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Why Don't Lefty Media Emphasize Capitalism's Greatest Crime—the Climate Crisis?
The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.
Jan 02, 2025
If climate overheating is the biggest threat to life on Earth, one might expect that progressive platforms would be all over this issue. Of all the great crimes of capitalism—war, imperial conquest, siphoning pocket change from workers into bloated coffers of corporate wealth, shaking down ordinary people for a false promise of healthcare, buying up housing with private equity to spike rents, etc.—the baking of the biosphere stands out as an act of unprecedented, monstrous proportions.
Corporate greed, in its bureaucratic, industrial ability to divorce sentiment from institutional momentum, has entered a realm unique in the half billion year evolutionary history of multicellular life. Corporate humanity, armed with technology, has the ability to fast-track mass extinction. The oligarchs of our species have gained admittance to a dimension formerly restricted to geological processes. If implosion of the biosphere had always been a consequence of rare acts of volcanism—the caprice of plate tectonics unfolding across eons—we now can completely obliterate living systems on a dime.
Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it.
Progressive media, thus, has every reason to be utterly riveted and obsessed with the climate—climate extinction is worse than war, worse than racism, worse than colonial expansion, worse than arbitrary police power, worse than union busting, worse than any corporate crimes short of nuclear war. Indeed, climate destruction might be thought of as the pure tincture of capitalism, the compressed essence of all forms of injustice. Climate, however, requires that people grasp a different order of magnitude to seriously address its lethal certainty. While police brutality, war, housing shortages, human rights abuses, and racism can possibly be addressed with reform, there is no wiggle room for climate's destructive trajectory. No series of incremental policy adjustments can placate Mother Nature and her planned revenge.
Climate remediation demands revolutionary change—there is no path forward to, as Jeremy Corbin words it, "turn the Titanic around," under our current political and economic systems. Climate overheating, unlike all the smaller threats plaguing our (and all other) species, requires an almost unimaginable shift in our institutions and ways of thinking—the transitions that might give the planet a hint of optimism have to take place globally within an international community hopelessly addicted to nationalism. A recent piece by Mark Wilson posted at the World Socialist Website (WSWS) encapsulates the gargantuan task—Wilson, referencing the suit by impoverished countries to access climate reparations via The World Court, states:
Whatever the verdict of this case, the major capitalist powers responsible for the climate crisis will continue to base their policies not on science, human rights, or environmental protection. Instead, the ruling elites and big business will make their calculations based on profit and on enriching themselves.
What is required by the working class globally is instead a break from the institutions that defend the capitalist system as it plunges the world into ecological devastation. The conscious political fight to abolish capitalism is the necessary strategic task to which all workers and young people must orient, as the only path to safeguard Earth and its living inhabitants.
As a regular reader of the WSWS, I generally find perspectives that are more pointedly directed toward revolution than incrementalism, but oddly, one has to look hard at WSWS offerings to find climate related analysis. I had to scroll through at least 30 pieces to find the above quote. That is not to begrudge the focus on international labor struggles, worker's rights, Gaza, and Marxist cultural perspectives, but the paucity of climate related reporting is not so much a failure of WSWS as it is a universal problem characteristic of progressive platforms in general.
A quick personal and anecdotal survey of five different online, leftist platforms reveals that fewer than 10% of pieces deal with climate, and only a tiny handful go into detail regarding the more nuanced debates around climate overheating mitigation. For example, the exploration of Degrowth—ubiquitous on niche environmental sites like Resilience—almost never receives detailed unpacking on more general online sites that promote leftist journalism. Unfortunately, we have a poorly informed public with a below threshold investment in civil disobedience, and little familiarity with the prevailing positions—largely emerging from academia—regarding the strategies that will be urgent and essential to transition from a political culture of runaway ecocide. Many have complained that the climate movement does not resonate with poor and working people. The massive mobilization needed to confront the sixth extinction depends on a well-informed public armed with the requisite narrative tools.
The problems confronting climate activism may be uniquely psychological. We don't see the same sort of immediate nexus that binds perpetrators and victims in the manner that a bloodied Gazan child can be traced to a conscious act of colonial expansion. The sort of violence manifest in the gratuitous burning of fossil fuels rather evades the scope of public understanding. We simply don't see the Central American refugee as a victim of corporate designs in the same way that we recognize a murdered Gazan child as a target of Israeli and U.S. military intent. Yet that connection is real and urgently needed to be framed for those who struggle to grasp the storyline. The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.
