Peace be with the survivors of all those who were murdered on 9/11 and with all others who still suffer or will suffer due to terrorism, including those who, may we not forget, live under inhumane, overcrowded, and unjust conditions that can give rise to the terrorism of the desperate in a wasteful, burning world kept safe for capitalism and dependent on for-profit production and distribution of fossil fuels by the largest, most expensive, and most deadly terrorist group in world history, the U.S. military industrial complex, with a profit-seeking cell located somewhere near you and me.

It's much cheaper to the captains of industry for us to shoot each other (or shoot up) than to pay for mercenaries to shoot us, although that is sometimes necessary. But better still than having our bodies, guns, and ammo actively turned on each other or ourselves is our continuing quiet apathy, division, and disenfranchisement at the ballot boxes of our ordinary lives, where each day is effectively a vote to maintain the status quo. (Text by Galtisalie, photo from a scene from the incomparable Matewan, 1987.)

I'm going to start with what I believe to be regionally true from decades of work at the intersection of economics, race, and the environment in the southeastern U.S. Although my experience is regionally-focused, I think it contains broader implications for the regionally-linked necessity of stopping global climate change.

It's not for now particularly encouraging, but we might as well start with inconvenient truth, which many southern, sometimes upper class, single-issue environmentalists do not fully acknowledge—that perceived short term economic self-interest matters far more to most struggling white working class folks than environmental truth and justice. That may sound elitist, but what is delusional if not elitist is to think that environmental problems will be seriously addressed without the masses also having jobs giving reasonable levels of economic security.

I'm not giving up hope, in part because "we” have no choice. Many of those (Merle) haggard white working class families are, for all their current shortcomings, potential and ultimately indispensable democratic comrades if we are ever going to have deep planet-saving change. Intra- and inter-regionally, we are all in this together whether we want to be or not.

Under the intentionally precarious, hyper-competitive strictures of U.S. divide and rule in the southeast, most white working class tend to want to politically associate with white ruling class “winners” even if they can't be one. Under a ritualistic hegemony of bootstraps moralism, slippery accounting, and outright racism, capitalism methodically educates the white working class in these parts to willingly be stolen from as long as it can hold out hope to get in on a small piece of the action.

This includes passively accepting capitalist polluters ruining humanity’s collective environmental heritage in exchange for various perceived short term material "freedoms”—including the freedom to potentially pay for electricity to shiver during the height of the summer or to fill up the large tank of a large truck or to wave like a winner the flag of a lost fascist cause or to take “defensive” measures, including potentially threatening ones in relation to long-time resident persons of color or more recently arrived undocumented workers. These measures may include relatively socially acceptable things like trying to get and keep by nearly any means necessary any job available to support one’s family, idiotic alt-right things like driving on a hot Sunday in full cammo to the nearest gun and knife show to arm up, or desperate acts to procure illegal medication to shoot up, such as petit theft at the Dollar General followed by cruising without a license the parking lot of a Walmart where one is already under a no trespass order looking for everyday low priced opioids.

Though half-brown/half-white and for now middle class, I'm in some ways in on it too, at least indirectly. Each month I get emailed an expensive naked selfie from the Southern Company, a power company so darned wholesome and exceptionally Americanny it traces its sacred corporate roots to "Dutch instrument-maker Pieter van Musschenbroek,” who did something electrically important even before the highly potent nightly nudist Yankee “Ben Franklin’s kite experiment.” (http://www.southerncompany.com/about-us/history/home.cshtml)

The rises and falls of my sexy electrical energy usage chart reveal a lot of information about my own chilled sloth but little about the polluting system that produces the energy for southerners of all races, ethnicities, and demographics. But, hey, in some ways down here we’re all for now southern gothic pollution voters! Who gives a Great Horned Owl hoot about inter-generational social responsibility?!!! Highfalutin things like environmental injustice don’t exist as long as they're not happening to you or yours at the moment.

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He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

some giant blank forgotten thing

Even if they "duly” own the mountaintop or mineral estate, or “duly" lease the fresh water extraction or ocean drilling rights, polluters for profit do not own the commons their pollution occupies or threatens. But because they directly lease some of us by way of wages, and most of the rest of us are not in solidarity with those they directly lease, and in the short run indirectly "benefit” from the pollution (as when we use, much less lower, our fossil fuel-dependent thermostats), polluters do not need to own the commons to pollute them. The cumulative effects of all this thievery, lack of solidarity, and mass complicity are destroying our planet with our semi-informed consent.

