GH blog blog: 2010-06-11T20:02:56Z Copyright (c) 2010, John Rensenbrink ExpressionEngine tag:green-horizon.org,2010:06:11 What Is the U.S. Green Party Up Against? What Must It Do Now tag:green-horizon.org,2010:index.php/blog/3.437 2010-06-11T18:20:00Z 2010-06-11T20:02:56Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net A quarter century has passed since the founding of the United States Green Party in 1984. Many other third parties have tried and failed during that time, a fact which is itself food for thought. Only the Libertarian Party, begun in 1972, remains as its durable companion national third party. The Green Party, like the Libertarian, perseveres in spite of enormous road blocks and daunting political storms.

It may fairly be argued that few other Green Parties in the world (there are over 90) encounter the same kind or degree of exclusion and suppression. Much of the exclusion and suppression is hidden under a cloud of lies, intimidations, and various structural exclusionary devices in the political system itself – devices that are eagerly reinforced by the privileged and petted Democratic and Republican parties. I listed these devices in my review of Theresa Amato’s Grand Illusion: the Myth of Voter Choice in a Two Party Tyranny in the last issue of this magazine (Fall/Winter 2009). The two parties are preserved as window dressing. They exist as reassurances that freedom of choice is still part of the fabric of our social and political system. This is the biggest lie of all.

A key reason for the bashing and exclusion of new parties and new voices is the emergence of the United States Government as the dominant military power-center of the world. This creates a dynamic in which serious political opposition is made to look unpatriotic, dangerous to security, and very dispensable even by liberally inclined opinion leaders. The governments of most other countries do not have as big a stake or investment in the sweepstakes of foreign policy success and risk of failure. This leaves more room for political opposition and real debate. There is less political risk for influential opinion leaders.

There is another ironic side to this as well. Green Parties in other countries, when they criticize U.S. policy and imperialist operations, can do it in a much more receptive atmosphere – not only popular opinion and leading media outlets, but also the governments of their countries as well. A critical posture gets them a hearing and ready support.

The ruling political class in the United States—including the leadership echelons of the Democratic and Republican parties—are full of venom against one another within the class, but they are united around the dominating imperial role of the U.S. government at home and abroad. Steve Welzer describes this dynamic in a preceding article of this issue.

A Worse Moment?

Think about it. Could there be a worse moment in the history of the American republic to start and persist with a new political party? As noted, the institutions of the republic are crumbling—undermined and replaced by an aggressive, beyond-the-law, national executive power. Congress, in this new imperial system, is reduced to compliant complicity in war after war, supporting unheard of monies for arms and bases abroad that suck the life blood out of middle class taxpayers; and internally, Congress is buffeted and badgered by twenty thousand and more (mostly corporate) lobbyists touting alluring sums of money. Most of the Senators and Representatives fall all over themselves to get that money. 

Some longstanding structural features of the republic now begin to contribute to its decline, such as the indirect election of the president via an outmoded Electoral College and a winner-take-all system of elections. The latter guarantees a monopoly on politics by the two dominant parties and pushes would be new parties to the margins of society, or destroys them altogether, along with the fresh ideas and inventive spirits these parties have in times past contributed to the body politic. The more the two parties exclude other voices and parties, the more they decline. This has been the case since the 70’s already; their stock with the American people has never been lower.

The symbolic and material sign that rot and decay has reached the inner core of the republic is the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission on January 21 of this year. On that day, the Court sanctified the outlandish doctrine that corporations are persons; and confirmed an earlier Court decision, in Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976, that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. Since corporations have large disposable amounts of money and now have carte blanche from the Court to use it to foster their issues and their candidates, any pretense of free and fair competition for public office has vanished.  These newly armed persons – pretending to be citizens in their own right—stride among us, shoving us around when we don’t go quietly, just like the giant machines in ghastly human form portrayed in the current movie Avatar. 

Connect this to the hammer lock the two dominant parties have on ballot access in virtually all the states. Connect it to the dependence of major party candidates for high office, at the state and national levels, on money provided by corporate goliaths. Furthermore, connect it to the fact that according to Rob Richie of FairVote, close to nine in ten Congressional incumbents are essentially guaranteed to win no matter what kind of opponent they face; and well over half of Congressional seats are firmly settled for one party due to partisan tilts and winner-take-all rules. Connect the above web of inter-connected factors to the naked, unabashed bail-out of the bankers and other Wall Street-ers who led the country to economic ruin.

Finally, connect all this to the decade-long treatment of ordinary people as only consumers of politics. The corporate media and the two dominant parties have done this for so long that scores of millions of our citizens behave as if that’s all they are – consumers, watchers, maybe in some cases as fans, but never as engaged citizens. This makes it extremely difficult to interest people in a new party. People are either fed up with politics or regard it as a game of winners and losers. Spectator politics and withdrawal from politics characterize the relationship to politics by the great majority of the population.

Public Speech Is Degraded into Verbal Warfare

On February 15, 2010, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana announced he will not seek re-election this year. His reasons were “ever-shriller partisanship” in Washington, “brain-dead partisanship”, “stringent partisanship”.  He was mistaken in his choice of the noun but right in his choice of adjectives.  Partisanship is inextricably part of political discussion and debate. It’s part of liberty. Disagreement over values, interests, personal commitments is part of life.  The hue and cry that partisanship should be expunged from politics is mistaken and misses the point entirely. The problem is the corruption and distortion of partisanship—its descent into verbal warfare. A predatory, take-no-prisoners, devil-take-the hindmost, get-em-before-they-get-you attitude has taken over in Washington and in many state capitols.  “It’s not like going to work every day, it’s like going to war,” said David Nagle, a former congressman from Iowa, about his experience in the House of Representatives, commenting on Senator Bayh’s departure.

Speech is the life-blood of politics. If and when it turns into verbal warfare, it means the end of politics. Genuine politics, at its core, is the give and take of argument, debate, and discussion. This has enabled the human species to invent constitutions and laws and to maintain and deepen them. Politics enabled us to create the republic and is absolutely necessary if we are ever to move to a full fledged democracy. Politics is a key alternative to violence. When speech goes bad, politics goes bad and the body politic is bewildered, shredded, and turns into factions..

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, Bill Moyers wrote: “That famous definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing has come to define the present moment of American politics. No wonder people have lost faith in politicians, in parties, and in their leadership. The power of money drives cynicism deep into the heart of every level of government.”

Along with the cynicism that seeps from its pores, the sheer incompetence of the national government is visible for everyone to see.  Senator Bernie Sanders hit eloquently at some of it in a recent article for In These Times. “The United States is in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Millions of Americans continue to lose their jobs, homes, life savings and ability to send their children to college. Since December of 2007, more than 7 million Americans have lost their jobs; a staggering 17.3 per cent of the American workforce is either unemployed or underemployed, and over 6 million Americans have been out of work for more than six months, the highest on record.” And then there is the stunning failure on health issues . . . the underfunded schools . . . the decrepit and dangerous infrastructure of roads and bridges. . . .

What can the Green Party do?

We can quit!

But is that wise? Is it really an option?

Let’s think again.

The above analysis of the obstacles reveals a unique opportunity for an alert political party. Yet the opportunity is there only if the Green Party now assesses its situation in the light of the utterly changed character of the United States government over what it was in an earlier time.

The party needs to shift it’s focus. Instead of thinking all levels of government are of equal importance to contest for, the party needs to direct itself frankly, clearly, and energetically to local and state legislative electoral activity and, simultaneously, direct itself to strong grass roots engagement with movements for community resilience and self-government. 

All of the high-ticket offices (President, Congress, Governor) are monopolized by the corporate/military/imperial complex. That’s not where the real action will be, can be, must be – though the party may elect a Governor here and there, or even a Congress person or even a Senator.

Something else is in the cards – something far more important. Ellen La Conte, in the article that precedes this one, outlines what this “something else” is. I will here describe, along similar lines, what this “something else” means in terms of a shift in Green Party focus and priorities. The Action articles that follow my article are case examples of what is being done and can be done in community after community both in America and in other countries.

Shift In Focus and Priorities for Action

In the Green Party future, if the Green Party seizes the historical moment, is the renewal of grass roots democracy and the growth of community-based economics in thousands of communities throughout the country. In this way, the corporate/military/imperial complex will be shorn of popular support, shorn of tax money, and shorn of legitimacy.

