It’s the end of the world and I don’t feel fine

Fredric Jameson is no longer here to remind us that imagining the end of the world is easier than imagining the end of capitalism, but the just concluded COP29 climate summit has refreshed our memory. Although securing profits is the primary goal of fossil fuel corporations along with the governments that love them, and the end of the world merely a collateral-damage byproduct, the COP29 climate summit once again showed just where priorities lie.

The very location of the summit, Azerbaijan, a country in which oil and gas bring in about 90 percent of its export earnings, is enough to determine what will be deemed a priority, no matter the cheerful statements on the COP29 website.

The 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (as COP29 is formally known) ended with agreements that fall far short of what is necessary to prevent runaway global warming and with no mechanism for ensuring that those inadequate pledges will be met. In other words, business as usual.

This was the second straight climate summit to be held in a major fossil fuel producer, after last year’s COP28 in the United Arab Emirates. That one ended with the world’s governments “encouraged” to “transition away” from fossil fuels while promoting finance capital as the savior. Not to be confused with the achievements of prior climate summits. The 2022 COP27 in Egypt ended with “requests” to “revisit and strengthen” 2030 climate targets. Oh please consider stopping your environmental destruction if it’s not too inconvenient. That was preceded by COP26 in Glasgow failing to enact any enforcement mechanisms; COP25 in Madrid concluding with an announcement of two more years of roundtables; COP24 in Katowice, Poland, promoting coal; and COP23 in Bonn ending with a promise that people will get together and talk some more.

^{The city of Baku, capital of Azerbaijan and site of the COP29 summit.}

You get the idea. And there were more “decisions” at COP29. For example — try not to jump out of your seat in excitement upon reading this — the summit leaders will “undertake a special assessment of access to climate finance at the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (2030) with a view to assessing progress in relation to the matters referred to in paragraphs 21-24 above and identifying further opportunities for enhancing access to climate finance in accordance with the aim of the new collective quantified goal and in line with Article 9, paragraph 9, of the Paris Agreement.” The world’s governments also “Decide to periodically take stock of the implementation of this decision as part of the global stocktake and to initiate deliberations on the way forward prior to 2035, including through a review of this decision in 2030.”

To translate those “decisions” into plain language, the summit concluded with an agreement that more access to finance, including loans, would be nice and that they will gladly check on the world’s progress six years from now, in 2030. Worse, even last year’s goal to “transition away” from fossil fuels — whatever that might mean in practice — was deemed too controversial and thus was jettisoned from final texts, reportedly due to heavy arm-twisting by Saudi Arabia.

Not much of a sense of urgency there. As to the role of finance, it would be useful for us to remember that from 2015, when the Paris Climate Accord was signed, through 2022, 60 of the world’s biggest banks invested US$4.6 trillion in fossil fuel projects. Four United States-based banks were the worst offenders, according to a report by seven environmental organizations, and three Canadian banks are among the top dozen in the world for financing fossil fuels. Each of these are big contributors to fracking and tar sands production. It’s not only companies like Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

If you have money, you can shift the responsibility

The slogan emblazoned on Azerbaijan’s official COP29 website is “In Solidarity for a Green World.” If by “green” is meant money, then that slogan means what it says. On the page listing the climate summit’s accomplishments, the figure of $1.3 trillion is shown as a new commitment. What does this $1.3 trillion consist of? The largest portion, $1 trillion, represents “Financial flows from compliant carbon markets” that may reach that total by 2050. The remaining $300 billion represents a yearly goal of money sent by developed countries to developing countries to subsidize the latter’s work to counteract the effects on them due to global warming.

Let’s take the first portion first. What are “Financial flows from compliant carbon markets”? That is legalistic language disguising that what is meant are so-called “carbon markets” under which polluting advanced-capitalist countries can pay lower-income countries to offset their global-warming activities rather than take measures inside their own countries. The establishment of this “carbon market” was agreed at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015 and took nine years to negotiate. The consummation of those talks does not mean that potential $1 trillion trading value will be money well spent.

In an interview with Inside Climate News, Alden Meyer, a senior consultant at E3G, which describes itself as an “independent climate change think tank,” explained what was agreed:  

“It’s called Article Six of the Paris Agreement, and there’s two major components of it. One is setting up a new sort of international body to allow trading of so-called offsets or credits, where a country that has a hard time meeting the commitments it’s made in their own country might make investments in another country where reductions would be considerably cheaper, and they could count those reductions against their own commitments, even though they weren’t happening in their own territories. … [Carbon trading] benefit[s] richer countries because … they can often be less expensive than making the investments in your own backyard. And so that’s another concern that some developing countries have had about this. They say, basically, you’re taking the benefits of the low hanging fruit in our countries when it comes to emission reductions and using it to avoid cracking down on polluters in your own country.”

So more burden will fall on Global South countries despite the fact that the Global North has contributed vastly more greenhouse-gas emissions to the atmosphere. Even when Global North countries reduce their domestic production of greenhouse gases, their exports have often more than made up the difference. For example, Climate Action Tracker reports that, from 2010 to 2022, United States exported emissions increased 216 percent, Canada’s increased 52 percent and Australia’s increased 40 percent, although Norwegian and British exported emissions have remained stable during this time frame.

They can pledge but they don’t have to pay

And then there is the $300 billion per year commitment to help Global South countries mitigate the effects of global warming. Those countries had been asking for $1 trillion per year from the developed countries of the Global North, but the latter refused to commit to any total until nearly the end of the summit. Two blocs of countries, the Least Developed Countries and the Alliance of Small Island States, are reported to have at one point walked out on the negotiations in frustration. Further, objections from countries including Bolivia, India and Nigeria were overridden, with a last-minute agreement pushed through without the objections getting a hearing. The final communiqué trumpeted the fact that the $300 billion figure tripled previous commitments, but sidestepped that the $300 billion are pledges with no mechanism for fulfillment. Previous similar commitments have either not been fulfilled or have been done only after several years.

Regardless, developing countries saw the $300 billion figure, less than one-third of what they see as needed, as insulting. A United Nations summary of the summit admitted that “India’s representative strongly denounced the new goal, calling it a ‘paltry sum’ and emphasizing, ‘We seek a much higher ambition from the developed countries [and the amount agreed] does not inspire trust that we will come out of this grave problem of climate change.’ ” Sierra Leone said the $300 billion pledge showed “a lack of goodwill” and a representative from a group of small island nations noted, according to the UN summary, “what a very different boat our vulnerable countries are in, compared to the developed countries,” adding that “We are literally sinking.”

The continuing result of the world’s most powerful countries and the countries most dependent on fossil fuel exports catering to fossil fuel company profits is that global temperatures are well on their way to soaring well beyond the 1.5 degree Celsius Paris goal and the 2 degree C. outer limit of avoiding a catastrophic runaway climate. Global temperatures are already approaching 1.5 degrees C. above the pre-industrial average and the past year’s parade of hurricanes, droughts and floods demonstrate a climate already becoming dangerously extreme. Even if all pledges for 2030 were met — and there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure that — global temperatures are forecast to rise 2.6 degrees C. from the pre-industrial average, well beyond the Paris goal and the outer atmospheric limit; even a 1.5 degree rise will surely be destructive.

More ominously, the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency portends a sharp reversal of even the tepid U.S. government’s attempts to address global warming, and the likely ascension of a Conservative government in Canada in 2025 will result in another disastrous reversal given not only that Canadian fossil fuels reserves are significant but that much of it is in the particularly dirty tar sands. The last time there was a Conservative government in Ottawa speaking against tar-sand exploitation was considered a crime. Further, it is worrying that the Conservative government of Alberta, the province where the tar sands are located, has busied itself with denying global warming exists. A report in DeSmog dryly notes:

“Rather than fossil fuel-driven CO2 levels being a grave danger to critical planetary systems, [a party] resolution stated, “the Earth needs more CO2 to support life and to increase plant yields, both of which contribute to the Health and Prosperity [sic] of all Albertans. Almost all delegates voted in favour of wording erroneously stating that current CO2 levels, at 420 parts per million, are “near the lowest level in over 1,000 [sic] years.” This figure is off the mark by about three million years — an era when the Earth was on average about three degrees warmer (up to 20 degrees hotter at higher latitudes) and sea levels were 25 metres higher.”

Maybe we should count the Pentagon as a country

Such resolutions would be too at variance with reality even for COP29 delegates. But their inability to deal with global warming with sufficient seriousness is not only embodied in the results detailed above but that militarism was never mentioned, much less discussed. The U.S. military is “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” according to a Brown University Watson Institute report. These emissions are larger than many mid-sized industrial countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, and greater than all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from iron and steel. The Pentagon, since the 1970s, consistently accounts for nearly 80 percent of total U.S. government energy consumption. The Brown University report says:

“Why does the US military consume so much energy? First, the Pentagon’s fighting ‘tooth’ employs equipment that guzzles fuel at an incredible rate. The logistical ‘tail’ and the installations that support operations are also extremely fuel intensive. Even the military’s non-armored vehicles are notoriously inefficient. For instance, the approximately 60,000 HUMVEEs remaining in the US army fleet get between four to eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel.”

Russia’s war on Ukraine is also a heavy contributor to global warming, New Scientist reports, with the impact of the war causing US$32 billion in damages based on total emissions that are larger than many countries.

Nor can the work of lobbyists be discounted from the dispiriting results of COP29. More than 1,700 oil, gas and coal lobbyists were registered for the summit. But their work might not have been difficult as “Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, was caught on film agreeing to facilitate oil deals at the negotiations,” the Guardian reported. The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has called oil and gas “a gift from God” and made clear his intention that fossil fuel extraction will continue at high rates. Public relations companies working for oil and gas companies also attended in large numbers. Ten public-relations firms alone sent dozens of representatives, with those 10 firms holding at least 91 contracts to boost fossil fuel company reputations, according to a DeSmog report.

Earth is poised to see 2024 become the hottest year since records began, and October 2024 actually exceeded the Paris goal, coming in at 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial average. The Caribbean Sea experienced its warmest temperature on record in October, continuing a trend of high temperatures, which contributed to a highly destructive hurricane season. “It appears unlikely Earth will again see a year in the 20th-century temperature range for many years to come, unless there is major volcanic cooling, a major geoengineering push, and/or a sustained, worldwide effort to reduce fossil-fuel emissions,” concludes Jeff Masters in the Eye on the Storm blog, essential reading for understanding global warming.

Is corporate profit really worth the destruction of Earth’s livability? Continuing business as usual will mean an effective end of the world if by “world” we mean a fully habitable planet with a climate, however variable, within human experience. Quite literally, parts of Earth’s surface could become uninhabitable by the end of the 21st century if global warming continues, separate from rising sea levels, disrupted agriculture and more severe storms. Rather than contemplate an end to capitalist business as usual, much less the end of capitalism before that economic system leads to catastrophic environmental collapse, the world’s industrialists and financiers, and the governments that cater to them, are willing to bring about an end to the world. Or perhaps they do know the consequences but calculate they will be gone before catastrophe happens.

