have been chosen by DiEM25 members to guide our movement in the months ahead!
These successful candidates all articulate the importance of our movement in today’s pressing context — in which we can not only observe climate disasters but also man-made ones, issues of corruption and greed, as well as a creeping rise of fascism in Europe and across the globe.
The results:
Yanis Varoufakis ♂ – 91.11%
Srećko Horvat ♂ – 68.79%
Ivana Nenadovic ♀ – 60.84%
Francesca Martinez ♀ – 54.27%
Erik Miltiadis Edman ♂ – 52.79%
Maja Pelević ♀– 49.63%
Runner-up candidates
While the following candidates did not win election to the CC this time around, we thank them all for participating and hope they’ll continue working with us. DiEM25 needs you and your commitment to make our movement better!
Ludovica Francesca Purini ♀– 41.38%
Ludovico Rella ♂ – 39.11%
Angela Lacerda-Nobre ♀ – 31.95%
The power of grassroots
By making their voices heard in this pivotal internal democratic process, our members have sent a loud message to the status quo: at DiEM25 we really mean it when we say that we believe in grassroots power!
The DiEMers that ran for a seat in the CC represent the pan-European, grassroots essence of our movement: they are people from very different backgrounds and countries. All candidates stand together ready to fight for the movement we all believe in. No other political organisation can pride itself on this level of openness and inclusivity, at such an international scale.
Background to the vote
Following DiEM25’s Organising Principles (OPs), six of the twelve seats in the movement’s CC were up for renewal this summer. Candidates could send their submissions from July 5 until August 4, and the voting period was between August 13 and 28.
Candidacies to the CC were open to all DiEMers who adhered to basic criteria like how long they have been a member of the movement, and how much time they could give to working on the CC, among others.
To ensure transparency and a genuine democratic process, voting was open to members that joined the movement before the elections were announced. Additionally, members’ accounts needed to be verified and active, for them to be able to vote.
As with all DiEM25’s internal democratic procedures, all transnational votes had equal value and were anonymised upon being cast. Furthermore, the results of the vote are in line with our OP’s gender-balance principles.
Gold mining project threatens livelihood of communities in Northern Ireland
One of the promises of the Green New Deal for Europe (GNDE) has been that ‘the GNDE will improve our quality of life by guaranteeing clean air and water;…restoring biodiversity to our communities and by reducing the number of hours we work each week’, however, extractive and mining industries in Europe and throughout the world threaten to undermine this promise, and the welfare of our communities.
In a Conference motion ‘Duty to Defend the Environment’ the Irish Congress of Trade Unions noted that proposals to mine gold in the Sperrin Mountains would cause massive environmental pollution to an area of outstanding natural beauty, and threaten the entire Foyle River system.
Threats from extractive industries
In the North West of Ireland, gold mining companies are prospecting in areas such as the Sperrin Mountains in Derry and Tyrone, and in Inishowen in Donegal. The communities in this part of Ulster have become very concerned that the toxicity produced by these mining activities could severely impact the health of residents by leaking into the rivers, lakes and soil in the region.
In the Sperrins, a Canadian-registered mining corporation, Dalradian, is trying to gain permission to construct a mine in order to extract 40 tonnes of gold over twenty years. In Inishowen – a neighbouring county – Arkle Resources is applying for a license extension to continue its prospecting work.
Arkle, which is a Dublin-registered company listed on the London Stock Exchange, has also announced intentions to drill for gold in an area covering the south eastern counties of Wexford and Wicklow. The health risks posed by mining are therefore not a localised problem, but one spreading across the entire country.
In December of last year, at the Derry Human Rights and Arts Festival, a spokesperson for the grassroots movement, ‘Save Our Sperrin’, outlined the dangers of gold mining:
- Physical damage to the Sperrins’ landscape, which is a valued social amenity, tourist attraction and means of growing food, as well as a ‘waste rock’ projected to reach a height of 17 stories
- Toxic pollution from cyanide processing and a mercury smelting furnace
- Acid rain as a result of discarded mine rock
- Arsenic, nickel, chromium and cadmium entering the food chain in dangerously high quantities
- Carbon emissions from a yearly consumption of 3.3 million litres of fossil fuels to power the goldmine’s operations
- The removal of thirty acres of peat land, which acts as a natural carbon capture source
The Green New Deal for Europe offers solutions to destructive, extractive, industries
Extractive industries, such as mining, are too often entirely indifferent to the impact that their work has on the communities and the environments in which they are operating. This is because they are not the ones suffering its consequences.
The ones who are affected are those whose lives are rooted in the community, and in many cases, whose families have been there for generations. Businesses must be made to consider and prevent the unintended effects of their activities, or forfeit their right to do business,
One of the proposals to bring about this type of change is Green Public Works, part of the Green New Deal for Europe.
