The US and its allies like Australia always claim to be “the good guys”—their wars only fought for freedom and democracy. It’s always a lie.
Twenty years ago, on 28 April 2004, a news report aired that proved to millions what anti-war activists had long argued: the US was indeed the bad guy. This was a little over a year after the US-led “coalition of the willing” had invaded and occupied Iraq, the second stop in the so-called war on terror begun in 2001. An episode of 60 Minutes revealed evidence that torture by US troops in Iraq was widespread, and detailed the sadistic abuse being meted out to Iraqi POWs at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison camp in Baghdad.
Be warned if you look for the photographs online: they are graphic. They show POWs stripped naked and smeared with human excrement, being forced to simulate sexual acts with guards, and being handcuffed to beds while naked and blindfolded. Geraldine Sealey, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2004/07/15/hersh_7/">writing for Salon</a>, claimed journalist Seymour Hersh had seen worse, unreleased images and videos, including of teenage boys being raped. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib">Hersh’s own article</a> in the New Yorker detailed sadistic sexual violence.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the world’s sole military superpower, eclipsing established and emerging powers. But imperialism is unrelenting. It isn’t enough to be number one; you must stay there. And the US had weaknesses. It was resoundingly defeated in Vietnam by determined military resistance, and rebellion at home and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/geier/1999/xx/vietnam.htm">among its troops</a>. This defeat engendered what became known as “Vietnam syndrome”, a national malaise that limited the US government’s ability to wage new aggressive wars.
To overcome Vietnam syndrome, a section of the US ruling class—referred to as the “neo-conservatives” or “neo-cons” for short—formed a think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Only 25 people signed PNAC’s 1997 founding <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050205041635/http:/www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm">statement</a>, but their influence was enormous. They included ten figures who were to take leading roles in the administration of George W. Bush, who was elected US president in November 2000. Among them were Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Bush’s brother Jeb, then governor of Florida, also signed on.
The members of PNAC had a simple argument, centred on the reassertion of the US’s role as a global military and political hegemon. “We need”, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050205041635/http:/www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm">they said</a>, “to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad ... we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles ... Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next”.
PNAC’s main proximate goal was to rehabilitate US power in the Middle East, and in particular to overthrow Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who had been a US ally in the 1980s but was regarded as a threat to US interests in the region by the early 1990s. In 1998, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050203012039/http:/www.newamericancentury.org/AttackIraq-Nov16,98.pdf">PNAC advocated</a> “an overall political-military strategy aimed at removing Saddam from power”. These people wanted war with Iraq. But they would have to wait until the time was right.
Osama bin Laden’s spectacular 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York gave Bush and his fellow neo-cons the excuse they needed to get started on PNAC’s plan.
With almost universal support domestically, the US war machine steamrolled into Afghanistan just four weeks after the 9/11 attack, driving the Taliban government from power. Emboldened by a rapid early victory, Bush announced in his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/sou012902.htm">January 2002 State of the Union address</a> that Afghanistan was just the start. “Our second goal”, he said, “is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction”. The US, he promised, would go after what he called an “axis of evil” including Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and nothing would stop it.
There was one problem for Bush—Vietnam syndrome.
According to polls taken by Gallup, CNN and USA Today, the US invasion of Afghanistan was initially supported by over 80 percent of Americans. Bush pitched it as a crusade to liberate Afghanistan and protect women’s rights, as well as a mission to capture Osama bin Laden and others deemed responsible for 9/11. This resonated with a public whipped into a state of fear about terrorism and fervour about the US’s regalvanised national mission to spread “freedom and democracy” around the world. 
Iraq, which had no links to the 9/11 attacks, proved to be a harder sell. There were huge anti-war protests in the US and around the world before the war began, including nearly a million on the streets in Australian cities in February 2003.
To deal with this problem, the Bush administration reverted to the tried and tested imperial strategy of simply making things up. Its pitch for its new war was based on two great lies. First, that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had so-called “weapons of mass destruction”; and second, that US forces would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people. 
The first claim was effectively debunked even before the troops went in, and the idea that the US would be received as liberators started to fall apart just weeks after the invasion, when US troops massacred at least thirteen people at a peaceful protest in the city of Fallujah. From there things went downhill fast. The torture and abuse of Iraqi POWs at Abu Ghraib that was revealed in April 2004 was just one of many crimes committed during the long years of the US’s blood-soaked occupation.
On the basis of the revelations about Abu Ghraib, seventeen US soldiers were suspended from the US military, with eleven court-martialled, dishonourably discharged and sentenced to prison for a combined 25 years. The main warmongers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others—never faced any consequences for their much greater crimes.