Our descendants — living in a world of flooded cities, food shortages, resource depletion, mass species die-offs, unprecedented human migration and large numbers of people dying should business as usual continue — are not likely to believe that their ruined world would be a fair tradeoff for a handful of industrialists and financiers of the past getting obscenely rich. We live in a global economic system under which it is profitable for a handful of powerful people to profit from the destruction of the environment, and this behavior is richly rewarded. Why should it be? In a rational world, with an economic system geared toward human need rather than the profit of a few, it surely wouldn’t be.

The cost of corporate profit in U.S. health care reaches $2 trillion

As has long been the case, the U.S. health care system is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries. And that expense continues to get larger and more unaffordable.

Just how large is the cost of private profit in health care? Almost two trillion dollars! Unbelievable? It certainly seems so. But that is indeed how much more money the people of the United States spent on health care in 2022 than they would otherwise have spent if the U.S. had a single-payer system. This is the direct result of a health care system that is designed to extract maximum profits rather than deliver health care. A system unique in the world in the extent that corporations such as insurance and pharmaceutical companies are allowed to play such a large role.

Health care spending in the U.S. is so extreme that the spending by the U.S. government alone is higher than the total spending (as a percentage of gross domestic product) of any other country. Incredibly, the government was banned from negotiating drug prices until the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was signed into law, but only some drug prices in some programs can be negotiated, a bountiful windfall for Big Pharma. Spending on health care in the U.S. in 2022 reached 16.6 percent of the country’s GDP with government spending alone accounting for 14 percent of GDP. The country with the next highest total, Germany, saw total health care spending account for 12.7 percent of its GDP.

^{Organizing for health care in Iowa (photo by IowaPolitics.com)}

Where does the total of nearly two trillions dollars come from? To calculate that figure, I took the per capita health care spending of the three largest EU countries — France, Germany and the United Kingdom — and the neighbor of the U.S., Canada, and compared that average of those four countries to U.S. per capita spending, each for 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The composite average for Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom is US$6,613 per capita, converted to U.S. dollars adjusted to create purchasing power parity as reported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Per capita health care spending in the U.S. for 2022 was US$12,555, or not far from double the composite average of the four peer countries to which it is being compared. The U.S. population in 2022 was 333 million, so multiplying that total against the per capita figure gives us a total of $1.979 trillion.

That is the cost of private profit in health care. And that total is steadily increasing. When I last did this exercise, in 2017, I calculated that the excess money paid to obtain health care for United Statesians was $1.4 trillion for the years 2011 to 2016. As a comparison, excess health care spending averaged $1.15 trillion for the period of 2001 to 2010 and $685 billion for the 1990s. Those ever higher insurance premium payments you are making as your employer forces you to shoulder more of the cost each year — if you are lucky enough to even have health insurance — are most definitely not your imagination.

And unlike other countries, where national health care systems cover everybody, there were 27 million people without health insurance in the United States. And for those with insurance, that does not mean the results are something to be proud about.

The most expensive and the worst results

In a survey of 10 countries — the five countries under discussion here along with Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland — the U.S. ranked dead last in health care system performance. This survey was conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, an institution more than 100 years old that supports “independent research on health care” and seeks better health care outcomes. The Commonwealth Fund’s report, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System,” pulled no punches in its conclusion: “The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.”

The Fund assessed the 10 countries’ health care systems through 70 health system performance metrics covering five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health incomes. Among the five broad areas, the U.S. was ranked last in access to care and health outcomes, and next to last in administrative efficiency and equity. Australia came out first among the 10 countries in this survey; interestingly, by a narrow margin Australia spent the least.

Another sobering result of U.S. health care is that United Statesians “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths.” The Commonwealth Fund reports pulls no punches about this sad result:

“The U.S. ranks last on four of five health outcome measures. Life expectancy is more than four years below the 10-country average, and the U.S. has the highest rates of preventable and treatable deaths for all ages as well as excess deaths related to the pandemic for people under age 75. The ongoing substance use crisis and the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S. contribute significantly to its poor outcomes, with more than 100,000 overdose deaths and 43,000 gun-related deaths in 2023 — numbers that are much higher than in other high-income countries.”

The report notes that physicians in the “uniquely complex U.S. system” necessitates that all must “spend enormous amounts of time and effort billing insurers. Denials of services by insurance companies are also common, necessitating burdensome appeals by providers and patients.” In contrast, “High performers on equity, including Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have limits on cost sharing (or in the case of the U.K., no cost sharing at all) to ensure that the ability to pay does not constitute a significant barrier to obtaining needed health services. In Germany, out-of-pocket expenses are capped, with the cost of coverage being income-based.” Australia offers free care in public hospitals, something unimaginable in the U.S., and Canberra regulates medicine costs.

The Commonwealth Fund report points to several factors that make the U.S. health care system perform so poorly, including lack of investment in primary care, administrative inefficiency, consolidation of hospitals, underfunding and decentralization.

There is nothing new here; a 2011 Commonwealth report ranked the U.S. last among 16 high-income, industrialized nations when measuring deaths that could potentially have been prevented by timely access to effective health care.

Delivering profits, not health care

What is not said directly in reports such as the above is the very fact that health care in the U.S. is designed to deliver corporate profits, not health care for individuals. Endlessly propagated capitalist ideology tries to convince us that the private sector is always better than anything provided by a government. So it is ironic indeed that the health care system with the most private-sector involvement performs the worst. But when we stop and think about it in a logical manner, freeing ourselves from ideology, this makes sense. Government doesn’t have to earn a profit; private enterprise expects to and will pack its bags if it doesn’t. Just as privatization invariably results in higher costs and often poorer quality than when the service was provided by a government agency as a public good, health care is provided far more efficiently when in public hands.

It’s the “magic of the market” at work. And if you are in need of health care in the U.S., that magic converts your money into fantastic profits. One big way this magic works is to steer as many seniors into Medicare Advantage. Medicare is the government-funded health care system that all who are 65 years of age and older are eligible for. The Medicare Advantage is a privatization of Medicare whereby insurance companies get their hands on health care money provided by the federal government. A June 2024 article published in Journal of the American Medical Association found that — surprise! — this corporate intervention provides less care at higher cost. 

The three authors of the report, Adam Gaffney, Stephanie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, flatly declare the health insurance industry’s trade group proclamation that Medicare Advantage is a good deal for taxpayers is false. The authors note that the non-partisan agency Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported to the U.S. Congress that Advantage “overpayments added $82 billion to taxpayers’ costs for Medicare in 2023 and $612 billion between 2007 and 2024.”

Following up on this report, Corporate Crime Reporter interviewed Dr. Ana Malinow, who works with National Single Payer, a group working toward a single-payer system in the United States. In this interview, Dr. Malinow said, “The Medicare Advantage companies want to pick the healthiest patients out there, because you know that those patients traditionally are not going to cost you a lot of money.” How it works, she explained, is that Medicare Advantage pays a set amount per patient, with more for sicker patients, so that the incentive is to “make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment.” As a result, “a program devised to help lower health care spending has instead become substantially more costly than the traditional government program it was meant to improve.”

Because of these systematic overpayments, Medicare Advantage is a cheaper option than traditional Medicare. Several of the biggest insurance companies have been charged with fraud by legal authorities, but Dr. Malinow notes that paying fines is merely a cost of business for them. A separate report, by the research group KFF, calculated that insurance companies’ gross margins per enrollee is roughly double the profits made on ordinary group and individual insurance plans.

And providing health insurance is highly profitable. For 2022, UnitedHealth Group reported profits of US$28.4 billion. Cigna had $6.7 billion, Elevance Health made $6 billion and CVS Health made $4.2 billion. “All told, America’s largest health insurers raked in more than $41 billion of profits in 2022,” the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported. Denying care is one way for these insurance companies to boost their profits. The Capital-Star report said, “An American Medical Association survey found 94% of physicians surveyed said that prior authorizations lead to delays in receiving care and 80% said that prior authorizations can lead to treatment abandonment.”

Big Pharma grabs big profits

Let us not leave out the pharmaceutical companies. Another article in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association found that the profit margins for pharmaceutical makers was “significantly greater” than for all others. To determine this, the article’s authors, led by Fred D Ledley, compared the annual profits of 35 large pharmaceutical companies with 357 companies in the S&P 500 Index from 2000 to 2018 using information from annual financial reports. The Big Pharma outfits had gross profit margins (the difference between the cost of goods sold and total revenue) double those of other corporations and net income close to double.

Want more? A report put out by the University of Southern California (not peer-reviewed) found that, adjusted for inflation, pharmaceutical company revenue more than doubled from 1979 to 2018:

“Based on 4,923 firm-year observations, we find that U.S. drugmakers’ sales revenue has increased from $139 billion in 1979 to $321 billion in 2018 (both numbers are in 2018 dollars). A large portion of the increases went to profit, increasing from 15.3% of sales in 1979 to 23.4% of sales in 2018. A much larger increase went to research and development (R&D), which increased from 4.6% of sales in 1979 to 19% of sales in 2018. Expenditures on acquiring drugs developed by other companies also increased from 0.1% of sales in 1979 to 5.2% of sales in 2018. These two categories represent the total costs of developing new drugs, both internally and externally.”

An investigation published by NYRequirements, a provider of health care education, found that the pharmaceutical industry, on a global basis, racked up an astonishing $1.4 trillion in profits for 2022. Pfizer topped the list with $31.4 billion in net income, with five more reporting more than $10 billion. And with that a lot of lobbying to keep themselves in the saddle can be done — Big Pharma spent $372 million on lobbying the U.S. government in 2022. Another €40 million is spent by the pharmaceutical industry to lobby in the EU.

How do these companies grab so much money? Corporate Watch offers five factors:

• Research and development is directed to “patients who are high-value and who will use the drugs long term.” On the other hand, “one-shot vaccines for epidemics that mainly affect poorer countries” are of no interest.
• The patent system prevents cheaper generic medications from being produced so that original manufacturers can collect windfall profits.
• “Price much, much higher than costs.” Although the industry spending 20 percent of revenue on R&D is higher than almost any other industry, “sales cover costs many times over.”
• Big Pharma spends less than it suggests on developing new drugs; most of what they ultimately market was developed in university and government labs, or in those of smaller research companies, and then bought. The U.S. National Health Institutes provides $39 billion a year to universities, medical schools and other research organizations.
• Massive lobbying, both in the U.S. and the European Union.

Corporate Watch provides examples of unconscionable profiteering. They write:

“Insulin usually costs less than $6 a vial to make, but sells for as much as $275 in the US (one example given by the campaign group Patients for Affordable Drugs). In Europe, pharma giant Gilead charged an average of €55,000 for a 12 week Hepatitis C treatment — when pills cost less than €1 per pill to manufacture. Such extreme examples illustrate a general pattern. One academic study found US pharma companies have an average 71% “gross profit” margin on drug sales — the money they make from a drug after the cost of producing it, but before company-wide costs such as marketing, taxes or executive bonuses.”

