Climate, technology and chaos Blog

We have had 40 years of neoliberalism. The incredibly influential corporate think-tank the Heritage Foundation‘s Project 2025 [1],[2],[3], is an attempt to boost that movement even further under the next Trump Administration. If accepted, which is likely, this will have a huge effect on the USA’s willingness to have anything to do with reducing fossil fuel burning, or preserving ecologies.

Neoliberalism, has resulted in a crisis of living for most of the population: lower wages, worse working conditions, greater debt (especially for education), less social mobility, less affordable housing, fewer and harsher prospects for people’s children, greater inequality of riches and power, and so on. Neoliberalism has been a significant contributor to extending and intensifying ecological destruction and the failure of action on climate change. The main focus of neoliberalism is to disqualify any governmental action that:

• Impinges on corporate power or profit,
• Involves government planing for the future
• Involves government planning for ‘justice’ or support for the lower classes

The aim is to leave everything to The Market, a God whose invisible hand always delivers wealth to the virtuous and the talented. Leaving things to The Market also tends to benefit established power and wealth, as they have succeeded in that Market and the politics of that Market. The secret doctrine is that the only time governments should intervene is when powerful corporations are threatened by their own stupidity, and the intervention should be free taxpayer-funded cash to do what they like with (pay emergency bonuses etc).

The rich elites argue that the main problems the world faces is that we don’t have enough neoliberalism, and that the few, weak attempts to contain climate change interfere with corporate liberty. They also note that China, which does not pursue neoliberalism, is possibly becoming a powerful economic threat. This implies neoliberalism is not that great at promoting prosperous economies.

Neoliberal policies require ordinary people to give up hope that they can participate in their own government at any level. These policies also lead to the branding of any dissent as ‘marxist,’ ‘politically correct,’ ‘woke’ etc and to proposals to crush dissent as un-American or un-Australian or whatever. This could display the potential weakness of contemporary capitalists: dissent and ecological challenges must be slurred, suppressed or avoided. All news must aspire to Murdochism (ie Fox, Australian Sky etc)

The newest neoliberal attack on liberty, in support of Tump, is called Project 2025 and comes from the American Heritage Foundation and other corporate think thanks.

The Background

The American Heritage Foundation has long been at the heart of rightwing politics in the US. As they say:

“the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s “Mandate” for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.”

https://www.project2025.org/about/about-project-2025/

How many people knew that when they voted for Trump they were really voting for a corporate think-tank, which has been bought by the hyper-rich? Or that Trump would not clean up the swamp, but enthusiastically embed special interests into his Presidency? This is not an idea which originates with ‘Trump haters’ but which is pointed out by the servants of those financial elites themselves.

Lets be clear these people have no false modesty, as they say in their manifesto for Project 2025, The Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise [this seems to have been hidden from the people again! try https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf It will probably be moved again later]

one set of eyes reading these passages [in this proposal] will be those of the 47th President of the United States

Mandate: xiii

It may be somewhat unlikely to be being read by the 47th President if it’s Trump, as it is a long and fairly boring book, but someone may point-form some of it for him (more freedom to make money, more tax cuts, ignore climate change, more fossil fuels etc). It would be surprising if they did not already have someone on the Trump team to do that. Remember this Project is well financed and well connected. It will be implemented unless voted out.

They give some more background history, showing their elite influence on US poltics:

In the winter of 1980, the fledging Heritage Foundation handed to President-elect Ronald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership. This collective work by conservative thought leaders and former government hands—most of whom were not part of Heritage—set out policy prescriptions, agency by agency for the incoming President. The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists

Mandate: xiii

By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy

Mandate: 2.

