Assessing Bookchin's social ecology and its contributions to social movements.
May 07, 2009
By Brian Tokar
Source: IAS
With all the debates and controversies that surrounded Murray Bookchin's many years of active political engagement, few commentators have addressed the lasting influence he had on the social and environmental movements of the past four decades. Participants in those movements, however, will always remember his compelling presence and his inspiring words. The earliest radical ecologists of the 1960s discovered Murray's early work in underground newsletters and often pseudonymous pamphlets. Antinuclear campaigners in the 1970s looked to him for glimpses of what a world of decentralized, solar-powered communities might look like, and radicals engaged in Green politics on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s relied on his vast historical and theoretical contributions in their uphill struggle to counter the drift among Greens toward conventional parliamentary politics. In the 1990s, anti-capitalist global justice activists sought Murray's counsel and looked to his writings as they crafted prefigurative models of direct democracy to take to the streets of Seattle, Prague and Quebec City.
Today, once again, people concerned about the future of life on earth are seeking an historical and philosophical, as well as a strategic underpinning for radical social and political action. The social ecology developed by Murray Bookchin in some thirty books and scores of articles, and advanced by Bookchin and his colleagues over more than forty years, offers the promise of a coherent theoretical outlook merging radical critique and analysis with a broad-ranging reconstructive social vision. In this age of imperial excesses, global injustices, and conspicuous disruptions in the earth's climate, it appears that today's social and ecological movements need social ecology more than ever.
Murray Bookchin's social ecology emerged from a time in the mid-1960s when ecological thought, and even ecological science, were widely viewed as "subversive." Even relatively conventional environmental scientists were contemplating the broad political implications of an ecological world view, confronting academic censorship, and raising challenging questions about the widely accepted capitalist dogma of perpetual economic growth. In a landmark 1964 issue of the journal Bioscience, the ecologist Paul Sears challenged the "pathological" nature of economic growth, and inquired whether ecology, "if taken seriously as an instrument for the long run welfare of mankind [sic], would . . . endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies . . ." [1]
Bookchin carried the discussion to the next level, proposing that ecological thought is not merely "subversive," but fundamentally revolutionary and reconstructive. With the world wars and Great Depression of the 20th century having appeared to only strengthen global capitalism, Bookchin saw the emerging ecological crisis as one challenge that would fundamentally undermine the system's inherent logic. His first book, Our Synthetic Environment, was issued (under the pseudonym, Lewis Herber) by a major New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and cited by authorities such as the microbiologist Réne Dubos as comparable in its influence to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.[2] Our Synthetic Environment offered a detailed and accessible analysis of the origins of pollution, urban concentration, and chemical agriculture.
In 1964, in an article titled Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, Bookchin stated:
The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy have failed to attain—but also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of social thought. For, in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man [sic] and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.[3]
Over the next four decades, Bookchin's social ecology emerged as a unique synthesis of utopian social criticism, detailed historical and anthropological research, dialectical philosophy, and political strategy. It can be viewed as an unfolding of several distinct layers of understanding and insight, spanning all of these dimensions, and more.
At its most outward level, social ecology confronts the social and political roots of contemporary ecological problems. It critiques the ways of conventional environmental politics, and points activists toward radical, community-centered alternatives. Bookchin always insisted that ecological issues be understood as social issues, and was impatient with the narrowly instrumental approaches advanced by conventional environmentalists to address specific problems. The holistic outlook of ecological science, he argued, demands a social ecology that examines the systemic roots of our ecological crisis and challenges the institutions responsible for perpetuating the status quo.
This critical outlook led to many years of research into the evolving relationship between human societies and non-human nature. Both liberals and Marxists have generally viewed the "domination of nature" as a fulfillment of human destiny and human nature—or more recently as an unfortunate but necessary corollary to the advancement of civilization. Bookchin sought to turn this view on its head, describing the "domination of nature" as a myth perpetuated by social elites in some of the earliest hierarchical societies. Far from a historical necessity, efforts to dominate the natural world are a destructive byproduct of social hierarchies.
Bookchin examined the anthropological literature of the 1970s and eighties, seeking principles and practices that emerge from our understanding of non-hierarchical "organic" societies: principles such as interdependence, usufruct, unity-in-diversity, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum: the principle that communities are responsible for meeting their members' most basic needs.[4] Complementarity for Bookchin meant disavowing the oppressive inequality of supposed "equals" within contemporary societies, instead invoking traditional communities' ability to compensate for differences among members. Technology has never been an end in itself, or an autonomous principle of human evolution, but rather a reflection of an evolving "social matrix."[5] Bookchin's historical and anthropological investigations affirmed his belief that any truly liberatory popular movement needs to challenge hierarchy in general, not just its particular manifestations in the form of oppression by race, gender or class.
His explorations of the persistent role of social hierarchies in shaping social evolution and our relationships with non-human nature led Bookchin toward a philosophical inquiry into the evolutionary relationship between human consciousness and natural evolution. He sought to renew the legacy of dialectical philosophy, abandoning Marxist oversimplifications and reinterpreting dialectics from its origins in the works of philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel. Bookchin's dialectical naturalism emphasizes the potentialities that lie latent within the evolution of natural and social phenomena, and celebrates the uniqueness of human creativity, while emphasizing its emergence from the possibilities inherent in "first nature." It eschews the common view of nature as merely a realm of necessity, instead viewing nature as striving to actualize its underlying potentiality for consciousness, creativity and freedom.[6]
For Bookchin, a dialectical outlook on human history compels us to reject what merely is, and follow the logic of evolution toward an expanded view of what could be, and ultimately what ought to be. While the realization of a free, ecological society is far from inevitable—Bookchin was not the teleologist his critics sometimes caricatured him as—it is the most rational outcome of four billion years of natural evolution. This dialectical view of natural and social evolution led to the controversial claim that nature itself should be viewed as an objective ground for a social ethics.
While continuing to develop and clarify his philosophy of nature, Bookchin also developed a distinct approach to political praxis, aimed at realizing the ecological reconstruction of society. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism draws on what he viewed as a fundamental underlying conflict between communities and the state, as well as on historical examples of emerging direct democracies, from the Athenian polis to the New England town meeting. Bookchin sought a redefinition of citizenship and a reinvigoration of the public sphere, with citizen assemblies moving to the center of public life in towns and neighborhoods, and taking control of essential political and economic decisions. Representatives in city councils and regional assemblies would become mandated delegates, deputized by their local assemblies and empowered only to carry out the wishes of the people.
Confederation is also a central aspect of libertarian municipalism, with communities joining together to sustain counterinstitutions aimed at undermining the state and advancing a broad liberatory agenda. Unlike many ecologists writing about politics, Bookchin embraced the historical role of cities as potential sites of freedom and universalism, and viewed the practice of citizenship in empowered neighborhood assemblies as a means for educating community members into the values of humanism, cooperation, and public service.[7] The stifling anonymity of the capitalist market is to be replaced by a moral economy, in which economic, as well as political relationships, would be guided by an ethics of mutualism and genuine reciprocity.[8]
Libertarian municipalism offers both an outline of a political strategy and the structure underlying social ecology's long-range reconstructive vision: a vision of, directly democratic communities challenging state power while evolving in harmony with all of nature. This vision draws on decades of research into political structures, sustainable technologies, revolutionary popular movements, and the best of the utopian tradition in Western thought. Bookchin spent his last years intensively researching the history of revolutionary movements in the West, from the Middle Ages to the middle of the 20th century, drawing out the lessons of the diverse, often subterranean, popular currents that formed the basis for revolutionary movements in England, France, the US, Russia, Spain, and beyond.[9]
Social Ecology and Social Movements
The influence of this body of ideas upon popular ecological movements began with the underground distribution of Bookchin's earlier essays during the 1960s. Ideas he first articulated, such as the need for a fundamentally radical ecology in contrast to technocratic environmentalism, became common wisdom among the growing ranks of ecologically-informed radicals. Actions such as the creation of People's Park in Berkeley in 1969, and the occupation of the administration building at Columbia University in 1968 (initially a protest against the university's expansion plans in West Harlem), occurred at a time when the outlook of social ecology was beginning to inform and inspire radical thinkers and activists. Bookchin and his colleagues, including Institute for Social Ecology co-founder Dan Chodorkoff, participated in some of the earliest efforts to plan for the "greening" of cities and bring alternative, solar-based technologies into inner city neighborhoods.
By the late 1970s, social ecology was playing a much more visible role in the rapidly growing movement against nuclear power. Utility and state officials were identifying rural communities across the US as potential sites for new nuclear power plants, and the movement that arose to counter this new colonization of the countryside united rural back-to-the-landers, seasoned urban activists, and a new generation of radicals who only partially experienced the ferment of the 1960s. Following the mass arrest of over 1400 people who sought to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977, decentralized antinuclear alliances began to appear all across the US. These alliances were committed to nonviolent direct action, bottom-up forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. They were captivated by the utopian dimension of the emerging "appropriate technology" movement, for which Bookchin and other social ecologists provided an essential theoretical and historical grounding. Over a hundred students came to the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) in Vermont every summer, to acquire hands-on experience in organic gardening and alternative technology, while studying social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructive anthropology and other political and theoretical topics.
New England's antinuclear Clamshell Alliance was the first to adopt the model of the affinity group as the basis of a long-range regional organizing effort.[10] Murray Bookchin introduced the concept of grupos de afinidad—borrowed from the Spanish FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation)—into the US in an appendix to his influential 1968 pamphlet, "Listen, Marxist!"[11] Bookchin initially compared the revolutionary Spanish affinity groups to the countercultural collectives that were appearing in cities across the US during the late 1960s. Quaker activists initially advocated the formation of affinity groups as a structure for personal support and security at large demonstrations at Seabrook. But after the mass arrests and two weeks of incarceration in New Hampshire's National Guard Armories, participants began to view the affinity groups as the basis for a much more widely participatory, directly democratic form of social movement organization than had ever been realized before.
