Bill O’Reilly defended anti-immigrant repression by repeating myths about immigrant violence: “Arizona had to do something. In the capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control. . . . The recent murder of an Arizona rancher by a suspected illegal alien and the shooting of a deputy sheriff by alleged alien drug dealers have made the situation almost desperate.” 42 Later, the story of the wounded deputy, like Brewer’s decapitation claims, started to fall apart. Forensic pathologists noted powder burns on the sheriff’s skin, indicating that the muzzle of the gun was in contact with his body when it fired and not twenty-five yards away as he claimed.43
Even Chris Mathews, while debating Amy Goodman, suggested, “Cultural change is not something any society accepts easily, or even with any kind of positive feelings about.”44 Mathews also promoted Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Fittingly, this book’s title refers, however cryptically, to the Nazi-justifying legal theory of Carl Schmitt. As the title implies, the book posits that immigration is destroying America.45 Here, trimming only slightly, is the broad scope of history as seen through the narrow confines of Buchanan’s mind:From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the West wrote the history of the world. Out of the Christian countries of Europe came the explorers, the missionaries, the conquerors, the colonizers, who, by the twentieth century, ruled virtually the entire world. But the passing of the West had begun.
Spain’s empire was the first to fall. . . . By 1918 the German Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires collapsed. World War II bled and broke the British and French. One by one, after war’s end, the strategic outposts of empire—Suez, the Canal Zone, Rhodesia, South Africa, Hong Kong—began to fall. Within three decades, Europe’s headlong retreat from Asia and Africa was complete.
From 1989–1991, the Soviet Union Empire fell and the Soviet Union split into fifteen pieces, half a dozen of them Muslim nations that have never before existed. Now, the African, Asian, Islamic and Hispanic peoples that the West once ruled are coming to repopulate the mother countries. . . . The crisis of Western civilization consists of three imminent and mortal perils: dying populations, disintegrating cultures and invasions unresisted . . . as Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.46
Elsewhere, the book oozes with more of the same: “We are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of our civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted.” And, “Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war. . . . We are in the midst of a savage culture war in which traditionalist values have been losing ground for two generations.”47
Buchanan is not of the lunatic fringe. Rather, he is a major figure in American life, aide to presidents, force in the Republican Party, and political analyst for MSNBC. His politics are mainstream.
The Paranoid Style and Its Rational Uses
Welcome to the new American Volksstaat. Here, hate wears a smile and operates in the name of fairness and freedom. The war on immigrants is very much a war of ideas. Richard Hofstadter dissected the elements of this worldview a generation ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American History, then in the famous article that followed from the book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Here is Hofstadter in 1964—note how current the critique sounds:The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. . . . America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.48
This mentality underwrites the current xenophobia. In 2010, Pew pollsters found that 67 percent of Americans said they “approved of allowing police to detain anyone who cannot verify their legal status,” while 62 percent approved of “allowing police to question people they think may be in the country illegally.” And 59 percent said they approved of Arizona’s profile and arrest law.49
Nor is it a coincidence that some of the biggest financial supporters of the xenophobic and “paranoid style” are oil magnates, most famously, the Koch brothers. These two mild-mannered and quiet billionaires started Americans for Prosperity, a free market advocacy shop that passed on at least $5 million in start-up money to the Tea Party. The Koch family has long followed Hayek’s ultra-antistatist theories and more recently has promoted climate-change denial. The two positions are naturally aligned: to venerate the market and despise the state is to oppose legal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Koch brothers spent more than $100 million to assist a network of thirty-four Far Right political and policy organizations. Among these were the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Independent Women’s Forum, and the American Enterprise Institute.50 The noise from this network is a mash-up of free market fanaticism, climate-change denial, and xenophobia. Talk radio and cable TV are the amplifiers.