Medical corporations invent new ways to profit off you

There is one additional culprit in this sad story. Another unique aspect of U.S. health care: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), who are “driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government,” according to a report in The New York Times. The Times report, published in June 2024 and written by Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson, said the job of these pharmacy benefit managers is to reduce costs but “frequently do the opposite.” These PBMs are “middlemen overseeing prescriptions” for more than 200 million people and owned by giant health care companies such as CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group. The Times authors explain: 

“They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees, a New York Times investigation found. Most Americans get their health insurance through a government program like Medicare or through an employer, which pay for two different types of insurance for each person. One type covers visits to doctors and hospitals, and it is handled by an insurance company. The other pays for prescriptions. That is overseen by a P.B.M. The P.B.M. negotiates with drug companies, pays pharmacies and helps decide which drugs patients can get at what price.”

Instead of saving money, more money is extracted. Overcharges for drugs, well beyond ordinary profiteering, are frequent, while small independent drug stores are underpaid, driving them out of business. (The PBMs are responsible for paying pharmacies on behalf of employers.) “[T]he P.B.M.s’ business practices touch virtually every American family,” the Times report says. “Even people who don’t take prescription drugs end up paying higher insurance premiums and taxes as a result of inflated drug costs.”

Perhaps none of the above should come as a shock considering that, last decade, when U.S. life spans were beginning to shorten, this was cheered as a “silver lining” because pension costs would be lower and in this decade, the Covid-19 pandemic was delayed being brought under control due to corporate greed. Huge profits were racked up as governments heavily subsidized newly developed vaccines but the pharmaceutical companies kept all the profits; in the case of Moderna minting several billionaires.

Vaccine makers refused to loosen their patent rights, clinging to intellectual property (IP) law, heavily skewed in their favor, to maintain a monopoly. Capitalist governments have rolled over for corporate interests for decades, making IP laws ever more rigid. It is unconscionable, or should be, when IP rules are used to keep life-saving vaccines away from most of the world’s people. A comprehensive waiver of World Trade Organization rules would have, even if temporary for the duration of the emergency, set aside Big Pharma’s IP rights and allowed all manufacturers of vaccines, wherever they are, to produce Covid-19 vaccines. The governments of India and South Africa proposed, in October 2020, just such a waiver to allow the production of one or more of the Covid-19 vaccines with most of the world’s governments behind them. The world waited in vain; the EU openly and the U.S. more subtly ensured IP rules were not touched. Corporate profits were more important than millions of lives.

What do these numbers and dispiriting results tell us? That health care should be a human right, not a good to be exploited for massive profiteering. The more private capital injects itself into health care, the more expensive it becomes with worse results. When denying care is what boosts profits, should we expect anything different? Some years ago I met a Canadian woman who complained about how much she disliked her country’s health care system. I told her of a friend of mine who had recently died. He had a bad heart and was in need of heart medication but the insurance company refused to allow it for him and he died because of that. “Does that happen in Canada?,” I asked. I was met with silence. It’s one thing to have to wait for medical attention sometimes in a non-emergency situation, upsetting as that can be, and not being able to access health care at all. Tens of millions can’t in the U.S., even those with insurance. 

More than 26,000 die in the United States yearly because of a lack of health insurance and hundreds of thousands go bankrupt due to the costs. That is the price of private profit in health care. Or, more to the point, the price of capitalism.

There are minimum wages, why not a maximum wage?

Why don’t we have a maximum wage? Asking that question is another way of asking why some people can rake in millions while others struggle to earn enough to eat. A maximum wage might be one way to tamp down some of the massive inequality that exists around the world.

The political conditions for a cap on chief executive officer or financier earnings don’t currently exist, so admittedly this is a thought experiment. But why not? There are two ways of going about this idea: Either a flat cap or a ratio of the minimum wage.

Let’s try the first of those two ideas. If the most important job in a given country is the head of government, then that could be a reasonable cap. The salary of the United States president is US$400,000. So if the president is the most important job, nobody should receive pay that is equal or higher. That could be enforced simply: All salary above $399,999 is taxed at 100 percent with no deductions. If a company wants to give a multi-million dollar salary to an executive and that executive wants the cachet of earning such a sum, he or she doesn’t get to keep all that. Up to $399,999 is taxed at an appropriate rate, and all above that is taken in taxes. And, yes, let’s make that all compensation — salaries, bonuses, stock profits and “golden parachute” payouts.

Under this concept, far more taxes will be collected if companies wish to infer “status” on their leading executives by still providing pay well in excess of the cap, or companies will simply reduce executive compensation to the specified limit and have more money to spend on employees or to reduce the prices of their goods and services because they won’t have to hand out so much money in salaries. In the real world, it would be more likely companies would simply shovel more money into dividend payments and stock buybacks, so some sort of limit on those would have to be worked out. It wasn’t that long ago that stock buybacks were illegal in the U.S.

^{(Artwork by Stevebidmead)}

Let’s try this with more of the world’s advanced capitalist countries. The Canadian prime minister makes C$379,000 per year. The British prime minister is eligible to earn £172,153. The president of France makes €142,000. The German chancellor earns approximately €362,277 per year, one of the highest compensations for any political leader. The Australian prime minister’s annual salary is A$587,000. And for good measure, the European Commission president is scheduled to receive €323,652, higher than most heads of national governments.

It is safe to say that anyone earning close to the above salaries isn’t going to need to go dumpster-diving anytime soon. Surely enough to live comfortably.

How much can one person possibly spend?

Nonetheless, the idea of a maximum wage goes against the very concept of capitalism. The object of capitalism is for capitalists to accumulate more. A macabre race: How could any human being spend billions, tens of billions, of dollars/euros/pounds?

Before we delve further into the mind-boggling inequality, let’s play with the second idea above, that of establishing a maximum wage as a ratio of the minimum wage. Implementing this would surely mean a big raise for low-wage workers! The United States federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour. For a 40-hour week that would be $290 per week or the grand sum of $15,080 for the year, assuming the full-time minimum-wage worker received vacation pay (or worked all 52 weeks of the year). A salary that would mean homelessness for anyone who had to survive on such a wage with no family support.

The Canadian federal minimum wage is $17.31 per hour. That would be $36,005 per year. For purposes of comparison, using the October 12 foreign-exchange rate of C$1=US73 cents, a Canadian working full-time for a year at the federal minimum wage would make the equivalent of US$26,145, or 73 percent more than his or her U.S. counterpart. (Some state and provincial minimum wages are higher.) The British minimum wage is £11.44 per hour. That adds up to an annual rate of £23,795, the equivalent of US$31,172 or about double his or her U.S. equivalent (calculated at the October 12 rate of £1=US$1.31).

If we were to establish a maximum wage as five or even 10 times the minimum wage, a lot of people would be taking a big cut in pay, especially in the U.S., where the minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009. That minimum wage has lost a third of its value in that time. So if some of those higher wages out there are to be preserved, the minimum wage would have to be greatly increased unless an extremely large ratio were selected under this scenario.

In the United States, home of inequality that stands out even by the standards of the Global North, chief executive officers were paid 290 times more than the average employee in 2023, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. To put those salaries in further perspective, the EPI reports that CEOs were paid nearly 10 times as much as the top 0.1% of U.S. wage earners in 2022. “Rising CEO pay does not reflect a rising value of skills or contributions to firms’ productivity,” the EPI said. “What has changed over the years is CEOs’ use of their power to set their own pay. In economic terms, this means that CEO compensation reflects substantial ‘rents’ (income in excess of actual productivity).”

We’re not talking about chump change here. The median pay of a chief executive officer at an S&P 500 company was $16.3 million in 2023. (The S&P 500 are 500 of the biggest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges.) Nine CEOs made more than $40 million last year, led by Hock E. Tan of Broadcom Inc., who “earned” $161,826,161.

Billions, not millions, for hedge-fund managers

Even these highest-earning chief executive officers are small potatoes next to the biggest earners among hedge-fund managers. The pay for the 25 hedge-fund managers who drew the highest compensation totaled US$26.085 billion for 2023, or an average of $1.043 billion per person. The median earner made $750 million. Topping this list, compiled by Institutional Investor, is Chris Hohn of TCI Fund Management, who “earned” $2.9 billion. Ten other managers made at least $1 billion.

These astounding totals are nothing new. For example, for 2014, when I last checked in with this annual compilation, hedge funds for the sixth consecutive year had fallen short of the average stock-market performance, returning for that year a composite average of three percent. Of the 25 hedge-fund managers who made the “Rich List” that year, 12 had returns below the 2014 average. Yet these 25 hedge-fund managers racked up a collective $11.6 billion that year — and that was considered an off-year. To return to 2023, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 14 percent and the S&P 500 rose about 24 percent. We’ll cut the difference between the two most important U.S. stock-market benchmarks and declare that 19 percent represents the average gain. Did those 25 top “earners” do much better? In other words, these moguls must have earned somebody serious money to collect such enormous paychecks. In fact, that was not the case. Only six of the 25 beat that 19 percent average gain and one equaled it.

In other words, despite the hype these “masters of the universe” like to throw around, a random collection of stock picking would have done better than most of these 25 financial titans. But there is no admitting wrong in finance capital evidently. There is plenty of money to be made, as these compensations demonstrate, and of course there is always money to be thrown at financiers, such as the $10 trillion thrown at financiers in the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. That was money created by the central banks of five of the world’s biggest economies for the purpose of artificially propping up financial markets — and that total represents only one program of the many used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada. And the pandemic itself was a wonderful opportunity for the wealthiest. In just three months, from April to July 2020, the world’s billionaires added $2.2 trillion to their wealth. During the first seven months of 2020 alone, technology and health industry billionaires saw their wealth increase by about $150 billion.

Your pay of course is rather less than these gaudy figures and it hasn’t risen much. If you are lucky, you might have received raises to keep you even with inflation; many didn’t get even that. It is not as if you are not working hard. The St. Louis branch of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which maintains a useful database of economic statistics, reveals that labor productivity has nearly tripled since 1970 while wages increased only a little more than 50 percent. Even the St. Louis Fed admits, “Since the early 1970s, there’s been an apparent disconnect between labor productivity and real wages.”

Greed may be good for those at the top of the economic pyramid, but not for the rest of us. Apologists for this extraordinary inequality would like us to believe that this is somehow natural, but it isn’t. Capitalist markets are simply the aggregate interests of the most powerful financiers and industrialists, and those interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the vast majority of humanity. It is long past time for class warfare to cease being a one-sided affair.

U.S., opposition claims on Venezuela election fall apart under scrutiny

Although any country that challenges domination by United States corporate or military power will inevitably be the target of a sustained demonization campaign, the lies consistently issued in a torrent against Venezuela are beyond the usual level of invective. Venezuela is the most lied-about country in the corporate press of the Global North, especially in U.S. corporate media outlets.

That Venezuela has sought to align its economy to benefit its own people, instituting an impressive array of social services, health programs and political structures to facilitate grassroots participation, has drawn the consistent ire of U.S. authorities. An unrelenting cascade of lies is necessary to generate public support for the unrelenting campaign targeting the Bolivarian Revolution.

We’ve had more than a month of daily screeds declaring the Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro has lost his bid for re-election. How is this determined? The U.S. government declared that Maduro must go, continuing an offensive that began as soon as took office following the untimely death of Hugo Chávez. That seems to be all the “proof” needed. The right-wing opposition to Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) screamed that it would not recognize the results of the July 28 election months ahead of time — if they were so confident of victory why denigrate the election in advance? — and predictably screamed louder when the results were announced.

