43 quotes found
"At the entrance to Shrehi, one of the villages attacked by ISIS in July, we stopped the car to visit the poster that had been erected with the names of the martyrs killed during the attack. Young men, women, children, murdered by a terrorist group with a history of collusion with the US Coalition against Syria and the Syrian Arab Army."
"[Beeley] began attacking the White Helmets vehemently. In 2015, she had called for the first responders to be killed, even though "violence to life and person [against civilians and non-combatants], in particular murder of all kinds" is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. "White Helmets are not getting it," she tweeted. "We know they are terrorists. Makes them a legit target." Beeley has admitted, in a private Facebook conversation with the blogger Scott Gaulke that was obtained by hackers and subsequently published, that even Assad does not deny torture. She wrote, "even Govt members dont [sic] deny it btw," adding that she would never admit this publicly."
"Beeley’s Twitter account is routinely referenced by Russian government social media accounts. She has a significant platform through Russian state media, her blogs have been cited in defence of Assad's atrocities by the Russian government, she has held meetings with the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakhorova, and has been endorsed by far-right agitators Katie Hopkins and Nick Griffin – as well as written up by Infowars."
"Beeley has justified the use of incendiary weapons against civilians, recycled and championed debunked conspiracy theories, and described a meeting with Assad as her proudest moment. This is cheerleading, not reporting."
"Assad’s very own Alex Jones."
"For allegations against the rebels, Beeley’s threshhold of proof is so low that it’s almost non-existent. For allegations against the regime it’s so high that it may never be reached."
"Extreme poverty should not exist, period. The fact that up to 17 percent of the world population lives in extreme poverty today (according to Robert Allen’s data on cost-of-basic-needs poverty) should be understood as an indictment of our economic system.8 It is a sign that severe social dislocation remains institutionalized in the capitalist world economy. Yes, the prevalence of extreme poverty is lower today than it was at the height of the colonial period, but this is not sufficient reason for celebration. The colonial high-water mark was an effect of capitalist policy and should never have existed."
"Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there."
"The rise of capitalism, rather than delivering improvements in human welfare, was associated with plummeting wages, a reduction in human stature, and a marked upturn in the incidence of famine. Progress did not begin until the 1880s in the European core, and the 20th century in the European periphery, the latter roughly a century later than the standard narrative suggests."
"While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of . This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and ’s Ethiopia."
"If the whole population were to consume and emit like Ireland and Switzerland, we would be living on a dead planet right now."
"(MMT) is getting a lot of attention these days, thanks in large part to the excellent work of and Nathan Tankus, two of the movement’s most effective communicators. Over the past few weeks a number of people inspired by their work have asked me whether there is scope for thinking about from a MMT perspective. My answer: definitely. In fact, the two belong together."
"Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place."
"We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet's history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution."
"A few years ago, virtually no one was talking about this . . . everyone just assumed that the web of life would always be intact. Now the situation is so severe that the United Nations has set up a special task force to monitor it: the (IPBES). In 2019, it published its first – a groundbreaking assessment of the planet's living species, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists. It found an accelerating rate of global , unprecedented in human history."
"It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialization from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance."
"Capitalism rose on the back of organized violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies. It did not put an end to serfdom; rather, it put an end to the progressive revolution that had ended serfdom. Indeed, by securing virtually total control over the means of production, and rendering peasants and workers dependent on them for survival, capitalists took the principles of serfdom to new extremes. People did not welcome this new system with open arms; on the contrary, they rebelled against it. The period 1500 to the 1800s, right into the Industrial Revolution, was among the bloodiest, most tumultuous times in world history."
"The same process of enclosure and forced played out over and over again during the period of European colonization – not just under the British but under the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch as well ... In all these cases scarcity was created, purposefully, for the sake of capitalist expansion."
"It's no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don't weep. We don't get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren't in here; they aren't part of us. It is not surprising that we behave this way. After all, this is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself."
"Of course, we also have to think about the role of population going forward. The more the , the more difficult this challenge will be. As we approach this question, it's crucial - as always - that we focus on underlying structural drivers. Many women around the world do not have control over their bodies and the number of children they have. Even in liberal nations women come under heavy social pressure to reproduce, often to the point where those who choose to have fewer or no children are interrogated and stigmatised. Poverty exacerbates these problems considerably. And of course capitalism itself creates pressures for population growth: more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers. These pressures filter into our culture, and even into national policy: countries like France and Japan are offering incentives to get women to have more children, to keep their economies growing."
"In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population."
"is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy consumption throughout the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the publics goods that people need to thrive. It is the first step toward a more ecological civilisation. Of course, doing this may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that's okay, because GDP isn't what matters. Under normal circumstances, this might cause a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing. It's a disaster. Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn't need growth in the first place. An economy that's organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than around the constant accumulation of capital."
"Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the twenty-first century must articulate a new demand: a demand for radical abundance."
"From this perspective, I cannot help but feel that degrowth is, ultimately, a process of decolonisation. Capitalist growth has always been organised around an expansionary territorial logic. As capital pulls ever-increasing swathes of nature into circuits of accumulation, it colonises lands, forests, seas, even the atmosphere itself. For 500 years, capitalist growth has been a process of enclosure and dispossession. Degrowth represents a reversal of this process. It represents release. It represents an opportunity for healing, recovery and repair."
"When I set out to write this book, I worried about using degrowth as a central frame. It is only a first step, after all. But as I think about the journey we've been on, I wonder if it is also more than that. Degrowth provides a way for us to approach this challenge. It stands for de-colonisation, of both lands and peoples and even our minds. It stands for the de-enclosure of commons, the decommodification of public goods, and the de-intensification of work and life. It stands for the de-thingification of humans and nature, and the de-escalation of ecological crisis. Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that's fizzing with life."