Bookchin's original "Note on Affinity Groups" was distributed widely in the lead-up to the planned follow-up action at Seabrook in June of 1978, and activists in Vermont, Boston, and elsewhere in New England worked hard to make the Clamshell Alliance live up to the most profoundly democratic potential of this organizational model. Antinuclear alliances across the US followed the Clamshell in taking their names from local species of animals and plants that were endangered by the spread of nuclear power, and adopted affinity groups and spokescouncils as their fundamental organizational and decision-making structures.[12]
The euphoria of affinity group-based internal democracy was to be short-lived in the Clamshell, however. Protracted debates over the appropriateness of various tactics within a framework of organized nonviolence led to a growing polarization throughout the organization. When most of the original founders of the Clamshell Alliance acceded to a deal with New Hampshire's Attorney General that led to the cancellation of the 1978 Seabrook occupation in favor a large legal rally, activists at the ISE, in Boston, and elsewhere helped expose the antidemocratic nature of that decision and pressed for a renewal of affinity group democracy. The Boston area chapter was completely reorganized around affinity groups and neighborhood-based organizing collectives, and a new organization, the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, picked up where the Clamshell left off. Bookchin's writing of this period helped sustain the antinuclear movement's powerful utopian impulses, and encouraged the grassroots resistance to the betrayals of the movement's self-appointed "leaders."
Green Politics and Beyond
By the early 1980s, Bookchin and other social ecologists began to closely follow the emergence of a new Green political movement in West Germany and other European countries. Social ecologists became excited about this new "anti-party party" that initially functioned more as an alliance of grassroots "citizen initiatives" than a conventional parliamentary vehicle. In the early 1980s, European Greens were running for office as delegates from various social movements, decisions were made primarily at the local level, and those elected to public offices or internal positions of responsibility were obliged to rotate their positions every two years. Greens in Germany and other countries were articulating a sweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy, from urban design, energy use and transportation, to nuclear disarmament and support for emerging democratic movements in Eastern Europe. Translations of Bookchin's writings played an influential role in the development of this new Green political agenda.
Staff members of the ISE played a central role in organizing the first gathering—in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1984—aimed at constituting a Green political formation in the US. One significant bloc of participants at that meeting were pushing for a national organization, thorough which self-appointed representatives of various issue-oriented constituencies would form a national organization, relate to other NGOs on the national level, and perhaps create a national Green Party within the year. The model that prevailed, however, was that of a more decentralized, grassroots-based movement, rooted in Green locals empowering regional delegates to make confederal decisions following locally-debated mandates. Social ecologists in New England had already begun to form a confederation of Green locals on that model, and the idea once again spread across the country. By the first national conference of the US Greens, in Amherst, Massachusetts in July of 1987, there were already over a hundred grassroots Green locals spread across the country. Ideas from social ecology, and activists based at the ISE, played key roles in the development of the first national Green Program between 1988 and 1990.
The early 1990s saw a growing tension between Greens committed to grassroots democracy and a municipalist politics, and those advocating for a US Green Party that would field candidates for national office. Social ecologists in New England circulated a call for a Left Green Network in 1988, and similarly-minded activists in the San Francisco Bay Area developed a Radical Green caucus. As Greens across the US collaborated on the development of a national program, policy positions advocated by the Left Greens were adopted by three consecutive national gatherings, much to the chagrin of those promoting a more mainstream agenda. Ironically, many Left Greens and other grassroots activists began losing interest in the Greens at this point. Green moderates went on to form a separate national organization, based exclusively on state-certified Green Parties, while the Left Green Network continued holding educational conferences and publishing educational materials largely independent of any other Green entity.
During the same period, a group of recent ISE students formed a youth caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside the Greens, and joined with the Left Greens to initiate a major direct action to coincide with the April 1990 twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day. On the day following the official commemorations—a Sunday filled with polite, heavily corporate sponsored events—several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters converged on Wall Street seeking to obstruct the opening of stock trading on that day. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a variety of social ecology writings, and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News,
Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth day into a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the public feel good while obscuring the corporate root of the Earth's pollution almost succeeded. It took angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs.[13]
Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, Bookchin and other social ecologists formed the Burlington Greens to develop positions on urban issues and run candidates for local office. The Greens opposed the commercial development of the city's Lake Champlain waterfront, and argued that the neighborhood assemblies established by the Progressive city administration for planning and administrative purposes should become the basis for a more empowered model of democratic neighborhood governance. The Burlington Greens gained national headlines in 1989 when the Greens contested several City Council seats and a Green candidate challenged the city's Progressive mayor in a citywide election.
During the 1980s and nineties, social ecologists also played a central role in the development and elaboration of ecofeminist ideas. Ynestra King's ecofeminism classes at the ISE during the late 1970s were probably the first to be offered anywhere, and annual ecofeminist colloquia were organized by Chaia Heller and other social ecologists during the early 1990s. Ecofeminist activists played a central role in initiating two Women's Pentagon Actions and a women's peace camp alongside the Seneca Army Depot in New York State, however ecofeminism evolved through the 1990s as a predominantly cultural and spiritual movement that social ecologists became increasingly skeptical about.[14] Self-identified ecofeminists with a rather eclectic mix of political outlooks also played a central role in the evolution of Green politics in the US.[15]
In the later 1990s, activists connected to the Institute for Social Ecology played a central role in the rapidly growing movement to promote global justice and challenge the institutions of capitalist globalism. Social ecologists raised discussions around the broad potential for direct democracy as a counter-power to centralized economic and political institutions, and helped further the evolution toward a longer-range reconstructive vision within the movement that came of age on the streets of Seattle. A few ISE students were centrally involved in the organizing for the WTO shutdown in Seattle, and several others formed an affinity group to participate in and document the actions. After Seattle, the ISE booklet Bringing Democracy Home highlighted the writings of various social ecologists on potential future directions for the movement. Global justice activists from across the US attended programs at the ISE in Vermont during the early years of this decade to further their political analysis and join Bookchin and other faculty members in wide-ranging discussions of where the movement might be heading.
Around the same time, the ISE's Biotechnology Project pioneered the use of New England's Town Meetings as a primary organizing vehicle to express opposition to the genetic engineering of food. In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops. Eight towns took the further step of discouraging or declaring a moratorium on the planting of GE crops within their town. By 2007, 85 Vermont towns and 120 across New England had passed similar resolutions. At a time when efforts to adequately regulate GE products at the national level had become hopelessly deadlocked, this campaign reinvigorated public discussion of GE issues in the region and across the US, gained international attention, and articulated a broader analysis of the social and ecological implications of genetic engineering and the commodification of life. It also revealed the limits of town meeting organizing absent a broader municipalist consciousness. A majority of those who worked to bring the issue to their towns were content to view their resolutions merely as a means to lobby legislators and other state and federal officials, rather than as part of a broader strategy to reclaim municipal political power, a problem that continues to be debated and theorized by social ecologists today.[16]
Social Ecology, Eco-Marxism and "Political Ecology"
Over the past decade, as a new generation of activists came to take for granted both the ecological crisis, and capitalism's increasing adaptation to it, a host of new "radical ecologies" have emerged from circles of academic Marxists, international development scholars, and progressive geographers. Each of these schools of thought has sought to substantially reinvent the history of ecological radicalism, often denying the central role of social ecology and overlooking many of the profound debates that have influenced ecological activists and scholars since the 1960s. Among these are James O'Connor's socialist ecology, John Bellamy Foster's ecological Marxism, and at least two schools of what has come to be called "political ecology."
O'Connor, a prominent Marxist economic crisis theorist, founded the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS) in 1988, and grew it into a respected international journal of critical ecological research and social theory. He framed contemporary social and ecological problems as manifestations of a "second contradiction of capitalism," in which the economy is plagued not only by a declining rate of profit (Marx's crisis of overproduction), but an inherent inability to pay for the problems it creates (a crisis of underproduction).[17] O'Connor, somewhat unique among Marxists, acknowledged an inherent limit to capitalist expansion, which he viewed as an imperative for increased cooperation, social regulation and planning. His attempts to reconcile ecology and Marxism, however, were perhaps fatally undermined by a persistent underlying economic reductionism. In the early 1990s, the CNS journal published John Clark's rather bizarre essay, "A Social Ecology," which framed the history of radical ecological thought in a highly revisionist fashion, casting Bookchin as a significant, but ultimately marginal figure in the development of social ecology.
John Bellamy Foster, a current editor of the independent Marxist journal Monthly Review, has been writing extensively about ecology since the 1990s, and offers a somewhat more accessible ecological Marxism. His main theoretical work, Marx's Ecology, offers a fascinating, in-depth examination of the roots of Marx's ideas in classical philosophical materialism and early ecological science.[18] However his more popular ecological writing is quite problematic, especially his approach to the development of left ecological ideas. He repeatedly responds to social ecology without ever discussing it, and references Bookchin's work in only the most cursory possible ways. Foster's 2002 book Ecology Against Capitalism attacks a generic, straw-man "green theory," while continually borrowing phrases from Bookchin: "Ecology and human freedom," a book chapter steeped in narrow economic reductionism; "Crisis of Socio-Ecology;" and even "Dialectical Naturalism," attributed, of course, to Frederick Engels. [19] Joel Kovel, the current editor of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, has offered a perspective more sympathetic to social ecology, but his most comprehensive and forward-looking work, The Enemy of Nature, is rather dismissive of Bookchin's contributions and instead seeks solutions to the inherent conflict between ecology and capitalism in an eclectic mix of Christian socialism, affinity groups, organic farms, and community credit unions.[20]
Meanwhile, more traditional academics have tried to carry the discussion of ecology and politics in a number of interesting, but ultimately limited directions. The current literature of "political ecology" is reviewed in two comprehensive and detailed texts, both published in the last several years. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, by Paul Robbins of Ohio State University, has its roots in cultural geography and development studies.[21] It reviews a broad scope of critical studies of environmental issues in the global South, but fundamentally dehistoricizes the evolution of ecological thought. There is almost no acknowledgement of any of the thinkers or ideas that have guided ecological debates over the past several decades. Robbins does cite Kropotkin, his French counterpart Elisée Reclus, and 19th century Vermont naturalist George Perkins Marsh, as important progenitors of the field, but the remaining history of ecological thought is essentially replaced by the works of contemporary academic geographers whose researches are little known outside of their academic discipline.