Before we dive into the details, which leaves the opposition’s case too weak to be sustained, let’s think about a parallel. Donald Trump and his fascist wanna-be followers said any result in which he lost to Joe Biden would not be recognized and four years later they continue to insist on a Trump victory. Even the most cursory examination shows the speciousness of the Trump gang’s complaints, and every court challenge has been swiftly swatted down. Or in Brazil, another aspirant to a dictatorship, Jair Bolsonaro, similarly claimed the vote was rigged; nobody other than his hard-core followers takes such claims seriously.

^{Venezuelans rally for the PSUV (photo by Francisco Trías/Tricontinental)}

Why then should we take the claims of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) opposition coalition and its candidate, Edmundo González, seriously? The PUD has yet to provide definitive proof that it won the election, much less with an absurd 70 percent of the vote. Given the large reservoir of support for the Maduro administration and the PSUV, the PUD would have given itself a modicum of respectability had it conjured a more plausible total, say just above 50 percent. Just on the basis of the 70 percent claim, already our eyebrows should be raised. Using the work of investigative reporters who have delved into the alleged voting records, which will be discussed below, the opposition’s claims fall apart. But even without that investigation, what locales have been presented? Undoubtedly, there are neighborhoods where the PUD did score 70 percent or perhaps more. But how representative are those? Another question not asked. But the investigations reveal that even most of these alleged voting records posted online by the PUD are doctored. In plain language, the evidence indicates they are not real.

To be sure, it would be for the best for Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) to post the detailed records so many, not only the opposition, demands. Under Venezuelan law, the CNE had 30 days to post those results and we are past that deadline. An online newspaper that supports the Venezuelan government, the Orinoco Tribune, on September 3 issued a call for the prompt publishing of the detailed election results, noting the cyberattacks and attacks on the country’s electricity system that undoubtedly have hampered the CNE’s work but nonetheless pointing out alternatives to publishing on its website that should be utilized promptly. These delays only add doubt to an already controversial situation.

Interestingly, but of course not surprisingly, there has been not a word in U.S. corporate media about the one party that was blocked from a candidate of its own choosing — the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). A ruling by the Supreme Court shamefully imposed a new leadership on the PCV, which the party sternly denounced as an illegal intervention in its internal affairs. The PCV said the seven people the court imposed as its new leadership are not party members and thus cannot occupy party offices. As a result of this gross interference, the PCV did not run a proper campaign because the imposed leadership backs Maduro. Even firm supporters of the PSUV government should condemn this meddling.

Why did the opposition refuse to participate in the examination?

What stands out here is that the PUD would not provide its alleged evidence to the Supreme Court of Venezuela after President Maduro asked that the high court examine the results announced by the CNE. There were eight other candidates other than President Maduro and Ambassador González. Yet Ambassador González was only one of the 10 candidates to refuse to provide the ballot records in their possession. All nine of the other candidates did so. Instead, the PUD created a website and posted their alleged ballots online, a violation of Venezuelan law that states only the CNE, an independent governmental branch, is authorized to do so. (How these ballot records are created and why candidates and parties would have them will be explained below.)

The Orinoco Tribune reported on August 23, in an article detailing the process the Supreme Court followed, “the magistrates concluded that the bulletins issued by the CNE were supported by the voting records transmitted by each of the voting machines and are in full agreement with the data provided by the national aggregation centers.” This was predictably denounced by Ambassador González, the PUD and the PUD’s leader, María Corina Machado, who has been involved in more than one plot to forcibly unseat the government. It can also be noted that the PUD includes the two discredited corporate parties, Democratic Action and COPEI, that had alternated in power until the sweeping Chávez victory of 1998 brought about the Bolivarian Revolution, which those parties have bitterly opposed every since, to the point of endorsing the 2002 coup that unseated Chávez for two days before popular resistance put him back in power.

If the PUD really possesses evidence of fraud, as they continue to loudly assert, why won’t they put forth their evidence? Their refusal should raise doubts, but evidently not for the corporate media, faithful stenographers of the U.S. government and U.S. multinational capital on all things Venezuela. Notably, all other candidates attended an August 2 Supreme Court hearing, held as part of the electoral audit process. At this hearing, all presidential candidates were formally notified that they were required to submit “all required legal documents of juridical relevance,” including all ballot records.

^{Venezuela remains in the cross-hairs (photo courtesy of Venezuelanalysis)}

Other candidates contesting the presidential election confirmed their participation in the Supreme Court’s examination. One of those candidates, Claudio Fermín of Soluciones, called for all candidates to back their claims with evidence. He said, “What is not comprehensible is that some claim to have the voting records [that backed their electoral victory] but do not submit them [to the court]. The instance to resolve this matter is the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, not social media or a virtual court, and much less the heads of state or ambassadors of six or seven foreign powers.”

One of the reasons the far right opposition cites for its alleged landslide victory are polls that supposedly predicted a González landslide victory. But whose polls? The poll cited was produced by an outfit called Edison Research. It has been reported that Edison Research is a “firm that is closely linked to the US government and does work for US state propaganda outlets that were founded by the CIA,” according to an Orinoco Tribune report. The Edison exit poll forecast a 65 percent share for Ambassador González. The Tribune report noted that the polling firm Hinterlaces, which the newspaper called “the most respectable independent firm in the country,” estimated that President Maduro would receive 54.6 percent of the vote in its exit poll. This latter exit poll has of course been ignored by the corporate media. According to the Tribune, Edison’s top clients include the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, each of which is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. The original funder of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is the Central Intelligence Agency.

Are the ballots published online by the Unitary Platform legitimate?

Let us now turn to the ballot records published online by the PUD that the far right coalition claims reveals irregularities in the CNE’s announced vote totals. A Spanish investigative reporter, Román Cuesta, examined the PUD documents from Tinaquillo, a city in the state of Cojedes, which he chose at random. Mr. Cuesta’s results were detailed by Misión Verdad, which describes itself as a consortium of independent researchers. According to Mr. Cuesta, of the 61 documents representing 61 polling stations, 52 were faked. These 52 documents contained “irregularities such as flat signatures, presumably false signatures, incomplete QR codes and the lack of the digital signature code of the voting machine.” Furthermore, Misión Verdad reported, “He also highlighted irregular patterns and signs of forgery in the signatures found, which in several cases look more like a free drawing than a personal signature. Once again, the lack of signatures was present, a serious irregularity in an electoral record that claims to be genuine.”

Mr. Cuesta found that “85% of the records from the municipality of Tinaquillo have problems with signatures, incomplete QR codes and a complete lack of machine codes.” These irregularities are significant, Misión Verdad reports:

“The problem of QR codes and machine codes is especially important since, due to an incomplete QR code, or the absence of codes, said document cannot offer reliable information about a polling station and, consequently, cannot be verified. This gives rise to the presumption of data tampering or editing of the opposition ‘records’, as established by the metadata analysis. If these have been edited and new numbers have been added to favour Edmundo González Urrutia, by eliminating the QR codes and codes from the machine, the information will be unverifiable.”

^{The Bosque de el Valle in Mérida state (photo by Jorge Paparoni)}

In reporting on the PUD’s problematic documents, the Spanish online newspaper Diario Red said many opposition documents lack the signatures of witness from the participating parties as well as those of the operators of the machines used in the process, contrary to Venezuela electoral law that these signatures are mandatory (and that any party observers may record any reservations they may have). Furthermore, in “hundreds of cases,” signatures appear to be forgeries, because “the signatures of the members of these electoral tables appeared duplicated and when comparing them, it was evident that the shape of the letters and the movement patterns pointed to a possible forgery” and that stamps and fingerprint scans are often placed on top of signatures, making it impossible to verify them. There are also differences in the spelling of names printed on ballots and how those names were signed.

Questions about the PUD documents had already been raised — the Diario Red report says that “Several opposition parties have already complained that the results of their votes do not match those they posted.” The Diario Red report concludes with a damning summation:

“The opposition’s strategy included several parallel maneuvers, essential for the coup to be successful. One of them was based on the publication of this page full of manipulated minutes, after making the counting process difficult with computer attacks on the Venezuelan electoral bodies, to create the favorable climate inside and outside the country.”

Do analyses of voting trends provide support for the opposition claims?

Two analyses of Venezuelan voting patterns, comparing the turnout and results of the July 28 election with two decades of past voting also raise doubts about the opposition claims. Of course, voting patterns can change and any individual election can result in a change from past elections. But even President Maduro’s total of 52 percent on 6.4 million votes, as announced by the CNE, represents a weaker showing than past presidential elections for the PSUV candidates. Ambassador González polled 43 percent on 5.3 million votes. Only one other candidate reached even 1 percent.

How do these figures comport with Venezuelan voting patterns, as compared to the vote totals asserted by the PUD opposition bloc? A detailed analysis published in Venezuelanalysis, noting President Maduro’s support declining from 68 percent in 2018, asks: “Does this suggest that Maduro’s popularity is waning and that he could not have possibly won the 2024 vote? Not necessarily.” The major opposition bloc boycotted the 2018 election and the resulting abstentions swelled the percentage for the PSUV and resulted in the lowest participation level of any presidential election going back to the late 1990s. For the 2024 election, the 6.4 million votes cast for President Maduro represents a decline from recent presidential elections but is within reasonable range of those results. The lowest total of any election since the 1998 election of Chávez was the 4.4 million votes cast in the 2007 constitutional referendum that the PSUV government lost by two percentage points, on a turnout similar to the 2024 presidential election. Yet the PUD claims that President Maduro won only 3.3 million votes.

Of course, voting totals for an incumbent can decline, sometimes sharply. But is PUD’s paltry total realistic? The Venezuelanalysis analysis finds it is not. “[T]he 6.40 million votes for Maduro’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) on July 28 is entirely plausible, while the insane claim of the fictitious U.S.-driven sweep is not at all convincing. On the contrary, the figures show that the only fraud consists of the opposition’s posturing,” the analysis concludes. It should be noted that Venezuelanalysis is consistently an excellent source of information; although it is broadly supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution it also routinely publishes articles critical of the PSUV.

^{Hugo Chávez swearing in as Venezuela president in 2013 (photo by AVN, Prensa Presidencial/Venezuelanalysis)}

A separate analysis, published by Misión Verdad, also notes that the 3.3 million vote total put forth by the PUD opposition would be wildly out of line with all previous voting patterns. Such a total would represent a dramatic decline in government support despite the fact that a far smaller decline was seen from 2013 to 2018, when Venezuela’s economy, under severe stress due to U.S. sanctions, was in far worse shape. A vote total of 3.3 million would represent “a notably adverse national context or with such a serious negative accumulation that it would have implied the rupture of the cohesion of the Chávista forces and their support base in a deep, generalized and extended way. A party could consolidate its support base only in extraordinary circumstances. The 2018-2024 period has not seen such upheavals.” And although difficulties certainly remain for Venezuelans, for this election, “the exchange rate was stabilized, hyperinflation was stopped, and price increases were minimized,” Misión Verdad writes. Thus, a significant drop in support would be more plausible for 2018 than for this year.