Fortress Europe
In Europe, the xenophobic Right is also alive and well. The older cryptofascist leaders, like Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s Front National, and Jörg Haider, long-time leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, are now fading. 51 But a new generation of leaders is taking the old message mainstream; among them are Dutch politician Geert Wilders and Danish People’s Party leader Pia Kjærsgaard.52 Perhaps more worrying is the adoption of overtly racist policies by center-right governments: witness, for example, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s expulsion of eight thousand Roma from France, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement that Germany’s multiculturalism had “utterly failed,” and the walling off of Roma communities in the Czech Republic.53
Romancing the End Times
Even among good liberals, one finds the temptation to embrace the armed lifeboat. Consider environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, who has done stellar work bringing the reality of climate science to a mass audience and started the international climate activist group 350.org. In his latest book, when he addressed the question of climate security, his politics faltered:If you think about the cramped future long enough, for instance, you can end up convinced you’ll be standing over your vegetable patch with your shotgun, warding off the marauding gang that’s after your carrots. . . . The marines aren’t going to be much help there—they’re not geared for Mad Max—but your neighbors might be. Imagining local life in a difficult world means imagining taking more responsibility not only for your food but for your defense. (Consider Switzerland, for example, where every adult male is a soldier.) Militia is an ugly word to many of us, but it’s worth remembering, at least for those of us with tricorne hats in the closet, that a local militia fought the fight on Lexington Green.54
That is an image of America as a failed state. There really must be a better option. Civilization, for all its faults, has much to recommend it, much within it that is worth defending. World civilization, this largely capitalist global economy, for all its exploitation and i
nequity, has produced phenomenal wealth and technology. Can we really not imagine a way to redeploy and redistribute these assets and capacities?
CHAPTER 16
Implications and Possibilities
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons
with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a
Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering
there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasper-
ated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enor-
mous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
CIVILIZATION IS IN CRISIS , though the effects are not yet fully felt. The metabolism of the world economy is fundamentally out of sync with that of nature. And that is a mortal threat to both. In the preceding pages, I have shown how the social impacts of climate change are already upon us, articulating themselves through the preexisting crises of poverty and violence, which are the legacies of Cold War militarism and neoliberal economics. The combination of these factors, their imbrications and mutual acceleration, is the catastrophic convergence. As part of the catastrophic convergence, we see forms of violent adaptation emerging.
In the Global South these take the form of: ethnic irredentism, religious fanaticism, rebellion, banditry, narcotics trafficking, and the small-scale resource wars like the desperate skirmishing over water and cattle in which the Turkana herder Ekaru Loruman was killed. In the North, the multilayered crisis appears as the politics of the armed lifeboat: the preparations for open-ended counterinsurgency, militarized borders, aggressive anti-immigrant policing, and a mainstream proliferation of rightwing xenophobia.
And keep in mind this key fact: even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped immediately—that is, if the world economy collapsed today, and not a single light bulb was switched on nor a single gasoline-powered motor started ever again—there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to cause significant warming and disruptive climate change, and with that considerably more poverty, violence, social dislocation, forced migration, and political upheaval. Thus we must find humane and just means of adaptation, or we face barbaric prospects.
I will not offer a program of green development, nor one of grassroots peace building and disarmament, nor a list of NGOs that point the way forward with their good deeds. Such efforts must be generated in their appropriate contexts by the protagonists of specific local dramas. Our crisis is not a matter of the reading public lacking the names and addresses of groups to work with. Likewise, there are almost endless examples of small-scale, grassroots forms of socially just adaptation that use appropriate technology and are embedded in participatory democracy. But these will remain Lilliputian until they become central to state policies and a formal agenda of economic redistribution on an international scale.
Furthermore, to dwell on noble grassroots groups and ingenious new, appropriate technologies can easily miss the point. The climate crisis is not a technical problem, nor even an economic problem: it is, fundamentally, a political problem.
Consider these factors in tandem.
Technology
Is there enough technology for mitigation or making the transition to a carbon-neutral economy? Yes, technologies to create large amounts of carbon-neutral energy already exist. You know what they are: wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal kinetic power all feeding an efficient smart grid that, in turn, feeds electric vehicles and radically more energy-efficient buildings. Clean tech is not without its problems, but it is here now, already available, and it works at an industrial scale. Can citizens of the Global North, particularly Americans, be as wasteful as they are currently? No. We will have to use energy and resources carefully.
Some see mitigation as hinging on a high-technology breakthrough. Billionaire software mogul Bill Gates, environmental scientist James Lovelock, and even NASA’s James Hansen pin their hopes on pie-in-the-sky fourth-generation nukes (known as IV Gen in the industry). Such technology would surely be safer than today’s rickety old plants and could be feasible given several decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. But industrial-scale application of IV Gen nukes would arrive too late to stave off climate tipping points. The US Department of Energy, a major booster of all things atomic, gives 2021 as the earliest possible date for a IV Gen nuclear plant to open.1 And keep in mind no atomic plant has yet been built on time or within budget, so the DOE’s forecast is very optimistic.
Science tells us that aggressive emissions reductions need to start immediately. Emissions need to peak by 2015, then decline precipitously, if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Such a time frame means we must scale up actually existing clean technology. That will take massive investments and serious planning—but that project has already begun. The United States remains as a laggard, but other leading economies are beginning the transformation.
