Organizing outside the Chinese Communist Party’s official union, workers have initiated a series of crippling strikes that repeatedly shut down factories, among other forms of rebellion. They are openly defying the totalitarian state-capitalist government of China, as well as the Western corporations whose factories they are closing. And they are winning. Wages are being increased by 40, 60, even 100% at some plants.

If the Chinese workers’ movement continues to disrupt the sweatshops pumping out our electronics and car parts, they could throw a wrench into the China->U.S. cheap goods conveyor belt that has carried global capitalist growth for more than a decade.  The destruction of this global trade alliance will not only free the Chinese workers from the abominable conditions Hari describes, but potentially free the entire planet from an economic system hell-bent on relentless growth and plunder.

image from The Economist

In short, capitalism relies on China’s absurdly cheap labor for its profit margins. This unsanctioned frenzy of Chinese labor organizing is striking a blow in the heart of the system. More power to ‘em! We should support these workers however possible. [alex]

And the Most Inspiring Good News Story of the Year is…

by Johann Hari, August 6, 2010

At first, this isn’t going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is.

Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile phone batteries.

Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20 pence an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for twelve years. On the night of May 27th, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.

Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide – the tenth this year.

For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft – so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: “We are like prisoners here.”

The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps ten workers, and each dorm houses 5000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations fifteen minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: “Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!” Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the toilet. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the toilets as punishment. Then it’s back to the dorm.

It’s the human equivalent to battery farming. One worker said: “My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse… This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over twelve hours a day.” At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: “We’re really livestock and shouldn’t be called workers.” They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot, “to symbolize their improving life.”

Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.

They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organizations – corporations – to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organizations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.

We’ll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here’s just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17 year old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big name Western corporations, including Disney. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: “When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn’t even see his eyes.”

So you might be thinking – was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse – and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting “there are no human rights here!” and “we want freedom!” The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China’s workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a “negative investment environment” – by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn’t enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 percent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this – and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn’t a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude – or you can side with the organizations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat in Britain, or the National Labour Committee in the US, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain’s GDP fell by 10 percent – but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

Child soldiers in the Congo Civil War

A civil war has been raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since.. well.. pretty much since the Belgians conquered the area, committed genocide, and called it a colony, as told in the excellent book King Leopold’s Ghost. But in the past 13 years, warfare has escalated and killed over 6 million Congolese, while rape has become an absolute epidemic and one of the main weapons of war. The UN’s top humanitarian official described the sexual violence against Congolese women as “almost unimaginable” for its frequency and ferocity.

This is a conflict that concerns us all, as it sheds crucial light on the functioning of global capitalism. At the center of the war is a mineral called coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, which is used in capacitors, a necessary piece of electronics found in virtually every electronic device of modern capitalist society, from laptops to cell phones to cameras and jet engines. See Coltan: Learning the Basics. Coltan is just one of several expensive and rare minerals abundant in this remote region of central Africa, but coltan is ONLY available in this part of the world, which makes it extremely valuable.

Millions of children are exploited to mine coltan and other valuable minerals in the Congo

The DRC government, Uganda, Rwanda, and various militias and guerrilla forces are fighting over control of the land where these minerals are mined. The local residents, whose traditional lifestyles have been disrupted by decades of civil war, are forced to dig tiny amounts of these “conflict minerals” from the soil in inhuman conditions, often with their bare hands. An estimated 2 million of the miners are children, and often they are literal or virtual slaves who are on the brink of starvation. It is a situation which can only be described as hell on earth.

When you hear about such extreme exploitation, you can be pretty sure that some folks are making a hell of a lot of money. In this case, it’s western corporations like Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Dell, IBM, Sony and many more who rely on extremely cheap capacitors in their electronics to make their profits from our Christmas presents. These companies have thus far avoided scrutiny by outsourcing the more direct business of extracting the minerals to smaller companies.

If there is any hope in this terrible situation, it is that capitalism is reaching the end of its ability to exploit the people of the world the way it has for the last centuries, and through the increased awareness of what is happening in places like the Congo, we as a people will say “Never again.” It is primarily the responsibility of those of us in the wealthy countries to put a stop to this paradigm of rape, slavery, and capitalist profit. Only we have the power to end the madness.

Below is a wonderful article that outlines specific solutions to the Congo civil war. [alex]

Conflict Minerals: A Cover For US Allies and Western Mining Interests?

Kambale Musavuli and Bodia Macharia

Originally published by Huffington Post, Dec. 14, 2009.

As global awareness grows around the Congo and the silence is finally being broken on the current and historic exploitation of Black people in the heart of Africa, myriad Western based “prescriptions” are being proffered. Most of these prescriptions are devoid of social, political, economic and historical context and are marked by remarkable omissions. The conflict mineral approach or efforts emanating from the United States and Europe are no exception to this symptomatic approach which serves more to perpetuate the root causes of Congo’s challenges than to resolve them.

The conflict mineral approach has an obsessive focus on the FDLR and other rebel groups while scant attention is paid to Uganda (which has an International Court of Justice ruling against it for looting and crimes against humanity in the Congo) and Rwanda (whose role in the perpetuation of the conflict and looting of Congo is well documented by UN reports and international arrest warrants for its top officials). Rwanda is the main transit point for illicit minerals coming from the Congo irrespective of the rebel group (FDLR, CNDP or others) transporting the minerals. According to Dow Jones, Rwanda’s mining sector output grew 20% in 2008 from the year earlier due to increased export volumes of tungsten, cassiterite and coltan, the country’s three leading minerals with which Rwanda is not well endowed. In fact, should Rwanda continue to pilfer Congo’s minerals, its annual mineral export revenues are expected to reach $200 million by 2010. Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen says it best when he notes “having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product.” As long as the West continues to give the Kagame regime carte blanche, the conflict and instability will endure.

According to Global Witness’s 2009 report, Faced With A Gun What Can you Do, Congolese government statistics and reports by the Group of Experts and NGOs, Rwanda is one of the main conduits for illicit minerals leaving the Congo. It is amazing that the conflict mineral approach shout loudly about making sure that the trade in minerals does not benefit armed groups but the biggest armed beneficiary of Congo’s minerals is the Rwandan regime headed by Paul Kagame. Nonetheless, the conflict mineral approach is remarkably silent about Rwanda’s complicity in the fueling of the conflict in the Congo and the fleecing of Congo’s riches.

Advocates of the conflict mineral approach would be far more credible if they had ever called for any kind of pressure whatsoever on mining companies that are directly involved in either fueling the conflict or exploiting the Congolese people. The United Nations, The Congolese Parliament, Carter Center, Southern Africa Resource Watch and several other NGOs have documented corporations that have pilfered Congo’s wealth and contributed to the perpetuation of the conflict. Some of these companies include but are not limited to: Traxys, OM Group, Blattner Elwyn Group, Freeport McMoran, Eagle Wings/Trinitech, Lundin, Kemet, Banro, AngloGold Ashanti, Anvil Mining, and First Quantum.

The conflict mineral approach, like the Blood Diamond campaign from which it draws its inspiration, is silent on the question of resource sovereignty which has been a central question in the geo-strategic battle for Congo’s mineral wealth. It was over this question of resource sovereignty that the West assassinated Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba and stifled the democratic aspirations of the Congolese people for over three decades by installing and backing the dictator Joseph Mobutu. In addition, the United States also backed the 1996 and 1998 invasions of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda instead of supporting the non-violent, pro-democracy forces inside the Congo. Unfortunately and to the chagrin of the Congolese people, some of the strongest advocates of the conflict mineral approach are former Clinton administration officials who supported the invasions of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda. This may in part explains the militaristic underbelly of the conflict mineral approach, which has as its so-called second step a comprehensive counterinsurgency.

The focus on the east of Congo falls in line with the long-held obsession by some advocates in Washington who incessantly push for the balkanization of the Congo. Their focus on “Eastern Congo” is inadequate and does not fully take into account the nature and scope of the dynamics in the entire country. Political decisions in Kinshasa, the capital in the West, have a direct impact on the events that unfold in the East of Congo and are central to any durable solutions.

The central claim of the conflict mineral approach is to bring an end to the conflict; however, the conflict can plausibly be brought to an end much quicker through diplomatic and political means. The so-called blood mineral route is not the quickest way to end the conflict. We have already seen how quickly world pressure can work with the sidelining of rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and the demobilization and/or rearranging of his CNDP rebel group in January 2009, as a result of global pressure placed on the CNDP’s sponsor Paul Kagame of Rwanda. More pressure needs to be placed on leaders such as Kagame and Museveni who have been at the root of the conflict since 1996. The FDLR can readily be pressured as well, especially with most of their political leadership residing in the West, however this should be done within a political framework, which brings all the players to the table as opposed to the current militaristic, dichotomous, good-guy bad-guy approach where the West sees Kagame and Museveni as the “good-guys” and everyone else as bad. The picture is far grayer than Black and White.

A robust political approach by the global community would entail the following prescriptions:

1. Join Sweden and Netherlands in pressuring Rwanda to be a partner for peace and a stabilizing presence in the region. The United States and Great Britain in particular should apply more pressure on their allies Rwanda and Uganda to the point of withholding aid if necessary.
2. Hold to account companies and individuals through sanctions trafficking in minerals whether with rebel groups or neighboring countries, particularly Rwanda and Uganda. Canada has chimed in as well but has been deadly silent on the exploitative practices of its mining companies in the Congo. Canada must do more to hold its mining companies accountable as is called for in Bill C-300.
3. Encourage world leaders to be more engaged diplomatically and place a higher priority on what is the deadliest conflict in the World since World War Two.
4. Reject the militarization of the Great Lakes region represented by AFRICOM, which has already resulted in the suffering of civilian population; the strengthening of authoritarian figures such as Uganda’s Museveni (in power since 1986) and Rwanda’s Kagame (won the 2003 “elections” with 95 percent of the vote); and the restriction of political space in their countries.
5. Demand of the Obama administration to be engaged differently from its current military-laden approach and to take the lead in pursuing an aggressive diplomatic path with an emphasis on pursuing a regional political framework that can lead to lasting peace and stability.

To learn more about the current crisis in the Congo, visit www.conflictminerals.org.

Kambale Musavuli is spokesperson and student coordinator for Friends of the Congo. Bodia Macharia is the President of Friends of the Congo/ Canada.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/17/bolivian_president_evo_morales_on_climate

AMY GOODMAN: Just before we went to air today, I interviewed Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. He was re-elected in a landslide victory earlier this month. On Wednesday, Evo Morales called on world leaders to hold temperature increases over the next century to just one degree Celsius, the most ambitious proposal so far by any head of state. Morales also called on the United States and other wealthy nations to pay an ecological debt to Bolivia and other developing nations.

AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, welcome to Democracy Now!

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Thank you very much for the invitation.

AMY GOODMAN: You spoke yesterday here at the Bella Center and said we cannot end global warming without ending capitalism. What did you mean?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity. Capitalism—and I’m speaking about irrational development—policies of unlimited industrialization are what destroys the environment. And that irrational industrialization is capitalism. So as long as we don’t review or revise those policies, it’s impossible to attend to humanity and life.

AMY GOODMAN: How would you do that? How would you end capitalism?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] It’s changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism. It’s ending the struggle to—or this searching for living better. Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better. Not living better. Living better is always at someone else’s expense. Living better is at the expense of destroying the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, what are you calling here—for here at the UN climate summit?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Defense of the rights of Mother Earth. The earth is our life. Nature is our home, our house. Happily, the United Nations have declared a Mother Earth Day. If the mother is recognized as Mother Earth, it’s something that can’t be sold, it’s something that can’t be—it can’t be violated, something sacred. This is nature. This is planet earth. And that’s why I’ve come here, to defend the rights of Mother Earth, to defend the rights to life, to defend humanity and saving Mother Earth.

AMY GOODMAN: What does climate debt mean, President Morales?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] After the destruction of Mother Earth, it’s important to recognize the rights of Mother Earth. And the best way to recognize this is by paying a climate debt. Second, it’s important to recognize the damages that have been done and attend to the people who have been affected by climate change, people who will lose their island homes, for example, people who will remain without water.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, said today, “We can’t look back; we have to look forward.”

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Looking forward means that we have to review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and humanity. And that’s the problem that planet earth faces today. And this means ending capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, also said today that $100 billion would be promised if a deal were arrived at, not just by the United States, per year, but in a public-private partnership with a number of countries around the world, but only if a deal is arrived at. She would not say what the US would contribute to this. What do you say about the US spending on the issue of global warming versus—well, you talked yesterday about war.