Additionally, the grassroots base of the PSUV remains intact. “There are more than 5 million active militia members, who are fully identified with Chavismo,” Misión Verdad writes. “The PSUV party has an organizational structure of 300 thousand street and community leaders.” Adding “100,000 social and community organizations, parties and movements of various kinds that form a support base,” outside the PSUV (the PSUV technically ran as the largest component of the Great Patriotic Pole), the Misión Verdad analysis estimates a base of at least 6 million, meaning that an implausible half of the engaged Chávista movement would have not voted or voted for the opposition, something that has never come remotely close to happening. Finally, because the PSUV base routinely turns out for presidential elections, while opposition voters are much less consistent, the opposition does better in high-turnout elections. But the July 28 election did not see a high turnout; with 58 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot, it falls in the broad middle of historic turnouts.

It might also be noted that the PUD’s program of dismantling the social advances of the Bolivarian Revolution and selling off the country’s assets, including privatizing the state oil company, are widely disliked, certainly by the Chávista base that hardly could be persuaded to vote for destroying all that has been built over 25 years.

Does Venezuela still have its “best in the world” election system?

Admittedly, that is a subjective question without a definitive answer, but it can be noted that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, then at the helm of the Carter Center, once called the Venezuelan election system “the best in the world.” To support that assessment, the Carter Center said in 2012:

“One of the key aspects of the security control mechanisms involves the construction of an encryption key — a string of characters — created by contributions from the opposition, government, and [National Electoral Council], which is placed on all the machines once the software source-code has been reviewed by all the party experts. The software on the machines cannot then be tampered with unless all three parties join together to ‘open’ the machines and change the software. In addition, each voting system machine has its own individual digital signature that detects if there is any modification to the machine. If the voting count is somehow tampered with despite these security mechanisms, it should be detectable … because of the various manual verification mechanisms.”

Sadly, the Carter Center within a day of the July 28 election, denounced the results, asserting that it “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” The Center based this on the CNE’s “failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station,” although Venezuela law allows for 30 days for those results to be published, not one day. The Center asserted that there were “relatively few places of registration” but acknowledged that “Venezuelan citizens turned out peacefully and in large numbers to express their will on election day.”

That is a strong contrast with the report issued by the National Lawyers Guild, an organization of U.S. lawyers who also had observers in Venezuela. On July 29, the Guild said its “delegation observed a transparent, fair voting process with scrupulous attention to legitimacy, access to the polls, and pluralism.” In an August 9 statement, the Guild announced that it “disputes repeated Carter Center press statements” and that the Center has failed to use necessary “care and caution” in its statements. The Carter Center has shifted strongly to the right and now mirrors U.S. government policy. In the August 9 statement, the National Lawyer Guild issued this summary:

“It appears that Carter Center leadership has shifted to the right over the last several years, impacting its overall work in the US and around the world.  The Center’s Chief Executive Officer, Paige Alexander, worked for [the United States Agency for International Development] for over 15 years, now called “the new CIA.”  She also sits on the southeast chapter board of the widely discredited Anti-Defamation League, which as recently as 2017 advised local police to plant undercover agents in anti-racist organizations in the US. A recent Center for Constitutional Rights report demonstrated how they use counterterrorism laws to target Palestinian solidarity organizers in the U.S., undermining free speech and civil rights. Jennie K. Lincoln, the Center’s senior advisor on Latin America and the Caribbean, is a former consultant with the Organization of American States, from which Venezuela withdrew in 2017 after repeated OAS attempts to undermine Venezuelan democracy and foment instability. Although we recognize that the Carter Center’s Democracy Program is praised for its election monitoring across the world, we are concerned that their funding sources, which include the US State Department, USAID, EU and UK government, make them vulnerable to imperialist political pressure. This may explain the hastiness of the Center in issuing its various statements and paralleling the US news cycle.”

The Guild also took exception with the Center’s statement that voting was peaceful, saying that in the last hours of voting, “violent mobs targeted polling stations across the country to prevent the counting of the voting receipts and the distribution of the tallies” and that the Center “also failed to note the targeted attacks on election observers.” These violent disruptive activities were observed first-hand by its observers, the Guild said. Nor has the Center made any reference to the “violence unleashed by the US-backed opposition,” with attacks on buses, security personnel, a hospital and the murder of two PSUV supporters. It should also be noted that the Agency for International Development is notorious for its political interference in countries around the world. 

How does the Venezuelan election system work?

Separate detailed explanations have been published online by Venezuelanalysis and Orinoco Tribune. Here we will briefly summarize these explanations.

According to Venezuelanalysis,voters go to the polls “with their national ID card with their unique ID number, photo, and fingerprint on.” No other identification is needed. Biometric authentication is used to activate voting machines. Votes are stored on the machines in random order to further ensure the integrity of votes. But prior to the actual vote, an extensive process is used to safeguard the vote, Venezuelanalysis writes:

“Venezuela’s entire electoral process has and will go through 16 different audits per process. These audits include auditing of the electoral register, the software, the voting books, the hardware, etc. Each audit is not only presided over by international observers, but also representatives of each participating political party. It is common for representatives from right-wing parties which later criticize the electoral process to make use of their right to send representatives to each audit, signing that they are happy with proceedings at the end.”

After voting on a machine, there is a physical printout that voters can check to confirm their vote was recorded accurately, and the printed receipt is deposited in a box, which can be monitored by any representative, so that results as recorded electronically can be confirmed. The vote itself was witnessed by international observers. The paper printouts are integral to the system, Venezuelanalysis writes:

“Once tally scrutinization on the machine finishes, a random paper ballot audit is announced where the machines to be audited are randomly selected drawing numbers, and the machine’s serial number is recorded. 53% of all voting machines in the country are audited on voting day before totalisation. This audit is public (a citizens audit) meaning that members of the community can come into the voting center to observe and corroborate the process. The audit checks totalisation tallies per candidate between the electronic result and the physical paper receipts in the box which is now opened. … The audit report is signed by election poll staff and observers from each party present, then sealed and handed to the military for delivery to the CNE. Copies of the report are handed over to the representatives of the two highest vote-getters.”

In its report detailing the election process, the Orinoco Tribune noted several steps that are taken, including audits of the machines and their software, and verifications of eligible voters. The system that the Carter Center earlier found excellent continues to be used.

Will foreign support swing behind the election results?

The unrelenting U.S. government campaign against the return of President Maduro to Miraflores Palace — the Biden administration had made it abundantly clear it would not accept any result other than the one it wanted — seems to have had an effect. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, although issuing tepid calls to respect Venezuela’s sovereignty, have called for a re-vote, implying that the results of July 28 should not be recognized. Lula, for whatever reason, seems to have lost his nerve and perhaps has momentarily forgotten the long history of U.S. imperialism and interference in Latin America, including U.S. participation in the 1964 coup that brought a brutal military dictatorship to power in order that the Brazilian economy be oriented toward U.S. goals.

Less surprising is the condemnations issued by Chile President Gabriel Boric, who has steadily moved rightward since winning election on a wave of left and left-center support. President Boric said he refuses to recognize President Maduro’s “self-proclaimed” victory, saying he has “no doubt” there was electoral fraud. That echoes the stances taken by the right-wing heads of state in South America, including Argentina. In response, the president of the Communist Party of Chile, Lautaro Carmona, said his party does recognize President Maduro’s victory. The C.P. of Chile is a part of President Boric’s coalition. The party previously said the international community should “refrain from adopting positions that could foster a climate of confrontation.”

A Misión Verdad commentary speculated that condemning President Maduro is a “lifeline” for President Boric, a lifeline needed because of resistance to his rightward turn from within his coalition and intensified pushback by the congressional opposition with elections scheduled for later this year and in 2025. The Chilean right, like its counterparts elsewhere, has furiously denounced the July 28 election results and has demanded President Boric do so; in addition, the U.S. is Chile’s biggest trade partner.

If there is any one certainty in this affair, it is that the unrelenting hostility of the U.S. government will continue. From the Bush II/Cheney administration’s support for the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, to the Obama administration’s declaration of Venezuela as a “a national security threat” to the Trump administration’s repeated threats of a military invasion and escalation of sanctions to the Biden administration’s continuation of his predecessor’s policies — all done with inhumane sanctions that in 2018 alone caused 40,000 deaths with an estimated 300,000 people considered “to be at risk because of lack of access to medicines or treatment.” These sanctions, targeting an entire population, are illegal under both U.S. and international law. The United States is able to enforce its sanctions, and force other countries to comply, because of its stranglehold on the world financial system, the linchpin of which is the use of the U.S. dollar for most international transactions.

The U.S. government possesses a power that no country has ever held, not even Britain at the height of its empire. And that government, regardless of which party or what personality is in the White House or in control of Congress, is ruthless in using this power to impose its will. And that government also covets access to Venezuelan oil on its terms, not on Venezuelan terms. We do well to consider the full spectrum of international interests before drawing conclusions about a Global South country, particularly one long the target of lies, sanctions, coup attempts and imperial maneuvers.

You are not alone if you are out of work

We are endlessly and repetitively treated to sermons on the wonders of capitalism. Everybody will be taken care of, with the proviso that you are willing to work. As I have had frequent cause to note, that a line has to be furiously propagated across every channel speaks to a lack of concrete reality. And as more people, especially young people, see that they have declining possibilities, more questioning inevitably arises.

The only thing worse in capitalism to having a job, however unpleasant, is not having a job. Unemployment benefits are barely at starvation rates and end all too soon. Naturally, that is worse in the United States than most other advanced capitalist countries of the Global North. Six months is the limit set at a rate well less than half of what your wages were in the job you just lost. And given that six months is the average time necessary to secure new employment, that means around half of those collecting unemployment insurance will likely have a spell of no income at all.

Moreover, the official unemployment rates issued by the world’s governments drastically understate how many are in need of full-time, regular work. And, in turn, the number of those with regular employment or seeking regular employment drastically understates the lack of jobs out there.

How large is the shortage of jobs? So large that only a little more than one-third of the world’s workforce has a formal job! To this we will return below.

The official unemployment rates understate the true extent of joblessness because they report only those collecting unemployment benefits and are actively searching for work (often the latter is necessary to qualify for the former). Your unemployment benefits ran out? Congratulations! You are no longer counted as unemployed. Maybe your landlord will not collect the rent until you are employed again since you are no longer an unemployment statistic? No, I suppose not. But if you are out of work, you are far from alone. Just how not alone? Let’s see if we can quantify that, first for a few countries and then for the world.

^{The old Vancouver Stock Exchange Building (photo by mafue)}

The official U.S. employment rate for May 2024 is 4.0 percent. That is certainly far better than the 14.8 percent reported for April 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic forced a closing of much of the economy. But how real is that 4.0 percent statistic? Not at all realistic, even though this is the standard rate faithfully reported by the corporate media every month. That is not to say that the 4.0 percent statistic is wrong, based on the definition used to calculate it. Rather, it is quite inadequate. The better measure is the U-6 statistic that is also issued by the U.S. government but invariably ignored. 

What is the U-6? This number represents all who are counted as unemployed in the “official” rate, plus discouraged workers, the total of those employed part time but not able to secure full-time work and all persons marginally attached to the labor force (those who wish to work but have given up). That figure is 7.4 percent for May. That comes closer to representing the true state of employment — and that 7.4 percent is actually better than the long-term average of 10.1 percent. Typically, the U-6 is somewhere near double the “official” rate.

