Your question is not easy to answer because on the one hand local food, slow food, and eating properly are obviously good for our health, good for the local community, and probably good for agriculture as well, but simply in political terms we never want to make an argument that suggests we go back to the way it was in the nineteenth century. It may make some of us feel good, or someone running a private dairy farm with 30 to 40 head of cattle might welcome the idea, but it won't ever work for Americans in general, for an industrial society. I think we need to talk in terms of what most Americans care about. An example of where progress has been made is in improving nutrition for children by getting corporate-sponsored sweetened beverages out of schools. This is the only country in the world where many young people under 16 are simultaneously obese and malnourished, and that's because of all the salt and sugar they get from industrial foods.
Without being able to fully answer your question I can say we need to ask the right questions about local agriculture and local food. Right now agribusiness, which in a certain sense has destroyed American agriculture, is being threatened. Before the Civil War 75 to 80 percent of Americans lived in rural communities or on farms whereas now only 2 percent do, if that, which means that most of our food is provided by massive agricultural enterprises. As my wife Leah, who is very involved in both buying and cooking local food, will point out, a large part of the problem with what agribusiness gives us is that it's not food at all. It's artificially constituted chemical stuff designed not to be eaten but to travel well and be kept on the shelf for a very long time. If those are the criteria, then there's nothing to complain about, but unfortunately, you end up eating this pseudo-food, and that causes problems. In order to raise these issues we need to find ways to present what we know is desirable in terms that make sense to families who aren't very green and who don't know the science of nutrition.
I believe it's conceivable that we can change the kind of capitalism we have in this country into something that is more connected with nature and with democracy. I think the unacknowledged villains in all of this, and it's an issue you've dealt with often in your books, have been corporate globalization and international trade. One specific example of what we're up against is that the low-carbon fuel standard which was part of the climate bill in California before it was edited out would have provided a productive and cost-effective market incentive for lower-carbon fuels, but it was challenged as a trade barrier by Canada, which was producing carbon-heavy fuels from tar sands. So no matter what we do, even if we're able to achieve the political will to pass legislation in this country that would force capitalism in a better direction, how do we gain the political will to challenge international corporate globalization and the problems it causes?
You're right. The IMF and the WTO have often been used to challenge California and other states that have tried to do something good, on the grounds that reforms interfere with free trade. If a state does something that's "conservative" in the best sense of conservationist or devoted to health and safety, that's regarded as an interference with free trade in terms of the treaties under the Bretton Woods institutions. It's a very serious problem, but it points to an even more fundamental problem, which is the relationship between democracy and interdependence, democracy and globalization. Here's the basic difficulty: every one of the challenges we face--including global warming, global health plagues, terrorism, drugs, labor markets, technology--is global in scale, yet all of our solutions are national or local. It means we are facing 21st century challenges that are all interdependent and across borders with 18th century nation-state solutions, which can't and don't work. As you point out, even if we solved our problems in this country in terms of health, of nutrition, of oil, it would affect only 20 percent of carbon emissions worldwide. The rest of the world accounts for 80 per cent, so we've got to get it right all together. But we lack the institutions to do that.
We talk about the globalization of crime, of disease, of markets, of anarchy, of terrorism, of weapons of mass destruction. One thing we don't talk about is the globalization of democracy. Unless we either democratize globalization or globalize democracy, we're not going to be able to deal successfully with these problems, even if we restore our own democracy to good health. It's not only about persuading American citizens, it's about persuading people worldwide, and that's why global governance becomes so important. There are numerous transnational organizations like Doctors Without Borders, but the one that's missing is Citizens without Borders. It's hard to figure out how to make citizenship without frontiers not just a slogan but something people believe in.
There's a good reason why local food and local community make so much sense. Human beings want to be rooted: in families, in neighborhoods, in towns. Yet now I demand you become a global citizen? What does that even mean? It's a great abstraction. I'm not a citizen of the world, I'm a citizen of Stockbridge or of Old Lyme or of Detroit or of Mason City, and maybe of the state of Massachusetts or Connecticut or Michigan or Iowa, and maybe even of the United States of America. But a citizen of the world? That doesn't make any sense. How do we combine the need for rootedness and belonging in the local community with the need for global responsibility through global democratic oversight ? That's the biggest challenge we have politically. I'm working right now on a project on what global governance might look like and how we might internationalize it without losing democracy. It's a real challenge.
