Is this really a new beginning?
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
So, in two days we will have a new president. These 8 years of a terrible, and terribly run, executive branch will come to an end.
Will something new truly emerge?
I can tell from the emails that come from the Obama people that this is certainly the aura they wish to create. We are still in this mode of expectation without knowing exactly what the new people are intending to do. And, as you know, the truth is always in the details.
Barack Obama has been associated with the pro-business, centrist, Democratic Leadership Council, a group from which we heartily wish the Democratic Party could free itself. The Clintons hail from the DLC, along with Raum Emanuel, Harold Ford, Vilsack, among others, and this wing of the party is one reason why the Democrats so often fail to inspire. Last year the DLC claimed Obama as one of their own. He was a member, but when becoming a presidential candidate denied that the DLC influenced his campaign. Maybe he just joined to make powerful political friends; maybe he is more progressive than the DLC. We’ll see. And we will hope fervently for it.
Important to remember that Bill Clinton famously signed off on legislation that freed financial institutions of their post-depression regulatory laws. This was DLC stuff. Steal the corporate world away from the Republicans by helping them with their agenda. Free up capital; let it flow freely and see where it goes. Now we know. It flows up, it concentrates, it brings out the worst in us.
The Republican Party, of course, has been in the iron grip of two tendencies, the religious right and the neoconservatives. What we have before us now, the mindnumbing challenges facing this country — our nasty wars, our collasped economy, the world deteriorating all around us — this is a large part of their legacy (Clinton’s, too, but that requires too much space than this post allows). The financial sector of the economy has been running much of our economic policy since Ronald Reagan, dismantling the safeguards that protected the money that belongs to you and me, whether individually or publicly.
If Obama tries to reform around the edges of this corporate culture, we’re in trouble. If he tries to propagate a big war in Afghanistan while trying to fix the economy in a progressive direction, he will fail as LBJ did when trying to propagate a big war in Vietnam while trying to create the Great Society.
So, I want us all to take seriously this business about being a movement, that word our new president is using in rallying his supporters to his side. He is right about something essential — politics does not change things, movements do. Big progressive movements have the potential to change the politics, as they did with the first American revolution right through abolition, women’s suffrage, the civil rights and anti-war movements, the Central American solidarity movement and on and on.
The other part of that story is that movements cannot be led within the dynamics of the two-party political culture. They must be free of the parties, pushing the parties from outside. I hope Obama will continue to inspire a socially progressive movment, but he cannot lead or direct it. That must come from us. It is not for him to tell the movement what to do, but for movements to tell him what to do, and then rally behind him when he supports us — like LBJ signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act with Martin Luther King, Jr. standing over his shoulder.
I welcome this transition wholeheartedly. Obama is correct when he says this is only the beginning. We have a lot of work to do. In the matters covered by this website and project, it is about overturning a corporate-political culture that is trashing the planet. It is about approaching our ecological and economic crises with a profound sense of justice and equity. It is about creating not just new energy sources but a whole new approach to economics, from one of growth and wealth generation to ecological economics, an economics that attacks wholeheartedly the stunning gap between rich and poor, wealth that has concentrated so rapidly in the past 20 years that less than one percent of folks in the U.S. control more wealth than more than 50 percent of the rest of us.
I welcome this transition wholeheartedly. But I remember where the energy that changes the world truly comes from. We must own that energy, the best source of a renewable human race that I know.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Yes, definitely yes, to a new beginning thanks to the passing into history on this day of the woefully inadquate leadership of a not-so-great generation.
It appears that a single generation, my not-so-great greed-mongering generation, will be remembered for having first recklessly plundered and then ravenously consumed the lion’s share of all Earth’s limited resources. No generation before mine, and certainly no generation to follow, will behave so arrogantly and avariciously because the resources to do what my generation has done will have already been devoured and, therefore, unavailable to future generations. In the pernicious process of global plundering and conspicuous per capita over-consumption, many too many leaders of my generation will also have allowed the unhealthy pollution of the environment, the unrestrained depletion of natural resources and the unconscionable mortgaging of our children’s future. My generation’s leaders will have lead us to threaten the children and coming generations with the likelihood of dangerous ecological conditions…a situation for which my generation is responsible but for which my generation refuses to take responsibility. Many leaders in my generation have determined to “pass the buck†to the children, come what may. So grave and unfortunate a situation cannot longer be ignored just because the leading perpetrators of this ominously looming ecological wreckage choose to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute when called upon to account for their (and our) behavior.
If I had to put this colossal tragedy in a single set of sentences I would speak out in this way,
“Never in the course of human events has so much been given to so few consolidators of great wealth and power, who then did so poorly by everyone else and everything else but themselves. A tiny minority of supremely greedy, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe in my generation have directed the human community toward the extirpation of biodiversity, degradation of the environment and the depletion of natural resources. The fitness of Earth as a place for habitation by our own children has been put at risk. The abject failure of so many of my generation’s leaders to assume responsibility for such incredible arrogance, poor judgement and stupendous wrongdoing is somehow not quite right and, at least to me, difficult to tolerate in silence.â€
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 …
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org