Wages of Rebellion Read Free Page A

obsessed with finding Moby-Dick and questions passing ships about the white whale. When the
Pequod
encounters the
Jeroboam
, a crazed prophet who calls himself Gabriel warns of destruction to all who hunt Moby-Dick.
    Fedallah, who Ahab believes has the power of prophecy, predicts that Ahab will see two hearses before he dies. Mortal hands, Fedallah says, will not have made the first hearse. The second hearse will be made only from American wood. Fedallah predicts that Ahab will be killed by hemp, which Ahab interprets to mean he will die on land on the gallows.
    As the ship approaches the equator Moby-Dick is sighted, and Ahab launches his whaleboat in pursuit. Moby-Dick smashes the boat. When the hunt resumes the next day, the whale is harpooned. The wounded whale again attacks Ahab’s whaleboat, and Fedallah is pulled into the sea and drowned. On the third day of the hunt, the crew sees Fedallah’s corpse, tangled in the harpoon line, lashed to the whale’s back. The white whale then rams the
Pequod
, and the ship sinks. The doomed ship and the white whale become the hearses—one made of American wood and the other not by mortal hands—foretold by Fedallah. The hemp harpoon line attached to Moby-Dick whips out of the boat and garrotes Ahab. The other whaleboats, along with the remaining ship’s crew, are sucked into the swirling vortex created by the shattered
Pequod
. Ishmael alone survives.
    Ahab’s grievances in the novel are real. But his self-destructive fury ensures the
Pequod
’s fate. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation of the earth, and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.
    We too see the danger signs. The ecosystem is visibly disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) issued a report in 2013 warning that the oceans are changing even faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans have absorbed much of the excess carbon dioxide and heat from the atmosphere, and this absorption is rapidlywarming and acidifying ocean waters. This process is compounded, the report notes, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs due to farming and climate change. The IPSO scientists call these effects—acidification, warming, and deoxygenation—a “deadly trio” that is causing changes in the seas unprecedented in the planet’s history. The scientists write that each of the earth’s previous five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of the “deadly trio.” 19 The sixth mass extinction of species has already begun, the first in some 66 million years. 20
    Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. 21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet.
    Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They