Freedom is not the chief and continual object of their desires;
it is equality for which they feel an eternal love.
Americans are so enamored of equality
that they would rather be equal in slavery
than unequal in freedom.
They will put up with poverty, servitude and barbarism,
but they will not endure aristocracy.
Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free,
but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
It was thenceforth plain to my apprehension,
that Slavery and Freedom could not coexist on the same soil.
Abraham Lincoln, 1837
We must be staunch in our conviction
that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few,
but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.
Ronald Reagan, 1982
Financial wizards and their minions have learned nothing since the last Great Recession. Certainly they’ve been richly rewarded over the last decade for catastrophic failure in the aughts. The Pandemic Panic has funneled trillions more into their swimming pools. Like Scrooge McDuck, the richest cartoon character in history they are greedy for more. Ecology and Society be damned, it’s Full Speed Ahead into the next Crash. Vultures of capital assume they will land on the spoils.
Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform by Ross Jackson, put out by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2012, has endorsements by most of the heavy hitters in economic and environmental progressive circles. I picked it up from our library’s discards recently. He’s a Scandinavian financier who got religion about the ongoing destruction of the health and sustainability of our planet, and the looming collapse of complex civilizations with billions of people living in them. He’s a globalist, but as a prophet. Look Up, People!
Jackson supports historian Joseph Tainter’s position that civilizations collapse because of increasing costs relative to benefits, not just financial, but all energy inputs required to “solve” inevitable problems. Eventually adding more complexity only yields negative returns. “The civilization will then begin to experience the effects of living on a finite planet with finite resources. What worked before does not work any more. Nevertheless we continue to follow strategies that have have been successful in the past.” They turn out to be disastrous, but people persist from not recognizing radical fundamental changes. They do not hit bottom of the abyss that cannot be crossed in one step.
Jackson started the Gaia Fund to help build a bridge to ward off collapse. He gives a short history of the economic theories and actions that got us here through industrial capitalism, from Adam Smith to Alan Greenspan, et al. He classifies industrial Communism as equally damaging, calling it a form of capitalism with the state controlling capital, (excess profits from despoiling nature and exploiting labor) with less resistance from environmental or political dissidents.
He contrasts liberal and neoliberal economists’ assumption that personal gain or greed is the prime motivation for human behavior in market economy capitalism, with philosopher Michael Polanyi’s position that our motivations stem from our social standing, a sense of security in family and local community, appreciation by others, an opportunity to contribute constructively to our larger society. The invisible hand waving pixie dust over market relations is as much a fantasy as unending growth and short term profits uber alles.
Governments must regulate and rein in greedy profit seeking at all costs for the common defense of liberty, freedom and justice for all its citizens, or perish. Promoting “a more sustainable and spiritual world”, the Gaia Fund invests in permaculture, ecovillages, greening degraded lands and sustainability projects around the world to demonstrate a more egalitarian, environmentally regenerative culture is possible.
One turning point in his narrative was post WWII, with the United States spreading its triumphal wings over global financial manipulation, sinking talons into its newly hatched eggs, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He quotes David Korten from When Corporations Rule the World, “The IMF and the World Bank have arguably done more harm to more people than any other pair of nonmilitary institutions in human history.” These financial institutions are only nominally global in representation, primarily designed to benefit U.S. and allies interests by lending billions for centralized industrial development in third world countries, then imposing fiscal austerity and mass poverty when their elites fail to keep up with payments on the shiny, new power plants to extract natural resources for export. No value added, except interest on the loans.
A secret memo written by George F. Kennan, director of the Policy Planning Staff for the U.S. Secretary of State in 1948, laid out realpolitik based on America having half the world’s wealth with 6.3% of global population at the time. Proportions are similar if not more grotesque today. He recognized this obscene tilt was only accepted in the Homeland through incessant propaganda about our global mission, even as aristocrats plotted to bring foreign chickens home to roost in our domestic coop. “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attentions will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should dispense with the aspiration to be liked or be regarded as the repository of the high minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers keeper, and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague, and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” That day is on us here in America, although the iron fist was ever present in developing nations.
Jackson calls for a spiritual transformation of economics to save human societies and what’s left of our planet’s ecosphere. Economics is called the Queen of the Social Sciences because she is imperious, irrational and follows fashion. Anything is possible, including her head in the hay. He’s got a dozen chapters on good faith global measures to save ourselves from the abyss, but his proposals will require a Gaian worldview to gain traction. Awakening to our natural world, understanding and acting with it to support our reduced needs and wants hasn’t achieved lift off, but when it does, a manual exists.
