CommonDreams.org ran an article titled

"World Consumption Plunges Planet Into 'Ecological Debt', Says Leading Thinktank

Consumption exceeds Earth's annual 'biocapacity' today amid warnings of dependence on overseas food and energy"

It made me think of how Michael Moore's new movie apparently dares to ask 'why is capitalism so great again?'. It made me think how I can't help but agree with that questioning, and how weak the pro-market reply seems to actually be.

A bottom-line observation I find every day more difficult to disagree with: "Ecological devastation, resulting from the insatiable need to increase profits, is not an accidental feature of capitalism: it is built into the system’s DNA and cannot be reformed away" The authors (the one I'm most familiar with is an academic who, by his own admission, got creamed by Nader in the Green Party primary of 2000) go on to clarify: "the capitalist economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to expand will subvert any limits that might be imposed in the name of “sustainable development.” Thus the inherently unstable capitalist system cannot regulate its own activity, much less overcome the crises caused by its chaotic and parasitical growth, because to do so would require setting [untenable, unacceptable] limits upon accumulation..." The above is from the so-called "Belem Ecosocialist Declaration", distributed at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in January this year. I'm an avid reader of (the non-technical literature of) Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz, even Jeffery Sachs up to a point, but somewhere along the line it becomes pretty clear that these guys and their visions of reforming the market system from within--particularly given the speed and depth of what needs doing such that industrial society can be brought into some kind of accord with the finite renewable limits of the natural world--just aren't speaking to the power-relations of the world as it is. The failure of democracy + capitalism to meet this front-and-center challenge is both a tragedy in itself, but also a compelling proof that the 'hypercapitalism' of our age and its "magic of the marketplace" have been

(a) a very thoroughly-conducted and global experiment for demonstrating what free markets can offer humanity, and

(b) this experiment, while having lots to say for itself, and being a really energetic, neat and elegant system, what with the self-regulating price equilibration, financing of all sorts of projects, lightning quick movement of funds from one end of the globe to the other, is in fact a failed experiment. It is, in its essence, a 'parasitical' system that leads to steep social pyramids and ghastly exploitations. There are over 20 million slaves living in the world today. Over 50 million children btw 5 and 11 yrs old who work all day rather than playing and being educated. A non-trivial percentage of these children are sex workers. Ecology aside, this is unacceptable. Intolerable. But the natural world is not a thing to be put 'aside' of course, as the 'ecological debt' article makes clear.

It's also clear, it seems to me at least, that nothing will change. Not until (and even then it's no sure bet) climate change begins to undeniably manifest it's truly mass-murderous and globally destabilizing potential. This might still not be enough to turn the heads that matter (ask a person from Darfur how much difference it makes that the world is made to recognizes a an appallingly high and rising pile of corpses). Assume it would matter. By then we'll be well into irreversible cascades of ecosystemic imbalance, which recent evidence suggests (see George Monbiot's recent column in the Guardian, "Not Even Wrong") may very possibly mark a dystopian moment well beyond the point of no return. What a stupid, stupid system, then, to find 'ourselves' (the 'royal we' as they say) so enthralled with. you don't hear the Thatcherite slogan TINA much anymore ("there is no alternative"), but that's because it's unnecessary to bother to say aloud. It's understood.

Obama and his party of the American left (insert rimshot here)

• can't (or won't) manage to cap credit card interest rates...at 30 fucking persent;
• they can't/won't legislate a profit-free single payer health insurance system, even as thousands die every day for lack of such a thing;
• they can't/won't effectively cap CEO salaries,
• or legally (re)open the labor market to any reasonable chance for widespread labor-union regeneration;
• won't staunch a foreclosure crisis with "right to rent" legislation (see Dean Baker), and
• won't address a campaign financing system that cripples our democracy (reforms which the president once upon a time championed as a candidate, then dropped like a bad habit).

And they won't move us to a green economy, nor into any ecologically "stable state" economy, even in a rare historical moment where a massive public-sector mobilization--a green New Deal--is not only a possibility, but

(a)would offer desperately needed work to a nation on it's knees with underutilized capacity and joblessness,

(b) would offer a glowing example to the rest of the world in a moment of existential ecological threat not a little spearheaded by ourselves and our Anglo antecedents, and

(c) would offer brand spanking new SUSTAINABLE public infrastructures on which to build generations-worth of follow-on prosperity.

