August 1, 2017
It’s long been clear that if
we want to avoid catastrophic climate disruption on a scale that threatens
human civilization, we need to leave vast amounts of fossil fuels in the
ground. Environmental writer Bill McKibben pointed out the math in a crucial
2012 article for Rolling Stone: To avoid disaster, 80 percent of the carbon
already discovered by private and state-owned energy companies has to be left
alone—to be treated as useless rock, not precious resources.
The problem is, the energy
companies are some of the richest, most powerful entities on Earth.
Corporations are designed to act like organisms with a single goal, maximizing
profits. And the fossil fuel industry’s future profits—roughly 80 percent of
them—depend on extracting that carbon and burning it, climate and civilization
be damned. They have been using and will continue to use their vast influence
to thwart any effort to avert that disaster.
Does humanity have the collective power to tell the current owners of carbon deposits that they no longer own them—that they don’t have the right to take them out of the ground and sell them as fuel? That’s the $640 trillion question. Doing so is essential to our future as a species—but a massive transfer of wealth of that kind isn’t like a revolution, it is a revolution, and a revolution on a scale history hasn’t seen before.
But climate isn’t the only
crisis that requires a revolution. Healthcare provided by for-profit
corporations inevitably tends towards more than we can afford to pay, as the
demand for life-or-death products is infinite. Solving the problem of paying
for medical care means telling medical corporations that they can no longer
expect the hyper-profits that their market value is based on expecting.
And it’s increasingly
evident that an entire sector of the healthcare industry—the purveyors of
for-profit health insurance—needs to be eliminated in order to bring health
costs under control. The insurance industry, though, has a special power in our
economy: As its business model involves taking money from people and investing
it, virtually every corporation on the stock exchange counts insurance
companies among its owners. So taking on the insurance business, which is
necessary to make healthcare affordable, means taking on all business. In other
words, it means a revolution.
This conflict between the
needs of the majority and the interests of the few runs throughout our economy.
On a local level, many cities have serious shortages of housing that people can
afford to live in, not because it costs so much to build and maintain housing,
but because the real estate market sets prices that assume
that landlords will maximize profits—and maximizing profits from a fixed
supply of land leaves many tenants on the street. If cities want ordinary
people to be able to afford to live in them, they will need to lower the value
of their real estate—which would be a revolutionary reversal of priorities for
most local governments.
These gaps between the status
quo and our survival are why we need a new media system. Corporate media are
really designed around preserving the status quo—unsurprisingly, because they
are owned by the class of people who benefit from things staying the same. And
they’re funded, through advertising, by the same corporations who are profiting
from the disastrous course we’re on—with energy, healthcare and real estate
among the most prominent industry sponsors. You will not learn from corporate
media how much danger their advertisers are putting us in, or what we can do to
stop them.
Revolutions need organizing,
and organizing needs information. We need a revolution, and the place to begin
is with the media
.
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