By Steve Hynd
President Obama has exhorted us to "win the future" - but if we keep hiding our heads in the sand about the kind of future it is shaping up to be, how are we to do that?
My colleague John has done sterling service this last couple of weeks, as have many others, staying on top of revolutionary unrest which has toppled expectations of stability, domino-fashion, throughout the Middle East. From Tunisia to Egypt and thence to Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and across the region, long-standing dictatorships are tottering, because of perfect storm of historically-unusual high cost of living for commoners has been thrown into sharp contrast against the corrupt and nepotistic excesses of the ruling class: income inequality - and the power disparity that it brings - has been the fuel on the Middle East's fires.
In the United States and across the pond in the United Kingdom too, income inequality has been the driver for protests and pushback by the ruling elites - albeit far less violently - as the "haves" attempt to impose austerity budgets on the "have nots" rather than give more from their own bulging (and untaxably offshored) purses. In Wisconsin and Ohia, as well as on the streets of Britain with the UKUncut movement, people have protested abridgement of their rights and short-changing of government services ordered by the rich so that the rich elite need not pay more or give up any of their own government-funded welfare. The Uncut movement has now come to America and USUncut is expecting its first day of action on Saturday 26th February. Their website says:
Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America�s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.
If we pay our taxes, why don�t they? If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?
It�s time for ordinary Americans to fight back and demand an end to the corporate tax avoidance.
US Uncut is calling for a national day of non-violent direct action across on Saturday, February 26 2011. Groups of citizen volunteers in cities throughout the U.S. will take actions targeting Bank of America branches demanding that it pays its fair share.
If there is a Bank of America in your city, then it is the central target for action on Saturday. (If there is not, then choose another target locally; the website should have more information on other key corporations soon.)
So in the West as in the Middle East, rising resource costs and massive income inequality are drivers for protests and political unrest. The primary difference right now is that Middle Eastern dictators are shooting their subjects who protest while in the West our elected elites are just concentrating on taking even more conventional political power away from their poorer countrymen. But the global crisis that links them isn't going to go away. In fact, it's only going to get worse.
My colleague Ron noted on Wednesday that "Somewhere between $100 and $120 a barrel the cost becomes more than our world economy can afford," and with the Saudis exaggerating their reserves and oil giant Shell admitting that we may already be past "peak oil", what's for certain is that the days of cheap oil are gone for good. Yet the oil and motor industries refuse to fund change to alternatives at anything like the pace we need to prevent a crash and their industry-paid shills in D.C. continue to support them by playing ostritch - all because those corporations see more and greater profits to be gained as oil prices rise and thus will put off making those changes the rest of us will need as long as possible so as to squeeze a few extra billion dollars out of a deteriorating situation.
There's a similiar short-sighted and short-term, "I'm alright, Jack" corporate attitude about climate change. The fossil-fuel electricity generation industry has millions of dollars to invest in lawmakers to ensure that they don't prevent corporations squeezing extra billions in profits out of pumping carbon into the atmosphere and the big food corporations likewise fund both lobbyists and campaign contributions to ensure their rising profits as prices skyrocket. Rising transportation costs, shifting weather patterns and water shortages raise the price of production - but the corporations ensure there's also an added rise in prices over and above those costs to maximize profits. Meanwhile, the Euphrates at Musul is so low that it can no longer run Iraq's largest hydro-electric power station, Texas is beginning to wonder where it will get the water to support a growing population, a sizeable increase in rainfall across the temperate belts is flooding some of the world's most productive farmlands and Bangladesh is sinking beneath the waters.
As analyst Tom Whipple predicts (hat tip to Ron): "Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition. Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world's peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come."
It's tempting to see hoarding of wealth by the rich elite as a deliberate hedge against the turmoil to come later in the century, although it's more likely just to be an emergent property of something the rich would be doing anyway. But whichever it is, as prices rise and resources become scarcer then the more money they have then the more of those ever-scarcer resources they can afford to buy - and sod the rest of us. Remedies that could soften coming blows are put off or put aside because they don't help the corporate bottom line right now, and our bi-partisanly corporate-funded and in any case rich themselves political leadership go right along with this myopic and dangerous short-termism.
The experts who are meant to advise the elite, the tink-tankers and analysts, are also mostly letting us down. In foreign policy as in domestic, the predominance of the ideology known as "realism" but which in practise actually means lurching from one short-term stability "fix" to another is ironically breaking down under the pressure of reality. There's no way to short-term fix the instability which is on our doorsteps - it's already too late for that. There's only a question of ameliorating somewhat the effects of the crisis, or not. But by and large our think-tankers refuse to contemplate this as they produce grand schemes to piss away more billions in trying for "success" in foreign adventurism or to "fix" economic deficits by taking even more away from those who need help most.
There will be no "world revolution" to redress the balance. Greed and selfishness are not the sole purview of the rich and "I'm alright, Jack" thinking means only a few will protest for others rather than for themselves. What I expect is a series of unrests and revolts over the decades to come, largely unconnected except by their underlying causes, as the common people locally demand that the rich share some of their riches and the elite locally give away as little as the can. As Noam Chomsky told Amy Goodman on Friday:
Actually, during this entire crisis, I thought one of the most astute comments was a two-sentence comment by Marwan Muasher. He�s a former high Jordanian official who�s head of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. He said, "There�s an operative principle in the Middle East." He said, "The principle is, as long as people are quiet and passive, we�ll do whatever we like." That�s a general principle of statesmanship that applies here, too. As long as people are quiet and passive, we�ll do whatever we like. Now, of course, if they stop being quiet and passive, we�ll have to adjust somehow. Maybe they�ll even throw us out, but we�ll try to hang on as much as we can. And that�s what we see going on in the Middle East. That�s what we saw going on in Latin America. It�s what we see right here.
Our future is more or less dystopic, it only remains to determine the extent of the dystopia. In America and the rest of the West we, even the poorest "we", will suffer less than those in other regions and will not die in biblical numbers. The rich need some poor to make stuff to adorn their mansions and yachts and we in the West will benefit from being relatively far less poor than our foreign comrades. But as the rich gather ever more wealth to themselves by ensuring as little "trickles down" on our heads as possible, there's no doubt we will suffer too.
By ignoring long-term trends in favor of "realist" short term thinking which is no better than putting a finger in the crumbling dyke, we're ensuring that "winning the future" is unlikely. Unless you happen to be a multi-millionaire or one of their chosen servants, of course.
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