The Time for Radical Change is NOW

I want to make a frank admission today: I'm beginning to lose faith in the power of political change. I'm beginning to lose faith in the power of activism. I don't feel like blogging, or supporting candidates, or uncovering the latest Republican scandal (though there seems to be a new one every day.) Attempting to shame the media once again into reporting some real news with regard for the actual truth, instead of serving yet again as a corporate infotainment venue, seems a notion so futile at this point it's almost quaint. I certainly don't see why I should bang my head against a wall hounding some braindead Democratic politician to support the most obvious, politically popular and strategically astute pieces of legislation.

I'm losing faith because the timelines even of progressive bloggers are too damn slow to make a difference. I'm losing faith because the minor changes being proposed to the way we do business as a nation are going to be utterly overpowered by the radical changes that will be forced upon us by external necessity. The time for demanding radical change, in short, is now--or there's little point in being politically engaged.

The principal reason for this goes to the very heart of why we have a government. The government exists for the purpose of long-term planning: primarily to protect its people from the byproducts of their own shortsighted ignorance, greed and stupidity, and to provide services that the people could never provide of their own accord without the benefit of long-term planning. Left alone and unregulated, the "free market" will accrue wealth and influence among the very few, whose shortsighted greed eventually causes a democratic system to collapse into oligarchy and tyranny--just as surely as the lack of an urban police force will cause the rise to power of criminal gangs and mafias. Without the influence reality-based, far-sighted thinkers, society is doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and entire civilizations to the cyclical rise and collapse that seems depressingly endemic to the human condition.

Today, any intelligent attempt at long-term planning for America and the world literally cries out for radical change. By any objective measure, the time for drastically changing the way we do business in this country is already well past due--and the gulf between what is seen as politically feasible, and what we need to do to save our skins, is simply enormous. Let's look at the issues, shall we?

The Climate Crisis

With every new emerging report, our deadline for acting to mitigate the climate crisis draws shorter and shorter--and the effects of failure to act become more and more severe. With every new report, the predictions of temperature increases and ice melts predicted for years or even decades from now are proving to be happening already. The latest report, published in the British paper The Independent (h/t to dkos diarist Barcelona for bringing this to our attention yesterday), put it in starkest terms yet:

A rise of two degrees centigrade in global temperatures – the point considered to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change which will expose millions to drought, hunger and flooding – is now "very unlikely" to be avoided, the world's leading climate scientists said yesterday...

Two years ago, an authoritative study predicted there could be as little as 10 years before this "tipping point" for global warming was reached ...

"Even if we achieve a cap at two degrees, there is a stock of major impacts out there already and that means adaptation. You cannot mitigate your way out of this problem... The choice (now)is between a damaged world or a future with a severely damaged world."

It's not just that the climate is changing increasingly for the worse: the rate of detrimental change is rapidly increasing. Even if we made major legislative changes today, it is unclear just how much effect we would be able to have on the problem by the time those changes in the law resulted in changes to corporate and popular behavior.

Certainly, if we wait until the expiry of George Bush's term in office, the effect will be that much more muted, and the problem that much more severe. If we wait over a decade until we have courageous progressives in office (and presuming that cyclical political winds haven't shifted back in conservative directions by then), the train will have already left the station with no hope of recall. And none of this even gets into the problem that controlling our own behavior is only the first step: putting pressure on China and other nations in Asia to do their part is also necessary to deal with the crisis--something that can only be done once we have the credibility and moral high ground on the issue to make any demands.

Meanwhile, our Democrats can't even put increased CAFE standards or a decent feebate system into their latest energy bill. Unbelievable.

The Economy

The Republican Party has so screwed over the American People that it is difficult to know where to begin, or even what measures to take in attempting to mitigate the problem. The upward redistribution of wealth in the United States has occurred at such a rapid pace over the last 25 years that it is genuinely surprising that there is a middle class left. Certainly, Bill Clinton was no economic saint, as he did less than nothing to stem the collapse of the American manufacturing sector or to close the increasing gap between rich and poor. Even so, he left us with a balanced budget and huge economic surpluses--in spite of the landmines and booby traps left for him by the Republican Congress.

Meanwhile, the economic surpluses and strengthened middle class left to us by Bill Clinton have been transformed by Reverse Midas Bush into massive deficits, a huge national debt, and an American Dollar now being sunk into an inflationary spiral in a vain attempt to mitigate the housing and liquidity crisis caused by (surprise!) a shortsighted and greedy lending, banking and finance industry. Not, of course, that America has an exporting sector left to take advantage of a weak Dollar. And, of course, the Republican Party, aided and abetted by spineless Democrats, have ensured that declaring bankruptcy is now next to impossible.

