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MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
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Political Climate Change
By Frank Scott
The
Kyoto Accords that went into affect in February take a mincing step towards
environmental sanity, but they are adamantly opposed by capital's most powerful
religious fronts. Judeo-Christian and Islamic governments in the US and Saudi Arabia
lead the stand against this small move towards controls on energy use. They
exemplify the return to unregulated, free market capitalism which threatens to
make the globe a green house gas chamber. But this reactionary policy is only
one aspect of the political economic reversal of the last thirty years.
After an international breakdown of the free market called "the great
depression," capital prescribed prozac, in the form of social democracy,
to protect its future. By assuring that people would not drop dead in the
streets, or worse, revolt against financial tyranny, capitalism "with a
human face" bought valuable time. But since the mid seventies it has
returned to its earlier ugliness. This developmentally damaged economic
practice supposedly promotes self-reliant individuality, but it does so by
threatening collective suicide.
Reactionary capitalism was popularized in the 1970s through the leadership
of Reagan and Thatcher, but they were only fronts, the way religious
fundamentalists are now. Behind them were the financial powers whose policies assured
wealth and affluence for minorities, by creating poverty and debt for
majorities. But the entire world is menaced by international economics that are
causing more destruction than the industrial revolution produced.
Nonpartisan science's warnings that we are abusing the planet's resources at
a dangerous pace have grown more numerous and frightening. Even America's lapdog, Tony Blair, saw fit to
call a British conference to examine the problem of climate change. It reported
that we are in even bigger trouble than we imagined.
But fundamentalist economics simply relies on religious theories of the free
market, regulated by a perverse natural law that guarantees all will work out
in the end. If people just get out of the way of market forces, some will
simply suffer, starve and die as nature would have it, so that a minority might
feast on the wealth created by everyone else. If the invisible hand that
regulates this market tends to give most people the finger, it's god's will, so
just shut up and enjoy it. Nice.
The newer, more deadly assault on the natural environment has been
accompanied by an attack on personal freedom. The threat of terrorism, inflated
to create profits and fear, has led to a rejection of previously observed
democratic rights. Though hardly so acknowledged, 911 was a tragic retaliation
against an oppressive force, and the war on terror has unleashed a greater
threat of retaliation than existed before, while abusing civil freedoms once
taken for granted, if rarely practiced.
Having slaughtered thousands in a criminal quest for imaginary weapons, it
has introduced fundamentalist instability to a nation previously stable and
secular. If that fundamentalism operates in pre-capitalist religious form, the
system may have made its long-term crisis more severe. But that crisis is a
problem for everyone, not just the relative few who profit from injustice and
exploitation.
While international nature-rape grows more dangerous, the national
atmosphere is of a witch-hunt, practicing soft-core fascism that could become hard
at any new, manufactured, menace.
The arrest and detainment of people guilty of nothing but being of Arab
lineage or of Muslim faith was barely noticed by a mind managed public. But
more attention has been paid, at least among college faculty, since media tele-vigilanties
found a radical academic guilty of "treason." His biting critique of
American policy unfortunately included a tasteless allusion to some who died
on 911, and this quote was used to vilify his character, threaten his job, and
severely challenged academic freedom.
In the present atmosphere of political correctness, criticism of anything
deemed sacred is treated as blasphemy, and it has become dangerous to speak
critical thoughts, even in the previously sacrosanct academic environment.
An even greater threat to the financial temple is seen if speech becomes
action. A radical lawyer who dared to defend someone defined, by the new
immorality, as unworthy of defense, faces a severe jail sentence, for doing
what she believed. And what her profession supposedly dictates.
Lynn Stewart practiced her politics and the law by representing a jailed
Islamic leader who threatened ruling power in Egypt, not the USA. But her
defiance of a gag order, by carrying a message from him to his followers in Egypt, was treated as an attack on the USA. This gag order, and the government eavesdropping
which recorded her conversations with her client, all are results of the near
insane anti-legal atmosphere that has reverted to biblical law. And so she
faces prison, and her profession, already sorely limited in the number who put
the law before the dollar, will now see even less willingness to defend the
unpopular.
Our mythological founding fathers might be spinning in their graves. But
more important than legends of our freedom's origins are the facts of its
compromised condition. In this, it joins the other endangered aspects of our
physical and metaphysical world.
The current political atmosphere is as threatening to our future as is the
present weather forecast by our climate changes. The only hope is a
strengthening of democratic desire to transform our entire social and natural
environment. That hope shows signs of becoming reality, in the global community
of political activism, and the national communities of some South American
states. And in the USA, where a peace movement ,
temporarily traumatized by the anybody-but-bush malfunction, is in motion
again.
For globally coordinated democratic action to avert future disasters, it
will have to create governments of the people, and not of private capital. Sounds
almost like the dream of high school civics. Or the reality of Venezuela. Whatever the inspiration, if we
fail to realize it, the future may make the present look clean and free by
comparison.