Even the U-6 statistic doesn’t necessarily fully capture the lack of jobs. A better indication of how many people have found work is the “civilian labor force participation rate.” By this measure, which includes all people age 16 or older who are not in prison or a mental institution, only 62.5 percent of the potential U.S. workforce was actually in the workforce in May 2024. That is a significant drop from the peak of 67.3 percent in May 2000, and the number has steadily drifted downward across the 21st century, except for a short-term drop during the 2020 pandemic that has since been reversed. Want more bad news? The percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product going to wages had fallen to 42.8 percent in 2023. Since 2011, the percentage going to wages has been the lowest it has ever been since the statistic began being tracked in 1929. This decline — the flip side of skyrocketing corporate profits — is long-term. The peak of 52 percent was reached in 1969.

A lack of jobs around the world

In Canada, we find much the same situation. The “official” unemployment rate was 6.2 percent for May 2024. But how high is Canadian unemployment when everybody is counted? The closest Canadian equivalent to the U.S. U-6 rate is the R8, which nonetheless counts people in part-time work, including those wanting full-time work, as “full-time equivalents,” thus underestimating the number of under-employed. The R8 for May is 8.5 percent. What might the actual percentage of Canadians lacking full-time work be? We can extrapolate from an analysis published by The Globe and Mail analyzing unemployment in 2012, which estimated the true unemployment rate for that year to be 14.2 percent as compared to the R8 figure of 9.4 percent. Thus if we apply the same ratio, the true Canadian unemployment rate must be above 13 percent.

Attempting these adjustments for other countries is difficult as statistics equivalent to the U.S. U-6 or Canadian R8 are not generally made available. Britain’s official unemployment rate is reported at 4.4 percent for February to April 2024. That rate counts 1.5 million Britons. According to a BBC report, there are an additional 1.7 million people who “said they wanted a job.” So if we count them, we arrive at a reasonably true unemployment rate of perhaps 9 percent.

The European Union reports an unemployment rate of 6.0 percent. The EU does provide a statistic for those counted as unemployed by the standard measurement, plus others out of work and part-time workers seeking full-time work (although difficult to find) and the latest statistic is 12.3 percent for 2022. Australia is also reluctant to make known the full extent of unemployment. For May 2024, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports an “official” unemployment rate of 4.0 percent and an underemployment rate of 6.7 percent. The latter rate includes part-time workers wishing full-time work. Australia does have an “extended labour force underutilisation” rate but does not seem to make this statistic available. In February 2017, the rate was given as 15.4 percent at a time when the official rate was 5.8 percent, so it is reasonable to estimate the true percentage of Australians without full-time work is more than 13 percent.

The bottom line as we sort out all these statistics is this: Capitalism does not provide anywhere near enough jobs. We have thus far examined countries among the Global North. Not surprisingly, the numbers get considerably worse when we zoom out to examine the state of the world as a whole.

Just how unable is the world capitalist system’s ability to provide for working people? As mentioned above, only a little more than one-third of the world’s workers have secured regular employment. Hard to believe? The numbers are there. The International Labour Organization published a report, “World Employment and Social Outlook,” in May 2024 that calculates the total of the world’s formal workers is 1.48 billion. That doesn’t mean, of course, that all those folks earn an adequate wage — we can safely assume that is far from the case — but these at least have regular employment. Those workers represent only 38 percent of the world’s workforce. To put that 1.48 billion total in perspective, the number of workers with only informal employment is 2.03 billion and there are another 402 million without work at all. This last statistic is fairly comparable to the U.S. U-6 statistic — the 402 million are the total of those “officially” counted as unemployed, plus all those without work who do want a job. That works out to a global unemployment rate of 10.3 percent. Those with only informal employment constitute another 52 percent of the world’s workforce.

It’s worse in the Global South and for women

What sort of system fails so drastically to provide the means to earn a living? And as capitalism’s relentless, uncontrollable competition continually intensifies, and thus the ever-present mechanization, layoffs, work speedups and all the rest of the techniques used to boost profits and thus maintain competitiveness, the percentage of employees with stable, regular employment will decrease in future years.

“Development” will not be a path out of this trap for the Global South, where, to nobody’s surprise, the jobs picture is much more dire than in the world’s advanced capitalist countries. Then there is the enormous wage and employment gap between men and women, also significantly more acute in the Global South than the North.

The total number of those without work around the world (the 402 million mentioned two paragraphs above) is referred to as a “jobs gap” in the International Labour Organization (ILO) report. The jobs-gap rate for the Arab region is 20.5 percent and for Africa 17.4 percent. Although not noted in the report, this surely provides much of the explanation for the immigration crisis.

^{The Blue Mountains from the lookout in Blackheath, Australia (photo by Gemm347)}

When broken down by sex, the gap between men and women becomes stark, and wider the lower a country’s income level. For high-income countries, the jobs-gap rate is 7 percent for men but 10 percent for women. For low-income countries, the jobs-gap rate is 15 percent for men but 23 percent for women. The ILO reports summarized this discrepancy as follows: “In 2024, the ILO estimates that 45.6 percent of women (aged 15 and above) are employed, compared to 69.2 percent of men, a gap of 23.6 percentage points. This gap is much larger than what the labour underutilisation indicators would imply, including the most broadly defined jobs gap indicator.”

Why such a discrepancy? The report states:

“A novel empirical ILO analysis shows that family responsibilities are a key driver of the gender gap in employment rates. … It must be highlighted that family responsibilities explain a large share of the observed gender employment gap across all income groups. In low-income countries, the estimated effect of family responsibilities accounts for 62 per cent of the gender employment gap. In high-income countries this share reaches 80 per cent and it is close to 76 per cent in middle-income countries.”

A one-sided responsibility for child rearing, care for relatives and other household work is a substantial contributor to the differences in male and female employment. 

“Given these results, it seems likely that social norms concerning the organisation of unpaid care work, coupled with deficits in care services, are critical factors behind the observed employment penalties. First, women generally bear disproportionate childcare responsibilities. Moreover, the effect of this can become entrenched through a deterioration of job prospects that can last well beyond the first few years of a child’s life. Second, even in the absence of children in the household, women devote a disproportionate amount of time to unpaid care work compared to men. In ILO 2018 the authors find in a sample of 11 countries that daily hours spent in unpaid care work by women in households with no children average 3.7, which increase to 6.1 daily hours in households with small children. For men, daily hours on unpaid care work are 1.7 with no children and 2.2 with small children in the household. This suggests a disproportionate share of time devoted to unpaid care work beyond childcare, whether for household upkeep or care of relatives other than children.”

As a result, the wage gap between men and women persists, and as with employment prospects, the gap is greater in lower-income countries. In high-income countries, the ILO calculates that women earn 73 cents to the male dollar and in low-income countries only 44 cents. That also means women are more likely than men to be in precarious (informal) employment and in turn wage differentials are larger in informal than formal work.

Going beyond trying to reform the unreformable

As is standard with these sorts of reports, there is useful information demonstrating a problem but concluding with the weakest tea possible in suggested solutions. True to form, the ILO report concludes by suggesting “social dialogue at all levels, aimed at promoting inclusive, equitable, and effective public policies that resonate with societal needs and promote human dignity for all.” There is nothing wrong or bad about those suggestions, but we really ought to be far beyond the point where a polite discussion with the world’s power brokers could be seen as anything other than a farce.

Human dignity and the provision of social needs are surely what is needed. But are the world’s capitalists, who grow wealthy and powerful under the current world economic and political system, and all the institutions that keep them in power and animated by the governments that promote the wealth and power of capitalists, really going to change their ways once the world’s unfairness is explained to them? Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny will be riding on flying pigs and elephants before that happens. Capitalism is working as intended, and its beneficiaries can’t, as a class, be expected to “see the light” no matter how nicely inequality is explained to them. A single capitalist, or heir to a capitalist fortune, might decry the world’s vast inequality and act on that, but an entire class is not going to commit economic suicide. Nor is any percentage beyond a minuscule number. 

What do the high representatives of capital have to say about the state of the world? Commentaries by orthodox economists, conservative think tanks and business publications such as Forbes say the problem is that wages are too high. The U.S. Federal Reserve, the world’s most important central bank, agrees that wages are too high. Cutting wages and lowering already low taxes for corporations and the wealthy are routinely promoted, despite higher taxes leading to more jobs. The International Trade Union Confederation yearly issues a report on the state of labor, and every year finds that not one country on Earth fully respects labor rights; in its 2023 study, only nine countries were merely “sporadic violators of rights.” One of the leading institutions used by the most powerful capitalist countries to leverage their power in the rest of the world, the World Bank, routinely funds massive infrastructure projects that can each displace tens of thousands of people, disrupt the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands and are often imposed with violence. The list could go on and on, but I’ll note just two more related items: the US$10 trillion handout to the financial industry through programs artificially propping up financial markets in just the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, on top of the further trillions handed out to business in those years while employees received crumbs and layoff notices.

Can this really be reformed? No. Working people are losing one of the most one-sided wars in human history. The hyper-competitive nature of capitalism, under which our labor is a commodity, can’t be altered; at best through massive effort reforms can be achieved until the next wave of attacks commences. As long as we continue to fail to question the world economic system, our conditions will only worsen. But questioning that system is only the first step in a long journey; changing the system to one centered on meeting human needs in a sustainable, environmentally sound manner is what is needed. Call that system “economic democracy” or “socialism” as you wish. Once again, that or barbarism is the choice to be faced.

Capitalism can’t overcome the laws of physics

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.

It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?

Here is where “green capitalism” rapidly falls apart. Liberal assertions that a transition to a green economy will be virtually cost-free are unrealistic. The costs of a transition to a greener economy are much less than the costs will be of continuing business as usual — how much will a three-meter rise in the sea level and massive disruptions to agriculture cost? — but the need to transition millions of employees to new employment, retrofit or replace transportation systems, adjust to new trade patterns and have access to less energy shouldn’t be minimized. And the infrastructure to build solar panels, windmills and all else will use large amounts of resources, including toxic “rare earth” minerals. Renewable energy, although vital if we are to have a future, isn’t a shortcut to reversing global warming.

^{The power of nature prevails (photo by Hans Kreder)}

A fundamental problem is that capitalism is dependent on consumerism. Household consumption (all the things that people buy for personal use from toothbrushes to automobiles) constitutes 60 to 70 percent of a typical advanced capitalist economy’s gross domestic product; it is because of this dependency that so much money and effort is put into advertising and marketing, creating “needs” we didn’t know we had, and the pervasiveness of “planned obsolescence.” Consumerism and over-consumption are not “cultural” or the result of personal characteristics — they are a natural consequence of capitalism and built into the system. Problems like global warming and other aspects of the world environmental crisis can only be solved on a global level through democratic control of the economy, not by individual consumer choices or by national governments. 