Another school of "political ecology," which initially emerged out of Oxford in the 1970s, is featured in the text, Critical Political Ecology: The politics of environmental science,[22] by Tim Forsyth of the London School of Economics. This work offers a critical, politically astute outlook on key issues in environmental science and management, informed by the ideas of prominent thinkers in critical theory and science studies. Forsyth's approach is self-consciously data-driven, and seeks to challenge traditional environmental "orthodoxies" in various fields of activity, while carefully disavowing the reactionary views of environmental "contrarians" such as the Danish writer Bjorn Lomborg. Forsyth invokes the language of democracy in two central chapters, but this is democracy as the demystification of scientific research, not as the foundation of a broader reconstruction of society.
Meanwhile, a flowering of popular ecological movements for land rights, community survival and against the privatization of public services has arisen throughout the global South. From the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico to "water wars" in Bolivia and India, widespread land seizures by displaced farming communities in Brazil, and the activities of radical farmers in South Korea, among others, these movements have increasingly captured the imagination of global justice advocates, even those who initially seemed to take ecological matters for granted. These movements offer a profound challenge to environmental politics, as it is commonly practiced in the North, and have also helped provoked a broad critique of traditional Northern approaches to land conservation as practiced by transnational NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund. While some authors have appropriately cautioned against the automatic labeling of indigenous, land-based movements as ecological,[23] the resurgence of interest in these movements has helped sustain the interest of global justice activists in ecological matters. It has also encouraged thoughtful urban youth to once again broadly identify with the world views of those whose livelihoods are still derived from the land.
During the first half of this decade, the traditional environmental movement in the US was rocked by an internal crisis of confidence, one that came into popular view in 2004 with the wide distribution of an extended essay provocatively titled "The Death of Environmentalism."[24] Responding to the dramatic rollback of environmental regulation under two Bush administrations, and the failure of policy advocates in the US to adequately address the impacts of global climate disruption, the essay (authored by two public relations consultants with close ties to the foundation world) echoed radical critiques of environmental praxis, while mainly seeking to unite big business and organized labor in a "New Apollo Project" for the development of renewable energy technologies. In 2005, a group of prominent environmental justice advocates circulated a response titled "The Soul of Environmentalism," which sought to reclaim the social movement roots of environmentalism in early civil rights struggles, and urge more attention to "big issues," community building, and "deep change." [25] This response effectively critiqued the narrow assumptions of "The Death of Environmentalism," and reaffirmed vital historical and practical links to other social movements, but was relatively sparse in its specific proposals for moving forward.
Today, with a growing awareness of climate disruptions and the profound ecological upheavals that may likely be upon us, environmental politics once again appears ascendant. But most often it is the same narrowly instrumental environmentalism that Bookchin critiqued in the 1960s and seventies. "Green consumerism," which first emerged as a national phenomenon around the 1990 Earth Day anniversary, has returned with a vengeance, incessantly promoted as the key to reducing our personal impact on the climate. Carbon dioxide trading, a transparently false solution first proposed in the late 1980s, has been advanced as the most politically acceptable policy option.[26] Public debates range from fruitless controversies over whether or not human-induced climate change is real, to narrow prescriptions for establishing a market price for carbon dioxide that might induce corporations to reduce their emissions. Even well-known radicals, such as the popular British columnist George Monbiot, focus on demonstrating the feasibility of a "least painful" lower-energy scenario, rather than posing a fundamental ecological challenge to the further destructive development of global capitalism.[27]
Social Ecology and the Future
In this disturbingly constrained political and intellectual environment, what is the future for ecologically minded radicals? Will capitalism finally come to terms with the environmental crisis? Or does the imperative of responding to the threat of catastrophic climate change still present a fundamental political challenge and a hope for a genuinely better future? To address these questions it is useful to consider some of the particular ways that social ecology may continue to inform and enlighten today's emerging social and environmental movements.
First, social ecology offers an uncompromising ecological outlook that challenges the supremacy of capitalism and the state. A movement that fails to confront the underlying causes of environmental destruction and climate disruption can, at best, only superficially address those problems. At worst, capitalism offers false solutions—such as the worldwide production of so-called biofuels to replace gasoline and diesel fuel—that only aggravate problems in the longer term.[28] Ultimately, to fully address the causes of climate change and other compelling environmental problems requires us to raise visionary demands that the dominant economic and political systems will likely prove unable to accommodate.
Social ecology's 40-year evolution also offers a vehicle to better comprehend the origins and the historical emergence of ecological radicalism, from the nascent movements of the late 1950s and early sixties, to the eco-saturated present. Over four decades, the writings Murray Bookchin and his colleagues reflected upon the most important on-the-ground debates within ecological and social movements with passion and polemic, as well as with humor and long-range vision.
Thirdly, social ecology offers the most comprehensive theoretical treatment of the origins of human social domination and its historical relationship to abuses of the earth's living ecosystems. Social ecology has consistently pointed to the origins of ecological destruction in social relations of domination, in contrast to both liberal and Marxist views that an impulse to dominate non-human nature is a product of a lasting historical necessity.
Fourth, social ecology presents a framework for comprehending the origins of human consciousness and the emergence of human reason from its natural context. Dialectical naturalism reaches far beyond popular, often solipsistic notions of an "ecological self," grounding the embeddedness of consciousness in nature in a coherent theoretical framework with roots in classical nature philosophies. It offers a philosophical challenge to overturn popular acceptance of the world as it is, and to persistently inquire as to how things ought to be.
Fifth, social ecology offers activists an historical and strategic grounding for political and organizational debates about the potential for direct democracy. Social ecologists have worked to bring the praxis of direct democracy into social movements since the 1970s, and Bookchin's work offers a vital historical and theoretical context for this continuing conversation.
Sixth, at a time when the remaining land-based peoples around the world are facing unprecedented assaults on their communities and livelihoods, social ecology reminds us of the roots of Western radicalism in land-based movements and communities, in stark contrast to the mythologized industrial proletariat of orthodox Marxism. Bookchin's The Third Revolution describes in detail how revolutionary movements in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the Spanish Civil War, have cultural roots in pre-industrial social relations, an understanding which can serve to historicize and deromanticize our approach to contemporary peasant-centered movements. Rather than an exotic other, vaguely reminiscent of a distant and idealized past, current peasant movements offer much insight and practical guidance toward reclaiming both our past and our future.
Seventh, social ecology offers a coherent and articulate political alternative to economic reductionism, identity politics, and many other trends that often dominate today's progressive left. Bookchin polemicized relentlessly against these and other disturbing tendencies, insisting that our era's ecological crises compel a focus on the general interest, with humanity itself as the only viable "revolutionary subject." Social ecology has helped connect contemporary revolutionaries with the legacies of the past, and offered a theoretical context for sustaining a coherent, emancipatory revolutionary social vision.
Finally, Bookchin insisted for four decades on the inseparability of oppositional political activity from a reconstructive vision of an ecological future. He viewed most popular leftist writing of our era as only half complete, focusing on critique and analysis to the exclusion of a coherent way forward. At the same time, social ecologists have often spoken out against the increasing accommodation of so-called "alternative" institutions—including numerous once-radical co-ops and collectives—to a stifling capitalist status quo. Opposition without a reconstructive vision leads to exhaustion and burnout. "Alternative" institutions without a link to vital, counter-systemic social movements are cajoled and coerced by "market forces" into the ranks of non-threatening "green" businesses, merely serving an elite clientele with "socially responsible" products. A genuine convergence of the oppositional and reconstructive strands of activity is a first step toward a political movement that can ultimately begin to contest and reclaim political power.
Defenders of the status quo would have us believe that "green" capitalism and the "information economy" will usher in a transition to a more ecological future. But, like all the capitalisms of the past, this latest incarnation relies ultimately on the perpetual expansion of its reach. All of humanity, from imperial urban centers to remote rural villages, is being sold on a way of life that can only continue to devour the earth and its peoples. Today's hi-tech consumer lifestyles, whether played out in New York, Beijing, or the hinterlands, defies all limits, raising global inequality and economic oppression to heretofore unimaginable proportions while thoroughly destabilizing the earth's ability to sustain complex life.
The corrosive simplification of living ecosystems, and the retreat into an increasingly unstable and synthetic world that Murray Bookchin predicted in the 1960s, has evolved from a disturbing future projection to a global reality. Our survival now depends on our ability to challenge this system at its core, and evolve a broad, counterhegemonic social movement that refuses to compromise on partial measures. Hopefully such a movement will embrace and continue to expand and elaborate the revolutionary and reconstructive social vision of social ecology.
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Brian Tokar is a faculty member at the Institute for Social Ecology and director of the Institute's Biotechnology Project. His books include Earth for Sale (South End Press), Redesigning Life? (Zed Books), and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom).
NOTES
[1] Paul B. Sears, "Ecology: A Subversive Subject," BioScience, Vol. 14, No. 7, July 1964.
[2] René Dubos, Man Adapting, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965, p. 196.
[3] Murray Bookchin, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971, p. 58. Post-Scarcity Anarchism was reprinted by Black Rose Books (Montreal) in 1986 and by AK Press (San Francisco) in 2004.
[4] Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), esp. Chapters 2 and 3. The Ecology of Freedom has also been reissued by both Black Rose (1991) and AK Press (2005).
[5] ibid., Chapters 9, 10.
[6] The fullest elaboration of these ideas appears in Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990 (Revised 1995).
[7] Bookchin, "A New Municipal Agenda," in Urbanization Without Cities, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992 (republished by Cassell in London, UK in 1995). Also see his earlier Limits of the City, originally published by Harper & Row in 1974 and in an expanded edition by Black Rose Books.
[8] Bookchin, "Market Economy or Moral Economy," in The Modern Crisis, Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986.
[9] Bookchin's The Third Revolution appeared in four volumes, issued between 1996 and 2005 by Cassell in London and New York.
[10] At least one earlier mass action, aimed at shutting down Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War in the spring of 1971, was organized on the affinity group model, but Clamshell activists were the first in the US to make this the underlying structure of their organization.
[11] Reprinted in Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit. ref. 3.
[12] A sympathetic, but factually flawed description of the libertarian and feminist roots of this movement, on both the east and west coasts, is available in Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
[13] Juan Gonzalez, "Getting Serious about Ecology," New York Daily News, April 24, 1990.
[14] See Chaia Heller, Ecology of Everyday Life, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999; also Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1991.
