Transcript: CHUCK COLLINS on Wealth Hoarding and Capitalist Capture /340
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Chuck Collins.
Chuck Collins Privilege or wealth is a disconnection drug that keeps people apart from one another and from building authentic real connections and communities. When you have that kind of wealth, you don't really have to ask for help you could buy all the services you need, but then you miss out on reciprocity, that important part of human existence, which is I need help, can you help me and the vulnerability and connection that is created by that?
Ayana Young Chuck Collins is Co-editor at any equality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of numerous books, including Born on Third Base, The Wealth Hoarders and Economic Apartheid in America. Altar to an Erupting Sun is his first novel.
Ayana Young Oh Chuck, thanks so much for joining us today, I really want to get the nitty gritty with you. So I'm excited.
Chuck Collins Me too. Thanks for having me.
Ayana Young When I heard about your work, I had so many questions pop up right away. And I thought, Oh, I really want to interview this person. You've done such vital work exposing the contours of inequality in this country. And I just would love to begin by discussing how growing inequality simultaneously leads to growing instability, especially in the face of the climate crisis.
Chuck Collins Well, that is a very important framework and I spent a lot of time just looking sort of at the very narrow, growing income and wealth gap. But when you realize as wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, it has all kinds of disruptions that disrupts democracy, it disrupts sort of economic stability, having some people have so much wealth, and a lot of people have nothing fuels speculation and instability. And then another form of concentrated power is in the industries that drive our energy policy––oil and gas and coal and the sort of financial enablers that provide the financing for extractive capitalist economy. They have seen their wealth and power radically concentrated over the last 40 years. So that's one of the ways that it affects our environment is it makes it very hard to kind of shift the trajectory of where we're going,
Ayana Young Mmmm, Yeah. Well, I want to get more into the details of that response. And in 'Listen, Billionaire, Doomsday Preppers', for inequality.org you write, quote, "Our current system of extractive capitalism is preventing the transformation required of us. We need to rewire ourselves as a species and change the economic system that is destroying nature and producing escalating inequalities," end quote. So how does the machinery of inequality mirror the machinery of the climate crisis?
Chuck Collins I think of them as interwoven machines or systems, the more I dig in and learn, the more I realize, really starting a century ago, with this rise of the Texas oil billionaires and the oil fortunes, you had a segment of business owners who invested heavily in shaping our political system. And that included an aversion to taxation, government regulation, and a clear path for unbridled energy extraction in the fossil fuel sector. So you have this one powerful segment of the economy and individuals in the economy, rigging the rules, if you will. And it's hard to envision this, but coming out of the great New Deal, and even under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, we had a very progressive tax system. Wealthy people paid high taxes. And we were kind of beginning to grow together as a society after becoming very unequal. And even in terms of the racial wealth divide, you started to see by the early 1960s, a narrowing of the gap between white and non white households, the concentration of wealth among the 1% being, let's say, 9% of all the wealth as opposed to 36% today. So you had a period of relative equality, not perfect in any way and still racially economically polarized, but then this reactionary fossil fuel sector captured our political system, pushing their candidates, pushing the parties, pushing the whole system.
So when you use the word, the machinery, it really was about capturing government and using the government to kind of advance their interests. Anyone today who is sort of looking at this collision course we're in between.. As we see more and more kinds of disruptions, we realize our political system is completely ill-equipped to respond to the level of the crisis. And if you dig into that, let's say you're saying, Well, geez, why? Why is Congress going to include the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt ceiling agreement? You know, why, why a pipeline project? Why a plumb for the fossil fuel industry? And you realize these folks really do have extraordinary power. And they've used that power, and you could say, a couple decades ago was about seeding, denial, oh, there is no problem. And then it was about seeding doubt, and promoting sham science. And along the way, blocking alternatives. Blocking to put a cap on carbon emissions or transition to global energy. The same industry used their power to block those. And finally, here we are delaying.
We know we need to rapidly transition away from oil, gas and coal, but we can't, But even as part of a debt ceiling negotiation of the deficit, the fossil fuel industry has its way with our political system. And personally, I experienced this trying to prevent a gas pipeline from being built in my neighborhood in Boston, the building of the Atlantic––a pipeline that came up the Atlantic Coast bringing fracked natural gas to export terminals along the East Coast. But they were building this pipeline right into my Boston neighborhood. And so I got very involved in that. But I was sort of looking upstream and realizing we're not going to be able to stop this because the game is entirely rigged. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC is a captured regulatory agency. It does the bidding of the industry, it's supposedly overseas. So all along the way, we see how the rules and the regulations are tipped against those of us who are trying to create a habitable Earth.