One cautionary note about who’s acting on his vision is apparent from reading it ten years after. He calls for forming a Gaian League of smaller, more nimble breakaway nations to lead where larger nations cannot follow, a union of mice countries bearing the banner of human and ecological rights, sovereign trade and democracy. Several he imagined might take on the mantle because of their then current policies have been effectively trapped in turmoil.
Bolivia was targeted by neoliberal hitmen and oligarchic reactionaries for control over its huge reserves of natural gas and lithium against the indigenous majority in poverty. Sri Lanka has shakily emerged from an ethnic civil war destroying their “most successful village networks anywhere in the South.” Iceland’s bankers went bust before the Great Recession, gambling on derivatives. Their elected representatives made the democratic decision not to bail them out, becoming pariahs in international lending circles. Venezuela descended into a lootocratic military backed socialist paradise with millions fleeing to neighboring nations, in no small part due to Uncle Sam’s heavy hand. New Zealand locked down tighter than a trannie’s twat to avoid the global pandemic and may never emerge from hiding Down Under. Maldives president was featured at Climate Change festivals then, but a military coup effectively banished him. The fate of other countries he names remains to be revealed, but if they even whispered Gaian League, economic elites meeting in Davos for the World Economic Forum’s winter gala would likely target them.
Saint Greta scolded the assembled elite at their 2019 retreat. “Now we all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the future living conditions for humankind. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail. We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint is, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.
“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”
Instead of putting on hair shirts and wandering barefoot around their palatial grounds, or renouncing artificially enhanced longevity, aristocrats cooked up a plandemic and panicked response to kill millions, hopefully billions of greenhouse gas emitters. The uber rich and influential invited to Davos by Klaus Schwab, Nazi progeny, have the biggest carbon footprint and methane mittens on the planet. Add in their technocratic staff’s frenzied paddling, and they easily surpass the poorest billions output. The Pandemic quarantined them to their yachts and gated estates, while their educated enablers froze like deer with cloth masks in the headlights of “public health” diktats.
A more recent jeremiad in that discard pile, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2021 is a romp through our national economic and cultural dismantling since the 1970’s, with a call to applying America’s evolving vision and democratic principles as warp and weft to weave back what was stolen. Packer’s 2013 National Book Award winning, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America also published by F, S & G, illuminated personal and social unraveling in the United States during the decades before and as the Great Recession spun them off the spool. Hope is a comparatively lightweight book, although the previous owner penned marginalia, underlined key sentences and added an index of page numbers of important points.
Packer professes to want to bridge cultural and political chasms in America, yet the first section is a paen to Trump Derangement Syndrome and Pandemic Panic platitudes. Not likely to gain any converts from the RedHalf with his shallow journalism and opinions about stolen election turmoil and contagion diktats.
Then, he divides One America into cultural quarters. The Free American anti-regulatory dreams of technocrat Libertarians and religious and social traditions of Real Americans make up the Red Side vs the educated intelligentsia Smart Americans and racially woke youth of Just America on the Blue Side. The author is a writer for The Atlantic magazine, so a Smart one.
When the Orange Mussolini lite was elected president in 2016 over Her, liberal journalists descended into fly over country, some venturing where only crop duster runways exist, to document and analyze the crude mentality of Trump supporters and persuade them of their error. Like earnest Mormon missionaries they queried the locals about misplaced faith in demagogues, inspected their attics for hidden white supremacists, examined them through pseudo-psychological lenses. Naturally, their case studies resented this manipulative empathy. Four years with no Reds suaded, Blues were exhausted from compassion.
After January 6, their gloves came off. They thumbed a hailstorm of tweets rattling off the reinforced roof and hurricane shutters of the doubled down Right. Woke youth had already begun cannibalizing Smart allies in academia, politics and journalism, so Packer shows his venom for these thought police. It’s a losing strategy and won’t last, but the Justice youth are drunk on their sudden power. Mao’s revolutionary guards were no more fervent in their public humiliation of selected specimens in this Great Leap Forward. Their lineage can be traced to the still birthed Occupy Movement. Frustration with democratic incrementalism fires them to assault the castle from the outside, rather than worm their way inside like their Boomer forebears.
Packer describes their “dissonant sound” as “a spirit of attack rather than aspiration” towards our founding principles. “A more accurate name would be Unjust America”, where our country’s history is a “continuous wrong” and “can never be made better.” That binary vision is what gives youth urgency and meaning, they are beyond history careening towards Utopian Fantasies. Told there’s no time to wait, they launch tweets from the twitter trenches. Like Christians eager for the End Times, these nihilists “interpret global warming as the planet’s cosmic revenge on white people for their greed and cruelty.”