[15] See Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
[16] The most comprehensive paper on this topic is Ben Grosscup, "Town Meeting Advocacy in New England: Potentials and Pitfalls," presented at the 2007 Social Ecology Colloquium (Marshfield, Vermont).
[17] James O'Connor, "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction," in John S. Dryzek and David Schlosberg, eds., Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader, Oxford University Press, 1998.
[18] John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
[19] John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
[20] Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature : The end of capitalism or the end of the world?, London: Zed Books. 2002.
[21] Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, Malden, MA. and Oxford, UK: Blackwell 2004.
[22] Tim Forsyth, Critical Political Ecology: The politics of environmental science, London & New York: Routledge, 2003.
[23] Larry Lohmann, "Visitors to the Commons," in Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
[24] Available at www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf.
[25] Available at www.rprogress.org/soul/soul.pdf.
[26] For an historical overview, see Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale, Boston: South End Press, 1997, Chapter 2; for a detailed examination of the consequences of present carbon trading policies, see Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatization and power, Development Dialogue No. 48, September 2006 (Uppsala: Dag Hammerskjold Center).
[27] George Monbiot, Heat: How to stop the planet from burning, Boston: South End Press, 2007. For a comprehensive review of more radical solutions to the climate crisis, see the "Less Energy" series in the Green politics journal Synthesis/Regeneration (St. Louis: WD Press), beginning with the Winter 2007 issue (No. 42).
[28] See Brian Tokar, "The Real Scoop on Biofuels," at http://ww4report.com/node/2864; also Eric Holt-Gimenez, "The Great Biofuel Hoax," at www.alternet.org/environment/54218/, and the July 2007 special issue of Seedling, published by GRAIN in Barcelona.
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21387
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The Disease of Permanent War
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on May 19, 2009, Printed on May 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140106/
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.
It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls--the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads--personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.
"War," Randolph Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."
In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.
Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.
Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war--who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution--must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.
Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.
Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.
Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.
The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.
Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.
The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote "Notes From the Underground" to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in "Notes From the Underground" carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.
"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."
We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems--economic, social, environmental and political--that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140106/
Posted on May 19, 2009, Printed on May 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140106/
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.
It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls--the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads--personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.
"War," Randolph Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."
In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.
Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.
Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war--who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution--must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.
Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.
Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.
Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.
The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.
Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.
The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote "Notes From the Underground" to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in "Notes From the Underground" carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.
"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."
We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems--economic, social, environmental and political--that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140106/
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Time For Renewable Energy
by Ralph Nader
After years of opposing or ridiculing renewable energy, the giant oil companies are using a new approach. A recent ExxonMobil advertising campaign puts it this way:
"Oil, gas, coal, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar....to fuel the future we need them all."
Not an unexpected maneuver from a fossil fuel company that has owned Washington and received subsidies and tax breaks for decades. What is unfortunate is that this is the exact kind of energy pitch coming out of the Obama Administration and most Congressional Democrats. Indeed it is right out of candidate Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric last year.
Then Senator Obama gave every energy source its due although he spent an inordinate amount of time pushing the mirage of "clean coal" and keeping nuclear energy on the table.
The problem is that all energy sources are not created equal for purposes of efficiency, and the well being of consumers, workers, the environment and posterity. Regardless of their BTU production, different kinds of energy produce different levels of harms and benefits, short and long term.
Take atomic power. Wall Street financiers have been adamant for years that lending billions of dollars to utilities to construct a single nuclear plant requires a 100% U.S. government loan guarantee. A 90% loan guarantee by the taxpayers is rejected by the Wall Streeters. They want a 100% guarantee on the barrelhead.
The well-known physicist, environmentalist Amory Lovins argues against nuclear energy just on economic grounds. He says he doesn't even have to get to the safety issues to recommend rejection. I know no one of prominence of on the other side willing to debate him. If you do, let me know.
But the safety issues surrounding the nuclear option will not go away. Neither the unresolved permanent storage of deadly radioactive waste, nor the national security problems, nor the risk of a class nine meltdown that could contaminate, in the words of the old Atomic Energy Agency (of the U.S. government), an area the size of Pennsylvania, are going away.
Then, of course, there is the missing "source" of energy from the Exxon ad. This is energy efficiency. Reducing waste. A thousand megawatts you don't waste is a thousand megawatts you don't have to produce. The same goes for not having to waste a gallon of gasoline in gas guzzling motor vehicles. Nothing can compete with the payback ratios of energy conservation which includes building and engine construction and use. Yet again and again it is not at the top of the list or on many lists at all.
Then there are the renewables-wind, geothermal, water and all the wonderous varieties of solar. A few days ago, the Sustainable Energy Coalition had its 12th annual Congressional renewable energy and energy efficiency EXPO + Forum at the Cannon House Office Building in the U.S. House of Representatives.
This year's EXPO featured over fifty businesses, trade associations, government agencies and non-profit policy organizations to hear some members of Congress regale them and converse with visitors.
I found the exhibits and their personable exhibitors to be specific, comprehensive and seemingly convinced that renewables are finally, after some failed starts, on an irreversible road to greater market share.
It was not only the advanced hardware and the use of tax credits that fed their optimism. Renewables are branching out in ways that are bringing them nearer to a level playing field with their heavily subsidized and coddled fossil fuel and nuclear "competitors." More venture capital, better tax credits, rebates and various state and local proposals exist to facilitate financing for users.
One spreading incentive comes from my home state of Connecticut which offers a special solar energy leasing plan for homeowners. The Nutmeg State claims it is leading "the way with the nation's first rate payer supporter residential leasing program for solar energy." Catch the details by visiting ctsolarlease.com or phone 888-232-3477.
The point of this column is to demand thoughtful discrimination by our policy makers between different kinds of energy. Some are clearly better than others. From the federal government on down to the state and local level, a discriminatory approach is a must if the conversion to renewables and energy conservation from fossils and nuclear is to accelerate.
The old energy lobbies are very stubborn and have their hooks into too many politicians who mouth the ExxonMobil party line.
There are far more jobs in the new energy economy with far more health, efficiency, and security benefits than there are in staying with hydrocarbons and radioactive atoms.
Ralph Nader [1] is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions [2].
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16
After years of opposing or ridiculing renewable energy, the giant oil companies are using a new approach. A recent ExxonMobil advertising campaign puts it this way:
"Oil, gas, coal, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar....to fuel the future we need them all."
Not an unexpected maneuver from a fossil fuel company that has owned Washington and received subsidies and tax breaks for decades. What is unfortunate is that this is the exact kind of energy pitch coming out of the Obama Administration and most Congressional Democrats. Indeed it is right out of candidate Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric last year.
Then Senator Obama gave every energy source its due although he spent an inordinate amount of time pushing the mirage of "clean coal" and keeping nuclear energy on the table.
The problem is that all energy sources are not created equal for purposes of efficiency, and the well being of consumers, workers, the environment and posterity. Regardless of their BTU production, different kinds of energy produce different levels of harms and benefits, short and long term.
Take atomic power. Wall Street financiers have been adamant for years that lending billions of dollars to utilities to construct a single nuclear plant requires a 100% U.S. government loan guarantee. A 90% loan guarantee by the taxpayers is rejected by the Wall Streeters. They want a 100% guarantee on the barrelhead.
The well-known physicist, environmentalist Amory Lovins argues against nuclear energy just on economic grounds. He says he doesn't even have to get to the safety issues to recommend rejection. I know no one of prominence of on the other side willing to debate him. If you do, let me know.
But the safety issues surrounding the nuclear option will not go away. Neither the unresolved permanent storage of deadly radioactive waste, nor the national security problems, nor the risk of a class nine meltdown that could contaminate, in the words of the old Atomic Energy Agency (of the U.S. government), an area the size of Pennsylvania, are going away.
Then, of course, there is the missing "source" of energy from the Exxon ad. This is energy efficiency. Reducing waste. A thousand megawatts you don't waste is a thousand megawatts you don't have to produce. The same goes for not having to waste a gallon of gasoline in gas guzzling motor vehicles. Nothing can compete with the payback ratios of energy conservation which includes building and engine construction and use. Yet again and again it is not at the top of the list or on many lists at all.
Then there are the renewables-wind, geothermal, water and all the wonderous varieties of solar. A few days ago, the Sustainable Energy Coalition had its 12th annual Congressional renewable energy and energy efficiency EXPO + Forum at the Cannon House Office Building in the U.S. House of Representatives.
This year's EXPO featured over fifty businesses, trade associations, government agencies and non-profit policy organizations to hear some members of Congress regale them and converse with visitors.
I found the exhibits and their personable exhibitors to be specific, comprehensive and seemingly convinced that renewables are finally, after some failed starts, on an irreversible road to greater market share.
It was not only the advanced hardware and the use of tax credits that fed their optimism. Renewables are branching out in ways that are bringing them nearer to a level playing field with their heavily subsidized and coddled fossil fuel and nuclear "competitors." More venture capital, better tax credits, rebates and various state and local proposals exist to facilitate financing for users.
One spreading incentive comes from my home state of Connecticut which offers a special solar energy leasing plan for homeowners. The Nutmeg State claims it is leading "the way with the nation's first rate payer supporter residential leasing program for solar energy." Catch the details by visiting ctsolarlease.com or phone 888-232-3477.
The point of this column is to demand thoughtful discrimination by our policy makers between different kinds of energy. Some are clearly better than others. From the federal government on down to the state and local level, a discriminatory approach is a must if the conversion to renewables and energy conservation from fossils and nuclear is to accelerate.
The old energy lobbies are very stubborn and have their hooks into too many politicians who mouth the ExxonMobil party line.
There are far more jobs in the new energy economy with far more health, efficiency, and security benefits than there are in staying with hydrocarbons and radioactive atoms.
Ralph Nader [1] is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions [2].
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16
The Local UP-Side of the Global DOWN-Turn
by Gregg Kleiner
I grew up on thirteen acres of rural hillside five miles from the one-store, one-school town of Lookingglass, Oregon, where my parents raised me and my four siblings to always try to see the flecks of good in the bad, the stars between clouds in the night sky.
My father pointed out that even maggots writhing inside the carcass of a stillborn lamb were doing important work in the cycle of life, and he said the bats living in a crevice near our chimney were benevolent creatures that erupted in a fluttering cloud at dusk to keep the mosquito population in check.
