[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Compassionate capitalism

Fri Aug 8 08:44:04 MDT 2008

Ecocide with a smiley face

by Lorna Salzman

Culture Change (July 20 2008)

"We all agree that development that pollutes and destroys in order to
enrich the already-rich is morally wrong. But development that pollutes
and destroys in order to help the poor is just fine. We owe it to the
poor. This is Compassionate Capitalism. And it is as ruthless,
unforgiving and unjust as the old kind."

_______________

Imagine a crew of poor and minority construction workers. After years of
poverty, lack of opportunity and discrimination they finally have
secure, well-paying jobs with good benefits.

They are building a new village that will house low and moderate income
families, including themselves. This village is located downstream from
a high dam that provides hydropower for the region.

The dam is old and recent inspections have revealed serious flaws that
could result in dam failure that could wipe out the village and cause
severe loss of life. The exact date of such failure is unknown but the
risk is large and real and engineers and geologists recommend that the
village be evacuated and rebuilt elsewhere as a precautionary measure,
until the dam is repaired.

Repairs sufficient to guarantee dam integrity will be expensive and will
take up to three or four years to complete. The costs are unknown as are
the sources of funding. State revenues are scarce and the federal
government has cut back on infrastructure repair. It is not known
whether funds will be made available, how much and when.

The villagers, which include the construction workers, do not welcome
the cost and inconvenience of relocation so they decide to remain where
they are, figuring that dam repair as well as village development will
provide lots of jobs. Some of them distrust the engineers and geologists
and their predictions. Some of them believe that the repairs can be
completed in a shorter period of time. Some believe the dam is
fundamentally sound and doesn't need much repair, if any. The village,
county, state and federal officials meet, confer, haggle, argue, hiring
consultants, holding public hearings, debating costs and benefits and
wasting over two years on the problem due to conflicting opinions.

While dam repair contracts are put out for bidding, the construction
workers continue their work on building housing developments, schools,
shopping centers, churches and light industrial structures. Investment
is attracted to the area. The village expands and becomes a small city,
with a larger economy and local industry, and residents prosper. Lots of
cars and RVs are sold, large air conditioned homes on large lots with
swimming pools are built as is an airport, and the interstate is
extended to the city. Shopping malls appear on the outskirts. Several
banks open new branches. Sewage systems are extended to the new
developments and a large water supply system to deliver water from the
river is also expanded. The increase in energy demand results in
construction of two new coal powered plants and plans are laid for a
nuclear plant at a "safe" distance, to accommodate growth.

Three years later, the dam breaks, destroying the entire city, killing
most of its residents.

This story is fictitious but the situation it describes is not. It is
what we face now with global warming. Those who staked their own lives
on the integrity of the dam were mainly low income minority workers, who
had faith in "the system" and in technology. There are millions more of
these among us today who doubt there is a global warming crisis and who
believe that new jobs and technology to help the unemployed and the
minorities should come first. To rationalize this, they denigrate the
seriousness of the climate change situation and, like the village
construction workers, look to technology and renewable energy
development as their salvation.

Meanwhile, growth continues, energy consumption expands, the consumer
sector continues to spend as before, floods, droughts and wildfires run
rampant, water supplies are drying up, food prices rise due to higher
energy and import costs, garbage and wastes accumulate, wildlife
habitat, open space and recreational lands are sacrificed for roads,
malls and development, energy prices skyrocket for numerous and
uncontrollable reasons, the oceans die, and the quality of life rapidly
deteriorates. And what do these workers and minorities demand? More of
the same things that caused the crisis in the first place: cheap energy.
Why do they call for this? In order to consume more.

Under all of this is an unswerving religious faith in the need for
continued economic growth: for unabated production of goods and
consumption, in the name of equity and social justice, to benefit those
who had been left out of the country's prosperity. This is the message
just delivered by Niger Ennis, a Republican strategist and head of CORE
(Congress on Racial Equality), a beneficiary of Exxon ($275,000 since
1998), who is pushing for cheap energy, more fossil fuel plants and
offshore oil drilling. Ennis gave an infamous Capitol Hill briefing,
along with climate skeptics, titled "Eco-Imperialism: Reflections on
Earth Day". He also said: "We support any candidate that is not cowed by
the powerful environmental lobby".

The prosperity approach is also the message delivered by the Apollo
Alliance, a front for the Democratic Party and possibly for the auto
industry which supports "clean coal". The affiliated 1Sky movement has
fairly strong positions on reducing energy consumption (25% reduction
from 1990 levels by 2020, eighty percent by 2050), but they have bought
into the carbon trading scam instead of supporting carbon taxes, and
promote that now-familiar cliche of "smart growth", without defining it.

