Category: Articles

It was easier, when I was younger, to hold onto a sense of righteousness when I looked out at the world, to see very clearly those elements of society that were fucked up and to cast myself against them. One of the most difficult things about continuing to be a radical as I grow older is realizing the extent to which all of the messed up ways of thinking that I am critical of are also present within me and manifest in interpersonal dynamics in my life as much as they do anywhere else.

An insidious example of this is the way that capitalist logic sets itself up as common sense; how any notion of value becomes linked to cash value and acting pragmatically in the world comes to mean hording or selling what is marketable and treating what is inexpensive and abundant as inconsequential. Even in radical circles the effect of this is pervasive, particularly the extent to which we let ourselves become afraid of scarcity and distrustful of the good faith of our friends and neighbors.

Scarcity versus Abundance

On the one hand a critique of scarcity thinking is very simple; systems of power use the idea of material scarcity to frighten people into accepting their legitimacy. The matter is complicated, however, by the fact that scarcity is real. In climates where the ground freezes in the winter or the land dries up in the summer, there have always been seasonal scarcities. With the spread of globalization and the creation of immense wealth and poverty, those climate imposed scarcities have been joined, and in some cases replaced by economically imposed scarcities. As our mass society alters the world to the point of ecological crisis, the specters of newer and grander scarcities everyday present themselves.

It is important to remember that these modern scarcities have been created by the extension of market logic into the environment itself, each new crisis is used as an excuse to expand the jurisdiction of the market system of value. People have been compelled to sever their connections to the Earth and destroy their awareness of its rhythms. The fear generated from that destruction is used to convince people that they need the system.

Whether we treat undeveloped land, forests and waterways as scarce commodities, or abundant commodities, we cheapen them. When we allow ourselves to talk about ecological forces as resources to be managed or appeal to a cost-benefit analysis of environmental destruction as a way to pass environmental laws and encourage green business practices, the very logic that led to these crises remains unquestioned and utterly shapes our thinking about how to address them. As if by seeing the whole environment as a dwindling commodity to be horded and made valuable through the market, we can somehow save it.

The most stunning success of capitalism has been the way that it has extended the sphere of the market into almost every aspect of our lives, expanding well beyond material reality and getting applied to the way that we conduct our emotional life. Friend, neighbor, and family relationships are commonly mediated by its logic of treating any good will as a scarce commodity. People are scared into thinking that what is scarce includes even our own ability to transform ourselves and each other through love. In this way gifts are turned into debts, kindnesses into credit, and interactions into transactions.

Its not that we consciously live our lives in such a callous manner but that it becomes very easy for this kind of thinking to insinuate itself as pragmatic realism and for the logic of passionately engaging with each other and ourselves to be downplayed as naïve idealism. When we are asked to operate as efficient producers and consumers in so much of our lives it becomes difficult to imagine relating to each other differently.

Nature itself hardly responds to scarcity with calculated efficiency, it often responds with wasteful abundance that is impermanent and indiscriminant. Anyone who has watched rotting fruit drop off a tree and realized that it has been feeding all manner of life for weeks knows this. It is in that kind of joyous wastefulness that beauty and love can blossom and grow. Calculated relationships wither, no matter how strategically beneficial they are, relationships born out of the joyful giving of affection and honest desire for connection thrive and produce fruit in ways that were inconceivable when the seed started sprouting.

Bad Faith versus Community

In the first part of his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde draws a distinction between a market economy where goods are traded with anyone as commodities and a gift economy where goods and services are given and received between people, creating or signifying connection and allowing excess to flow to those in need within a community. A meal cooked, a creative work, or a market commodity can all be gifts to the extent that they are given and received rather than being bought and sold.

In a gift economy there is no strict accounting, there does not need to be because you are dealing with people that you have a relationship with and the actual material that changes hands is only a part of what is happening; social connections are also strengthened. Gift economies work when good faith is assumed on both sides and come into crisis when the relationships they depend on are strained or forced.