Smart Americans worship from hymbooks of neoliberal prophets. Economist Lawrence Summers, advisor to Bill Clinton and Barak Obama, NY Times journalist Thomas Friedman and other cheerleaders for free trade deregulation promised globalization would lift all boats, eventually. Cosmopolitan and multicultural celebrators, they travel and feed around the planet or order out from ethnic restaurants at home. “One effect of the pandemic has been to entrench the new aristocracy of Smart America.” No different than the ancient regime, these nouveau aristes are arrogant, certain of their meritocratic lineage, selfish aesthetes who enjoy humiliating Dumb and Dumber America. Covid’s conconomy conveniently created a new crop of billionaires.
He skewers the Freedom bros as mesmerized by the “self made man and lonely pioneer” mythology of American. These Ayn Rand libertarians conveniently forgot they were swaddled, reared, educated and assisted by others. They serve as sock puppets for billionaires resentful of regulations that stifle their free market or burden them with taxes as our brother’s keeper. Ronald Reagan, a more congenial dismantler was their god, until Rand Paul and Paul Ryan replaced him as minor deities in the Tea Party movement.
At least they are solidly opposed to the “common good” of mandatory inoculations and authoritarian “public health” whiplash science, as are the religious Real Americans. That’s enough reason for the radical left Health and Wellness freaks to ally with these reactionary troglodytes, even if we disagree on everything else. “Liberals and progressives” have drunk the FlavorAid, (Reverend Jim Jones was too cheap to supply Kool Aid as suicide sweetener), of “public health” pronouncements with out questions. Their worship of St. Anthony is a derangement of stubborn opposition to the right and the kooky left, which have seized on an “anti-science” conspiracy thread of indisputable facts about Fraudci.
Packer goes easy on the religious and traditionally prejudiced older Americans, simple folk befuddled by ancient texts and modern haranguers. They are not likely to relinquish their grip on guns and god in a storm of uncertainty anyways.
History lessons about progressive Americans who transcended their times and wove the national fabric a little tighter and more inclusive are offered. He believes Americans can find common ground around public schools providing equal opportunity for kids of all colors and classes to reclaim a sense of shared citizenship and self-government. This is yet another futile demand laid on educators and administrations not known for flexibility in surrendering power to students and parents. How about just stop poisoning our children from fetuses through adulthood with hazardous foodstuffs, polluted environments and inoculations laced with neurotoxins?
Packer gives a half hearted salute to Build Back Better agendas and the green economy dreams of Smart America. Repair the safety net, support labor unions to create an economy “that gives everyone a chance not just to survive but to participate with dignity” from caregivers to warehouse workers. Unions severed the political bonds between labor and college educated by supporting the Vietnam War and ecological destruction for jobs, jobs, jobs. That wound has never healed.
His proposals to resurrect Real Journalism as non-profit driven is as likely as bringing Frankenstein to life with LED lighting and digital enhancement. Journalists are like poisoned cockroaches frantically waving their twitter feeds as self appointed guardians of democracy. The “self destructive impulses” that disintegrated corporate media and sent their reporters packing to PR firms, began with the erosion of ad sales to the internet. Elite journalists began to “fetishize data” just like our tech overlords, and now “inhabit incestuous circles of backscratching and backbiting.”
Disintegration of our democracy began with their trivialization of campaigns as horseraces, journalists insider trading on access, stenography as reporting. We were provided democracy theater from the comforts of home cinemas, no need for actions, protests, street mobilization to hold representatives feet to the fire. Pundits began bleating about the threat to democracy when a few thousand Trumpets blundered into the rotunda demanding a do over. Where was the alarum over near majorities never voting at all for decades, wholesale capture of Congress and the executives by corporate and hereditary oligarchs with their unlimited campaign funding?
“The discredited gatekeepers of old media” were replaced with “half a dozen new gatekeepers, the most powerful monopolists in the world.” With unseen algorithms, plus an army of scuttling bots and “fact checkers”, any reports contradicting their dominant narrative are deep sixed. Packer’s proposals for his field are as ineffectual and shallow as for areas he knows little about.
Health being primary. The “assault on the Capitol” left him unhinged with vertigo, “a disorder of the crystals in the inner ear.” Somehow this made “perfect sense” to him, but it didn’t help his insight into deeper structural fractures in society. Most likely he relied on “modern medicine” for relief and they have none, only ineffective meds. “Paroxysmal positional vertigo” can be resolved by hanging your head off the edge of a bed, slowly tilting and rotating skull and neck until the crystals slide back into place like a kachinko maze. It can take two or more sessions. Some chiropracters, osteopaths and cranial adjustment providers provide these manipulations if self help doesn’t succeed.
Packer is probably still dizzy, since he saw the “time of separation” as “almost over” in 2021. “When we can finally show our faces, will we dare to embrace?” Kumbaya.