Two statistics that provide perspective on the high cost of new and improved: About 40 percent of U.S. landfill waste is discarded packaging and the cost of packaging constitutes 10 percent to 40 percent of a product’s retail price. No rational system would propagate such waste, but capitalism is not rational; the endless pursuit of profit for a small number of people at the expense of everybody else and indifference to environmental cost are the natural consequences. “Green capitalism” is “doomed from the start” because maximizing profit and environmentalism are broadly in conflict; the occasional time when they might be in harmony are rare exceptions and temporary, wrote Richard Smith in his 2014 paper “Green capitalism: the god that failed.” This is because the managers of corporations are answerable to private owners and shareholders, not to society. Profit maximization trumps all else under capitalism and thereby sets the limits to ecological reform.

What has just been discussed is serious enough. But what if the impossibility of capitalism continuing for the foreseeable future is not only its inherent contradictions and destructive tendencies, as discussed above, but also due to physical limits? Endless growth, and a system that needs endless growth to survive, is not only impossible due to the finite nature of natural resources, the repression and exploitation that fuels it eventually reaching a point of explosion, and the inability to expand because the entire globe is now encompassed by it. It is also impossible in the long run because 100 percent recycling and conservation is a physical impossibility.

Laws of thermodynamics versus limitless expansion

An interesting paper just published in the Real-World Economics Review, “How entropy drives us towards degrowth,” lays this out in six succinct pages. Written by Crelis Rammelt, a professor of environmental geography and international development studies at the University of Amsterdam, the author concludes that global capitalism “annihilates its own habitat” and “devours the equivalent of an entire Mount Everest’s worth of resources every 20 months.” 

That’s a whole lot of resources! The number of months will be fewer in the future because, structurally, capitalism must expand. This is the dynamic of the system that is often obscured. The rigors of competition force all capitalists to reduce costs and find new customers to successfully compete; failure to do so means going out of business. With all competitors forced into this endless treadmill, the entire system is dependent on expansion and the creation of new markets. Now that capitalism has conquered virtually every space on Earth, there can be no more geographic expansion. Thus the pressure of competition only becomes more acute, as does the need to extract more natural resources, which will inevitably be more difficult and expensive to obtain as easily reached materials are exhausted.

Thus, Dr. Rammelt wrote, the search for short-term fixes intensifies. “This system demands continued accumulation of capital and falters when hindered in this process,” he wrote. “The typical response to the ecological crisis is therefore not to restrict economic growth but to pin all hope on efficiency, circularity, dematerialization, decarbonization, and other profit-driven green innovations within capitalism. In this exposition, I argue that this hope is false because entropy always looms. Entropy serves as a physical measure of disorder, and we observe its inexorable increase all around us: everything decays, rots, disintegrates, and falls into disorder.”

^{Photosynthesis in action (photo by Rcaravit)}

Energy changes form but does not disappear, he notes, but the second law of thermodynamics states that thermal energy (heat) flows from the hotter body or location to the cooler. In parallel with this law of entropy, energy flows from a place of high concentration (such as a battery) to a place of low concentration (such as a toy), thus resulting in a loss of energy for the battery. Entropy also shows itself in the degradation of everyday objects: food spoilage, metal erosion and clothing wear and tear. Something external has to provide supplemental energy to keep a system from complete degradation. For the Earth’s natural system, that external is the Sun. “The biosphere taps into solar power to perform ‘useful work,’ namely concentrating dispersed energy and matter into” new forms. “A healthy and well-functioning biosphere thus stands as the only force on Earth capable of counterbalancing the rise in entropy.”

Nature, however, cannot regenerate without limits. Although new food sources are created, sufficient for a natural biosphere and the life that inhabits it, “the metabolism of the destructive beast called capitalism expands too fast for the biosphere to keep up.” The metabolism of capitalism outstrips the ability of nature to regenerate itself. (Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than Earth’s biocapacity can regenerate). “Ecosystems have evolved over millions of years to optimize energy consumption in ecological food webs and to delay and reduce entropy through biodiversity,” Dr. Rammelt wrote. “Tragically, growth-oriented economies do the exact opposite by pushing against this natural order and increasing entropy at a devastating rate.”

It’s a physical world no matter what we wish

Substituting one-crop monocultures for more varied agriculture, irrigation, more intensive use of fertilizers and finally genetically engineering crops are among the ways that capitalism attempts to evade limits. But soil degradation, the creation of dust bowls, chopping down forests and pollution persist and become more dangerous. “Capitalism, in its pursuit of relentless growth, damages the very biosphere it relies on to mitigate its entropy-amplifying activities.” It is not a physical possibility to overcome environmental stresses by becoming more efficient or devising more ways to recycle more. Nature has its limits, Dr. Rammelt writes:

“Can we not combat entropy through frugal and circular production? The typical response to the ecological crisis isn’t to slow down growth but to rely on dematerialization and circularity. However, ‘green capitalism’ cannot maintain itself, let alone grow, by merely reusing its own waste and byproducts. Just as monkeys require fresh bananas from the forest and can’t survive on their own feces, production systems require new input of low-entropy matter and energy to function. The same goes for a forest that depends on solar energy from space and can’t survive solely on falling leaves. Shifting to biomass as a raw material for production also won’t save green growth as it will intensify pressure on land, water, and soil.”

At first glance, the fact that the global economy recovers less than 10 percent of waste materials and retains only 28 percent of global primary energy consumption after conversion would seem to indicate a vast potential for improvements in the efficiency of resource usage. But a closed system that loses nothing is simply impossible, because not everything is recyclable and because transmission losses are inevitable:

“[E]ven though we are far from achieving 100% circularity and efficiency, the laws of nature will always obstruct us from attaining such a goal. To counteract all unavoidable losses and inefficiencies, we require a constant influx of fresh, low-entropy matter and energy. This requirement holds true for circular economies and other green growth models as well. The encouraging news is that the biosphere can convert certain types and quantities of waste back into raw materials. However, we should not anticipate the biosphere to sustain this service at the same accelerating pace at which our economies increase entropy.”

^{Socialism or Barbarism? (Image by Michael Coghlan via Flickr)}

That humanity can dominate nature “is an illusion.” The laws of thermodynamics remain in place. “Consequently, a growth-centered capitalist economy finds itself trapped in futile attempts to completely decouple itself from nature — aiming for a 100% circular, service-oriented and zero-waste existence. This obsession stems from an incapacity to imagine an economy that does not grow, where both the quantity and quality of its metabolism remain within secure ecological and planetary boundaries.”

Therefore, the conclusion is inescapable that an economy that requires continual growth must reach a physical limit; reaching such a limit is nothing less than global environmental collapse. Dr. Rammelt advocates a “radically different pathway”: degrowth. He defines degrowth as “a socio-economic transformation aimed at reducing and redistributing material and energy flows, with the goal of respecting planetary boundaries and promoting social justice.” Although he does not give a name to a post-capitalist system other than one of “degrowth,” such a sustainable system would have to be one that not only stays within the planet’s physical limits but provides enough for everybody. The material basis for everybody to have enough to eat and a place to live comfortably already exists; such a distribution is impossible under capitalism, where, again, production is performed for a small number of people to accumulate massive amounts of money with little left for everybody else.

Once again, Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis that either socialism or barbarism is our future stares us in the face.

Capitalism attacks Argentine workers and you may be next

As always when a representative of the right wing tells you he or she is campaigning to bring “freedom,” be afraid. Very afraid. For “freedom” in these cases means freedom for the richest financiers and industrialists to do whatever they want.

For them, “Freedom” is for capital, not for human beings without capital to invest. Today’s exhibit is the offensive against working people that is taking place in Argentina, where the new extreme right president, Javier Milei, is determined to see how far capitalist ideology can be pushed. So far, Argentines have pushed back but Milei, cheered on by domestic and international big business leaders, is nothing if not determined to ram through his austerity packages. And he has shown no inclination to allow mere democracy to stand in his way.

Nonetheless, there is no surprise here. President Milei ran on a program of extreme austerity, brandishing a chainsaw at his election rallies. Unfortunately, enough Argentines bought his siren songs, or were desperate enough to try anything given the country’s punishing inflation, to elect him, ending a one-term period in executive office by the ordinarily dominant Peronists. Alas, doing something new for the sake of doing something new, when it is aimed at you, rarely works. And here there is actually nothing new. President Milei simply promoted standard hard right ideology, albeit promoting it with unusual vigor. Snake oil is snake oil, as Argentine working people are already finding out. 

^{People filled the streets of Buenos Aires and Argentina’s biggest cities to demand “memory, truth and justice” for the victims of state violence (photo by Izquierda Diario)}

Still waiting for benefits to trickle down, aren’t you? For more than 40 years, the same tired propaganda has been peddled, and has been implemented in various countries, starting with Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military dictatorship in 1973, in Chile, and gaining speed with the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980. “Neoliberalism” is the term that the world came to adopt for this vicious austerity. (The term references how the world outside of North America uses the word “liberal” to mean minimal government regulation to enable decisions to be made by market forces; this is termed “libertarianism” in North America. Capitalist “markets,” however, are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the biggest financiers and industrialists and are not the neutral arbiters loftily sitting in clouds even-handedly dispensing justice as conservative propagandists would have us believe.)

The ideology that undergirds austerity programs has a long history and has to be incessantly promoted, all the more so because traditional “laissez-faire” ideas had become discredited during the Great Depression, leading to post-World War II Keynesianism becoming entrenched. The need for capitalists to give concessions to save their system due to the mass revolts of the 1930s and the failure of fascism as a “solution” to capitalists’ difficulties in maintaining profits helped the temporary acceptance of (or resignation to) Keynesianism. Perhaps the most influential ideologue of laissez-faire/neoliberal economics is Friedrich Hayek, who went so far as to assert that solidarity, benevolence and a desire to work for the betterment of one’s community are “primitive instincts” and that human civilization consists of a long struggle against those ideals. “The discipline of the market” is the provider of civilization and progress, he wrote. His most prominent student, Milton Friedman, would supply the Pinochet dictatorship with its economic program, the first modern case of “shock therapy” being imposed with maximum force because there was no other way it could be implemented.

What Thatcherism had in store for Britons was demonstrated by her crushing of the miners’ strike and Reaganism in turn showed its teeth by crushing the air traffic controllers’ strike. Punishing austerity was to follow on both sides of the Atlantic as declining profits and increasingly stiffer and more globalized competition required pushing down wages and working conditions, reducing or eliminating regulations and outsourcing production to wherever labor was cheaper and regulations fewer. Making all this work required dropping barriers to trade, thus bringing on the age of so-called “free trade” agreements that put regulation outside political or democratic control, and cracking open countries outside the capitalist core of the Global North to expose those economies to plunder with legal defenses stripped away by unaccountable multinational organizations. Debt is used to enforce these prerogatives, with multinational lending organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund imposing draconian conditions on loans that are used to pay off earlier loans, sending Global South countries into deeper debt. The European Union is another neoliberal offensive, a supranational organization run by and for bankers that overrules democratically elected governments at the national level.

The Milei offensive in not new to Argentina

Argentina, although among the biggest countries outside the capitalist core, has suffered multiple rounds of neoliberal austerity. President Milei’s draconian attempts to maximize corporate profits are not new.