The murder of George Floyd pulled at our collective heartstrings. Tens of millions of people cringed at the specific, personal, intimate revelation of police violence. We oddly respond emotionally to a single act of injustice, yet numbly fail to resonate with the onrushing death of billions. Perhaps it is our job as writers to make climate crimes personal and immediate. Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it. The enormous bridge linking the planet's greatest global catastrophe to the private suffering of real people may be nearly impossible for writers to span.
At the very least we can picture the suffering of Roger Hallam—sentenced to five years in prison for climate civil disobedience. Perhaps we can also appreciate that John Mark Rozendaal has been threatened with a seven-year sentence for playing a Bach Cello Suite outside of Citibank in NYC as part of the Summer of Heat protest. A man holding an umbrella above the cellist also risked Draconian retribution. Civil disobedience has often been energized by collective outrage toward state violence directed against those who stand up for human rights—think of Rosa Parks who became the iconic symbol of the civil rights movement.
All of the things that make journalism vivid and anxiously relevant ought to drive the climate narrative. The corporate world and their political puppets want nothing more than to see readers on leftist platforms bored with climate coverage.
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Now It Can Be Told... After All the Harm Has Been Done
Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report on atrocities.
Dec 26, 2024
This week, The New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train, and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings, and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”
Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”
Now they tell us.
The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:
* * * * *
Timing is crucial in media and politics—and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told—years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized.
But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.
What American policymakers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment—not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression—is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.
When the warfare in Afghanistan finally ended, major U.S. media—after avidly supporting the invasion and then the occupation—were awash in accounts of how the war had been badly run with ineptitude or deception from the White House and the Pentagon. Some of the media analysis and commentaries might have seemed a bit sheepish, but news outlets preferred not to recall their prior support for the same war in Afghanistan that they were now calling folly.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign-policy leadership or major news media, let alone its political economy. On the contrary: the forces that have dragged the United States into an array of wars in numerous countries still retain enormous sway over foreign and military affairs. For those forces, over time, shape-shifting is essential, while the warfare state continues to rule.
The fact that strategies and forms of intervention are evolving, most conspicuously in the direction of further reliance on airpower rather than ground troops, makes the victims of the USA’s firepower even less visible to American eyes. This presents a challenge to take a fresh look at ongoing militarism and insist that the actual consequences for people at the other end of U.S. weaponry be exposed to the light of day—and taken seriously in human terms.
Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.
That we live in one interdependent world is no longer debatable. Illusions about American exceptionalism have been conclusively refuted by the global climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the ever-present and worsening dangers of thermonuclear war. On a planet so circular in so many ways, what goes around comes around.
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Israeli Strike on Press Van Kills Five Palestinian Journalists in Gaza
"Journalists are civilians and must always be protected," said the Committee to Protect Journalists' Middle East and North Africa Program.
Dec 26, 2024
The Israeli military bombed a clearly marked press vehicle in central Gaza early Thursday, killing five journalists in an attack that the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned as a "heinous crime."
The journalists killed were Fadi Hassouna, Ibrahim al-Sheikh Ali, Mohammed al-Ladah, Faisal Abu al-Qumsan, and Ayman al-Jadi. All of them worked for "Al-Quds Today," a local television channel.
Middle East Eyereported that the slain journalists were "outside al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp when their van was struck by an Israeli strike on Thursday morning."
Hani Aburezeq, a Middle East Eye reporter at the scene, said the broadcast van "was entirely burnt and destroyed."
"It was fully engulfed in flames," Aburezeq added.
Al Jazeerareported that one of the journalists killed in the strike was "waiting for his wife in front of the hospital while she was in labor to give birth to their first child."
The Israeli military claimed without providing evidence that the five men were militants posing as journalists. Israel has repeatedly accused journalists working in Gaza of being militants; international law prohibits the targeting of journalists unless they "directly participate in hostilities."
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more than 130 Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killed since Israel's massive assault on the enclave began following the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023.
CPJ's Middle East and North Africa Program said Thursday that it is "devastated by the reports that five journalists and media workers were killed inside their broadcasting vehicle by an Israeli strike."
"Journalists are civilians and must always be protected," the group added.
A Guardianinvestigation released earlier this year found that "amid a loosening of the Israel Defense Force's interpretation of the laws of war after the deadly Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, some within the IDF appear to have viewed journalists working in Gaza for outlets controlled by or affiliated with Hamas to be legitimate military targets."
"Under the Geneva conventions, a journalist can lose their civilian status if they engage in planning or carrying out combat operations," The Guardiannoted Thursday. "Working for an organization such as 'Al-Quds Today' does not make someone a target."
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