Andrew Cheeseman

Abu Ghraib 20 years on

Just when you might have thought that Australia’s refugee policy couldn’t get any worse, immigration minister Peter Dutton’s response to the Rohingya crisis proves that there is no limit to the government’s barbarism.
Rohingya are denied citizenship in Myanmar, and the regime accuses them of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They’ve been persecuted for a long time, but recently their situation has become a lot worse.
Horrific incursions by the Myanmar military into northern Rakhine state, a Rohingya-majority area of the country, have resulted in more than 400,000 Rohingya being forced to flee across the border into Bangladesh, joining almost half a million who fled earlier pogroms.
Villages have been burned, suspected opponents of the regime have been assassinated, and perhaps 3,000 people have been killed.
French president Macron and the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal have called what is happening genocide. The United Nations describes the current situation as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing, and asked the Myanmar government to stop all current military operations and all discrimination against Rohingya people. Predictably, it refused. An eyewitness to the atrocities told the Guardian:
“The soldiers used rocket-propelled grenades, and they set fire to the houses with matches. Once they had gone past, I went back. All the houses were burned. In the road, I saw a dead man I recognised called Abu Shama. He had been shot in the chest. He was 85.”
This eyewitness also found the singed and decapitated corpse of his grandmother. “Her name was Rukeya Banu. She was 75. When I returned to the jungle, I described the whole incident to the rest. They burst into tears. We walked for three days.”
A humane response to these atrocities would be to find a way to help the displaced and those still under siege. But Dutton and the Australian Border Force are trying to induce Rohingya refugees locked up on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, to return to Myanmar. One detainee said that he was offered $25,000 to return. Foreign minister Julie Bishop said, “Australia wants them to return to their country if possible”.
The Manus Island concentration camp has long been a sick experiment in physical and mental torture. Refugees there experience alternating terrors – long stretches of extreme isolation, then anxiety about meetings with the cruel Border Force officials.
At unpredictable times, this cycle of anxiety and isolation is punctuated by sharp moments of fear – on many occasions, refugees have been attacked by locals and guards.
Worse even than the mainland detention centres of the last decade, which were described as “factories for producing mental illness”, the concentration camp on Manus has been so cruel that some Rohingya refugees have decided they are safer taking Dutton’s barbaric deal.
This is not someone voluntarily deciding that they will risk their life re-entering Myanmar in order to protect family or friends. It’s the result of cold, calculated, long term torture by the Australian state.
By trying to force the refugees to return, Peter Dutton and every senior Border Force official responsible for this situation are acting as willing accomplices to the genocide taking place in Myanmar.

Rohingya in Australia’s detention centres offered a deal with the devil

There are lots of problems with section 44 of the Constitution. Dual citizens should have full democratic rights, including the right to be an elected federal representative.
But when it comes to breaking bureaucratic rules, there is one law for politicians and very different laws for the rest of us.
Like several other politicians, National Party senator Matt Canavan made a bureaucratic boo-boo and didn’t renounce his right to Italian citizenship before standing for election. His initial story was that his mother had set into train a series of unfortunate events in 2006 that culminated in him becoming an Italian citizen. Poor senator Canavan was supposedly none the wiser.
Canavan’s version of events was given a favourable hearing all through the press, until it started to appear that the High Court would become involved. At that point his lawyers issued a new story – that he actually had been an Italian citizen since 1983, and all reference to his mother applying on his behalf disappeared.
Senators can get away with a lot, and lying to the people who elected them seems to be fairly routine – something that is a matter of course for career politicians. But perjury – lying to a court – is a risk they don’t take lightly.
Isn’t it a lovely story? A senator makes an honest oversight that means they have held an extremely lucrative job they quite possibly were never entitled even to apply for. After around a million dollars in salaries and unknown amounts of other perks, the senator fixes the underlying issue by renouncing the dual citizenship. Suddenly everything is all right again. Everyone lives happily ever after, there are kittens and rainbows for all, and the errors are forgiven and forgotten.
Contrast this to the treatment of refugees. The Herald Sun in May reported that almost 100 people have been deported in the last three years because the Department of Immigration “discovered they had provided false identities or ‘materially incorrect information’ in their original visa claims”.
“Legacy caseload” refugees are being forced to fill in the Byzantine mess of “Form 866” before 1 October. Containing around 100 questions, and more than 30 pages long, Form 866 takes experienced migration lawyers more than a day to work through.
Unlike our senator, refugees get only one shot at completing this form. Any information left off cannot be added later, making legal help even more important for refugees – at the same time as legal assistance for refugees has been slashed.
Thousands of these refugees are now stuck in a legal hell, terrified of the consequences of making a mistake or omission on their one shot at Form 866. Even with no allegation of dishonesty, changing their story or making a mistake during this process could doom them to deportation, torture or even death.
But at least the law is fair and forgiving to senators.