My mother would sometimes pause in the midst of her non-stop maternal motion of rearing five children to point out the fact that there is always some small helping of good to be found in the bad. She once pulled the family station wagon over on the way to Good Friday confession to marvel out the windshield at the silvery edges on dark storm clouds that were backlit by the sun, and how the silver was like Easter morning and the dark like that day – Good Friday. I still recall that roadside moment when I hear the term “silver lining.” Another time, our mother ushered us all outside into the pasture on an icy March morning so we could witness the power (and faith) that yellow and purple crocuses had to push up out of frost-crusted mud toward the weak light. And when the creek that drained our property overflowed its banks one winter and carried away dead animals, plastic toys, and two brothers who lived upstream and had fallen in one trying to save the other, our mother made sure we all saw the fertile silt the floodwaters left behind in the low spots along the banks.
All these memories help ground me as I watch financial markets disintegrate, global warming accelerate, and workers from cubicle farms to sawmills receive pink slips then queue up at unemployment offices. It is thanks to my mother that I can’t help but try to see the upside of this downturn, as she would no doubt be doing if she were still alive.
I believe there will be many small, good things that come out of the financial realignment and the environmental crises that, in the end—if we as a human race have the courage to make some fundamental changes in time—might well add up enough to usher in a new era: one based more on community, conversation, and compassion than on consumerism, capitalism, and high-flying careers.
Although the downturn will be downright difficult for many of us, perhaps we can focus on the small goodnesses that will bloom out of these hard times, some of which are already budding. Here are a few where I find hope:
* Borrowing Eggs: As oil prices begin climbing back up, we are turning to our neighbors instead of our automobiles when we’re short an egg or cup of flour for a recipe. There’s nothing that builds community quite like the old-fashioned knocking on a neighbor’s door to borrow a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, or a simple egg. And when the bread or pie is baked, we might return the favor in the form of a warm slice, perhaps delivered by a child.
* Peddling Proudly: We are bicycling more, which pushes blood to our cheeks, slows the pace of our lives, and puts us more in touch with the elements of the natural world. Look no farther than China to see how the simple, but super-efficient bicycle moves masses for next-to-nil. And think of all the bicycle mechanics we’ll employ!
* Growing Good Food: Front yards, porches, school grounds, and vacant lots are becoming vegetable gardens where we’re growing food in pots or on plots the way our grandparents did. At community gardens, we’re sharing the weeding as well as the bounty, relieved our children are learning how to grow food before the whole concept is forgotten by a generation reared on buying it sealed beneath plastic wrap at air-conditioned supermarkets. To wash soil from a freshly-pulled carrot and see that brilliant orange, and then taste the sweet crunch, ranks right up there with miracles in my mind. Every child must experience this.
* Clothesline Confidential: The simple clothesline is making a bold comeback, with backyards, balconies, and apartment-building rooftops erupting with the bright, billowing colors of clothes drying in the breeze—consuming only energy supplied by that fireball, the sun. Clothespin factories will soon employ laid-off millworkers.
* Walking Widely: We are utilizing the twin lower appendages of our homo erectus nature to ambulate more often to more places, seeing and hearing and smelling things impossible to sense from the windshield-walled interiors of contraptions powered by the infernal combustion engine.
* Keeping Coops: We’re keeping chickens in backyards where these feathered friends lay eggs with yolks the color of the sun, fertilize their environs, keep pests in check, and eventually become soup for our souls. We are once more waking to the crowing of roosters and the cackling of hens, and our children are learning that meat doesn’t grow on those Styrofoam trays, and eggs aren’t laid inside cartons in two neat rows of twelve at a time.
* Taking Transit: We have more time for reading and conversation as we ride trains, busses, and boats to our more far-flung destinations. We’re mingling at train stations and bus depots, those ageless gathering places that have been overlooked for far too long. Who knows if airports will even be in the picture.
* Community Canning: We’re learning to put food by again, canning fruits and vegetables inside clear quart jars we line up in steamy kitchens where friends, family, and neighbors gather to participate in this ritual of community and survival. When we open those jelly jars of blackberry jam in the watery light of late-January, we’ll ingest the warmth and sweetness and sunshine of summer, our lips a happy shade of purple. And what lovely gifts homemade preserves make for neighbors.
* Live-in In Laws: As housing markets continue to tighten, we’re opening our homes to extended family members, the way everyone once lived. Grandma Grace or an Aunt Emma are providing childcare, Uncle Joe, an unemployed sous chef, is taking care of the cooking and cleaning, Grandpa George is teaching life lessons by telling stories or taking the kids fishing when mom and dad need some time alone to reconnect and tend their love. In our fast-paced society of soccer moms, drop-off daycare centers, and family dinners that have become rare, the live-in extended family is long overdue for a comeback. This arrangement will also reduce healthcare costs, because living in community is powerful medicine that prevents dis-ease.
* Making Music Live: We are gathering more often with our instruments and voices to make music together, in living rooms and parks, instead of only listening to electronic forms downloaded and pumped via earbuds directly into our brains. We’re attending local concerts that cost just a few bucks, instead of traveling miles to mega-concerts that cost loads of cash (thanks in part to those pesky transaction fees). Until recently, homemade music had been a part of every civilization since forever—from caves, longhouses, and mud huts, to the pioneers moving westward. What have we lost along with our live, local music?
* Shopping Mom-and-Pop: Corner groceries are making a comeback, along with the local hardware store and the neighborhood pub, all of them located within walking distance, while those sprawling malls and big box stores in the suburbs silently fade out of fashion, morphing instead into gymnasiums for pick-up basketball games, community colleges, local concert venues or indoor skate parks.
* For-the-fun-of-it Labor: We’re relearning the value of volunteering, because that’s sometimes the only way to accomplish certain things as pink slips proliferate making regular paychecks rare. Working together – for no reward other than sweat, a sense of community, and the fruits of our communal labor – we will survive, and probably be happier.
* Barefoot Baseball: Instead of driving our children all over the region to compete in high-end sports leagues, we’re returning to playing ball in our local neighborhood lots and playgrounds, where young and old gather to cheer the local team members, some of whom might play barefooted, but grinning. Fans are bringing beer brewed in basements, veggies grown in backyards, and home-baked goodies (containing borrowed eggs) and to share on blankets in the shade.
The list could go on and on. And in the end it all adds up to become a way of life that we’ve lost touch with.
You might call me a dreamer, a sentimental soul who’s longing for the old days when my mother pointed out those persistent yellow crocuses nosing out of mud and my father used a dead lamb to teach his children about life.
But during tough times, like those we all now face, I believe it is vital to dream, to see the bright flecks in the darkness, to feel the potential contained in the tiniest of seeds…and then to get to work. Hard work. Now.
Because it is during our darkest hours that the best of the human spirit surfaces. I hold onto a tentative hope that our human community will have the courage, vision, and compassion to radically change our ways—soon: reduce our footprint on this Planet, turn back to community, and do simple, good things for one another.
So let’s get started: Put up a clothesline. Knock on a neighbor’s door and ask for an egg. Ride your bicycle. Bake bread. Stick together. Play catch, in the rain.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16-1
I grew up on thirteen acres of rural hillside five miles from the one-store, one-school town of Lookingglass, Oregon, where my parents raised me and my four siblings to always try to see the flecks of good in the bad, the stars between clouds in the night sky.
My father pointed out that even maggots writhing inside the carcass of a stillborn lamb were doing important work in the cycle of life, and he said the bats living in a crevice near our chimney were benevolent creatures that erupted in a fluttering cloud at dusk to keep the mosquito population in check.
My mother would sometimes pause in the midst of her non-stop maternal motion of rearing five children to point out the fact that there is always some small helping of good to be found in the bad. She once pulled the family station wagon over on the way to Good Friday confession to marvel out the windshield at the silvery edges on dark storm clouds that were backlit by the sun, and how the silver was like Easter morning and the dark like that day – Good Friday. I still recall that roadside moment when I hear the term “silver lining.” Another time, our mother ushered us all outside into the pasture on an icy March morning so we could witness the power (and faith) that yellow and purple crocuses had to push up out of frost-crusted mud toward the weak light. And when the creek that drained our property overflowed its banks one winter and carried away dead animals, plastic toys, and two brothers who lived upstream and had fallen in one trying to save the other, our mother made sure we all saw the fertile silt the floodwaters left behind in the low spots along the banks.
All these memories help ground me as I watch financial markets disintegrate, global warming accelerate, and workers from cubicle farms to sawmills receive pink slips then queue up at unemployment offices. It is thanks to my mother that I can’t help but try to see the upside of this downturn, as she would no doubt be doing if she were still alive.
I believe there will be many small, good things that come out of the financial realignment and the environmental crises that, in the end—if we as a human race have the courage to make some fundamental changes in time—might well add up enough to usher in a new era: one based more on community, conversation, and compassion than on consumerism, capitalism, and high-flying careers.
Although the downturn will be downright difficult for many of us, perhaps we can focus on the small goodnesses that will bloom out of these hard times, some of which are already budding. Here are a few where I find hope:
* Borrowing Eggs: As oil prices begin climbing back up, we are turning to our neighbors instead of our automobiles when we’re short an egg or cup of flour for a recipe. There’s nothing that builds community quite like the old-fashioned knocking on a neighbor’s door to borrow a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, or a simple egg. And when the bread or pie is baked, we might return the favor in the form of a warm slice, perhaps delivered by a child.
* Peddling Proudly: We are bicycling more, which pushes blood to our cheeks, slows the pace of our lives, and puts us more in touch with the elements of the natural world. Look no farther than China to see how the simple, but super-efficient bicycle moves masses for next-to-nil. And think of all the bicycle mechanics we’ll employ!
* Growing Good Food: Front yards, porches, school grounds, and vacant lots are becoming vegetable gardens where we’re growing food in pots or on plots the way our grandparents did. At community gardens, we’re sharing the weeding as well as the bounty, relieved our children are learning how to grow food before the whole concept is forgotten by a generation reared on buying it sealed beneath plastic wrap at air-conditioned supermarkets. To wash soil from a freshly-pulled carrot and see that brilliant orange, and then taste the sweet crunch, ranks right up there with miracles in my mind. Every child must experience this.