From a certain point of view, one can see the difficulties faced by the President and his Congress. Beset by Blue Dogs, an inherently conservative and incrementalist Constitution, a volatile undercurrent of demagogued, angry and well-armed rightist populism, a very unhelpful media environment, and a very well-institutionalized corporate sector long accustomed to calling the shots whenever push comes to shove. I'm sure there's more--complications of federalism, a reactionary-dominated Supreme Court--but that's a pretty good start. On the other hand, this is a guy--and an insurgent party--who came to power with promises of reform and changemaking. I recently heard it said that Obama himself has been known to quote Frederick Douglass' dictum that 'power concedes nothing without a fight'...recognizing the need for a fight, then, one can only be bitterly disappointed that the blue team isn't bringing--it's impossible to imagine it's being brought by this crowd, in fact--to this fight the paradigm-shifting best, most compelling and most transformative agenda possible. So long as the market and it's corporations remain in the saddle, and so long as market thinking works a kind of 'fascism reigning in the heads' (Foucalt) of even (or especially) our most self-consciously 'progressive' elites, we're up shit's creek without a paddle. With a seriously wicked storm blowing in, to boot.

Jim Stratton does the "Blogonomics" blog for the Orlando Sentinel. Today the topic was about 'mixed economic signals' with regard to month-to-month unemployment numbers. Seems like this guy loses the fact that the best his 'optimistic' argument can amount to is that "things are getting worse more slowly" as I heard Robert Reich say recently.

The retreat into false wonkery one sees in the likes of Stratton remind me of an analogy I saw made by George Monbiot in a GuardianUK column yesterday. in Monbiot's case the very economics-relevant subject was one of a pending international climate change summit and the likelihood that the participant nations are more than likely to ignore just-too-inconvenient new evidence that the already-dire models on which summit goals are organized around, are nowhere near good enough. Turns out things are even worse than had been figured (specifically, the planet looks much less capable of responding with any human-scaled promptness to a the kind of CO2 mitigation international leaders had in mind). The new evidence will prove, it's a safe bet, too much for the technocrats of our global capitalism to respond to, and so, Monbiot suspects, the summitt will devolve into squabbles over who's lookout this or that piece of the problem is whose:

"Unless there is a radical change of plan between now and December, world leaders will not only be discussing the alignment of deckchairs on the Titanic, but disputing whose deckchairs they really are and who is responsible for moving them. Fascinating as this argument may be, it does nothing to alter the course of the liner."

And so it is with Stratton's read on the economic troubles:

"Just released figures show that jobless claims fell a bit last week (a good thing) but the number of people still getting unemployment benefits grew (a bad thing)...Most economists say the recession is probably over, but indicators are going to be screwy while we bump along the bottom. And the patient won't really start to feel better until we get some job creation."

Of course when you think about it, the pathetic 'optimism' that comes with "jobless recovery" fine print is not really worth mentioning, actually. At all. It's an environment where entrenched power gets to dig in deeper. Wooppee.

But Stratton does mention it of course. After all, getting consumers to 'feel' better about things is the key to clearing the old economic pipes--so they'll spend money they don't have, if the dig-out from the early-2000s recession is any guide. A very poor guide, given that credit card bankruptcies are the stuff of a lot of people's nightmares--both waking and otherwise--right now.

Stratton poses the following low-confidence kink in the consumer-driven recovery scenario:

"...The nightmare scenario unfolds something like this: The labor market continues to deteriorate because businesses are spooked by tight-fisted consumers. More people lose their jobs, meaning less money flows into the economy.

A new round of foreclosures follows when people become unable to make mortgage payments. Meanwhile, folks who've held onto their jobs clamp down further on spending, fearing they'll soon be asked to clear out their desks.

That's not just theory. I see it every day..."

I don't doubt it. But what's frustrating is that the focus remains on this 'paradox of thrift' bit, never moving to the fact that Florida has structural problems extending far beyond what any jump-started (and really pretty irrationally-exhuberant, were it to materialize) consumer confidence could be expected to fix.

What's being overlooked is this: the soul of Florida's free market (sic) traditions has long been a growth-as-ponzi-scheme poor-man's ripoff.

Meaning today that the vicious recessionary haymaker Stratton describes actually comes wrapped in brass knuckles of elite stupidity. In a cracker-ass heritage of 'waste, fraud, and abuse' of the common wealth, and anything approaching long-run enlightened self interest.