One law for senators, another for refugees

There are a lot of terrifying places to encounter a fire, but one of the worst has to be in or around an aircraft carrying 15,000 litres of fuel.
Aviation rescue firefighters are there to make sure you don’t have to, and if all the fail-safes don’t work, they are there to save your life. Like other firefighters and paramedics, they are facing government cutbacks.
Research conducted by Boeing indicates that 61 percent of serious air crashes occur during take-off or landing, and that the greatest danger passengers and crew face isn’t the impact. It’s fire.
Aircraft design is a marvel of modern engineering, with fabrics inside that are designed to be as resistant to fire as possible, and fuel tanks built tough to prevent explosion. But this design doesn’t protect people forever in a serious crash.
Aviation design aims to buy time: enough time for firefighters to respond. The goal is to keep passengers alive for five minutes – long enough for the uninjured to evacuate, and for firefighters to arrive and extinguish fires or save those too injured to escape under their own power.
Firefighters have to be on scene within three minutes if this critical timeline is to work. This is why 26 of Australia’s airports are staffed by firefighters equipped with state-of-the-art 30 tonne fire trucks. Between them they attend 6,700 aircraft and airport incidents and emergencies each year, varying from small fuel spills to major engine fires and light plane crashes, all the while training for the nightmare scenario of a jet airliner crashing.
Or at least, that’s the state of play today.
The federal government is planning cuts to aviation rescue firefighter funding. This will lead to an end of these services at Coffs Harbour, Uluru, Gladstone, Broome and Newman airports. Any future airport emergencies that occur in those locations will be left in the hands of country firefighters without specialised aviation training.
Potentially even worse, the government is planning to reduce overnight shifts at Sydney International Airport from 17 firefighters and six trucks to eight firefighters and three trucks. While Sydney shouldn’t have scheduled flights landing during those hours, aircraft diverted in an emergency can land at any time and are the most likely to require firefighters on hand.
The proposed cuts come in a context of aviation rescue firefighters already often working double shifts and sleeping in improvised beds at the airport.
Society needs firefighters specialised in city fires, in aircraft fires, in marine fires and in rural fires. It doesn’t need corporate or government bean counters looking to save every cent they can to boost profits for privately run airports.

Cost cutting threatens airport fire services

There’s a saying that the eyes are a window into the soul. But if you want to catch a glimpse of Hillary Clinton’s soul, you can just look at her private email server.
A lot of press attention has focused on the antics of sexual predator and all-round scumbag Anthony Weiner, which were the most public revelation from the email hacks. But the most damning indictment of the US establishment isn’t the actions of Weiner.
The Congress, and other institutions of power like the Catholic hierarchy, has always attracted scum like him. And for every Anthony Weiner, there are a dozen more just like him who never get caught.
The true scandal is the picture that Clinton’s emails paint of what business as usual looks like under capitalism, on the days when there isn’t a scandal. This is shown in spades in the emails of Washington-based Democratic Party powerbroker John Podesta, the chair of the Clinton election campaign team.
The emails, obtained by WikiLeaks, contain lots of minor gems, like generous, wealthy Democratic Party donors asking for cushy jobs for their children, or paying to set up private meetings with Democrat luminaries at Martha’s Vineyard, an exclusive resort for the super-rich.
Most significant, however, are the bombshells about the nature of representative democracy itself. In Hillary Clinton’s own words:
“You just have to sort of figure out how to – getting back to that word, ‘balance’ – how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today …
“I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavoury, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”
Cut out the extraneous words, and this just says, “Say one thing to the public, and another thing in private to the people you really care about”.
Also among the leaked emails were speeches Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs executives, talking about regulation of banks.
“There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”
In other words Clinton’s “private position” solution to the dodgy lenders and speculators who triggered the global financial crisis is to let corrupt bankers decide what rules and regulations apply to banking.
Mainstream liberal ideology claims that representative democracy gives ordinary people a degree of control over what leaders decide, letting the popular will shape the overall direction in which society is headed.
In practice, capitalist parliaments allow representatives far removed from the working class to be wined and dined by the true power in society, the capitalist class.
Bribes in the form of holidays at luxury retreats, generous campaign donations, speaker’s fees (Clinton charges as much for a speech as my house would sell for) and appointments to corporate boards are some of the methods by which big capitalists keep their pet politicians bought and paid for. Giving these same handouts to both sides ensures that whichever politician wins a given election, big capital is the real winner.
The ruling class, and in particular its political wing, is very aware that most of the working class rejects many central tenets of neoliberalism: lower company taxes, so-called free trade deals that increase the power of business, and gutting welfare.
This is why they need politicians who can be trusted to do the “responsible” thing, not the popular thing.
Most telling of all was a throwaway remark Clinton made to executives at Xerox: “We need two parties … Two sensible, moderate, pragmatic parties”.
That’s Clinton’s dream, and Wall Street’s dream as well: a “democracy” in which the population chooses the leader but none of their policies – which are stitched up in back room deals between friends.