* Clothesline Confidential: The simple clothesline is making a bold comeback, with backyards, balconies, and apartment-building rooftops erupting with the bright, billowing colors of clothes drying in the breeze—consuming only energy supplied by that fireball, the sun. Clothespin factories will soon employ laid-off millworkers.
* Walking Widely: We are utilizing the twin lower appendages of our homo erectus nature to ambulate more often to more places, seeing and hearing and smelling things impossible to sense from the windshield-walled interiors of contraptions powered by the infernal combustion engine.
* Keeping Coops: We’re keeping chickens in backyards where these feathered friends lay eggs with yolks the color of the sun, fertilize their environs, keep pests in check, and eventually become soup for our souls. We are once more waking to the crowing of roosters and the cackling of hens, and our children are learning that meat doesn’t grow on those Styrofoam trays, and eggs aren’t laid inside cartons in two neat rows of twelve at a time.
* Taking Transit: We have more time for reading and conversation as we ride trains, busses, and boats to our more far-flung destinations. We’re mingling at train stations and bus depots, those ageless gathering places that have been overlooked for far too long. Who knows if airports will even be in the picture.
* Community Canning: We’re learning to put food by again, canning fruits and vegetables inside clear quart jars we line up in steamy kitchens where friends, family, and neighbors gather to participate in this ritual of community and survival. When we open those jelly jars of blackberry jam in the watery light of late-January, we’ll ingest the warmth and sweetness and sunshine of summer, our lips a happy shade of purple. And what lovely gifts homemade preserves make for neighbors.
* Live-in In Laws: As housing markets continue to tighten, we’re opening our homes to extended family members, the way everyone once lived. Grandma Grace or an Aunt Emma are providing childcare, Uncle Joe, an unemployed sous chef, is taking care of the cooking and cleaning, Grandpa George is teaching life lessons by telling stories or taking the kids fishing when mom and dad need some time alone to reconnect and tend their love. In our fast-paced society of soccer moms, drop-off daycare centers, and family dinners that have become rare, the live-in extended family is long overdue for a comeback. This arrangement will also reduce healthcare costs, because living in community is powerful medicine that prevents dis-ease.
* Making Music Live: We are gathering more often with our instruments and voices to make music together, in living rooms and parks, instead of only listening to electronic forms downloaded and pumped via earbuds directly into our brains. We’re attending local concerts that cost just a few bucks, instead of traveling miles to mega-concerts that cost loads of cash (thanks in part to those pesky transaction fees). Until recently, homemade music had been a part of every civilization since forever—from caves, longhouses, and mud huts, to the pioneers moving westward. What have we lost along with our live, local music?
* Shopping Mom-and-Pop: Corner groceries are making a comeback, along with the local hardware store and the neighborhood pub, all of them located within walking distance, while those sprawling malls and big box stores in the suburbs silently fade out of fashion, morphing instead into gymnasiums for pick-up basketball games, community colleges, local concert venues or indoor skate parks.
* For-the-fun-of-it Labor: We’re relearning the value of volunteering, because that’s sometimes the only way to accomplish certain things as pink slips proliferate making regular paychecks rare. Working together – for no reward other than sweat, a sense of community, and the fruits of our communal labor – we will survive, and probably be happier.
* Barefoot Baseball: Instead of driving our children all over the region to compete in high-end sports leagues, we’re returning to playing ball in our local neighborhood lots and playgrounds, where young and old gather to cheer the local team members, some of whom might play barefooted, but grinning. Fans are bringing beer brewed in basements, veggies grown in backyards, and home-baked goodies (containing borrowed eggs) and to share on blankets in the shade.
The list could go on and on. And in the end it all adds up to become a way of life that we’ve lost touch with.
You might call me a dreamer, a sentimental soul who’s longing for the old days when my mother pointed out those persistent yellow crocuses nosing out of mud and my father used a dead lamb to teach his children about life.
But during tough times, like those we all now face, I believe it is vital to dream, to see the bright flecks in the darkness, to feel the potential contained in the tiniest of seeds…and then to get to work. Hard work. Now.
Because it is during our darkest hours that the best of the human spirit surfaces. I hold onto a tentative hope that our human community will have the courage, vision, and compassion to radically change our ways—soon: reduce our footprint on this Planet, turn back to community, and do simple, good things for one another.
So let’s get started: Put up a clothesline. Knock on a neighbor’s door and ask for an egg. Ride your bicycle. Bake bread. Stick together. Play catch, in the rain.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16-1
Michael Pollan: "Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised"
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Amy Goodman: Energy, healthcare, agriculture, climate change, global outbreaks like swine flu—what do all these topics have in common? Food. That’s right, none of these issues can really be tackled without addressing some of the fundamental problems of the food system and the American diet.
Well, my next guest is one of the leading writers and thinkers in this country on food. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California, Berkeley, author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which just came out in paperback. ... Let’s start with the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected to industrialized agriculture?
Michael Pollan: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation, where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact. And this was in Mexico.
And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have ... so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and ... we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.
Goodman: And what has been the industry response?
Pollan: Oh, the industry response and the media response, by and large, is not to pay attention to that part of the story. We haven’t gotten a lot of investigation of, well, exactly how do these things evolve and how did these conditions contribute to it.
The other angle, too, is that, you know, as we bring any pressure to bear on American animal agriculture, the tendency is going to be for it to move to Mexico. And indeed, that appears to be the case here, that these are American corporations who have to escape any kind of environmental regulation, have moved their confinement, animal operations, south of the border.
Goodman: Explain how these animal operations work.
Pollan: Well, a pig confinement operation is a pretty hellish place. They are, you know, tens of thousands of animals, kept jammed together. The animals are so close together that they have to snip their tails off, because the animals are so neurotic—I mean, pigs are very intelligent; they’re smarter than dogs—that they will nip at each other’s tails. They’ve been weaned so early that they have this sucking desire, and so they take it out on the tails of the animal right in front of them. So they snip the tails off, not to stop the procedure, but to make it so painful that animals will avoid having their tails bitten, just to make them raw and painful.
They administer antibiotics to these animals on a regular basis, because they could not survive without them. And the waste goes down directly below the animals into this giant cesspool that’s flushed, two or three times a day, out. I mean, ... they’re incubators for disease.
The sows remain in crates their whole lives, so they can be conveniently inseminated, and they have their babies right there in their crates. You know, to go to one of these places is to stop eating industrial pork, basically. If we could see into this industrial meat production, it would change the way most of us eat.
Goodman: It’s amazing, because the whole coverage, it seems, of swine flu is to be afraid of human beings coming over the border, that they are the main problem.
Pollan: Yeah, that they’re carrying it, yeah, yeah. No, it’s not—we don’t—it is not contracted by eating the pork. That doesn’t, you know, seem to be a problem. And some countries have taken that tact, used this to keep out American pork. But that link hasn’t been made.
Goodman: Can you talk about corporations in other ways, like Monsanto, talking about the sustainability of genetically modified foods?
Pollan: Yeah, Monsanto is very much on the attack right now, pushing its products, particularly in Africa, and making the case that the most sustainable agriculture will be intensive production on the land base we have. The argument is that there’s only so much arable land in the world, we have ten billion people on the way, and that the only way to feed them is to get more productivity over the land we have, to further intensify agriculture, using their genetically modified seeds.
And the word “sustainable” is never far from their lips. And they have this amazing ad campaign. Two things are notable about it. One is that the language of sustainability and the critique of industrial food is being picked up by some of the major players within industrial food, either as an effort to co-opt the rhetoric or simply confuse the consumer and the citizen.
The other thing is that it’s very interesting that Monsanto should be arguing that it has the key to improving productivity. If indeed what we need to do is improve productivity, don’t look at genetically modified crops. They have never succeeded in raising productivity. That’s not what they do. If you look at the—the Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report looking at the twenty-year history of these crops, and what they have found is that basically the real gains in yield for American crops, for world crops, has been through conventional breeding. Genetic modification has—with one tiny exception, Bt corn used in years of very high infestation of European corn borers—has not increased productivity at all. That’s not what they’re good at. What they’re good at is creating products that allow farmers to expand their monocultures, because it takes less management. So, if indeed we need to go where Monsanto says, there are better technologies than theirs.
Goodman: What about companies boasting that they use real sugar, like that’s a health claim.
Pollan: Well, you know, it’s very interesting. Since this book came out, where I argue don’t buy high-fructose corn syrup and don’t buy products with more than five ingredients, suddenly the industry is—you know, they’re so clever. I have to hand it to them. But now they’re arguing that their products are simpler, and there’s new Haagen-Dazs 5, which is a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. You know, it’s still ice cream. Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it as health food because it now has only five ingredients. ... Frito-Lay potato chips now is arguing that they’re local. Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato chip is really a stretch.
So—and on the high-fructose corn syrup thing, now that you’ve got Snapple and soon-to-be Coca-Cola making a virtue of the fact that they contain real sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup, what that is is an implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing. Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar.
Goodman: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn syrup.
Pollan: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why you should avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I’m just trying to help people, when they’re going through the supermarket—the main thing you want to avoid is processing, you know, extreme processing. And high-fructose corn syrup—I mean, think about it. Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose corn syrup? It’s not a home—it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in a home pantry. It’s a tool of food science.
My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread, in pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they basically have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it. High-fructose corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we subsidize the corn from which it’s made.
But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.
So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
Goodman: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping General Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios is clinically proven to help lower cholesterol. They say it makes it a drug under federal law.
Pollan: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has been so lax, and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health claims all through the supermarket has basically been the FDA has been hands-off for a decade. And to see them tighten a little bit and make these companies prove these health claims—
You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don’t eat any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on. So just kind of tune that out.
Goodman: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom Vilsack?
Pollan: Well, it’s interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was disappointed initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as usual. He has surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason, cautious, for hope. I think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin reforming things.
He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the organic program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in the ’90s. And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This woman will be running the Department of Agriculture. I think that’s wonderful. We’ll see what she can do. She’s up against an incredible amount of opposition.
He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well handled and was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the House and Senate. He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture. He’s very committed to farmers’ markets and developing these local food chains, and I think that’s very encouraging.
But he has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the focus—
Goodman: What do you mean, they’re the way to—
Pollan: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.
Goodman: Michelle Obama’s organic garden, that the pesticide industry had in a memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?