So they are telling us that the Reagan years, with:

• the destruction of the American economy,
• the outsourcing of government operations which led to increase in costs and declines in services,
• the collapse of S&Ls through deregulation which left some people very rich and others without their life savings,
• the asset stripping of companies undervalued on the stock market which led to the loss of functional US companies and local jobs,
• the return of frequent boom and bust cycles which from which the rich were bailed out and the poor and middle class left to rot,
• the beginning of outsourcing jobs to China and other cheap labor countries,
• the decline of wages and security
• the overspending on the military
• the increase of government debt because of that spending together with massive tax cuts to the wealthy.
• the stripping back of those State services which helped people and gave them some levels of security because they ‘cost too much’ and supposedly supported ‘welfare queens,’
• the support for murderous pro-corporate dictatorships in Latin America (The founding of neoliberalism occurred under Pinochet in Chile)
• the boosting of people who would become the USA’s most destructive enemies (the Taliban, Iraq, Iran etc).
• The induced collapse of Russia into Organised Crime Capitalism which led to a massive decline in Russia’s population (through starvation?) and eventually to Putin.

All of this, can all be traced to the American Heritage Foundation, by their own boasts.

Fighting against Democracy

They rather oddly comment about:

elite support for economic globalization. For 30 years, America’s political, economic, and cultural leaders embraced and enriched Communist China and its genocidal Communist Party while hollowing out America’s industrial base.

Mandate: 11

and

Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe. It has made a handful of American corporations enormously profitable while twisting their business incentives away from the American people’s needs…

America’s elites have betrayed the American people

11-12

For some reason they forget to mention that the elites in question were the neoliberal capitalist wealth elites who support Heritage and neoliberalism. Capitalism has always been global, always seeking cheap resources, cheap labour and cheap pollution. It was the neoliberals who hollowed out America’s industrial base, with the full support of the Republican Party. It was also the neoliberal elites that tried to shut down ‘left wing’ anti-neoliberal-globalism. The Left was protesting about how this kind of globalism increased corporate power, ending both national sovereignty and attempts at making a ‘helpful’ State across the globe.

History apparently can be hammered into an ‘acceptable shape’ with enough repetition and power.

I’m also not quite sure why anyone would be proud of causing and boosting all these problems, but they do add that:

The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coalition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom

Mandate: 1

Presumably they are referring to the events covered by the well known Trilateral Commision Report, which alleged that the USA and other parts of the world were suffering from a crisis of too much democracy: Women’s liberation, Black Liberation, Gay liberation, the workers getting uppity, the birth of popular envionmental and anti-pollution movevments, etc. These movements were a real problem for the rich-elites. They were panicking. All this democracy could strip away their power and wealth, leading to chaos for them. Who knows what could follow? This fear underlies a fundamental neoliberal doctrine going back to Hayek and Mises: the spread of democracy needs to be stopped as it impinges on The Market, and possibly stops corporations taking all the wealth for themselves. A proposed focus on promises of individual prosperity, breaking up community action, distrust of government and faith in freedom of The Market seemed a workable solution to this fear. Hence their advice to Reagan was aimed at shutting down the possible increase in liberty for the people, and reinforcing the power of corporate elites.

They even link this 1970s surge of non-elite liberty to the present day:

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.”

Mandate: 1

They admit that the radical chic of the anti-elite democratic movements of the 1970s are comparable to ‘woke’ support for human rights for the suppressed people of the present day. This includes the terrible woke support for not shooting people because they are black, or not victimizing people because of their sexual identity, etc. The neoliberal position is clear: liberty must be thwarted unless it is just corporate liberty. They obviously think that having previously told Reagan how to benefit the financial elites is a selling point for the normal population, which perhaps it is, given how that period has been sanitised by the corporate media.

They also make it clear that one of their prime policy objectives is clearing the public service of anyone who disagrees with their project and appointing people who will do exactly as they are told by the Republican President. As when Trump removed Comey and his attorney general Jeff Sessions for not stopping the Mueller inquiry. So ends Democracy and discussion. If loyalty to the President is the sole denominator of success and employment, then no one will ever tell the executive when their plans are going desperately wrong. North Korea is not the ideal State.