An economy of market exchange operates most efficiently between strangers under the assumption of bad faith. Bad faith is the belief that all parties are involved for their own narrow material gain and, left to their own devices, would be cruelly indifferent to each other. Hyde connects this assumption of bad faith explicitly to a desire for authority and the presumption of scarcity: “Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear.” (p. 128)

The assumption of bad faith produces more bad faith and leads to actions and attitudes that warrant continued ingratitude and mistrust. It is an inherent part of the culture of capitalism and as such, can seem impossible to change, but it is something that can be addressed and made less powerful on the scale of our actual lives by people who do not view their relationships as strategic, their emotional energy as scarce or their capacity for creativity and love as limited.

It is not, however, as simple as market logic bad, gift economy good. There are moments when it is useful to be able to interact with a person without being drawn into a relationship with them and a gift economy only works in the context of a relationship that is being created and sustained in good faith. Good faith is not something that can be brought into existence by force of will, it must be built. Trying to define all possible interactions as either gift exchange or commodity exchange quickly becomes confining. Nonetheless, getting rid of capitalism means leaving behind the logic that feeds it, it means learning to shrink the areas of our life that are governed by the market and expand the areas that are buoyed by good faith relationships and fed with gifts. When the sphere of the market shrinks to the point that it is not much more than a process used for negotiating barter with strangers, it becomes something that is no longer capitalism. When the relationship networks expressed through gift exchange grow to the point where people trust the strength of their communities, they render the state obsolete.

In the meantime, figuring out how to live in the presence of scarcity, without allowing fearful thinking to dominate our lives and learning how to exist in broken communities without retreating to an isolated place that views everybody else’s motives with bad faith are difficult emotional things to do. They require creating a culture that does not tolerate market logic; that is infused with the ferment
ed juices of abundant emotional life. The more that we can be honest with ourselves and each other about the ways in which we are affected by ugly systems of power and control, the more likely we are to be able to forge that kind of culture in a lasting and meaningful way. The way forward cannot be found, it must be created by each person through a process of engagement.

This fall should see massive global protests to pressure government bureaucrats and their corporate opportunist masters to get serious about taking steps to decrease human emissions of global warming gasses. There are protests planned to precede and coincide with the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen, Denmark December 7-18 — a crucial world meeting under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that is struggling to negotiate a successor treaty to the expiring (and failed) Kyoto Protocol. There will also be a few scattered protests aimed at the hugely flawed greenhouse emissions / climate laws currently working their way through Congress.

But as I write this article, it seems fairly unlikely that there will be protests and resistance at a level anywhere close to the scale of the danger, although it doesn’t have to be like that. Right now, human society is on a path that goes over a cliff — consuming and developing thoughtlessly, competing instead of cooperating, and using up the earth’s finite resources and ability to absorb pollution at an alarming rate. Continuing greenhouse gas emissions at the present rate will cause a climate catastrophe. These emissions are already causing the largest species extinction in world history. And yet instead of building alternative energy infrastructure or learning to use less, the world is building new coal fired power plants every week.

There is a different path available. Many people are working on figuring out the social, cultural and technological details for a new direction in which humans don’t live our lives at the expense of our future and the rest of the environment’s health. Humans are part of the world’s ecosystem — we are not above it or separate from it. When our day-to-day lives depend on killing the earth, we’re really killing ourselves.

It is easy to figure “well, we’re fucked — there is no way to turn this ocean-liner around in time”, and use that as a comfortable excuse to stay disengaged. But this cop-out won’t work in the long-term. Psychologically, it means you have to use more and more emotional energy on denial and justification — avoiding the signs that are increasingly all around us that something is seriously wrong. Wouldn’t it be easier to face the unpleasant facts and rather than turning away, overcome our fears and paralysis by getting engaged in addressing the root of the problem?

It is up to all of us — as individuals, as members of the activist community, and as conscious beings who are part of the natural world around us — to cut through the fog, the sense of resignation, disempowerment and frustration — and figure out how we can go down a different path. If human societies don’t change course soon and figure out a way to maintain the ecological balance on the planet from which we evolved, all the stuff we spend our days working on and worrying about isn’t going to matter.