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] The best thing would be that all war spending be directed towards climate change, instead of spending it on troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan or the military bases in Latin America. This money would be better directed to attending to the damages that were created by the United States. And, of course, this isn’t just $100 billion; this is probably trillions and trillions of dollars. How are we going to spend money to kill and not save lives? We have to spend money to save lives, not to kill. These are our differences with capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: You called the war in Afghanistan terrorist. Are you saying President Obama is a terrorist?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] People who send their troops to kill outside their country, that’s terror. There’s not only civil—terrorists dressed as civilians; they can also be dressed in military uniforms. Worse still if they’re financed with the money from the peoples, from taxes. Of course, every country has the right to defend itself, just as every country can defend itself. But invading another country with uniformed people, that’s state terrorism. Moreover, to establish military bases in Latin America with the objective of political control, and where their military base is an empire, that’s not respect for democracy. There is no peace, social peace. There is no development for those countries nor integration in those regions. This is what we’ve lived in South America and Latin America.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your message to President Obama at these climate talks?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] After listening to his speech at the heads of state Summit of the Americas, we were very hopeful that he would be an ally in addressing poverty. Now I’m not so hopeful. Rather, we’re disappointed. If something has changed in the United States, it’s the color of the president. So I’ve been called upon, through administrative resolutions, to close unions, or to eliminate unions, when I’m doing exactly the opposite.  In the report that was done regarding access to trade preferences under the ATPDEA program, it was charged that the Bolivian government has been involved in suppressing unions, when, in fact, quite the contrary, the government’s been very active in providing infrastructure and support to unions through improving the centers where unions meet, etc. Even President Bush did not make any observations about the new clauses in the constitution of Bolivia, whereas under the new administration there have been observations and comments made about the new constitution that’s been drafted, in particular in relation to the management of the gas and oil sectors. This is a clear involvement in Bolivian internal affairs by the Obama administration. At the end of the day, it seems that they’re asking us to change the constitution. This is something that not even Bush did. If we just look at this, this makes Obama seem—look worse than Bush. And the documents are there.

AMY GOODMAN: I know you have to leave. My last question is: you’ve called for a climate tribunal; what do you mean?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Those who do damage to planet earth and those who do damage need to be judged. Those who do not fulfill the terms of the Kyoto Protocol should also be judged. And for those ends, we have to organize a tribunal for climate justice in the United Nations.

AMY GOODMAN: And one degree Celsius?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] That’s our proposal.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it could be achieved?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Yes. Yes, otherwise it would be a lack of commitment to humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think there will be a deal that comes out of Copenhagen?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] I doubt it. We’re developing other proposals for my intervention.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s catastrophic that there’s no deal?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] No, it’s a waste of time. And if the leaders of countries cannot arrive in an agreement, why don’t the peoples then decide together?

AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. I thank you very much, President Morales.

AMY GOODMAN: The Bolivian President Evo Morales speaking to us here in Copenhagen. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. It’s Climate Countdown. You can go to our website at democracynow.org to read the transcript of what President Morales had to say and also to see or hear the video podcast.

Annie Leonard, creator of the original “Story of Stuff,” has hit another one out of the park by breaking down complex political issues into simple, accessible and visually appealing viral videos. Check it out (And share with family and friends)! [alex]

And here is the original, highly-acclaimed “Story of Stuff”

see more at storyofstuff.com

This brief overview of the military, food, health care, etc. industries suggests ways to completely transform and down-scale the economy, which would actually make us all richer. Worth the read! -alex]

We Can Produce Less and Consume More

by Don Fitz

Originally published by ZNet, July 15, 2009.

A major gulf between environmental and social justice activists is “stuff.”  Environmentalists (or at least serious ones) say “less.”  Social justice organizers have the habit of saying “more.”

This divisive question cuts to the edge of the sort of society we want to build.  Deep greens envision a world with much less stuff.  A great outline is Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff. [1]  An excess of human-produced objects destroys species habitat, poisons communities with toxins, depletes oil and intensifies climate change.

Social justice activists, however, have devoted centuries to denouncing capitalism as placing fetters on the expansion of production.  Whether the struggle is against racism, for labor rights, or resistance to imperialism, the cry is for the oppressed to have a much bigger piece of the pie.

In response to the current economic crisis, a near-unanimous chorus sings “There must be a stimulus package.”  There is considerable debate over the size of the stimulus and what should be stimulated but not a whimper asking whether growth is really a good idea.  It is a rare Michael Moore suggesting that auto plants should not produce autos, but rather solar panels and windmills for a society without privately owned cars. [2]  It is even more rare to hear suggestions that auto plants should manufacture less and that unemployment could be resolved by shortening the work week.

A shorter work week is not exactly of the top of most environmental agendas.  In fact, environmentalists often shoot themselves in the foot when they call for “sacrifices” from those who have already done more than their fair share of doing without.

Production and consumption: A broken connection

These conceptual problems stem from progressives using corporate economic frameworks.  The error is believing that there is a connection between the amount of production and the amount of consumption.  The common misperception is that an increase in consumption requires increased production, and, conversely, a fall in production means there will be less available to consume.

Accepting corporate economics, environmentalists make the false conclusion that if CO2 levels are to drop, then people must consume less.  Social justice activists mistakenly believe that putting people back to work and providing basic necessities for all requires an increase in production.  Neither of these are true.  The greatest decrease in CO2 levels would come with a change in production and requires no personal sacrifice.  Increasing production would not guarantee enough jobs; but, changing production could.

The mistake in economic thinking is hardly surprising since there was a direct link between production and consumption during more than 99% of human history.  In pre-capitalist societies, if people wanted more, they produced more of what they wanted.  This characterized the first few centuries of capitalism.

But between WWI and WWII, something happened that could only be considered a problem within the capitalist mode of production: Industry had the ability to produce enough to satisfy everyone’s basic needs.  The first capitalists to realize this were aghast.

Jeffrey Kaplan chronicles their dismay at the discovery “that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.” [3] Though a tiny handful of business leaders thought that America should switch to a four hour workday, most concluded that such leisure could breed radicalism and that a failure to increase production would threaten profits.

In 1929 President Herbert Hoover’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes announced the growing corporate consensus that capitalism could best survive by creating artificial needs. The Committee gleefully announced that “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” [4]
Having grown up in a world of planned obsolescence, most of us have spent our lives watching each new generation of consumer items last for a shorter period of time than the previous one. We grumble, complain and treat decreasing durability and increasing gadgetry as laws of economic nature which are beyond our control.

Capitalism has shown that it is possible to steadily increase the amount of production (about 2-3% annually) with little to no increase in meaningful consumption.  The word “meaningful” is key in understanding whether consumption goes up, goes down, or stagnates.  If a stove is manufactured to last 10 years instead of 50 years, a couple may purchase 5 stoves instead of 1 during a 50 year marriage.  This is an increase in consumption in only the most non-meaningful way.  In the world of real people, as opposed to the fantasy world of economists, there has actually been a slight decrease in meaningful consumption.  There were four times when the couple was without a stove.

Is it possible to decrease production while increasing consumption?

Since the end of WWII, there has been a fantastic increase in production with very little increase in consumption of basic needs and zero increase in personal happiness.  It is easy to miss the flip size of this: Due to the massive overproduction of the damaging and the useless, it is now possible to reduce production while consumption stays the same or even increases. This can be done by (a) producing more durable items, (b) producing different items, (c) changing the relationship between production and society [such as urban redesign] and most often (d) doing some combination of (a), (b) and (c).

The ability to produce less and consume more resolves the contradiction between environmental and social justice activism.  Both should focus on “production-side environmentalism” or what is produced rather than “consumption-side environmentalism” or what people purchase. If we produce what people need, there is no reason to urge anyone to “Buy this instead of that.”

The most harmful aspects the economy are on the production side where consumer choices have minimal impact. [5] Arguing whether choices of consumers reduce environmental destruction by 0.2% or 2% is debating whether they are trivial or frivolous. Individual life style changes cannot even approach the 80% reduction in CO2 emissions needed to prevent the tipping point of climate change.

In contrast, changes in production can have an enormous impact on every aspect of the environment. Examining monstrous economic waste reveals that a very rapid decrease to 50% of current levels of production could occur simultaneous with an increase in consumption.  Once that it achieved, we can enter a second phase of reducing production to 30%, 20% or perhaps 10% of current levels while continuing to improve the quality of people’s lives.

By reducing and fundamentally changing entire areas of production, it is possible to reduce the overall mass of stuff while having zero effect on meaningful consumption.  Dramatically reducing production would profoundly reduce CO2 emissions, extend the use of available oil by centuries, and eliminate human expansion into species habitat.  If people working at and living near manufacturing facilities were the ones making decisions about production, it would become possible to eliminate toxins that poison humans and other species.

Let’s take a look at how that could happen in a few sectors of the economy.

Militarism

Just how do you “consume” militarism?  Does it mean that you have increased “security?”  Is it the ability to preserve your life, home and community?

Expanding US military production will not increase the consumption of security.  It would make us less secure (meaning decreased consumption). The only way to increase the consumption of security is by halting the US assault on peoples throughout the world.

Additionally, the military is the only sector of the economy where emissions of green-house gases (GHG) can be reduced by greater than 100%.  This is because militarism is the only type of economic activity whose primary purpose is destruction.

When a road is bombed in Serbia, energy is used to rebuild it.  Energy usage translates to the emission of GHG, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2).  When a home is leveled in Afghanistan, reconstruction requires energy.  Every hospital brought down and every person maimed in Iraq means CO2 emissions during the treatment of patients and construction of new treatment facilities.

Military production is unique. If it were halted, GHG emissions would be reduced by an amount equal to (a) GHG emitted from repairing what the military bombed, plus (b) GHG produced during its regular activities of building bases, using weapons and transporting troops and equipment.

Though the official figure for the military budget is $623 billion, the War Resistors League [6] calculates total military-related spending at $1,118 billion by including NASA, Department of Energy nukes, vet benefits and interest on past military debts. Another $110 billion should be tacked on for extra spending on the war in Iraq.

The gross domestic product (GDP) is $13,246.6 billion. [7]  Putting these together leads to an estimate that just under a tenth of the US economy is military-related spending:

[$1,188B + $110B] / $13,246.6B = 9.80%

This only accounts for military sales to the Pentagon.  Since US arms manufacturers are major providers for regimes throughout the world, military spending actually accounts for considerably more than 10% of the GDP.  Steve Martinot estimates that “The military is connected and conjoined to roughly 50% of all economic activity in the US.” [8]

Militarism may contribute more than any other sector of the economy to oil depletion, creation of toxins and habitat destruction.  Yet, the one area of the economy where a greater than 100% reduction in greenhouse gases is possible is the area least likely to be discussed in connection with climate change. Clearly, reducing military (including nuclear) production would increase consumption by (a) providing more security and (b) destroying less infrastructure.

The food industry

When the 21st century began, obesity outpaced hunger. [9]  In the current world, hunger has nothing to do with either the quantity of food produced or the size of the food industry.  Increasing the size of the food industry would (a) increase corporate profits and (b) increase obesity with its related problems such as diabetes, blood pressure and heart disease.  Increasing the quantity of food produced would do nothing to end starvation, which is caused by overpricing and non-distribution of food.

Food is the most basic necessity. It illustrates what “decreasing production” of an industrial sector means.  It does not mean decreasing the amount of the commodity produced.  The “production of food” encompasses the labor and other inputs that go into what Americans eat, including:

·  huge agricultural equipment, its manufacture, and the oil to operate it;
·  chemical fertilizers and pesticides, research to create them, and everything to transport and store them;
·  genetically engineered seed, its research, and Monsanto’s legal team and seed police which perpetrate criminal trespass to steal plant samples;
·  the entire chain of food processing and packaging (up to 99% of the cost of some products);
·  transportation of 1400 miles from “farm to fork” for the average morsel of food;
·  manufacture of trucks, boats, planes, roads and docks to transport food;
·  advertising in order to manufacture the desire to eat garbage masquerading as food, and,
·  growing 8 to 10 times as much grain to produce a pound of beef protein as would be contained in the grain itself.

Adding these together means that it could be possible to produce as much or more food than America currently consumes with less than 10% of the economic energy that currently goes into agro-industry.  A dramatic overhaul of production would increase consumption by (a) increasing the quality (nutrition) of food we eat, and (b) increasing the consumption of healthy living by decreasing obesity-related disorders.

Clothing (and appliances)

Until the last few decades consumer goods were designed to last.  Post-WWI corporations faced the dilemma that increasing the durability of products would mean that people would have what they needed with little reason to purchase more.  By the post WWII period, planned obsolescence had slammed clothing, appliances and household items full force.

When I speak on global warming, I like to wear a blue corduroy shirt I bought when I was 17.  It still has all the fuzzy nap between ridges, even though corduroy I bought in the 1980s and 1990s has long since fallen apart. In 2009, I turned 61.  That proves beyond a doubt that, in 1965, clothing manufacturers knew how to produce corduroy that would last for 44 years. Every piece of corduroy that falls apart sooner than that does so by design.

People of my generation and older can tell dozens of stories of things that “used to last” — shoes, dishes, coffee pots, desks, furniture, everything bought for the home or office. The most vile form of commoditization is the disposable bag, bottle, cup, plate, and camera designed to be used a single time and then spend centuries contaminating groundwater or choking distant aquatic life.

This is one reason that trying to guilt trip people into “buying less to save the planet” is pointless. How much we buy is determined less by environmental awareness and more by product durability and what we are forced to purchase to keep a job and to survive.

Business is not immune to the ever-decreasing durability that plagues consumers.  Computers and computer software suck capital from industry as they drain family budgets with their out-of-date-by-design formatting.

Take all the useless junk that people are persuaded that they need, add it to those useful goods with a premeditated plan to fall apart, and ask “How much manufacturing is truly needed for the consumer goods that make for a quality life?”  Production could decrease by at least 70% with zero decrease in the quality of life and the increase in mental health that would come from knowing that you probably don’t have to fix or buy something tomorrow.