Ayana Young Oh, absolutely. I'm in the midst of that right now with the campaign to stop acid generating mine up here in Alaska. And it's incredible how much our systems, government policy, legal, and otherwise is literally set up to take from the earth and pollute. It's truly shocking, but not shocking at the same time, because we look around and we see what has become of these policies and governmental agencies, etc.
So well, there was a quote, in your author q&a, and you explain, "When we look at the US Congress today, we have to appreciate that we are looking at the end product of almost a century of industry manipulation and political capture. When a powerful industry – oil, gas, coal – uses their wealth and power to shape and warp our current political environment for over 70 years. This is what it looks like," end quote. So yeah, maybe there's like two questions here, which is, who actually has the visible and invisible eyes power to make broad decisions about resource use? And how does inequality at this level undermine both democratic process and corporate and government transparency?
Chuck Collins Yeah, great question. Maybe on the latter point, I think when we think about inequality of wealth, it's really about inequality of power. It's the power to influence our democratic system and the power to block things, which has been considerable over those 70-100 years, preventing us from taking soft energy paths as Amory Lovins used to call them. We've stuck with the carbon extraction, the methane extraction path. So it's really that power imbalance. And the quote you mentioned makes me think, also about the culture, you say, Well, you know, 30% of Americans are not going to want to give up their large trucks or whatever. We have to understand that all we've been serving on the menu is carbon products. If most of us had known what Exxon and Shell knew 40 years ago, and our elected officials knew that we'd probably have more things on the menu, you'd be able to take light rail or mass transit or be able to use it an electric vehicle that was created 40 years ago and has been perfected, or a decarbonized energy sector would at least be more like Europe where we have many more efficient appliances and vehicles and choices. But we couldn't even become Europe in terms of per capita energy consumption because the fossil fuel industry at each step of the way, uses their wealth and power to block alternatives. So it's like going to the diner and all there is is one type of food on the menu. And well, what's the choice here? This is all we have.
Ayana Young Oh, I guess, going off, you know, what you just spoke to I want to talk about how staggering inequity is normalized. And there was another interview that you did with NPR and you say, quote, "Jeff Bezos was the first centibillionaire, maybe in 2017? Is it the new trend? I mean, just for perspective, in 1983, there were only 18 billionaires in the United States and now there are 657 today. So I don't consider that a good economic indicator. I think it's a troubling sign that too much of society's wealth and income is flowing upward to that small group of people," end quote. And gosh, it's kind of hard to wrap my mind around how dramatic this change is just across a few decades and it makes me question how is extreme and growing inequality continually normalized? And how has this wealth been consolidated so quickly anyways?
Chuck Collins So even the notion of what choices we have has been kind of constructed and manipulated over these decades. And then I think on the visible power, I think we can identify a couple of dozen major global energy companies. And at this point, just a handful of major financial institutions that prop up the whole sector. Although you and I can talk about where the cracks or the weak spots in the system are, where the potential pressure points are, but you can see these dozen biggest oil companies, and then the natural gas players, and the shrinking but still globally significant coal sector, all of which just have record profits. Even during the pandemic, they were just seeing their profits reach unprecedented levels in 2021. The oil industry's profits doubled over the previous several years. So they're making a lot of money along the way.
Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, part of it is over 40 years. If it had happened over five years, we would have been more alarmed. But, it has been a steady, growing updraft of wealth, not just to the 1% people. We talked about the 1%, in 2009, the Occupy movement, but we're really talking about the 1/10 of 1% people with $30 million or more all the way up to the billionaire class. That is where almost all of the economic gains of the last couple of decades are going. They're flowing almost all the way to the top. And then, during the first two years of the pandemic, there was almost a tragic concentration of wealth where the US billionaires saw their wealth go from 2.9 trillion to 5 trillion in two years. And I think popular culture mirrors that and somewhat, normalizes it there. If you just look at the billionaires that show up in every movie now, whether they're creating dinosaur islands or dominating some conversation or political process... there is kind of a strange normalization along with a myth that people are where they are, because they deserve to be where they are, meaning that somehow these folks have created something innovative and and we're all benefiting from it. Whether it's Elon Musk, creating Tesla or Starlink, well geez, shouldn't they be well rewarded for what they're doing? So there's even sort of a story that goes along with it that justifies the extreme concentration of wealth.
Ayana Young Hmm. Yeah. I think it's really interesting in popular culture as well that people simultaneously want to be billionaires and want to hate billionaires at the same time. It's really confusing what our culture conditions us to believe and want. You look at music or movies, you know, basically any media and it's truly about wanting this luxury lifestyle with the private jets and the yachts and the access to anything at any time, anywhere, but then also building up a understandable frustration and even hatred against the people who do hold this kind of wealth. So it's kind of love and hate. And then of course, the absolute majority of us will never be able to reach that anyways. But so many songs are money, money, money, money, and then you grow up singing those songs. I think we're really being bamboozled. And I think we are in so many ways, but definitely around wealth and wealth accumulation. I can understand why so many of us are confused, even if that's unconsciously.