Though the term "economic growth" is not the explicit message of Green
for All, headed by Van Jones, formerly head of the Ella Baker Center and
its "green growth" campaign, its overall thrust of creating "five
million jobs conserving twenty percent of our energy by 2015" (the 1Sky
objective as well), not basing its objectives on science, fails to
acknowledge the need to sharply reduce energy consumption in the next
three or four years (the time period remaining before we exceed several
climate tipping points, according to James Hansen). In so doing it
leapfrogs over the global climate crisis to that golden land of
opportunity, not comprehending that no amount of renewable energy
technology can ever meet our present demand, much less the future demand
of the five million new workers in renewable energy who will, if past
experience is a guide, use their newfound wealth to emulate the life
style of profligate Americans.

A twenty percent reduction in energy use by 2015 is barely an
improvement over the ineffectual Kyoto Protocol proposal. Green for All
supported the Lieberman-Boxer energy bill, with some reservations, while
most environmental groups declared the bill to be woefully inadequate.
Essentially Green for All is an anti-poverty effort with a green tinge,
not an anti-global warming effort. And the strongest pro-growth shout
emanates from the Break Through Institute, headed by neo-liberal growth
and globalization fanatics Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose
prescription for survival is one word: Prosperity.

It is no accident that most of those pushing for Business as Usual are
either members of a minority group or use economic justice as their
justification. This is a clever move since it guarantees funding from
liberal donors like the Pew Charitable Trust and the Nathan Cummings
Foundation as well as the Rockefeller Foundation. It also guarantees
credibility in the media and with liberal leaders and organizations, who
would rather retire to a desert island than be considered racist.

The subliminal theme here is this: we all agree that development that
pollutes and destroys in order to enrich the already-rich is morally
wrong. But development that pollutes and destroys in order to help the
poor is just fine. We owe it to the poor. This is Compassionate
Capitalism. And it is as ruthless, unforgiving and unjust as the old kind.

It is striking that spokesmen for minority groups have for so long found
little to criticize about corporate greed, profits and pollution, or
capitalism in general, but had little trouble attacking their friends -
the environmental community - for what they believed was racism and
deliberate ignoring of urban minorities.

So the push for millions of new minority jobs also raises the following
question: since corporations have shown little or no interest in the
needs of minorities or the poor in the past, how much faith can we have
that in the hoped-for future renewable energy economy they will make an
effort to include them?

The main objective here is to distract the liberals' attention away from
the breaking dam and onto the jobs being created in the city beneath the
dam as it expands ... to distract attention away from the global warming
tipping points that we face in the next few years, away from the bad
news, away from anything that instills doubt in economic growth and in
capitalist society itself.

To express doubt of traditional growth patterns smacks of hardship and
sacrifice, especially for the poor. Thus, doubt must be completely
abolished by drawing attention to the purported benefits of growth to
the poor, by pointing to the jobs ... not to the dam. Where are the
jobs? We know where they are: in renewable energy, energy efficiency,
public transportation, rehabilitation of buildings and infrastructure,
local and regional food supplies, weatherization, and elsewhere. These
are already cliches. Nothing new there.

But the Good News Bears who want you to ignore the breaking dam don't
tell you the truth about these jobs, particularly about how long it will
take to bring them to the needy. How long will it take to replace fossil
fuel and nuclear plants with wind energy systems? How long to rebuild
and expand Amtrak and build new regional and local public transportation
systems to replace air travel and private cars? How long to replace
high-energy, processed, prepackaged and imported food with local food
supplies? How long before the federal government and the private
investors turn away from fossil fuels and nuclear reactors definitively
and put their faith and funds into these things?

If you guessed more than five years, you guessed correctly. Try twenty.
Or fifty. The problem is that the dam is crumbling in the meantime.

That minority leaders like Ennis and Jones are not aligning themselves
with those demanding real solutions to slow down and mitigate global
warming through dramatically reduced consumption of energy and goods is
truly tragic. That their followers are being duped into supporting the
American Dream of increasing consumption of energy and goods -
Compassionate Capitalism - including a demand for cheaper oil, is
testimony to the tragic gullibility that characterizes all Americans,
not just the poor and the minorities.

In a nutshell, we don't have a tough uncompromising movement or
leadership with curbing global warming as its focus. We have
anti-poverty and social justice groups and campaigns posing as green but
with a "plentiful lack" of serious proposals to overhaul the entire
capitalist/consumer society. It is quite clear that marginal and
incremental economic reforms will not slow down the economic growth
beast much less threaten its existence.

It appears that even those members of society who have lived at the
bottom are not ready or willing to admit that this society is neither
sustainable nor reformable. Perhaps they are whistling in the dark. But
it is more likely that these reformist groups are being encouraged in
their schemes by funders and forces cemented to the concept of economic
growth and to capitalism at all costs who welcome the emphasis on jobs
and renewable energy as a distraction from the daily reports of
accelerating climate change. The revolutionaries, however, are nowhere
to be seen.

I've got news for them. Nature doesn't distinguish between rich and poor.
_____

Lorna Salzman, formerly with Friends of the Earth during David Brower's
leadership, writes on politics, energy and the environment. Her website
is lornasalzman.com

"We are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to say we are
winning. It is the war against the earth". - author Raymond Dasmann
_____