The only real economy left now is that of the Plutonomy: as long as the rich spend money like water and the American middle class goes deeper and deeper into debt, the GDP continues to hum along nicely even as the system itself hollows out like a rotted tree. As I stated in my post The Economy of the Rich, by the Rich and For the Rich, all the industries that cater to the wealthy are performing beautifully, even as the rest of us take the dregs of what they provide and struggle (usually underemployed) in recessionary conditions. It was difficult to know whether to laugh or the cry as I watched CNBC yesterday, and the commentators were expressing shock that rising energy prices didn't seem to be having a dampening effect on economic growth: the idiots who currently run the system don't seem to understand the economics of a Plutonomy--if only the rich are driving economic growth, little things like rising energy costs that don't affect them, won't affect economic growth.

What is required to even attempt to fix this situation is a far-sighted plan to reward work instead of wealth, to reverse the trend of income inequality, and to invest in the sorts of biological and energy technology fields that will provide the good jobs of the future.

Obama and Edwards have each come out with some good-looking plans to accomplish some of these things. The problem (beyond the fact that neither of them, unfortunately, looks set to win the Democratic nomination) is that by the time they take office and fight to pass some of these programs through Congress, it will already be late 2009 or 2010: far too late to undo the damage occurring to the American Economy at incraesingly rapid pace.

The War

It is obviously important to stand and fight to end the Occupation of Iraq as soon as possible. And yet, while the Senate and the President bicker over just how many American troops stay in Iraq and for how long, the bigger and much more important picture is going completely unaddressed. While progressives fight to end this war/occuaption, we are leaving ourselves completely vulnerable to going into the next war on the slightest pretext or excuse.

Progressives are failing to address how we got dragged into Iraq in the first place. Anyone who has read American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips and Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson knows that we are in Iraq for two reasons: 1) to protect oil resources, and 2) to help perpetuate the military-industrial complex.

As long as America continues to be hopelessly dependent on oil, and as long as America continues to increase the amount of money and the size of its economy dependent on warmaking (the film Why We Fight is a must-see on this topic), America will continue to wage oil wars overseas. It might be Iraq today, but it will be Iran tomorrow. Or maybe Venezuela. Or maybe a Caspian nation. Or perhaps an oil-rich nation in Africa. Heck, maybe even China a decade from now.

Until and unless we make the major structural changes and bold moves necessary to decrease military spending, create an Apollo Program for new energy, and devolve the military-industrial complex, Iraq will be just one in a long series of expensive and crippling oil wars that bring our nation to its knees just as surely as the overreaches of the Roman and British Empires destroyed their ability to thrive and function.

And yet, as things stand politically today, the popular move of withdrawing forces from Iraq is seen as too radical a goal to achieve, while reducing military spending is seen as political suicide. If that is truly the case, then there is little point in political advocacy on foreign policy: by the time we wait the decade or two we need for real progressive leadership, Americans will already have endured two or three more destructive oil wars. By then, it will be too late.

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In short, the stepping-stone changes we as progressives are attempting to make in American politics are too little, too late. We don't have five, ten, twenty years to do something about global warming, about the hollow economy, about the oil-military-industrial complex.

The time for demanding radical change and serious guts from our politicians is now. Small-scale gains and trading out Republicans for Democrats on a case-by-case basis, election by election, isn't even close to enough. We need major, serious change--and quickly. We need the current crop of Democrats to stand up and fight; we can't wait another ten years.

Otherwise, the long-term planning required of government will be superfluous: the painful changes that are demanded of us now, will be forced upon us tomorrow or else we, as a democratic nation, will fall into the dustbin of history. Either way, it won't be pretty.

The End of NeoLiberalism: A Crisis of Unimaginable Consequence

It is a common tendency among human beings to believe that the problems and challenges facing their particular generation during their particular lifetimes are more momentous and of greater consequence than almost any that have come before them. Every war, it seems, is crucial to the fate of liberty; every political battle of the essence in determining the fate of the nation, or even the world. It is therefore important to keep some perspective when making grand pronouncements about political struggles in which one is presently engaged.

Nonetheless, I think it not unreasonable to suggest that we are embroiled today in a climactic and deeply consequential struggle that will not only test the mettle of the collective human spirit, but also has the opportunity to discredit for at least one generation or more an entire ideology of evil and selfish greed.

I speak, of course, of the battle over global warming.
Almost anyone reading this piece is aware of the imperative urgency surrounding the problem: the melting of the Antarctic and of the Arctic ice caps at rates faster than anyone had predicted; the threatened loss of millions of species; the Pentagon's own report on food and water shortages causing mass instability and migrations; the list of catastrophic consequences of failure to act on this crisis is nearly endless.