The struggle to attain these things is going to be intense. Mammoth corporations won’t like it and will try to stop it. They already are busy at it. Politicians of the kept-parties and military leaders will try to deflect it and force it to serve the ends of the imperial system. Government encroachment on the liberties and constitutional rights of citizens will increase even beyond what has been already endured.

Three Dimensions of the Shift

The Green Party is well situated to fight this battle. In three ways: non-violent resistance to the imperial system of the United States government; thousands of Green candidates for local offices and state legislatures; and steady and practical support by thousands of Green and green-minded activists for localization of the staples of life and for community self-governance.

In terms of resistance—the party will put priority efforts to shake loose some space and daylight for alternative voices in the imperial political system via campaigns for publicly financed elections, Instant Run-off Voting, Proportional Representation and the direct election of the president.

In terms of thousands of Green candidates for local offices and state legislatures—the party has a base in many states and communities that can be further developed and the base can be developed in areas that at present do not yet have that base.

The purpose of this resistance to the imperial power in tandem with electing a flood of Greens to state legislatures is to defend the growth of self-sustaining and self-governing communities; and to fight for policies that contribute to their further growth.

Localization, the third part of the shift, is key. The Green Party future has in it a steadily deepening operative alliance with the great waves of localization and re-localization movements that are now growing across the country and in many parts of the world.  Goals of self-governance, the affirmation of personal liberty and constitutional rights, community building, and of a transition to a sustainable society at local and regional levels will become the central focus of Green activism and Green electoral activity. It’s a transition to gradually attained self-sufficiency in food, a transition to multiple forms of renewable energy locally and regionally controlled; to a transformed transportation system featuring swift commuter trains, neighborhood walk-abouts, and walk-to-work and bicycle-to-work opportunities, a transition to locally controlled schools, locally and regionally controlled water facilities.

When the staples of life are once again within the life-structure of ordinary people in their communities, and they are not any longer dependent on mammoth corporations; and when the money they have circulates among them, and when the taxes they would otherwise yield to the national government are spent close to home, at that point the imperial system will be vulnerable to democracy and peace.

The Green Party will be part of a great national movement to get our nation to move beyond the limits of republican institutions to a fully democratic society and government. The republic begun by the founders did provide a basis for an evolution to full democracy, but left a lot undone that later generations would have to get done. Unfortunately, the republic was taken over by two immense forces: the rise of mammoth corporations with immense economic and political power and, then in tandem therewith the long descent into the maelstrom of imperial world politics. These two forces have shattered the republic. Now the long journey to democracy must be the road we travel. The Green Party can be a big help in helping the people to travel that road.

The national Green Party will return to its original intent, which is to be a helper to state and local Green parties. It will be hard for the Green Party to stop its longings for presidential prominence, and maybe there will be token or symbolic presidential campaigns, but the primary attention of the Greens will not be there.

As the Green Party enters its next quarter century, the party’s energy and focus can and will be on local/regional institutional resurgence. The driving themes will be inclusive grass roots democracy and self-governance, community-based economics, and the defense and nurturing of personal liberty and responsibility.

John Rensenbrink is co-editor of Green Horizon Magazine. He wrote “Against All Odds: The Green Transformation of American Politics” in 1999. He helped found the U.S. Green Party and the Maine Green Party. He is a member of the Green Party’s National Committee and its International Committee. He is Professor Emeritus of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College. {extended} ]]> Obama rejects non-violence, embraces American exceptionalism tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.434 2009-12-11T07:17:00Z 2009-12-11T06:17:07Z Steve Welzer stevewelzer@msn.com In his Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama said: “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.”

The debate about non-violence vs. the need for the use of violent force tends to come down to a discussion about Hitlerism. I think a non-violent movement of passive resistance would have dissipated the energy of Hitler’s expansionism with less bloodshed than that which resulted from WWII. I think M. L. King and Gandhi were right: “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time—the need for humanity to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

The use of force in a situation requiring immediate self-defense is one thing. Bush and Obama, on the other hand, talk about the “need for”, justification and morality of the United States of America “underwriting global security” using its hypertrophied military force (American exceptionalism in international relations).

The leaders of the dominant powers of any era always take the position that Bush and Obama take. That position and its consequences are evil.

Steve Welzer

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Politico - Dec 10, 2009

Conservative praise for Nobel speech

By Eamon Javers

President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech Thursday is drawing praise from some unlikely quarters - conservative Republicans - who likened Obama’s defense of “just wars” to the worldview of his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.

It’s already being called the “Obama Doctrine” - a notion that foreign policy is a struggle of good and evil, that American exceptionalism has blunted the force of tyranny in the world, and that U.S. military can be a force for good and even harnessed to humanitarian ends.

“There will be times,” Obama said, “when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

The remarks drew immediate praise from a host of conservatives, including former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I liked what he said,” Palin told USA Today. “Of course, war is the last thing I believe any American wants to engage in, but it’s necessary. We have to stop these terrorists.”

Gingrich told The Takeaway, a national morning drive show from WNYC and Public Radio International, “He clearly understood that he had been given the prize prematurely, but he used it as an occasion to remind people, first of all, as he said: that there is evil in the world.”

“I think having a liberal president who goes to Oslo on behalf of a peace prize and reminds the committee that they would not be free, they wouldn’t be able to have a peace prize, without having [the ability to use] force,” Gingrich said. “I thought in some ways it’s a very historic speech.”

The context was striking. The president is enormously popular in Norway - a crowd of several thousand waited at his hotel chanting “Obama. Obama. Obama.” And “yes we can. Yes we can. yes we can.” Still, he spoke to the Nobel committee in a room packed with European dignitaries - including the Norwegian royal family - on a continent where skepticism of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is strong. And despite the sentiments in the room, Obama defended the American war effort there and told the Europeans that their reflexive pacifism may be self defeating.

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms,” Obama said. “The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.”

And Obama’s comments came just nine days after the president stood before cadets at West Point and told them that American values are “the moral source of America’s authority,” as he ordered an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan. His decision to push for a surge also garnered Obama comparisons to Bush, who had done much the same thing in Iraq three years earlier. The Oslo speech, too, reminded some of Obama’s predecessor - with a twist.

“The irony is that George W. Bush could have delivered the very same speech. It was a truly an American president’s message to the world,” said Bradley A. Blakeman, a Republican strategist and CEO of Kent Strategies LLC who worked in the Bush White House.

Added Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations: “If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations,” said “When Obama says them, people purr. That is fine by me.”

Obama’s remarks were a historical counterpoint to the speech made by Martin Luther King Jr., on another tenth of December, 45 years ago. On that day, King told the Nobel committee in Oslo that their award to him was “a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.” King rejected violence for all time: “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.”

But Obama broke with King on the issue of non-violence, drawing an implicit distinction between King as the leader of a movement, and himself as the leader of a nation. “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence,” the president said. “I know there is nothing weak - nothing passive - nothing naive - in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

As a candidate, Obama was somewhat more wary of framing America’s political battles in terms of good and evil - though he said then as he did today that evil exists.

At a civil forum with John McCain at the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., in the summer of 2008, Obama said, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil because, you know, a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.”

As he accepted the Nobel in Oslo, the doubts about confronting evil weren’t evident. “For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world,” Obama said. “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

“Wow. what a shift of emphasis,” said Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former policy advisor to McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kagan said. “I don’t know what to say about an ‘Obama doctrine,’ because based on this speech, I think we are witnessing a substantial shift, back in the direction of a more muscular moralism, ala, Truman, Reagan.”

Liberals, too, offered quick praise for the speech.

“This was no tie-dye peace prize,” said Christine Pelosi, an attorney, author and Democratic activist, writing in POLITICO’s Arena. “The President laid out the ‘right makes might’ Obama Doctrine: securing a just peace takes both the nonviolent teachings and military traditions of quiet heroes who fight for human rights as civilians and service members.”

Democratic strategist Lanny Davis said, “Simply: all Americans should be proud.” But Davis also took a shot at Bush, the man on the minds of so many conservatives Thursday morning. “We and our president are once again viewed positively by most peoples of the world,” he said. “A sea change from recent years.”

