Search the archive.

(Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at New College of Florida and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. William Darity Jr is the Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African-American Studies, and economics; and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darrick Hamilton is associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research.https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/federal-job-guarantee-universal-basic-income-investment-jobs-unemployment/)

The UBI represents one way to fight increasing deprivation. But another potential intervention — the federal job guarantee (FJG) — might be a far more promising demand. A job guarantee is not a new idea. It has been part of the American conversation at least since populist governor Huey Long put forth his Share Our Wealth Plan. In 1934, he argued that the United States should use public works to ensure “everybody [is] employed.” These calls were echoed by politicians from Roosevelt in his Economic Bill of Rights to George McGovern during his 1972 presidential bid. Martin Luther King also stumped for a job guarantee, demanding immediate “employment for everyone in need of a job.” He saw “a guaranteed annual income at levels that sustain life and decent circumstances” as the second-best option. Here are five reasons to agree with him. 1. A job guarantee means fewer poor Americans. A job guarantee would reduce poverty more quickly and provide more benefits than a UBI. To ensure a sufficient income, we argue for a FJG that would pay a minimum annual wage of at least $23,000 (the poverty line for a family of four), rising to a mean of $32,500. This would eliminate the “working poor” for full-time working households. In addition to the wage, workers in the FJG program would receive health insurance and pension benefits in line with those that all civil servants and elected federal officials receive. In comparison, many of the UBI proposals promise around $10,000 annually to every citizen (for an example, see Charles Murray’s proposal here). On the one hand, this plan would break the link between employment and money. But it does so at half the rate that would be available under the FJG, not even considering lifesaving benefits like health insurance. 2. The robots haven’t taken over yet. We still need workers. The dangers of imminent full automation are overstated: there is little evidence that companies are largely replacing human workers with robots. As Dean Baker explains, If technology were rapidly displacing workers then productivity growth — the rate of increase in the value of goods and services produced in an hour of work — should be very high, because machines are more efficient. In the last decade, however, productivity growth has risen at a sluggish 1.4 percent annual rate. In the last two years it has limped along at a pace of less than 1 percent annually. By comparison, in the post–World War II “Golden Age,” from 1947 to 1973, productivity grew at an annual rate of almost 3 percent. No doubt, stable and high-paid employment opportunities are dwindling, but we shouldn’t blame the robots. Workers aren’t being replaced by automatons; they are being replaced with other workers — ones lower-paid and more precariously employed. Nevertheless, technology, and globalization, have struck fear into American workers. Not because they are by nature a raw deal, but because the balance of forces over the last few decades has been skewed so dramatically in the favor of capital. Technology, nor globalization, need have negative employment effects on workers — but they certainly can. It’s time to get the rules right, and ensure workers are provided the dignity of a job. A federal job program would solve the real problem, while UBI would simply treat a side effect. 3. A FJG could build an inclusive economy. Conventional wisdom holds that people dislike work. Introductory economics classes will explain the disutility of labor, which is a direct trade-off with leisure. Granted, employment isn’t always fun, and many forms of employment are dangerous and exploitative. But the UBI misses the way in which employment structurally empowers workers at the point of production and has by its own merits positive dimensions. This touches on a heated debate on the Left. But for now, there is no doubt that people want jobs, but they want good jobs that provide flexibility and opportunity. They want to contribute, to have a purpose, to participate in the economy and, most importantly, in society. Nevertheless, the private sector continues to leave millions without work, even during supposed “strong” economic times. The workplace is social, a place where we spend a great deal of our time interacting with others. In addition to the stress associated with limited resources, the loneliness that plagues many unemployed workers can exacerbate mental health problems. Employment — especially employment that provides added social benefits like communal coffee breaks — adds to workers’ well-being and productivity. A federal job guarantee can provide workers with socially beneficial employment — providing the dignity of a job to all that seek it. The FJG would also act as a de facto wage floor — private employers will have to offer wages and benefits at least as enticing as the federal government to attract workers. There has been extensive public support for recent increases in the minimum wage, such as the Fight for $15 campaign, demonstrating that most Americans believe workers deserve a living wage. Fighting for a higher minimum wage is an important step to ensure that workers are compensated a living wage rather than a poverty wage, yet let us not forget that the effective minimum wage in this country without a UBI or a job guarantee is $0. This must change. Finally, some argue that a “skills mismatch” explains why some workers remain unemployed. While we reject that narrative, a well-designed FJG will nevertheless include a training element to build workers’ skills and a jobs ladder to create upward mobility in the workplace. All of these elements will build an inclusive economy that provides good jobs for all. The UBI, in contrast, could subsidize bad jobs — allowing low minimum wages and lack of benefits to persist.

(Sean, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/05/02/house-passes-climate-bill-economic-opportunity-us-leadership-column/3642769002/)

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. We have a decade to figure out how to reverse global warming if we ever want to ensure a habitable planet for our children. It’s going to take a full, species-wide effort to figure out how to do so in a way that minimally disrupts our quality of life. And yet, under the Trump administration, we have reversed course. It’s time to stop digging. For too long, our nation has lacked conviction, settling for partial steps, struggling to reconcile economic and environmental pressures. But those delays, while inexcusable, pale next to President Donald Trump’s active sabotage of our environment. Continuing on this path is a risk to national security, public health and the welfare of future generations. And that is why I am so pleased to be a part of a new majority whose leadership is not afraid to recognize the hole we are in — the new majority that, on Thursday, stopped digging and passed H.R. 9, the Climate Action Now Act. I am proud to serve as a co-lead of H.R. 9 that would prevent this administration from making the United States the only nation on Earth not party to the Paris Climate Accords. H.R. 9 also challenges the Trump administration to step up and show us their plan for combating climate change. H.R. 9 rebukes the reckless attitudes of this president and brings us back to the global bargaining table to participate in the critical discussion over how to turn the tide and embrace a low carbon economy before it is too late. But, ultimately, H.R. 9 merely pauses the digging. And that raises the question — what’s next? Stop hand-wringing and start innovating As a former CEO of a clean energy company, I humbly submit that, contrary to much of the hand-wringing that seems to deter this body from acting: There are no economic or technical barriers preventing us from profitably reducing greenhouse gas emissions. All we have to do is recognize that lowering fossil fuel use also lowers fossil fuel expense. Replacing our old, dirty energy infrastructure with new, efficient and clean infrastructure isn’t a cost to be feared but an investment we should be eager to make. Lowering fossil fuel use will make our energy bills lower, our manufacturers more profitable, our wallets a little fuller and our planet safer. Climate change is a threat we should fear. But addressing climate change is an economic opportunity to be embraced. Our failure to seize that opportunity so far speaks only to the inefficiencies and distortions in our regulations that create needless barriers to capital deployment. But we can fix those laws! And by embracing the goals of the Paris Climate Accord, we can unleash the innovation of our manufacturers, businesses and regulators to drive those investments forward. US must not ignore existential climate threat This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for transformative economic growth. It is on a scale with the industrial and information revolutions. Americans should be leading the way on combating climate change and developing the clean energy economy of tomorrow, not running from the challenge. American leadership is not kowtowing to despots, it’s not declaring phony emergencies to build unnecessary walls, and it’s not ignoring the single most serious threat to the existence of human life on Earth. From Normandy to the Cold War, American leadership has been about identifying long-term existential threats to the entire population and then leading the rest of the world to mobilize around a shared set of goals and values. H.R. 9 is the first opportunity in over a decade for our Congress to reclaim America's leadership role on climate, and I am proud to be part of passing it Not because it’s enough. But because the world depends on American leadership, and if the White House refuses to lead, the House will. Onward.

(Scott Moore is the director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Erin Sikorsky is the director of the Center for Climate and Security, an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/30/us-china-climate-finance-negotiations-cop-emissions-loss-damage/)