Clinton’s emails show how the system is rigged for the rich

Slavery may have been officially outlawed in the United States after the Civil War, but it has been moved from the plantations into the prisons. Coerced labour remains alive and well in the “land of the free”.
Almost 1 percent of the US adult population (2.2 million people) is in jail, and this rate is three times higher for African Americans, who are disproportionately targeted and arrested by police, less likely to be able to afford bond or a lawyer and more likely to be convicted and to receive longer sentences.
Most of the people in US prisons are jailed for nonviolent crimes.
It’s a system designed to break people, one that makes it hard for them to reintegrate into life outside jail and more likely to wind up back inside. This provides the US capitalist class a large pool of people with no rights and who can be used as slave labour.
Among the jailed population, almost a million inmates are forced to work. And they are not just making car licence plates. These days, state governments as well as companies as large as Victoria’s Secret and AT&amp;T use prison forced labour to sew garments, staff call centres, build freeways and repair fences. This servitude is used to keep down the wages of the rest of the working class.
In terrible conditions, and at great risk to their own safety, inmates sometimes fight back. Prisoners across 24 states planned strike action on 9 September, announcing that they were refusing to participate in forced prison work programs. This isn’t the first prison strike in recent years in the United States – there have been strikes and hunger strikes in Georgia, California and Texas in the 2010s. But it is the most nationally coordinated.
The strikers’ demands included wages in line with those of free US citizens doing similar jobs, better mental health programs, better education and rehabilitation programs and privacy during medical appointments. The broader attitude of the prisoners is summarised in a statement from strike organisers: “The entire structure of courts and police, of control and slave-catching must shift to accommodate us as humans rather than slaves”.
Some of the prisoners were intimidated out of striking – one inmate in the south reported anonymously that, while they wanted to strike, the prison warden said that anyone not reporting to work would be charged with inciting a riot.
While prison lockdowns make it hard to get information, in other places the strike was more successful.
A significant minority of prisoners in North Carolina refused to work, and while they were outnumbered by prisoners not striking, they appear to have avoided serious repercussions.
In Chowchilla, California, just a few women refusing to work led the prison management to lock down the entire prison.
Most impressively, an anonymous report from Holman Prison in Alabama claimed that every single inmate respected the strike and slept or read as prison officers performed the work themselves.
This isn’t the end of the fight against 21st century slavery in the United States. It will take far more to smash the prison-industrial complex and end unpaid labour. But it’s a very important beginning.