{extended} ]]> New Orleans Is All Of Us tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.433 2009-11-20T02:07:01Z 2009-11-20T01:07:20Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net This article by Kimberly N. Ruffin appears in the current issue of Green Horizon Magazine (Fall/Winter 2009/10). Ms.Ruffin, an African American scholar teaching literature at Roosevelt College in Chicago, invites and urges the reader to respond to her challenging thoughts about the essnce of citizenship in the wake of the catastrophe in New Orleans. John Rensenbrink, Editor, Green Horizon Magazine.

New Orleans is all of US:
Citizenship in an Age Ecological and Economic Crisis

“It’s hard to be a citizen.  You gonna have to fight to get that.  And time you get it you be surprised how heavy it is.”
“Solly” in Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson

By the time you read this, another anniversary of the 2005 New Orleans Levee Disaster will have passed.  Although reporting about “Hurricane Katrina” (as it is commonly called) has faded from mainstream media, this on-going incident in America’s recent history deserves remembering.  Our memories should propel us to discussion and action. 

The Levee Disaster seared in my mind the idea of “dual citizenship”: ecological and national.  The disaster emblemized these two concepts as fractured and at odds with one another.  Many of the human victims and survivors of the disaster felt their national citizenship violated and squandered by criminally negligent rescue and return efforts.  Regardless of national citizenship, people around the world watched as their fellow ecological citizens were left to die and criminalized as they fought to live.  Additionally, an ecologically vulnerable but crucial part of America’s environmental and economic vitality, New Orleans was sorely neglected (particularly its levee system) by the federal government.  As a result, what we knew of a world-beloved city was obliterated.  New Orleanian residents were left with their ecological and national citizenship decimated.

Numerous post-Levee Disaster films confirm Solly’s sentiments in the epigraph: citizenship is something people have to fight for and something that is “heavy” to carry, something that is constantly being (re)made and maintained.  Filmmakers’ record of what happened in New Orleans provide us with a way to remember, and perhaps move beyond, the chasm between ecological and national citizenship so symbolized by the 2005 Levee Disaster.  Also, they highlight New Orleans as a city of rituals.  Rituals that bonded people to place and one another. Indeed, ritual may be one of the most powerful tools we have in closing the gap between ecological and national citizenship.

New Orleans: New Citizenship
Documentary films such as Dawn Logsdon’s and Lolis Eric Elie’s Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans focus on race (in particular “blackness”) and national citizenship, allowing for a specific understanding of the city and a larger appreciation of America’s ecological history and present.  Their film, and others like it, depicts African-Americans as fighting constantly to obtain fully recognized national citizenship, beginning in the antebellum era and climaxing with the 2005 Levee Disaster. Implicit to these films is the ecological story of a human group trying to root itself in a place on Earth, despite huge barriers from human systems.  Ultimately, the films show the worst that can happen from asynchronous ecological and national thinking.  They call for imaginative and collective work that may help the world change the terms of citizenship.

Musician Glen David Andrews underscores the trauma of denied citizenship felt by New Orlenians after the disasters, “Right now, [we’re] going to need a lot psychiatric help. And I’m gonna be one of the first people to get in line.  ‘Cause I still can’t come to grasp with [the fact that] the church I was baptized in: gone.  The cemetery where all my family is: gone. I sincerely hope nobody asks me to say the ‘Pledge of Alligiance’ or play… ‘God Bless America’ or any of them dumb ass songs again because I’m never going to play it because I don’t feel like an American citizen.  I know I’m not an American citizen in the eyes of the power that be” (Faubourg Tremé).  Andrews’s comments capture the anguish felt by New Orleanians; his participation in the city’s continuing music and parade traditions demonstrate the power human culture has to connect people to geographies even without the benefits of fully honored national citizenship.  Although he will change his repertoire of songs to exclude those tied to national citizenship, he still participates in public rituals that signal his ecological belonging.

Faubourg Tremé also documents the way people used print culture to actively shape the terms of citizenship.  Specifically, it focuses on Paul Treveigne, founder of the “first Black daily newspaper in the United States”: L’Union later named The Tribune, which historian Laura Rouzan declares as the “beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the South because it was vocal; it was articulated, and it was written.” Historian Eric Foner celebrates the writers’ ideological work calling them “proponents of an idea that we may take for granted… which is equality before the law for all Americans regardless of race.  This is the origins of the concept of civil rights we understand today” (Faubourg Tremé). Framed by two eras of “reconstruction” (post-Civil War and post-Levee Disaster) and the story of two journalists, Faubourg Tremé spends the bulk of its time positioning New Orleans, especially the neighborhood of its title, as an overlooked harbinger of civil rights “that changed the course of American history.” By the film’s end, viewers feel as if New Orleans has this potential again.  Speaking of post-Levee Disaster New Orleans, Elie remarks that “this is not the first time my community has been devastated and then abandoned by its government.  In the past, we survived and came out stronger.  What I’m wondering now is how can our past help us survive this time?” The resistance to dehumanization by enslaved and free people of color populations in New Orleans’s past suggests that using words to popularize the idea of civil rights and shape the idea of citizenship may answer Elie’s question in our age of ecological and economic crisis. 

Criminalized Citizens
The DVD cover of Desert Bayou explains “the most devastating thing about Katrina is what it revealed about America.” Its stories about Black evacuees and their post-disaster time in Utah reveal that America has racial traditions that go a long way in impacting the environmental experience of Americans.  The oxymoronic title stems from the identification of people and environment: just as the film documents how 600 Black 2005 Levee Disaster survivors cope with radical environmental and cultural change after being flown to Utah, the film also tells how a racially “White” city and state attempt to appear racially accepting after ecological catastrophe.  Despite apparent good will on the part of many Whites in Utah, the sins against displaced African-American New Orleanians continue.  The narrator summarizes the injustices that happened to the Black evacuees saying, “Put on a plane and shipped to the almost entirely White state of Utah without their knowledge, upon arrival frisked, housed in a secure military base far from civilization and under curfew, subjected to criminal background checks after which erroneous findings were broadcast on the radio resulting in community panic… were this the experience of most Americans outrage would soon follow; however, for an African-American from New Orleans it would simply appear to echo their everyday experience”(Desert Bayou).  The Black evacuees’ experience demonstrates that perceptions about race, nation, and ecology impact whatever geography in which a racialized person finds him/herself.

This is true, in part, because of mass media’s spin on post-Levee Disaster events.  Rocky Anderson, Former Salt Lake City Mayor (2000-2008) remarks, “You saw an unbelievable, and I think a racist coverage by the media, leading this nation to think that all these African-American people are raising utter hell [after the flooding], and none of it was true; not one bit of that was true.  And yet that’s still the impression in most people’s minds in this country and that’s because it was repeated over and over and over again in our nation’s media” (Desert Bayou).  The documentary films cited here definitely provide a counter-narrative to these images; in particular, they document the ways in which endangered ecological citizens, often unfairly criminalized as looters and potential threats, came to their own aid after the Levee Disaster, showing the power of the marginalized to meet their own needs.  Desert Bayou also documents the decision by several former evacuees to take root in a new geography despite the misperceptions about them created by negative images.  Three of the four African-American adults profiled decide to trade the sub-tropical, below sea-level urban terrain of New Orleans for the semi-arid, mountain-surrounded urbanity of Salt Lake City, Utah, perched over 4,000 feet above sea-level.  They represent the ecological refugees to come as climate change worsens.  Untold numbers of people will have to relocate as their current environments become uninhabitable.  What systems and rituals do we have in place that will ease their transitions and help the communities that absorb them cope?

