Need for an economic/financial revolution
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
What I want to say is this: the financial system that has rapidly evolved in the past two decades, and the economic havoc it has wreaked for tens of millions of us — and that’s just in the U.S. — is one of the greatest dangers to the ecological life of the planet, a principal obstacle that will have to be overcome if the living communities of the Earth are to survive in a way that holds the promise of future health and well-being.
1 in 5 elderly are poor - Photo: Poverty in America - change.org
Folks, we need to get very clear about this. The major financial institutions, their investors and stockholders, are no friends of the planet. They do not have in mind first and foremost the danger we are in from various imminent (or already occurring) ecological breakdowns any more than they care about near 10 percent unemployment (more like 15 percent really) or the crumbling of Detroit or inner city poverty or whether the inhabitants of impoverished neighborhoods get a decent education or the millions of homeowners who have already lost or are about to lose their incomes, homes, and life savings.
In many ways, we are being sold a bill of goods if we really believe that salvaging the giant financial institutions and their CEOs somehow saves the rest of us from even greater calamity. As we can see now, the NY Stock Exchange could hit 10,ooo pts. yesterday amidst reports that unemployment will still rise with little hope of relief for years, that foreclosures are certain to rise, that credits cards are falling into default at a growing rate, and that small banks heavily invested in commercial real estate are going to be hit with a new wave of failures.
Abaondoned homes in Detroit - Examiner.com
But those large financial firms and their investors are making out like bandits. You see, this world of financial wizardry has become mostly separated from workers, factories that make things, small businesses and family farmers, you know, the real tangible world in which most of us live. While the real world reels, Goldman Sachs is about to pay out a record $22 billion in compensation, while JPMorgan Chase reported $3.6 billion profits for the 3rd quarter.
So, as I have done in the past, I want to list a few things to read or view in order to explain why I write this today. Think of it as how we do our self-education, because we really, really need to understand the forces at work in our world. If we don’t understand them, we will not be able to see what is happening and respond appropriately or effectively.
Still on the job but at half the pay – from the NY Times:
“In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression…the amount of money people are paid has taken a big hit; not just those who have lost their jobs, but those who are still employed.”
Rivals Pose Threat to NY Stock Exchange – also from the Times:
The NY Stock Exchange is shrinking as more and more financial might shifts to unregulated ‘dark pools’ that make investment decisions at lightning speed with massive computers using abstract mathematical formulas that amount to a lot of guessing. These people can bring down whole economies. Check it out. Here is one dizzying description of how this sort of thing helped bring about last year’s disaster.
Bill Moyers’ Journal Oct. 9 – interview with Rep. Marcy Kaptur and economist Simon Johnson:
Just about the best explanation yet on how the financial institutions have captured our democracy by buying our Congress. Really, if you do not feel moral outrage after viewing this, you must be dead. Rep. Kaptur’s righteous rage over what is happening to her constituents in Toledo who are losing their homes and falling off the economic precipice is more than infectious.
And, of course, there is always Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. He’ll make you cry, laugh, and rage all at the same time.
They tell us that capitalism has something to do with freedom to choose — things like jobs, where you want to live, objects you would like to possess — but this is the bill of goods we’ve been sold. Because it is not our choice. Freedom of choice has been taken from the airline pilot because that is what the financial sector needs to do right now in order to make profits. And if your job is no longer needed, it will never come back. You have the right to these things if that is how to grow their financial wealth. You do not have those rights if your ability to do these things conflicts with the interests of private capital represented by these big opaque financial giants.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics
If right now it is in their interest to slash jobs, wages, and benefits to increase profit margins, or to salvage the institutions that represent investors and stockholders, then so be it. They shed the excess, the debt, the bad investments suppressing their profits, subsidized by, well, us. They do what they must do in the interests of their stockholders. If this is a permanent adjustment (and I think it is), than many of us will never again find our place within that system. Good luck to us all!