Chuck Collins Yeah, I have a funny little story, which is once I was giving a talk to a very large group, so I said, "Well, I'd like to do a poll here. How many people here admire America's billionaires for things that they've created?" You know, half the people in the room raise their hands. "How many people here are suspicious or even resentful toward billionaires?" half the people raise their hand? "How many people would like to be a billionaire?" Everybody raises their hand. So well, that's complicated. I think one thing that happened during the pandemic was, people saw how the game was rigged, and that inequality wasn't about unequal sacrifice. And the fact that the billionaire class globally and in the US was seeing their wealth accelerate during a time of hardship for a lot of people. And that fueled some sense of like, okay, this system is broken. Like, we shouldn't have a society that funnels so much of our societal wealth to the top, there's something broken here. And that's where I think, just in the last couple years, you have a current president who proposed a tax targeted on billionaires. Well, that's the first time in modern history where you've ever heard that kind of policy proposal. And it's because such proposals are very popular across the political spectrum, people think that the super rich are not paying their fair share of taxes, and should pay their fair share, and we should tax billionaires, and we should discourage these undemocratic concentrations of wealth and power. So I think there's a little more critical thinking now about whether this is a good thing or not.
Ayana Young Absolutely, I think there's definitely critical thinking, frustration questioning, which is, of course, we need that, it's the basis for change. But I think also, it can feel overwhelming, and a lot of us can feel powerless, like what could we possibly do to change or shift this really corrupt system that is so entangled. And I want to talk a bit more about the wealth hoarding and how some of this has even become possible. In your book, you discussed the wealth defense industry. So it'd be great if you could explain a bit more of the frameworks and structures that make up this industry. And the ways that laws and banking structures are designed to enable wealth hoarding.
Chuck Collins Well, as wealth concentrates in fewer hands, those folks will hire their professional helpers, if you will, their enablers to minimize their taxation and maximize transferring wealth down their narrow family line. So again, think of people with $30 million or more, which in my view, is plenty of money to have a good life, but at a certain point, it's about legacy. It's about how can I accumulate as much as possible and leave it to my unborn great, great grandchildren, so they don't have to work. So these are folks that have the ability and money to hire tax attorneys, wealth managers, accountants. I call it the wealth defense industry. Their job is to preserve the capital, minimize tax, and create trusts and other mechanisms to transfer the money down the line. And it's a fairly significant sector. We're talking 10s of 1000s of people who pretty much get up every morning and say, "How can I help global billionaires keep their money and get richer, accumulate more," and so they have a bias against tax. And they spend a lot of their days designing various loopholes or transactions or various forms of ownership and trusts that sort of masks. And so at this stage, we estimate somewhere around $30 to $40 trillion, owned by this ultra wealthy group, is now in the shadows. It's pretty much off the ledger. It's not reachable for taxation or accountability and the wealth defense industry will say, "Well, we're just helping our clients obey the law," but in fact, they're actively writing and manipulating the law.
So here we have a situation where, in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service, not a very popular agency generally but important in terms of making sure everybody pays their fair share. Well, they're completely outgunned in their ability to follow all these tax shenanigans that this wealth defense industry creates. They're up against some of the most powerful law firms and, and skillful attorneys and these wealthy families even create what they call family offices, which basically just run their affairs. So this is what an oligarchy looks like, when you have a wealth class, for whom taxes is almost optional, they've pretty much opted out and delinked from the rest of society. And that's part of the problem, including as we talk about the ecological problem. They think that they can hop in a private jet and avoid the worst consequences of ecological disruption. I would argue that's delusional. But nonetheless, people have this idea that they have enough wealth, they can maintain residences and six different parts of the world and avert the worst aspects of social and climate disruption.
Ayana Young It's so complex, the systems are truly set up to allow resource extraction to happen by any means possible. And for those who know how to play the game, the wealth hoarding game, or whatever we want to call it, to keep playing it and to keep getting more and more powerful, because of course, they all collude together. And so it's really a rigged system that's working really well, for a small amount of people. And I sometimes get trapped in what the solutions can be, or what the changes could be to halt this or start to shift this in a more equitable, a supportive direction for the majority of us, and, of course, the earth and the more than humans that call this their home as well. And I know that taxes are something that has been brought up as a way to start to balance out the inequality like a wealth tax or something like that.