This is an investment programme that aims to decarbonise Europe’s economy, reverse biodiversity loss, guarantee decent jobs for local people, and harmonise economic aims with environmental justice so that mining projects, such as those in Ulster, are held to account and that the wellbeing of residents whose communities are most likely to be effected by these type of operations are guaranteed and prioritised above all else.
Photo (C) Ashley Dace
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Wildfires: Looking at Greece, deciding about Europe
Greece is a country that has been at the forefront of many of Europe’s most critical crises: economic (2008-today), migrant (2014-today), and environmental.
It is a telling case study, as the approach of the European Union to each of these political challenges has unveiled it further for what it truly is: an authoritarian and cynical economic cartel for the rich and powerful. The promise for European joint prosperity and solidarity remains unfulfilled to this day, and will remain so until the European Union is democratised.
Following the disastrous floods on the German-Belgian border, Europe is now facing another catastrophic effect of climate collapse: wildfires are ravaging Southern Europe, hitting some of the countries most weakened by Europe’s chronic inability (and unwillingness) to radically deal with the issues it is called to face.
Below we number five major blunders and cynical moves by the Greek Prime Minister, which constitute the rule – rather than the exception – for how the European Establishment deals with any crisis:
1. Priority to Property rather than the Environment
“Our priority is always the protection of human life. This is followed by safeguarding property, the natural environment and critical infrastructure. ” [Kyriakos Mitsotakis]
The head of the New Democracy government in Greece, perhaps without even realising it, confessed that for him and his government, “property” is their first priority (which, when it is publicly owned, is usually subjected to auctions and privitisation) and then the environment and (“critical”) public infrastructure.
DiEM25 unreservedly condemns the cynical confession of Kyriakos Mitsotakis who, at a time when the younger generation is facing environmental dystopia, fails to understand – even when engaged in battle against a side-effect of climate change – that property is devoid of any value when the environment collapses.
2. Investing in Repression at the expense of Protection
“We ought to… show our gratitude [to firefighters], recognizing that sometimes we ask them to do things that are simply beyond their capabilities. ” [Kyriakos Mitsotakis]
The Prime Minister spoke as if the capabilities of the Fire Brigade are independent of the means available to them from the government. He spoke as if the problem was their capabilities, and not the obvious fact that the austerity-serving governments (at the instruction of their European and IMF masters), including the current one, left the Fire Brigade helpless after they had first – criminally – assigned forest firefighting to them and financially depleted the Forestry Departments. Every victory won by the Fire Brigade in Greece is won against impossible odds and despite of the sabotage inflicted on them by their European “partners” and their own government.
With this unfortunate expression, Mr Mitsotakis tried to pass over his personal, criminal choice to leave the Fire Brigade defenceless, since the current and the former government (SYRIZA-New Democracy) “burdened” it with forest firefighting, while investing huge resources in the Greek police, making Greece the country with the third highest ratio of law-enforcement agents per citizen in Europe. Where are the necessary recruitments in the Fire Brigade and Forestry? Where are the new resources? Why is only one Beriev Be200 (the jet firefighter capable of dropping 12 tons of water) operating? If the EU and the IMF are still controlling Greece’s expenditures, then why was Greece allowed to by 18 Rafale fighter jets from France, with money that could cover the purchase of over 50 Beriev firefighter jets? Where are the reinforcements for the National Health System and, worst of all, the Forestry Service – which the austerity-serving governments have, in effect, abolished?
Mitsotakis referred to the “battles… that we lost” without any admittance as to why we have lost them. While he, and the rest of Europe, prioritise the suppression over the protection of citizens, then these battles we continue to be lost, every time, regardless of the bravery and self-sacrifice of the people who fight them.
3. Supporting the victims by supporting the…bankers
“The properties will be restored… ” [Kyriakos Mitsotakis]
In their desperation, listening to the Prime Minister, the small and medium-sized fire victim businesses are justified in hoping that their houses will be rebuilt with the help of the state. Until they learn the truth from the lips of Interior Minister Makis Voridis, who referred to “…favorable terms of borrowing with the guarantee of the state for the restoration of the damage caused to houses!”
As if the small and medium-sized businesses of Greece are not already drowning in debt! Without shame, the New Democracy (ND) government chooses once again to impose new debts, in favour of the bankers, on citizens that the State has failed to protect from an expected natural phenomenon.
Will the Prime Minister say what will be done with these new loans, announced by Mr. Voridis as “aid” for the fire victims, if and when they cannot be repaid? Will they also be sold to the coffers of their inner-circles? What about the loans of the pandemic victims who may have escaped the fires? We do not expect an answer, of course.