Shelter

Current standards for urban planning anticipate that 2% of US buildings will be replaced every year. [10]  That means the average house is expected to last 50 years.  Does that make a 50 year old home an old building?  Many European buildings went up 500 years ago.  That proves that 500 years ago architects knew how to design buildings that would last for 500 years.

Architects should be able to replicate that in the 21st century.  Or maybe the problem isn’t individual architects, but a building sector pushing to have each generation of homes constructed to worse standards than the generation before.

The construction industry has gleefully joined the agro-food complex and consumer goods manufacturers in intentionally undermining the use value of what they produce.  After I spoke about global warming at an area high school, the principal privately challenged my figure that US buildings are designed to last 50 years.  “I went to a city council meeting last week,” he told me.  “And they were approving construction of a new government building that the architect said would last 20 years.”

“And did the architect promise it would be covered with eco-gadgets?” I wanted to know.

“Solar panels.  Double-flush toilets.  It would have everything.”

The amount of energy saved with green gadgets is lost many times over by erecting new buildings when existing ones will do fine.  What could be more absurd than building mountains of new eco-homes when existing homes are being made empty by foreclosures?

Imagine a “green building” plan that said …

1. No building could go up unless there was an absence of unused comparable building space within 50 miles; and,
2. Any new building would have to be constructed to a 500 year standard.

It should be obvious that if buildings were constructed to last 10 times as long we would need one tenth as many new buildings.  There is no reason that we should not be able to ensure a home for every family (increase in consumption) at the same time there is less construction (decrease in production).

Single payer health care

What does “consumption” of health care mean?  If it means getting endless tests, surgery and pills that make you sicker, then increased production is required to increase the consumption of health care.  But if we define “consumption” of health care to mean having better health, then increased consumption can only occur with a huge decrease in the health care industry.

The life expectancy in the US is 78.0 years.  The life expectancy in Cuba is 78.0 years.  The annual cost of health care in Cuba is $193 per person.  The cost of health care in the US is over 20 times as much, over $4500 per person per year. A reasonable American could conclude that when s/he spends $100 on health care, less than $5 goes to keeping her/him healthy and over $95 goes to the cancerous growth of the sickness industry. [11]

This suggests that the US could decrease health care costs by 90% and still spend twice as much per person as does Cuba.  Just how could the US make such incredibly deep cuts in the cost of “medical production” without damaging (and even improving) the quality of health care?

·  Eliminate health insurance companies.  The insurance industry alone soaks up at least 30% and possibly 50% of US health care costs [12]
·  Focus on community preventive care rather than hospital care.  Hospitals are necessary for many emergency treatments. Childbirth and locked mental health wards are examples of what the industry has medicalized in pursuit of profit.
·  Eliminate most medications.  Require physicians to document that available non-medication treatments have been exhausted prior to writing a scrip.  I dumped my last primary care physician after he started yelling at me for refusing to take meds for blood pressure (which is now under control by changes in diet and exercise).
·  Replace most specialists with neighborhood primary care physicians.  Everyone living in a US city should be able to reach a primary care physician by walking or cycling for less than 15 minutes.  The fact that the medical establishment cannot conceptualize this shows its contempt for preventive care.

Increasing the production of health care means bloating the profits of the insurance industry, hospital complexes, equipment manufacturers and drug pushers.  Such increased production would not make Americans healthier. That can only happen by totally redesigning health care into a much smaller system than it is now.

Transportation

Increasing the production of cars will not increase the speed with which people arrive at where they need to go. More cars means more roads, more distance between destination points, and more time spent traveling.

Nevertheless, the automobile industry would have us believe that improving transportation means putting more cars on the road.  Corporate environmentalists nod in agreement, accepting the car culture as an Act of God but wishing it would be based on hybrid, electric or hydrogen cars. Shallow green plans to cope with transportation are consistently devoid of any thought of reducing the production of cars.

A deep green approach to transportation would focus on eliminating at least 95% of privately owned cars in American cities. Such a plan might look something like this:

·  Redesign cities to rebirth local businesses so that people can make 80% of their trips by walking or cycling.
·  Ensure that frequent and cheap mass transit allows for people to use it for 80% of other trips.
·  Establish car-sharing or ride-sharing for the 4% of trips remaining.
·  Only after the above are adopted, eliminate parking spaces except for emergency, construction and car-shared vehicles.

Would this increase or decrease the “consumption” of a transportation system?  Orthodox economists would insist that it would not be increasing consumption because people would not be driving in ever-increasing circles. This rigid mindset fails to realize that transportation means getting from point A to point B, or from all the points A to all the points B you need to get to. The more that destination points are spread apart by urban sprawl and the more that roads are choked with cars, even “green” cars, the longer and more miserable transportation is.  Despite what economists might tell you, this is increased consumption of agony, not increased consumption of transportation.

If people can get to all the where-they-need-to-go’s quicker, easier and in a more healthy way, their consumption of transportation can go up while the production of cars plummets.

Not necessarily a good thing to do

Just because you have the ability to so something does not necessarily mean that it is a good thing to do. As a society, 21st century American has the ability to simultaneously decrease production and increase consumption. While this is a beginning step, it does not mean that it is a path that need be long followed.

It should be possible to rapidly reduce US production by 50% while the average person would have the ability to consume more.  If getting serious about addressing climate change and related catastrophes became the norm and if reducing production were to be seen as a virtue, people might think, “Now that shirts last four times as long and only cost a little more, I can afford to have 80 shirts instead of 30.  But do I really need 80 shirts?” [13]

Once production for human need replaces production for corporate profit, it becomes possible to reconnect production and consumption.  When people again produce what they need, reducing what they consume means less would be produced.

Multiply 80 shirts by a thousand commodities and hundreds of millions of consumers and we have Phase 2 of the reduction of production.  Phase 1 is the reduction of production with an increase of consumption.  Phase 2 is an intensified reduction of consumption based on a reduction of consumption and an improvement in the quality of life.  Is it realistic to imagine reducing production to 30%, 20% or even 10% of current levels?

Phase 2: Less production, less consumption and a better life

Militarism. With the US having a military budget greater than the rest of the world combined, 800 military bases on which the sun never sets, and enough nuclear weapons to disintegrate every person many times over, it could reduce its spending by over 90% with zero threat to national security. A Phase 1 reduction in military production by 90% would be accompanied by spending some of that money at home in useful areas of the economy and some abroad to repair the damage done.  Phase 2 reduction would begin if people asked, “If we are already providing the basic necessities of life with other economic changes, instead of using military savings to produce additional goods, why don’t we produced nothing extra at all and use the savings to reduce the work week?” [14]

Food. There might be as much as a 90% drop in food inputs by reducing transportation, pesticides, fertilizers, equipment, processing, packaging, genetic contamination and meat.  As people watch this happen with no decrease in the quantity but a huge increase in the quality of food, the stage will be set for Phase 2. Wes Jackson, Stan Cox and their colleagues at The Land Institute have provided brilliant guidelines for developing hybrid lines of perennial food plants that would reduce the amount of land tilled, leading to less erosion and less land being needed for food production. Add this to the expansion of numerous techniques of organic and indigenous farming throughout the world to yield continuous ways to reduce agricultural inputs. [15]

Consumer goods. Core to the concept of increasing consumption while decreasing production is requiring consumer goods to be manufactured to standards of life expectancies that are many times what they are now. During Phase 1, people could well see their work week getting shorter while they accumulate even more stuff than they have now. Railing against people for personal accumulation does little good for many reasons, one of which is if one person buys less, then another person (or a government, a business or a bank) buys or invests more.  It is only when production as a whole drops that reductions in personal consumption can lead to further drops in production.  In this context, people might well decide to share tools and washing machines and children might enjoy clothes passed down from older siblings, which, multiplied millions of times intensify the downward trend in production.

Construction. When we ask how many centuries instead of how many decades a new building should last, it is also time to start thinking about the second phase of decelerating construction.  The question for that phase is: If we focus on retrofitting existing structures, how close to zero new construction can we get?  How do we modify what we already have to create housing collectives, co-housing communities and urban ejidos?  In a post-market economy, new social relationships in living would become the dominant factor in architecture.  More dense living and a smaller space per person would be the sine qua non of deep green urban redesign.

Transportation. The great transportation contradiction is that the more people who own cars, the longer it takes to get from points A to points B.  As mentioned, increased car ownership increases the distance between destination points as well as obviously putting more cars on the road.  The drive can take a dive only if people can get there without four wheels.  Phase 1 of transportation reformulation means designing communities for walking and biking in order to reduce car ownership.  Phase 2 begins when people collectively identify needs that can be met without their going anywhere.  For example, imagine food warehouses replacing supermarkets.  Households combine electronic grocery lists into a neighborhood order that the warehouse delivers and is then disaggregated by neighbors.  Instead of thousands of cars each filling a massive parking lot, a few dozen delivery trucks fill orders.

Health care. A big reason for bad health care is the industry organizing itself separate and apart from communities.  If neighborhood health centers were to replace distant offices, insurance companies, quick fixes, drugs, hospitals and overpaid specialists, people could then ask how else they could chip away at the sickness business while improving the quality of their lives.  Though redesigning neighborhoods so people can walk to their doctor and kick soda machines out of schools is a part of this, changes can be much bigger.  Communities could ask: How can a neighborhood share the care of severely disabled people rather than constructing more nursing homes and treatment centers with three shifts per day and a management team that answers to insurance companies?

Barriers

Webster’s defines misanthrope as “one who hates or mistrusts all people.” Sincere environmentalists often border on misanthropy when they claim that “the problem is people” and prescribe “sacrifice” or “doing without” as solutions for ecological catastrophe.

Social justice activists can throw up an equivalent roadblock to progressive unity when they support proposals for endless economic growth.  The greatest barrier to coping with climate change, peak oil, toxins and habitat destruction is the total mass of production.  This mass is increasing; its increase vastly outpaces any real or imagined increase in consumption; and its increase is made worse by peddling green gadgets.

This eco-gadget pseudo-solution has expanded to the point that it is itself a major barrier.  The shallow green quest for perpetual motion machines fuels the corporate myth that technology can solve crises of an over-technologized society.  It diverts attention from examining why a social system would require an irrational increase in the production of objects when there are already far too many.

We cannot respond to every industry that should be abolished, shrunk, or changed to producing durable goods by saying “Let them build solar panels.”

·  If we replaced every weapons factory and every nuke with solar panel factories…
·  If we replaced every health insurance building and every drug company with solar panel factories…
·  If we replaced every auto plant with solar panel factories…
·  If solar panel production made up for the lowered quantity of production that manufacturing durable goods would cause…
·  If solar panel production made up for the decline in construction that building homes to last for 500 years would cause…

If we actually created that many solar panels and put them on our houses, we would all be cremated by the amount of heat generated.

At some point, we need to recognize that we just do not need to produce so much.  The point of enough stuff was reached about 75 years ago and we have been witnessing geometrically increasing obsolescence ever since.

We have the ability to cut back on production while providing for everyone’s needs.  This should be the beginning point of socially aware environmentalism.  It should be central to environmental social justice.

Don Fitz is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is published for members of the Green Party USA.  He can be contacted at fitzdon@aol.com

Notes

1. Free online at http://www.storyofstuff.com/

2. http://michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=248

3. Kaplan, J. (May/June, 2008). The gospel of consumption: And the better future we left behind. Orion Magazine. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962

4. Kaplan p. 2

5. Fitz, D. Energy, environment and exhortationism.  Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought.  No. 49, Spring, 2009, 21-25.
6. www.warresistors.org <http://www.warresistors.org>

7. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Department of Commerce http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm (Table 3)

8. Martinot, S. Militarism and global warming. Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought. No. 42, Winter, 2007, p. 16.

9. Popkin, B.M. (September 2007). The world is fat. Scientific American, 297 (3), 88-95.

10. Kutscher, C.F. (Ed.) Tackling climate change in the U.S.: Potential carbon emissions reduction from energy efficiency and renewable energy by 2030.  American Solar Energy Society, 2007. www.ases.org/climate <http://www.ases.org/climate>  change

11. Dresang, L.T., Brebrick, L., Murray, D., Shallue, A., & Sullivan-Vedder, L., 2005. Family medicine in Cuba: Community-oriented primary care and complementary and alternative medicine. Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, 18 (4), 297-303.

12. Lindorff, Dave http://counterpunch.com/lindorff06242009.html

13. While there could be a 90% or greater reduction in several economic sectors, economies of scale may mean that a much smaller drop in basic industry could be achieved, perhaps meaning that less than a 90% overall decrease would occur.

14. If militarism accounts for 11% of the GDP and it were reduced to 1% of the current GDP, that would be a reduction of the GDP by 10%. That could translate to 10% more goods being produced or it could translate to a reduction of the 40-hour work week to 36 hours, or it could translate to 5% more goods being produced and shipped abroad as reparations for US war crimes simultaneous with a 5% decrease in the work week to 38 hours.

15. Cox, S. Sick planet: Corporate food and medicine. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008.  Glover, J.D., Cox, C.M., & Reganold, J.P., August, 2007. Future farming: A return to roots? Scientific American, 297 (2), 82-89.