To rephrase Reagan: “the most chilling words you will ever hear, are ‘I’m from a corporation and I’m here to bring you liberty'”

Scapegoating: Don’t blame the riche elites for anything

As neoliberalism not only failed to produce general prosperity but generated the opposite, neoliberals need a long line of scapegoats to explain the failure. Obviously none of these explanations will include the neoliberal project itself or the self-destructiveness of capitalism, because corporations are tools designed and used to avoid personal responsibility (limited liability), and the media is largely owned by corporations or billionaires. Perhaps weirdly most of these alleged scapegoats are ludicrously inadequate for the magnitude of events attributed to them:

The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty [for corporations] under siege as never before.

Mandate: xvi

Everyone ‘knows’ both that the US is full of powerful Marxists, and that they are an unpopular and tiny portion of the population. The only way that Marxists can be an explanation for neoliberal failure, when there are no self-identified, active or important, political Marxists in the US, is to either call Democratic Party members Marxist, or talk about supposed ‘cultural marxists’ swarming through institutions but otherwise invisible or hidden. On top of that, the evil is represented by a certified list of powerless people such as trans people, drag queens, people who talk about racism and the problems it generates, “anti-family campaigners” (?) etc. who are destroying our children: {“children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries” Mandate: 1}. It is never the actually powerful or rich that cause problems.

A central strategy of neoliberalism to is to remove responsibility for suffering from those elites causing the suffering, while putting the responsibility onto minority scapegoats. This builds up two opposed categories, ‘straight and visible pro-capitalist champions of liberty and protectors of children’ vs ‘sexually corrupt, hidden, evil, anti-capitalist champions of tyrannical government and child abuse.’ You are either loyal to neoliberals, or something which is only barely human. You either accept the truth of your ‘information group’ or become corrupted by listening to, or discussing anything with, the wicked. This was a technique that was effective for the Nazis as well, but its pretty basic.

They say they will help this process of binarisation and:

start… with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights,

Mandate: 4-5

Apparently merely saying these words is a tyrannical threat to other people’s first amendment rights to free speech. No one said Neoliberals were coherent, but right-wing freedom of speech often involves removing other peoples right to speak, rewriting history, and making sure that poor weak corporations and evangelical foot-soldiers, are heard and protected (but only if they agree with the project).

The task at hand to reverse this [tiny and trivial] tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right. Project 2025 is more than 50 (and growing) of the nation’s leading conservative organizations joining forces to prepare and seize the day

Mandate: xiv

So there are lots of rich elite sponsored organisations involved in this pro-corporate revolutionary attack on minorities and non-powerful people. What a suprise. This all suggests that some defenders of a collapsing capitalism, as in the 1930s, are happy to use persecution and violence to keep it going.

As a kind of footnote, it is possible in neoliberalism to attack some forms of capitalism, just as Nazis were allowed to attack Jewish capitalism, this attackable capitalism is the ‘new’ information technology capitalism. “The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps.” (Mandate: 5). They don’t say that this is just like the way food companies try to addict kids to sugar and artificial chemically filled foods, or arms manufacturers might try to get kids addicted to their weapons, or toy companies to their scraps of plastic. This pushing of addiction is normal capitalism, as they would know. They also allege that info-tech companies are “a tool of China’s government. In exchange for cheap labor and regulatory special treatment from Beijing, America’s largest technology firms funnel data about Americans to the CCP”. Again these bad companies behave just like ordinary companies who use Chinese labor, and attempt to gain favour from the Chinese government. Trump pays taxes in China for his Maga goods which are made there, Ivanka gets special trademark deals with the Chinese government, but this is completely ok. It can be ignored

The established elite nearly always despise the nouveau riche, who are the not-yet-establishment. They can even talk about “Big Tech,” but you can’t talk about “Big Oil” or “Big Ag”, even though Big Oil may ‘rule the world’.

War

It also seems clear that they want war with China. Again authoritarianism needs wars to boost the profits of arms manufacturers, and get rid of competition.