The Cost of Complacency
Massive in length and scope, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four
Acts contains an explicit discussion of fault.  New Orleans City Council Member Cynthia Hedge-Morell says directly, “I tell people all the time: Katrina didn’t do in [the city], the [US Army] Corps of Engineers did.  If they had built those levees, really to [withstand] Category 3 [hurricane strength], all of the residents of New Orleans would still be here” (When the Levees Broke).  Robert Bea, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California—Berkeley, calls the 2005 Levee Disaster “the most tragic failure of a civil engineering system in the history of the United States.” Yet, the stinging indictment of the government for levee failures and delayed rescue efforts comes along with voices of caution that in no way releases American citizens of responsibility.  Terence Blanchard, trumpeter and New Orleanian, chides with “precautionary rhetoric” (Patrick 151) saying, “Everybody needs to understand that this is an American tragedy. It’s not a tragedy for Louisiana or New Orleans, this is an American thing. Because, if it can happen to us, in New Orleans, it can happen anywhere in this country.” His comments highlight the emblematic function of New Orleans and its potential to change “the course of American history” (Elie) by energizing citizens to be proactive.  Another New Orleanian trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, highlights the dangers of a citizenry that does not hold its representatives accountable.  He comments, “What is the government doing [after the Levee Disaster]? They trying to figure out how to hand out contracts, how to lower minimum wage so that the sub-contractors can make all the money; steal money from me and you. Man, we’re paying taxes! You understand what I’m saying? But they’ve been doing it. And we [are] stupid. We sit by and we let them do it. And we re-elect ‘em and that’s what they do” (When the Levees Broke).  Blanchard and Marsalis speak out of frustration born of governmental misdeeds, and at the same time, they pinpoint that our republican government does not act alone; it relies on the implicit or explicit permission of its citizens.  Although the film documents residents determined to use the electoral process to express their demand for change, it leaves the audience wondering, what happens if we let our interest in protecting our planetary life support systems inform our national citizenship at other moments?  What are other ways one can be active as someone trying to align ecological and national citizenship?  What are the ways our ecological belonging can impact our lives as participants in municipalities and nation-states?  How can we respect the ecological citizenship of those who do not enjoy privileged national citizenship?

Rights & Entitlements vs. Duties & Obligations
Mark J. Smith and Piya Pangsapa have it right when they say, “For over two centuries, citizenship has been fixated upon rights and entitlements, glossing over duties and obligations” (9).  Being active during the electoral process is not enough.  The Levee Disaster signaled an alarm:  if we remain complacent about citizenship, we cannot expect to be secure.  We have duties and obligations to ourselves, our neighbors, and the world to make ecological citizenship tangible.  Civic rituals that express, question, and envision ecological and national belonging are necessary.  We need rituals that help us (re)connect to place and, more broadly, to our place in our current local and global ecology.  These rituals may look nothing like the ones New Orleans is (in)famous for, but we need them nevertheless.

In the interest of fostering civic dialogue, I turn to you, readers of Green Horizon Magazine:  Do you think a having a sense of dual citizenship, both ecological and national, is helpful?  If so, can rituals, events, and dialogues in our communities move us forward in better appreciating the interlocking nature of these citizenships?  What are these rituals?  I don’t think it’s frivolous to talk of such rituals at a time when we are undergoing “global economic decline.” Do you think I’m misguided?  I’m eager to participate in the ritual of discussion and debate.  As an envoy of your civic duty, I invite you to comment at: http://www.green-horizon.org

Works Cited

Desert Bayou.  Dir. Alex LeMay. Cinema Libre Studio , 2007.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans.  Dir. Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie.  Serendipity Films, 2008. 

Patrick, Amy M.  “Apocalyptic or Precautionary? Revisioning Texts in Environmental Literature.” Coming into Contact Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice.  Ed.  Annie Merrill Ingram, et al. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Smith, Mark J. and Piya Pangsapa.  Environment and Citizenship:  Integrating Justice:  Responsibility and Civic Engagement.  London & New York: Zed Books, 2008.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.  Dir. Lee, Spike. HBO Film, 2006.

Wilson, August.  Gem of the Ocean.  Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2007.

BIO:  Kimberly N. Ruffin is an Assistant Professor of English at Roosevelt University.  Her book, Black on Earth: African-Americans and Ecological Insights will be published by University of Georgia Press in Fall 2010.  She strives to be a better ecological and national citizen by volunteering as a TreeKeeper and University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener.

{extended} ]]> Down with Obamacare tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.432 2009-10-30T21:35:01Z 2009-10-30T20:35:06Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net Down with Obamacare

In Congress there are 88 members of the Single Payer Caucus.

If they were to use the muscle their numbers give them, they could let it be known loud and clear that they will not vote for the bills now about to come forward from Committees in the House and Senate. These bills are an abomination. They are a testament to the utter failure of the Democrats and of Obama, their president, to meet the actual health needs of the American people.

Since their votes are absolutely crucial for Congresswoman Pelosi and Senator Reid, such clear and resolute opposition to Obamacare by the Single Payer Caucus would put an end to the whole health care debate charade put on by the entrenched Demo-publican political class – a class, or call it a clique, that is driving America down the rat hole, not only on this issue but on every other major issue, domestic and foreign. 

This decisive action could jump start a real debate over health care and single payer would take center stage.  Even on Fox news! We’d have a people’s debate about single payer – up or down. The pharmaceutical and health insurance corporations would be thrown on the defensive. Such action would arouse a powerful flood of popular action that would at last force the political clique to listen at last and to give way.

But the members of the Single Payer Caucus won’t do it. Instead they will follow the lead of Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY). He is maneuvering to get a vote on single payer in the House. He has hopes of getting Pelosi to arrange a floor debate and vote on his single payer amendment. 

Sound good?  Not at all. It’s a maneuver. Yes, we’ll have a debate, a seeming debate, performed in order to make single payer proponents feel good. The Single Payer Caucus can say, hey we tried. So Pelosi can schedule a debate on single payer, a vote can even be taken, single payer will predictably lose and then all 88 members of the Caucus will come together with Pelosi and the other Democrats in the House to vote for an abomination. Maybe some will even hold their noses.

There is only one answer.  On the health issue, the work and fight for single payer must and will go on. On the big issue behind this issue, the work and fight must go on to replace at the polls and to contest in the street and in the halls and classrooms of the country the ruinous politicians and politics of the dominant political class (aka clique).  It is time for America to turn to the Green Party.

{extended} ]]> Obama: Preliminary Report Card tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.431 2009-10-24T03:10:01Z 2009-10-24T02:10:25Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net A Preliminary Report Card on Obama

President Obama is defended by supporters who point to the entrenched power of status quo and conservative/centrist forces in Senate and House. These forces are also preponderant in the vast reaches of Washington bureaucracy—and in great babble of wealthy lobbyists clamoring for their special interests. How can he be expected to make very much headway in achieving his stated goals, given such obstacles. These forces, together with the blatant and corporate-financed right wing jackals who howl for his destruction every day put his personal life in constant danger and make it extremely difficult to accomplish any of his purposes. A case in point is his effort to at least get health insurance to those who most need it via his “public option”.  But even that patently inadequate band aid may well be denied him.

His supporters have a point. However, their point applies much more to domestic policy than to foreign policy. In foreign policy, it is no secret any more that the executive power of the President overshadows, out-paces, and out-guns the legislative power of the Congress. Nor can the Supreme Court exert any real influence over the actions of the President in the conduct of foreign affairs. The Supreme Court, in fact, has acknowledged in a case decided as long ago as 1932 (Curtis-Wright), that the power of the president in foreign affairs, is “inherent” – ingrained in the office. It is a non-delegated power, different from every other power, since every other power rests ultimately on the principle that ultimate power belongs to the several states and to the people (Tenth Amendment). The Court was merely catching up with a trend that had begun already during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a trend that through the subsequent decades has assured the occupant of the White House a fairly free hand in the conduct of our nation’s relations with other nations. This trend towards “the Imperial Presidency” (title of a current book) is a trend that was intensified even further in the eight terrible and tyrannical years of the second Bush’s occupancy of the office.

SO . . . if Obama has that much greater freedom of action in foreign affairs than he has in domestic affairs, shouldn’t he be pursuing policies and taking actions that lead to fulfillment of his stated goals of real peace in the world founded on collaborative peace seeking and justice seeking and ecology-seeking policies?

But has he done so?  His record so far is pretty dismal. He continues the reliance on U.S. military power as his ace in the hole, not only, but as his first line of policy. The great test is his policy towards Afghanistan. So far this is nothing but a rehash of the Bush policy towards Iraq. And so this also means maintaining, even expanding, the huge number of U.S. military bases around the world.

