THE AGE OF MATERIALISM GONE MAD
The former head of Australia’s Macquarie Bank, Allen Moss retired last month with a final payout of $80million, of which $24.8 million was his annual bonus. In Britain, despite the credit crisis, bankers and their ilk have extracted a record £13 billion in bonuses this year. The rare protest is treated with scorn. A wealth cap? “Utter madness”. Plato said there “should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty or excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil”. Instead of public debate, what we get today are photo ops of billionaires donating laptops to children in Cambodia, etc. This is like a feudal lord’s annual visit to the hovels on his estate, where he presents a bag of potato peelings.
The unquenchable ostentations of the super rich may be good for Armani, Maserati and yacht designers, but it thwarts the global goal of carbon neutrality. (Disclosure: I am partial to an Armani sale). Boomers fiddle around with their worm farms, discuss their carbon footprint and worry about their food miles over lazy weekend lunches, unaware that the soaring sales of Lear jets obliterate their efforts .Most citizens wish to emulate the Forbes Five Hundred lifestyle, than to expose it, and who can blame them/us. Desire is daily drummed into our heads
Tra la la, along comes Hervé Kempf, the environmental editor of Le Monde, with his book, "How the Rich are Destroying the Planet." Kempf’s believes that a “global stateless class composed of the hyper-rich is responsible for our species' headlong rush to environmental destruction, both indirectly, through the rest of society's attempts to imitate and emulate their wasteful habits, and directly, through their control of the levers of power, all presently set at "Catastrophe". You have to love the French. They make you think. Pass the Champagne. Let’s have another revolution. Kempf argues that the ecological crisis and social crisis are two facets of the same disaster. And that this disaster is set in motion by a system of power that has no other end than the maintenance of the ruling classes' privileges”. No, he’s an ecologist, not a Marxist. Don’t expect the economic system to uplift the poor, he says, because it works in the opposite direction, by monopolizing wealth and power at the expense of those who have the least. Think hedge funds, futures trading, merchant banks, arms trading; and think of over 4 million displaced Iraqis around the world, including some 2.2 million inside Iraq, many once middle class, now living in poverty or on miniscule handouts and/ or hideously wounded, scavenging in rubbish dumps. How can you not judge the Western politician perpetrators?
Kempf wants to "bring down the rich" rather than pull up the poor, in order to begin to “respect the thresholds of irreversible deterioration of the planet's resources”. http://www.truthout.org/article/how-rich-are-destroying-planet
An English language edition of the Kempf’s book is due to be published in Britain, October 2008, but don’t expect it to be serialized in Vanity Fair.
So having digested these warnings, have I become clinically depressed? Do I hit the streets with a sign,“The end is nigh”? Am I disheartened? Only sometimes.
In visits to University campuses, I’ve been enthralled by the zest and determination of the current crop of students, as they soak up the kind of knowledge that was never my text books, such The Environmental History of the World, or, even more intriguing, The Geography of Sustainablity. Not everything is going in the wrong direction. Could these be the Planetary Heroes that Al Gore dreams of? See the pic below. Sure, they’ve probably been binge-drinking,(a birthday was being celebrated) but there’s something in their chirpy smiling spirit that’s reassuring. It’s not going to be downhill all the way once this lot hit their stride.
Class of 2008
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