Cap in Hand, part 1: Green Realism

The Refuge for Realists

Cap and Trade or Dividend is an old idea, an old Republican policy, and I am told an updated version of this Trojan horse, presented as a great gift by Peter Barnes, is creaking on its wheels as it rolls into West Marin from the darkest corners of 20th century economic philosophy for us townsfolk to gawk at. Cap and Trade solves thorny problems for the timorous thinker. First, you don’t have to blame corporations. It isn’t their essential activity that is destructive to nature, and must be stopped. It is that markets have not been created to account for their behavior and “price-in” their destructiveness. Once they pay the right price for the smoke they produce, or at least the carbon in the smoke, they will correct their behavior.

And who is going to enforce this new market? Well, the same politicians who are presently beholden to the corporations who pollute. Cap and Trade asks the corporations and the government to go into a room together and solve the problem by creating a new market to fix the old market.  Of course, because the intellectuals refuse to take a stand directly against the corporations themselves, attempting only to modify corporate behavior over time, the politicians don’t even have a basis from which to resist them. As Paul Fenn put it, “It is like putting the tobacco companies in charge of the strategy to stop people from smoking.”

Where these Cap and Trade schemes have been tried various tricks are used, often built into the markets themselves, to allow polluters to evade the cap – to not reduce carbon emissions. These markets have failed repeatedly in practice. But how is it supposed to work in theory? Well polluting corporations, like power plant owners, have the amount that they pollute grandfathered into the scheme. Then starting from year one the cap gets lower, polluters must emit less carbon, until say 2050 when carbon emissions will be at a level that, based on the enormity of the problem, they need to be today.  It is a proposal on a timeline so long that only people who believe in cryogenics won't find themselves utterly dismayed.

That last bit, sadly, isn’t entirely a joke. Hedge fund founder and Googleian Ray Kurzweil eats 150 pills a day in a bid to live until technology will make him immortal. The grand old man of the convenient fantasy California-style Stewart Brand has his own “Long Now” foundation which asks us to look forward to the year 10,000 and start planning on that basis. No wonder he is so untroubled by the half-life of nuclear waste. Not to be outdone, Peter Schwartz, business partner of Brand, both longtime consultants to Shell Oil amongst others, once told an audience in San Francisco that he wasn’t concerned about climate change because through the advances of bio-technology his son would live forever, giving him ample time to deal with the problem. Does it bother anybody that our intellectuals sound like a group thirteen year-old boys in a treehouse trying to write a Star Trek script?

Cap and Trade does not even rise to the level of tragedy because either foolishly or shamelessly it serves the powerful interests that are destroying the world.  It is no compensation to be paid $5,000 a year by polluters in exchange for the loss of our future as a species. For even with this addendum of a dividend scheme, where will this money be spent in the climate change conditions that Cap and Trade cannot halt?

Ideas like Cap and Trade flow from people like Friedrich von Hayek and Ronald Coase (who ultimately disavowed it) through Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, though the locals who tout them seem not to know it. They are predicated on a worldview that believes there is no such thing as a society, that only when we make a market out of the whole earth, including the air we breathe, can our problems be solved. In an effort to be “realistic”, Barnes and the serious men have become, perhaps unwittingly, dominated by the ascendant ideology of our time: Neo-liberalism. Though they probably think they are just helping the Democratic Party – supposedly a force for good – the Party leadership beginning with Bill Clinton has moved in earnest to adopt the economic policies of the right as well. I am reminded of the line from a terrible early 80s fantasy film, “It used to be just another snake cult, but now, it’s everywhere!”

Remember that these local thinkers talk to some extent about the forces that govern our world, but not about the structures that holds all of these interests in place. Those underlying structures they think of as a natural and immutable ecology of power in which we need to find the right balance between participants – a balance, for instance, between the interests of the coal industry and the people whose water and air are poisoned. That is right, this line of thought says that companies mining coal are a part of nature as well, and any solution will have to balance their need to survive with ours.  This false ecological view of the world causes blind spots in their vision, narrowed further by the fears they confuse for wisdom. Many of them, of course, are simultaneously rich, distracted and unevenly educated, and the combination of these cardinal West Marin qualities often compels these men and women to speak, with great confidence, opinions that are useless, trivial or demented (sadly for those dependent upon their patronage, the service population in its various forms are often compelled to listen to them).