For decades, China was a leader in international climate negotiations. But that changed at the latest United Nations climate change conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At the November 2022 summit, known as COP27, China became the target of criticism for failing to do enough to address climate change. The disapproval came not just from other big greenhouse gas emitters but also from other developing countries: Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda and chair of the influential Alliance of Small Island States, called China a “major polluter” that could no longer expect a “free pass” on contributing to climate finance. This shift underscores an inconvenient truth for Beijing: Given its status as the world’s largest emitter and second-largest economy, China’s climate commitments increasingly look insufficient, and even its former allies in climate negotiations want Beijing to do more. This creates major geopolitical vulnerabilities for China—and opportunities for the United States and its allies. In short, Beijing’s leadership loss on climate is Washington’s gain. China has played an essential role in climate talks since the 1990s. Beijing took part in the original negotiations that led to the main global climate agreement, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which then-Premier Li Peng signed in 1992. As China became the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the early 2000s, it began to play a more prominent role in international climate policy, underscored by a 2014 U.S.-China joint announcement in which Beijing, for the first time, promised to take steps to reduce its emissions alongside similar steps pledged by Washington. In 2020, when the United States had stepped back from its climate commitments under the Trump administration, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2060. Despite this increasingly prominent role, the bedrock of China’s climate policy has remained the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”—the idea that while all countries should do their part to fight climate change, wealthy industrialized nations that contributed the bulk of emissions over time should bear most of the effort and expense. This principle helps hold together the Group of 77, or G-77, a caucus of developing countries at the United Nations. Beijing has long been influential in the G-77—so much so that it is technically called the Group of 77 and China—and has coordinated its role in U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations largely through the coalition. Yet it has become increasingly difficult for China to draw a clear line between itself and the industrialized nations it argues should bear the brunt of costs in responding to climate change. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, China was able to secure its status as a developing country in the world’s climate regime. But every year since then, China has been the world’s largest emitter. Though China was responsible for about 12 percent of cumulative global emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution to 2017—compared to 25 percent for the United States and 22 percent for the European Union and United Kingdom—China now emits about a third of the world’s greenhouse gasses each year, well ahead of any other economy. Analysis suggests China could surpass the United States’ cumulative emissions around 2050. The difficulty of Beijing’s balancing act became fully apparent at COP27 when it was effectively abandoned by other developing countries as they fought to secure “loss and damage” compensation for countries heavily affected by climate change. A key sticking point in the negotiations was the United States’ and European Union’s insistence that China be ineligible to receive compensation from the fund. Initially, the G-77, leading negotiations on behalf of the developing world, balked at any effort to exclude China. Eventually, however, the coalition agreed that the landmark loss and damage fund would focus on the most vulnerable countries rather than China and other rising economies. China, for its part, conceded to the agreement, but refused to rule out pursuing future claims to compensation. Beijing’s growing isolation in international climate talks bodes ill for its overall geopolitical standing for three main reasons. First, China will be even more vulnerable to criticism for its growing environmental footprint abroad, especially in small island developing states, as its Belt and Road Initiative-linked projects damage and disrupt local ecosystems. In 2019, for example, Papua New Guinea ordered a Chinese-owned factory to close after it breached environmental laws, while a Chinese tourism development project in Antigua and Barbuda was criticized for destroying mangroves that help prevent climate-linked storm surges. This criticism may eventually make it harder for China to expand its influence and market access across the developing world. Second, Beijing’s reputation as a difficult partner in managing resources shared between countries that are threatened by climate change, such as fisheries and transboundary rivers, will only worsen. Already, dams built and financed by Chinese firms have attracted growing scrutiny for disrupting the flow of major rivers, such as the Mekong, that are shared with several neighboring countries. As the costs of climate change mount, China is likely to become a larger target for countries experiencing growing disruption to key natural resources, and it may lose out on access to those same resources. Third, China’s growing isolation in climate talks dulls Beijing’s narrative of steadily expanding global influence. Climate action is arguably the area in which Beijing has been most successful in acquiring soft power, which has helped bolster its overall standing on the world stage. Due to the sheer size of its economy and emissions, China has been treated as an equal by other major powers in climate policy, especially the United States and the European Union, since at least the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, in which China played a decisive role. Since then, Beijing has trumpeted its involvement in climate talks as an example of its global leadership, but that will be harder to do as fewer countries want to take China’s lead. To be sure, China’s isolation on this issue is not inevitable, and Beijing may well make an ambitious commitment to climate finance akin to its pledge to decarbonize by 2060. But a serious pledge would probably require Beijing to abandon its longstanding insistence that it has no obligation to contribute to adaptation funds due to its limited historical contribution to climate change—an unlikely scenario since China rarely makes abrupt changes in long-held diplomatic positions. Given these constraints, China will likely become increasingly politically vulnerable due to its position on climate action. If the Biden administration steps up, Beijing’s loss can be Washington’s gain. The United States should do at least three things to seize this opportunity to enhance its leadership on climate. First, along with its European and Japanese allies, Washington must fund the new U.N. loss and damage financing mechanism, which will require billions of dollars in new investment to succeed. It must also ensure the fund has robust safeguards that ensure the money actually helps protect the world’s most vulnerable populations from climate impacts, rather than being pocketed or used unwisely by corrupt politicians. Securing funding from Congress is, of course, a tall order. Last December, even with Democrats controlling both the House of Representatives and Senate, Congress’s end-of-year spending bill came nowhere near fulfilling U.S. President Joe Biden’s pledge to provide $11.4 billion annually in climate finance by 2024. When asked whether they supported providing loss and damage funds, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle cited a need for climate adaptation investment at home instead. Yet more ambitious climate adaptation financing abroad is needed to strengthen U.S. leadership and enhance national security. Take Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state where devastating change climate impacts, such as last summer’s mass floods, increase the risk of political instability and extremism. In recent years, Pakistan has received significant investment from Beijing, while its relationship with Washington has been strained. But while China has emphasized its climate investments in Pakistan and its commitment to recovery efforts, Islamabad has opened the door to forward-leaning diplomacy from Washington by calling for massively scaled-up loss and damage funding that Beijing has so far shown no willingness to provide. U.S. efforts to mobilize this funding would draw a strong contrast to China’s behavior and help shore up stability in a country of national security concern to the United States. A second, and perhaps easier, opportunity for Washington to pursue with its allies and partners is to better equip international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, to contribute to climate finance. Multilateral development banks have steadily increased their lending for climate resilience and adaptation in recent years, but this category still accounts for a minority of their total lending. Climate adaptation must instead become the overriding priority for all such institutions. In her January trip to Africa, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for these institutions to put transnational issues such as climate change at the center of their work. However, the United States has yet to embrace more ambitious plans such as the Bridgetown Initiative, put forward by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, which aims to prevent developing nations’ debt from spiraling out of control in the wake of climate hazards, increase funding for climate resilience, and create a new mechanism for reconstruction investment after climate disasters. Third, the United States should prioritize climate action in its own bilateral foreign aid programs. Few, if any, international development goals can be accomplished without averting dangerous climate change impacts. Climate resilience and adaptation must accordingly become the overarching priority for agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as they follow through on Biden’s exhortation for all U.S. federal agencies to become climate agencies. Washington has more climate solutions to offer other countries than ever before, after last summer’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and recent investments from the Defense Department, State Department, and USAID in developing climate-resilient strategies. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act includes $30 billion in tax credits to support increased U.S. production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and critical minerals processing. Sharing the technologies and innovations derived from these investments with vulnerable allies, partners, and, importantly, prospective partners, is a win-win approach—for U.S. leadership, competition with China, and in tackling the climate crisis. China’s growing isolation clearly offers the United States a critical opportunity to help the world adapt to climate change and, in so doing, enhance its leadership role on this fundamental international issue. Now is the time to seize it.

A study estimates global-scale, multi-sectoral economic impacts of climate change, and suggests that a plausible range of decisions and actions by humans can determine the scale of the economic impacts, even if the uncertainty in the climate response to increased greenhouse gas concentration is considered. These actions include reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and improvement of socioeconomic conditions. This study highlights the importance of societal changes and the current generation's responsibility for the future. People are less motivated to take actions if its outcome is uncertain, and this could be true for climate-related issues. The uncertainty in climate response to the increase in greenhouse gas concentration, which is often believed to be substantially large, makes it difficult to believe the benefit of reducing emissions or the effectiveness of making society more resilient to climate-related hazards. This could be one of the reasons for inaction even though urgent action is called for. A new study published in Nature Climate Change, conducted by a Japanese research team (consisting of researchers at Ibaraki University, Kyoto University, National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Ritsumeikan University, Shibaura Institute of Technology, The University of Tokyo, and University of Tsukuba), might change such views. The study estimates economic impacts of climate change and suggests that humankind's decisions and actions can overwhelm the uncertainty in climate response in terms of reducing the impact of climate change. Estimation of the economic impacts of climate change is itself extremely challenging because it can affect society in many ways. Collaboration between researchers in a diverse range of fields enabled the research team to conduct a global-scale assessment covering the economic impacts associated with climate change for nine impact sectors: the economic impacts arising from changes in agricultural productivity, undernourishment, heat-related excess mortality, cooling/heating demand, occupational health costs, capacity of hydroelectric power generation, capacity of thermal power generation, fluvial flooding, and coastal inundation. Describing the novelty and significance of the study, Dr. Hijioka, the research managing director of Center for Climate Change Adaptation, National Institute for Environmental Studies states, "This is very special research, with no equivalent in the world." The estimated value of the aggregated economic impacts had a large divergence depending on three assumptions: socioeconomic conditions, amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and climate responses to the increased greenhouse gas concentration. Under the most pessimistic combination of assumptions, the estimated economic impact will be equivalent to 8.6% of the global total GDP at the end of the 21st century, while it will be limited to around or less than 1% if the 2-degree target, which was adopted in the Paris Agreement, is achieved and societal resilience to climate-related hazards improves. More importantly, the results also indicated that the contribution of the uncertainty in the climate response to the divergence -- or variance -- of the estimates was minor compared to the contribution of the differences in the anthropogenically directed societal pathways (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions and socioeconomic developments). "This means that humankind has the potential to determine the scale of the economic impacts of climate change," explains Dr. Takakura, a researcher at National Institute for Environmental Studies.