To offer a (timely) Katrina analogy, Floridians are getting hit harder than most, and in a more sustained way, by foreclosure waves themselves (subprime, option ARM, recession-driven, residential, commercial), but also suffer from the shamefully faulty economic-developmental engineering of our state and local political classes and their proudly short-term thinking. The mentality: "Shitty labor market profiles are for tomorrow's public stewards--today, what's important is that taxes stay absurdly low". Busts are anomolies 'noone could have predicted'...and boom times are for crowing about how all boats are rising.

Ours is a long-recognized-as-problematic economic model held hostage now to

• (a) tourists too insecure to keep coming, feeling in no position to be fleeced again as theme park throughput [And the OS ed board bashes Grayson for pushing prudently-targeted vacation-rights legislation designed to work as Disney-centric stimulus] and
• (b) construction jobs whose workers are left to wonder where the entire 'bubble sector' they worked w/in has vanished to--a sector our ecosystems couldn't sustainably bear regardless [and so the OS ed board pours scorn on Hometown Democracy, natch].

Not that these are my ideas: An Aug 16 piece in the NYT ("FL: Which Way is Up?") and a Sept 1st San Antonio paper editorial ("FL - Uncontrolled growth no way to build economy") do a convincing job of telling the grim cautionary tale our state now exists to offer others.

For still more, you can't do better than economic development expert Richard Florida's Atlantic Magazine piece from March entitled "How the Crash Will Reshape America". Of a Central Florida-style "way of life" that author sees as now dead and gone, he describes the following: "...Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending continued, more people arrived. Yet the boom itself neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product." Housing and, for us, low-wage, high volume tourism. Florida's view is that the localities likeliest to emerge stronger from this shitstorm are not us, but rather the anti-Orlandos:

vibrant, open, progressive cities rich with authenticity, and w/ leaders committed to the BUILDING of EXCELLENT and COMPELLING PLACES...not bubble-riders that build stadiums for billionaire hucksters, or who turn already-regressive regional transit infrastructure agencies into campaign cash machines.

Just when we need creative bold leadership, we find ourselves with Dyer (he of the stadium), Crotty (he of the corrupt Expressway Authority), Sansom, Crist, and policies like SB360 and the same taxes-are-evil voodoo-economic dogma that helped bring the house down in the first place.

The point is that his is WAY worse than a consumer-confidence based supply and demand problem; you'd figure a newspaper man might be a little hipper to problems of inadequate institutional structures and business models.

From the topix.net Orlando Sentinel comment boards I waste too much time on. The article under discussion is this one:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orl-asecgrayson-hurricane-center-062062709jun27,0,3886177.story

"nailman":

Doorworker {myself} said:

"...The other thing: Climate change is real; worst-case models are being shown as undershooting the pace of change; and we are already above the consensus estimate of irreversible levels of greenhouse gasses..."

Well then what is the use? Why are we worried about the barn doors now for? If the climate has been irrevocably trashed why am I going to be forced to pay for something that can not be changed? Although you know what the real solution to restoring the planet is, sterialize the human race. This 4.6 billion year old planet will restore itself with life after People. Hell it has survived mass extinctions before.

My response:

George Carlin has it right on this, **IF** you keep in mind he was a fabulously wealthy and pedestal-hoisted dude, whose closest loved ones will be the last to ever have to taste the worst of what "global weirding" has on tap...a point that reminds me of 'Charlie' schooling Barton Fink on his 'tourist with a typewriter' BS, aka cheap vacationing in other people's misery (great movie...Coen Bros are the best). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOSKzYfAgE That in mind, 'the earth is fine, it's the people who are fuxed'. Amen to that. But I have kids...that 'man is a bad animal' nihilism grows horns and a snake-tongue for me when I see stuff like this

http://pulitzerphotos.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/oklahoma-city-bombing/

or this

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/SaveChAlli/1b656d306762a6b9b578bb7db46e6d05.htm

...and think that our species' competitive advantage is in our forward-looking capacity; our technological abilities (not least the invention of science); and our genius for pattern-seeking, organization and cooperation (too often expressed in warmaking, but even so). So yeah, I worry about the 'barn door' even still. But then I'm one who's read a misanthropic madness into what passes for 'free market' capitalism for as long as I've understood the term.

Anyway, here's the Carlin bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

And as for the EVEN GREATER madness of how it could be that, as our country slouches day by day further into disaster, we do so amidst the howling of wingnut authoritarian populists terrified about losing the 'freedom' to completely enslave and poison them/ourselves and our children--this article strikes me as pretty right on:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090629_the_truth_alone_will_not_set_you_free/?ln