It is amazing how easily the brewing climate catastrophe can get lost in a blizzard of concerns and problems: the economic crisis, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, health care reform, gay marriage — the list goes on. And for most people, it can be hard enough just to get through the day on a personal level — juggling work, family and a million other things while trying to carve out some time for freedom and pleasure.

Somehow, we have to figure out a way to put decreasing greenhouse gas emissions on the front burner and keep it there to demand real action, not the false solutions, greenwashing, and gradualism leading to non-action that is the current reality. Protests in the streets and grassroots organizing are the key — the mainstream economic and political systems are incapable of changing paths because they created the emissions-dependent world and their power is utterly dependent on maintaining it.

It is becoming more obvious how the outdated structures of power that are killing the planet are the same structures that require inequality, oppression, violence and misery. There’s room to make connections and move the struggle forward across a broad front while not losing sight of the reality that if we lose the environment, our species is going to go down with it.

A Call to Climate Action

Numerous groups are calling for coordinated, global protests during the international climate change meeting in Copenhagen Dec. 7 – 18 . The COP meets once a year and includes government officials from 189 countries plus 10,000 official observers — corporate lobbyists and representatives from mainstream non-governmental organizations.

While theoretically United Nations conferences like Copenhagen could coordinate a global plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in reality they are like a World Trade Organization applied to greenhouse gas emissions. Elites — whether from the developed world, major corporations, or the third world — prioritize figuring out new, perverse ways to profit from greenhouse gas emissions reducton. Actually reducing emissions is in the backseat, almost an afterthought. The Copenhagen process favors top-down, corporate solutions that permit business as usual — with resulting inequality and profit — to continue with as little disruption as possible.

The most popular corporate solution to global warming is creating a global emissions trading system in which industries in rich countries could continue emissions as usual in exchange for paying someone else who claims to have reduced emissions for “credits” to pollute. The key assumption behind such initiatives is that the most important goal is maintaining constant economic growth, and that emissions reductions are a laudable goal as long as they can be achieved without hurting growth. But this thinking gets it backwards — the endless pursuit of economic growth on a finite planet is what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

A key aspect of Copenhagen-related protests will be to outline the difference between real actions to address greenhouse gas emissions and false solutions. A real emissions reduction means fossil fuels are left in the ground and not burned — either because alternative energy sources are found or because the energy isn’t required in the first place. A false solution is a solution that allows a particular industry, technology or nation to continue to burn precisely the same fossil fuels as before, or even increase emissions, and yet pat themselves on the back because they’ve used accounting methods to show an emissions reduction. You would think such absurd numerical trickery would be laughed out of the room and recognized as an Emperor With No Clothes, until you realized that this is the primary mainstream response to the climate crisis.

While some people are going to Copenhagen to protest there, the best advice seems to be to avoid international travel and do something in your own community. In Copenhagen, there is likely to be a diversity of tactics ranging from polite lobbying and street protests, all the way to militant direct action to shut down the meeting and symbols of outmoded CO2 emissions, such as local coal-fired electricity plants. Protests in the USA are likely to be along similar lines with tiny actions in smaller places and grander actions in population centers. You can get involved in planning and participating in these actions.

As Slingshot goes to press in mid-September, it is not a good sign that there are currently very few specific times, dates and places being proposed for decentralized actions. That means there’s a lot of room for folks to get involved and make something happen. It might also mean that not much is going to happen unless someone gets up and organizes something soon. You don’t have to wait for someone else to call for an action — you and your friends can do it yourselves. Check the end of this article for links to some of the radical climate action groups.

350 parts per million

To build
up momentum for the Copenhagen meeting, the 350.org group founded by early climate visionary Bill McKibben is calling for decentralized, global actions on October 24. 350.org likes visible, symbolic protests — many spelling out the number 350 — that can be photographed and emailed into a central website. 350 refers to the maximum number of parts per million of carbon dioxide that scientists believe can be in the atmosphere without leading to disastrous climate change. The 350.org folks like it because it is a simple message for people to rally around — not proposing precisely how to cut emissions, but just trying to set a target for CO2.