In summary, Mitsotakis and his government has once again proven that the state of the 21st century does not serve its citizens, but its capital: the government is here to protect the interests of bankers, not the people.
4. The burnt land will soon be hotels and shopping centres
“The houses are being rebuilt and the trees will grow again…” [Kyriakos Mitsotakis]
Mr Mitsotakis pretends not to know that in Greece trees tend not to grow again, precisely because houses are being “rebuilt” where the forests used to be!
“And of course the burnt areas will be immediately declared reforested areas, as, after all, the Constitution requires. ” [Kyriakos Mitsotakis]
Precisely because the Constitution has become a rag in the hands of the austerity-serving governments of ND-PASOK-SYRIZA, with the result that the burnt areas of the past are now multi-family houses, maisonettes, shopping malls, golf courses, etc., our electoral wing in Greece, MeRA25, had submitted a simple amendment to the constitution that prohibits the change of use of burnt land (from forested to urban) for 30 years. And how did the government react? It rejected it without comment, confirming its determination to turn a blind eye to the building of the burnt areas.
5. The government of oil-mining & pipelines keeps silent on Climate Change
“We have a duty to shield our country against the reality of Climate Change. ” [Kyriakos Mitsotakis]
A prime minister who promotes fossil fuel extraction and considers pipelines as “development” projects is not a prime minister who is entitled to invoke the fight against Climate Change.
A Prime Minister who, in order to appease the nationalists of his party, talks about shielding the country from Climate Change (as if Greece inhabits some separate environment to that of other nations around it) does not have the right to remain Prime Minister.
A Prime Minister who tries to blame Climate Change for his own failures, which are a result of the austerity-serving policies, has no right to remain Prime Minister.
Our electoral wing in Greece, MeRA25, is the only party in Parliament that condemns every mining project and every pipeline, and that mobilizes daily against local contractor crimes against the environment. It will not allow Mr. Mitsotakis and Mr Tsipras, the most beloved Greek Prime Ministers of Exxon-Mobil, Total and domestic contractors, to shed crocodile tears over Climate Change – while their choices act as fuel for the fire that is burning the planet.
Looking at Greece, deciding about Europe
The Coordinating Collective of DiEM25 supports all those who have either been thrown into the battle with the flames or are in danger from them across Europe and beyond. While the fires rage, the members of DiEM25 stand in solidarity with the people and the animals that are suffering.
At the same time, because this disaster is not “natural” but the result of unnatural, classist and oligarchic policies, the Coordinating Collective calls upon DiEM25 members and all progressive citizens to unite behind the following eight conclusions:
- Overturn the mentality that the priority is property and not the ecosystem that keeps us alive, or the public goods without which we are doomed to suffer at the hands of the rich and the elite
- Invest in protecting, not repressing, citizens – condemning the hypocrisy of governments that put “new locks on a burning house”
- Abolish our servitude to austerity, instead of strengthening it: we condemn the hypocrisy of governments that shed tears for burnt houses while they are preparing to serve them up to bankers as collateral
- Push for the immediate empowerment of Forestry Departments around Europe, and make those who are best placed to help us deal with Climate Change responsible for doing so
- Resolve to keep all fossil fuels in the bowels of the earth as a minimal contribution to the fight against Climate Change
- Work together for the overthrow of any government that pretends to combat phenomena that its policies reinforce
- Highlight the complicity of a European Union which intervenes to close down banks for the benefit of lenders and bankers, and is ready to make grand statements and wag the finger at some, but turns a blind eye when Nature and Europeans burn, drown and suffocate because of the austerity it enforces with an iron fist
- Stand with the Progressive International, which represents a unique opportunity to internationalise and coordinate the universal human struggle to end the exploitative model that has brought us, as a species, to the brink of destruction
Barcelona City Council’s fight to shield flamingoes from rent-seeking flights of fancy
Covid-19 forced billions of humans to re-assess the way we live, work and travel. Monstrous wildfires (from British Columbia to Greece and Croatia) and murderous floods (e.g. Germany) have confirmed that which we should have known: We, humans, have damaged the planet, possibly, beyond repair.
Against this background, it is heartbreaking to observe how our governments are not losing an opportunity to add to the environmental damage in order to serve the ugliest minority who are motivated by the most hideous of urges: entrepreneurs seeking to milk public money to feather their own nests while destroying the last sanctuaries of wildlife near our cities. But, there is good news too: Municipalities are leading the fight to shield our remaining wildlife from both government and business vandals. Barcelona City Council is a case in point.
Barcelona’s airport is sitting next to one of the Iberian peninsula’s most important bird sanctuaries – and one of the few surviving ones. Covid-19 has massively shrunk the number of flights in and out of the airport.