In an interview with [unknown] you say, "These are our tax dollars at work in the United States. If I'm a billionaire, and I give $1 to my private foundation, I get 73 cents in tax reductions. We as taxpayers subsidize the charitable giving of billionaires. We should be skeptical, and we should say, Well, maybe they should pay higher taxes, and society should decide how the money is invested." So I guess the first question here is, how can we re-system so that taxpayers are not subsidizing the wealthy, and so the taxpayers are also not paying for extraction and funding the kinds of systems that have led us to a place of such stark inequality and instability. And just to get a little more detailed here, we could say, oh, we want a wealth tax. And we say, philanthropy is the breadcrumbs of capitalism. It's BS, it's a way for people to hold more money. And then they get to decide where those monies go. And a lot of times where philanthropy goes is into more programs that are actually not so great for the earth or for people. And so we say, well, we want a wealth tax. But so many of us are really discouraged about how our taxes are spent. You look at the Tongass National Forest, our taxes were used to subsidize old growth logging up to a billion dollars literally paid to log the last remaining old growth left on the planet in our national forests, because it wasn't profitable, actually. Obviously, the war machine, like our taxes are being used for that. So I think to me wrestling with this tax question, it's not that I don't want billionaires or really wealthy people to be taxed more, but I don't even like where our taxes go now. So I guess I'm kind of throwing it all at you in one big splatter. And so I'm sorry for not being more succinct here. But I'm definitely kind of mired in this.
Chuck Collins Yeah, I'm with you there. The first thing and just to set the context, I laid out a kind of dismal picture. But what I see are all kinds of cracks in that system, including people who work in this wealth defense industry who have reached the end of their careers and are sort of feeling like huh, all I've done with my life's energy is help the rich get richer. And so there are all these whistleblowers stepping forward. Pretty much everything we know about this system is because of leaks made by people working inside law firms inside wealth management firms who have given journalists, the Pandora papers, the Panama Papers. A number of them have reached out to me and I've worked with them to get their stories out. So just on the upbeat note, there are cracks in the system. And we're learning more about it. And we've learned that, okay, we know that a wealth tax would be good. But we have to start with dealing with some of the loopholes, and the trust's and all these sort of complex ownership systems that the super wealthy use that are deliberately complicated, hard for you and I to sit here and talk about because they're designed to be misunderstood or not well understood. So that's just one context.
Your point about philanthropy is important, which is that wealthy people are moving money to the shadows, into trusts, offshore corporations, into shell companies and different countries or in the US. They're also moving it into the charity sector. And some of that is going to good things. And now we're talking about the billionaire class. But it is another form of tax reduction, and a way that people can concentrate their wealth and power and hold on to control. So philanthropy more and more, is becoming more top heavy, more dominated by the ultra wealthy. So yeah, we should be skeptical about it. And we should change the tax laws around charitable giving so people can't just completely opt out of paying taxes. But there's the problem of how do we raise our money?
And then the problem, you point to, Ayana, is how is it spent? And that is another form of our democracy problem. You know, it's hard to get excited about taxes, when we know so much goes into the military, so much goes into sort of the corporate agenda that isn't helping, it's actually causing harm. So we have to both struggle around the priorities of government reasserting democratic control over how money is spent, as well as a better system for making sure everybody's chipping in their fair share. So there's the revenue side, and then there's the spending side. And I argue, hey, you know, we need to have a fair tax system, we also need to come back and make sure that the resources are used well, even in the in the last couple of years, four years ago, Congress was debating a $4 trillion investment bill, that would have had huge investments in climate mitigation, permanently affordable housing, creating a modern childcare system. I mean, that was a visionary bill, you had a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president and it was, you know, stopped really just by two votes in the Senate. You know, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema. I mean, that's how close we came as a society to passing a really big, bold, progressive spending agenda. So it's important to remember that because it was a near miss, but we may have another shot in the coming years. But it is hard to be excited about taxes, when we see that the political capture and manipulation is spending the money on the wrong things.
Ayana Young Yeah, it seems like tax itself is certainly not the democratic solution it's pitched as, especially considering the immense amount of lobbying that goes into deciding tax code and corporate tax breaks. And I guess it's just this question of in our current system is just taxing even possible? Because I'm not sure how we can ensure or hold accountable that the resources actually go to communities. You know, who are the watchdogs? How do we actually speak up when we do see things that are unjust, because things are really hidden? Whether it's the billionaires hiding their money, or whether it's the government hiding within bills, and hundreds of pages where percentages go, it's so convoluted. And so I almost want to talk about how to reform tax code for dummies who are sitting, figuring out ... I want it to be really spelled out of what steps we could take. And I will add something about the philanthropy, and I don't know the statistics, but I could imagine the majority of philanthropy is kind of questionable. And the nonprofit industrial complex has its own issues, of course. But a lot of these programs and projects wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for some philanthropy. Like who's going to fund people fighting mining and old drug logging and coal? There are some nonprofits out there that are actually the warriors for the climate for the earth. Who's going to fund resistance movements, if it isn't for philanthropy? And so I know these are two separate questions of getting more into the nitty gritty of philanthropy and what it funds in a beneficial way. And then also this question of how do we even begin to hold a type of tax reform accountable to make sure that the taxes are being used for our communities and that it is a just tax system?