The further ironic and sad thing about all this is that this continued commitment to a militarist foreign policy is horribly expensive and by so much it bleeds money and resources away from the domestic policies he needs to make his domestic goals really possible.  So he is backing his behind into a corner on both fronts, domestic and foreign.

John Rensenbrink

{extended} ]]> Stealing of the Election in Iran --Shades of Ohio 2004 tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.430 2009-06-15T22:52:01Z 2009-06-15T21:52:01Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net The Stealing of the Election in Iran: Shades of Ohio 2004. 

Laura Leach for The World gave a thorough and compelling account of the political situation in Iran on National Public Radio today. It’s more and more apparent that voting was interfered with and the voting totals were manipulated to assure victory to the incumbent. 

One’s mind flashes back to Ohio, 2004. There, as well, the votes of huge numbers of people were either not counted, or were counted as if for the incumbent. Or, the voting was made so difficult that thousands could not get to the voting booth, in spite of waiting in the rain for hours. And as we all bitterly remember, Ohio’s illicit “majority” for Bush pushed Bush over the top in the Electoral College and assured him four more years in the White House. 

How very similar to Iran now!  But I don’t read any “recollection” of this fraud in Ohio in the reports by American and European journalists on the Iranian situation.

They of course are “right” to question and criticize the stealing of the election in Iran. But they did no such thing when the stealing of the presidency that happened in Ohio in 2004 was in full swing. They were quiet as mice!  Even quieter!! And shussed those of us who yelled “foul”! The Green Party’s presidential candidate David Cobb immediately intervened in the Ohio situation, bringing suit in the courts. But the American mass media and all its pundits said not a word.

John Rensenbrink

{extended} ]]> The Most Daunting and Crucial Statistic tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.428 2009-06-13T17:24:00Z 2009-06-13T16:28:09Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net
The human population of the planet is now at 6.8 billion people. Awesome!

I remember a speech about our human and planetary predicament I made in Boulder, Colorado in 1992 in which part of it dealt with the population explosion. I remember saying—having just researched the matter—that the planet was gaining a net increase of 92 million people per year.

Since that time we have had indications that maybe the number of births over deaths could be leveling off a bit. And maybe we have gotten the impression that we are on top of the population problem – or at least getting there.

This is an illusion.

Our species is still adding enormous numbers to the total. An article in the current Earth Island Magazine points out that the net increase in the earth’s human population is now 81 million per year. That’s only 11 million less per year than 15 years ago.

As a human species we now so dominate the eco-systems of the planet that other species of plant and animal life (including fish, of course) are getting crowded out. That means the terrifying prospect of a world with simply not a sufficiency of resources for us humans, to say nothing of the awful spiritual destitution that this loss of animals and plants (and degraded eco-systems) means for us.

So I say the statistic I started this blog with is the most daunting and crucial statistic you or I now encounter.

It should motivate us to think harder and harder and to focus more and more on the fundamentals of how and why we have contrived to get ourselves into this mess – and how to live through it and come out in a better place.

One thought I have, among others, is this: community-life is what can enable our species to survive and thrive. In community we can find the natural balance that can teach us and help us to husband our resources and to balance our population in relation to available and potential resources.

Did you know that there is a political party (the only political party) that is dedicated to the restoration and revival and resurgence of community-life throughout the world? Did you know that there is a political party (the only political party) in each of 80 countries in the world that consciously resists the destruction of our communities and our eco-systems by the huge bureaucratic, militaristic, and centralized corporations and governments of the earth? It is these huge bureaucratic entities that contribute most to the terrible mess we are in and that continue to distort the conditions of our lives, including the destruction of community-life.

These distortions are a huge part of the reason why populations continue to grow to a point where we are outrunning our resources and destroying our spiritual relationship to nature. It is a relationship without which we will perish – both from external causes and from internal evisceration of our spirit.

Can you guess which party it is? {extended} ]]> Why a New Political Party is Imperative --The Democrats Don’t Deliver and Critics Miss the Point tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.427 2009-06-10T03:35:00Z 2009-06-10T02:35:04Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net Two Failures: The Democrats and Their Critics

Democrats dominate both Houses of Congress. But they can’t or won’t deliver to defend the life-critical needs of the overwhelming majority of the American people—as witness their feeble legislative efforts on health care, their failure to protect people from outrageous credit card interest rates (usury plain and simple), and their failure to deal decisively with despicable and on-going mortgage lending practices. The Democrats in Congress are in thrall to the moneyed interests, and most seem either happy about this or resigned to it – for after all, as they figure it, the money-system gets them re-elected. 

Critics of this depressing and dangerous situation are many. William Greider is one example of a man who powerfully scores these terrible failures. Yet he, along with most of his fellow critics of the system, miss the one thing that can change the system. This one thing is to deny the Congressmen their re-election. Our heroes in Congress are so zeroed in on getting re-elected that the threat of electoral opposition gives them the willies. Greider mentions, with wistful hopefulness, such oft-tried populist pressure group activity on specific issues plus independent candidacies here and there. But the politicians are used to pressure group tactics—they know how to play the pressure and lobbying game. As for candidates who are Independent, the moneyed politicians know that a lone independent candidate is usually not much of a threat; and that even if he or she wins, they are powerless in office—they sooner or later join the regular politicians in the money system or they quit in helpless frustration.

The desperate situation in Washington and in the country cries out for an independent electoral/political force, aka a new political party. It is the loss of their nice and fat jobs as office holders that sparks the fear and trembling of the politicians. A political party is a horse of a different color altogether from that of an Independent – a party sustains its candidates and helps them when in office. It is there on a continuing basis to push for policies, field more and more candidates and office holders, and provide the means whereby the muscle of the people is enabled to overcome the moneyed power structure. It is this, a new political/electoral force - a political party – that is feared above all. If the Greiders of the country and their avid readers could at last recognize the huge importance of a new political/electoral force – a political party— and act on that recognition, we might get somewhere in this country. The Green Party is available as a vehicle to accomplish a sea-change in the political system. Why don’t America’s intellectuals en masse turn to the Green Party?

{extended} ]]> Green Party, the Tenth Amendment, and Governor Perry of Texas tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.426 2009-04-23T21:11:01Z 2009-04-23T20:11:35Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net Greens, the Tenth Amendment and Governor Perry of Texas

The Texas governor, Rick Perry, earlier this month joined Texas state Rep. Brandon Creighton and other sponsors of a bill in support of states’ rights under the 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On the surface, it might seem that self-declared conservatives are in accordance with one of the Green Party’s Ten Key Values – a very important one, Decentralization.

I agree with Governor Perry when he says, “I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state.”

It is ironic that he should say this and that he should appeal to the 10th Amendment. The previous President is a leading citizen of his state of Texas. In Bush’s eight years in officce, he pushed policies and administrative directives that deeply and dangerously intruded into the lives of U.S. citizens in every state.  In fact, both Republicans and Democrats, going back many decades, have consistently and relentlessly fattened the Washington bureaucracy to a point where it has truly become “oppressive in its size”, to quote Perry.

There is a part of the Tenth Amendment that he does not mention. The complete language reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Note that last crucial phrase: “to the people”.  Governor Perry doesn’t mention that. He is not really ready to allow “the people” to have the powers not delegated to the United States. He is merely special pleading for his state and using the Tenth Amendment to bolster his anger at government regulation.

Yet it is a bit interesting to find him citing a part of the Constitution that has been all but obliterated in the creeping, and then galloping, abandonment of power to Washington during the past century. 

“Power to the people’ was a battle cry for Cynthia McKinney’s campaign for President last year under the banner of the Green Party. The Tenth Amendment is a very important part of the Green campaign to bring the people back into power in our country.

{extended} ]]> A Green Party Administration: Its First 100 Days tag:green-horizon.org,2009:index.php/blog/3.425 2009-02-12T15:50:00Z 2009-10-13T13:53:51Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net
I wrote this piece the weekend before Obama’s inauguration. It is partly a fantasy but it is also meant as a practical vision of what a Green president-elect might/could proclaim to the county and the world at this moment.

I do not mean thereby to downplay Obama’s historic moment. I was full of joy on Obama’s inauguration day and very glad to hear his brave and inspiring words. He may be able to ameliorate some of the terrible problems vexing our people, so much of them caused and/or exacerbated by eight years of mendacious, unlawful, and incompetent leadership. At the very least, his administration may give us a reprieve in which to gather our wits and create momentum for meeting successfully the multiple crises that now loom over us.

