One response to “Empire of Chaos: Climate Change & Political Ecology”
This presentation was very good, Parenti has clearly done his research. The pressure from social movements he calls for gaining some teeth will be needed, but for preventing and/or stopping disastrous, fuel-guzzling inter-capitalist war.
American elite’s interests, like all national capitalist interests, have always been self-serving and not necessarily about preserving capitalist ideology. It is the geopolitical challenge to US hegemony that is causing it to lash-out, so as to protect its global control in general. Finding a way to end American geopolitical supremacy and the exorbitant privilege of the dollar peacefully is the key to solving climate change.
The neoliberal turn in foreign and domestic policy has not changed the targeting of certain countries or made their actions erratic; there is still a pattern of maintaining control over world markets, however stupid those actions may be (as in the war against Iraq crippling the region and giving rise to ISIS, but the targeting of Iraq was done in order to punish states for not buying oil with dollars, as was Libya). The US has always been motivated by its own interests as a dominant power and as a class preserving the Capitalist system only secondarily. The Cold War was between two competing military powers more than a epic ideological struggle.
All I’m saying is that American elites are not stupid and ignorant, they have the same strategy they’ve had since the end of WWII. It is That strategy that is under attack right now and not so much that Socialism is absent, so that now they are negligent in creating failed states.
synthetic zerØ 
This presentation was very good, Parenti has clearly done his research. The pressure from social movements he calls for gaining some teeth will be needed, but for preventing and/or stopping disastrous, fuel-guzzling inter-capitalist war.
American elite’s interests, like all national capitalist interests, have always been self-serving and not necessarily about preserving capitalist ideology. It is the geopolitical challenge to US hegemony that is causing it to lash-out, so as to protect its global control in general. Finding a way to end American geopolitical supremacy and the exorbitant privilege of the dollar peacefully is the key to solving climate change.
The neoliberal turn in foreign and domestic policy has not changed the targeting of certain countries or made their actions erratic; there is still a pattern of maintaining control over world markets, however stupid those actions may be (as in the war against Iraq crippling the region and giving rise to ISIS, but the targeting of Iraq was done in order to punish states for not buying oil with dollars, as was Libya). The US has always been motivated by its own interests as a dominant power and as a class preserving the Capitalist system only secondarily. The Cold War was between two competing military powers more than a epic ideological struggle.
All I’m saying is that American elites are not stupid and ignorant, they have the same strategy they’ve had since the end of WWII. It is That strategy that is under attack right now and not so much that Socialism is absent, so that now they are negligent in creating failed states.