But just as An Inconvenient Truth does, Food Inc. hurts its impressive presentation by missing the landing. The movie tells us exactly what the problem is, but neglects to present an adequate solution to the concerned audience, who by the end of the film is ready to take action.  Instead, the makers of Food Inc. tell us that this horrible corrupt system can be undone if we “vote with our dollars” and buy organic yogurt from Wal-Mart, even though Michael Pollan in the film has already told us that organic and healthy foods cost more and many families can’t afford them.  Is this film aimed at people who think social change means being more mindful about their personal consumption habits? This might make people feel better, but will it actually stop the machine of destruction that is the industrial food system?

In this essay (below), author Derrick Jensen refutes the logic of this sort of “change” as ineffective – consumers don’t make change, organized citizens/workers/students/communities do.  He rightly argues that “moral purity” is a different, and ultimately less noble, goal than “to confront and take down those systems.”  This is one of Jensen’s better essays, but I still find it lacking in another crucial measure: Does it inspire hope?  Jensen tends towards the apocalyptic, which shuts down people’s ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, a light which is crucial to help us find our path out of the darkness.

I hope my website provides real solutions to the enormous problems we face, while also inspiring hope that we can achieve those solutions, ourselves. Making better individual consumption/lifestyle decisions is a great thing, and part of the picture, but it’s not enough. We need to work together, to organize, to achieve the social change that is needed, and that we deserve. [alex]

Why personal change does not equal political change

by Derrick Jensen

Published in the July/August 2009 issue of Orion magazine

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

February 2009
By Bruce E. Levine

Originally published by ZMag.

At a giant Ikea store in Saudi Arabia in 2004, three people were killed by a stampede of shoppers fighting for one of a limited number of $150 credit vouchers. Similarly, in November 2008, a worker at a New York Wal-Mart was trampled to death by shoppers intent on buying one of a limited number of 50-inch plasma HDTVs.

Jdiniytai Damour, a temporary maintenance worker was killed on “Black Friday.” In the predawn darkness, approximately 2,000 shoppers waited impatiently outside Wal-Mart, chanting, “Push the doors in.” According to Damour’s fellow worker Jimmy Overby, “He was bum-rushed by 200 people. They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.” Witnesses reported that Damour, 34 years old, gasped for air as shoppers continued to surge over him. When police instructed shoppers to leave the store after Damour’s death, many refused, some yelling, “I’ve been in line since yesterday morning.”

The mainstream press covering Damour’s death focused on the mob of crazed shoppers and, to a lesser extent, irresponsible Wal-Mart executives who failed to provide security. However, absent in the corporate press was anything about a consumer culture and an insane society in which marketers, advertisers, and media promote the worship of cheap stuff.

Along with journalists, my fellow mental health professionals have also covered up societal insanity. An exception is the democratic-socialist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980). Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955), wrote: “Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.”

While people can resist the cheap-stuff propaganda and not worship at Wal-Mart, Ikea, and other big-box cathedrals—and stay out of the path of a mob of fundamentalist consumers—it is difficult to protect oneself from the slow death caused by consumer culture. Human beings are every day and in numerous ways psychologically, socially, and spiritually assaulted by a culture which:

• creates increasing material expectations
• devalues human connectedness
• socializes people to be self-absorbed
• obliterates self-reliance
• alienates people from normal human emotional reactions
• sells false hope that creates more pain

Increasing material expectations.
These expectations often go unmet and create pain, which fuels emotional difficulties and destructive behaviors. In a now classic 1998 study examining changes in the mental health of Mexican immigrants who came to the United States, public policy researcher William Vega found that assimilation to U.S. society meant three times the rate of depressive episodes for these immigrants. Vega also found major increases in substance abuse and other harmful behaviors. Many of these immigrants found themselves with the pain of increased material expectations that went dissatisfied and they also reported the pain of diminished social support.

Devaluing of human connectedness.
A 2006 study in the American Sociological Review noted that the percentage of Americans who reported being without a single close friend to confide in rose in the last 20 years from 10 percent to almost 25 percent. Social isolation is highly associated with depression and other emotional problems. Increasing loneliness, however, is good news for a consumer economy that thrives on increasing numbers of “buying units”—more lonely people means selling more televisions, DVDs, psychiatric drugs, etc.

Promotes selfishness.
Self-absorption is one of many reasons for U.S. skyrocketing rates of depression and other emotional difficulties—and self-absorption is exactly what a consumer culture demands. The Buddha, 2,500 years ago, recognized the relationship between selfish craving and emotional difficulties, and many observers of human beings, from Spinoza to Erich Fromm, have come to similar conclusions.

Obliterates self-reliance.
The loss of self-reliance can create painful anxiety, which fuels depression and other problematic behaviors. In modern society, an increasing number of people—women as well as men—cannot cook a simple meal. They will never know the anti-anxiety effects of being secure in their ability to prepare their own food, grow their own vegetables, hunt, fish, or gather food for survival. In a consumer culture, such self-reliance makes no sense. At some level, people know that should they lose their incomes—not impossibilities these days—they have no ability to survive.

Alienation from humanity.
The priests of consumer culture—advertisers and marketers—know that fundamentalist consumers will buy more if they are alienated from such normal reactions as boredom, frustration, sadness, and anxiety. If these priests can convince us that a given emotional state is shameful or evidence of a disease, then we will be more likely to buy not only psychiatric drugs, but also all kinds of products to make ourselves feel better. When we become frightened and alienated from a natural human reaction, this “pain over pain” creates more fuel for depression and other self-destructive behaviors and harmful actions.

Pain of false hope.
The false hope of fundamentalist consumerism is that we will one day discover a product that can predictably manipulate moods without any downsides. Modern psychiatry is a full member of consumer culture. Its “Holy Grail” is a search for the antidepressant that can take away the pain of despair, but not destroy life. In the late 19th century, Freud thought he had found it with cocaine. In the middle of the 20th century, psychiatrists thought they had found it with amphetamines, and later with tricyclic antidepressants like Tofranil and Elavil. At the end of the 20th century, there were the SSRIs, such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft, which were ultimately found to create dependency and painful withdrawal and to be no more effective than placebos. Whatever the antidepressant drug, it is introduced as taking away depression without destroying life. Time after time, it is then discovered that when one tinkers with neurotransmitters, there is—as there is with electroshock and psycho-surgery—damage to life.

Fundamentalists reject both reason and experience. Fundamentalists are attached to dogma and if their dogma fails, they don’t give it up, but instead resolve to deepen their faith and double down on their dogma.

Erich Fromm, 54 years ago, concluded: “Man [sic] today is confronted with the most fundamental choice; not that between Capitalism or Communism, but that between robotism (of both the capitalist and the communist variety), or Humanistic Communitarian Socialism. Most facts seem to indicate that he is choosing robotism and that means, in the long run, insanity and destruction. But all these facts are not strong enough to destroy faith in man’s reason, good will, and sanity. As long as we can think of other alternatives, we are not lost.”

Breaking free of fundamentalist consumerism means thinking of alternatives and it also means an active defiance: choosing to experience the various dimensions of life that have been excluded by the dogma.

Z

My favorite solution: “Neighborhood watch instead of neighborhood watch TV.” [alex]

Prepare for the Best

A guide to surviving — and thriving in — Philadelphia’s new green future.

by Paul Glover

Published: Jan 28, 2009
CityPaper

The Dark Season closes around Philadelphia. Wolves howl, “Tough times coming!” Young professionals with good jobs study budget cuts, watch stocks flail. Career bureaucrats are laid off; college students wonder who’s hiring. Old-timers remember when Philadelphia staggered through the terrible Depression years without jobs or dollars, while crime and hunger rose. Some districts here never escaped that Depression — they’re still choosing between heating and eating.

As usual, the future will be different. Philadelphia’s responses to global warming and market cooling, high fuel and food prices, health unsurance, mortgages, student debt and war will decide whether our future here becomes vastly better or vastly worse. Whether we’re the Next Great City or Next Great Medieval Village. Imagine Philadelphia with one-tenth the oil and natural gas.

But to hell with tragedy. Let’s quit dreading news. Take the Rocky road. There are Philadelphia solutions for every Philadelphia problem.

Imagine instead that, 20 years from now, Philadelphia’s green economy enables everyone to work a few hours creatively daily, then relax with family and friends to enjoy top-quality local, healthy food. To enjoy clean low-cost warm housing, clean and safe transport, high-quality handcrafted clothes and household goods. To enjoy creating and playing together, growing up and growing old in supportive neighborhoods where everyone is valuable. And to do this while replenishing rather than depleting the planet. Pretty wild, right?

Entirely realistic. Not a pipe dream. And more practical than cynical. The tools, skills and wealth exist.

Mayor Michael Nutter foresees we’ll become the “Greenest City in the United States.” So it’s common-sensible to ask, “What are the tools of such a future?” “What jobs will be created?” “Who has the money?” “Where are the leaders?” “How will Philadelphia look?” “What can we learn from other cities?”

Some of the proposals sketched here can be easily ridiculed, because they disturb comfortable work habits, ancient traditions and sacred hierarchies. Yet they open more doors than are closing. They help us get ready for the green economy, and get there first. Big changes are coming so we might as well enjoy the ride. You have good ideas, too — bring ‘em on.

As President Barack Obama says, “Change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up.” Philadelphia’s chronic miseries suggest that primary dependence on legislators, regulators, police, prisons, bankers and industry won’t save us. They’re essential partners, but the people who will best help us are us. As stocks and dollars decay, most new jobs will be created by neither Wall Street nor government. We and our friends and neighbors will start community enterprises; co-operatives for food, fuel, housing and health; build and install simple green technologies to dramatically cut household costs. Then we can have fun. Music, sex, breakfast. Music, sex, lunch. Music, sex, dinner.

Amid the worst daily news, thousands of Philadelphia organizations and businesses, block captains, landlords, homeowners and tenants are already setting the table for an urban feast. Many know they are part of a movement seldom noted by media; others work alone. Some take big bites of this future; others nibble. Several take large risks; others go slow. Rather than stare at gloom, they fix it. They see a future that works.

The trumpets and drums of Philadelphia’s green symphony are its boldest groups and businesses. They set the pace for rebuilding the entire city toward balance with nature. While all green actions are celebrated, here are some Philly “Best of Future” nominations. For more details, see greenjobsphilly.org/future.html.

Challenges: Like an army camped far from its sources of supply, Philadelphia trucks food from hundreds and thousands of miles away, especially in winter. Costs of harvest, processing and distribution rise, raising prices. Fertile soils were scraped bare. Thousands are hungry here. Relax, though, we’re not riding a spoon to the mouth of doom. An urban food army is marching.

Next steps: Philadelphia has 40,000 vacant lots. Their best use is now for growing fruits, berries and veggies. Same with many of our 700 abandoned factories: These are prime sites for vertical and roof farms, hydroponics, aquaculture, mushrooms. Plant the parks, too. Greenhouses extend seasons. Land breathes again when abandoned parking lots are depaved. Edible landscaping blooms meals. Edible community centers process neighborhood yields. Fallen leaves stay in neighborhoods to become new soil. Feeding kitchen scraps to worms (vermiculture) builds the food of food.

Local heroes: Mill Creek Urban Farm, Greensgrow, Weaver’s Way Co-Op Farm, City Harvest, Youth 4 Good, Philadelphia Orchard Project, Neighborhood Gardens Association, Philadelphia Urban Farm Network, Farm to City, edible landscapers, Philadelphia School and Community IPM Partnership, Henry George School, Philadelphia’s greenhouses, Community Supported Agriculture.

World champions: Beijing grows all its vegetables within 60 miles. TerraCycle manufactures organic soil. Guerrilla Gardeners throw seed bombs. Sites: cityfarmer.org, urbanagriculture-news.com, spinfarming.com. Books: Food Not Lawns, The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping. Keywords: depaving, urban land reform, solar envelope zoning.

Big picture: Philadelphia can become a giant orchard and year-round garden, housing and reliably feeding more people than live here today.

Challenges: Within 20 years Philadelphia businesses, homes and agencies that waste energy will close. Philadelphia Gas Works CEO Thomas Knudson recently declared that natural gas is a “transitional fuel” beyond which this city must evolve. The price of coal tripled last year. PECO rates will leap within two years. Electric shut-offs rise. So we’ll rebuild Philadelphia rather than fade.

Next steps: Establish independent neighborhood utilities with wind, passive solar and micro-geothermal. Employ thousands to build and install these. Employ multitudes more to manufacture and install insulation made with newsprint and fly ash (a residue of coal combustion). We’ll get free winter warmth from 500,000 solar windowbox heaters. District heating and cogeneration reduce fuel need. Municipal utilities reduce grid costs. Tree shade reduces cooling costs: Plant a million.

Local heroes: Energy Coordinating Agency, Bio-Neighbors Sustainable Homes, Roofscapes, Philadelphia Green, Philly Tree People, Urban Tree Connection, green contractors. Harold Finegan’s gym needs no fossil fuel for heating and cooling.

World champions: American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Rocky Mountain Institute, Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Book: Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It Ourselves Guide.

Big picture: Philadelphia can function even better with one-tenth the fossil fuel. Our lives will be more secure.

