How the rich plan to rule a burning planet | Red Flag
▻https://redflag.org.au/node/6974
In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however – in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands – they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.
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Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout – all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.
If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead. Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.
We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private #profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism – and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.
