Nothing New

My opposition to reactionaries and socialists is perhaps a love of being different. Perhaps that is also one reason I thought of the solution to climate change without reading it in a book or on a protest sign. True, my idea, to delicense an oil major, follows logically from environmentalism, but no one comes out and says it like me. Everyone else beats around the bush, trying to phase out fossil fuel with subsidies and taxes. Subsidies will not work for the same reason taxes will not work. My reasoning there is perhaps a distortion of other mainstream ideas. Both subsidies and taxes increase GDP, and increased GDP increases fossil fuel production, and every drop produced is burnt, no matter its price. According to MMT, taxes are what gives money value, and I interpret giving money value as a boost to GDP. It's telling that MMTers want guaranteed employment; they don't want us to work less. Leftists may have given us weekends, but they still want us to identify as workers. Work and consumption are two sides of the same Orwellian coin. The problem with degrowthers is that they are invariably undemocratic. They oppose democracy by proposing to use it in corporations; that would destroy democracy as certainly as reactionaries do. Workers are habitual; they would toe the company line, just like share holders do. I even disagree with other new econonomists that I have studied even less. The idea that government causes innovation is only half true. In fact neither government nor economy causes innovation. Innovation is wasted time, plain and simple. There is zero incentive for scientific experiments, or hobbies, that all innovation comes from. If you want more innovation, you need more unemployment. Full employment is business as usual. Corporations grow because their employees, from CEO all the way down, are compassionate and want to spread the wealth that their company affords them. Corporations cannot change because they are hierarchical; if an employee changes, peers, managers, and underlings will oppose the change; it's only external threats against the existence of their company that can change every employee at once. A company's financials statement is like its skin, and like animals, their existence does not end at skin; it extends out into the environment or the economy. Oil companies, more than others, depend on the entire economy to exist. CEOs are the employees most dependent on their company, and oil companies are the companies most dependent on the economy. I don't know if eliminating a CEO would be good for a company, but I suspect eliminating an oil company would be good for the economy. It would be good because, not in spite, of increasing unemployment. Allowing a few powerful companies to exist goes hand in hand with fascism; noting is new. Fighting against fascism just makes it stronger. Instead, destroy one of its puppet masters; delicense an oil major. Why do I call Trump a fascist, and not an authoritarian? I guess fascist has fewer syllables, but also there are authoritarians that are qualitatively different from Trump. Other authoritarians were created by the USofGenocide; they exist to serve weapons corporations in the USG, not in their own country. Even petrostate authoritarians just serve the top dog oil companies, that all call USG home. Oil companies don't compete; they prop each other up in the economy, just like employees prop each other up in a company. Like Hitler, Trump serves corporations in his own country. Killing Nazis did not end the war; destroying the top dog corporations ended the war.

Strident

I've been getting more strident against extremes. Kill me now if I'm getting conservative in old age. But socialism is not better than Republicanism. Just because liberalism has not yet reached its stride on climate does not mean it is not our best hope. Of course, Biden has to fade away before we can cut fossil fuel labor loose, and delicense an oil major. But that is no reason to do anything else first. Destroying an oil major has to come first, or it will never come. Only civil rights rival climate in urgency. Classism is a distant third. Here are some of my responses to ecosocialists on youtube.

Oil companies are like animals with their backs to the wall; they will do anything to survive. Everyone knows the planet is not big enough for both us and oil companies. Some of you repress the emotions caused by the fact that to survive, we must destroy an oil company right away, and destroy them all by the time we want the climate to stop getting worse. Thus, you create elaborate metaphysical mechanisms between climate change and fascism. Hitler and Trump are merely figure heads for the top dog companies. To prevent the climate from getting worse, and incidentally prevent fascism (a lesser threat), stop demanding the end of capitalism or government, and simply delicense an oil major. You calling the problem classism is just as bad as SCOTUS calling oil companies persons. It is not us against individuals that happen to be paid the most by oil companies, it is us against the oil companies themselves. Even KochIndustries would exist without its namesake. Kill what Koch would die for, KochIndustries.

Universal healthcare is not leftist. Democrats are fighting for universal healthcare. Leftists are fighting for strong unions. Not all unions are bad; fossil fuel unions are bad; and teachers unions are good. There is no clear line between manager and worker; managers do a lot of work essential to their company. Whether the manager is good or bad depends on the company; fossil-fuel managers/workers are bad; non-fossil-fuel managers/workers are good. Republicans want less democracy. Democrats want more democracy. Leftists want less democracy. The difference between leftists and Republicans, the two sides of an Orwellian coin, is that Republicans reduce democracy with consumption, and leftists reduce democracy with labor.

There is no more a correlation between energy use and well being than there is between gdp and energy use or well being and gdp. The reason physicists have graphs is for social reasons that they don't understand, because society is not precise. I'm not an atom in a black body experiment. This is not a zero sum game. The only thing we know for certain is the one thing physicists refuse to bring to consciousness. They are afraid because of the emotion the realization brings. They are afraid of emotion because they think it is contrary to reason. In fact the emotion you feel when I propose to disband an oil company helps you to reason correctly.

Right and Wrong

 A couple of decisions throw this society's stability into question. One time a California judge ruled in a city's rights case that climate is political, not a matter of justice. Other times the justice system has ruled corporations are people. The disrespect for language those decisions demonstrate scares me about whether courts are upholding the constitution that is constituted from language. Of course climate is a matter of justice; indigenous people are the first to demand we keep the oil in the ground to protect water. Of course corporations are not people; not only are they brainless, but they don't even breathe. You could claim the courts were not being literal, but I claim that is disrespectful of the language, and therefore unconstitutional. Why would an institution ostensibly based on truth be non-literal? Math is not literal because there are not words for the things it decides. But there are plenty of words for matters of justice; there is no excuse for courts to be not literal. They are plenty literal when it suits them. If words can be taken out of context, they they can mean literally anything. It is almost certainly a more literal interpretation of the constitution to treat corporations as collectives than to treat them as persons, if only because the constitution consists of language. It is literally impossible to respect the language, and treat a corporation as person. The constitution certainly does not mean to be ignored, so it certainly does not allow collectives to be persons. Similarly with climate justice, if the constitution is not to be disregarded, then we have to interpret it to mean judges must dispense justice, and not defer it to congress. In fact, the judge is dispensing justice by deferring it to congress. I'm certain the citizens in that case felt as ruled against as I did, when there was no justice against the oil company. No justice against an oil company is injustice against the citizens; the judge cannot hide behind congress, and will go down in history as a criminal against humanity. I'm not saying the legal branch of government is inherently bad. I'm just saying that if it wants to survive, it has to rule against oil companies at every opportunity. Just because that would not be sufficient for survival is no excuse. Certainly we could vote an oil company out of existence, and no other action would be needed to stop the climate from getting worse. But we should not have to fight against other victims of oil companies to get there.