This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein ($22.49 hb, $14.99 Kndl)

Amazon:  The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change.

On classroom size and classroom management

In a conversation today with my spousal unit, a teacher, we agreed that what needs to happen is that teachers should (all together now) start sending incorrigibly disruptive kids to the principal.  Seriously lower the tolerance level for disruptive behavior. Two strikes and you’re out; when you come back you get one strike.  If this were done, the principals would be flooded with these students.  But as long as this doesn’t happen, as long as the teachers try to soldier on and put up with the disruption, the problem is out of sight out of mind for the administrators.  They need to feel the pain.  Teachers should find their inner Republican and just shut the system down.

A review of “Why are Jews Liberals?”

Norman Podhoretz, “conservative” neocon Jew, has a new book which I am very unlikely to read, but which I’ve been following in discussions on the internet tubes.

Leon Wieseltier reviews it in the NY Times, and as before when I’ve read him, I thought what he wrote was great.  His last couple of paragraphs:

Podhoretz’s book was conceived as the solution to the puzzle that Milton Himmel farb wittily formulated many years ago: “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” I have never understood the reputation of this joke. Why should Jews vote like Episcopalians? We are not Episcopalians. The implication of the joke is that political affiliation should be determined by social position, by levels of affluence. In living rich but voting poor, the Jews of America have failed to demonstrate class solidarity. Never mind that parties of the right in many Western countries have always counted on the poor to make the same betrayal, and support causes and candidates that will do nothing to relieve their economic hardship but will exhilarate them culturally or religiously or nationally.

It is not a delusion, not a treason, to vote against your own economic interest. It is a recognition of the multiplicity of interests, the many purposes, that make up a citizen’s life. When, in the Torah of Judaism, Moses commands the Jews to perform acts of social welfare, he sometimes adds the admonition that they were themselves strangers and slaves. The purpose of this refreshment of their memory is plain. The fact that we are no longer stran gers and slaves is not all we need to know. We may not regard the world solely from the standpoint of our own prosperity, our own safety, our own contentment. We are proven by the other, not by the same. The question of whether liberalism or conservatism does more for the helpless and the downtrodden, for the ones who are not like us, will be endlessly debated, and it is not a Jewish debate; but if the answer is liberalism, then the political history of American Jewry is neither a mystery nor a scandal.

Obama’s health care address to joint session

Personally I’m disgusted.  It will be interesting to see if there is any call for something vaguely approaching civility from the right — like how far can you go, really? Do you just shout louder and louder and look more and more like an ass.  Will they moon him the next time he talks?  I remember being told during the last decade that you don’t have to respect the man, but you should respect the office.  Now I wonder what that is supposed to mean?

The author of the paragraphs below has been, in my opinion, a tepid, try-to-please-as-many-as-you-can, centrist journalist who has drifted somewhat to the right under the prevailing winds of the last decade.  — rls

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/09/racisim_in_the_house_chamber.html#more

Some of the same ugly feeling was present in the House chamber Wednesday night. The lack of respect shown the president of the United States was both appalling and shocking. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) yelled “You lie,” when Obama said that his health care proposal would not cover illegal aliens. Other Republicans held up placards saying “What Plan?” or “What Bill?” as Obama was speaking. The Party of Rudeness had outdone itself.

All presidents get vilified. It’s part of the job. White House aide Van Jones stepped down last week amid controversy over the fact that, among other things, he once signed a petition declaring that the administration of George W. Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” Bill Clinton was accused of running drugs through Arkansas’s obscure Mena Airport, among many, many other things.

But when the fringe starts pushing into the center, then attention must be paid. In general, the Republicans in the House treated Obama disrespectfully, and some of them treated him with contempt. When opposition to a piece of legislation turns swiftly into disdain for the man — when policy becomes personal — a columnist is permitted to wonder why. He is permitted, furthermore, to wonder if some of Obama’s more hateful critics are not expressing a repressed bigotry — the feeling that the man up on the dais cannot really be the president of the United States. After all, he does not look like one.

It would be an awful thing if genuine criticism was labeled racist and therefore muffled. But the disrespect shown Obama seems so disproportionate to the issue — health-care reform — that I just have to wonder. Wilson later apologized for his outburst, but he cannot take it back. It was, as has been said of another incident, a teachable moment. I hope he and other Republicans learn from it.

Nobelists send a letter to Obama

There is a letter to Obama at the Federation of American Scientists website, from 34 winners of the Nobel prize, telling him to get cracking on global warming. …

Well, techically they aren’t exactly saying that.   They are telling him he’s already falling short on his commitment to research on clean energy if the United States is to achieve its goals on “reducing greenhouse gases at an affordable cost”.   So by inference these guys all “believe in” global warming.  Or else they are in on the “scam”.*

There is this list out there of scientists (I believe the number is 14,000) who say global warming ain’t happening.  I know there are at least a couple of real scientists on the list, along with a number of TV weathermen and dentists.  I’m wondering if out of the thousands who have signed, there are as many as 34 Nobelists, much less 25 prize winners in physics and six in chemistry (presumably people in these fields are more qualified to evaluate the fraudulence of global warming, than, say, your local dentist).

*  “Global warming is a fraud.” — Comment an acqaintance made recently.

to achieve their goals in reducing greenhouse gases at an

affordable co

Obama added a signing statement

And the House “overwhelmingly rejected it“.

I am glad — very glad — they did.

The question is … WHY THE  F@#* did they wait till now?  Last count was they missed about 700 of Cheney/Bush signing statements!!