Challenges: Absentee ownership and unemployment discourage repair and foster blight. Gentrification, foreclosure and taxes pressure humble homes. More middle class become homeless daily. Whether rowhouse or condo, homes won’t be affordable unless massively insulated. And hey, river wards, both ocean and sewage, are rising. ‘

Next steps: Renters become homeowners through right-of-first-refusal (landlords offer sale first to renters) and sweat equity credits (renters swap community work for houses). Enforce law requiring absentee owners to have local agents. Shift to Land Value Taxation, which places tax burden on land rather than homes. Equitable development is a legal movement that‘ prevents gentrification through restraints and incentives. Enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires lending in low-income neighborhoods (not sub-prime) and prohibits racial lending. Cease evictions based on dishonest loans. Evict shady lenders. As heating bills rise we’ll move underground, because deep dirt is the best insulation. Not just elites to bunkers (Bill Gates lives inside a hillside), but all of us into pleasant, sunlit ecolonies. Big solar windows catch winter heat. Amend building codes for green innovation.

Local heroes: Hundreds of local organizations fight for and finance affordable neighborhoods. Women’s Opportunity Resource Center, Women’s Community Revitalization Project, Philadelphia Housing Task Force, Community Land Trust Corp., Project H.O.M.E., People’s Emergency Center, African-American Business & Residents Association, Henry George School, Habitat for Humanity, Green Roof Philadelphia, Ray of Hope Project, churches. Major underground buildings in Philadelphia include Franklin Court Museum, Wilma Theater, Penn Center shops.

World champions: Germany requires R70 insulation — three times tighter than the typical U.S. home — in new buildings. National Community Reinvestment Coalition, United for a Fair Economy, Earthships, Boston City Life/Vida Urbana, Equitable Development Toolkit, Shelterforce. Book: The Earth-Sheltered House: An Architect’s Sketchbook.

Big picture: Everyone living in Philadelphia in 50 years will be living in earth shelters. Green means we’ll all be comfortable. No behind left chill.

Challenges: Corporate insurers raise costs, limit choices, resist paying. They block reform legislation. Premiums rise beyond the reach of millions. ‘ Taxes rise to cover city employee benefits and indigent care. Thousands of Philadelphians are stuck in jobs they dislike, to keep insurance. ‘ Philadelphia’s 140,000 uninsured avoid care and die earlier, or go bankrupt paying more. Medicaid’s waiting list grows. Hospitals close; free clinics lose staff. Toxic air and chemicals, junk food and lack of exercise cause much disease. Grassroots action will heal city and citizens.

Next steps: While pushing for universal health care (less bureaucracy, lower cost, free choice), gaps can be filled by genuinely nonprofit regional self-financing systems. Fraternal benefit societies and member-owned co-op health plans create independent safety nets and preventive care clinics. Medical centers can barter, accept Philadelphia MediCash.

Local heroes: Thousands of holistic and allopathic healers, Health Care for All Philadelphia, Catholic Worker Free Clinic, Esperanza Health Center, Congreso de Latinos Unidos, Planned Parenthood, Philadelphia Urban Solutions, Philadelphia Community Acupuncture, Philadelphia FIGHT, Philadelphia Health Care Center, PhilaHealthia, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Shriners Hospital for Children. Dozens more at philllyhealthinfo.org.

World champions: Mutual Health Organizations, Ugandan Health Cooperative, Ithaca Health Alliance, Dr. Patch Adams, Healthcare-NOW!, Book: Health Democracy.

Big picture: When sickness is big business, free healing requires insurrection.

Paul Glover teaches metropolitan ecology and green jobs at Temple University. He is founder of the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), Ithaca HOURS local currency, Citizen Planners of Los Angeles and other groups. He is the author of Green Jobs Philly, Health Democracy and Hometown Money. More information at paulglover.org.

Challenges: Extreme capitalism and extreme socialism trample humanity. Lack of cash and credit kills businesses, jobs and homes. Some folks still have lots of money, but most of us have less. Dollar power dwindles because dollars are backed by less than nothing: rusting industry and $10 trillion debt. So we’ll print real money — neighborhood currencies — backed by real people.

Next steps: Mutual enterprise systems (neither Wall Street nor Red Square) celebrate the spirit of regional enterprise when it serves community and nature. They applaud innovations — public and private and personal — that meet real needs. Local trading credits based on local land, skills, time and tools refresh the economy. Poverty is lack of networks more than lack of dollars, and Philadelphia has thousands of networks — business, professional, technical, fraternal, neighborhood, church, union, electoral, senior, youth, racial, sexual, athletic, hobby, family, friends. Woven together they’re a powerful base of regional trust, trade and wealth. Take your pick of neighborhood and sector currencies. Cities may not issue them but may accept them for taxes.

Local heroes: Philadelphia’s 83 credit unions, Valley Green Bank, e3bank, Equal Dollars, barter exchanges and gift economy, Philadelphia Regional and Independent Stock Exchange, Philadelphia Fund for Ecological Living (PhilaFEL).

World champions: Ithaca HOURS, Berkshares, LETS, Time Banking, National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, Permaculture Credit Union, Grameen Bank microlending, Kiva, Robin Hood Ventures.

Big picture: Dollars control people; local currency connects people.

Challenges: Millions are spent to sanitize polluted river water and pump it to homes. Then we poop into it. Storm drains carry sewage and garbage back to rivers. Sewage treatment does not remove all pharmaceuticals. Old chemical tanks poison groundwater. Sinkholes undermine houses. Bottled-water scam drains local economy. Climate change brings frequent flood and/or drought. ‘ But new technologies will protect our liquid assets.

Next steps: Amend code to permit filtered graywater yard use, and waterless compost toilets. Install watersaving devices. Collect rainwater in rooftop tanks, barrels and swales. Plant xeriscapes. Depave driveways and abandoned parking lots. Start Progressive Street Reclamation, converting least-used streets and alleys to playgrounds and gardens.

Local heroes: Philadelphia Water Department taxes pavement, rewards depaving, distributes rain barrels. Friends of the Wissahickon installs compost toilets in the park. These convert turds into clean, sweet-smelling garden soil.

World champions: Swedes collect urine from apartment houses, store it six months, then use as fertilizer (EcoSanRes). Mexicans collect urine from city hall and schools to fertilize fields (TepozEco). Zimbabweans plant fruit trees atop privy muck (ArborLoo). Book: The Humanure Handbook.

Big picture: Clean water is becoming more valuable than gold. Nobody shits on gold.

Challenges: Philadelphia’s rail system was ripped out for cars, which clog streets and slow emergency response. Cars smash, kill, maim. They inhale paychecks and taxes, exhale rotten air. They compel war for oil. We’ll become stronger and sexier as pedaling bipeds.

Next steps: To risk your life for your country, ride a bike. Hop on the bus. Revive street rail with ultralight passenger cars. Restore regional freight routes. Raise transit funds with local gasoline tax. Make pathways for bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, Segways, scooters and wheelchairs. Restore canals. Zone for mixed use, to reduce travel needs. Live near your work. Employ multitudes making mosaic sidewalks. Convert paving to playgrounds.

Local heroes: PhillyCarShare, Bike Share Philadelphia, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Neighborhood Bike Works and Bike Church, Critical Mass bike rides, bike shops, Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, Pennsylvania Transit Coalition, PenTrans. Even SEPTA: Trains are clunky and late, but they’re there.

World champions: Carfree Cities conferences, carfree.com, World Naked Bike Ride, Urban Ecology.

Big picture: The first cities rebuilt for proximity rather than speed will win this race.

Challenges: Philadelphia has lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs in 50 years. Now we import stuff once made here. Today, millions of American jobs depend on servicing bad things rather than good things. Car crashes are 8 percent of the GDP. How many jobs would end if criminals went on strike? What jobs would be lost if people ate healthy fresh food and exercised? What if we were content with what we owned?‘ We’ll advance from jobs managing damage to jobs creating a beautiful city worthy of beautiful children.

Next steps: All skills can rotate greenward. Philadelphia needs at least 100,000 green-collar jobs to rebuild, retrofit, plant, harvest, manufacture and repair the homes and tools of the future. Arts and healing arts are green jobs, too.

Local heroes: Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, American Cities Foundation, Penn Future, Ray of Hope Project. Green Jobs Philly, Neighborhood Environmental Action Team, Green Labor Administration, several City Council members.

World champions: Blue Green Alliance (enviros and unions united), Green for All, Apollo Alliance, D.C. Greenworks, Sustainable South Bronx.

Big picture: We’ll develop new definitions of career, success; build green safety nets.

Challenges: America has been outstanding at pouring concrete, going fast and throwing things away. But high costs of raw materials, manufacture and trucking are causing consumers to quit consuming for the sake of consumption. Our Next Great Economy will sell more of durable value. We’ll all have enough.

Next steps: Regional manufacture will resume as transport costs grow. Top niches will be basics: housing, energy, clothing, housewares. Orchards and gardens and food processing. Holistic healing will grow. Likewise, handcrafts. Everything energy-efficient.

Local heroes: Sustainable Business Network, Buy Local Philly, White Dog Café, Provenance Architecturals, Re-Store, flea markets, farmers markets, materials exchanges, repair shops, recycling.

World champions: Socially Responsible Investing. ‘Magazines: Green Business Journal, Adbusters. ‘Site: storyofstuff.org.

Big picture: Smart money invests to raise all boats.

Challenges: Many bureaucrats trained in obsolete systems resist change, defend their turf. City’s health insurers and pensions drag city down.

Next steps: Government welcomes grassroots innovators by passing laws facilitating greening of economy and neighborhoods: urban land reform, urban agriculture, sanitation and water codes, building codes. When urgent change is resisted, citizens underthrow the government.

Local heroes: Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, PWD, streets guys who dig on rainy nights.

World champions: City of Curitiba, Brazil, encourages experimentation and welcomes mistakes. Magazines: Governing, Planners Network.

Big picture: Good government takes risks, makes change easy. “Make no little plans” —Daniel Burnham.

Challenges: Whenever people are hungry, cold or fearful due to unemployment, crime rises. Isolated resentment becomes street protest or riot. Racism flares. Taxpayers cannot hire enough police to escape chaos. Public safety is secured by creating safety nets for food, fuel, housing and health care.

Next steps: Jobs fight crime. Decriminalize marijuana locally. Hire ex-offenders. Neighborhood watch instead of neighborhood watch TV.

Local heroes: Block captains, Men United for a Better Philadelphia, Ray of Hope Project, City Harvest, People Against Recidivism.

World champions: Time Dollar Youth Court, Rainbow Police. Book: Defensible Space.

Big picture: People who are respected, loved and secure do not kill. ‘

Challenges: Curriculums are less relevant to getting jobs or fixing society. Forty-five percent of Philadelphia high-schoolers drop out. Students are graded like eggs.

Next steps: Respectfully teaching skills of neighborhood management will make learning fun. Teach creativity rather than consumerism.

Local heroes: Thousands of dedicated teachers, Neighborhood Enterprise Schoolteachers, magnet schools, Waldorf School. Newspaper: The Notebook.

World champions: Paolo Freire; free university education in Europe.

Big picture: Loving learning is the first lesson.

Challenges: Media that’s cynical about grassroots power features crime and celebrities.

Next steps: Empower average people to make music, art, dance, theater. Revive street-corner singing. Bring back vaudeville. Parachute clowns into parks.

Local heroes: Mural Arts Program, Raices Culturales Latinoamericanas, Spiral Q Puppet Theater, 373 groups listed at philaculture.org. Locally made homecrafts. Philadelphia’s 2,800 murals feature children, heroes, nature.

World champions: El Sistema (Venezuela) makes barrio kids into maestros.

Big picture: Everyone is a creative genius. Good culture releases that power and beauty.

Whether you’re a student, job seeker, employee or retiree, there are thousands of ways to connect to Philadelphia’s green movement. You’re the one we’ve been waiting for. Check the ever-growing list of local green-jobs Web sites (start with greenjobsphilly.org/future.html). Visit local green businesses and groups. Time to bring those murals to life.

Paul Glover teaches metropolitan ecology and green jobs at Temple University. He is founder of the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), Ithaca HOURS local currency, Citizen Planners of Los Angeles and other groups. He is the author of Green Jobs Philly, Health Democracy and Hometown Money. More information at paulglover.org.

Also note that I strongly disagree with his recommendation to abandon politics – he’s right that politicians are swine but i think he’s wrong in overlooking people’s ability to build a resistance movement that can make real changes to our society, despite politicians best efforts to derail it.  So with that, enjoy the article! [alex]

Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.

My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the “Collapse Gap” – to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War.

Slide [2] The subject of economic collapse is generally a sad one. But I am an optimistic, cheerful sort of person, and I believe that, with a bit of preparation, such events can be taken in stride. As you can probably surmise, I am actually rather keen on observing economic collapses. Perhaps when I am really old, all collapses will start looking the same to me, but I am not at that point yet.

And this next one certainly has me intrigued. From what I’ve seen and read, it seems that there is a fair chance that the U.S. economy will collapse sometime within the foreseeable future. It also would seem that we won’t be particularly well-prepared for it. As things stand, the U.S. economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act. And so I am eager to put my observations of the Soviet collapse to good use.

Slide [3] I anticipate that some people will react rather badly to having their country compared to the USSR. I would like to assure you that the Soviet people would have reacted similarly, had the United States collapsed first. Feelings aside, here are two 20th century superpowers, who wanted more or less the same things – things like technological progress, economic growth, full employment, and world domination – but they disagreed about the methods. And they obtained similar results – each had a good run, intimidated the whole planet, and kept the other scared. Each eventually went bankrupt.