Chuck Collins You know, I think we should celebrate and lift up the segments of the philanthropy movement that are thinking about change, not just reinforcing the status quo. And we had a group of wealth advisors come to visit, and talk to a really inspirational woman from the United Kingdom named Stephanie Brobbey, who's a wealth advisor, she worked for many decades in the traditional sector helping rich people minimize tax and pass on inheritances, and she jumped the rails. And now she works with wealthy individuals who are trying to minimize their wealth, give away substantial amounts of capital and give it in ways that heal the harms caused by the extraction of the capital, and also to pave the way toward a different energy policy. So it's very far thinking, and we are so thankful that there are people doing that work. So that is part of the contradiction here. I guess people sort of jokingly say, "Well, we're in the late stage of capitalism. And we're at this weird point where some of the people who have benefited from the system are also seeing its harms, and rebelling against it." And I take some encouragement in that. In the same way I see people defecting from the wealth defense industry.
And I think on a simple level, for 40-50 years, the rules of the tax system have been rigged to benefit capital, to benefit wealth holders, at the expense of wage earners. And what we need to do is basically reverse that we need to tax wealth, we need to tax work lower than we tax wealth. Low and middle income people should keep more money in their pockets, and wealthy people should pay a fair share. Again, it's really interesting. There's this big fight over the budget deficit and the debt ceiling that has been recently debated. And the Republican priorities were dismantling the investment in the Internal Revenue Service that was being made to enforce tax laws. That was their priority, along with getting Joe Manchins, Mountain View Pipeline ran through. So that's the one party's agenda. And pretty much one and a half of the political parties, that's their priorities. But that was the money that we were going to invest as a society to ensure proper enforcement, and that the wealthy weren't just loopholing their way out of paying taxes. So yeah, enforcement is important, good tax rules, and going after these hidden wealth systems. And there's work sort of happening in each of those areas.
Chuck Collins Another area that I take encouragement is taxing luxury consumption. We just did a report in the last month about private jets. It's not surprising to you that private jets are one of the worst causes of carbon emissions. And we as taxpayers effectively subsidize the private jet class. And it's growing rapidly. Where I live, there's an airport that, you know, they're proposing to expand it four times, simply to handle private jet traffic–private jets owned by the super rich. So that's a place where there's a good populace push back. We should tax private jets, we should tax the fuel, and we should tax their sales. And we should discourage private jet travel. And if we can't outright ban it, we should make sure the fees are very steep to cover the real costs their harms are creating. So I see a lot of interest and pushback and movements growing and making these kinds of tax demands central to how we fix the climate and how we fix the future in many ways.
Ayana Young Yeah, I think it could be central if our value systems shifted. And I think there's something I get really focused on, which is the roots of the problem. For instance, if our taxes were paying for protecting the earth, protecting our food systems, our soil, our waters, making sure we had access to health care that wasn't just the pharmaceutical industrial complex, or the medical industrial complex. Then, I mean, I don't want to go into socialism here, but a lot of reasons those of us in not the wealthy class need to make money is because we actually need to pay for things that could be considered common goods or just living a sustainable life, a healthy life with our families. And so I think if our taxes were actually going to maintaining or securing a healthy planet and a supportive culture, then probably even those in the middle would be really glad to pay taxes because the taxes would be supporting them in ways that they were agreeing to. But even trying to get to a place where we agreed on what we need is complicated.
Like I was thinking about, 'Okay, well, with the wealth tax, you could, you know, decide off of a certain amount of categories where the money goes." It's just so hard. I mean, the corruption is so thick, and whether it's in the nonprofit world, or the government, or even things that have good websites that make you believe that beautiful things are happening, you look a little deeper, and then you go, Wait, what is going on? Like, this is not what I thought I was donating to even my $20. You know what I'm not saying this because I think there's no way out. I'm just somebody who wants to overturn the rocks and get to the root because I feel like, and I'm not saying people shouldn't work on whatever they're working on to try to reform these systems. But I find when we work on the surface, we can kind of change things, but if our value systems don't change, then it's not that we're doing nothing, but we're not actually shifting it.
And I think there's something really important too, about philanthropy, and power. And there's an interview with NPR, and you explained, quote, "It's not just about well, it's about the power that goes with it to shape the culture, including philanthropy, and how they use their philanthropy and political giving to rig the rules of the economy," end quote. So wealth and taxes and the government are all in cahoots to shape culture, and shape our value systems and shape our desires even. And so if we are wanting to reform philanthropy tax as well, how do we actually speak to the value systems that will help us create reform in ways that are truly, I don't even know the word, I hope any of this is making sense and that I'm not just babbling into the ether?