As director of Fellowship of the Commons I'd like to know your opinion about the notion of a common sector of the economy as a countervailing force to the private sector. My organization is involved in creating a common sector of the economy to reclaim the commons and assert the autonomy of the American people. Peter Barnes, who gave a Schumacher Lecture in 2003, wrote the book Who Owns the Sky? There are other commons trusts, such as Habitat Trust, Fresh Water Trust, and Advertising Trust, but the Sky Trust in particular is pertinent to what you've been talking about because it would set up a cap and dividend program. The sole responsibility of its board of trustees would be to convey the atmosphere intact or improved to future generations. It would draw a line in the sky indicating how much CO2 would be allowed to be emitted in a year, and then it would auction permits to all of the industry--coal, gas, oil. The money made from those permits, trillions of dollars, would go into a trust, and that money would be used to pay a dividend to each and every citizen. This is a winner politically. Energy prices are going to have to go up to address the CO2 crisis, and the dividends would offset the costs for us all.
Thank you for the specifics, and let me say to begin with, I'm a pluralist. I believe that in our great civil society the larger the number of organizations and people that are working toward our goals, the better. That's not to say we shouldn't also from time to time coordinate and work together, and we certainly shouldn't do alone what we can do better together, but there are many things that we do best when we put our own energy into it. I think your idea is a very good one. It responds directly to my distinction between citizen and private consumer, between public and private.
The word "public" has lost its resonance. I did a blog a couple of weeks ago on the Huffington Post after watching Ken Burns's PBS series on the national parks, and in it I said that President Obama should watch that series to be reminded of the importance of public lands and public parks, because unfortunately in the health-care debate he gave up on what is public. He allowed the privatizers and the marketeers to define public as something bureaucratic and bad--"socialist." Yet "public" is a great American word. It's part of the word "republican," and we should repossess that word and embrace the notion that there should be a public option for health care. Our health is a public good for all of us, so there needs to be a public option. Repossessing some of these terms instead of allowing them to be defined by enemies of the public sector is extremely important, and it sounds as though that's part of what you're doing.
I'm with the Common Good finance organization, and we're trying to create a bank called the Common Good Bank to do some of the things you were talking about. Could you define further what you think needs to happen in the financial system to make it work for the common good?
There's an easy answer to that, which is to apply to the financial institutions and some of the new instrumentalities like derivatives the regulatory laws that have applied traditionally to public commercial banks. Starting with President Clinton and worsening since then, secondary markets and securities and then derivatives were gradually exempted from regulation and were basically allowed to go their own way. The idea was that the markets understood these things and were going to profit from them, so they would do right by them. With all the talk now about the need for regulation there has been no re-regulation of the derivatives market among the changes the Obama administration has made, perhaps not surprising when you look at the personnel currently at Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget as well as at Citibank and other megaliths responsible for financial change.
I'm not an economist, but my simple answer is that what is needed is transparency and regulation. Make sure that a) you know what's going on and b) it's regulated in terms of simple public-interest standards already established. This isn't reinventing the wheel, this is not introducing something new. The regulatory instruments of the two Roosevelts for the most part worked very well. What changed was the emergence of new institutions and instrumentalities that claimed they didn't need regulation. But the present global financial crisis proves yes, they do. Restoring regulation will obviously require some changes because these institutions are novel.
The biggest challenge is to figure out how to do this internationally. One of the problems is finance capital. If it doesn't like a national regulatory context in which it finds itself, it simply moves away, as has been the case with jobs. We've already seen a great deal of off-shore movement. Unless you have a system in which the regulations in place can be applied right across the globe, you get a "race to the bottom," with finance capital finding those places where it is not regulated and then simply going there to continue doing the same devastating and anarchic things it was doing here.
Every internal combustion engine in the world can run on hydroxl gas, which is water separated into hydrogen and oxygen. Stan Meyers invented a combination of an electromagnetic frequency and a spiral, a vortex the size of a spark plug, to run his car on water. There are scientific papers documenting how it can be done. Well, the oil industry had Meyers murdered. So in addition to what you were describing as a systemic problem there is also a serious problem of criminality. Many other inventors have duplicated this method, and I'm working on it myself, so I know that the oil problem can be solved in the course of six months, which is how long it takes to ramp up the technology to do it. With this method it will take only two years at the most to completely solve the global warming problem.
My second point is that when Jonathan Edwards was developing the background to capitalism, people were using government-issued debt and interest-free money called colonial scrip. And in Pennsylvania during colonial times, you could go to the legislature and get a charter for your corporation, which the legislature approved because you wanted to do something the members of the legislature wanted, and so they gave you the money, which they just created.
In general what you say points to the fact that the corporation, which is the basis of capitalism, is a state-created, state-regulated entity, and there could not be capitalism without democracy. There is no capitalism in the state of nature. You're right, the government plays a large role, as do currency systems, as do law systems; and enforcement of contracts too is crucial to capitalism.
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