Slide [4] The USA and the USSR were evenly matched in many categories, but let me just mention four.

The Soviet manned space program is alive and well under Russian management, and now offers first-ever space charters. The Americans have been hitching rides on the Soyuz while their remaining spaceships sit in the shop.

The arms race has not produced a clear winner, and that is excellent news, because Mutual Assured Destruction remains in effect. Russia still has more nuclear warheads than the US, and has supersonic cruise missile technology that can penetrate any missile shield, especially a nonexistent one.

The Jails Race once showed the Soviets with a decisive lead, thanks to their innovative GULAG program. But they gradually fell behind, and in the end the Jails Race has been won by the Americans, with the highest percentage of people in jail ever.

The Hated Evil Empire Race is also finally being won by the Americans. It’s easy now that they don’t have anyone to compete against.

Slide [5] Continuing with our list of superpower similarities, many of the problems that sunk the Soviet Union are now endangering the United States as well. Such as a huge, well-equipped, very expensive military, with no clear mission, bogged down in fighting Muslim insurgents. Such as energy shortfalls linked to peaking oil production. Such as a persistently unfavorable trade balance, resulting in runaway foreign debt. Add to that a delusional self-image, an inflexible ideology, and an unresponsive political system.

Slide [6] An economic collapse is amazing to observe, and very interesting if described accurately and in detail. A general description tends to fall short of the mark, but let me try. An economic arrangement can continue for quite some time after it becomes untenable, through sheer inertia. But at some point a tide of broken promises and invalidated assumptions sweeps it all out to sea. One such untenable arrangement rests on the notion that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad, to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years. Free money with which to buy energy equals free energy, and free energy does not occur in nature. This must therefore be a transient condition. When the flow of energy snaps back toward equilibrium, much of the US economy will be forced to shut down.

Slide [7] I’ve described what happened to Russia in some detail in one of my articles, which is available on SurvivingPeakOil.com. I don’t see why what happens to the United States should be entirely dissimilar, at least in general terms. The specifics will be different, and we will get to them in a moment. We should certainly expect shortages of fuel, food, medicine, and countless consumer items, outages of electricity, gas, and water, breakdowns in transportation systems and other infrastructure, hyperinflation, widespread shutdowns and mass layoffs, along with a lot of despair, confusion, violence, and lawlessness. We definitely should not expect any grand rescue plans, innovative technology programs, or miracles of social cohesion.

Slide [8] When faced with such developments, some people are quick to realize what it is they have to do to survive, and start doing these things, generally without anyone’s permission. A sort of economy emerges, completely informal, and often semi-criminal. It revolves around liquidating, and recycling, the remains of the old economy. It is based on direct access to resources, and the threat of force, rather than ownership or legal authority. People who have a problem with this way of doing things, quickly find themselves out of the game.

These are the generalities. Now let’s look at some specifics.

Slide [9] One important element of collapse-preparedness is making sure that you don’t need a functioning economy to keep a roof over your head. In the Soviet Union, all housing belonged to the government, which made it available directly to the people. Since all housing was also built by the government, it was only built in places that the government could service using public transportation. After the collapse, almost everyone managed to keep their place.

In the United States, very few people own their place of residence free and clear, and even they need an income to pay real estate taxes. People without an income face homelessness. When the economy collapses, very few people will continue to have an income, so homelessness will become rampant. Add to that the car-dependent nature of most suburbs, and what you will get is mass migrations of homeless people toward city centers.

Slide [10] Soviet public transportation was more or less all there was, but there was plenty of it. There were also a few private cars, but so few that gasoline rationing and shortages were mostly inconsequential. All of this public infrastructure was designed to be almost infinitely maintainable, and continued to run even as the rest of the economy collapsed.

The population of the United States is almost entirely car-dependent, and relies on markets that control oil import, refining, and distribution. They also rely on continuous public investment in road construction and repair. The cars themselves require a steady stream of imported parts, and are not designed to last very long. When these intricately interconnected systems stop functioning, much of the population will find itself stranded.

Slide [11] Economic collapse affects public sector employment almost as much as private sector employment, eventually. Because government bureaucracies tend to be slow to act, they collapse more slowly. Also, because state-owned enterprises tend to be inefficient, and stockpile inventory, there is plenty of it left over, for the employees to take home, and use in barter. Most Soviet employment was in the public sector, and this gave people some time to think of what to do next.

Private enterprises tend to be much more efficient at many things. Such laying off their people, shutting their doors, and liquidating their assets. Since most employment in the United States is in the private sector, we should expect the transition to permanent unemployment to be quite abrupt for most people.

Slide [12] When confronting hardship, people usually fall back on their families for support. The Soviet Union experienced chronic housing shortages, which often resulted in three generations living together under one roof. This didn’t make them happy, but at least they were used to each other. The usual expectation was that they would stick it out together, come what may.

In the United States, families tend to be atomized, spread out over several states. They sometimes have trouble tolerating each other when they come together for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, even during the best of times. They might find it difficult to get along, in bad times. There is already too much loneliness in this country, and I doubt that economic collapse will cure it.

Slide [13] To keep evil at bay, Americans require money. In an economic collapse, there is usually hyperinflation, which wipes out savings. There is also rampant unemployment, which wipes out incomes. The result is a population that is largely penniless.

In the Soviet Union, very little could be obtained for money. It was treated as tokens rather than as wealth, and was shared among friends. Many things – housing and transportation among them – were either free or almost free.

Slide [14] Soviet consumer products were always an object of derision – refrigerators that kept the house warm – and the food, and so on. You’d be lucky if you got one at all, and it would be up to you to make it work once you got it home. But once you got it to work, it would become a priceless family heirloom, handed down from generation to generation, sturdy, and almost infinitely maintainable.

In the United States, you often hear that something “is not worth fixing.” This is enough to make a Russian see red. I once heard of an elderly Russian who became irate when a hardware store in Boston wouldn’t sell him replacement bedsprings: “People are throwing away perfectly good mattresses, how am I supposed to fix them?”

Economic collapse tends to shut down both local production and imports, and so it is vitally important that anything you own wears out slowly, and that you can fix it yourself if it breaks. Soviet-made stuff generally wore incredibly hard. The Chinese-made stuff you can get around here – much less so.

Slide [15] The Soviet agricultural sector was notoriously inefficient. Many people grew and gathered their own food even in relatively prosperous times. There were food warehouses in every city, stocked according to a government allocation scheme. There were very few restaurants, and most families cooked and ate at home. Shopping was rather labor-intensive, and involved carrying heavy loads. Sometimes it resembled hunting – stalking that elusive piece of meat lurking behind some store counter. So the people were well-prepared for what came next.

In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket, which is supplied from far away using refrigerated diesel trucks. Many people don’t even bother to shop and just eat fast food. When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the nation’s girth, is visible, clear across the parking lot. A lot of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what comes next. If they suddenly had to start living like the Russians, they would blow out their knees.

Slide [16] The Soviet government threw resources at immunization programs, infectious disease control, and basic care. It directly operated a system of state-owned clinics, hospitals, and sanatoriums. People with fatal ailments or chronic conditions often had reason to complain, and had to pay for private care – if they had the money.

In the United States, medicine is for profit. People seems to think nothing of this fact. There are really very few fields of endeavor to which Americans would deny the profit motive. The problem is, once the economy is removed, so is the profit, along with the services it once helped to motivate.

Slide [17] The Soviet education system was generally quite excellent. It produced an overwhelmingly literate population and many great specialists. The education was free at all levels, but higher education sometimes paid a stipend, and often provided room and board. The educational system held together quite well after the economy collapsed. The problem was that the graduates had no jobs to look forward to upon graduation. Many of them lost their way.

The higher education system in the United States is good at many things – government and industrial research, team sports, vocational training… Primary and secondary education fails to achieve in 12 years what Soviet schools generally achieved in 8. The massive scale and expense of maintaining these institutions is likely to prove too much for the post-collapse environment. Illiteracy is already a problem in the United States, and we should expect it to get a lot worse.

Slide [18] The Soviet Union did not need to import energy. The production and distribution system faltered, but never collapsed. Price controls kept the lights on even as hyperinflation raged.

The term “market failure” seems to fit the energy situation in the United States. Free markets develop some pernicious characteristics when there are shortages of key commodities. During World War II, the United States government understood this, and successfully rationed many things, from gasoline to bicycle parts. But that was a long time ago. Since then, the inviolability of free markets has become an article of faith.

Slide [19] My conclusion is that the Soviet Union was much better-prepared for economic collapse than the United States is.

I have left out two important superpower asymmetries, because they don’t have anything to do with collapse-preparedness. Some countries are simply luckier than others. But I will mention them, for the sake of completeness.

In terms of racial and ethnic composition, the United States resembles Yugoslavia more than it resembles Russia, so we shouldn’t expect it to be as peaceful as Russia was, following the collapse. Ethnically mixed societies are fragile and have a tendency to explode.

In terms of religion, the Soviet Union was relatively free of apocalyptic doomsday cults. Very few people there wished for a planet-sized atomic fireball to herald the second coming of their savior. This was indeed a blessing.

Slide [20] One area in which I cannot discern any Collapse Gap is national politics. The ideologies may be different, but the blind adherence to them couldn’t be more similar.

It is certainly more fun to watch two Capitalist parties go at each other than just having the one Communist party to vote for. The things they fight over in public are generally symbolic little tokens of social policy, chosen for ease of public posturing. The Communist party offered just one bitter pill. The two Capitalist parties offer a choice of two placebos. The latest innovation is the photo finish election, where each party buys 50% of the vote, and the result is pulled out of statistical noise, like a rabbit out of a hat.

The American way of dealing with dissent and with protest is certainly more advanced: why imprison dissidents when you can just let them shout into the wind to their heart’s content?

The American approach to bookkeeping is more subtle and nuanced than the Soviet. Why make a state secret of some statistic, when you can just distort it, in obscure ways? Here’s a simple example: inflation is “controlled” by substituting hamburger for steak, in order to minimize increases to Social Security payments.

Slide [21] Many people expend a lot of energy protesting against their irresponsible, unresponsive government. It seems like a terrible waste of time, considering how ineffectual their protests are. Is it enough of a consolation for them to be able to read about their efforts in the foreign press? I think that they would feel better if they tuned out the politicians, the way the politicians tune them out. It’s as easy as turning off the television set. If they try it, they will probably observe that nothing about their lives has changed, nothing at all, except maybe their mood has improved. They might also find that they have more time and energy to devote to more important things.

Slide [22] I will now sketch out some approaches, realistic and otherwise, to closing the Collapse Gap. My little list of approaches might seem a bit glib, but keep in mind that this is a very difficult problem. In fact, it’s important to keep in mind that not all problems have solutions. I can promise you that we will not solve this problem tonight. What I will try to do is to shed some light on it from several angles.

Slide [23] Many people rail against the unresponsiveness and irresponsibility of the government. They often say things like “What is needed is…” plus the name of some big, successful government project from the glorious past – the Marshall Plan, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program. But there is nothing in the history books about a government preparing for collapse. Gorbachev’s “Perestroika” is an example of a government trying to avert or delay collapse. It probably helped speed it along.

Slide [24] There are some things that I would like the government to take care of in preparation for collapse. I am particularly concerned about all the radioactive and toxic installations, stockpiles, and dumps. Future generations are unlikely to able to control them, especially if global warming puts them underwater. There is enough of this muck sitting around to kill off most of us. I am also worried about soldiers getting stranded overseas – abandoning one’s soldiers is among the most shameful things a country can do. Overseas military bases should be dismantled, and the troops repatriated. I’d like to see the huge prison population whittled away in a controlled manner, ahead of time, instead of in a chaotic general amnesty. Lastly, I think that this farce with debts that will never be repaid, has gone on long enough. Wiping the slate clean will give society time to readjust. So, you see, I am not asking for any miracles. Although, if any of these things do get done, I would consider it a miracle.

Slide [25] A private sector solution is not impossible; just very, very unlikely. Certain Soviet state enterprises were basically states within states. They controlled what amounted to an entire economic system, and could go on even without the larger economy. They kept to this arrangement even after they were privatized. They drove Western management consultants mad, with their endless kindergartens, retirement homes, laundries, and free clinics. These weren’t part of their core competency, you see. They needed to divest and to streamline their operations. The Western management gurus overlooked the most important thing: the core competency of these enterprises lay in their ability to survive economic collapse. Maybe the young geniuses at Google can wrap their heads around this one, but I doubt that their stockholders will.

Slide [26] It’s important to understand that the Soviet Union achieved collapse-preparedness inadvertently, and not because of the success of some crash program. Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. The last thing we want is a perfectly functioning, growing, prosperous economy that suddenly collapses one day, and leaves everybody in the lurch. It is not necessary for us to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning to match the Soviet lackluster performance in this area. We have our own methods, that are working almost as well. I call them “boondoggles.” They are solutions to problems that cause more problems than they solve.