US prisoners fight against forced labour

Duncan Storrar is guilty of a simple crime: he had the temerity to ask a question that embarrassed big business and the government in front of a national audience on Q&amp;A.
As a result, the most powerful news organisation in the country has done everything in its power to destroy his life.
Duncan’s question was simple. He asked why the government would give tax breaks to the wealthy who make enough to barely notice them, when for him – a person with a disability who works part time for the minimum wage – a tax break would make a real difference and allow him to spend more on his children.
The response from Liberal MP Kelly O’Dwyer and big business spokesman and all-round schmuck Innes Willox was a mixture of arrogance, bumbling and incomprehension. O’Dwyer thought the question offered a good opportunity to mention how much one of her small business constituents had benefited from a government-sponsored $6,000 toaster. Willox, on the other hand, thought he would distinguish himself from the other softies on the panel by berating Duncan for not paying enough tax.
They both looked like the entitled fools that they are.
Unfortunately though, the rich and the powerful do not fight fair. Outraged that a mere commoner had not only taken on but wiped the floor with the supposedly polished performers of the business and political elite, the rabid dogs of the Australian ruling class, the Murdoch tabloids, launched a savage campaign of revenge, character assassination and good old fashioned bullying.
News Corporation is extremely good at three things – minimising the tax it pays, kicking the poor and going after its political opponents. Here was a chance to do all three at once. Hot on the heels of a front page hatchet job targeting a homeless man sleeping rough and begging in the Melbourne CBD, the Australian and the Herald Sun recognised that, while they might be unable to discredit the message, News Corpse “journalists” could shoot the messenger instead.
They poured over Duncan’s past looking for anything they could find to discredit him, and targeted his strained relationship with his adult son. These papers have hounded Duncan and his family so ruthlessly that Duncan’s mother has fears that her son may attempt suicide.
This harassment has a purpose. It’s about trying to keep other ordinary people from feeling confident that they can have a say on political issues. There’s not a person alive who doesn’t have a couple of skeletons in their closet that a ruthless news conglomerate can’t dig up. Whether they are dug up or not is a decision newspaper editors make on political grounds.
The idea that only people who are completely “respectable” can have an opinion is an attack on democracy harking back to the days when the vote was extended only to men (never women) who owned considerable property. It conveniently ignores the fact that the crimes of polite society are invariably much worse than those of the working class people they rail against.
The same newspapers that hound Duncan stayed almost totally silent about Malcolm Turnbull’s naming in the Panama Papers and his investments in the convenience store chain 7-11. The Murdoch press tried to shut down all debate when Tony Abbott’s daughter was given a secret scholarship to one of the private colleges that was poised to make millions out of deregulation. And these same papers didn’t raise a fuss when it was discovered just what a young David Cameron had done to a dead pig. After all, what’s a little exploitation, bribery and necro-bestiality between friends?
This isn’t the first time Murdoch has tried this. Red Flag contributor Roz Ward has recently been subject to ongoing attacks by the Australian for her work fighting homophobic bullying via the Safe Schools program.
But while Murdoch’s shitrags have been going for the jugular, ordinary people have had a much better response to Duncan’s plight. An online fundraiser to benefit Duncan, comically advertised as “Buy Duncan Storrar a toaster”, raised more than $60,000 from 2,380 people. This solidarity should give us all hope for the future. It shows that while those in power want a dog-eat-dog world, solidarity is still very much alive among the rest of us.

Why Murdoch hacks want to destroy Duncan Storrar

“Heavily armed robots turning a city into a war zone, stalking the streets and killing soldier and civilian alike.”
This isn’t the plot of an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. It’s a vision of what the future might be like, according to a report by scientific journal Nature on the future of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) – armed automatons with the ability to select and attack targets, without human intervention.
While killer robots sound like science fiction, the contributors to Nature broke down the technological requirements into two main components: the location and hazard perception seen in prototype self-driving cars, and target selection. Both technologies are close to complete.
The terrifying aspects of this development are more than just those to do with what the journal terms “the ethical debates” posed by technologies like LAWS. There also are political implications.
First, LAWS make it less of a commitment for a government to go to war. A steady stream of dead soldiers, their lives wasted in a foreign intervention, can start to turn a population against war. A steady stream of broken robots is unlikely to have that effect.
Second, the technology would make the state more stable in situations of upheaval. Mass armies often mutiny in times of rebellion. These robots, however, would know only how to kill. And kill they would, for whatever regime possessed them.
The weakness of the Nature article is that it promotes international law as a solution to prevent these killing machines being abused by nation states.
The problem, of course, is that international law has proven impotent in protecting vulnerable populations from imperialist slaughter.
Any treatment of dangerous new technologies like LAWS by international law possibly would be limited to restricting smaller powers from developing the technology openly, but leaving the floodgates open for imperialist powers to build and use these killing machines.

