LESS MAD WORLD


The world is a less mad place to be now. Listening to Jarvis Cocker's guest editor slot on the Today programme this morning, it slowly dawned on me that we're both part of the new orthodoxy. I found myself agreeing with everything he said - many were things I have thought again and again over the past twenty years. The urgent need to push the environment to the top of the political agenda can now be delivered in a flat monotone rather than screamed in panic - because everyone apart from career contrarians (Jeremy Clarkson et al) believes it, at some level. It all seemed a bit dull, however, even though Jarvis was doing his best, just like the mournful progress of a hymn tune which makes its weary way to its final utterly predictable conclusion.

So we had to fight hard for the boring mainstream. And so it came to pass - the UK government and Barack Obama both committed to 80% reductions in carbon emissions by 2050, and I am going into 2009 with a spring in my step and feeling more at home in our strange civilisation. Not only this; the progress of history and ideas is at last resuming. (See September 18th, below) It's not a bad time for the new President to be taking office. The timing is uncannily perfect.

What I'd most like to do in 2009 is get reinspired.

A GREEN NEW DEAL

"As long as the basic tenet of unlimited hoarding of wealth remains fundamental to our economy, economic disparity and environmental degradation will continue. We will continue to accept as fair and inevitable that economic growth creates concentration of wealth, on the one hand, and unemployment, displacement of people and poverty, on the other. Without a fundamental rethinking of the current economic dogma of private property rights above all other values, and that human progress is best measured in increased material consumption, we cannot create an environmentally sustainable and poverty-free society."
Roar Bjonnes, a Proutist thinker.


It is much easier to diagnose the problem than to propose solutions for it, especially solutions that don't contain the kind of dynamic which moves inevitably to some kind of old-style state-controlled economy. I think that, even in the context of a free market economy, certain restrictions would be practicable, and without removing incentives for motivated and successful people. For example:

1. The prohibition of dealing in certain kinds of "junk" stocks, however they are defined: hedge funds, short selling, etc
2. Fixing currency exchange rates, or otherwise prohibiting large-scale currency speculation.
3. An end to corporate lobbying to restore democratic control of parliaments, and the payment of MPs at a more moderate level to attract people who are genuinely interested in public service.
4. Increasing taxation on multinational corporations as part of a co-ordinated reining in of the supranational freedoms which they have accumulated and abused. The money would be used to fund green technologies and training for work in a more environmentally sustainable economy.
5. Repossessed property should be taken into the public domain to replenish the public housing stock, and rented in the first place to the defaulting occupant(s), at a subsidised rate. Over time, there should be a gradual restriction in the number of properties one individual/family is allowed to own.
6. A substantial increase in the minimum wage, which would be paid (including flexible increments) to people working for publicly-funded sustainable projects. This would be paid for by a drastic reduction in military expenditure, as well as far heavier taxation on higher earners.

STRANGE PRIORITIES

A colleague of mine asked a good question today: Why is it that the UK government bought the debts of the Bradford & Bingley the other day (at a cost of £4000 per household, on average) - and yet sold the profitable part to a (privately owned) Spanish bank? Is this simply bad business sense or, more likely, knee-jerk neoliberal thinking by a government that has well and truly lost touch with its roots?

AIN'T JUST THE ONE WAY

"Democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised." George W. Bush, in his closing remarks yesterday. Translation: "I'm shit scared." The best system for whom? And how many alternatives are currently being considered?

GOOD NIGHT TO FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM!

"This is a failure of a system where we relied on the markets and excluded government. And the markets failed." Tony Benn

"The authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have demonstrated that they'll do all they can to protect and preserve institutions that directly touch the lives of millions of people." Robert Preston, BBC News

The events of this week are the final full-stop at the end of the long, rather tedious Thatcher-Blair era when free market dogma was seen to trump all other concerns and put an end to sensible political debates about how our economies should best be structured and run. Suddenly, it's all up for grabs again, and so much the better.

Trumpeted by Reagan and Thatcher and followed blindly ever since, the dogma that people's interests should be subordinated come what may to the whims of the free market rolled back some of the best achievements of the twentieth century. This flawed doctrine bequeathed us the evil inheritance of an ever widening gap between rich and poor, unviable economic prescriptions for developing nations, spiralling property prices, economies built on "industries" that produced nothing, increasing profits in the hands of Fat Cats and financiers, and ever more miserly wages for people who actually did the work and produced the goods. Even more seriously, it was this apparently unassailable idea which has brought the global environment to the brink of collapse. Finally, (finally!) the system has begun to implode.