With a view, then, towards staking out a practical vision that is adequate to the crises we face, I offer this sketch of what a Green administration should set about to do—to be updated as each January 20 comes round – trusting that our constitution will withstand any further shocks and thus continue to guarantee the orderly transfer of power from one party to another.

Here is what I have in mind. You will see that it takes a substantively different approach from the one being taken by Obama. Note also that it is based fundamentally on the principle of community self-reliance and community empowerment both here and abroad.

The Green Party’s President-Elect is about to take office in Washington, D.C. She will be joined by Green Party majorities in both Houses of Congress. Their program for their first 100 days in office includes the following highlights for both domestic and foreign policy.

Domestic Policy

==Initiate a one-trillion dollar community-based grant-in-aid program from the national government to local communities. These funds will be channeled though collaborative arrangements between state and local governments and require maximum feasible participation in governance by all parts of each local community receiving these grants. Also required is a 5% matching grant from each participating local community.

The purposes of the grants are for sustainable community development and community empowerment. The grants include funds for renewable energy, conservation, work-force housing, small business development coupled with apprenticeship programs to hire the unskilled, open space, extra support for teachers and for ecologically informed education, college scholarships, food and water security, public works, public transportation, regional cooperative projects, support for neighborhood policing programs, and support for the arts. This replaces the “bailout from the top” scheme initiated by Bush etc. in late 2008 called TARP --the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

==Direct the national Treasury Department to shift the measurement of economic progress away from reliance on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to full scale reliance on Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI). This will assist government officials, business executives, and university economists to provide, and be provided with, a critical tool to measure sustainable economic activity. We must no longer kid ourselves that 50,000 deaths a year on our highways contribute to our well-being—which by present measurements seems to be the case because doesn’t all the activity and work connected with these deaths add to the Gross Domestic Product?. Or that building more prisons adds to GDP. Or piling up waste. Or buying more oil because our buildings waste tons of energy. Or waging wars for oil (thus adding enormously to the GDP!) when you can shift to renewable energy. There are thousands of such examples. We need to measure well-being, not commodity transactions of goods and services.

==Substantially lower the income tax and combine this with a carbon tax of $250 per ton to be phased in at the rate of $25 per year from 2009 to 2020 –-the carbon tax to be offset at each step of the way with a matching reduction in income tax. This is advocated by Lester Brown of “State of the World” fame and is designed to discourage fossil fuel use and to stimulate investment of renewable sources of energy.

==Extend Medicare to the entire population; in other words, a single payer health care program for all.

==Establish a financial transactions fee. Economist Dean Baker (Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.) estimates that a very small fee – ranging up to, say, 0.25% will yield $100 billion or more annually. The fee would be placed on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets, including the great variety of exotic and speculator-driven financial instruments so much in the news lately.

==Initiate a Reparations Program for dispossessed African American and Native American peoples.

==Initiate a constitutional amendment for the election of President and Vice President by popular vote.

==Pressure state and local governments to institute Instant Run-off Voting in elections and to develop pilot programs for proportional representation.

==Push for laws and administrative rules in military and civilian life that provide support for gay marriage and gay families.

==End the Drug War, decriminalize cannabis, and support growing hemp for industrial use.

==Initiate a constitutional amendment affirming that the word “person” in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States applies to real persons and not to corporations.

Foreign Policy

==Initiate—through collaborative diplomacy—Peace, Justice, and Sustainability Summits, starting with Summits engaging respectively the governments in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, and in the Asia-Pacific region, leading to a World Summit on Peace, Justice, and Sustainability within two years.

==Promote in these Summits a worldwide program for collective security; renewable energy; and community-based sustainability programs in food, water, energy development, education, transportation, and local self-reliance, with guaranteed participation by all sections of the local community.

==Promote in these Summits plans and provisions to end the trade in arms, the trafficking of women, and the militarization of space.

==End the war and the military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

==Promote equally the security and rights of both Israel and Palestine.

==Develop a plan to close American military bases throughout the world, phasing out the bases in step with collaborative actions to provide the affected countries with alternative collective security arrangements.

==Take leadership in promoting a worldwide financial transactions fee, the funds raised to be directed primarily to solar power development in developing countries.

==Institute a world-wide carbon tax, proceeds to be used to lower taxes that burden small businesses.

==Create a World Environmental and Labor Protection Organization alongside the World Trade Organization (WTO)—OR expand the WTO to include protection of the environment and labor.

John Rensenbrink

Topsham {extended} ]]> Work vs Wall Street tag:green-horizon.org,2008:index.php/blog/3.424 2008-10-27T16:34:00Z 2009-04-23T20:12:53Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net
Generally, the stock market is a frothy mess sitting on top of the rest of the economy, taking advantage of whatever’s making money. First it used to be joint stock companies, but it evolved into financial services and instruments superimposed on top of the companies that were actually manufacturing something.

Over the years, creative schemes of fooling around with other people’s money became a more important part of the action on the stock market. The amount of capital exchanged grew out of all proportion to the amount of actual money supporting it. In other the words, the manipulators were investing less and less of their own money but profiting from imaginative ways of mining others’ money.

In all of this frenzy, something important was forgotten. Money is a stand in for something else. Somewhere down the line people are making cars and clothing, building houses, and growing and processing food. People can’t eat money or live in houses made of it. For the most part, people use money to buy stuff, but it is undeniable that in the last few years people have been spending more than they have. This is where much of the money involved in the present debacle has come from.

By now the gap between the amount of money involved in making and growing stuff and the amount of placeless capital circling the world in search of profitable investments has become huge. We are, as the economist Hazel Henderson pointed out years ago, an over-capitalized society. Most of us don’t have enough money ourselves, but much of what we do spend has been recruited to investment “instruments” that multiply it many times over.

Now, all of this is connected to climate change and other environmental disasters in the making.

If we are going to back away from the ecological crisis we have been creating, our economy has to give us the right messages. For instance, we need to be reminded that money doesn’t build houses or grow food – people do. It’s called work. Up until a century ago most of us built our own houses and grew our own food, with the help of neighbours and friends. Work is important. Successful businessman and environmentalist Paul Hawken pointed out in his book Growing a Business that small new businesses fail because they have too much startup capital, not too little. People forget, he says, that the most important resource in starting a successful business is hard work.

Another crucial message from our economic system must be that cooperation works. Years ago researchers found that businessmen who were more competitive did not succeed as well as cooperative ones. Besides, competition has only produced the huge monopolies we have, and they certainly aren’t doing anything creative to prop up our tanking economy.

Third, our measures of economic growth have to mean something. Indices such as the Gross Domestic Product count all the money that’s made on goods and services. The GDP does not include a measure of how much of our so-called natural resources – water, trees, fossil fuels – are being depleted. But otherwise the GDP includes everything, absolutely everything. It includes money made by traders on Wall Street. It includes profits made when huge firms merge and the millions in bonuses made by CEOs. It includes the costs of oil spills, Hummers, funerals, automobile crashes, and sickness care – hospitals, drugs, and doctors’ bills. It is definitely not a measure of our wellbeing.

Alternative measures such as the Human Development Index and the Living Planet Index have been around for years. It’s time we started using them, because they give us useful information.

We need resilience in the years ahead, and a local, greener economy will provide it. We have the skills and ability to grow our own food, build our own houses, and even make our own cars here in southern Ontario without chasing down placeless capital from somewhere else. Such money will only be withdrawn when the return isn’t good enough. Good hard work must replace at least some of our inefficient use of energy.

Our last canning factory was closed this year because it wasn’t making enough money for its Wall Street investors. It will cost both us and the environment more to rely on China or Thailand for our canned fruit and vegetables. And the supply isn’t reliable, either in terms of its availability or its nutrition. This is stupid economics.