Chuck Collins Oh, I think it makes a lot of sense and in some ways, I think about where do we have agency to enact the values. And it's not surprising that people trust their local government, or their state more than they do the federal because the federal government is kind of where the big corporate players have really exercised their power to capture it. But some states have gone really different directions. But it's interesting to look at states that are kind of doing a better job of collecting money in a fair way and investing it in a way to create healthy communities. And where the focus is on let's re-localize economic activity. Let's build regenerative agriculture systems. Let's educate people for livelihoods that are in this region that are not based on sort of harmful sectors. I always go back to think about Joanna Macy's framework, which is 'we need to stop the bad, we need to build the alternatives, and we need to shift our culture.' And that can be done within philanthropy. We really need philanthropy, social change-oriented funders to help fund organizing to stop the harms not just let these corporations have their way. But we also need to be kind of seeding the new economy, the new society in the shell of the old. So how can we create healthy agricultural practices, regional economies? And then how do we shift the culture at the same time?
One of the things I wrote a novel that came out this month and it's partly about what would it look like if some of these powerful local alternatives played out and move to a bigger scale over the next decade? Communities are coming together to face climate disruption are creating a culture of mutual aid, a culture of local face to face celebration, as opposed to everything on television. Looking at land and access to land and reparations, and who's been excluded, looking at fordable housing and building permanently affordable housing that's outside the speculative market. So I see that in the region where I live. And I kind of tried to, in a fictional way, as a positive vision, sort of spell that out, what would it look like in the decade ahead? How does that play out? So I think it's helpful to have visions that are based on different sets of values, along with all of our important work to stop the big harms from rolling everything back that we're trying to do.
Ayana Young Well, thanks for getting into the weeds with me there. I think in a lot of ways, we're talking about dreaming into another world. And I guess there's this question of who gets to dream.
Chuck Collins You know, in a healthy society, do we all get to have an affirmative vision and think ahead? When I was reading these columns about these billionaires who were paying attention to the upcoming ecological and social breakdown, and their response is to go and build a bunker in New Zealand, a kind of a very privatized personal, protect myself and my family, but not the rest of the world. And that's what I was saying is, that's delusional because unlike a lot of other problems, the ecological breakdown, there is no planet B. Maybe that's why some of these billionaires are interested in outer space. But the reality is, we have this amazing, beautiful planet that we need to take care of. And my rap to these billionaires is, look, you're not going to be able to find a private, personal opt out solution, like you have for many other society's problems. When it comes to the climate crisis, you're going to have to rejoin humanity, bring your wealth home, bring it out of the shadows, and out of this speculative casino marketplace and reroot it in local economies and in place, and use it to repair the harms from the extractions globally. So you have to think not just about your own backyard, but other people's backyards, but bring the wealth home.
And part of my interest in the hidden wealth system is, well, there's $40 trillion. There's the losses and damage fund, that those of us in the higher incomeGlobal North owe to the parts of the world that haven't burned as much carbon that haven't extracted for their own selfish interests, [unknown] bounty. We need to pay restitution, and reparation to a lot of the society. So, the wealth of nations is hidden in the offshore accounts of the ultra wealthy. We need to bring it out and bring it home. And it's really an invitation to the individuals too––you're not going to flourish and your grandchildren are not going to flourish in that privatized security model. You're going to have to rejoin humanity, warts and all, pay your taxes, stop extracting in the way you are. And then at the same time, we as a society have to demand that. So there's a voluntary invitation. And then there's the rest of the society saying how do we organize to defend ourselves against these extractors and who are bringing us to the brink of societal collapse? And there are people who are hearing that, and there are people who are stepping out of their privileged bubbles, and trying to find ways to rejoin humanity and redeploy the wealth that they have in healthy ways. So that gives me some hope, as I see those trends.
Ayana Young In you know, as we think about the future, I want to talk about your new book, which is speculative fiction, and thinking their future dreams and visions, and your new book, Altar to an Erupting Sun, which is described as, quote, "A near future story of one community facing climate disruption in the critical decade ahead," end quote. Yeah, I’d just love if you could give us a brief introduction to the novel.
Chuck Collins Yeah, it really is the story of a community in New England, that is trying to prepare and practice mutual aid and figure out how to live within the Earth's boundaries and restore soil and sequester carbon and die differently, think about death and dying very differently than we as a culture do, at least in sort of US Anglo culture. Well, and I should say it's in the in the tradition of, you know, there's a lot of great visionary fiction that isn't just sort of zombie apocalypse dystopia, but, Ursula LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson, and Octavia Butler and others who have painted visions of the future that show us possible ways of how we could be together and live in harmony with the earth. So I'm writing in that same spirit.