"Today, some 4.3 billion people – more than 60 per cent of the – live in debilitating poverty, struggling to survive on less than the equivalent of $5 per day. Half do not have access to enough food. And these numbers have been growing steadily over the past few decades. Meanwhile, the wealth of the very richest is piling up to levels unprecedented in human history. As I write this, it has just been announced that the eight richest men in the world have as much wealth between them as the poorest half of the world's population combined."
"The plunder of Latin America left in its wake. In India, 30 million died of . Average living standards in India and China, which had been on a par with Britain before the colonial period, collapsed."
"From his base on , the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he forced the local inhabitants – the – to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so would have their hands chopped off or were hunted down and killed. Men were forced to spend their lives in mines, stripping the mountains in search of gold. Up to a third of workers died every six months. Within two years of the Spanish invasion, some 125,000 people had been killed - half the island's population. Most of the remaining inhabitants of Hispaniola were forced into slave labour on plantations. A few decades later, only a few hundred Arawaks remained alive."
"Economists often speculate that the failed to develop because of a lack of capital. But there was no such lack. The wealth that might have provided the capital for development (precious metals in Latin America and surplus labour in Africa) was effectively stolen by Europe and harnessed to the service of Europe's own development. The global South could theoretically have developed as Europe did were it not for the plunder of its resources and labour, and were it not for the fact that it was forced by Europe to supply raw materials while importing manufactured goods. Whether or not they would or should have done so is another matter, of course - after all, much of European-style development required violence towards other lands and other peoples. But the point remains: it is impossible to examine the economic growth of the West without looking at the base on which it drew."
"When the CIA made clear that they would back a coup, General - who was upset with President Sukarno for supporting policies that undermined the military's power - offered to lead it. In 1965, with the aid of weapons and intelligence from the United States, Suharto between 500,000 and 1 million of Sukarno's supporters in one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. By 1967, Sukarno's base had been either eliminated or intimidated into submission, and Suharto took control of the country. His military regime - which ruled until 1998 - was open to Western corporate interests."
"As it turns out, making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer. Nor does it stimulate economic growth, which is the sole justification of . In fact, quite the opposite is true: since the onset of neoliberalism, the rich countries of the have seen growth rates fall from an average of 3.5 per cent during the 1960s and 1970s down to an average of 2 per cent during the 1980s and 1990s. As the numbers show, neoliberalism has failed as a tool for - but it has worked brilliantly as a tool for restoring power to the wealthy elite."
"If we dig behind the rhetoric, it becomes clear that Western support for right-wing coups had little to do with Cold War ideology, and certainly nothing to do with promoting democracy (quite the opposite!); the goal, rather, was to defend Western economic interests. The veil of the Cold War has obscured this blunt fact from view."
"People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of . The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral s – with reams of new laws, backed up by the of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the has known ever since the in 1842, when British gunboats invaded China in order to knock down China's , free trade has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and ."
"To get a sense of how extreme is: if we all were to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent of 3.4 earths."
"Scientists tell us that up to 140,000 species of plants and animals are disappearing each year due to our of the Earth's ecosystems. This rate of extinction is 100 to 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution - so fast that scientists have classed this as the event in the planet's history, with the last one having occurred some 66 million years ago."
"was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent. It tallies up all money-based activity, but it doesn't care whether that activity is useful or destructive."
"While global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, the number of people living in poverty, below $5 per day, has increased by more than 1.1 billion. Why is this? Because past a certain point, GDP growth begins to produce more negative outcomes than positive ones – more than wealth."
"In light of this, perhaps we should regard countries like Costa Rica not as underdeveloped, but rather as appropriately developed. We should look at societies where people live long and happy lives at low levels of income and consumption not as backwaters that need to be developed according to Western models, but as exemplars of efficient living – and begin to call on rich countries to cut their excess consumption."
"Rather than submitting to plans handed down by central governments in distant capitals, people are using to make decisions about their resources and environments, seeking regeneration and harmony with their surrounding ecology. In the Middle East, communities in the mountains of northern Iraq and in in Syria are experimenting with similar ideas."
"The Reagan and Thatcher administrations eventually came to power on platforms that promised to enhance individual freedoms by liberating capitalism from the 'shackles' of the state – reducing taxes on the rich, cutting state spending, privatizing utilities, deregulating financial markets, and curbing the power of unions. After Reagan and Thatcher, these policies were carried forward by putatively progressive administrations such as Clinton's in the USA and Blair's in Britain, thus sealing the new economic consensus across party lines."
"The growing economic power of the richest percentiles translated directly into increased political power, as they gained new influence over elections. In the USA, the collapse of as a result of neoliberal reforms has meant that corporations are able to outcompete labour in campaign financing. Their position was further strengthened in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising as an exercise of 'free speech'."
"In their "wide portfolio" of potential actions, the various paths proposed by the IPCC all rely on unproven carbon capture technologies, to enable production and economic growth to continue. Ecological economists point out that the IPCC ignores a much simpler and more obvious alternative: that we find ways to slow or reverse economic growth in the overconsuming countries. "The principle of reducing energy and resource use represents a safer and more ecologically coherent approach to climate mitigation," conclude Jason Hickel and his coauthors. But, thus far, most policy proposals have studiously ignored this option."
"Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity than can be won when the left remain respectful, polite, and deferent. But fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don't care about respecting free speech or the ; they've openly declared their murderous intent towards (and other undesirables) and they'll pursue that goal by any means necessary. In this context, physical resistance is a duty, an act of self-defence, not an unsightly outpost of leftist moral decline. What's more - it works. From the in 1936 to similar confrontations in Lewisham and in London in 1977, physical resistance has time and again protected local populations from racist violence, and prevented a gathering caucus of fascists from making further inroads into mainstream politics."