And so this must be one of our starting points for how we approach the political culture from here on out. This is where capitalism has led us. The Earth – its waters, soils, the air we breathe, its natural wonders — and human beings — suffer the consequences of this abstraction and concentration of wealth generation. It’s why I sometimes tell people that one of the most important things we can do if we want to change things is to work urgently for campaign finance reform, to take our Congress back from the financial institutions that now own it.
For the Earth, for our sisters and brothers around the world, we must do this.
October 19th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
What I find amusing is that the people at the top who benefit from lavish “compensations” tend to be “social darwinists”. For the poor, it is a “dog eat dog” world. Poverty and misery are, ultimately, “Mother Nature’s” way of eliminating the unfit so that evolution may progress.
Maybe.. But why, exactly, does not the same logic apply to the CEO’s who bungled the economy? Should not they too be “eliminated” as “unfit” managers..
As the French say: un poids, deux mesures. One weight, two measures. What is good for the goose is good for the gander..
The reality is that our “monetarized” economy is increasingly out of contact with the productive forces of earth, man and nature. It is a giant speculative bubble that is in the process of bursting as the “dot.com” bubble burst earlier. From another perspective, the capitalist economy itself, is a giant Ponzi scheme in which future generations are robbed (of resources, of natural ecological services, of real wealth..) to feed the short term greed of present generations.
As a man sows, so shall he reap.
The gods blind those they would destroy.
October 19th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Also, two logics – one for the CEOs and one for the rest of us. Two universes, little if any connection. The larger the separation, the more dangerous this becomes. The bubble burst last year, but they have already started inflating the next one — and the next bubble burst will be bigger than the last…
until we all learn to stop this madness.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:06 pm
The business elite will inflate the bubble because they haven’t learnt anything; they inhabit a bubble universe pinched off from physical reality. Despite recent green-mouthing, the elite does not grasp that all REAL wealth is ECOLOGICAL in nature, based on living, self-regenerating processes; real wealth is not found in non-renewable resources (which, by definition, deplete and exhaust).
The proof is in the pudding!
- Industrial economics depleted the planet’s non-renewable resource base in a mere 2 centuries.
- Life has been self-sustaining, self-regenerating (and evolving) for 4 BILLION YEARS; that’s 20,000,000 times longer than the entire life of industrial society!!
Obama and company make the error of attempting to revivify a corpse; the globalized, fossil fuel economy IS ALREADY DEAD: they mistake post-mortem twitches as signs of life and imminent recovery..
I may be wrong – stranger things have happened! :0 – but I believe the fossil fuel economy is dead because of Peak Oil. The global economy may indeed “recover” in fits ‘n starts for a few years only to falter again as oil prices spike due to increased demand. The fact is, the days of cheap oil are over and, with them, the globalized “free market” economy based on cheap oil.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50450
(some of these folk work in the oil industry!)
Oil will not run out tomorrow (or the day after) but cheap oil production cannot keep pace with rising demand from burgeonning economies (India, China..). Prices will rise, creating a “tight supply” market (Classical Economics 101, freshman year).
Worse, speculation on oil futures will create oil price spikes followed by crashes when bubbles burst and panic selling sets in. This is called “volatility” and will stunt alternative fuel development projects.
Consider Natural Gas Liquification. Infrastructure costs are huge which requires a long “look ahead” period of stable fossil fuel prices in order to ASSURE RETURN ON INVESTMENT. (Oil and gas prices are linked because they can inter-substitute as energy sources, to some degree.)
October 21st, 2009 at 4:24 pm
The facts are simple: we waited too long to deploy “bridging technologies” as transitional energies sources to a sustainable, renewable energy future.
Bridging technologies (large sense): natural gas, remaining cheap oil reserves, energy conservation / efficiency, public transport, (even) nuclear energy.. We frittered away these resources and the most precious resource of all, TIME, in order to persue the short term pleasures our ad men programmed us to persue. Now we pay the consequences..
For me, the “golden window of opportunity” to use bridging technologies to transition to a clean energy future was, roughly, 1960 to 1990 (at the very latest).
Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, outlining some of the threats to the environment and the consequences thereof, was published circa 1960. If the political will existed, world governments could have commissioned scientific teams to investigate global environmental challenges and appropriate ways to deal with them. This work could have been completed by 1970. Again, with political will, the UN could have initiated a global “Manhattan Project” (atom bomb program of World War II) to assure that global energy and food requirement would be met in a sustainable, self-regenerating fashion. Such a project could – with political will – have gotten off the ground circa 1975.
This, however, was not the trajectory followed. As a result, we are today IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT BALL GAME WITH A NEW SET OF RULES (the business and political elites are blissfully ignorant of this reality, I feel).
All is not doom ‘n gloom. A logical reaction to the current situation is rage, of course. I used to react strongly in this way, to the point of causing health problems. I’ve found that acceptance of the fact that the poo is ALREADY IN THE FAN cools the rage a bit, makes for clearer thinking, and a greater capacity for action / enjoyment of life: “a great burden lifted from the soul”. Without that burden – which can get as bad as beating up on yourself just for being human! – I feel the soul is freer to act in effective ways.
There is, in fact, reason for hope even with the poo in the fan. Life evolves under the pressure of change, even REQUIRES it: adapt or die off! There is plenty of evidence to support this proposition from the fossil record of early life. “Cephalized” (“brainy”) lifeforms – if they survive an extinction event – respond by becoming brainier, more adaptive. “Necessity is the mother of invention” in the biological and social-cultural realms.
If this is true, we should “look forward” :0 to a time of increasing stress, chaos, and change with – on the PLUS SIDE – a real chance to affect positive change (“co-creators with God in bringing about his Kingdom on Earth”). Researchers like Edgar Morin: “La Méthode”, Illya Prigogine – Nobel Prize, Robert Reid: “Biological Emergences”, MIT Press recognize such times as critical phases of RAPID transition / selection that “program” the future evolution of the system in question for long periods of time. Example: the asteroid that slammed into earth 65 million years ago, ending the reign of the dinosaurs and beginning that of the mammals (us!). As Illya Prigogine who won the Nobel prize for his work on self-organizing systems put it, “timing is of the essence” at such times. A small impulse can deflect the system off along one of SEVERAL RADICALLY DIFFERENT evolutionary trajectories. In our times, we could envision “scenarios” like
- extinction of life on earth (exceedingly unlikely in the extreme)
- extinction of human life (quite unlikely)
- extinction of SciTech culture (“new stone age” – moderately unlikely)
- a chaotic, nasty transition to a sustainable Space Age culture (a weak version of the previous scenario which includes a rebound / recovery – fairly likely)
- a “utopian” revolution (à la Marx) to a sustainable Space Age (rather unlikely)
- various HiTech dystopias (?? likelihood ??)
and so on (use your imagination!). The point is, this is a time of choosing, selecting what will come. The hick is that none of us knows whether or not his action will have the intended outcome. But change things we must; in fact, we cant’t help it: even BREATHING actively maintains the atmosphere at its current chemical composition. In an interconnected world, we are actors WHETHER OR NOT WE LIKE IT.
October 21st, 2009 at 5:11 pm
SOME positive outcomes of the coming de-globalization (as the fossil fuel economy fizzles out):
- shipping food over god-awful distances will disappear. Food will be grown regionally / locally (except, ideally, for exotics like tropical spices which have a high value per unit weight). This saves energy in transport, reduces pollution. If well managed, this transition could lead to healthier, fresher, more nutritious food which is less contaminated by carcinogenic / mutagenic pesticides. Land management should – and should be MADE TO – improve with less nitrogen and phosphorous runoff to watercourses. Land quality should improve. At present, industrial agrigulture impoverishes the organic, life-sustaining properties of the soil. In an overpopulated planet such practices are non-sustainable, patently insane and MUST BE ELIMINATED! The collapse of globalized agro-industry can aid this process by elimination faulty, unecological farming practices. People will be able to get to know their farmer again: farmer, consumer and farmer / consumer coops are becoming viable business models, all to the benefit of local famers and consumers. We need to ACTIVELY ACCELERATE THESE PROCESSES OF POSITIVE CHANGE IN OUR LOCAL COMMUNITIES as much as we can! “Think globally / act locally” is truer now than it ever was.