A rational person might have thought that this is the perfect time for both the Catalan and the Spanish governments to re-think the equilibrium between air travel, quality of life and the environment. But, no! Government and business are, instead, salivating over the EU Recovery Fund’s billions and, lazy as they are, came up with a ‘brilliant’ idea: Instead of finding green projects to finance (that create good quality green jobs and help with the struggle to reverse the damage we have inflicted upon the environment), they will use the monies to… expand the airport – to cement over the adjacent wildlife reserve – to eradicate the flamingoes so that more jets can fly frequent flyer humans in and out.
Against this alliance of idiotic evil (Spanish government, Catalan government and business ‘interests’), only one institution is standing tall: Barcelona’s City Council. Progressives must support them. If the City Council loses this battle, humanity loses. And if the City Council wins, municipalism will have demonstrated that it is probably humanity’s, and the environment’s, last resort.
Fit for the 1%: The failure of the EU’s Fit for 55 plan
We’ll begin with the good news about the European Commission (EC)’s Fit for 55 plan, because that part is short: it extends carbon pricing to new sectors, more importantly maritime transport, and it makes some of the emissions reduction targets of the European Green Deal ever-so-slightly less underwhelming.
Now, on to the bad news.
Expectations are always understandably low, but the EC’s remarkable capacity to disappoint knows no bounds. Not only are the measures of Fit for 55 simply not enough to limit average temperature rises to 2 degrees celsius – let alone the crucial 1.5 degree threshold – but the plan is designed to accomplish what the EU loves doing more than anything else: making common people pay for the sins of big corporations.
Case in point: a key change to the Emission Trading System (ETS), which means transport and housing emissions will now be included in the scheme. This means you’ll feel the financial weight of transition on your wallet when you get your heating bill or go to a gas pump, while big businesses in the agriculture and heavy industry sectors remain exempt from doing their bit. Once again, the burden of the transition will fall on those who bear the least responsibility for the climate crisis. The Fit for 55 plan fits the 1% the best.
While they pass the bucket of emission costs on to citizens, the EC makes sure that their friends in the fossil fuel industry continue to rake in big profits as their polluting operations continue to grow with the help of public money and unprecedented support from private banks, who have funnelled more than 2.7 trillion dollars into fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement. No plans for a hard fossil fuel phase out or detailed roadmaps for emission reductions by sector are to be found.
As to housing, while EC backs renovating buildings according to green standards, they are silent on perhaps the most important aspect: buying back vacant spaces and making them affordable and fit for use. It may sound radical, but we believe ending homelessness and making living spaces efficient and dignified is a better idea than taxing people already worrying about how to pay rent.
Unsurprisingly, the EC also has little to say or offer on inequality and jobs creation. Their goal is to generate 160.000 jobs in the infrastructure sector by 2030, which represents merely 6.5% of the bloc’s economically active population. To put that in context, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created more than 20.000.000 jobs between 1933 and 1935 alone.
Solidarity with the Global South, where people are being hit the hardest by climate change, is another shortcoming. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will put a price on imports of steel, aluminum, cement, fertiliser and electricity, with the stated goal of preventing companies from ditching the EU for places with more favourable regulations. In reality, it’s a thinly veiled attempt by the EC to protect the bloc’s big industrial corporations, with no regard for the broader global implications of a climate crisis that is caused by Europe and other developed nations but wreaks havoc in vulnerable communities everywhere on Earth.
The EC had at least the decency of dropping the word new when they co-opted the term Green New Deal, erased all meaning from it and unveiled the European Green Deal in 2020. Indeed, new it is not. But nor is it green. As to the word deal, we can only understand it as a tribute to the backroom dealing between Brussels career politicians and well-paid lobbyists that brought this disastrous plan to life.
Fortunately, there’s still time to take us out of the crash course that the EC has set us in. That’s why the Green New Deal for Europe is DiEM25’s biggest and by far most urgent campaign.
Instead of the vague and loose allocation of 250 to 350 billion euros in a decade that the EC promises, we propose concrete investments amounting to 700 billions euros per year, funded by green bonds issued by the European Investment Bank (EIB), not by common people already struggling under austerity and the pandemic. This is more than doable – our survival and the next generations’ depends on it. That money will be used to address the climate crisis in a way that also moves us past the economic, social and democratic crises that we currently face. It will guarantee decent jobs, healthcare, housing and education for all, while taking into account intersectional, international and intergenerational justice.
Ours is a deal between humanity and nature, not between politicians and oligarchs.
Everywhere in Europe, your voice is needed more than ever. Learn more about the Green New Deal for Europe, organise by joining a DSC and help set the course of our campaign.
The future is up for grabs. Let’s seize it before it’s too late.
Photo (c) Mike Langridge