Just look around you, and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance, legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says “I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen” – by all means encourage him! It’s not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Slide [27] Certain types of mainstream economic behavior are not prudent on a personal level, and are also counterproductive to bridging the Collapse Gap. Any behavior that might result in continued economic growth and prosperity is counterproductive: the higher you jump, the harder you land. It is traumatic to go from having a big retirement fund to having no retirement fund because of a market crash. It is also traumatic to go from a high income to little or no income. If, on top of that, you have kept yourself incredibly busy, and suddenly have nothing to do, then you will really be in rough shape.

Economic collapse is about the worst possible time for someone to suffer a nervous breakdown, yet this is what often happens. The people who are most at risk psychologically are successful middle-aged men. When their career is suddenly over, their savings are gone, and their property worthless, much of their sense of self-worth is gone as well. They tend to drink themselves to death and commit suicide in disproportionate numbers. Since they tend to be the most experienced and capable people, this is a staggering loss to society.

If the economy, and your place within it, is really important to you, you will be really hurt when it goes away. You can cultivate an attitude of studied indifference, but it has to be more than just a conceit. You have to develop the lifestyle and the habits and the physical stamina to back it up. It takes a lot of creativity and effort to put together a fulfilling existence on the margins of society. After the collapse, these margins may turn out to be some of the best places to live.

Slide [28] I hope that I didn’t make it sound as if the Soviet collapse was a walk in the park, because it was really quite awful in many ways. The point that I do want to stress is that when this economy collapses, it is bound to be much worse. Another point I would like to stress is that collapse here is likely to be permanent. The factors that allowed Russia and the other former Soviet republics to recover are not present here.

In spite of all this, I believe that in every age and circumstance, people can sometimes find not just a means and a reason to survive, but enlightenment, fulfillment, and freedom. If we can find them even after the economy collapses, then why not start looking for them now?

Thank you.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2325

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. (Thomas Jefferson, US President; 1743 – 1826)

America is dying. It is self-destructing and bringing the rest of the world down with it.

Often referred to as a sub-prime mortgage collapse, this obfuscates the real reason. By associating tangible useless failed mortgages, at least something ‘real’ can be blamed for the carnage. The problem is, this is myth. The magnitude of this fiscal collapse happened because it was all based on hot air.

The banking industry renamed insurance betting guarantees as ‘credit default swaps’ and risky gambling wagers were called ‘derivatives’. Financial managers and banking executives were selling the ultimate con to the entire world, akin to the snake-oil salesmen from the 18th century but this time in suits and ties. And by October 2009 it was a quadrillion-dollar (that’s $1,000 trillion) industry that few could understand.

Propped up by false hope, America is now falling like a house of cards.

It all began in the early part of the 20th century. In 1907 J.P. Morgan, a private New York banker, published a rumour that a competing unnamed large bank was about to fail. It was a false charge but customers nonetheless raced to their banks to withdraw their money, in case it was their bank. As they pulled out their funds the banks lost their cash deposits and were forced to call in their loans. People now therefore had to pay back their mortgages to fill the banks with income, going bankrupt in the process. The 1907 panic resulted in a crash that prompted the creation of the Federal Reserve, a private banking cartel with the veneer of an independent government organisation. Effectively, it was a coup by elite bankers in order to control the industry.

When signed into law in 1913, the Federal Reserve would loan and supply the nation’s money, but with interest. The more money it was able to print, the more ‘income’ for itself it generated. By its very nature the Federal Reserve would forever keep producing debt to stay alive. It was able to print America’s monetary supply at will, regulating its value. To control valuation however, inflation had to be kept in check.

The Federal Reserve then doubled America’s money supply within five years, and in 1920 it called in a mass percentage of loans. Over five thousand banks collapsed overnight. One year later the Federal Reserve again increased the money supply by 62%, but in 1929 it again called the loans back in, en masse. This time, the crash of 1929 caused over sixteen thousand banks to fail and an 89% plunge on the stock market. The private and well-protected banks within the Federal Reserve system were able to snap up the failed banks at pennies on the dollar.

The nation fell into the Great Depression and in April 1933 President Roosevelt issued an executive order that confiscated all gold bullion from the public. Those who refused to turn in their gold would be imprisoned for ten years, and by the end of the year the gold standard was abolished. What had been redeemable for gold became paper ‘legal tender’, and gold could no longer be exchanged for cash as it had once been.

Later, in 1971, President Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard altogether, therefore no longer trading at the internationally fixed price of $35. The US dollar was now worth whatever the US decided it was worth because it was ‘as good as gold’. It had no standard of measure, and became the universal currency. Treasury bills (short-term notes) and bonds (long-term notes) replaced gold as value, promissory notes of the US government and paid for by the taxpayer. Additionally, because gold was exempt from currency reporting requirements it could not be traced, unlike the fiduciary (i.e. that based upon trust) monetary systems of the West. That was not in America’s best interest.

After the Great Depression private banks remained afraid to make home loans, so Roosevelt created Fannie Mae. A state supported mortgage bank, it provided federal funding to finance home mortgages for affordable housing. In 1968 President Johnson privatised Fannie Mae, and in 1970, Freddie Mac was created to compete with Fannie Mae. Both of them bought mortgages from banks and other lenders, and sold them onto new investors.

The post World War II boom had created an America flush with cash and assets. As a military industrial complex, war exponentially profited the US and, unlike any empire in history, it shot to superpower status. But it failed to remember that, historically, whenever empires rose they fell in direct proportion.

Americans could afford all the modern conveniences, exporting its manufactured goods all over the world. After the Vietnam War, the US went into an economic decline. But people were loath to give up their elevated standard of living despite the loss of jobs, and production was increasingly sent overseas. A sense of delusion and entitlement kept Americans on the treadmill of consumer consumption.

In 1987 the US stock market plunged by 22% in one day because of high-risk futures trading, called derivatives, and in 1989 the Savings & Loan crisis resulted in President George H.W. Bush using $142 billion in taxpayer funds to rescue half of the S&L’s. To do so, Freddie Mac was given the task of giving sub-prime (below prime-rate) mortgages to low-income families. In 2000, the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com bubble burst, and 50% of high-tech firms went bankrupt wiping $5 trillion from their over-inflated market values.

After this crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan kept interest rates so low they were less than the rate of inflation. Anyone saving his or her income actually lost money, and the savings rate soon fell into negative territory.

During the 1990s, advertisers went into overdrive, marketing an ever more luxurious lifestyle, all made available with cheap easy credit. Second mortgages became commonplace, and home equity loans were used to pay credit card bills. The more Americans bought, the more they fell into debt. But as long as they had a house their false sense of security remained: their home was their equity, it would always go up in value, and they could always remortgage at lower rates if needed. The financial industry also believed that housing prices would forever climb, but should they ever fall the central bank would cut interest rates so that prices would jump back up. It was, everyone believed, a win-win situation.

Greenspan’s rock-bottom interest rates let anyone afford a home. Minimum wage service workers with aspirations to buy a half million-dollar house were able to secure 100% loans, the mortgage lenders fully aware that they would not be able to keep up the payments.

So many people received these sub-prime loans that the investment houses and lenders came up with a new scheme: bundle these virtually worthless home loans and sell them as solid US investments to unsuspecting countries who would not know the difference. American lives of excess and consumer spending never suffered, and were being propped up by foreign nations none the wiser.

It has always been the case that a bank would lend out more than it actually had, because interest payments generated its income. The more the bank loaned, the more interest it collected even with no money in the vault. It was a lucrative industry of giving away money it never had in the first place. Mortgage banks and investment houses even borrowed money on international money markets to fund these 100% plus sub-prime mortgages, and began lending more than ten times their underlying assets.

After 9/11, George Bush told the nation to spend, and during a time of war, that’s what the nation did. It borrowed at unprecedented levels so as to not only pay for its war on terror in the Middle East (calculated to cost $4 trillion) but also pay for tax cuts at the very time it should have increased taxes. Bush removed the reserve requirements in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from 10% to 2.5%. They were free to not only lend even more at bargain basement interest rates, they only needed a fraction of reserves. Soon banks lent thirty times asset value. It was, as one economist put it, an ‘orgy of excess’.

It was flagrant overspending during a time of war. At no time in history has a nation gone into conflict without sacrifice, cutbacks, tax increases, and economic conservation.

And there was a growing chance that, just like in 1929, investors would rush to claim their money all at once.

To guarantee, therefore, these high risk mortgages, the same financial houses that sold them then created ‘insurance policies’ against the sub-prime investments they were selling, marketed as Credit Default Swaps (CDS). But the government must regulate insurance policies, so by calling them CDS they remained totally unregulated. Financial institutions were ‘hedging their bets’ and selling premiums to protect the junk assets. In other words, the asset that should go up in value could also have a side-bet, just in case, that it might go down. By October 2008, CDS were trading at $62 trillion, more than the stock markets of the whole world combined.

These bets had absolutely no value whatsoever and were not investments. They were just financial instruments called derivatives – high stakes gambling, ‘nothing from nothing’ – or as Warren Buffet referred to them, ‘Weapons of Financial Mass Destruction’. The derivatives trade was ‘worth’ more than one quadrillion dollars, or larger than the economy of the entire world. (In September 2008 the global Gross Domestic Product was $60 trillion).

Challenged as being illegal in the 1990s, Greenspan legalised the derivatives practise. Soon hedge funds became an entire industry, betting on the derivatives market and gambling as much as they wanted. It was easy because it was money they did not have in the first place. The industry had all the appearances of banks, but the hedge funds, equity funds, and derivatives brokers had no access to government loans in the event of a default. If the owners defaulted, the hedge funds had no money to pay ‘from nothing’. Those who had hedged on an asset going up or down would not be able to collect on the winnings or losses.

The market had become the largest industry in the world, and all the financial giants were cashing in: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, and AIG. But homeowners, long maxed out on their credit, were now beginning to default on their mortgages. Not only were they paying for their house but also all the debt amassed over the years for car, credit card and student loans, medical payments and home equity loans. They had borrowed to pay for groceries and skyrocketing health insurance premiums to keep up with their bigger houses and cars; they refinanced the debt they had for lower rates that soon ballooned. The average American owed 25% of their annual income to credit card debts alone.

In 2008, housing prices began to slide precipitously downwards and mortgages were suddenly losing value. Manufacturing orders were down 4.5% by September, inventories began to pile up, unemployment was soaring and average house foreclosures had increased by 121% and up to 200% in California.

The financial giants had to stop trading these mortgage-backed securities, as now their losses would have to be visibly accounted for. Investors began withdrawing their funds. Bear Stearns, heavily specialised in home loan portfolios, was the first to go in March.

Just as they had done in the 20th century, JP Morgan swooped in and picked up Bear Stearns for a pittance. One year prior Bear Stearns shares traded at $159 but JP Morgan was able to buy in and take over at $2 a share. In September, Washington Mutual collapsed, the largest bank failure in history. JP Morgan again came in and paid $1.9 billion for assets valued at $176 billion. It was a fire sale.

Relatively quietly over the summer Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the publicly traded companies responsible for 80% of the home mortgage loans, lost almost 90% of their value for the year. Together they were responsible for half the outstanding loan amounts but were now in debt $80 to every $1 in capital reserves.

To guarantee they would stay alive, the Federal Reserve stepped in and took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. On September 7th 2008 they were put into “conservatorship”: known as nationalisation to the rest of the world, but Americans have difficulty with the idea of any government run industry that required taxpayer increases.

What the government was really doing was handing out an unlimited line of credit. Done by the Federal Reserve and not US Treasury, it was able to bypass Congressional approval. The Treasury Department then auctioned off Treasury bills to raise money for the Federal Reserve’s own use, but nonetheless the taxpayer would be funding the rescue. The bankers had bled tens of billions from the system by hedging and derivative gambling, and triggered the portfolio inter-bank lending freeze, which then seized up and crashed.

The takeover was presented as a government funded bailout of an arbitrary $700 billion, which does nothing to solve the problem. No economists were asked to present their views to Congress, and the loan only perpetuates the myth that the banking system is not really dead.

In reality, the damage will not be $700 billion but closer to $5 trillion, the value of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s mortgages. It was nothing less than a bailout of the quadrillion dollar derivatives industry which otherwise faced payouts of over a trillion dollars on CDS mortgage-backed securities they had sold. It was necessary, said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, to save the country from a “housing correction”. But, he added, the $700 billion taxpayer funded takeover would not prevent other banks from collapsing, in turn causing a stock market crash.

In other words Paulson was blackmailing Congress in order to lead a coup by the banking elite under the false guise of necessary legislation to stop the dyke from flooding. It merely shifted wealth from one class to another, as it had done almost a century prior. No sooner were the words were out of Paulson’s mouth before other financial institutions began imploding, and with them the disintegration of the global financial system – much modelled after the lauded system of American banking.

In September the Federal Reserve, its line of credit assured, then bought the world largest insurance company, AIG, for $85 billion for an 80% stake. AIG was the largest seller of CDS, but now that it was in the position of having to pay out, from collateral it did not have, it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

In October the entire country of Iceland went bankrupt, having bought American worthless sub-prime mortgages as investments. European banks began exploding, all wanting to cash in concurrently on their inflated US stocks to pay off the low interest rate debts before rates climbed higher. The year before the signs had been evident, when the largest US mortgage lender Countrywide fell. Soon after, the largest lender in the UK, Northern Rock, went under – London long having copied Wall Street creative financing. Japan and Korea’s auto manufacturing nosedived by 37%, global economies contracting. Pakistan is on the edge of collapse too, with real reserves at $3 billion – enough to only buy a month’s supply of food and oil and attempting to stall payments to Saudi Arabia for the 100,000 barrels of oil per day it provides to the country. Under President Musharraf, who left office in the nick of time, Pakistan’s currency lost 25% of its value, its inflation running at 25%.