What about the technological aspects of adaptation? All over the world, one can find small-scale, often grassroots projects that point the way forward. My colleague, environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard, has reported on the “quiet green miracle” of a tree-based approach to farming that is transforming the western Sahel. The farm communities he visited in Burkina Faso had been in slow-motion crisis since “the terrible drought of 1972–84, when a 20 percent decline in average annual rainfall slashed food production throughout the Sahel, turned vast stretches of savanna into desert and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger.” But widespread adaptation of the new “agroforestry” or “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR)—essentially the same sort of methods we saw in Brazil’s Nordeste but developed for an African context—have led to the mass regeneration of tree coverage across parts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. And with that, despite a locally growing population, water tables have actually risen between five and seventeen meters.2 That is truly amazing.
Other examples of positive change are found in the portfolio of the UN Development Program’s Global Environmental Facility, which distributes small grants to community-proposed adaptation and mitigation projects. The UNDP GEF has work going in 29 countries. Its projects include community-based forestry projects and energy-efficiency projects in Kenya; wind- and solar-based electrification and solar-power electricity generation to displace charcoal and diesel; improved watershed management, fighting desertification, protecting biodiversity. In Bolivia this UN program is establishing 22 rural clean-tech electrification projects, providing power to 200,000 rural households and, in so doing, it will prevent 21,000 million tons of CO2 emissions over the next 25 years.3
But, as with the agroforestry projects we saw in Brazil, all these remain small scale, operating at the periphery of state policy. That needs to change. Brazil under Lula made great strides in addressing poverty, in large part by repudiating the moralistic, planning-phobic nostrums of new classical economic orthodoxy.4 But the light pink, semisocialist reforms in the style of Brazil will only work as socially just adaptation if reconciliation with nature is at the center of the agenda.
Economics
Is there enough money for mitigation and adaptation? Actually, yes: there are enormous pools of capital sloshing around the international financial system looking for profitable outlets and in the process creating dangerous destabilizing speculative bubbles.
In May 2010, the Washington Post reported that “Nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession.”5 But, as the article went on to point out, they were not investing in creating new jobs. According to Federal Reserve data from late 2010, American companies had not sat on so much uninvested cash since 1956.6 Many of the large banks spent the first years of the great recession engaged in an international “carry trade,” borrowing money from the US Federal Res
erve at very low interest rates, then lending it back to the US government—that is, buying Treasury Bonds. This largely passive and parasitic style of speculation, rather than investment in real capital stock, was the basis for two years of record bonuses on Wall Street. In 2010, the top twenty-five Wall Street firms paid out $135 billion in compensation to their traders and analysts.7 Meanwhile, the real economy stagnated. Coal and natural gas remain the dominant fuel sources, and there was no government policy in place to help structure, guide, encourage, mandate, or in anyway bring about a new wave of private investment in clean-technology-based industrialization.
As I write, those pools of liquidity are bidding up a speculative bubble in primary commodities like grains and metal ores. “Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent.”8 The Commodity Food Price Index rose by almost 75 percent between 2006 and the end of 2010.9 Wheat prices surged 56 percent in just the second half of 2010. This was also due in part to climate crises—floods in Pakistan and Australia and forest fires in Russia—led to a decrease in supply and a spike in demand. Once the price was moving up, speculators awash in cash and cheap credit started driving it up further.10
Not only is government failing to push private capital to invest in clean technology, but it is itself failing to invest. We suffer an appalling dearth of public money being directly invested in clean technology; nor is there a robust program of subsidies. At the same time, federal tax policy did almost nothing to penalize or prohibit speculation. The US government has resources available for the transition, even without raising taxes on speculators. Consider the military budget. When the 2010 federal budget was signed into law on October 28, 2009, the final size of the Department of Defense’s budget was $680 billion. Defense-related expenditures by other parts of the federal government—such as weapons testing and storage by the DOE, security for the State Department in combat zones, health care for wounded veterans, the antiterrorism functions of the Department of Homeland Security, military aspects of NASA’s work, etc.—constitute between $300 and $600 billion more, according to various estimates, which would bring the total for defense spending to between $1 and $1.3 trillion in fiscal year 2010. To play it safe, we can say that direct military spending, plus supplemental war-fighting costs, plus the DOE’s atomic weapons program totaled $722 billion in 2010.11 In short, there’s money to be found—if we want to find it.
Tropic of Chaos Page 24
