Look deeper Mr. Prinz

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http://www.counterpunch.org/cox03142005.html

Bush, Cheney and End-Time Crackpots Are Scary, But...
Look Deeper, Mr. Moyers

By STAN COX

It's enough to make your hair stand on end and your eyes bug
out. Not only is the Earth in peril, but some people who
hold sway over the fate of the planet believe that soon the
whole place is going to go up in a blaze of brimstone anyway
-- and they can't wait to watch it happen!

Bill Moyers, in the March 24 issue of the New York Review of
Books, paints a scary picture indeed. With a greeting of
"Welcome to the Rapture!", Moyers writes about the vast
numbers of Americans who believe that an imminent end of the
world is predicted in the Book of Revelation and about their
energetic support for the Bush administration. He draws this
conclusion:

A powerful current connects the administration's
multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment
as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of
fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the
fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up
serving the interests of economic elites.

Moyers is right: It "sends a shiver down the spine." But the
Earth was headed down a highway to hell long before Bush was
elected or the Armageddon Clock started up. Triumphant
capitalism, performing precisely to specifications, is
showing itself fully capable of pulling off an ecological
apocalypse, with or without the help of superstitious
scripture-twisters.

When it comes to shining a light on some of the most
alarming outgrowths of capitalism, Moyers is a master. But
in going after the Bush administration's scorched-Earth
environmental policies, its "multinational corporate
cronies", and those hallucinatory crackpots brandishing
their biblical licenses to plunder, he missed the root cause
of the problem: capitalism's addiction to perpetual growth.

Growth: the sacred bull in the china shop

While there are not enough members of Congress willing to
oppose the building of roads in wilderness areas or the
gutting of the Clean Air Act, many do take those positions.
Such issues are OK to discuss in polite society. On the
other hand, when did you last hear a national politician
say, "This economy's growing too fast, and if elected, I'll
work to cut growth!"?

 >>They never say that, because they would be admitting that
capitalism is unsustainable. There is no such thing as
capitalism without growth. Capitalists -- a class of folks
whose income is "unearned" (a term devised and used, with
uncharacteristic clarity, by the IRS) -- have a
well-understood role in society: to take a pile of money and
turn it into a bigger pile of money.

But a bigger pile of money, once achieved, is not an end but
another beginning. To the capitalist, that pile is useless
unless it can be turned into an even bigger pile. As a
result, more resources are used and wastes expelled this
year than last, and even more next year.

 >>Now, if you're a politician or, say, a liberal pundit, you
can't very well tell working people, "I'm afraid that our
capitalist class is going to be needing an increasingly
bigger share of our national income for a while -- well, um,
actually forever -- and it's all going to have to come out
of your paychecks."

Instead, you talk about economic growth and its seemingly
miraculous ability to keep boosting the capitalist's return
on investment while not completely wiping out the workers
who generated it. No problem: Money's imaginary, so bigger
piles of it are always possible, and there is no biggest pile.

But, of course, we do have a problem. We have no infinite
piles of the stuff (even the renewable stuff) that's needed
to turn money into more money. There's a rule that no
species can increase its resource exploitation infinitely,
and Homo sapiens has not been granted a waiver . Fossil
fuels, soil, salmon, and healthy ecosystems are real, and
the rules that apply to money -- which is no more real than
'Monopoly' money -- don't apply on planet Earth.


Where good capitalists go bad

Whatever the issue, nasty villains in plush corner offices
make an easy target. But they are no more to blame for the
state of the planet than are the prophets of Armageddon. All
capitalists, big and small, have individual views but a
common role in society.

The chief concern of one Captain of Industry might be global
warming; of another, the tax deduction on his corporate jet;
of another, the Beast with seven heads and ten horns. It
doesn't matter because they are all playing by the same
rules. The one who doesn't accumulate capital at the
requisite pace might well end up punching a clock for one of
the others, or worse.

Those who want to square the circle, to have infinite
economic growth on a finite planet, generally invoke greater
efficiency. Technology is supposed to let businesses
generate more monetary wealth while using and abusing less
of the material world.

Now, nobody -- no CEO, no environmentalist, not even the
Antichrist -- is going to argue against efficiency. But
capitalism has a way of turning good things inside out.

If you're a business owner, and you find you can produce the
same number of lawn chairs or helicopters while spending
less on energy, materials, labor, or waste disposal, that's
efficiency, and that means money in the bank for you. But
it's your job as a good capitalist to get that money out of
the bank, ASAP, and invest it in the real world, where you
can turn more stuff into more money. (No matter if demand is
down -- buy advertising!)

In a growth-dependent economic order, efficiency simply
provides more opportunities for production and consumption.
Relying on efficiency to make growth less destructive is
like trying to run up a "Down" escalator that never stops
accelerating.



What's really scary

Ecological economics, a heretical branch of the discipline,
has demonstrated conclusively that if we're to live within
our material means, planet-wide, we must (1) limit our
species' rate of reproduction, (2) hold our "throughput" of
resources and wastes down to a sustainable level, and (3)
set upper and lower limits on monetary wealth and income.
These policies make up a package; following only one or two
of them won't do the job.

While most ecological economists are not explicitly
anti-capitalist -- that is, they do not advocate taking
society's most important investment decisions out of the
hands of an unelected capitalist class and putting them into
democratic institutions -- it is difficult to see how
capitalists or capitalism could flourish in the kind of
world they envision.

And there are ways of making investment decisions
democratic. For example, in his book After Capitalism, David
Schweikart outlines a vision of the future that we all would
find familiar, with private property, buying, selling,
profits, and entrepreneurs - but without capitalists!
Letting all of society, not just a tiny sliver, decide how
to invest would not by itself stop the cancerous growth
that's killing the ecosphere. But it's the necessary step.

In his article, Bill Moyers runs through a checklist of the
Republicans' environmental sins, from their attacks on the
Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts to their
enthusiasm for oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. But we can't stop there. As I'm sure he knows, we
could win every one of those legislative battles and still
see the planet's degradation proceed at an accelerating pace.

I sympathize with Moyers. Motivating people is a tricky
business. End-times zealots like Gary Frazier and corporate
bugaboos like Dick Cheney are just scary enough to shock
thoughtful people into action on a few high-profile issues.
But talk about root causes of the ecological crisis,
particularly capitalism's dependence on unchecked growth,
and most of your audience runs, screaming, for the exits.

I don't pretend to have a solution to that dilemma. But we
have to start asking these deeper questions, and soon. The
Armageddon Clock may be a fantasy, but real clocks are
really ticking.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. He
can be reached at: t.stan at cox.net

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