Meanwhile energy costs had soared, with oil reaching a peak of almost $150 per barrel in the summer. The costs were immediately passed on to the already spent homeowner, in rising heating and fuel, transport and manufacturing costs. Yet 30% of the cost of a barrel of oil was based upon Wall Street speculators, climbing to 60% as a speculative fear factor during the summer months. As soon as the financial crisis hit, suddenly oil prices slid down, slicing oil costs to $61 from a high of $147 in June and proving that the 60% speculation factor was far more accurate. This sudden decline also revealed OPEC’s lack of control over spiralling prices during the past few years, almost squarely laid on the shoulders of Saudi Arabia alone. When OPEC, in September, sought to maintain higher prices by cutting production, it was Saudi Arabia who voted against such a move at the expense of its own revenue.

Europe then decided that no more would it be ruined by the excess of America. ‘Olde Europe’ may have had enough of being dictated to by the US, who refused to compromise on loans lent to their own broken nations after WWII. On October the 13th, the once divided EU nations unilaterally agreed to an emergency rescue plan totaling $2.3 trillion. It was more than three times greater than the US package for a catastrophe America alone had created.

By mid October, the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P 500 had erased all the gains they made over the previous decade. Greenspan’s pyramid scheme of easy money from nothing resulted in a massive overextension of credit, inflated housing prices, and incredible stock valuations, achieved because investors would never withdraw their money all at once. But now it was crashing at break-neck speed and no solution in sight. President Bush said that people ought not to worry at all because “America is the most attractive destination for investors around the globe.”

Those who will hurt the most are the very men and women who grew the country after WWII, and saved their pensions for retirement due now. They had built the country during the war production years, making its weapons and arms for global conflict. During the Cold War the USSR was the ever-present enemy and thus the military industrial complex continued to grow. Only when there is a war does America profit.

Russia will not tolerate a new cold war build-up of ballistic missiles. And the Middle East has seen its historical ally turn into its worst nightmare, be it militarily or economically. No longer will these nations continue to support the dollar as the world’s currency. The world’s economy is no longer America’s to control and the US is now indebted to the rest of the world. No more will the US be able to demand its largest Middle Eastern oil supplier open up its banking books so as to be transparent and free from corruption and terrorist connections lest there be consequences – the biggest act of criminal corruption in history has just been perpetrated by the United States.

It was the best con game in town: get paid well for selling vast amounts of risk, fail, and then have governments fix the problem at the expense of the taxpayers who never saw a penny of shared wealth to begin with.

There is no easy solution to this crisis, its effects multiplying like an infectious disease.

Ironically, least affected by the crisis are Islamic banks.

They have largely been immune to the collapse because Ilamic banking prohibits the acquisition of wealth via gambling (or alcohol, tobacco, pornography, or stocks in armaments companies), and forbids the buying and selling of a debt as well as usury. Additionally, Shari’ah banking laws forbid investing in any company with debts that exceed thirty percent.

“Islamic banking institutions have not failed per se as they deal in tangible assets and assume the risk” said Dr. Mohammed Ramady, Professor of Economics at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals. “Although the Islamic banking sector is also part of the global economy, the impact of direct exposure to sub-prime asset investments has been low” he continued. “The liquidity slowdown has especially affected Dubai, with its heavy international borrowing. The most negative effect has been a loss of confidence in the regional stock markets.” Instead, said Dr. Ramady, oil surplus Arab nations are “reconsidering overseas investments in financial assets” and speeding up their own domestic projects.

Eight years ago, in May 2000, Saudi Islamic banker His Highness Dr. Nayef bin Fawaaz ibn Sha’alan publicly gave a series of economic lectures in Gulf states. At the time his research showed that Arab investments in the US, to the tune of $1.5 trillion, were effectively being held hostage and he recommended they be pulled out and reinvested in the tangibles of the Arab and Islamic markets. “Not in stocks however because the stock market could be manipulated remotely, as we have seen in the last couple of years in the Arab market where trillions of dollars evaporated” he said.

He warned then that it was a certainty that the US economic system was on the verge of collapse because of its cumulative debts, ever-increasing deficit and the interest on that debt. “When the debts and deficits come due, they just issue new Treasury bonds to cover the old bonds due, with their interest and the new deficit too.” The cycle cannot be stopped or the debt cancelled because the US would no longer be able to borrow. The consequence of relieving this cycle would be a total collapse of their economic system as opposed to the partial, albeit massive, crash of 2008.

“Islamic banking”, said Dr. Al-Sha’alan, “always protects the individuals’ wealth while putting a cap on selfishness and greed. It has the best of capitalism – filtering out its negatives – and the best of socialism – filtering out its negatives too.” Both systems inevitably had to fail. Additionally, Europe and Japan did not need to be held accountable and indebted to America anymore for protection against the Soviets.

“The essential difference between the Islamic economic system and the capitalist system”, he continued “is that in Islam wealth belongs to God – the individual being only its manager. It is a means, not a goal. In capitalism, it is the reverse: money belongs to the individual, and is a goal in and of itself. In America especially, money is worshipped like God.”

In sum, the crash of the entire global economic system is a result of America’s fiscal arrogance based upon one set of rules for itself and another for the rest of the world. Its increased creative financing deluded its people into a false sense of security, and now looks like the failure of capitalism altogether.

The whole exercise in democracy by force against Arab Muslim nations has almost bankrupted the US. The Cold War is over and the US has nothing to offer: no exports, no production, few natural resources, and no service sector economy.

The very markets that resisted US economic policies the most, having curbed foreign direct investments into America, are those who will fare best and come out ahead.

But not before having paid a very high price.

Tanya Cariina Hsu is a political researcher and analyst focusing on Saudi Arabian and US relations. One of the contributors to recent written testimony on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the US Congressional Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of FOCA (Friends of Charities Association) in its Hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., her analysis has been published and critically acclaimed throughout the US, Europe and the Middle East.

The first to break the barrier against public discussion of the Israeli influence upon US foreign policy decision making, in Capitol Hill’s “A Clean Break” Symposium in Washington D.C. in 2004, as the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy (IRmep) Director of Development and Senior Research Analyst, Ms. Hsu remains an International Fellow with the Institute.

Born in London, she re-located to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2005 and is currently completing a book on US policy towards Saudi Arabia.

[Kevin Phillips, author of "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism", surveys the economic crisis facing U.S.-dominated global capitalism - including peak oil, the collapse of the Dollar, rising food costs, and the growing dominance of the banking and credit industries. This is fairly radical stuff coming from a former GOP strategist.]

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is one of the most serious signs of this overall global crisis of American capitalism?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, not to single out just one, I have an approach I use to say that normally when a country is—United States is—heading into a recession, there are one or two, sometimes three, factors that you worry about. But at this point in time, the American economy, you can think of it as being kind of in a shark tank, and there are like six or seven sharks, and you don’t usually see anything like that number.

And just to skim the list quickly, we have a financialized economy in which we don’t make much anymore, and finance is up to 20 to 21 percent of the US GDP, and manufacturing down to 12. Finance dominates the US economy.

The second problem is that we have massive debt, both public and private. It’s gone up about 700 percent since the early 1980s, staggering numbers where there—we basically have $50 trillion worth of credit market debt, which is tradable debt. And people just have no idea of this. It’s not government debts that’s the problem, it’s private sector debt, both financial and corporate and then in the consumer sector with credit cards and then mortgage debt. We just have this extraordinary level of it. 340 percent of the gross domestic product, that’s how big debt is. And the last time something was close to this—and it was less—was in the late 1920s and early 1930s. So it’s enormously a vulnerable, dangerous thing.

Third shark in the tank is the collapse of home prices. They continue to follow the scary trajectory that has people predicting that there’s going to be a 15 to 20 percent decline in home prices, which would be the sharpest since the Great Depression.

Then you can go to shark number four, that’s global commodity inflation. Oil and food, people are as worried now about the price of milk as they are about the price of a gallon of gasoline. That’s a global problem, but it makes a mockery of the administration’s pretense that there’s no inflation.

Now, the next shark in the tank is obviously the price of oil. And it’s not just global commodity inflation, it’s the problem that we see of oil production peaking in the world sometime in the next ten to twenty years. And the advance signs of this are scarcity in peaking in certain countries. And the prediction just came out of Goldman Sachs a couple of days ago that within a fairly short period of time, probably this year, you’re going to see $150 or $200 oil.

And that’s because, partly at least, of the scarcity, but the US dollar has been tied historically since the 1970s to oil, because of a deal worked out when OPEC wanted a price increase. Henry Kissinger and others were involved in getting OPEC to commit that they would sell and buy oil only in dollars and that they would invest their petrodollars in the US, in Treasury debt. So we have a currency that’s profited from the connection to oil, which sustained it in many ways. But now oil has boomeranged on the United States.

We have to spend $400 billion a year to import the oil we need. We don’t have the basis for controlling oil anymore, after the idiocy in Iraq, which was partly put in motion to solve the oil problem, and instead you’ve got oil prices going up 500 percent in five years. So the dollar is on the ropes, and that’s the other shark in the tank.

There has never been a period in anybody’s memory, except very old people who remember the late ’20s and ’30s, where you had so many things converging. And that’s what makes it frightening. And every time the administration says it looks like it’s under control or it’s half-over, you start to get evidence that, no, it’s not under control, and maybe it’s not even a third over.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Kevin Phillips, his latest book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. I want to ask you about how commodity speculation has affected world food prices. We’re seeing food riots now around the world.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, there’s a degree of commodity speculation going on, because a lot of the hedge funds in the United States have a major allocation to commodities, and they see commodities as a particularly attractive play with some of the major currencies losing their respect. And that’s particularly true of the dollar. American hedge funds think it may make more sense to be in commodities than to be in dollars or in American stocks.

But I would not say that the principal driver of global food prices is speculation. A lot of it has to do with climate change. Some of it has to do with energy. Grains that used to be used for food are now possible sources of energy. So is sugar in Brazil. So you’re getting an overlap of what’s food and what’s energy, and the whole commodity sector is being pushed up by that, especially as more and more people move into the lower middle class or middle class in China, in India, in Brazil, and the demand for food and for energy keeps climbing. So this is more than speculation, but they do play a role.

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, you also write about peak oil. What do you mean? And how does this fit into the global crisis of American capitalism?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, it’s a very unfortunate circumstance. The United States used to be the big oil power. We had the big oil resources in the twentieth century, and oil powered our success in two world wars, it made our industry the strongest in the world, and it built our transportation and residential infrastructure, which is now something of a threat because it consumes so much oil. But the United States at this point only produces a third of the oil it needs.

The peak oil question has to do with whether or not global production isn’t either about to peak within the next five, ten, fifteen years—some people believe that it’s peaked already. And if that’s the case, you can expect that, given the demand for oil that can’t be replaced by other things too quickly, certainly not in five to ten years, you’re going to see oil prices just keep climbing. And if people can assume they keep climbing, then they become a speculative vehicle, if you want to get your money out of dollars, which then makes oil prices rising or a huge negative for the dollar, which means that we have this currency which is weakening in ways that raise all kinds of other questions.

So peak oil is one of those things you just won’t see on the front pages of the newspapers, but I wish they would deal with it, because there are lots of things going wrong with the economy that the media, as well as the politicians, really don’t want to put on page one, and page one is where they ought to be. This is serious stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, what could you see as the global crisis at its worst?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, the global crisis has several dimensions. One of the dimensions, obviously, is that if the economy goes sour and if we have a run on the dollar and the value of American dollars declines in a severe way, you’re going to have foreigners buying up a lot more of our industry, and people would want to sell it to them. America’s role as a global debtor would just mushroom. We’d be at the beck and call of other countries. The dollar would be subject to being abandoned by the oil producers. You can have a major league recession in the United States, which of course then would be compounded by all this huge amount of debt beginning to fall in.

But I think there’s another dimension that people tend to forget here. If you have the rise of finance, as we’ve seen it in this country, to be the largest part of the private economy, you have on one hand the growth of the Federal Reserve Board in regulating more and more of the American economy, and they’re partly controlled by the banking sector. They’re not elected by anybody. So you’re missing a democratic ingredient in that respect.

It’s also very true that the growth of finance has involved the growth of a debt and credit industry. And part of what finance has brought as it grows is that more and more people are in more and more debt, and the amount of debt that individuals have and that they have to service is increasingly a burden. And people get into debt to maintain either a living standard they can’t afford or one that’s been nurtured by consumerism and advertising to get people to spend money they don’t have. So you’ve got an element that the public is losing control of its own economic future when you have an economy that’s full of debt and credit industries, which are a mainstay of finance.

The implications of all of this for who controls what within the United States are huge, and that will be especially true if a lot of the debt we’ve built up starts imploding because of higher inflation and higher interest rates.

Video available at Democracy Now!

The Story of Stuff

A little 20-min. video that gives a basic lesson in political economy for the average American consumer. Brilliant!