(Olivia, https://www.ecowatch.com/co2-emissions-mass-extinction-study-2648427335.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1 , 10-21)

The excess carbon dioxide emitted by human activity since the start of the industrial revolution has already raised the Earth's temperature by more than one degree Celsius, increased the risk of extreme hurricanes and wildfires and killed off more than half of the corals in the Great Barrier Reef. But geologic history shows that the impacts of greenhouse gases could be much worse. In fact, scientists from Scotland's University of Saint Andrews and two major German research centers have for the first time determined a "conclusive picture" of the initial trigger and subsequent processes responsible for Earth's biggest mass extinction. The answer? Massive amounts of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere from a volcanic eruption. "We are dealing with a cascading catastrophe in which the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere set off a chain of events that successively extinguished almost all life in the seas," study lead author Dr. Hana Jurikova told The Independent. The study, published in Nature Geoscience Monday, sought to understand the mechanisms behind an event known as the "Great Dying," the University of Saint Andrews explained in a press release. This was a period around 252 million years ago between the Permian and Triassic epochs in which 95 percent of marine species were wiped out within tens of thousands of years. It is the closest life on Earth has come to total extinction. Scientists have advanced many theories for what caused this turn of events, including a release of methane from the seafloor and volcanic activity, but this is the first time a group has determined the exact cause, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, one of the research centers involved in the new study, said. The extinction process went something like this, as Saint Andrews explained. A volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia sent 100,000 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. This release led to ocean acidification and warming, which was especially deadly to marine life that requires calcium carbonate for their shells and skeletons. The atmospheric warming increased the rates of chemical weathering on land. This caused more nutrients to run off into the ocean, depleting it of oxygen and perhaps also poisoning it with sulphide. "It took several hundreds of thousands to millions of years for the ecosystem to recover from the catastrophe, which profoundly altered the course of evolution of life on Earth," Jurikova said. The researchers, who also included members of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, were able to reach their conclusions by examining the shells of fossil brachiopods. "These are clam-like organisms that have existed on Earth for more than 500 million years," Jurikova explained in the GEOMAR press release. The researchers were able to assess the pH levels in the ocean based on the different isotopes of boron in the fossilized shells. Because oceanic pH levels are tightly linked to atmospheric carbon dioxide, the team could then create a model of the atmosphere at the time.

(Brad, Climate activist/author, , 3-3)

It’s time for America to be ambitious again. Congressional advocates of a Green New Deal are calling for a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era” in order to decarbonize the US economy by 2030. Taking the climate crisis seriously means getting the United States to net-zero or negative carbon pollution within ten years while working to undo the damage already done. Doing so involves reconstituting not only our electrical grid, but also our transportation system, agricultural system, financial system, built infrastructure, medical system, trade and manufacturing, land use, political system, gender relations, military — our entire economy, our entire relation to each other and to the rest of the world. While all that may seem impossible to those on the fossil fuel industry payroll, it can be done if the United States mobilizes at a scale achieved in our nation’s history during World War II. The Green New Deal resolution calls for the United States to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” “through a ten-year national mobilization.” This target of rapid, total decarbonization is at odds with the goals of Trump’s administration and the projections of carbon polluter giants such as ExxonMobil; and is considerably more ambitious than recent Democratic Party leadership plans, which have been fixed on an 80 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2050 benchmark since the Step It Up campaign of 2007. Rapid, total decarbonization is also what is needed in this time of climate emergency. The consequences of extracting and combusting hundreds of billions of tons of fossilized carbon in recent decades are with us now. Nation-states are crumbling from a degraded climate, with catastrophic droughts, floods, fires, storms, ocean rise, glacial retreat, and biodiversity collapse putting people in all corners of the globe in biblical peril. If humanity does not end the burning of fossil fuels and reverse deforestation, the possibility that it will share the fate of the vast majority of all species to have existed on this planet — extinction — is unreasonably high. The price tag of insufficient action, as Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s “dismal theorem” finds, is potentially infinite, “since catastrophes that would cause human extinction remain too plausible to ignore.”

(Will, Chemistry@Australian National, Johan Rockström, View ORCID ProfileKatherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, View ORCID ProfileMichel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, PNAS August 14, 2018 115 (33) 8252-8259; https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252)

Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the hotter Anthropocene. The fork in the road in Fig. 1 is shown here as the two divergent pathways of the Earth System in the future (broken arrows). Currently, the Earth System is on a Hothouse Earth pathway driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases and biosphere degradation toward a planetary threshold at ∼2 °C (horizontal broken line at 2 °C in Fig. 1), beyond which the system follows an essentially irreversible pathway driven by intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks. The other pathway leads to Stabilized Earth, a pathway of Earth System stewardship guided by human-created feedbacks to a quasistable, human-maintained basin of attraction. “Stability” (vertical axis) is defined here as the inverse of the potential energy of the system. Systems in a highly stable state (deep valley) have low potential energy, and considerable energy is required to move them out of this stable state. Systems in an unstable state (top of a hill) have high potential energy, and they require only a little additional energy to push them off the hill and down toward a valley of lower potential energy. The Anthropocene represents the beginning of a very rapid human-driven trajectory of the Earth System away from the glacial–interglacial limit cycle toward new, hotter climatic conditions and a profoundly different biosphere (2, 8, 9) (SI Appendix). The current position, at over 1 °C above a preindustrial baseline (10), is nearing the upper envelope of interglacial conditions over the past 1.2 million years (SI Appendix, Table S1). More importantly, the rapid trajectory of the climate system over the past half-century along with technological lock in and socioeconomic inertia in human systems commit the climate system to conditions beyond the envelope of past interglacial conditions. We, therefore, suggest that the Earth System may already have passed one “fork in the road” of potential pathways, a bifurcation (near A in Fig. 1) taking the Earth System out of the next glaciation cycle (11). In the future, the Earth System could potentially follow many trajectories (12, 13), often represented by the large range of global temperature rises simulated by climate models (14). In most analyses, these trajectories are largely driven by the amount of greenhouse gases that human activities have already emitted and will continue to emit into the atmosphere over the rest of this century and beyond—with a presumed quasilinear relationship between cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature rise (14). However, here we suggest that biogeophysical feedback processes within the Earth System coupled with direct human degradation of the biosphere may play a more important role than normally assumed, limiting the range of potential future trajectories and potentially eliminating the possibility of the intermediate trajectories. We argue that there is a significant risk that these internal dynamics, especially strong nonlinearities in feedback processes, could become an important or perhaps, even dominant factor in steering the trajectory that the Earth System actually follows over coming centuries. This risk is represented in Figs. 1 and 2 by a planetary threshold (horizontal broken line in Fig. 1 on the Hothouse Earth pathway around 2 °C above preindustrial temperature). Beyond this threshold, intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks in the Earth System (Biogeophysical Feedbacks) could become the dominant processes controlling the system’s trajectory. Precisely where a potential planetary threshold might be is uncertain (15, 16). We suggest 2 °C because of the risk that a 2 °C warming could activate important tipping elements (12, 17), raising the temperature further to activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth System to even higher temperatures (Tipping Cascades). Such cascades comprise, in essence, the dynamical process that leads to thresholds in complex systems (section 4.2 in ref. 18). This analysis implies that, even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a “Hothouse Earth” pathway. The challenge that humanity faces is to create a “Stabilized Earth” pathway that steers the Earth System away from its current trajectory toward the threshold beyond which is Hothouse Earth (Fig. 2). The human-created Stabilized Earth pathway leads to a basin of attraction that is not likely to exist in the Earth System’s stability landscape without human stewardship to create and maintain it. Creating such a pathway and basin of attraction requires a fundamental change in the role of humans on the planet. This stewardship role requires deliberate and sustained action to become an integral, adaptive part of Earth System dynamics, creating feedbacks that keep the system on a Stabilized Earth pathway (Alternative Stabilized Earth Pathway). We now explore this critical question in more detail by considering the relevant biogeophysical feedbacks (Biogeophysical Feedbacks) and the risk of tipping cascades (Tipping Cascades). The trajectory of the Earth System is influenced by biogeophysical feedbacks within the system that can maintain it in a given state (negative feedbacks) and those that can amplify a perturbation and drive a transition to a different state (positive feedbacks). Some of the key negative feedbacks that could maintain the Earth System in Holocene-like conditions—notably, carbon uptake by land and ocean systems—are weakening relative to human forcing (19), increasing the risk that positive feedbacks could play an important role in determining the Earth System’s trajectory. Table 1 summarizes carbon cycle feedbacks that could accelerate warming, while SI Appendix, Table S2 describes in detail a more complete set of biogeophysical feedbacks that can be triggered by forcing levels likely to be reached within the rest of the century. Most of the feedbacks can show both continuous responses and tipping point behavior in which the feedback process becomes self-perpetuating after a critical threshold is crossed; subsystems exhibiting this behavior are often called “tipping elements” (17). The type of behavior—continuous response or tipping point/abrupt change—can depend on the magnitude or the rate of forcing, or both. Many feedbacks will show some gradual change before the tipping point is reached. A few of the changes associated with the feedbacks are reversible on short timeframes of 50–100 years (e.g., change in Arctic sea ice extent with a warming or cooling of the climate; Antarctic sea ice may be less reversible because of heat accumulation in the Southern Ocean), but most changes are largely irreversible on timeframes that matter to contemporary societies (e.g., loss of permafrost carbon). A few of the feedbacks do not have apparent thresholds (e.g., change in the land and ocean physiological carbon sinks, such as increasing carbon uptake due to the CO2 fertilization effect or decreasing uptake due to a decrease in rainfall). For some of the tipping elements, crossing the tipping point could trigger an abrupt, nonlinear response (e.g., conversion of large areas of the Amazon rainforest to a savanna or seasonally dry forest), while for others, crossing the tipping point would lead to a more gradual but self-perpetuating response (large-scale loss of permafrost). There could also be considerable lags after the crossing of a threshold, particularly for those tipping elements that involve the melting of large masses of ice. However, in some cases, ice loss can be very rapid when occurring as massive iceberg outbreaks (e.g., Heinrich Events). For some feedback processes, the magnitude—and even the direction—depend on the rate of climate change. If the rate of climate change is small, the shift in biomes can track the change in temperature/moisture, and the biomes may shift gradually, potentially taking up carbon from the atmosphere as the climate warms and atmospheric CO2 concentration increases. However, if the rate of climate change is too large or too fast, a tipping point can be crossed, and a rapid biome shift may occur via extensive disturbances (e.g., wildfires, insect attacks, droughts) that can abruptly remove an existing biome. In some terrestrial cases, such as widespread wildfires, there could be a pulse of carbon to the atmosphere, which if large enough, could influence the trajectory of the Earth System (29). Varying response rates to a changing climate could lead to complex biosphere dynamics with implications for feedback processes. For example, delays in permafrost thawing would most likely delay the projected northward migration of boreal forests (30), while warming of the southern areas of these forests could result in their conversion to steppe grasslands of significantly lower carbon storage capacity. The overall result would be a positive feedback to the climate system. The so-called “greening” of the planet, caused by enhanced plant growth due to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration (31), has increased the land carbon sink in recent decades (32). However, increasing atmospheric CO2 raises temperature, and hotter leaves photosynthesize less well. Other feedbacks are also involved—for instance, warming the soil increases microbial respiration, releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere. Our analysis focuses on the strength of the feedback between now and 2100. However, several of the feedbacks that show negligible or very small magnitude by 2100 could nevertheless be triggered well before then, and they could eventually generate significant feedback strength over longer timeframes—centuries and even millennia—and thus, influence the long-term trajectory of the Earth System. These feedback processes include permafrost thawing, decomposition of ocean methane hydrates, increased marine bacterial respiration, and loss of polar ice sheets accompanied by a rise in sea levels and potential amplification of temperature rise through changes in ocean circulation (33). Tipping Cascades. Fig. 3 shows a global map of some potential tipping cascades. The tipping elements fall into three clusters based on their estimated threshold temperature (12, 17, 39). Cascades could be formed when a rise in global temperature reaches the level of the lower-temperature cluster, activating tipping elements, such as loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet or Arctic sea ice. These tipping elements, along with some of the nontipping element feedbacks (e.g., gradual weakening of land and ocean physiological carbon sinks), could push the global average temperature even higher, inducing tipping in mid- and higher-temperature clusters. For example, tipping (loss) of the Greenland Ice Sheet could trigger a critical transition in the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC), which could together, by causing sea-level rise and Southern Ocean heat accumulation, accelerate ice loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (32, 40) on timescales of centuries (41). Fig. 3. Download figure Open in new tab Download powerpoint Fig. 3. Global map of potential tipping cascades. The individual tipping elements are color- coded according to estimated thresholds in global average surface temperature (tipping points) (12, 34). Arrows show the potential interactions among the tipping elements based on expert elicitation that could generate cascades. Note that, although the risk for tipping (loss of) the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is proposed at >5 °C, some marine-based sectors in East Antarctica may be vulnerable at lower temperatures (35⇓⇓–38). Observations of past behavior support an important contribution of changes in ocean circulation to such feedback cascades. During previous glaciations, the climate system flickered between two states that seem to reflect changes in convective activity in the Nordic seas and changes in the activity of the AMOC. These variations caused typical temperature response patterns called the “bipolar seesaw” (42⇓–44). During extremely cold conditions in the north, heat accumulated in the Southern Ocean, and Antarctica warmed. Eventually, the heat made its way north and generated subsurface warming that may have been instrumental in destabilizing the edges of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (45). If Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt in the future, the freshening and cooling of nearby surface waters will have significant effects on the ocean circulation. While the probability of significant circulation changes is difficult to quantify, climate model simulations suggest that freshwater inputs compatible with current rates of Greenland melting are sufficient to have measurable effects on ocean temperature and circulation (46, 47). Sustained warming of the northern high latitudes as a result of this process could accelerate feedbacks or activate tipping elements in that region, such as permafrost degradation, loss of Arctic sea ice, and boreal forest dieback. While this may seem to be an extreme scenario, it illustrates that a warming into the range of even the lower-temperature cluster (i.e., the Paris targets) could lead to tipping in the mid- and higher-temperature clusters via cascade effects. Based on this analysis of tipping cascades and taking a risk-averse approach, we suggest that a potential planetary threshold could occur at a temperature rise as low as ∼2.0 °C above preindustrial (Fig. 1).

(Andrei Ionescu, https://www.earth.com/news/new-evidence-that-climate-change-is-caused-by-human-activities/)

A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has provided clear evidence of a human “fingerprint” on climate change, showing that specific signals from human activities have altered the temperature structure of our planet’s atmosphere. While differences between tropospheric and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as anthropogenic effects on the climate, scientists have largely ignored what happens from the mid to the upper stratosphere (about 25-50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface). “Including this information improves the detectability of a human fingerprint by a factor of five. Enhanced detectability occurs because the mid to upper stratosphere has a large cooling signal from human-caused CO2 increases, small noise levels of natural internal variability, and differing signal and noise patterns,” the authors explained. While in the troposphere, noise can include daily weather, interannual variability caused by El Niños and La Niñas, and longer-term natural fluctuations in climate, in the upper stratosphere such noises are smaller, making anthropogenic climate change signals easier to distinguish. “Extending fingerprinting to the upper stratosphere with long temperature records and improved climate models means that it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured trends in the thermal structure of the Earth’s atmosphere,” the scientists argued. “This research undercuts and rebuts claims that recent atmospheric and surface temperature changes are natural, whether due to the Sun or due to internal cycles in the climate system,” said study lead author Benjamin Santer, an expert in Physical Oceanography at WHOI. “A natural explanation is virtually impossible in terms of what we are looking at here: changes in the temperature structure of the atmosphere. This research puts to rest incorrect claims that we don’t need to treat climate change seriously because it is all natural.” This study is rooted in the earlier work of Suki Manabe and Richard Wetherald in 1967, who utilized a simple climate model to investigate the potential impact of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion on atmospheric temperature. Their modeling revealed a distinct finding: an elevation in CO2 levels resulted in increased heat retention within the troposphere (the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere) and decreased heat dissipation in the stratosphere (the layer above the troposphere), consequently causing warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere. This projection of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling in response to rising CO2 levels has been consistently supported by more intricate models and validated through comparisons of model outcomes with global-mean atmospheric temperature measurements obtained from weather balloons and satellites. While these earlier studies focused on global-mean temperature alterations in the middle and upper stratosphere, approximately 25 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, they did not delve into the intricate patterns of climate change within this particular layer. However, advancements in simulations and satellite data have now made it possible to examine this region more comprehensively. The current study marks the first attempt to identify discernible climate change patterns, often referred to as “fingerprints,” specifically attributed to human activities in the middle and upper stratosphere. “The human fingerprints in temperature changes in the mid to upper stratosphere due to CO2 increases are truly exceptional because they are so large and so different from temperature changes there due to internal variability and natural external forcing. These unique fingerprints make it possible to detect the human impact on climate change due to CO2 in a short period of time (~10 – 15 years) with high confidence,” said co-author Qiang Fu, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. “This study shows that the real world has changed in a way that simply cannot be explained by natural causes. We now face important decisions, in the United States and globally, on what to do about climate change. I hope those decisions are based on our best scientific understanding of the reality and seriousness of human effects on climate,” Santer concluded.

