Did 'Limits to Growth' Incite Capitalist Tyranny, Greed?

(Thanks to Mary Plante for help with this story's Internet research.)

Was the One Percent's ongoing frenzy of tyranny and greed triggered by a hitherto-unsuspected and possibly accidental perpetrator?

It's a whodunit that begins in 1970 with a Club of Rome research project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the results of which were revealed two years later in The Limits to Growth. 

Controversial even before its publication, Limits is a 205-page exposé of our species' imprisonment in the expanding bubble of capitalism's demand for ever-increasing profit. It defines the present mode of capitalist “growth” as not just unsustainable but deadly. It offers several environmentally centered alternatives – each within a capitalist context – by which to achieve healthy, relatively egalitarian and above all sustainable human societies. It's conclusion is grim: if the bubble continues to swell, when it bursts – as eventually it must – life as we've known it will end forever.

But this prediction violates one of our nation's most rigidly enforced taboos; it confirms, albeit in apolitical terminology, a core truth of Marxian economics: that capitalism will eventually self-destruct, killing untold millions as it implodes. Capitalists and their hirelings in Ruling Class Media and academia thus predictably denounced Limits as “doomsday” negativity. Despite widespread rebuttals by environmentalists, the unusually toxic clamor of rejection eventually succeeded: the book was marginalized as lunatic-fringe prophecy, and the fickle public soon forgot its urgent message.

Now though it appears the trashing of Limits may have been an especially clever Big Lie. The One Percent may have clandestinely adopted its projections as the basis for their own long-range planning, then publicly attacked it to hide their true purpose and intent – a classic example of disinformation and misdirection. Here's the evidence:

The year following the start of the Limits project, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote for his colleagues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the (formerly) super-secret Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of modern capitalism.But what prompted the memo? Had Powell been alerted that Limits – despite its carefully phrasing – would give capitalism's opponents statistical confirmation of their arguments?

Soon afterward, no doubt as a reward for writing the memo, Powell was appointed by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court. There Powell laid the groundwork for corporate personhood,  the legal doctrine that has annulled our constitution, destroyed our representative democracy and reduced most of us to embittered subjects of an increasingly despotic plutocracy.

Less than two years after the Powell appointment, the newly re-elected Nixon issued his then-astounding declaration of war on the 99 Percent, vilifying us as spoiled, pampered ingrates, proclaiming his second-term policies would be designed to inflict maximum hardship on us all. Even William Randolph Hearst Jr., the interviewer, friend and political ally to whom Nixon disclosed his intent, said in print he was shocked by the President's outspoken harshness.

Not surprisingly, the historically damning text of the interview – Page One in every Hearst newspaper of the day (early 1973) – has seemingly been suppressed. My own clipping of the original article was lost, with all my files and most of my life's work, in the 1983 fire. My many efforts to obtain a replacement copy of Hearst's report – efforts that included letters to librarians at two of his newspapers – have been unsuccessful.

(Memo to the Working Press: a diligent investigative reporter with sufficient resources could probably find many more connections between the Limits project, the Powell Memo and Nixon's anti-99 Percent proclamation. A good starting point would be the MIT Trustees roster. Scan it for anyone who was amongst Powell's friends and associates and thus might have informed him of Limits and its anti-capitalist implications.  Bear in mind the lesson of the well-documented friendship between the arch-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater and the genuinely liberal President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: that within the One Percent, political labels are ultimately meaningless – that One Percenters are united by their common Ruling Class economic interests far more than they are divided by the charades of partisan politics.)

Meanwhile consider what has been done to us since 1973. Capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and murderous poverty for everyone else – is now the defining reality of life in the United States. At the same time a growing body of evidence suggests the conclusions of Limits are frighteningly accurate. The bubble concept is proven beyond dispute: note the ongoing atrocities inflicted by the collapse of the housing market. That's a mere prelude – if Limits is correct – to the global disaster that looms.

Such a debacle, said to be only about 18 years away, would inflict unprecedented starvation, sickness and death – particularly in combination with terminal climate change.

Nevertheless even the newer Limits data has remained obscure, suppressed – as the original work eventually was – by a relentless, Powell-type deluge of antagonism. A recent sequel (The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update; Earthscan: 2004), is scarcely known outside academia. But now, as Common Dreams tells us, the projections of both the original Limits and its Update are reaffirmed by yet another study, this reported in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. Perhaps Limits will at long last attain its deserved place as one of the most pivotal works in human history.

In any case the fact such studies continue – impossible without Ruling Class approval and financing – is still more evidence in support of a connection linking Limits and the Powell Memo to capitalism's methodical destruction of our quality of life. Indeed the environmentalist focus of Limits may itself be camouflage. Perhaps from the very beginning (and surely unbeknownst to its researchers and authors), its core purpose was that of an in-depth intelligence estimate, a detailed analysis of long-term threats to the One Percent's dominance. The likelihood of such a disguised purpose – the closely guarded secret of few executives and trustees – is underscored by MIT's extensive involvement with the U.S. military-industrial complex and the Club of Rome's relationship with the global monopolies.

Whether the book's urgent plea for environmental sanity expressed its authors' heartfelt intent or was merely eyewash, present-day conditions make it clear the One Percent chose long ago to reject the Limits alternatives and instead embraced the Ayn Rand option: business as usual, the 99 Percent and the world in which we live be damned. Capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – has become the planetary version of terminal cancer. What the Ruling Class is doing to us – the slaying of our American Dream and the termination of our American Experiment in constitutional democracy – is obviously far worse than just a proverbial rough spot on our national highway.

Contrary to the Big Lies disseminated by politicians and Ruling Class Media, the losses of our liberty and livelihood are not the temporary consequences of “war on terror” or “recession.” The associated restrictions are intended to last forever – and they probably will. Such is the real “change we can believe in”: the scheming that began with the Powell Memo, its purpose to ensure Ruling Class wealth and power survive – invariably at our expense, no matter the cost in death and suffering, no matter the magnitude of the impending environmental and economic disasters.

That's why – despite the fact we outnumber the oppressor 99 to 1 – our feeble efforts at resistance are already being crushed: witness the unprovoked attacks on the Occupy Movement. Despite our protests, those of us who are not useful as slaves will soon be cast into fatal impoverishment; the abandonment has already begun. This is the malevolent purpose that unites the downsizing of the economy, the destruction of the social-safety net, the attacks on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the war against women, the methodical elimination of our constitutional rights. The horrors of post-earthquake Haiti and post-Katrina New Orleans are previews of the misery to which the One Percent is condemning us.

Nor is the obviously genocidal intent of present-day capitalist policy anything new. Its 19th Century equivalent – disabled, sick or otherwise unprofitable slaves flung overboard during the mid-Atlantic passage – created a sea of death so genetically memorable it's even now infamous for its people-hungry sharks.

When we view today's United States in the context of the Powell Memo and the Limits project, we see a long-range cause-and-effect sequence that cannot be denied. We see too how we woefully underestimated the determination and Machiavellian cunning of the One Percent. We realize there will be no restoration of our constitutional rights, no economic recovery, no relief from debt slavery unless We the People – we the 99 Percent – mobilize in sufficient numbers to compel the necessary changes.

But the One Percent has already adopted a policy of brute-force attacks against nonviolent protesters. These tactics combine with the invincible terror-weapons in the Ruling Class arsenal of oppression to nearly eliminate our likelihood for success. Never in our species' history has such absolute power been possessed by so few. Peaceful resistance – already an expression of great courage – is fast becoming our sole opportunity to experience freedom.

(Copyright Loren Bliss 13 April 2012. Permission to reproduce is granted, conditional upon crediting the author and linking to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

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