But one of the purposes of the story is, well, how do people respond to this impossible news of the moment that we're in, and my main character is a lively woman named Rae Kelliher, who is kind of the life of the party. She's the weaver of social movements. She's a longtime nonviolent, direct action trainer. She's kind of like a Star Hawk. People know Star Hawk who also wrote a great visionary novel called Fifth Sacred Thing. And Rae Kelliher is at the end of her life. This is not a spoiler because this is how the book begins, but she's facing down a terminal illness. And she has been a kind of a death doula and a death, death and dying, conscious dying kind of support advisor to lots and lots of people. She decides she's going to go out, taking her own life and the life of the CEO of a fossil fuel company, who she believes is acted to delay humanity's response to the climate crisis.
So she goes out with the shocking horrific act of violence which is completely outside of her life experience. I mean, this is somebody who, Rae Kelliher, most of her adult life participates in the salamander crossing guards. Here in New England, in the warm first nights of March, the rains fall and salamanders and frogs come down the hills and crossroads and to get to their spawning ponds for their, their orgies, and so that they get run over. And so Rae is part of this group of people who have such a respect for life that they stand out with reflective vests and flashlights and try to help these critters get across the street. So that's just like who she is. So part of what the book then does is say, Well, let's look ahead, what's happened as a result, or what ripples has this action had looking forward. And not surprisingly, there's tremendous negative blowback. There's a criminalization of dissent and movements to face the climate crisis or setback, in some ways because of this.
And on the other hand, there's a laser focus on the role of the fossil fuel industry in doing what you and I have been talking about here, which is to pretty much block the alternatives. And so that creates a new conversation and new openings there. And then seven years later, we get to see how things have shifted. And a birthday celebration, seven years later, her friends and family sort of ask, Well, why did she do this? What in her life shaped her and formed her? And so then it's really also a story of formation going back to her being 19 years old, and living through the social movements and forces of the last 40 years. So it's about her formation, and how she, while she's deeply rooted in nonviolent tradition, her understanding grows of how this particular industry has manipulated everything, and how she believes that they are responsible in a higher level way than just all of us are responsible.
So anyway, that's the theme and it's been an opportunity to discuss. And this is what her daughter says at the end of the book, What my mother what Rae did was wrong, but what bold action will you take to defend our one and only home, the planet Earth? And that's really the spark for the conversations that have come out of the book.
Ayana Young Beautiful. Well, I'm excited to curl up with that book. And I really appreciate the focus on community building. And in an article you wrote for Yes Magazine called “One Way to Skip Wall Street and Invest in Your Community,” you write, "Instead of opting out of the community opt in with gusto by relying on public transportation, education, recreation, and other community resources, " end quote. Syeah, I'd love to dream into what it might look like to intentionally invest in diverse communities, and to focus on sharing wealth within localities.
Chuck Collins I think that there are great examples emerging of people who won the lottery at birth, you know, inherited substantial wealth, or started a company and received a windfall of rewards, financial wealth coming at them, and who are kind of asking that question of wait a second, what do I do now? And I have sometimes said, privilege or wealth is a disconnection drug that keeps people apart. It keeps people apart from one another and from building authentic, real connections and communities. And when you have that kind of wealth, you don't really have to ask for help. You could buy all the services you need, but then you miss out on that important part of human existence, which is reciprocity. I need help. Can you help me? – the vulnerability and the connection that is created by that. Though, I've tried to make the case to young folks who won the lottery of birth. It’s entirely in our selfish interest to shed this wealth and privilege and straitjacket that goes with it, and come home. Coming home is being based in a community, not an elite enclave, but a community of authentic reciprocity where people depend on one another.
Invest that wealth in institutions, in organizations, in enterprises. Yield control of the wealth to others. And I see that happening in lots of places and you see formation of cooperatives. You see new farms, you see younger people getting involved in food production and all the sort of value-added enterprises.
How do you build a new economy in the shell of the old? Well, the capitalist part of that, the capital doesn't necessarily run the show. Capital should be subservient to the community and to labor and to work and workers first. And once we understand that capital is a useful thing, but it doesn't get to call the shots, you have a very different framework for how you build an economy. I don't know if you call it socialism or decentralism. I think it's just a better new system––doesn't have an easy tagline. New Economy. Some people call it Solidarity Economy. But yeah, I think bringing that well into place, again, recognizing that we have to support places and other parts of the world where the wealth has been extracted, and wealth needs to return to those places as well. But yeah, I see a lot of exciting work in that kind of new economy space that also addresses sort of historic racial inequities, a sort of a form of reparations.
