Our collapse is more than an economic and political collapse
It is, at its core, a crisis of faith. The capitalist ideology of unlimited growth has failed us. It did not take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to soil erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming, and climate change. It failed to understand that the huge, unregulated international flows of capital and its assault on American manufacturing would wreck the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which could soon deflate); wild tech, stock, housing and financial bubbles; unchecked greed; the decimation of our manufacturing sector; the empowerment of an oligarchic class; the corruption of our political elite; the impoverishment of workers; a bloated military and defense budget; and unrestrained credit binges are essentially consequences of a failed ideology, and together combine to bring us down. Soon the financial crisis may very well become a currency crisis. And when it does, this second shock will threaten our country's financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
In his book The Great Transformation, written in 1944, Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences -- the depressions, wars, and totalitarianism -- that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, absent heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism -- and a Mafia political system -- which is a good description of our current power elite.
Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market's assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.
We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown
Russia's northern coastline has begun producing huge quantities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study describe what they saw along the coastline recently as "methane chimneys" reaching from the sea floor to the ocean's surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will rapidly increase the rate of global warming. http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/news/news_detail.cfm?id=713
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted (courtesy of the oil, gas, and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government) to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could asphyxiate the human species.
1. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the "planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." (The Earth's atmosphere now has an average concentration of 385 ppm.) To halt this self-immolation, Hansen has determined, the world must stop burning coal by 2030 -- and the industrialized world must do it well before that -- if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. But in the United States coal supplies half of our electricity! And China opens up a new coal-fired power plant every day www.post-gazette.com/pg/07331/836960-28.stm
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