(Benjamin, PoliSci@Albany The Politics of Threat Perception and the Use of Force: A Political Economy Model of U.S. Uses of Force, 1949-1994 International Studies Quarterly (1998) 42, 567-590)

An overwhelming amount of research indicates that economic conditions are politically important, and may influence the outcomes of elections (Alesina and Rosenthal, 1989; Chappell and Keech, 1985; Erikson, 1989; Fair, 1978; Hibbs, 1977, 1987; MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson, 1992). By causing public dissatisfac- tion with the incumbent political leadership, poor economic performance may make a use of force to divert public attention or increase the salience of foreign policy issues more attractive. At the same time, though, the use of force may be more costly when the economy is performing poorly in certain ways, since the risk of war may worsen inflation, further depress the performance of financial markets, and raise the prospect of costly international commitments that are more difficult to finance in hard times than during more prosperous periods. Most previous analyses of the use of force have used a "misery index" of inflation and economic growth, usually weighted by the proportion of the public citing economic issues as the most important facing the country, to indicate economic performance (Ostrom andJob, 1986;James and Oneal, 1991 ;James and Hristoulas, 1993; Meernik, 1994; DeRouen, 1995; Meernik and Waterman, 1996). High inflation and high unemployment have similar demand effects because they both increase the attractiveness of a diversionary use of force. However, these conditions have different supply effects. High unemployment makes the use of force less costly by reducing labor costs if war or some other long-term international commitment results. (Indeed, the cynical might point out that war has historically been a highly effective jobs program.) On the other hand, high inflation increases the cost of using force because war tends to make this condition even worse. In the models presented here, the effects of inflation and unemployment are considered separately. Since only unemployment has complementary supply and demand effects on the use of force, only this variable should be significant over time. Blechman and Kaplan (1978:26-32) used the S&P 500 index of stock prices, discounted for inflation and real growth, as an indicator of "national confidence," representing a "buoyancy in the national spirit and a more optimistic view of the future." They found that this index was related to the annual number of uses of force. Unfortunately, Blechman and Kaplan did not adequately develop a theoreti- cal argument about the role of this variable. It is not clear that confidence and optimism should produce a greater tendency to use force in international relations. One could just as easily argue that a confident and optimistic nation will believe it can resolve its international disputes without resorting to military intimidation or the use of force. Perhaps because the meaning and implications of the concept are unclear, the notion of national confidence is rarely mentioned in the subsequent literature. In spite of the relationship Blechman and Kaplan found, the discounted S&P 500 index is rarely used in empirical research on the use of force.

(Callie, https://www.the-sun.com/tech/8293960/artificial-intelligence-wiping-jobs-chatgpt/)

In May alone, artificial intelligence was the reported reason behind nearly 4,000 job cuts, according to data compiled by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The executive outplacement firm found that 3,900 job losses were due to AI, while 19,598 was due to businesses closing. Two months earlier, Goldman Sachs estimated that AI systems could potentially replace upwards of 300 million full-time jobs. “If generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities, the labor market could face significant disruption,” the March report reads. “Using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work.”

Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The catalyst has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have profound implications for global security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective, illustrates how emerging risks are getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight couplings in our global systems have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball into a full-blown crisis elsewhere. The COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer be sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass communications worldwide. This paper concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals. Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence, VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset INTRODUCTION The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food security? Are our healthcare systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries. Human activities within however are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, healthcare and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined. Risks accrued in one system may cascade into an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker, 2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour of intersecting systems is determined by complex and largely invisible interactions at the substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the source and morphology of the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain nightmare. It is also tilting the geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly 20% of global imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable. Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile” sources components from China (Owens, 2020). An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines. Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity. COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT) production and delivery system serves as both an enabler and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a). As traditional forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of emerging threats through a systems thinking approach. METHODOLOGY An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily informed by the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020): • Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000; Young et al, 2006); • Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012); • Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system (Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and • Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources. ECONOMY According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of a previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown, impacting all areas of human activity. The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might be the worst decade in US history” and may lead to a Second Great Depression. Other forecasts are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019). Yet another study revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-19 outbreak. The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact, boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020). As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014). The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the rate the global middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy (Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007). Economic stressors, in transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments. Bullions now carry more weight than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe. After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from the Bank of England in 2019, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit. According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based on historical precedents – in particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated (Dudik & Tomek, 2019): “You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.” (Parenthesis added by author). President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s gold-repatriation program by hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek, 2019). Indeed, with two global Titanics – the United States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-denominated iceberg in the middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far, wide and for a considerable period. A reality check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016). In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a). We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade. ENVIRONMENTAL What happens to the environment when our economies implode? Think of a debt-laden workforce at sensitive nuclear and chemical plants, along with a concomitant surge in industrial accidents? Economic stressors, workforce demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change – arguably pose the biggest threats to the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation: The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary, “vulnerable” or unpaid jobs. Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In line with the systems thinking approach, however, global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo. Frazzled workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis (2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500 injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina, 2020). The environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated. Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate greed rather than to mundane human activity. Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012). Production and delivery delays, caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial overcompensation. This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation workers may also resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global corona-economy (Liacko, 2021). Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative, its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems, developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications. On an equally alarming note, depressed economic conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008). The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section. Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages – whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark defiance of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival. Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a Sword of Damocles over this decade. GEOPOLITICAL The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great Depression. Since history often repeats itself, expect familiar bogeymen to reappear in societies roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk on its own – may reach alarming proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forcing Israel to undertake reprisal operations inside allied nations. If that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon effects like these present a classic VUCA problematic. Contemporary geopolitical risks include a possible Iran-Israel war; US-China military confrontation over Taiwan or the South China Sea; North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies; an India-Pakistan nuclear war; an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz; fundamentalist-driven implosion in the Islamic world; or a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia. Fears that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not fundamentally change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got replaced.

(Christian, https://fortune.com/2023/06/15/economy-recession-federal-reserve-powell-deutsche-bank-hard-landing/)

It appears as if U.S. economists may have popped the Champagne corks on a soft landing too early—at least according to Deutsche Bank. The German multinational bank’s top research team believes Washington has sparked a boom-bust cycle that now is nearing its end stage. In its house view, the recession slated to arrive as soon as October is the inevitable consequence of a series of aggressive rate hikes designed to extinguish the very flames of inflation that policymakers ignited through their own actions during the COVID pandemic. “Avoiding a hard landing would be historically unprecedented,” warned group chief economist David Folkerts-Landau in a research report titled The Clock Is Ticking, published on Wednesday. This bleak view contrasts with recent investor bullishness as well as the belief that the Federal Reserve has seemingly pulled off the impossible by cooling an overheated economy without sparking a recession, leaving only deflated asset prices as collateral damage—a “non-recession recession” as private equity firm Apollo Global Management called it last month. Germany’s only bulge bracket bank uses an indicator that attempts to measure the probability of a recession in the next 12 months. Currently it is handicapping the chances of a contraction in U.S. economic activity “near 100%”—in other words, a virtual certainty. But in order for this to occur, one thing has to happen first: Consumers must exhaust the last of their savings stored up from COVID lockdowns. “These will not be depleted until nearer year-end,” Folkerts-Landau wrote, so “things are going to script for our Q4 recession timeline.” Additional headwinds in the latter half of the year will come from the government mandate for college graduates to resume repaying their federal student debt. For more than the past three years, there has been a moratorium on payments and interest accrual in place owing to the pandemic. Fed reversal expected for March with ‘aggressive’ easing to come Worse, Deutsche estimates the United States will stay there in the year to come—just as the November presidential election campaign kicks off with the Iowa caucus. In fact, it believes the U.S. will be the only leading industrial nation to see its economy shrink in 2024, when activity will contract by four-tenths of a percent after adjusting for inflation. By comparison, it should still grow by 1.4% this year, according to Folkerts-Landau’s team. Other G7 countries have little reason to cheer either, though. The rosiest 2024 performance could top out at a tepid 0.8% in Japan, while both Germany and the eurozone as a whole should expand at a rate of just half of one percent. Deutsche believes that businesses and consumers have not yet adjusted to the current higher interest-rate regime, following a decade or more with rates either negative or effectively zero, as well as near-continuous quantitative easing across the U.S. and Europe. Geopolitical tensions, in particular with regard to the war in Ukraine, as well as food price inflation from a possible El Niño weather phenomenon could pose additional curveballs that are difficult to calculate but could have major implications for growth. Markets might however brush the disappointing performance aside, as the bank expects the Federal Reserve will embark on an “aggressive” policy-easing cycle starting in March that brings the Fed funds rate from its 5.4% terminal level down to 2.625% in the third quarter. On Wednesday, the Fed did not hike for the first time after 10 straight meetings. As a result, the S&P 500—which typically prices in future developments roughly six months in advance—should finish this year at 4,500, up from 4,373 currently and 3,840 at the start of this year. “We expect the grind higher to be choppy,” Deutsche cautioned.