Alan Wolfe on Liberalism

The first use of [the term] “liberal” in a political sense took place in 1810, when Spanish delegates to the Cortés, or parliament, meeting in Cádiz , adopted the term to characterize a program seeking to end feudal privileges and to establish a more modern government. But the word “liberal” existed etymologically long before it existed politically. “Liberal” stems from the Latin liber, or “free.” Because it originated as an adjective whose meaning was dependent on whatever noun it was modifying, “liberal” has always had a rather capacious – dare one say liberal? – meaning; the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary points out that “liberal,” besides meaning free, can also mean generous, abundant, large, gentlemanly, unstinting, lax, candid, and unprejudiced. Legacies of that broad meaning abound today: students do not study something called the conservative arts and many societies claim to be liberal democratic while none call themselves conservative democratic. In ordinary usage, “liberalism” refers not only to a substantive political program and a morality emphasizing fairness; it also possesses a connotation emphasizing an openness to the world.

The liberal temperament has more to do with psychology than with politics or morality. “Liberalism” in this meaning of the term seeks to include rather than to exclude, to accept rather than to censor, to respect rather than to stigmatize, to welcome rather than to reject, to be generous and appreciative rather than stingy and mean. Temperamentally, liberals are impatient with arguments rooted in fear and self-protection. They tend to see the past’s improvements in the human condition as reason for anticipating continued improvement in the future. To be sure, liberals recognize evil can lurk in the hearts of men and women and that some political systems – by definition, illiberal ones – have been evil in the extreme. But they hold that the existence of the bad does not make impossible the realization of the good. On the contrary, the fact that some societies lack liberalism’s generosity of spirit is all the more reason for liberals to insist on reform, not only in the public and political sense but in the private and human one.

From The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe (pp 18-19).

Changing the national anthem

Michael Kinsley on “The Star Spangled Banner” … or, as we said as kids a long time ago, “the star speckled bannana” …

I agree with nearly all his sentiments

The melody is lifted from an old English drinking song. The lyrics are all about bombs and war and bloodshed — and not in a good way. By the penultimate verse, the song has turned really nasty: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” In the first verse — the one we generally sing — there is only one reference to any value commonly associated with America: “land of the free.” By contrast, “home of the brave” is empty bravado. There is nothing in the American myth (let alone reality) to suggest that we are braver than anyone else.

…

What should replace it? … The unimaginative, easy choice would be “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” a.k.a. “America” …

This is my vote:

The best of the conventional choices would be “America the Beautiful.” Its range is an octave plus one note, with a couple of tricky leaps (“Uh-MARE-i-cah, America”). But the tune is lovely, and the lyrics are eloquent and almost eerily appropriate in their humility. (“Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law.”)

Al Qaeda sounds like …

This article (“Double blast against Obama shows strain on Al Qaeda”)discusses the fear by Al Qaeda that Obama may disarm some of the anti-Americanism in the mid-East, and hence take (some of) the air out of their sails.  The desperate tone of Al Qaeda has its nearest analog here in that of the Republican right wing and its “evangelical Christian” base.  I’m just sayin’ …

“Zawahri is right to be worried,” said Edwin Bakker, a senior research fellow at the Dutch Clingendael Institute in the Hague.

“Al Qaeda partly lives on anti-Americanism and the ‘war on terror’. Now Bush has gone and been replaced by a guy who’s second name is Hussein. And they fear his speech really is going to have a positive effect.”

Obama and the national debt

Robert Samuelson has a realistic discussion of the deficit/debt in his column today along with spending and debt projections for the next eight years if things go according to Obama’s plan.  He concludes:

At best, the rising cost of the debt would intensify pressures to increase taxes, cut spending — or create bigger, unsustainable deficits. By the CBO’s estimates, interest on the debt as a share of federal spending will double between 2008 and 2019, to 16 percent. Huge budget deficits could also weaken economic growth by “crowding out” private investment.

At worst, the burgeoning debt could trigger a future financial crisis. The danger is that “we won’t be able to sell [Treasury debt] at reasonable interest rates,” says economist Rudy Penner, head of the CBO from 1983 to 1987. In today’s anxious climate, this hasn’t happened. American and foreign investors have favored “safe” U.S. Treasurys. But a glut of bonds, fears of inflation — or something else — might one day shatter confidence. Bond prices might fall sharply; interest rates would rise. The consequences could be worldwide because foreigners own half of U.S. Treasury debt.

…

The wonder is that these issues have been so ignored. Imagine hypothetically that a President McCain had submitted a budget plan identical to Obama’s. There would almost certainly have been a loud outcry: “McCain’s Mortgaging Our Future.” Obama should be held to no less exacting a standard.

I fear that we do not have the political will or political leadership to accept the responsibility for getting our spending down and taxation up to manageable levels.  The mechanisms that Samuelson discusses — higher interest rates required for continued deficit spending, interest payments taking greater and greater control of the national budget, inflation as a means of “managing” the debt, etc. — will inevitably work to the detriment of the economy and the health of the country down the road.  Obama will be no more responsible than the Bushites who squandered a marvelous opportunity, but if he continues in this way, he is in danger of being no less.

I think the solution to our problem lies in the way of rebuilding our energy infrastructure along the lines that the Obama administration has suggested (the details could use some massaging, of course).  In the end the solution will also involve adjusting our “defense” priorities — military spending must be reduced significantly.   Spending as it is, is largely justified as high tech public works projects for individual senators and congresspersons, and not by military necessity.  And the military necessity consists of defending American “interests” which are largely a function of the desires of the moneyed class.

True energy independence, which will only come about when we move to an electrified economy that is based on sources other than fossil fuels, will render obsolete the (current anyway) excuses for the obese military we field today.

This is an evolutionary path that we will follow either by choice sooner or by necessity later.  The shape of the American democracy will probably be much different depending on the timing, however.