The next conservative President must, restore war-fighting as [the military’s] sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority

Mandate: 8, but the message is hammered all through the book

Putin is not such a concern, but is a concern (cf 181-2)

Of course no mention of needing to use the army to help rebuild the USA as climate change wrecks it.

No one should be naive about China, but I suspect most people are not quite as keen for war with China as these elites – its a great money making oportunity for “Big Arms’. Encouraging external threats, and singling out weak internal threats for suppression, are part of the authoritarian schema.

Environmentalism

Environmentalism which inhibits corporate action is defined as Left wing fanaticism. Environmentalism should not actually be concerned with the environment.

Those who suffer most from environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human. Stewardship and conservation are supplanted by population control and economic regression. Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.

Mandate: 11

Oddly population control as a remedy for climate change is a right wing talking point, and no evidence is presented that climate change and ecological destruction and corporate poisoning do not affect “the aged, poor, and vulnerable”. They, in a characteristically unconservative manner, refuse to recognise that a working environment is necessary for humans, especially the poor and vulnerable, and that humans do not live away from the Earth’s environment (without huge amounts of costly technology). And that if corporations will not realise that the fuels which currently run the world’s corporations harm the world’s humans and enivronment, then corporations must be forced to recognise that their profits are destroying everything important to us.

It is they who abandon the confidence in human resilience and creativity, by assuming their polluting energy sources, and other forms of ecological destruction, cannot be abandoned or transcended by human ingenuity.

Corporate activity sacrifices everyone to profit and disregards the laws and workings of God’s creation. We do not need to boost its power to do more violating of our lives, by voting for the Right.

Given all this, their approach to climate change is obvious if sometimes vague. If action inconveniences profit, the problem is unimportant.

The President should also issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs. The USGCRP produces strategic plans and research (for example, the National Climate Assessment) that reduce the scope of legally proper options in presidential decision-making and in agency rulemakings and adjudications. Also, since much environmental policymaking must run the gauntlet of judicial review, USGCRP actions can frustrate successful litigation defense in ways that the career bureaucracy should not be permitted to control. The process for producing assessments should include diverse viewpoints

Mandate: 59

the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.

Mandate: 60

We might wonder what fanaticism for slowing climate change we are talking about when Biden is encouraging new fossil fuel licenses and mines, and continuing subsidies for fossil fuels.

In March 2023 the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee wrote:

As we’ll hear today, the United States subsidizes the fossil fuel industry with taxpayer dollars.  It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income.  

In the United States, by some estimates taxpayers pay about $20 billion dollars every year to the fossil fuel industry.  What do we get for that?  Economists generally agree: not much.  To quote conservative economist Gib Metcalf: these subsidies offer “little if any benefit in the form of oil patch jobs, lower prices at the pump, or increased energy security for the country.”  The cash subsidy is both big and wrong. 

But the really big subsidy is the license to pollute for free.  The IMF calls this global free pass an “implicit” fossil fuel subsidy.  Economists call it an “unpriced externality.”

SEN. WHITEHOUSE ON FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES: “WE ARE SUBSIDIZING THE DANGER”

It seems that doing even less to curb ecological destruction, or subsidizing it even more, is the only thing compatitble with corporate liberty. This implies corporate freedom is not only more important than democracy, but more important than life itself.

We should indeed ignore climate change and the role of fossil fuels:

USAID should cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world and support the responsible management of oil and gas reserves as the quickest way to end wrenching poverty and the need for open-ended foreign aid. The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate Strategy 2022–20307 ); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; and narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts. The agency should cease collaborating with and funding progressive foundations, corporations, international institutions, and NGOs that advocate on behalf of climate fanaticism.