It is also a given that any action taken to mitigate the crisis must be global in nature, with the participatory cooperation of all the major industialized nations for any movement towards a reduction in greenhouse gases and an increase in sustainability to be meaningful over the long run. This will, of course, require the firm hand of governments worldwide in regulating corporate behavior and spurring investment in new technologies. While America consumes the lion's share of the world's oil and produces increasingly enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, failure to engage China, India and other industrialized nations in the collective effort will render much of this activity moot.

It will be a difficult challenge--one that could easily cause waves of pessimism in students of human history. How we as a species react to this unprecedented challenge will say a great deal about who we are and what are capable--or incapable--of.

All of this, however, has been said before at various times and in various ways. What has been less reported on, but is of nearly equal importance to my mind, is the almost Manichean socio-political and ideological consequences of this battle for both the United States and constitutionally democratic (at least in theory) nations across the globe.

The ideology most under threat from worldwide acceptance of the necessity to act in mitigating global warming is that of "Free-Market" Neoliberalism. Just as the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan have helped to discredit the concept of neoconservatism everywhere but the lame-duck halls of the White House, the free market's failure to stop the devastating creep of global warming will, if brought to internationally recognized popular consensus, obliterate the credibility of the prevailing economic conventional wisdom surrounding the Washington Consensus.

This baleful philosophy of neo-liberalism holds as its guiding principle the idea that--if given enough time--corporations in a free-market system unfettered by governmental (i.e., consumer and labor) regulation will provide the greatest variety of products and services at the lowest prices to the greatest number of people. It also holds that unswerving allegiance to this principle will result in greater worldwide prosperity, increased jobs, and a brighter future for the world's citizens.

When confronted with the abject failures of this ideology (though many would argue that rather than failures, these consequences were the entire goal from the beginning--namely, the redistribution of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the very rich), such as America's large number of uninsured, the unquestionable disaster that was energy deregulation, the increasing gap between the massively rich and the rest of us, the disastrous consequences of IMF/World Bank-controlled "globalization", etc., the defenders of the status quo usually engage in one of two different responses:

"Give it more time and even less regulation--it will work, I swear!"

or

"The cure would be worse than the disease."

In the case of uninsured children or the bleak future of many African and South American countries under the weight of IMF loans, the former is the usual response: that the healthcare industry is under the weight of too many lawsuits; that corruption is still too rampant in third-world countries; that the market will eventually provide a solution for healthcare for the American poor; that we just haven't given African economies enough time.

The latter, however, is often cited as well on a host of different issues: single-payer healthcare is supposed to be worse than the present system; reasonable economic protections are supposed to lead to even greater poverty; state-controlled electricity is supposed to lead to even higher prices. Though these arguments are all demonstrably false, they are continually employed by the desperate mandarins eager to continue the fleecing of the hoi polloi.

Time and fear are the greatest assets of the neoliberal--a situation remarkably similar to that of the neoconservative, whose mendicant pleading for yet another Friedman Unit in Iraq and threats of another 9/11 in the wake of Democratic electoral victory manage to hum the same tune--if only on a lower, more ominous octave. The melody in both cases is sharp, disturbing and painful to the ears of Truth.

Global warming, however, is a problem that not only points to an utter failure of the neoliberal system, but also cannot be assuaged by appeals to fear or to a continued stay of patience on the part of the world's increasingly suffering population.

The fact that a problem of such momentous impact has gradually arisen under the watchful eyes of our quarterly-report-obsessed Wall Street bureaucrats with nary the movement of a little finger to stop it is itself proof of the myopic blindness (not to mention selfish greed) that afflicts a purely market-driven system. It is proof of a failure of long-term thinking and visionary planning in pursuit of higher and higher record corporate profits.

But the fact that global warming is an autocatalytic process--i.e., one whose negative impact will increase, feeding off itself--means that there IS NO MORE TIME. We cannot wait for the "free market" to eventually provide the bounties that the Thomas Friedmans of the world insist are at the end of the neoliberal rainbow, if only we march long and hard enough in pursuit of the mirage. The threat is upon us NOW--and if nothing is done to stop it NOW, soon nothing will be able to stop it.

And the corporations in the free market certainly won't be able to stop it themselves.

Meanwhile, there is almost no cure that could be worse than the disease of apocalyptic climate change resulting in the elimination of polar ice caps, the loss of millions of species, world wars, famines, droughts, diseases, natural disasters, mass migrations, energy depletion, and the very real possibility of global economic and even civilization collapse. One is reminded of Al Gore's joke in his potent documentary An Inconvenient Truth in which the Earth is balanced on a scale, counterweighted with gold bars. In comparison with losing one's civilization, one's freedom, one's stability, even the planetary patterns of life we have come to know and depend on, almost any economic cost is preferable.

And it is instructive to note that most of the corporatist effort has at this point been to attempt to discredit the very premises behind global warming, rather than to mitigate the perceived need to act. Because they know that if the public comes to accept the basic premises, there will be no way for them to defend the ideology that has been their prevailing basis of power for decades.