Pollan: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant development. I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact symbols are important. And the word “organic” are fighting words in this—is a fighting word in this world. And she did not have to say it was an organic garden; she could have simply said it’s a garden. And that she did was noticed.
And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers, wrote her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady, saying, you know, “You’re really casting aspersions on industrial agriculture, and we really hope you will use our crop protection products.” In other words, “Buy our poisons, whether you need them or not.”
Goodman: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Your words of wisdom? Your food for thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?
Pollan: Yeah, it’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something really to be avoided.
And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry the health claims, the—
Goodman: What do you mean, “edible food-like substances”?
Pollan: Well, these are products of food science. These are the stuff in the middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn’t go bad for a year, deathless food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does it mean to say a food has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It means it has been engineered to resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi, mold. And what does that mean? Well, it has no nutritional value for those things. The insects, the bacteria, they’re not interested in the Twinkie, because there’s nothing of nutritional value in it.
Goodman: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and the whole issue of healthcare reform?
Pollan: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not going to be able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of healthcare down, without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of the American diet.
The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion we’re spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that’s not all food, because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, which we spend, you know, billions and billions on. It’s implicated in type 2 diabetes. It’s implicated in about 40 percent of cancers. It’s implicated in stroke, all sorts of cardiovascular problems.
And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the food crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President Obama recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address this, because that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch Program would be a down payment on the healthcare reform, because you would reduce long-term the costs of the system. Treating a case of type 2 diabetes costs the City of New York, every new case, $500,000. It is bankrupting the system. And it’s preventable.
Goodman: How is it treated?
Pollan: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it’s $13,000 a year in additional medical costs. It takes something like ten years off of your life span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease in your life, a possibility of amputation and blindness, you know, being tethered to machines and drugs your whole life. It’s a very serious sentence, and it’s entirely preventable with a change in lifestyle.
The interesting thing is, why don’t we have really powerful public interest ad campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the government could save the most money the most easily would be having a public advertising campaign about the dangers of soda. There are a great many children that, simply by getting off soda, avert this whole course.
Goodman: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they’re talking about now?
Pollan: You know, I’m not sure, frankly. I haven’t really thought that through. It’s probably not a bad idea. I think that the cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup and sugars in our economy is part of the problem and that when we started subsidizing—I guess I would attack it on the other side. We should not be making these corn-based products so cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to change the subsidies. The reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn in huge amounts, and I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm. I think that’s really where I would put my emphasis.
Goodman: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer countries?
Pollan: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that the great unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that countries like China realize that they will not be able to feed their population on their soil base, because of their numbers, but also because they poison so much of their soil. Their soil is polluted, and they have a serious problem with that. So they are buying up huge swaths of land in Africa.
This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean, Africans are going to stand by while their best farmland is being used to feed Chinese? I mean, I don’t see this as a sustainable solution for anybody. But this is what’s happening.
And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and we should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be careful about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we’re failing to put in cover crops and things like that.
Goodman: [Y]ou wrote a long letter to President Obama, to the “Farmer-in-Chief,” as you put it. What’s the most salient point in it?
Pollan: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be able to tackle either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you look at our food system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases, the way we’re growing food, the way we’re processing it and the way we’re eating. And the healthcare crisis, as I’ve talked about. So we need to address it. It’s really the shadow issue over these other two issues.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
© 2009 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Amy Goodman: Energy, healthcare, agriculture, climate change, global outbreaks like swine flu—what do all these topics have in common? Food. That’s right, none of these issues can really be tackled without addressing some of the fundamental problems of the food system and the American diet.
Well, my next guest is one of the leading writers and thinkers in this country on food. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California, Berkeley, author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which just came out in paperback. ... Let’s start with the latest news over the last month, swine flu. How is that connected to industrialized agriculture?
Michael Pollan: Well, we don’t know for sure yet. We’re still kind of investigating. But the best knowledge we have is that this outbreak came from a very large industrial pork operation, pork confinement operation, where, you know, tens of thousands of pigs live in filth and close contact. And this was in Mexico.
And, you know, it’s very interesting. Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have ... so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and ... we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.
Goodman: And what has been the industry response?
Pollan: Oh, the industry response and the media response, by and large, is not to pay attention to that part of the story. We haven’t gotten a lot of investigation of, well, exactly how do these things evolve and how did these conditions contribute to it.
The other angle, too, is that, you know, as we bring any pressure to bear on American animal agriculture, the tendency is going to be for it to move to Mexico. And indeed, that appears to be the case here, that these are American corporations who have to escape any kind of environmental regulation, have moved their confinement, animal operations, south of the border.
Goodman: Explain how these animal operations work.
Pollan: Well, a pig confinement operation is a pretty hellish place. They are, you know, tens of thousands of animals, kept jammed together. The animals are so close together that they have to snip their tails off, because the animals are so neurotic—I mean, pigs are very intelligent; they’re smarter than dogs—that they will nip at each other’s tails. They’ve been weaned so early that they have this sucking desire, and so they take it out on the tails of the animal right in front of them. So they snip the tails off, not to stop the procedure, but to make it so painful that animals will avoid having their tails bitten, just to make them raw and painful.
They administer antibiotics to these animals on a regular basis, because they could not survive without them. And the waste goes down directly below the animals into this giant cesspool that’s flushed, two or three times a day, out. I mean, ... they’re incubators for disease.
The sows remain in crates their whole lives, so they can be conveniently inseminated, and they have their babies right there in their crates. You know, to go to one of these places is to stop eating industrial pork, basically. If we could see into this industrial meat production, it would change the way most of us eat.
Goodman: It’s amazing, because the whole coverage, it seems, of swine flu is to be afraid of human beings coming over the border, that they are the main problem.
Pollan: Yeah, that they’re carrying it, yeah, yeah. No, it’s not—we don’t—it is not contracted by eating the pork. That doesn’t, you know, seem to be a problem. And some countries have taken that tact, used this to keep out American pork. But that link hasn’t been made.
Goodman: Can you talk about corporations in other ways, like Monsanto, talking about the sustainability of genetically modified foods?
Pollan: Yeah, Monsanto is very much on the attack right now, pushing its products, particularly in Africa, and making the case that the most sustainable agriculture will be intensive production on the land base we have. The argument is that there’s only so much arable land in the world, we have ten billion people on the way, and that the only way to feed them is to get more productivity over the land we have, to further intensify agriculture, using their genetically modified seeds.
And the word “sustainable” is never far from their lips. And they have this amazing ad campaign. Two things are notable about it. One is that the language of sustainability and the critique of industrial food is being picked up by some of the major players within industrial food, either as an effort to co-opt the rhetoric or simply confuse the consumer and the citizen.
The other thing is that it’s very interesting that Monsanto should be arguing that it has the key to improving productivity. If indeed what we need to do is improve productivity, don’t look at genetically modified crops. They have never succeeded in raising productivity. That’s not what they do. If you look at the—the Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report looking at the twenty-year history of these crops, and what they have found is that basically the real gains in yield for American crops, for world crops, has been through conventional breeding. Genetic modification has—with one tiny exception, Bt corn used in years of very high infestation of European corn borers—has not increased productivity at all. That’s not what they’re good at. What they’re good at is creating products that allow farmers to expand their monocultures, because it takes less management. So, if indeed we need to go where Monsanto says, there are better technologies than theirs.
Goodman: What about companies boasting that they use real sugar, like that’s a health claim.
Pollan: Well, you know, it’s very interesting. Since this book came out, where I argue don’t buy high-fructose corn syrup and don’t buy products with more than five ingredients, suddenly the industry is—you know, they’re so clever. I have to hand it to them. But now they’re arguing that their products are simpler, and there’s new Haagen-Dazs 5, which is a five-ingredient Haagen-Dazs product. You know, it’s still ice cream. Ice cream is wonderful, but we shouldn’t treat it as health food because it now has only five ingredients. ... Frito-Lay potato chips now is arguing that they’re local. Now, you have to remember, any product is local somewhere. Right? This food doesn’t come from Mars. But to think that Frito-Lay as a local potato chip is really a stretch.
So—and on the high-fructose corn syrup thing, now that you’ve got Snapple and soon-to-be Coca-Cola making a virtue of the fact that they contain real sugar, no high-fructose corn syrup, what that is is an implicit health claim for sugar. And that is an incredible achievement on the part of industry, to convince us that getting off of high-fructose corn syrup has made their products healthier. It has done no such thing. Biologically, there’s no difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sugar.
Goodman: Well, explain why you were going after high-fructose corn syrup.
Pollan: Well, my argument about high-fructose corn syrup and why you should avoid it is it is a marker of a highly processed food. I’m just trying to help people, when they’re going through the supermarket—the main thing you want to avoid is processing, you know, extreme processing. And high-fructose corn syrup—I mean, think about it. Do you know anyone who cooks with high-fructose corn syrup? It’s not a home—it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in a home pantry. It’s a tool of food science.
My problem with it is its ubiquity through the food system. You have high-fructose corn syrup showing up where sugar has never been—in bread, in pickles, in mayonnaise, in relish, in all these products—that they basically have found that if you sweeten anything, we will buy more of it. High-fructose corn syrup is a very convenient, cheap ingredient, because we subsidize the corn from which it’s made.
But to boast about your product not having high-fructose corn syrup as being some kind of virtue is really stretching it. And I think what we see here is another example of the food industry’s ingenuity in taking any critique of industrial food and turning it into the next marketing strategy. It’s a lot like the low-fat campaign, you know, which began as a government critique of food, you know, beginning with George McGovern in the ’70s saying we should eat less red meat because of heart disease. Whatever you think of the science of that, which turns out not to have been that good, it was a well-meaning campaign to improve the American diet. Industry came back and re-engineered the whole food system to have less fat in it and no fat in it. And that campaign sold a lot more food. And, in fact, since that campaign, we’ve been eating about 300 more calories a day, and we’re a lot fatter. So, you can’t—you just can’t underestimate their ability turn any critique into a way to sell food.
So, I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
Goodman: Michael Pollan, the Food and Drug Administration is slapping General Mills with a warning over its claim that Cheerios is clinically proven to help lower cholesterol. They say it makes it a drug under federal law.
