• for: elephants in the room - financial industry at the heart of the polycrisis, polycrisis - key role of finance industry, Marjorie Kelly, Capitalism crisis, Laura Flanders show, book - Wealth Supremacy - how the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Captialism Drive Today's Crises

• Summary

  • This talk really emphasizes the need for the Stop Reset Go / Deep Humanity Wealth to Wellth program
  • Interviewee Marjorie Kelly started Business Ethics magainze in 1987 to show the positive side of business After 30 years, she found that it was still tinkering at the edges. Why? - because it wasn't addressing the fundamental issue.
  • Why there hasn't been noticeable change in spite of all these progressive efforts is because we avoided questioning the fundamental assumption that maximizing returns to shareholders and gains to shareholder portfolios is good for people and planet.**** It turns out that it isn't. It's fundamentally bad for civilization and has played a major role in shaping today's polycrisis.
  • Why wealth supremacy is entangled with white supremacy
  • Financial assets are the subject
    • Equity and bonds use to be equal to GDP in the 1950s.
    • Now it's 5 times as much
  • Financial assets extracts too much from common people
  • Question: Families are swimming in debt. Who owns all this financial debt? ...The financial elites do.

• meme

  • wealth supremacy and white supremacy are entangled

• for: book - wealth supremacy - 7 myths, 7 myths of Capitalism, capital bias, definition - capital bias

• DESCRIPTION: 7 MYTHS of CAPITALISM

  • The Myth of Maximization
    • example of absurdity of maximization
      • Bill Gates had $10 billion. Then he invested it and got $300 billion. There's no limit to how much wealth an individual can accumulate. It is absurd.
  • Myth of the Income Statement
    • Gains to capital called profit is always to be increased and
    • Gains of labor is called an expense, is always to be decreased
  • Myth of Materiality (also called capital bias)
  • definition: capital bias
    • If something impacts capital, it matters
    • If something impacts society or ecology, it doesn't matter
  • With the capital bias, only accumulating more capital matters. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. This is how most accountants and CFO's view the world.

• quote: Laura Flanders

  • The capital is what matters. We're aiming for more capital and nothing else really matters. That's the operating system of the economy. So the real world is immaterial to this world of wealth as held in stocks and shares and financial instruments.

• 21:52 Carbon credits, carbon markets
  • it's a scam designed to perpetuate fossil fuel use, in a phoney war against the climate crisis
  • Offsets were designed to allow polluters to pay others to create schemes that would compensate or "offset" that pollution. The classic example WAS afforestation, the planting of trees that can sequester that carbon.
  • Carbon neutrality comes from this idea that you can keep polluting if you offset it and become "carbon neutral"
  • A company may decarbonize a lot of their supply chain but may struggle to get rid of airflights around the world. In that case, they use offsets. When companies analyze the very difficult choices, they take the easy way out and use carbon offsets
  • However, there is so much offsets for afforestation now that there isn't enough land on earth
  • Carbon markets are a recipe for grifting and fraud or zero impacts
    • https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
  • This is the current state of offsets

31:00 Shell oil carbon offset greenwashing scam - the sky zero proposal - Shell claims they can offset all the O+G emissions out of the ground - it is preposterous - there's not enough land on earth when you tally up all the carbon offset afforestation schemes

• 32:30 Neo-colonialism

  • rich white man can offset his emissions by buying land from a developing nation. Now the indigenous people cannot use that land for any reason.
  • also, will require huge amount of water to grow those trees
  • we don't have enough land and we don't have 100 years, only 5 years.
  • nature-based solutions are an industrial, myopic approach

• 37:00 Deferred Emission Reduction

  • a lot of carbon credits are called deferred emission reduction credits.
  • this is avoided emissions - ie. trees in a forest with 100 ton of sequestering potential
  • this is promise to not destroy the biosphere any further so it's not removing any existing carbon
  • maybe multiple people might own the same forest, or someone might come along and burn it down
  • Trees are vulnerable to climate impacts - ie. Microsoft bought a large forest in California that later burned down in a climate change intensified wildfire

• 40:00 can we do anything within the extractive capitalist system?

  • some people claim that as long as extractivist capitalism still persists, we cannot have system change
  • also a neocolonialist element - global north exploited the global south to create most of the emissions in the atmospheric commons
  • a number of people are beginning to see that an extractivist capitalist system is not in line with effectively addressing the climate crisis
  • wind, solar, etc has displaced electricity generation in a number of countries like in the UK. However, these are only a few countries.Renewables are helping increase overall energy production

• 44:22: Stop burning fossil fuels

  • t doesn't matter if investments in renewables triple. It won't make a difference if we don't significantly stop burning fossil fuels at the same time.

• 47:00 economic growth prevents real change

  • Insisting on 1, 2 or 3% growth, will limit the response to the climate threat to render it irrelevant
  • Climate change is still mostly an optimization problem. They are more concerned with economic damage.
  • Economists believe that anything that threatens economic growth cannot be accepted

• 51:00 Degrowth making headway

  • Degrowth scholars are getting more attention on the need to decouple economic grwoth from climate policies

• 52:10 Is there a positive future scenario - The role of solidarity

  • Solidarity is the greatest strength we can harness.
  • The success of Doughnut Economics gives me hope
  • The richest 1% must reign in their impacts and redistribute to allow the impoverished to live humane lives
  • We can all have good lives and we don't have to manufacture that wonder
  • This is what it is to be human

Canadaland: Commons

Introducing our new season… Mining

Stories about the dirty business of Canadian mining.

Mining is a dirty business, but it is what Canada does best. Three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are best right here in the Great White North.

In our new season, Commons: Mining, we’ll be digging deep into the practices and the history of the extractive industry. From the gold rushes that shaped the country to the cover-ups and the outright frauds at home and abroad.

Canada was built on extracting what lay under the land, no matter the damage it did or who it ended up hurting.

The first episode of Commons: Mining comes out on October 13th.

Canada is fake

Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

Extraction Empire

Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).

Theft on a grand scale

It’s really been about theft on a grand scale. Look at how the United Kingdom became rich, or England and then Britain as it was, at the time. It was through bleeding India dry, we bled $45 trillion out of India. We taxed the subcontinent until there was virtually nothing left, then used a small amount of that tax money to buy its goods. So we were buying goods with their own money. And then we used the phenomenal profits — 100% profits — from that enterprise to finance the capture of other nations, and the colonization of those nations and the citizens, the railways and the other things we built in order to drain wealth out of them.

— George Monbiot