Mandate 257-8

Yes Fossil fuels and their companies must be supported. It can be presumed that responsible management of oil and gas reserves, means full exploitation and sales at the highest price with almost no local benefit, as that is what it usually means. In Australia we know this means attacks on local government, pollution, destruction of water supplies, and almost no financial benefit from the mines, or the sales, because of minimal mineral royalties, tax breaks, tax evasion through foreign tax havens and paybacks of high interest loans from branches of the same company overseas. More neoliberal globalism in action to benefit profit, not locals.

In fact, almost nothing need be done. Especially anything which challenges corporate liberty to destroy the world for profit.

Again their arguments are selective:

The Biden Administration’s extreme climate policies have worsened global food insecurity and hunger. Its anti–fossil fuel agenda has led to a sharp spike in global energy prices.

Mandate: 257

No mention of the Russian invasion of Ukraine which massively lowered the supply of both food and fossil fuels, putting prices up all over the world not only in the USA. No mention of the record profits of major oil companies cronying up together to increase prices even more than they should have increased. No mention of food company profit increases. The dogma seems to be that whatever an established corporation does must be good, and have no deleterious effects at all. It is extreme to even pretend to worry about climate change.

They make the usual Bjon Lomborg argument:

The aid industry claims that climate change causes poverty, which is false. Enduring conflict, government corruption, and bad economic policies are the main drivers of global poverty. USAID’s response to man-made food insecurity is to provide more billions of dollars in aid—a recipe that will keep scores of poor countries underdeveloped and dependent on foreign aid for years to come.

Mandate: 257

We can note that the only bad industry is one which attempts to help people. However, climate change does cause poverty, through crop failure, wild fires, drought, floods and homelessness. We might even think about how working outside in excessive heat can cause death, which may lead the rest of the family into even greater poverty. But we have to believe families are more at risk from a small number of transsexuals’ than they are from corporate destruction. Climate change kills while it brings profits, so its ok. We already know that they do not really mean sensible economic policies, they mean letting corporations do what they will, as the environment is doing fine in the hands of corporations….

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs. In effect, the Biden EPA has once again presented a false choice to the American people: that they have to choose between a healthy environment and a strong, growing economy

Mandate: 419.

It seems to me that the neoliberal right is saying somthing like:

1. you should ignore warnings about collapsing ecologies and wild destructive weather, because we don’t know how to solve theses problems while keeping our established companies hyper-profitable,
2. It is important to recognise that property rights give property owners the right to destroy their property even if it harms others.
3. We don’t want people to get involved in government, and planing to save the planet as who knows where it will end? and
4. You cannot have both a strong economy and a healthy environment, so you must choose ‘The Market’ at all times, and that will always deliver because we say so, and you must trust us.

In reality, you also won’t get a ‘healthy economy’, if by healthy you mean one that benefits everyone and their ecologies, as one of the points of neoliberalism is to stop general benefit from happening. General benefit generates calls for democracy, like we had in the 1960s and 70s, and that is a problem for corporate control and elite profits.

Temporary conclusion

That is probably enough for the moment. The point is that a new Trump presidency, will attempt to make things even better for corporations at even bigger costs to the American People.

On this issue we can rewrite one of their passages to be a more accurate of themselves:

Ultimately, the Right does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. The established corporate rich are special when compared to the middle class and the poor. Men are special in comparison to women. Straight people are special in comparison with gay or queer people. Republicans are special in comparison with Democrats. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life, because they cut wages at every opportunity, intensify corporate power, and shift the cost of the State onto the middle classes. They think only they themselves have rights, along with the moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee to corporate power.

Mandate: 16 rephrased

These think tanks are aiming at suppression of any dissent, or objection to, excessive corporate power and profit – and are relatively open about it, once you realise that, in their world view, liberty is something that only exists for established corporations and their supporters. It is something which is for sale and can be bought, or not bought if you don’t have the money. The rest of us can suffer the consequences of that liberty and watch the world burn, flood and fall apart.

As Ronald Reagan put it: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation”

Mandate: 2

We need to defend our liberty against the corporate sector and its think-tanks.