Intelligent government policy should focus on not losing canning factories to foreign capital or farmland to sprawl and nourish small, local firms and the talented men and women who run them. This would produce an economy that could withstand better the follies of international capital. {extended} ]]> Wall Street versus the Planet tag:green-horizon.org,2008:index.php/blog/3.423 2008-09-25T09:31:01Z 2009-04-23T20:13:42Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net
The collapse of the investment banks and the destruction of ecosystems. An intertwined tale. Greg Gerritt 9/24/08

The Collapse of the investment banks and the corporations that insured them against their own greed is a startling turn of events. The masters of the universe, the wealthiest crew on the planet, ran out of productive things to do, started creating new ways to manufacture money out of froth, whipped the froth into a frenzy, made billions, and had no idea what to do except ask for big hand outs from the government when the froth collapsed.

The answer of the bought politicians is to give buckets, no boatloads, of money to the same people who created the big mess that threatens the lives and livelihoods of people all over the world, and ask them to do it again, only this time to be a bit more careful in the name of keeping everyone employed.

People are reacting to the Bush agenda bailout in nuanced ways, mostly denouncing the specifics, which are horrible, but generally stating that a bailout of Wall St is the right approach, if only done this way or that. Critics on the left are denouncing it saying if the tax payers are buying all this stuff, they ought to get the rights associated with community ownership in saying how it will be run, and while the critics on the left are correct, if we own it, it ought to be run in ways that are open to the community’s input and benefit the community, but the analysis still lands short of what is needed to actually resolve the problem.

What most observers seem to be missing is the idea that the fundamentals of the economy have changed over the years, primarily the situation in the realms of natural resources and ecology on planet earth. The reality is that in an economy based on ever faster growth it is becoming harder and harder to make fortunes in the on the ground economy. Too many ecosystems are disappearing and collapsing, too many natural sinks are full, minerals are becoming harder and harder to recover, and ever greater quantities of almost anything are becoming very difficult to find.

We all know about peak oil, the idea that from now until forever it will be harder and harder to bring more barrels of oil out of the ground on a daily basis, and that a civilization built on cheap energy is in serious peril. No one is starting new oil companies, though there is money being invested in new drilling equipment in the ever more desperate efforts to drill ever more difficult oil fields for ever diminishing pools of oil. Have we considered the role of forests in our economy, from paper, to lumber, to furniture, to fire wood, to a place of recreation, to a source of food? That forest products still under gird civilization, that deforestation is one of the primary causes of the collapse of economies through time? Have they looked at what is going on in the forests? How they disappear before our eyes, even in a place like New England in which forests return easily and had partly done so from previous deforestation? The only cut and run forests left in the world, the forests that in the past would have provided the raw materials to fuel the economic recoveries from Wall St insanity, are the two hardest forests to work, tropical rainforests and the far north. Then consider the massive amount of ever more expensive oil it takes to exploit these forests, and the greenhouse gas emissions that come from deforestation, and consider whether any natural resources will be able to help Wall St end this latest speculative mismanagement monster.

You can not start the next Great Northern Paper, it would be a joke. Fisheries all over the planet are overfished and collapsing. In agriculture, think Monsanto and patented seeds, an attempt to make a fortune by cornering markets rather than develop global agriculture. Manipulation ballooned because all the farmland is already in production, and much of it is already severely depleted and eroded. Using genetic engineering, patented seeds and no longer allowing farmers to save their own for next year’s planting, bait and switch and watch Indian farmers commit suicide appears to be the business model these days. Then think about higher prices for food as the ethanol craze gets hotter. The airline industry is going broke, funny how that happened right about the time of peak oil. Are we actually seeing the demise /transmogrification of the automobile industry? It appears to be rapidly going bust in the US. One might say this is because there is more money to be made in the mental gymnastics economy and that corporations in other countries do not have to pay for retirees health care costs, but an idea that needs to be discussed much more is that there are physical limits that we are running up against on Earth and it will be harder and harder to make money in the production of things or in shipping them.

If those seeking great fortunes can no longer rely on actual production to make money they seem to resort to the financialization of the economy, the use of innovative trickery to manipulate investments, to funnel more resources to them and their friends. More and more money has flowed into the financial sectors of the economy, aided and abetted by politicians at every turn handing over big subsidies for local jobs in the industry. What the “smartest guys in the room“ came up with this time for their aggrandizement was vastly inflated housing prices, partly because their friends in government helped create the policy of building no housing people could actually afford. This was then followed by selling unaffordable houses to people who had few other housing options, and then turning debts by people who could not afford the payments after the interest rates jumped on their bait and switch mortgage into investments for speculators. It was based on pretending the housing boom would last forever and therefore this was a very safe way to invest money. It is the economy of turning everything into an investment because the buddies of the rich in government will always say we can not afford to let the wealthy, the powerful, the providers of campaign funds, and the investment that drives our ever MORE fail. Just the little guy is allowed to fail.

The apologists for the the failed economic model will point out Microsoft, Dell, Google as the future of the economy, but you can not eat a google or software. But how about Windmills, solar panels, and geothermal electricity as clean and essentially boundless and a place to see major investment and fortunes? Or pharmaceuticals, plastics, communications and nanotechnology?

Yes, we shall have some Green Jobs building windmills, some jobs in modern manufacturing that seeks to dematerialize manufactured products, but ultimately unless we actually stop the shenanigans and start to really try to live within our means on Earth, the collapsing ecosystems will push those seeking fortunes into ever wilder and stranger financial instruments to make more money and hold on to their power, triggering financial collapses faster and faster followed by more funny money bailouts that we pay for so they can prop up the economy of more a little longer. Are we hoping for some miracle like a second planet to exploit? Yes, we can eat the planet faster for a little longer. Buckminster Fuller thought we might figure out how to make that transition, turning into a truly sustainable economy as we drained the last of the fossil fuels. But he also knew it would take sharing and an end to war as well as the end of the fossil fuel economy, and he figured it was a close race between a thriving sustainability and the demise of modern industrial civilization. Can we make that transition if we continue to let speculators steal us blind and then get bailed out by the government on the taxpayers dime? Can the banks continue to rob the people without spending ever more money on war, both to steal resources and to prevent outbreaks of people power when people get tired of the robber barons?

Today, no one can prove that the ever more creative financialization of the economy is driven by ecosystem collapse, that the collapse is constraining investments in actually meeting the needs of the 6.7 billion of us that inhabit the planet, but the trend seems pretty obvious when you think about it, so maybe we ought to talk about this a bit more before we bail out Wall St with $700 billion that could heal ecosystems, generate clean energy, feed people, and before we feed the war machine to defend what Wall St seeks to impose on us.



There is a big hole in my argument. Currently capital flows fastest to short term investments, quick buck schemes. One can not say that one can not make a fortune in the wood cutting business, there are still people getting sweetheart deals with tin horn dictators, and war criminal presidents and making money cutting wood despite the collapse of forest and forest ecosystems around the world and the moving of their residents to shanty towns. It is likely that over the short term people will expand some resource based businesses, the planetary resource base still exists, it is still large compared to the demand, even if it is shrinking, depleting, dieing. But it is still a diminished investment possibility. Yes, one can found the next mental gymnastics giant, a google or microsoft, but for the most part fortunes are made in the financial industry, the phony manipulation of money, and the rules the politicians write are designed to help that speculation rather than rein ii in. I can not prove that the financialization is currently driven by resource depletion. I am not sure if the right things are measured to prove it, and ferreting out the human motives behind any particular investment is impossible. But we can clearly see the sinks fill up, the forest, fish, soil and oil disappear and the smaller and smaller percentage of the economy based on actual production of tangible goods. We can not yet prove the ever more highflying gymnastics of the financial sector is related to running into the limits of the earth, but it is what we see, it seems the most logical explanation for what is going on, and it gives us fair warning of what lies ahead unless we return our economy to a sound environmental footing. {extended} ]]> WithPalin, McKain Weds the Worst of America’s Past tag:green-horizon.org,2008:index.php/blog/3.422 2008-09-09T01:59:00Z 2008-09-09T00:59:16Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net Palin an albatross for McKain?

McKain and his “smart” crowd have crowded out a failed sitting president. In trying to turn a new leaf, they seek to co-opt the Obama litany of change. On the other hand, with the governor of Alaska in their attack pack, they are stuck with something really “old”, an out-of-date right-wing factional extremist on “social” issues. I don’t think the Independent vote can stomach that crap—the Independent vote will decide this election. 