This leaves an intellectual vacuum into which the new ecological thinking, hitherto dismissed as a heresy of the fringe, can begin to develop and mature in the arena of serious debate. Unfettered by a dogma which now looks as dated and irrelevant as the scholasticism of Medieval Christendom, people (and possibly even the less cautious politicians, when they eventually put down their hymn sheets and realise the world has moved on) will be able to debate green and sustainable solutions to the global problems of the new century without being shouted down. We can dare to imagine, for instance, repowering with wind and solar energy. We can now do better to provide a decent standard of living for everyone without relying on "trickle down". Once unthinkable, now that governments have shown they will actually intervene in the economic sphere, such completely affordable aspirations are now possible with a bit of political imagination and a whole lot of pressure from people on the streets.

We may be going through the birth pangs of a new era and it's been a long time - my whole adult life - coming. The battle of ideas is back on, and there's a whole world out there to be claimed. "For the many", Mr Blair, actually for the many. Good night free market fundamentalism. You won't be missed.

IRREVERSIBLE

"Today is just another Friday in August. Drowsy and close. Office workers' minds are fixed on the weekend, clock-watching, waiting perhaps for a holiday if your finances have escaped the credit crunch and rising food and fuel prices. In the evening, trains will be littered with abandoned newspaper sports pages, all pretending interest in the football transfers. For once it seems justified to repeat TS Eliot's famous lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."
Andrew Sims, New Economic Foundation, writing in the Guardian


(Today I felt like a child who has woken up from a nightmare, except that it's a waking dream and it's continuing. There is almost no one who understands the situation; there's little comfort to be had; it's crouching in the shadows every minute; I'm powerless.)

100 months

from the same article: "But does it have to be this way? Must we curdle in our complacency and allow our cynicism about politicians to give them an easy ride as they fail to act in our, the national and the planet's best interest? There is now a different clock to watch than the one on the office wall. Contrary to being a counsel of despair, it tells us that everything we do from now matters. And, possibly more so than at any other time in recent history."

There's little comfort in that, because most of the people are like the politicians: no one seems to want to know.

get ready for 4 degrees

JAMES LOVELOCK, PASCAL'S WAGER, RALPH NADER & THE ROBOTS


In The Revenge Of Gaia, the new book by the climate scientist James Lovelock, he "predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater." (from an article in today's Guardian.) Given that some kind of catastrophe is inevitable, Lovelock's solution is to "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years till it hits the fan." A lot of people I know have been saying this kind of thing for a while; often they're the same ones who refused to believe in the ecological crisis when it first burst, well, crept, into the newspapers in the late 1980s. Funny, that. Of course it's nice to live with the weight of the world lifted from your shoulders... but there's a more intelligent solution.

We've been here before, in the face of another great defining moment, the retreat of religion. At the time when there was still uncertainty about God's existence, French philosopher Pascal came up with his famous "wager', namely that in the face of this uncertainty, it was a better bet to believe in God because of the size of the prize i.e. eternal bliss. Presumably, the pleasure we might lose in terms of reining in the worst of our Earthly desires would be made up for in the sense of serenity we'd experience by doing the right thing? Anyway, this is how I understand it.

Something similar applies now. It is simply a better bet to act as if we can ameliorate the climate catastrophe. Until we're sure we can't. This time it's the size of the possible loss that counts.

On a related topic, given that we expect climate catastrophe, and that we have daily exposure to the latest evidence (if such were needed) that capitalism isn't working very well at the moment, why isn't there more of a fuss about veteran campaigner Ralph Nader's presidential bid?

Take a minute to look at what Nader stands for. Click the link, go on. He wants to cut the bloated military budget, adopt a carbon tax, lead an "aggressive" clampdown on corporate crime and - if this doesn't sell him, nothing will - impeach Bush & Cheney! None of the other candidates would dare to confront corporate power. But isn't this precisely what needs to be done in 2008? It's hard to believe that so many millions of voters can't see this. (Ignorant? Stupid? Androids? A combination of all of these?)

The mainstream politicians wallow in the public's ignorance/stupidity/roboticness, of course. Even though it's clear we are locked into a kind of danse macabre with global corporations, none of them have the imagination to disengage from this, or even talk about how this might be done. We can have "change", Mr Obama, but it needs to be radical and visionary.

I would like to see the current generation of politicians swept away - by the ballot box if possible, but by any means necessary - to be replaced by more courageous people, like Nader, who are not afraid to say what they believe, and whom we can therefore trust to respond effectively to the current crisis in capitalism, and to the threat of global catastrophe.