(Kathryn, labor economist and independent policy consultant https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-16/america-s-inequality-of-income-and-wealth-will-only-get-worse?leadSource=uverify%20wall)

When people worry about the US economy these days, their focus is invariably too myopic. Forget about the battle with inflation: It will be won, perhaps at the cost of a painful recession, and the country will settle back into its previous trajectory. The real problem is that trajectory. America is turning into an oligopolistic economy that marginalizes the vast majority of its inhabitants. To get a sense of what I mean, consider a fairly conservative exercise: Take historical trends and extrapolate them for the next 25 years. The results are alarming. Let’s start with income. By 2048, the top 1% of Americans will account for 22.5% of the nation’s total, the largest share since the peak of the stock bubble in 1928. Meanwhile, the middle will stagnate. The median annual income will rise a mere 0.3% a year in inflation-adjusted terms, from about $67,000 in 2021 to about $72,000 in 2048. The income of the poorest 10% will actually decline. Malaise in the Middle The outlook for wealth is even worse. By 2048, more than 62% will belong to the top 1%, crushing the 1928 record of 51%. And nearly a quarter will belong to the top 0.01%, far exceeding the extreme inequality of the robber-baron era. Too Much at the Top How is this happening? It’s far from inevitable. In terms of development, the US is on par with the industrialized nations of Western Europe. Yet in terms of inequality, it’s closer to Turkey, Mexico, Haiti and Iran. Rather, America chooses inequality. Protections for the poor are extremely weak: On historical trends, the minimum wage will reach just $10.62 in 2048 in nominal terms, from $7.25 today. Preferences for the rich keep expanding: Our exercise projects that the amount exempted from estate tax should reach a nominal $24.3 million in 2048, up from $12.9 million today. The more concentrated the wealth, the less it is taxed. No politician would campaign on a platform of giving more to the wealthiest, allowing the middle class to barely get by and stiffing the poor. Yet unless the US changes tack, that’s precisely the future it’s headed toward.

(Bandy X, Medicine&Law@Yale, Causes and cures VII: Structural violence Aggression and Violent Behavior Volume 28, May–June 2016, Pages 109-114)

Behavioral violence, in measurements by the tolls of street violence or war, is more noticeable, even though the “tranquil” waters of structural violence may contain much more violence. American violence scholar James Gilligan (1999) compared structural violence to the most deadly military conflicts: estimating 49 million military and civilian deaths from World War II, or about 8 million per year from 1939 to 1945, or even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the United States and the former Soviet Union at 232 million, could not even begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year, during times of peace as well as of war. In other words, every fifteen years, on average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating thermonuclear war or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. He also described structural violence as increased rates of disabilities and deaths among the people who occupy the bottom class. He noted that the suffering of people from lower classes are the product of people above who have collective bargaining power making choices that determine the allocation of resources. Unlike behavioral violence, its lethal effects operate continuously rather than sporadically; it can occur independently of any intention to kill anyone (for example, it can be a byproduct of wishing to maximize one's wealth and power); and it is usually invisible, in the sense that deaths from structural violence may appear to have other causes, natural or violent. More recent figures bear out these conclusions even more startlingly, as we will see in the next section. Gilligan (2001) also articulated how, through the mechanisms of shame, humiliation, and inferiority, the disparities in classes are the most potent cause of behavioral violence, such as suicide, homicide, warfare, or capital punishment (Bloom, 2001). American anthropologist Paul Farmer (2003) also developed the concept of structural violence by first defining structure as a pattern of collective social actions within institutional practices, law, economic policies, and other habitual elements. These structures can materially manifest through facilities such as roads, server systems, hospitals, and schools. He described violence as suffering resulting from social arrangements that put individuals in harm's way. Since the exertion of structural violence is systematic—that is, indirect—by everyone who belongs to a certain social order, no one is at fault, at the same time as everyone of that order is at fault. Cumulative historical forces and processes work together to constrain individual agency inversely, if not always neatly, with the ability to resist marginalization and oppression, and deny them the benefits of social progress.

(Rick, PoliSci@CCSF https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/the-u-s-has-made-great-progress-at-increasing-economic-inequality/

One of the more impressive accomplishments of the United States in recent decades is how it has achieved greater economic inequality in line with what Marx expected from a capitalist economy. There are periods of setbacks—in which economic inequality is reduced–followed by improvements resulting in even higher levels of inequality. Advancing economic inequality has been a bipartisan undertaking. The actions of both the Democrats and Republicans in power have increased economic inequality as their leaders, together, champion the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle and working classes. Additionally, despite the growth in the diversity of the ruling class, economic inequality has continued to widen. Examples of progress towards greater economic inequality that results in unmet needs and misery for many is made apparent in media stories such as a recent one in the Guardian with the title “I can’t afford groceries’: why one-third of US college students don’t have enough to eat.” Wealth Inequality Wealth is the value of what one owns minus one’s debts. Many people owe more than all of what they own is worth. They have negative wealth. Then there are those at the top who have played a major role in our country’s success at achieving such high levels of economic inequality. They include our “generous” good friends, the “job creators,” Musk, Bezos and Gates, the wealth of each is more than $100 billion. The Federal Reserve Board, the banker’s bank, has been providing data on the distribution of wealth in the U.S. going back to 1989. The share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest has grown tremendously. In 1989, the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent held 8.7% of the nation’s wealth rising to 12.6% as of the end of 2022. The Fed’s data show that in 1989, the wealth of the .1% was 2.26 times greater than the poorest 50%. At the end of 2022, the value of their holdings, $17.6 trillion, was more than four times greater than the wealth, $4.16 trillion, of the poorest 50% of the U.S. population.

(Alicia, money reporter at CNBC Make It. She formerly covered personal finance at Money Magazine and Lifehacker. Adamczyk has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/coronavirus-is-exacerbating-economic-inequality-in-the-us.html)

Experts, who have been trying to sound the alarm on the growing economic inequality in the United States for the past few decades, are seeing their worst fears realized during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since mid-March, tens of millions of Americans across the country have lost their jobs as a result of the economic fallout from the pandemic. No group has been spared: men and women, young and old, Black and White. But as the economy starts to recover, some groups are faring significantly worse than others, including Blacks, Hispanics, millennials, mothers and low-wage workers in the service industry. They are not returning to work at the same rate as White professional workers. The same groups, ironically, are also overrepresented in frontline industries that were deemed essential during the peak of the crisis, including health care, child care, cleaning services and grocery stores. In North Carolina, these frontline workers are 65% women and around 30% Black, according to the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, disproportionate to the percentage of the total workforce those two groups account for. Economic recessions never impact every group the same. But the degree to which Black and White workers are seeing their fortunes diverge post-Covid is one of the reasons many economists have deemed the ongoing recovery “K-shaped.” While White Americans have recovered more than half of the jobs they lost between February and April, Black Americans have recovered only around one-third. As recovery drags on, the coronavirus recession has turned into the most unequal in modern U.S. history. “The recession is almost over for white collar jobs with good benefits,” says Patrick McHugh, research manager at the nonpartisan North Carolina Budget and Tax Center. “But we’re still a long way away from recovering for people in the middle, and particularly low wage jobs.” Even before the Covid-19 crisis, many North Carolinians, like many Americans generally, still hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession. While the number of white collar jobs in the financial and tech sectors have grown in the state over the past decade, job growth in mid-income industries like manufacturing has been stagnant. “A lot of the other job growth was in extremely low paying positions that don’t have real opportunities for career advancement and would come with entirely meager benefits, if any,” says McHugh. With those middle-income jobs disappearing, many individuals, especially Black workers, settled for lower paying work and have not been able to build up the assets they would need to cushion another financial blow: Before coronavirus, 42% of North Carolina households would have been unable to cover all of their expenses for three months without assistance, including 33% of White households and 63% of Black households. Covid-19 has decimated those low-wage industries. Temporary furloughs in these fields are turning into permanent job loss. Long-term unemployment is on the rise. “We have to get a handle on income disparity,” says Ken Schorr, executive director of the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, based in Charlotte, NC. “This will not be a society that anybody wants to live in if we don’t get a handle on providing a better deal for working people in the bottom half of the income spectrum.” Systemic racism means people of color face the worst outcomes Centuries of systemic racism have made the financial outcomes disproportionately worse for Black and Hispanic Americans, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported earlier this month. Black Americans, especially, have been kept from higher-paying white collar jobs, and are over-represented in the service and hospitality sectors, which have borne the brunt of the coronavirus layoffs. That is further bifurcating the U.S. economy. Across the country, just 20% of Black workers are able to work from home, compared to 30% of White workers and 37% of Asian workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While white collar professionals work remotely, service industry workers must go to work and risk being exposed to Covid-19 or go without income at all. “Racism forms the foundation of inequality in our society, and it threatens our economy and limits economic opportunity for people of color,” the Fed wrote. And not only are Black workers more likely to lose their jobs, they are also more likely to have their unemployment insurance claims denied by their employers and more likely to receive less aid when they do get approved, according to research from Nyanya Browne and William Spriggs of Howard University. That’s no accident. It’s “the legacy of white supremacy” in North Carolina, says McHugh. States with higher populations of Black residents, especially in the South, have slashed unemployment insurance budgets and intentionally designed the systems so that they are more difficult to access, he says. Even more stark are the health disparities. Black Americans are disproportionately dying of Covid-19. In fact, APM Research Lab estimates that the virus is responsible for the death of 1 in 920 Black Americans, compared to 1 in 1,840 White Americans. The age-adjusted Covid-19 mortality rate is 3.2 times as high for Black Americans as it is for Whites. “Inequality has been building for decades, and the pandemic ripped it open,” says Schorr. How to move forward Another Covid-19 recovery package from the federal government is necessary to help the 23 million Americans still without work and keep inequality from growing even worse. The CARES Act, passed in March, included $2 trillion in enhanced unemployment, stimulus checks for individuals, food assistance and much more. Aid was disbursed quickly and was well-targeted to those who needed it, say the experts interviewed for this article. Fewer people fell into poverty than would have been expected, according to recent research from Columbia University. But now many of the most helpful provisions have expired. Yet the crisis is ongoing, and though some jobs have come back, the recovery has flat lined. Meanwhile, Congress has been negotiating another deal for months but has so far been unable to agree on what to include in the next aid package. Without more relief, everyone loses, says Eliza Forsythe, a labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Some economists believe if we had been more proactive, we could have gotten back to recovery faster,” says Forsythe. “The CARES Act was really successful in terms of mitigating the effects. But we’re not giving [workers] more support. That prolongs the recovery.” Enhanced unemployment benefits, a sticking point of the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, are important. They helped prop up the economy in the early months of the crisis, says Forsythe, ensuring families could pay all of their bills. Without them, households are falling behind. Now is the time to think big Just as important as the benefits themselves is the continuity of providing them, says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Households need the short- and long-term assurance that they will have income. “We know that when families are experiencing huge fluctuations in income, it can have a [domino] effect. It can lead to them losing their homes, or to debt that can end up costing them way more than the original bill,” says Curran. “Without action even more folks are going to be losing out.” Federal assistance for state and local governments is also crucial, says North Carolina Budget and Tax Center’s McHugh. With tax revenues down across the country, this would allow local governments to offer more aid to their citizens. Now is the time to think big, says William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University. The virus has demonstrated the need for an expanded national health-care program and a federal jobs guarantee. The latter would essentially be a national payroll to ensure people could have income whenever there was a need, not on the “sporadic basis” Congress is providing now, says Darity. Nationalized health care would mean that if people lost their jobs, they wouldn’t automatically lose their health insurance. Without more relief, inequality in the U.S. will continue to grow. That hurts individuals and families, and the economy as a whole. “The data is clear that the need is high,” says Curran. “As a poverty researcher, we’re trying to sound the alarm here. We know action that was taken earlier this year worked, but we know that it wasn’t enough and we know that families need more. Congress can do something, but they need to take action.”