If the Democrats have any brains left, or real courage, they will take Palin to the cleaners for her identification with a reactive and narrow faction representing the worst features of America’s past. They have a great opportunity to blunt and make nonsense of McKain’s in-authentic appeal to “change”. It’s something he clearly cannot claim with Palin on his team. With Palin he’s turning the clock back.  But do the Dems have the intelligence, savoir faire, and courage—and just plain common sense honesty to make that argument and make it stick?  I doubt it. They will as usual temporize, temporize, temporize on this and on foreign policy as well. And they will lose the election.

John Rensenbrink

{extended} ]]> Obama in Denver: We Must Take Seriosly What He Says and Does NOT Say tag:green-horizon.org,2008:index.php/blog/3.421 2008-09-01T15:59:01Z 2008-09-01T14:59:46Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net Obama in Denver: We Must Take Seriously What He Says . . . and Does NOT Say

On Friday morning last week, the New York Times did big stories on Obama’s speech of the night before to the Democratic National Convention, the 75,000 people in the stadium, and a TV audience even bigger than the one that viewed the opening of the Olympics in Beijing on August 8.

The lead story dealt a lot with the hoopla of the event and when it turned to what he said, it was described, and dismissed, by the reporter as a series of broad generalities.

But that’s not true. Not far into the speech, Obama specifically outlined the major things he will do as president. Apparently, the media, whether left or right or in between, have gotten so used to slotting Obama as a rhetorician, and nothing more, that even when he specifically states that he is being specific, and serious about the specifics, he is not heard and what he says is not taken seriously. That is a big mistake, in addition to being patronizing, and lazy.

Obama was being serious that night and we should take what he says with serious attention. Only then can we also see what he does NOT say.  What he does not say speaks volumes about him and his party. It is very disturbing.

I will explain.

Departing from the noble generalities that have often dominated his major speeches, Obama launched into a recitation of specific things he will do if elected. These include such substantive and very much needed policies as the following:

--cut taxes for 95% of all working families;

--launch a 10-year program to end U.S. dependence on Middle-East oil;

--budget $150 billion for the rapid development of renewable energy;

--make health care affordable for everyone, and providing those who in any case cannot afford it “the same coverage as members of Congress” (Obama’s words);

--provide a world-class education (his words) for all children in America;

--provide higher salaries for teachers; and, looking directly into the camera for emphasis

--“we’ll make sure you can afford a college education”.

Having said these and other similar things, some of them equally costly, he paused to observe that, of course, this will cost money. Where will this come from? he asked. At this point, he still seemed on track with an honest and straightforward and truly caring message.

He answered that he will close corporate loop holes and subject the federal budget to a line by line scrutiny that will trim any bureaucratic fat that’s there.

He spent less than a minute saying this, after having spent more than ten minutes of a 45-minute speech detailing his substantive cost-related program.  Less than a minute!  He quickly went on to utter moral homilies about individual responsibility.

I shook my head. I felt like shouting at the TV screen. “Are you kidding!” You were serious but now you are simply self-deluded or you are knowingly deluding your immense audience.

He had just said that his program will cost big bucks.  But he won’t get nearly enough from closing corporate loopholes or trimming bureaucratic excess. 

Where, then, oh where, could Obama turn to find the bucks he needs for fulfillment of his promises? Or, in other words, what is it that Obama is NOT saying?

Can you, dear reader, answer the question?  It’s really a no-brainer. 

The money can only come from funds diverted from the huge and overwhelming military budget. That’s where the money is. That’s where by far most of the tax dollars of all Americans are going. Closing income tax loopholes and trimming bureaucratic excess is nice and helpful but it is peanuts by comparison to what will be needed to accomplish Obama’s domestic program.

Does Obama know this?  Of course, he must know this!  If not, he is truly in deep denial about the reality of political priorities in the U.S. government. The national government is top-heavy with expenditures for 750 military bases in foreign countries and with a Pentagon that sops up money for military hardware as if it were a gigantic sponge. It is a government of, by, and for two major parties that is top-heavy with a yearning by Washington and Wall Street elites to play super-big wheel in the world.  So, yes, of course Obama knows this. He was not born yesterday.

The wretched truth is that he does not want to deal with this reality— the somber reality of the military industrial complex about which President Eisenhower already warned us 50 years ago.

Was Obama pulling a sleight of hand in his stirring speech?  One would be hard pressed not to think so. For what else can one think: he makes promises to do things that are desperately needed – which is why he makes them. But when it comes to really facing up to what’s needed if the money for it is to be forthcoming, he retreats into silence. It’s the silence of a man who faces a huge and inconvenient truth and blinks.

He and his party with him must face up to the reality of a choice. It is the choice between America as the world’s policeman (with all that that entails for endless expenditures for endless wars) or an America

 (a) that rejects dreams of world domination—whether pursued by force of arms and intimidation (the Bush/Cheney approach) or pursued by “tough diplomacy” with force ever ready at hand (the Obama/Biden approach);
 that relies on collaborative policies with other nations in search of solutions that many nations can and will support;
 c) that relies on an approach in which the U.S. is one among many other nations who together build strong international institutions for security and world social justice; and
 d) that thus trims its military budget to a point where funds for desperately needed programs at home become available.

Obama flies away from encountering that choice.  His party does the same.  His silence, his party’s silence, is the denial that there is that choice. It is the most crucial choice that must be faced and must be made if our communities, the nation, other nations, and the human race itself is to be saved. So in his most important, and most serious, speech to date, Obama deceives his fellow citizens with promises he and his party cannot fulfill – and are not prepared to fulfill.

The one small and bright spot in the horizon of national and world politics is the existence the Green Party, both here and abroad. The Green Party has made that choice. It is a choice for a war-less world – and all that that entails for the survival and thriving of all peoples.

{extended} ]]> McKinney and Nader: Are votes for them of equal value? tag:green-horizon.org,2008:index.php/blog/3.420 2008-08-01T01:03:00Z 2008-08-01T00:03:49Z John Rensenbrink rensen@gwi.net John Rensenbrink

There is this notion that progressive-minded people, who can’t see voting for Obama, have a choice between two outstanding candidates, Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader.  I agree that they are both outstanding candidates.  But I firmly disagree that a vote for one or the other is of equal value.

Allow yourself to think beyond the present power structure. Envision a different situation in which the present power structure has been dismantled. Surely, no power structure is permanent. The present one is dominated by megacorporate predatory giants and their Democrat and Republican minions. It will not last. It is not permanent. Please savor that thought.

With that firmly in your mind, ask yourself what is needed to reach beyond the present power structure.  Ask yourself whether what McKinney brings and what Nader brings are the same or different.  No, I am not talking about “the issues”, that favorite of liberals and progressives. On “the issues” the two are pretty similar.

Where they are not similar at all is on the question of power to change the power structure.  Here we must confess that Nader’s campaign begins and falls with him, begins and falls with just this current campaign, good for this day and train only. On the day after the election in November, that’s all done. Nor is there any reason to believe that there will be any impact of any kind on the existing power structure.

Now take another look at McKinney’s campaign.  She is running not as an Independent like Nader.  She is running as the candidate of a proven political party. The Green Party has been in existence since 1984 and is well established in almost all parts of the country. It has a courageous past and a promising future. It is dedicated to contesting for power.That means—given the Green Party’s values and principles—that it is dedicated to altering fundamentally the existing power structure—ending the stranglehold on public policy by the megacorporate giants and their Republican and Democratic minions. 

Cynthia is running full tilt as a Green. For the Green Party. She has stated that her goal is to get at least 5% in November.  This will qualify the Green Party candidate for President in 2012 for millions of dollars in public funding.  It will make the national Green party a substantial force and lay the basis for greater victories in the future.  Now, that’s really thinking! Even if she does not get the 5%, her campaign will strengthen the Green Party and give it greater internal fiber and exposure to the public. This will help all future Green campaigns for all offices, including for president. 

Hooray for Cynthia!  She really gets it.  She knows that the powers-that-be are a power structure – and a bad one to boot. And that it must be dismantled if the issues people hold dear are to get a chance at being resolved.  She puts first things first. Cynthia will not win the White House in November, but she is helping to lay the groundwork for “painting the White House Green” in the future.  Thus a vote for her is a vote for our future. It carries far more value than a vote for Nader, however fine a candidate he is.

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