Currently, there are 390 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere — up from around 280 ppm before the industrial revolution. The number increases every year as more and more fossil fuels are burned to sustain the current of form of human social organization. While the Kyoto Protocol was designed to cut emissions to 1990 levels (which were already too high), emissions have instead gone up and up and up since Kyoto went into effect. Despite all the Al Gore movies and speeches and billboards, emissions have not been reduced. To the contrary, the growing demand for more stuff by a growing world population is being met in the first world as well as in the third world by relying almost exclusively on fossil fuels.

To reduce the CO2 concentration to less than 350 ppm would require much less fossil fuel combustion going forward, rather than the current expansion of fossil fuel use. Over time, natural processes such as plant growth can remove some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere if humans would stop adding more. In the US, 40 percent of CO2 emissions are from burning coal, oil and natural gas to generate electricity — 83 percent of that is from coal. This could be the easiest area to dramatically cut emissions, since alternative technologies to generate electricity already exist and the fossil fuel combustion for electricity are concentrated in a relatively small number of huge facilities.

The 350.org website already lists over 1,000 protest plans in over 100 countries spanning the globe, so many people can plug into these actions. According to their website, there will be “school children planting 350 trees in Bangledesh, scientists hanging banners saying 350 on the statues on Easter Island, 350 scuba divers diving underwater at the Great Barrier Reef.”

350.org is not a radical group in that they don’t have an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian analysis — they don’t connect the climate crisis with the many forms of oppression associated with the current order. But to their credit, they are highly critical of the pathetic lack of action by governments and corporations regarding greenhouse emissions and climate change. They seem to understand the distractions and greenwashing that is going on and realize that fundamental change is necessary which can only come from grassroots action. According to their call to action, “This is even more important than changing your lightbulb–this is your chance to help change the way the whole world operates.” They organize public events on a global scale so it makes sense to check their website, find the closest action, and join in.

False solutions — business as usual

To set the stage for the Copenhagen meeting, the US Congress is trying to pass an emissions trading bill known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES, H.R.2454 or the Waxman-Markey Bill). While other developed countries have had global warming laws for the past few years, this would be the first US law aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The bill would seek to require a 17 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels for a variety of greenhouse gases (chiefly CO2) by 2020 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050. It also requires electrical utilities to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and a few other odds and ends like electrical grid modernization, more electric cars and energy efficient buildings and appliance mandates.

The key to the emissions reductions is to create a “cap-and-trade” system. The government would create emissions credits which would give their owner a right to emit a particular amount of CO2. Over time, the number of credits would decrease. The idea is that the invisible hand of the market would determine how these emissions reductions would happen. A business holding a bunch of credits could reduce their own emissions and then they could sell the extra credits they didn’t need to use for their own emissions, taking the proceeds to help pay for costs associated with cutting their emissions. Or, if it was cheaper for a particular company to buy credits for emissions rather than reducing their own emissions, they could do that. Theoretically, such a system would mean that the cheapest emissions reductions would be made first, and the most expensive would be made last. A similar system was successful in reducing acid rain pollution that is created when high sulfer coal is burned.

The ACES is a timid business give-away. A 17 percent reductions target by 2020 is an extremely modest goal given the scale of the problem and is hard to take a distant 2050 goal very seriously. Under the bill, the government would give out 85% of the credits to various corporations and utilities for free and have an auction for the remaining 15 percent. To the extent the credits can be sold, this means the government gives away billions to heavy greenhosue gas emissions. Moreover, it means companies can make money selling credits for adopting emissions reducing technologies they would have done anyway. Such programs are prone to speculation, difficult to enforce, and legitimize the fossil fueled status quo.

Look for more timid, corporate welfare plans like this in Copenhagen, except applied on a global scale. A key flaw in transnational emissions trading schemes is that rich, developed countries buy credits so they can continue to emit pollution from sellers who are “reducing” emissions in dubious ways. For instance, there are already documented cases in which Europeans (who currently have cap-and-trade) have bought credits from third world projects that would have been built anyway.