Ayana Young Yeah, I was thinking back to the conversation we're having about accountability kind of makes me think also of the morality or the propaganda of wealth. And I think that there are these cultures of belonging that you're speaking to that's about investing in each other. And then the kind of rugged individualist culture that so many of us are conditioned in, which are kind of like pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Or if you just work hard enough, you'll get it, or everyone has the same opportunity. And so, yeah, I would like to debunk this with you a bit, and maybe talk about the difference between those who believe that if you work hard, you'll become wealthy. And if you're not doing well, financially, it's because you're lazy or something, versus those who invest in each other in their communities. It's kind of like how do we culturally shift to see beyond the veil of this morality that surrounds ideas of wealth country?
Chuck Collins Yeah, does it does go to this myth of deservingness. People are, if you have a lot of wealth, it's because you deserve it, you got up in the morning, you worked hard, whatever you did to create that. And if you don't have wealth, or even if you're economically struggling, well, you deserve that condition, because you've haven't worked hard, or there's some limitation or failing on your part. And that's just a cruel societal myth that is promoted. People will promote that narrative of deservingness to justify these extreme inequalities and racial differences. And one of the things I've seen is people stepping outside of that, you know, well, what help did you get? What role did society play in your having a decent life? Did you go to a high school that had public investments that helped you in any way?
So you know, hearing some of these patriotic millionaires and billionaires instead of just talking about, Oh, how I, you know, got I invented this new technology or whatever, talking about all the ways they got help. And I think it's kind of like seeing the web. And this is a little bit genderized. I think men tend to start, you know, with the I did this, I did that story. And there's a sort of web that other people see, it's like, well, we're all part of this web, you know, there is no rugged individual. None of us were raised by wolves in the woods or whatever. We exist entirely because of this web. It is sometimes invisible. And sometimes money renders it invisible, deliberately, or and deliberately. But the reality is no one does it alone, and no one is going to make it alone. And the more wealth people have, the more they forget that. So I think that's part of how we debunk the myth is say, Let's tell true stories of how interdependent we are, for starters, and critique the sort of great man theory of wealth creation or the mythology of you are, where you are because of something you did. And the more you look into that, the more you realize how multigenerational advantage works, and multigenerational advantage and disadvantage, that goes back multiple generations. Trauma flows over generations and privilege and opportunity flows over generations. So no one can be born and say, I'm here because of something I did. There's all wind blowing one way or the other. It's either blowing into your face or it's blowing at your back and debunking that mythology is absolutely critical to this project of building a more equitable society.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really appreciate that you spoke to this myth, because I think it's one of the underpinnings, it's part of the roots of our value systems and how we feel about each other. And also just respecting each other or not respecting each other. And the yeah, there's a lot more questions to ask, but I know we're coming up on our time. So I'm not sure if there's something that you'd like to end on.
Chuck Collins What's on my mind coming out of the conversations from the novel is where do we have room to move? I think there's a certain amount of despair and a sense of loss, and if you kind of look at the objective moment we're in, it sort of feels like, okay, we're, we're in the backseat of the car and the car is heading to the cliff, and we can't even affect the steering wheel or whatever. And, as an organizer-campaigner I'm always sort of looking out for the pressure points are the places where we have some room to move. And I think there is a lot of room for us to move, I think. There's withdrawing money from the fossil fuel sector, the divestment movement and the movement to put pressure on the lending institutions. There's all this interesting work around getting insurers to stop insuring the fossil fuel sector. There's a move to say, well what if we did like a international or at the national level, a tribunal that looks at sort of the climate, the role of the fossil fuel industry and funding, doubt, delay, denial just so we get query that this is a rogue sector, that is incapable of stopping the harms that it's creating that we have to figure out, whether it's through nonviolent direct action, or through withdrawing social license or creating authorities to buy their assets, and keep them from being burned. We should zero in on the pressure points where we do have some ability and room to move. And realize that each year, it's gonna be more obvious how the planet is being disrupted, the flooding, or the heat waves or the smoke in your eyes, or disruption to our food system. And that in each moment, as people wake up and realize that there's going to be an opportunity to focus attention on the role of this industry, and bringing us to this point, and essentially halting and reversing.
So I think there's all kinds of things we can do to focus on sequestering carbon and building soil fertility and regenerative agriculture and the tools and things that we consume. But there's also stopping this industry that's bringing us to the brink. So that's a conversation on my mind lately, and looking for the places where we can each make a difference in that space.
Ayana Young Oh, Chuck, thank you so much. This has been a really wonderful and interesting and challenging conversation. And thank you so much for spending this time with us today.
Chuck Collins Yeah, thank you for your really thoughtful questions.
Evan Tenenbaum Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you'll hear today is by Vide Geiger, Sean Smith, and The Ascent of Everest. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, and Evan Tenenbaum.