If the archive were to be destroyed, would anything of ‘man’ remain? Art gives man the ability to imagine himself as eternally present, beyond any particular epoch or text, and yet also places this eternity in the fragile tomb of a material object: ‘Even if the material lasts only for a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 166). ‘Man’ as a race (as a unified body imagining himself as a natural kind) is essentially tied to extinction: for man is at once an ex post facto or metaleptic positing of that which must have been there all along, awaiting eternal expression. At the same time ‘man’ is also that being who hastens extinction in general by imagining himself as a single tradition solely worthy of eternal life, stamping the world with his own image. This unified humanity that has become intoxicated with its sense of self-positing privilege can only exist through the delirium of Race, through the imagination of itself as a unified and eternal natural body:

All delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean racist. It is not a matter of the regions of the body without organs ‘representing’ races and cultures. The full body does not represent anything at all. On the contrary, the races and cultures designate regions on this body—that is, zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Phenomena of individualization and sexualization are produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. Along the way we struggle against other races, we destroy civilizations, in the manner of the great migrants in whose wake nothing is left standing once they have passed through. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, 94)

The scyborg’s medium is assemblage. When we take assemblages seriously as both analytical of power and as the medium for it, then the question becomes, how do you hack assemblages? The scyborg is a sculptor of assemblage—s-he splices one machine to another, de/links apparatuses from/to one another, places machines to work in making new machines, disassembles and reassembles the machine. The scyborg can connect Black radical thought to the paper-producing academic–industrial complex and set the print command to “manifesto.” The scyborg is like R2D2 in the Death Star, opening escape tunnels, lowering and raising doors to new passageways, making the death machine run backward, and ultimately releasing the plans for its destruction. The scyborg is an artist in the un/patterning of relations of power.[19] The scyborg loves dirty work.[20] Scyborgs do not care whether the assemblage they are retooling is first, second, or third world. Categorical thinking is not the point. Nothing is too dirty for scyborg dreaming: MBA programs, transnational capital, Department of Defense grants. Scyborgs are ideology-agnostic, which creates possibilities in every direction of the witch’s flight—not just possibilities that we like. This is why some of you are not always decolonial in behavior. Thankfully, your newly assembled machine will break down. Some other scyborgs will reassemble the busted gears to drive decolonial dreams. To dream it is to ride the ruin. Scyborgs are creating the free university. Scyborg desires are connecting the neoliberal motor that drove President Obama’s campaign for tuition-free community college to antipoverty organizing and to critical education. One of the interesting ways this is being done is by connecting free universities to the rhetoric of democracy and citizenship. Democracy is not decolonization. Democratization will expand, at best, the normative class of citizens through reinvestments in settler colonialism and new articulations of antiblackness. However, “democracy” as a discourse was also ready material for assemblage, a gear to attach to build the free university. The dream of universal education is born from the reality of exclusive schooling. This dream may shift as educational expansion creates new imbalances, such as inflated credentials, the devaluing of unschooled knowledge, new gaps between educational training and employment, or gaps between the trained workforce and the available supply of jobs. However, in building the free university assemblage and watching it fall apart, perhaps something unpredictable will come of its ruin. As to what, and whether the free university will be decolonizing, will be answered in scyborg assemblage. To be very clear, I am not advocating for rescuing the university from its own neoliberal desires but rather for assembling decolonizing machines, to plug the university into decolonizing assemblages. Close to my heart, Roses in Concrete Community School opened its doors in 2015 in Ohlone, what some call Oakland, California. This school is part of a larger self-determination project for a mostly Black and Brown community, in which we hope for a pre-K–16 educational institution, community-based economies, and land.[21] Also in 2015, also in what is now called Oakland, longtime Indigenous educators and activists Corrina Gould (Chochenyo/Karkin Ohlone) and Johnella LaRose (Shoshone Bannock) created the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust built upon “the belief that land is the foundation” that can bring all peoples together in “the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands . . . to Indigenous stewardship.” Sogorea Te’ Land Trust also reworks Western concepts of “land tax,” nonprofit status, and inheritance. Decolonizing land relations is the heart that reworks this machinery. Sogorea Te’ not only calls on but indeed provides an avenue for people living in Ohlone lands “to heal from the legacies of colonialism and genocide, to remember different ways of living, and to do the work that our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.”[22] Nearby Roses in Concrete is an abandoned U.S. Navy base the size of a small town. California community colleges are talking expansion, while the tuition-free college movement had nearly found a federal reality under President Obama. A scyborg might connect these pieces—might imagine how the machines of freedom schools and free community colleges could purchase land, land that could become part of an Indigenous land trust. Roses in Concrete has a sister school in Aoteroa that originated from a Māori bilingual program Te Whānau o Tupuranga (Centre for Māori Education) and Fanau Pasifika (Centre for Pasifika Education), which became a school in 2006 and then became Kia Aroha College in 2011. Similar to Roses, Kia Aroha College is built on a holistic “scholar warrior” culture that developed the school over twenty-five years into a “culturally-located, bilingual learning model based in a secure cultural identity, stable positive relationships, and aroha (authentic caring and love).”[23] This craft of creating Indigenous space in an urban colonial context requires a constant rearrangement of settler law, Indigenous rights, state educational ministry systems, built schooling environments, and community systems of Indigenous education. Furthermore, these associations between school makers in Māori/Pasifika and in U.S. ghetto colonial contexts produce new shared scyborg flight plans. These technologies are driven and repurposed by scyborg desires. Where I am now, on Kumeyaay land at UC San Diego, we are at the confluence of the engineering apparatus, the naval and sea industries, the U.S.– Mexican border, the white utopian project of Black exclusion, the settler project of Native disappearance, the transnational project of international (read model Asian) recruitment. Scyborgs might reorganize these technologies into third university organisms with decolonizing programs: a project of water, a project of transnational/Indigenous solidarity, a project of Black assertion, a project of islands. As I write, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (my other I) are supporting a collective of collectives, the Land Relationships Super Collective, that connects different land-based movements across North America with one another to share strategies, resources, learnings, and so on. As Eve and I are both university professors, the university plays into this as an institution that must be refused, and yet also as an organism, an assemblage of machines, that we can make work, make space in, make liquid enough to allow us to contribute to land rematriation projects directly. The third world university will be built by scyborg labor. This is not a revolutionary call for scyborgs of the world to unite. This is a call to gear-in and do the dirty work of desiring machines. Through desires’ dirty work, we might recommission these first world scraps into a third world machine.