Killer robots to leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’, say scientists

ASIO has the right to access every phone number you call, to know where and when you called it and to collect your web browsing history. The NSA is reading so many emails and phone messages that whistleblower Edward Snowden says it has millions of “dick pics”.
So you’d be forgiven for thinking that any privacy you still have is a 20th century relic – like Betamax video players, steam engines or cameras that use film.
In these dark times for privacy, however, an unlikely champion has arisen. His name? Joe Hockey. His goal? To protect the privacy of tax-dodging multinational corporations.
It’s not easy to set up complex corporate structures so that revenue earned in Australia is treated for taxation purposes as having been earned in low tax counties like Singapore or Ireland, or in outright tax havens like the Cayman Islands.
Joe Hockey is going out of his way to make sure you can do it in secret, without having to worry about pesky public scrutiny.
The Australian Tax Office, with the backing of the treasurer, is so concerned that multinational corporations won’t like it any more that it denied a Uniting Church freedom of information request to release names of resources companies accused of tax avoidance.
It instead responded with a document in which all of the answers were redacted. When the Senate Economics Reference Committee asked for a full version of the document, tax commissioner Chris Jordan refused, claiming that providing it would not be in the public interest. Our privacy-loving hero Joe Hockey, fresh from voting for mandatory metadata retention laws, gave him the green light.
The transcripts of the Senate committee argument are fascinating. “It would be unprecedented for taxpayer specific situation [sic] to be provided in a public way … We need to be able to have transparent and open relationships with companies. We cannot have a situation where companies argue they won’t share info with us under belief [it will be made public].”
This excuse totally ignores the fact that keeping secrets from the ATO is a crime, and always has been.
So now we have a situation in which the budget is in deficit, tax receipts from transnational corporations are falling and abuse of tax loopholes is widespread.
Isn’t it great that someone is looking out for the privacy of oppressed billionaires?

Finally some privacy – for multinational tax dodgers

The World Wide Fund for Nature’s 2014 Living Planet Report paints a grim picture of capitalism’s impact on the environment and in particular on living creatures.
Between 1970 and 2010, the Living Planet Index, which tracks more than 10,000 local populations of 3,038 different mammal, bird, reptile, fish and amphibian species, has declined by an unprecedented 52 percent. The number of freshwater animals fell 76 percent.
“Put another way”, say the report’s authors, “in less than two human generations, population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half. These are the living forms that constitute the fabric of the ecosystems which sustain life on Earth – and the barometer of what we are doing to our own planet, our only home. We ignore their decline at our peril.”
While the report focuses on the present rather than the future, the trends it outlines are getting worse. Several direct causes are identified – habitat losses, pollution, excessive fishing and climate change being at the forefront.
The report is correct that human activity is responsible for almost all of these falls. However, it contains two major weaknesses.
It erroneously focuses on human population growth as a driver of environmental degradation. This both misdirects blame for the problem toward faster growing sections of the population – mostly the Chinese and Indian working class – and in doing so provides a useful scapegoat for the corporate executives, politicians and other ruling class figures who make the decisions that devastate the planet.
The other significant weakness is found in the report’s introduction, titled “We are all in this together”. It might seem correct – after all, there is only one planet Earth and we all live on it. The problem with the formulation, however, is that the planet isn’t simply dying; it’s being killed. And not because of the decisions most of us make.
For example, the scramble to source and then burn fossil fuels is one of the most environmentally damaging practices. The technology exists to provide most or even all of the world’s energy needs from renewable sources. Yet the uptake of alternative energy is limited by the way the economy is currently structured. Renewables account for only 2-3 percent of global energy production.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Brendan Pearson told the Australian Financial Review the reason. “[M]ost of all it’s cost”, he was quoted as saying on 17 October.
On one hand, trillions of dollars are invested in polluting industries. Exxon-Mobil alone has a market capitalisation of more than US$400 billion. And sixteen out of the 20 highest quarterly profits ever reported were made by oil and gas companies.
On the other, the majority of the ruling class outside of the energy sector also prefers to burn cheap fossil fuels in order that production costs are kept down and profits are commensurately higher. “We have to depend on fossil fuel, especially coal, because coal is the most low-cost energy source”, Yasushi Aoki, the head of Nippon Steel, one of the world’s largest steel producers, told the AFR.
The rest of us get little or no say in this.
The sort of concerted worldwide action needed to begin to reverse the damage outlined in the Living Planet Report is realistic only in a world that isn’t dominated by the almighty dollar. The minority at the top of society have absolutely no interest in such a world. They are not with us, they are against us.

Abu Ghraib 20 years on

Rohingya in Australia’s detention centres offered a deal with the devil

One law for senators, another for refugees

Cost cutting threatens airport fire services

Clinton’s emails show how the system is rigged for the rich

US prisoners fight against forced labour

Why Murdoch hacks want to destroy Duncan Storrar

Killer robots to leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’, say scientists

Finally some privacy – for multinational tax dodgers

Half of the world’s vertebrates died off in last 40 years

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us