These are truly momentous times, and the stakes could not be higher: not only for the world and for our environmental futures, but for our political and ideological futures as well.

GOP in serious bind on global warming opposition

Another day, another conflict between reality, voter perception, and Republican Party talking points. Yesterday came just the latest example of the increasingly bad news confronting the GOP in advance of the 2008 elections, this time in the form of a little-noticed post by Mark Mellman, pollster for John Kerry.

Mellman astutely observes in his article at The Hill that Republican voters in the critical New Hampshire primary are deeply concerned with the issue of global warming--contrary to the stance of the GOP overall. In fact, GOP presidential candidates will be in a serious bind when it comes to the issue: ignore it, and they lose the respect of their voters; make it an issue, and lose the respect of their wingnut base and the support of many of their big-money donors.

As Mellman says:

With Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) working overtime to convince America that the GOP is the vanguard of the Flat Earth Society, it is worth recognizing that Republican voters are far ahead of their elected officials, who are in danger of losing support as a result of embracing a Luddite position on global warming.

In December — long before Al Gore’s Oscar and the latest consensus scientific report — we surveyed 400 New Hampshire Republican primary voters for Clear the Air and Clean Air-Cool Planet and found them surprisingly enlightened, despite their conservative orientation. Unlike their leaders, Republican voters are concerned about the dangers posed by global warming and endorse immediate action to curb the carbon pollution that causes it.

Nearly eight in 10 Republican primary voters in New Hampshire believe global warming is a reality that is either happening now or will happen in the future. A solid 56 percent majority see global warming already occurring, while an additional 23 percent believe it will happen in the future. Just 14 percent think global warming will not happen.

Without getting into details, let me say that I've worked with Mellman before; while we have disagreements on policy and framing positions (and I believe he made serious mistakes in advising the Kerry campaign), the quality of his and his company's polling work is second-to-none and right on a par with that of Frank Luntz. Mellman is the closest thing the Democratic Party has right now to Frank Luntz in terms of accuracy and depth of their research. So I think it's safe to say that these numbers are truly indicative of the actual sentiments of New Hampshire voters, and that the polling was not biased.

But it gets worse for Republicans addicted to inaction on this critical issue. It turns out that a vast supermajority of New Hampshire Republicans want strong governmental action taken to curb emissions:

Moreover, this issue is of central concern to Republican primary voters. Nearly all (82 percent) say it is important to them that the U.S. take action to reduce the emissions that cause global warming....

Perhaps most strikingly, Newt Gingrich’s argument against the reality of global warming elicited extremely negative reactions from his fellow Republicans. When confronted with the former Speaker’s statement that “There’s no evidence to support global warming — none. It’s essentially cultural anthropology,” nearly half said it made them less likely to vote for the candidate who uttered it, including 34 percent who said it made them much less likely to vote for that candidate.

By contrast, the most compelling statements all carried clear calls to action. For example, 65 percent of GOP primary voters said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who said, “The Global Warming Plan I introduced in my state reduces greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 ...”

And what about Iowa? Well, there is no public poll available about Iowans' concern over global warming, it should be remembered that Iowa was the only red state to join in the 2004 lawsuit against the five largest global warming polluters in the United States--joining mostly deep blue states California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. This is partly because the probable effects of global warming/climate change on Iowa's economy have been shown to be quite severe (as shown here, here and here). In fact, the consequences of global warming are already hitting Iowa: As ISU Extension Climatologist and Professor of Agricultural Meteorology Elwynn Taylor said at the announcement of the 2004 lawsuit,

"The first sector to take a hit from global warming is agriculture. Iowa and Kansas could feel it hardest because of our dependence on agriculture. Erratic, sharp weather fluctuations - a likely consequence of global warming - leads to wide extremes in crop yield. I've estimated that global warming already consistently is costing about half a billion dollars a year in reduced corn yield to Iowa alone. And the effect on beans is likely similar."

It's safe to say, therefore, that the issue of global warming is going to be a significant one not only for the Democratic primary faithful (many of whom would vote for Al Gore in a heartbeat), but also for the Republican primary voters as well.

Moreover, this news comes just as major rifts are being created among evangelicals over the importance of global warming and climate change within the overall spiritual/religious debate. This issue is already traumatizing and splitting the TheoCon segment of the GOP; it will soon cause a rift between the average GOP early primary voter and professional deniers in the keep-my-exploitation-money-at-any-costs moneyed wing of the party.

And that alone should be enough to give any GOP operative or candidate serious heartburn--even if Iraq and the most corrupt administration in history weren't problems enough for them. Like they say, when it rains it pours. Hopefully, the ensuing storm will wash away the corrupt Republican ideology for a generation.