What are these fears that pervert the minds of our intellectuals? The first and most obvious is the fear of the empire itself. Take our institutions of higher learning: although universities usually allow each department a token radical, they too are increasingly entranced by “free market” ideas and are endlessly constructing new buildings that require wealthy, often corporate, donors and federal funding.  To jeopardize either patron would be fatal to the growing university bubble, and their chancellors dare not alienate them. Energy corporations, like BP and PG&E, are notorious (or should be) for constraining the debate on politics and policy within universities in favor of technological research – which when it comes close to showing promise – is often defunded. With John Yu whose odious mind produced the Bush administration’s rationale for torture as a tenured professor of law and former head of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano now the Chancellor, you can’t slide a postcard between the most malevolent interests of empire and the University of California.  

Older fears possess our thinkers when writing about changing the world for the better, based in memories of the political upheavals of the 1930s. Remember FDR was a compromise; he was going to protect businessmen from those they more deeply feared like Huey Long. But the ultimate and to some inevitable danger of political unrest is represented by figures like Stalin and Hitler who remain bidden or unbidden in our political memory. If, like those two, a leader says he has the formula for a new and better society, to achieve our dreams of freedom and prosperity, what then will he do to those who oppose it, or whom the leader has designated as the enemies of the dream?

The consequence of these persistent half-remembered memories is an unwillingness to speak out in opposition to either corporations or the government. These are the “realists”, and their sober and stable managerial approach to crisis explains the poverty of the solutions they present to climate change or the “Great Recession.” Writers like Peter Barnes refuse to directly confront the sources of climate change or declining living standards in America for fear, I believe, of arousing political ideas.

Today, there are ideas that say you can change the world by disallowing through law the abuse of the planet or its people, ideas that simultaneously allow our local governments to provide investment in infrastructure to replace the burning of fuel. Such direct actions are considered, “unserious” or “unrealistic”, because if we identify corporations as the culprits of global and domestic decline, the realists fear we will march toward Communism. If we identify the government as the cause of failure, we will unwittingly bring to power fascists and a greater tyranny. And let’s pull away the curtain for a moment, lurking in the shadows is perhaps the true fear of the portfolio men and women: the capricious Index, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to whom they must make endless sacrifices in an effort raise share prices ever higher, because without those particular dividend payments, survival in West Marin is truly unimaginable. 

West Marin is nestled in the center of American empire, not at some rural margin. That is why what we think, and still more to know who we truly are, is very important. Some of us believe we are really out in the country and receive the terrible events on TV or the internet as fragments from a distant world. Our lives feel stagnant as climate change, war, government spying and declining prosperity demand serious collective answers to the question of how we and our children will survive. Unfortunately for us, our local intellectuals are proposing answers to the big crises of our time which in their pursuit of the “real” are ironically more utopian than any Bolshevik dream. The realist says, “Ask the polluters not to pollute, ask them instead to pay the poor.” 

A Plague of Sorrow and Grief

"It occurred only in the summer months. As with dancing mania, people would suddenly begin to dance, sometimes affected by a perceived bite or sting and were joined by others, who believed the venom from their own old bites was reactivated by the heat or the music."

Yesterday, Bradley Manning was convicted of Espionage because he reported to the world that our military and our politicians were engaging in crimes against humanity. As political refugee Alexander Solzhenitsyn told Americans of Stalin's vast network of prison camps, Edward Snowdon revealed that the American Government is spying on our calls and emails. Ed Snowdon today sits in a Moscow airport seeking refuge from political persecution: in Russia. 

But the nation is fixated upon other issues.  Why?  

In 1518 a "dancing mania" broke out in Strasbourg.  A woman named Frau Troffea was struck first, dancing uncontrollably in the street, and soon the mania spread with hundreds of the residents of the town joining in. Observers of those held in this trance were even attacked if they didn't join in, while many participants, exhausted, panicked and tired, danced till they died.  The church, the city government and the medical profession did not know how to respond, but the record survives of their concern and confusion.  Then, in the hilarious logic of the medical profession of medieval Europe, a cure was found: If music was played to accompany the dancers, they'll dance their way out of it!  The City Council accepted this therapy and so cleared two guildhalls and a grain market, even setting up a stage and paying musicians to play for the entranced. The solution to mass hysteria was to encourage it.