A different path

Corporations and the governments that serve them aren’t going to bring us a lower emissions, ecologically sustainable world. There’s no money to be made nor bureacratic systems to expand when people reject the basic goals and values of the industrial age and realize that life is about engagement with ourselves, our surroundings and others, not owning and using stuff. The systems threatening climate catastrophe are the same systems that treat human beings as objects to be controlled, manipulated and used. In fact, a corporation treats people and the environment with a similar disregard: a tree is a natural resource while a person is a human resource.

Going down a more ecologically sustainable path isn’t just about protests and rejecting particular government plans or learning ways to consume less and installing alternative technologies to replace fossil fuels, although some of these changes may be steps along the way. People are going to have to engage each other and find solutions outside of media channels controled by corporations and the state — on the streets and in local communities. The protests this fall can be (with your help) a modest first step.

For more info, contact: www.climate-justice-action.org, www.risingtidenorthamerica.org

When my partner was laid-off by a multi-national, expletive-deleted, employer in August of 2000, we faced a financial disaster. She had been previously diagnosed with leukemia, had already had multiple lengthy hospitalizations, required weekly visits to a Hematology/Oncology clinic, and would eventually need a Bone Marrow Transplant, an expensive procedure costing more than $200,000. She had only continued working to maintain her health insurance. Now that insurance would be gone in a few months. What were we going to do?

In a weird way that lay-off was the best thing that could have happened to us. It turned out that she was eligible for Medicare because Leukemia is considered a total disability. She applied for coverage immediately after she was laid off. When she finally had the transplant, the costs were covered by Medicare, saving us at least $15,000 in co-payments.

Now the entire country is facing a financial disaster. Private HMO/Insurance companies have bled us to the point of death, while providing an absolute minimum of actual health care. It’s time to expand Medicare coverage to everyone, instead of limiting it to those over 65 and/or totally disabled. The reasons for this are so obvious that they almost defy explanation.

Medicare’s administrative costs are about 4% of its total operating budget. HMO or insurance company administrative costs range between 25%~40%.

The actual price that Medicare pays for a given service or procedure is far lower than a HMO/Insurance company has to pay for the identical procedure. When my partner had her transplant, Medicare paid about $21,000 for a hospital stay and procedure that would have cost a private insurance company over $200,000.

Every employed person is already paying taxes for Medicare. This includes the alleged illegal immigrants. Well if everyone is paying for it, shouldn’t we all be receiving the benefits now instead of waiting until we’re 65 or disabled.

The nurses and nurse practitioners that actually provide most of the services at the clinics would have to spend less time on getting the insurance companies nit-picker approval for every procedure. When I talked to my partner’s nurse practitioner, she told me that she used to spend 4 hours every day phoning the insurance companies trying to get approval for every procedure. They eventually had to hire another nurse just to deal with the companies.

Expanding Medicare would be the least expensive way to resolve the present Health Care crisis. Medicare is a system already in place and functioning fairly well. All it would take is a few minor tweaks to expand coverage, instead of designing a set of entirely new programs.

Some estimates predict that it would save the economy 300 billion dollars to adopt universal Medicare. It would eliminate that alphabet soup of federal and state programs that were designed to deal with the health issues of specific communities, such as Medicaid, Medical, SCHIP, and Workers Compensation Health programs. Industry would not be required to provide health insurance to their employees, (Ford Motor Company consistently pays more in employee Health Insurance each year than they do in sheet metal). We’d all have access to clinics and preventive care, instead of having to resort to hospital emergency rooms, which typically cost 5 to 6 times more.

President Obama and his health-care advisors, already know all of this. So why has there been no mention of a Medicare expansion program from the White House? The White House dismisses a universal health care plan because they say “Americans demand a choice”. Well, there is no choice even for those of us who are employed with healthcare, We get the insurance company that our employer provides. If your employer decides to change insurance companies, it’s “Fuck You Charlie”. He also says that Americans are distrustful of bureaucracy. Well, bureaucracy is what we’ve got. The only actual choice is whether health insurance will be administered by government or corporate bureaucrats. Government bureaucrats are at least slightly accountable. Corporate drones answer only to their masters.