- if the transition to “post-growth” economies is well managed, so that people don’t end up starving for example, people will once again begin to make contact with the REAL VALUES OF LIFE like family, community, personal effort and achievent, group effort and achievement, cultural and spiritual expression, artistic creation, etc. Consumerism, in order to function, must expel such vital values from human life. The lack of real satisfactions in life creates an ETERNAL HUNGER for SUBSTITUTE satisfactions which globalized consumer industry feeds off. Man does not live by bread alone.
- localized / regionalized production of energy in DECENTRALIZED / DISTRIBUTED consumer /producer grids, if well designed, produces energy intelligently. Less infrastructure is needed for energy transport and less energy is lost in transmission since most energy (electricity) is consumed close to the point where it is generated. This means less pollution and less use of non-renewable resources. Electric meters should run both ways: you buy electricity from the grid when you need it; your house (or neighborhood) supplies electricity to the grid when you produce a surplus (for this YOU get paid by the electric utility).
- More local / regional production means less road, rail, air or sea transport of goods: less energy consumed, less pollution, less environmental destruction (for example in extraction of energy resources). This means, in practice, cleaner air and water, less climate change, less extreme weather (and geopolitical instability from crop failures). It also means less health problems related to pollution. We have paid a high price for our consumer society! There are many “externalized” – hidden – costs in the present system of production !!! (“Hidden subsidies” to pollutors for example: the pollutor saves money on pollution abatement equipment; the poor sucker living down wind / stream pays with health problems as does the public health system: “socialism for the rich”!)
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:57 am
You’ve written a lot here, and thank you. More people need to be thinking like this – creatively. I agree with you that we will be changing/adapting in crisis, not with forethought to avoid the crisis. It is already too late to turn the Titanic around to avoid the iceberg. We’re going to hit it – then we have to decide what we’re going to do, how we are going to reorganize and survive.
Much is beginning now, with the International Day of Action on Climate this weekend, with the Transition Town movement, the eco-village movement, the birthing all over the place of farmers’ markets, organic and community-oriented farming, a huge explosion in this country of backyard organic gardening, alternative food and local sustainable energy projects.
That such things exist is crucial because people will have something to turn to – models, local organizations and networks, skilled resource people, etc., as things begin to fall apart.
I also staunchly disagree with those who say human extinction is on the near horizon. As I often tell audiences and community groups, I don’t think we’re going to get off that easy. But in the midst of crisis, humans can be incredibly clever, have enormous fonts of ingenuity and creativity. The deadening of spirit that comes with our consumer society has caused people to forget those fonts, or to ignore them, but they are still there to be tapped.
As Miriam Therese MacGillis said the other night – we will need to learn things like composting and bicycle repair. We will need to get to know our neighbors. We will need to spend more time with our children. It will be a very hard transition, but we may find we like ourselves a whole lot more.
Thanks for your comments.
Margaret
November 9th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Monumental madness of the tiny minority of humanity (ie, thieves of the highest order, scoundrels and mad men) who dishonestly commandeer a lion’s share of the world’s wealth, depravedly ‘bonus’ themselves for doing so, dishonorably make the rules by which all human beings live and deplorably rule the world primarily for the own benefit of themselves and their minions.
Words to live by from these self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us:
Go forth and multiply. We Masters rule. Forget about humanity.
Plunder, gorge yourselves and hoard ’til you are sated. Satisfy your unfulfilled wishes. Greed rules. Forget about humanity.
Build McMansions, pleasure centers, hideaways from the world, skyscrapers, faster cars, bigger cars, mega-yachts and polluting aircraft for personal aggrandizement and gratification. Greed rules and rules absolutely. Forget about humanity.
In times of danger to self and others, with a single exception, you have an inviolate “duty to warn”. In the “stand alone” case the rule is to be set aside: You can forget about humanity.