The crisis unseen

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By
Saul Landau                                                                      Read Spanish Version  

The
medical dictionary defines crisis as “the turning point of a
disease for better or worse.” Doctors with cool heads understand
their procedures may produce recovery or death for their patients.
The mainstream economic crisis “experts,” however, have offered
Washington politicians a less than helpful way of responding to
catastrophe: panic and denial. Indeed, the gurus and politicos
apparently made their diagnosis without even glancing at the larger
context or at recent foibles.

After
the November election, liberal Democrats began to scream for rapid
bailouts and threw money at bankers who then shocked the lawmakers by
behaving like bankers. They took the taxpayers’ money and spent it
on themselves. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott
Fitzgerald wrote. “They are different from you and me. They possess
and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft,
where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that,
unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
(“The Rich Boy,” 1926)

In
mid November, the very rich of the auto industry flew in lush
corporate jets to DC to beg money from the impoverished public. The
car CEOs displayed an unusual candor in revealing their stupidity,
arrogance and greed at Congressional hearings. They characterized as
“unfair” their competitors’ (Japanese carmakers) tactics —
like innovation.

No
Senator asked, even rhetorically: “Why not gradually phase out
rather than immediately bail out this industry? Even by producing
‘green’ cars as the core of the U.S. economy, doesn’t the
future of the automobile seem incompatible with the future of life on
the planet?” The most environmentally friendly car still needs for
its production massive amounts of steel and other metals, rubber,
plastic (petroleum products) and acids — not to mention the
ingredients needed to build levels of parking garages, highways and
other quintessentially un-green operations associated with this so
20^th
Century transportation.

The
legislators did not refer to the larger crisis. The worsening
environment has become the context not only for current economic
collapse, but will induce devastating hardship in the near future.
Think of the hits that the insurance and reinsurance businesses will
take, the serious shortages of food and other needs. Respected
scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that burning fossil fuels
(like coal, oil and natural gas) and cutting down forests have
created a global peril. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which
in 2005 the White House called “the gold standard of objective
scientific assessment,” issued a joint statement with 10 other
National Academies of Science: “The scientific understanding of
climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking
prompt action… that all nations identify cost-effective steps …
to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global
greenhouse gas emissions.” (Joint Statement of Science Academies:
Global Response to Climate Change [PDF], 2005)

The
stimulus bill does not address the need to decrease — now —
heat-trapping pollution.

Scientists
have now reduced their internal debate to how much and how fast the
heat-trapping emissions will bring doom. They project devastating
impacts on the economy from rising seas flooding coastal cities and
contaminating water supplies; extreme heat, droughts and floods will
increase in frequency and strength. People will die; property will be
destroyed: agriculture will become problematic.

The
raging February fires of Australia offer Nature’s most recent
illustration of human helplessness when flames and high winds
combine. A display of such destructive power — along with hurricanes
and California fires — should help to end the idiotic babble about
the virtues of man controlling the “free market. For those who
think tax cuts for corporations and dribble down economics will work,
Disney should make a new film called “The Flintstones Return,”
where both
animals and people work for the giant entertainment corporation in a
deregulated world.

As
Nature demonstrates human inability to “control” it for
fashioning economic production models, the U.S. President assumes
greater power in national security affairs. Obama comes to office at
a time when the idea of the United States controlling other areas of
the world has become ridiculous. It’s time, as Pat Buchanan wrote,
to “liquidate the empire.”

Congress
follows the same foolish path. Instead of placing the present economy
and foreign policy in its larger and more vital environmental
context, without which all else becomes moot, deal-making Members of
both Houses bickered about cutting a couple hundred billion here and
there from the stimulus package as economic indicators — and voter
fear and anger — continued to flash disaster signs. Republican
Senator John McCain righteously mounted an attack from the Senate
floor on February 6, parroting Rush Limbaugh. “This is a not a
stimulus bill. It’s a spending bill.” McCain and fellow
Republicans still demand tax cuts, which have failed to stimulate
anything more than the prostates of a few very rich and old men.

“Are
you kidding?” replied the Democrats. “When the government spends
money it automatically stimulates the economy, stupid.” But to what
end? The righteous Democrats like the blinder mice across the aisle
did not address the greater crisis within which exists the downward
spiraling world economy.

Aside
from pitying the poor polar bears deprived of food by arctic melting
and the thousands of other species now endangered by the warming and
melting, the venerable Solons appear to have gone not back to their
home states, but rather to the state of denial. By limiting debate on
Obama’s stimulus to how much spending and where it was going and
not to the environment, the context for all economic and other
activity, Congress took a virtual leave of absence from its
responsibility — to say nothing of its oath of office.

Indeed,
it took a federal lawsuit to force government agencies to address
global warming implications of their overseas financing activities.
In August 2002, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the city of
Boulder, Colorado, sued (Friends of the Earth, Inc., et al. v.
Spinelli, et al.) the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas
Private Investment Corporation for illegally spending $32 billion to
finance and insure decade-long fossil fuel projects without assessing
the projects contribution to global warming as demanded under the
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Between
1990 and 2003, these projects “produced cumulative emissions that
were equivalent to nearly eight percent of the world’s annual
carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly one third of annual U.S.
emissions in 2003.” So much for the environmental consciousness of
two Bushes and Clinton!

Finally,
in August 2005, a federal judge allowed “cities suffering economic
and other damages from climate change” to sue the government.
Shockingly, the court heard expert testimony that climate change is
both real and caused by human activities, and therefore “pollutants
can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.”

“We
can no longer consume the world’s resources without regard to
effect,” Obama declared on January 20. The February 2009 settlement
of the global warming lawsuit should compel federal agencies to stop
backing fossil fuel projects. It should compel the President to put
such guidelines into the stimulus plan.

Obama
alone, however, cannot challenge the inapplicable axioms that
Congress and the media still assume work as guidelines to policy. Few
of these brilliant observers and actors seem to reflect on their
immediate surroundings.

Look
at Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, or downtown Mumbai. In
almost every major city of the world, monstrously tall office
buildings dominate the area. Those who work in the millions of
offices inside the edifices produce nothing useful for the world —
certainly not food or clothing. Yet, the corporate lawyers, brokers,
advertisers, accountants, etc. require their space to be heated and
or cooled 24/7, 365 days a year. Even if sun and wind energy
eventually replaced harmful fossil fuels, one would think that a few
visionaries would ask questions about why immense investments should
continue to pour into such non-productive entities.

Does
President Obama need a “Department of Future Planning and Office of
Dealing With the Crisis of Climate Change” to assemble a team of
thinkers to put questions to the public and challenge lawmakers to
deal with the overarching crisis that threatens the future of life?

Indicators
point instead to him amassing a national security management team to
run the empire. Escalating the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan,
for example, might well turn the man who admired President Lincoln
into a caricature of Emperor Napoleon — but without scoring the
initial battlefield victories. If, however, he returns to the
humility that characterized many of his campaign speeches and his
Inaugural Address, Obama could not only help save this economically
depressed nation; he could inspire the world. When he addresses
Congress in his State of the Union speech, perhaps Obama will appeal
for public support and intellectual guidance to face the most serious
crisis in the history of the world: the changing environment.

Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His A BUSH AND
BOTOX WORLD was published by Counterpunch A/K. His DVDs are available
at www.roundworldproductions.com.