Obama’s plan is designed to simply “reign in” the worst excesses of the private insurance companies, while ensuring they continue their bloated existence, although they may be slightly less bloated than before. But any plan regulating health care is bound to be a very expensive failure and political suicide as long as the Health Insurance Industry and their corresponding thousands of lobbyists control congress through both parties.

Obama could have promoted a Universal Health Care program. Given the enthusiastic support that he had when first elected, and from the health-care rallies that I’ve actually attended, and the people I’ve talked to, including a lot of medical professionals, Obama might have generated enough genuine grass-roots support to overcome the astro-turf, “tea-bag”, and Fox-news style corporate propaganda campaigns. He might have forced congress to legislate some genuine changes in this country. Instead he’s chosen the path of political expediency. That expediency has cost him all credibility and will probably lead to his political downfall.

When Obama was inaugurated president he promised to “Defend the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic”. The “Denial of Care” policy means that Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna, Human Health and all the other HMO/ health insurance companies are directly responsible for more American deaths in any given month, than Al-Qaeda has had for its entire existence.

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.

This paper is a result of folks coming together to exercise their intellect, creativity, and cooperative autonomy. It is in itself an act of community and defiance in the face of capitalism. This issue of the paper contains a lot about health: physical, psychological and spiritual (variously defined).

Health care is a huge topic, with teabaggers protesting (though probably not actually teabagging) the O-man’s proposals. Why are we even debating this? Shouldn’t we all just have health care, as human beings, as beings in general? But we live in some reality none of us signed up for, and the lunatics who think capitalism is a good idea are right now trying to decide if we should be forced to pay for a broken system of so-called health care, which is really just more profit for those with money at the expense of those without. Real health is not just the absence of symptoms, but is also being free enough to choose how to live, being able to live without having to fuck others over or getting fucked over yourself.

The best prescription for health is living true to yourself, without alienation, or an alienating power telling you what to do. We here at Slingshot are struggling toward that goal, though it may be in fits and starts, with our own unexpressed anger and alienation weighing us down, with unhealed hurts blinding us to our beauty and fabulousness. Even with all our woundedness we hope to bring you, dear reader, a large slice of energy, beauty, honesty and vision.

Reports of the death of independent print media appear to be greatly exagerated, at least around the Slingshot shipping basement which fills up with paper this time of year. Together with piles of this paper and huge stacks of the 2010 Organizer, we’re excited to be publishing our first book (see ad to the right). Making a book was a lot of work and even struggle — trying to blend the collective process with the author/editor/artist’s strong ideas about how the book should be.

The point of publishing the book was to protect People’s Park, in Berkeley, from continued University of California repression — they still think they own the land under the Park — and to inspire folks everywhere to create their own parks on vacant land everywhere. Land belongs to all beings on the earth – reclaim it. We hope to have some articles about the current struggles at People’s Park, including illegal arrests of park users and a crackdown on free speech, in next issue. But for now we’ve featured other land issues including a Redwood treesit and I-69 protests.

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors & independent thinkers to make this paper happen. If you send something written, please be open to being edited.

Editorial decisions are made by the Slingshot collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate & constructive criticism.

Thanks to all who made this: Aaron, Amanda, Apple, Bannannna, Bird, Bryan, Eggplant, Kathryn, Kermit, Keziah, Lesley, PB, Rena, Sal, Stephanie, Terri, and all the authors and artists.

Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on Sunday, Dec., 13 2009 at 4 p.m. at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below).

Article Deadline & Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 102 by January 16, 2010 at 3 p.m.

Volume 1, Number 101, Circulation 19,000

Printed September 24, 2009

Slingshot Newspaper

Sponsored by Long Haul

3124 Shattuck Avenue. Berkeley, CA 94705

Phone: (510) 540-0751

slingshot@tao.ca • www.slingshot.tao.ca

Circulation Information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income and anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue. Outside the Bay Area, we’ll mail a free stack of Slingshot to you if you give ’em out.

Back Issue Project

We’ll send you an assortment of back issues for postage: send us $3 for 2 lbs or $4 for 3 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. Send cash or check to Slingshot 3124 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94705.

.