Pollan: Yeah. Well, good for them. I mean, you know, the FDA has been so lax, and the reason you see this proliferation of bogus health claims all through the supermarket has basically been the FDA has been hands-off for a decade. And to see them tighten a little bit and make these companies prove these health claims—
You know, another piece of advice from In Defense of Food is, don’t eat any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you’re worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It’s sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on. So just kind of tune that out.
Goodman: What do you make of the new Agricultural Secretary, Tom Vilsack?
Pollan: Well, it’s interesting. When Vilsack was appointed, I was disappointed initially. And I said something like, this was agribusiness as usual. He has surprised me in various ways, and I have some reason, cautious, for hope. I think he has a mandate from President Obama to begin reforming things.
He has appointed as his number two—the woman running the Department of Agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, is a proven reformer. She developed the organic program in the department and as a staffer to Senator Leahy back in the ’90s. And she is really committed to sustainable agriculture. This woman will be running the Department of Agriculture. I think that’s wonderful. We’ll see what she can do. She’s up against an incredible amount of opposition.
He made an initial move to go after subsidies that was not very well handled and was rebuffed very easily by the agriculture committees in the House and Senate. He, I think, will do a lot to support local agriculture. He’s very committed to farmers’ markets and developing these local food chains, and I think that’s very encouraging.
But he has a mission to make “nutrition” the watchword of the nutrition programs in the Department of Agriculture: School Lunch, Food Stamps, WIC. Now, that sounds kind of “duh,” but, in fact, those programs have nothing to do with nutrition right now. They’re essentially ways to dispose of agricultural surpluses. So if they actually raise the nutrition standards and make that the focus—
Goodman: What do you mean, they’re the way to—
Pollan: Well, the reason we have a School Lunch Program, you know, it began as an effort really to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. I mean, we’re using our children as a disposal for excess, you know, cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products, and that the—you know, under the School Lunch Program, we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We’re using the School Lunch Program to teach them how to become fast-food consumers. So, it’s not about health, and it needs to be about health. So, if he can move that program in that direction, I think that will be wonderful.
Goodman: Michelle Obama’s organic garden, that the pesticide industry had in a memo that they shuddered when they heard her use the word?
Pollan: Yes. You know, I think her garden is actually a significant development. I mean, you can dismiss it as symbolic politics, but in fact symbols are important. And the word “organic” are fighting words in this—is a fighting word in this world. And she did not have to say it was an organic garden; she could have simply said it’s a garden. And that she did was noticed.
And the Crop Life Association, the trade group of the pesticide makers, wrote her a letter, being as cordial as you must be to a First Lady, saying, you know, “You’re really casting aspersions on industrial agriculture, and we really hope you will use our crop protection products.” In other words, “Buy our poisons, whether you need them or not.”
Goodman: We’re talking to Michael Pollan. His latest book, now out in paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Your words of wisdom? Your food for thought? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?
Pollan: Yeah, it’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something really to be avoided.
And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food? Because now the market is full of these edible food-like substances, the ones that carry the health claims, the—
Goodman: What do you mean, “edible food-like substances”?
Pollan: Well, these are products of food science. These are the stuff in the middle of the supermarket, the stuff that doesn’t go bad for a year, deathless food, immortal food. You have to think, well, what does it mean to say a food has got a shelf life of six months or a year? It means it has been engineered to resist bacteria, pests of all kinds, fungi, mold. And what does that mean? Well, it has no nutritional value for those things. The insects, the bacteria, they’re not interested in the Twinkie, because there’s nothing of nutritional value in it.
Goodman: Can you talk about how the food system affects healthcare and the whole issue of healthcare reform?
Pollan: Well, I think that we are soon to recognize that we are not going to be able to reform healthcare, which depends on getting the cost of healthcare down, without addressing the American diet, the catastrophe of the American diet.
The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, estimates that of the $2 trillion we’re spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that’s not all food, because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, which we spend, you know, billions and billions on. It’s implicated in type 2 diabetes. It’s implicated in about 40 percent of cancers. It’s implicated in stroke, all sorts of cardiovascular problems.
And, you know, in a sense, the healthcare crisis is a euphemism for the food crisis, I mean, that they are identical. And I do think that President Obama recognizes this. And I think that you will see programs to address this, because that is how you could—you know, a better School Lunch Program would be a down payment on the healthcare reform, because you would reduce long-term the costs of the system. Treating a case of type 2 diabetes costs the City of New York, every new case, $500,000. It is bankrupting the system. And it’s preventable.
Goodman: How is it treated?
Pollan: Well, type 2 diabetes is, once you contract it, it’s $13,000 a year in additional medical costs. It takes something like ten years off of your life span. It means an 80 percent chance of heart disease in your life, a possibility of amputation and blindness, you know, being tethered to machines and drugs your whole life. It’s a very serious sentence, and it’s entirely preventable with a change in lifestyle.
The interesting thing is, why don’t we have really powerful public interest ad campaigns to inform people about this? I mean, the way the government could save the most money the most easily would be having a public advertising campaign about the dangers of soda. There are a great many children that, simply by getting off soda, avert this whole course.
Goodman: What do you think of taxing soft drinks, that they’re talking about now?
Pollan: You know, I’m not sure, frankly. I haven’t really thought that through. It’s probably not a bad idea. I think that the cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup and sugars in our economy is part of the problem and that when we started subsidizing—I guess I would attack it on the other side. We should not be making these corn-based products so cheap with our tax dollars. I think we have to change the subsidies. The reason that soda is so cheap is that we subsidize corn in huge amounts, and I think we have to change the incentives down on the farm. I think that’s really where I would put my emphasis.
Goodman: What about large corporations buying up the farmland of poorer countries?
Pollan: Well, this is going on. There is a growing recognition that the great unrenewable resource is arable soil in this world and that countries like China realize that they will not be able to feed their population on their soil base, because of their numbers, but also because they poison so much of their soil. Their soil is polluted, and they have a serious problem with that. So they are buying up huge swaths of land in Africa.
This is a political disaster, you know, waiting to happen. I mean, Africans are going to stand by while their best farmland is being used to feed Chinese? I mean, I don’t see this as a sustainable solution for anybody. But this is what’s happening.
And we should take note and realize that our farmland is so precious, and we should be very careful about developing it, and we should certainly be careful about letting it run off into the Mississippi River because we’re failing to put in cover crops and things like that.
Goodman: [Y]ou wrote a long letter to President Obama, to the “Farmer-in-Chief,” as you put it. What’s the most salient point in it?
Pollan: The most salient point is simply, you are not going to be able to tackle either the healthcare crisis or climate change unless you look at our food system. In the case of climate change, food is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases, the way we’re growing food, the way we’re processing it and the way we’re eating. And the healthcare crisis, as I’ve talked about. So we need to address it. It’s really the shadow issue over these other two issues.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
© 2009 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140029/
Howard Zinn: Changing Obama's Military Mindset
By Howard Zinn, The Progressive
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.
If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.
Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.
Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought—and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—followed this thread.
The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.
We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.
Some people might say, “Well, what do you expect?”
And the answer is that we expect a lot.
People say, “What, are you a dreamer?”
And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.
We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.
Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.
Which is what the market has been doing—and that’s why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.
You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past. You can’t pour money into the upper levels of the country—and into the banks and corporations—and hope that it somehow trickles down.
What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.
This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.
What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren’t poverty stricken. The CEOs aren’t poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let’s take $1 trillion, let’s take $2 trillion.
Let’s take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.
Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he’s not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good—the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.
It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they’ll hire people. No—if people need jobs, you don’t give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.
A lot of people don’t know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You’re out of work? The government has a job for you.
As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.
The government created a federal arts program. It wasn’t going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.
And that’s just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.
In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise—and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.
Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, “It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq.” He said “get out of Iraq,” and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq—not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.
But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.”
What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?
It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers—that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.
It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.
Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.
Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don’t have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.
This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we’ve got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.
We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don’t really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.
One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, “Oh, we’re very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want.”
This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they’re going to bomb this one house. But there’s one problem: They don’t know who’s in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who’s in the car? No.
And later—after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house—they tell you, “Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there’s seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists.”
But notice that the word is “suspected.” The truth is they don’t know who the terrorists are.
So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we’ve got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We’re the ones who have to tell him, “No, you’re on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won’t accomplish anything that way, and we’ll remain a hated country in the world.”
Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.
The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved—it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries.
We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and—this is part of the emancipation—you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.
Let’s use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people’s lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.
What’s required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need.
This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, “Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect.”
But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.
Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.
We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, “Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons.” No, we have to speak our minds.
This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”
And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.
© 2009 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on May 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.
If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.
Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.
Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought—and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative—followed this thread.
The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.
We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.
Some people might say, “Well, what do you expect?”
And the answer is that we expect a lot.
People say, “What, are you a dreamer?”
And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.
We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.
Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.
Which is what the market has been doing—and that’s why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.
You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past. You can’t pour money into the upper levels of the country—and into the banks and corporations—and hope that it somehow trickles down.
What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.
This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.
What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren’t poverty stricken. The CEOs aren’t poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let’s take $1 trillion, let’s take $2 trillion.
Let’s take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.
Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he’s not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good—the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.
It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they’ll hire people. No—if people need jobs, you don’t give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.
A lot of people don’t know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You’re out of work? The government has a job for you.
As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.
The government created a federal arts program. It wasn’t going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.
And that’s just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.
In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise—and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.
Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, “It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq.” He said “get out of Iraq,” and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq—not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.
But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: “It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.”
What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?
It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers—that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.
It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.
Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.
Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don’t have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.
This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we’ve got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.
We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don’t really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.
One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, “Oh, we’re very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want.”
This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they’re going to bomb this one house. But there’s one problem: They don’t know who’s in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who’s in the car? No.
And later—after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house—they tell you, “Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there’s seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists.”
But notice that the word is “suspected.” The truth is they don’t know who the terrorists are.
So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we’ve got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We’re the ones who have to tell him, “No, you’re on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won’t accomplish anything that way, and we’ll remain a hated country in the world.”
Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.
The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved—it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries.
We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and—this is part of the emancipation—you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.
Let’s use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people’s lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.
What’s required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need.
This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, “Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect.”
But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.
Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.
We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, “Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons.” No, we have to speak our minds.
This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”
And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.
© 2009 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140035/
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