I'm not at all suggesting that we should simply give up the flimsy allure of our democratic strip (mining) show. By now we are all well aware that the Soviet Union also did not do a good job of protecting the environment.

I'm not attempting to put lipstick on that ecological pig. Obviously a state capitalist/distorted worker state (or for that matter a monarchist sovereign) regime is every bit as capable of harming the commons as a market capitalist system. And the Chinese industry of today, with quite a bit of authoritarian government oversight, continues to belch out coal spew, although it finally may be halting some of this (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environment/china-c...) and is largely doing the spewing to produce shoddy consumerist junk for our own debt-ridden (and increasingly unemployed) market capitalist society, much of which we don't really need.

I'm also not going to attempt to provide a comprehensive or developed socialist critique, Marxist or otherwise, of "profit". I'll leave that to highly qualified compañeras whose wonderful political-economic analyses frequently grace this digital page.

Nor will I make the case that all profit-making enterprises are utterly incompatible with socialism. I tend to think that some enterprises such as small farms and worker-owned cooperatives may be in part profit-driven yet still be socialized. However, they can only with varying degrees of success hope to remain “competitive” under capitalist conditions. The hegemony of capitalism makes survival, much less socialization, of profit-based small group and cooperative enterprises precarious at best. The system’s corruption spreads like the plague to islands of socialization.

More germane for present “energy voter”/indirect pollution consumption purposes: because capitalist polluters hold such sway in the U.S. and other “democracies", both true democratization in general, which must encompass the economy, and even specific protection of supposedly “cherished” public assets like our endangered springs, rivers, and reefs, become extremely difficult to impossible.

Rather than begin to correct this state of affairs, we even let private companies run and extract profits from energy production and distribution, an obvious example of a sector that can and should be readily socialized.

Whether or not one subscribes to the labor theory of value or other heterodox economics, the severe societal costs of profit-making from pollution—on the commons, on democracy, and on solidarity—are immoral, inconsistent with even capitalist pretenses, and make socialization extremely difficult.

Polluters for profit are the tobacco companies of our time. They will lie and buy their way into and through as many more generations of pollution voters as they can. And we smile back and blow them kisses each month we pay their naked selfie bills or otherwise accept their wasteful, polluting, consumerist wares.

Their need to maintain and expand rents and other profits muzzles the mouths of captive politicians and bureaucrats, profit-sponging charitable deduction-dependent preachers, and desperate poppas and mommas from Appalachia to Anhui and all parts in between. They will never tell us that we don't really need their profit extraction, or that we can collectively do much better by future generations, so that they can keep schlocking the same naked selfie gawking.

They force society to socialize their corporate costs. Far from being self-sufficient industrial Titans, they are global clean air and water-consuming government-supported welfare kings.

Each formerly clean air or water molecule in each cubic micrometer of public space is stolen, irreplaceable societal chemical property on or in stolen societal sky or surface or subsurface waterways—stolen not only from us but also from future generations.

To expect a morally sick, profit-driven, shortsighted system to prevent environmental sickness through market incentives of all things—or even traditional “command and control” regulations alone—is hopelessly naive. Whom do we think is in command? Whom do we think is being controlled?

If we want to prevent pollution from destroying our planet we will have to revolt against, and remove our own utter political and economic vulnerability to and complicity with, the polluters who can so easily control the regulators. The system of profit-making from externalities must end.

But how? Our corporate-controlled "democracy” teaches us to admire our own naked polluting selfies, figurative and otherwise, while we ignore those who are already suffering. We are collectively dishonest about our own naked selfie complicity.

We must decide whether we will all now be revolutionary "coal miners daughters” or, in one way or another, remain the divided and ruled wage slaves and playthings of the polluting barons who write their own rules in the capitalist organizing committees convened regularly in the national and state capitals.

The duty of the times is not to wax nostalgic about the polluting past in an attempt to perpetuate a polluting future but for the masses to collectively seize democratic control of the stolen commons and, more broadly, the stolen global economy. Mass rejection of neoliberal consumer-driven wasting of the commons must be accompanied by mass rejection of neoliberalism itself.

[video:https://youtu.be/pM84OekHtAQ]