The fascistic military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 laid waste to the Argentine economy while unleashing horrific human rights abuses. Upon seizing power, the military handed over economic policy to a well-connected industrialist, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, who ruthlessly implemented a severe neoliberal program of shock therapy, backed by a savage campaign of torture, “disappearances” and killings waged by the military and two allied fascist groups. The CGT union federation was abolished, strikes outlawed, prices raised, wages tightly controlled and social programs cut. As a result, real wages fell by 50 percent within a year. Because of the collapse of internal consumption caused by this austerity, ten percent of Argentina’s workforce was laid off in 1976 alone. For the last five years of the military junta, 1978 to 1983, Argentina’s foreign debt increased to US$43 billion from $8 billion, while the share of wages in national income fell to 22 percent from 43 percent.

Upon the return of formal democracy, the debt did not go away. A civilian president, Carlos Menem, imposed an austerity program in the early 1990s in conjunction with selling off state enterprises at below-market prices. This fire sale yielded $23 billion, but the proceeds went to pay foreign debt mostly accumulated by the military dictatorship — after completing these sales, Argentina’s foreign debt had actually grown. The newly privatized companies then imposed massive layoffs and raised consumer prices. By 1997, about 85 percent of Argentines were unable to meet their basic needs with their income. In contrast, banks underwriting Argentine government bonds earned an estimated $1 billion in fees between 1991 and 2001, profiting from public debt. As one example, an investment bank that arranged a restructuring of Argentina’s debt, under which a brief pause in the payment schedule was granted in exchange for higher interest payments, increasing Argentina’s debt, racked up a fee of $100 million.

^{Argentines participating in the March 24, 2024, truth and justice demonstration in Buenos Aires draw parallels between the military dictatorship and Palestine (photo by 1985Idea)}

It all finally imploded at the end of 2001, when the government froze bank accounts and the country experienced so much unrest that it had five presidents in two weeks. The last of these presidents, Néstor Kirchner, suspended debt payments. Had Argentina resumed scheduled payments in 2005, interest payment alone on the debt would have consumed 35 percent of total government spending. Kirchner announced that Argentina intended to pay only 25 percent of what was owed and any group that refused negotiations would get nothing; in the end, Argentina paid 30 percent to bondholders who agreed to talk.

Almost all of Argentina’s debtors accepted the 30 percent, seeing 30 percent as better than nothing. Many of Argentina’s creditors were not the financial institutions that originally made the loans; much of the debt had been sold to speculators. There were two notable holdouts, however — the hedge funds Elliott Capital Management and Aurelius Capital Management. These two speculators demanded full payment of the face value of the debt that they bought for pennies on the dollar. How to extract money out of a country where living conditions had already sunk to perilous lows? The head of Elliott Capital and its NML Capital affiliate impounded an Argentine Navy ship docked in Ghana, tracking the ship and waiting for it to reach the country that would be most favorable to its tactic of seizing an asset. This was no aberration; that speculator, Paul Singer, has a documented history of buying debt owed by poor Global South countries for pennies on the dollar and demanding to be paid full face value, no matter how dire that country’s condition.

The speculators on Argentine debt could use the tactic of impounding ships because a U.S. federal judge had issued a series of rulings declaring that Argentina must pay the full amount to the holdouts. Those rulings were not isolated instances of an out-of-control judge; the U.S. Supreme Court would later issue two rulings that fully backed the speculators. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 is supposed to bar lawsuits in U.S. courts against non-U.S. governments, but a 7-1 bipartisan majority of the Supreme Court decided that the law is malleable when not convenient. The Argentine bonds had been sold with a provision that New York law would be used to settle disputes related to them, which gave U.S. courts the excuse needed to extend U.S. law to Argentina. In essence, the high court ruled that financiers are more sovereign than a national government.

Standing up to finance capital

Nonetheless, the administrations of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández refused to kneel. Their left-wing populism has been overstated — they left capitalist relations untouched and at best merely tolerated the movement of recovered factories — but they did consistently put the interests of Argentine working people ahead of international financiers. That came to an end when a new right-wing president, Mauricio Macri, took office and fulfilled his campaign promises to put an end to the country’s sovereignty. As a reward, Buenos Aires was again allowed to borrow on international financial markets — so that it can borrow money for the sole purpose of paying billions of dollars to speculators. The Macri administration committed itself to paying $6.4 billion to the holdouts, which could only be paid off by more borrowing.

President Macri served only one term, with the Peronists regaining office. Now a hard right president is again in power. President Milei wasted no time implementing a program that is a dream for Argentine capitalists; his chainsaw is not an empty metaphor. Acting immediately — after all, “shock therapy” is also not just a metaphor — President Milei devalued the peso by 50 percent, reduced transportation and utility subsidies, lifted price controls and dissolved half of the government’s ministries. He also announced a new “protocol” to limit public protests and the creation of a “registry” under which activist organizations would be sent bills for the expenses of the state repressing their public protests. The purported purpose of this protocol is, you guessed it, to achieve “peace and order.”

This program, naturally, has drawn rapturous praise from business interests. Elon Musk, he of the mass firings, poor pay and notorious hostility to unions and regulations that protect employees, has endorsed President Milei, and “top Argentine CEOs” “heap praise” on him, Bloomberg reports. The president has in turn lavished praise on Margaret Thatcher, calling her “brilliant.” 

^{Entre Rios province, Argentina (photo by Felipe Gonzalez)}

Those who are at the receiving end of the Milei administration’s attacks, and those who represent them, have a decidedly different take. The General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Luc Triangle, said, “The IMF is celebrating the budget surplus in Argentina, but it’s indefensible to ignore the human cost of this economic shock therapy. Pensions have been slashed, thousands of public sector workers fired, public services are on the verge of collapse, unemployment is growing and food poverty spreading. These kinds of misguided, far-right economic measures deepen inequality and erode democratic foundations. It is no surprise that Milei also wants to bypass Congress and repress civil liberties — this is the anti-democratic ideology at the centre of his regime.”

What is it that the International Monetary Fund is celebrating? Inflation that had reached 160 percent in November, on the eve of President Milei’s inauguration, has steadily increased, reaching almost 290 percent in March. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the club of advanced capitalist countries and large Global South countries, predicts that Argentina’s inflation will be 251 percent for 2024 and that its economy will shrink 3.3 percent for 2024, easily the worst performance among G20 economies.

Democracy? What democracy?

The decrees mentioned above were only the beginning. Days into office, President Milei in December 2023 issued an 83-page “Necessity and Urgency Decree” intended to eliminate hundreds of regulations, erode labor rights and open the door to mass privatizations of state-owned enterprises. Both houses of Argentina’s National Congress must vote in their majorities to overturn the decrees, or they go into effect. The Senate voted it down but has not yet faced a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. In the interim, a court, hearing a challenge by the CGT trade union federation, voided some of the decree, suspending it until the Congress fully considers it. But there was still more to come.

Following up on his decree, President Milei a week later introduced an omnibus bill with the Orwellian name of “Foundations and Starting Points for the Freedom of the Argentine People,” a 351-page document that contains 664 articles. If passed, this bill would declare an “economic emergency” and delegate more than 1,000 powers from the legislative to the executive branch until December 31, 2025. This would enable the president to bypass Congress. Noting that President Milei said “the state is an enemy,” Professor Tom McDowell, writing in CounterPunch, summarized this offensive:

“Grounded in the same logic as neoliberalism’s conventional demand for freedom from the state, democratic institutions increasingly appear as impediments to the logic of the marketplace. … The anti-parliamentarism at the core of the neoliberal theoretical outlook has increasingly transformed into a populist program that mobilizes a general dissatisfaction with politicians against democratic institutions as such. Neoliberal politicians, such as Milei, use this reasoning to manufacture the conditions for the ongoing use of emergency powers and the concentration of authority in the executive branch.”

^{The Puerto Madero district of Buenos Aires. (Photo by Juan Ignacio Iglesias)}

Following a one-day general strike in which 1.5 million people took to the streets, the omnibus bill was voted down in Congress. The fight was still not over, because the omnibus bill was trimmed and sent back to Congress, with the new version passed by the Chamber of Deputies on April 30. The Senate is debating the bill with a May 25 deadline to act; although the pro-Milei parties do not have a majority in the Senate, one of the left-wing parties that voted against it in the Chamber, Frente de Izquierda, does not have a Senate seat, leaving the outcome uncertain, according to the Buenos Aires Herald. The revised bill would still privatize nine state-owned enterprises, down from 41, implement “reforms” to pensions and labor law, make “maximizing profit obtained from exploiting natural resources” state policy and cut taxes for foreign companies.

The need to step up the fightback

Despite the militant action that stopped the December decree, opponents of the Milei administration on the Left decry a lack of resolve by mainstream labor organizations. Samuel Karlin, writing for Left Voice, writes that union bureaucracies and center-left parties are containing the ability of the working class to fight back. He writes:

“Months later the law is once again advancing due in large part to the refusal of the CGT — the country’s largest federation of trade unions — to mobilize workers against the attacks. The CGT — in addition to not holding assemblies or promoting the organization of the working class and a plan of struggle until the law falls — negotiates behind closed doors with the government, preventing the workers’ strength from being expressed against the adjustment and the law in the streets and workplaces. The CGT is more afraid of the mobilized workers than of the Milei government itself. Meanwhile, the centrist and center-left Peronists who lead the union bureaucracies and social movements have sought to negotiate the terms of the attacks rather than wage a fight against it.”

Nonetheless, militant pushback is happening, demonstrated by 800,000 students, educators and allies protesting cuts to public universities, including reductions in teacher pay and the closures of some schools. Mr. Karlin notes, “Milei is advancing U.S. imperialist penetration in Latin America and developing the Far Right movement internationally. As Israel becomes increasingly isolated due to its genocide of Palestinians, Milei has become one of the Zionist state’s fiercest allies. Milei wants to use Argentina as a laboratory for his far-right reaction, instead we should use it as a laboratory for fighting back the Far Right.”

Another dangerous initiative of the Milei administration is its denial of the massive crimes committed by the fascistic military regime of 1976 to 1983. The total of those murdered, “disappeared,” arrested, tortured and/or forced into exile likely is in the hundreds of thousands, with an estimated 30,000 killed. The administration’s ministers, including the president himself, either deny the toll the military regime took or attempt to justify it. Thus an annual demonstration in March against the military dictatorship drew large crowds, who had an increased sense of urgency.

What has the new government achieved? Argentina’s poverty rate has risen to 57 percent, the highest rate in two decades. The president openly celebrated firing 50,000 state workers, with plans to fire another 70,000, and the removal of 200,000 from social-benefit programs. In addition, reductions to pensions were the largest in 30 years. The previous hard-right president, Mauricio Macri, took out a $57 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and the cuts demanded by the IMF in exchange led to austerity, a downward cycle that threatens to accelerate.

Regardless of what country we live in, we all have a stake in the Argentine people’s success in fighting off the Milei austerity package. Industrialists and financiers, and the public office holders who love them, are undoubtedly watching closely the events in Argentina. If a country with one of the most militant working classes can have extreme austerity imposed on them, similar offensives will soon be on the way elsewhere. Capitalists around the world understand well their common class interest. The working people of the world, the overwhelming majority of Earth’s population on whose backs the wealth of those elites is built, need to understand their common interest.