In Michael Parenti’s classic anti-imperial analysis of Hollywood mov- ies, he points to the ‘upside down’ way that the ‘make-believe media’ portrays colonial settlement. In films like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by ‘natives,’ inverting, in Parenti’s view, the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense. Indeed, aggression and self- defense are reversed in these movies, but the image of a surrounded fort is not false. Instead, the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath – before and before – enclosure. The surround antagonises the laager in its midst while disturbing that facts on the ground with some outlaw planning. Our task is the self-defense of the surround in the face of repeated, targeted dispossessions through the settler’s armed incursion. And while acquisitive violence occasions this self-defense, it is recourse to self-possession in the face of dispossession (recourse, in other words, to politics) that represents the real danger. Politics is an ongoing attack on the common – the general and generative antagonism – from within the surround. Consider the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, first theorists of the revolution of the surround, the black before and before, the already and the forthcoming. Their twinned commitment to revolution and self-defense emerged from the recognition that the preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of innovation. This is not a contradiction if the new thing, always calling for itself, already lives around and below the forts, the police stations, the patrolled highways and the prison towers. The Panthers theorized revolution without politics, which is to say revolution with neither a subject nor a principle of decision. Against the law because they were generating law, they practiced an ongoing planning to be possessed, hopelessly and optimistically and incessantly indebted, given to un- finished, contrapuntal study of, and in, the common wealth, poverty and the blackness of the surround. The self-defense of revolution is confronted not only by the brutalities but also by the false image of enclosure. The hard materiality of the unreal convinces us that we are surrounded, that we must take possession of ourselves, correct ourselves, remain in the emergency, on a permanent footing, settled, determined, protecting nothing but an illusory right to what we do not have, which the settler takes for and as the commons. But in the moment of right/s the commons is already gone in the movement to and of the common that surrounds it and its enclosure. What’s left is politics but even the politics of the commons, of the resistance to enclosure, can only be a politics of ends, a rectitude aimed at the regulatory end of the common. And even when the election that was won turns out to have been lost, and the bomb detonates and/or fails to detonate, the common perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere, here, around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts. Meanwhile, politics soldiers on, claiming to defend what it has not enclosed, enclosing what it cannot defend but only endanger. The settler, having settled for politics, arms himself in the name of civilisation while critique initiates the self-defense of those of us who see hostility in the civil union of settlement and enclosure. We say, rightly, if our critical eyes are sharp enough, that it’s evil and uncool to have a place in the sun in the dirty thinness of this atmosphere; that house the sheriff was building is in the heart of a fallout zone. And if our eyes carry sharpness farther out we trail the police so we can put them on trial. Having looked for politics in order to avoid it, we move next to each other, so we can be beside ourselves, because we like the nightlife which ain’t no good life. Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique. So it matters how long we have to do it, how long we have to be exposed to the lethal effects of its anti-social energy. Critique endangers the sociality it is supposed to defend, not because it might turn inward to damage politics but because it would turn to politics and then turn outward, from the fort to the surround, were it not for preservation, which is given in celebration of what we defend, the sociopoetic force we wrap tightly round us, since we are poor. Taking down our critique, our own positions, our fortifications, is self-defense alloyed with self-preservation. That takedown comes in movement, as a shawl, the armor of flight. We run looking for a weapon and keep running looking to drop it. And we can drop it, because however armed, however hard, the enemy we face is also illusory. Uncut devotion to the critique of this illusion makes us delusional. In the trick of politics we are insufficient, scarce, waiting in pockets of resistance, in stairwells, in alleys, in vain. The false image and its critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be more than what we are. But we already are. We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in or- der to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take root, we’re gone (because we’re already here, moving). We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition. We’re in a trance that’s under and around us. We move through it and it moves with us, out beyond the settlements, out beyond the redevelopment, where black night is falling, where we hate to be alone, back inside to sleep till morning, drink till morning, plan till morning, as the common embrace, right inside, and around, in the surround. In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper of our need for institutions, and all institutions are political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional institutions in the common, settling it, correcting us. But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t want to be correct and we won’t be corrected. Politics proposes to make us better, but we were good already in the mutual debt that can never be made good. We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything. An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self- governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.

Beyond this targeting of certain elements in Marx’s work – too metaphysical, too logocentric, too Hegelian, too idealist – Derrida finds something else there. When Specters of Marx arrives, Derrida makes it clear that he thinks Marx still has a place in our world, claiming that there will be no future without him. He argues that if deconstruction has so far ‘been prudent and sparing but rarely negative in the strategy of its references to Marx’, it is because Marx seemed to have been ‘taken over’, ‘welded to an orthodoxy’. But not only are there no objections to an encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, Derrida also goes so far as to place his own work ‘in the tradition of a certain Marxism’, and even talks of ‘this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction’ (Derrida, 1994: 92). He affirms this in the face of a contemporary discourse – of politicians, academics, journalists – which declares the ‘death’ of Marx and Marxism and the triumph of political and economic liberalism. Derrida probably overplays the oppositional status of his book: there is always someone somewhere announcing the death of Marx and always someone else resurrecting him or calling on his ghost – and as he himself admits, his intervention comes after a longstanding demand to write about Marx. Nevertheless, the background to both Derrida’s book and the conference which gave birth to it was marked by a conspicuously self-congratulatory tone on the part of Western liberals following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a celebration epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (which Derrida submits to a brief but amusing and effective critique). Yet this liberal triumphalism is at once jubilant and anxious, manic and troubled: desperate to announce the benign and auspicious victory of liberal capitalism despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Against this anxious triumphalism, Derrida throws the spotlight on that which it would hide, detailing the suffering, exclusion, oppression, and violence that exist in the world, despite – or because of – the triumph of neo-liberal virtues, offering a list of ten ‘plagues’ of the ‘new world order’, including inter-ethnic conflict, developing-world debt, and the spread of nuclear weapons: Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating ‘the end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (Derrida, 1994: 85) This stirring indictment of global injustice is made in the name of a new, radicalized critique ‘inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism’ (Derrida, 1994: 86). The spirits of Marx or Marxism: it is a central hypothesis of Specters of Marx that there is more than one ‘spirit’ of Marx. Like all texts, Marx’s writings are radically heterogeneous: his work offers a number of alternatives, many Marxes. Like Lyotard, Derrida is not interested in Marx’s work as a unified system. As inheritors of the spirits of Marx, we must distinguish between them, ‘filter, sift, criticize . . . sort out several different possibles’, in order to reaffirm this inheritance (Derrida, 1994: 16). Derrida goes even further: for while all ‘inheritance is always . . . a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation’ (91–2), there is something in Marx’s work which calls for its own reinvention: To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in principle and fi rst of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation. (Derrida, 1994: 88) Not only does Marx offer numerous possibilities to choose from, ‘[w]e do not have to solicit the agreement of Marx’ for the choices we make. ‘And we do not have to suppose that Marx was in agreement with himself’ (Derrida, 1994: 34). This does not mean that Marx is simply a blank canvas on which we can sketch our own theory: Derrida often points to Marx’s unique value in providing resources for the analysis of contemporary relations between nation-states, the market, international law, technological innovations, and capital. Yet Derrida does not provide these analyses himself: ‘what I am putting forward here . . . corresponds more to a position-taking than to the work such a position calls for, presupposes, or prefigures’ (53). In fact he is clearer about those spirits of Marx he wants to reject. We have already seen Derrida suspicious of the metaphysics in Marx. In Specters of Marx he expands on this identification of the unwelcome spirits of Marx, Marxisms that should be left to one side: We would be tempted to distinguish this spirit of the Marxist critique [as critique of liberal capitalism and its ills], which seems to be more indispensable than ever today, at once from Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system, as ‘dialectical materialism,’ from Marxism as historical materialism or method, and from Marxism incorporated in the apparatuses of party, State, or workers’ International. (Derrida, 1994: 68) The identification in this passage of Marxism as ontology is important: the interrogation of Marx’s ontology is one of the most important themes of Derrida’s book. It relates the reading of Marx strongly to Derrida’s work hitherto, aligning it with his deconstruction of the onto-theological heritage of Western metaphysics from Plato onwards. Against Marx’s ontology Derrida proposes a ‘hauntology’: the study of the spectral. For the ‘spectres of Marx’ refer not only to the ghosts of Marx that haunt us today, but also to the spectres that haunted Marx himself.4 It is using the figure of the spectre that Derrida deconstructs Marx.