The cause of this mania, it has been suggested, was an atmosphere of danger and fear present in the city because of poverty, failed harvests: what we call today, economic insecurity.  In times of extreme stress and crisis, when the causes of our pain and anxiety seem to be outside of human control, there is a sublimation of dread and panic onto the body, and the mind -- the performance of a ritual, no matter how improbable its efficacy, becomes a command that all must obey...

...even if it makes everything worse.   

And here we have to go back in time, to the frustration of democracy and the rise of business and empire in the 1960s.  Fifty years ago many Baby Boomers set out to take control of the government itself and make it equitable and just. And the Government fought back. After the civil rights victories of the middle 60s, the idea that activist politics would transform government in America and take control of its institutions was abandoned in the wake of COINTELPRO and other government attacks upon those activists. President Nixon set in motion the globalization and financializaiton of the economy and a consequent decline in the welfare of the majority of Americans for the last forty years.  The void of lost prosperity was filled, by subsequent Presidents and their marketing campaigns, with the endless waving of little American flags and an increasing fixation by Americans on sports -- leaving middle America in 2013 a gibbering unemployed fool in a football jersey cursing Arabs, buying Cheetos, and ammunition at Walmart. 

A Plague of Sorrow and Grief:

Those still interested in politics since the 1970s. accepting as they did that the government and society couldn't be changed for the better, thought perhaps that the new role of government could be to spread the existing benefits enjoyed by the white middle class to minorities.  And thus began the descent into the mad dancing world of identity politics.

Remember: the from the mid-70s globalized trade and production caused America to de-industrialize.  Production and jobs were transferred and lost abroad.  Always among the first to lose their jobs in an economic downturn were African Americans; without meaningful work, black life in America was "recriminalized", the new Jim Crow.  In the 80s Americas prison system expanded dramatically to house a larger and larger population of the unemployed.  All indicators of prosperity were dismissed in favor of a mania for indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average... ...Today the stock market is at an all time high, while unemployment is endemic, and 1 and 6 Americans are feeding themselves with food stamps, and 4 of 5 live in poverty during their lifetimes. 

They play that Tarantella...

Undaunted by the real: on the parade of policy trinkets, among them Affirmative Action.  Instead of Civil Rights for African Americans, we have a policy that says: if you survive eighteen years of degrading poverty and crime in America's collapsing cities, then we'll let a tiny percentage of you into the universities. Championed by university professors who wish away the first two brutal decades of life and meet those famished in body and mind with a performance of postmodern concern and a featherweight aria of enlightenment. "Come dance with me."

Here in the midst of these crises. the law is bent to token inclusions: like gay marriage, marriage itself the extension of a Medieval privilege, and our listeners can look forward to something called "Trayvon's Law" a bill that will not address unemployment, destruction of the natural environment, rotten schools, and government corruption and government criminality, but will outlaw some set of accidents, circumstances of a celebrated an instance of crime.

Now every major newspaper and website is running dozens of articles on racism and gay rights and the dance is on.  The causes of globalization and global warming are not to be considered, only the symptoms of our hysterical anxiety are to be treated.  And if you question this dance, the trance of Americans suspended and whirling in terror and hallucinatory elation, if you don't join in, you may yourself be attacked. 

Presently in the United States, there is a fear and dread in all of us.  In history, this anxiety is usually the private reservation of the poor, but because of global warming, a globalized economy, a wrecked environment and our vanishing civil liberties, this dread can no longer be escaped by the rich and middle classes, those people formerly invincible in their ignorance of the problems of the world.

Like the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, in their moment of confrontation with the what they believe to be the inescapable decline of our World, strange distractions and manias have captured the imagination of Americans. Our ever-dancing issues, gay marriage, abortion and the pageant of mourning over the death of a teenager, who died not of race, but of social and economic collapse, these eclipse reality: and the prescription of our medieval doctors? The journalists and intellectuals in America say today, "Dance yourself to Death."