Here We Go Again

In an interview with Al Jazeera Jin Liiqn, the supervising chairman of China Investment Corporation, China's sovereign wealth fund, was asked whether China intended to invest in the European Union's new bailout fund. He did not think so unless Europe's labor laws, which provide for shorter work weeks and longer vacations than found elsewhere, were made more demanding of the workers. He accused European workers of being given to "sloth and indolence."

This from a high official of a government that allows its corporations to work people so hard they commit suicide as in the company that produces Apple's iPad; allows deceptive recruitment of young, poor, rural women to work in immense factories working long hours cheek by jowl as they sew clothing and assemble electronic parts only to then be housed in controlled corporate dormitories when off work; that is throwing peasants off their land in Africa as they plant massive, GM laden monoculture crops to feed its population. In China we are witnessing the worst aspects of capitalism being played out once again, but with all the "efficiency" trappings of the 21dt century. We have been here many times before. The initial Industrial Revolution in England forced peasants off their land in order to graze sheep and provide wool for the new machines of textile factories. The resultant poverty, slums, and other social dysfunctions are powerfully depicted in the engravings of William Hogarth and the novels of Charles Dickens. In the United States it resulted in the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146, mostly teenage immigrant girls, died because of locked doors and grossly inadequate fire escapes. Many chose to leap to their death on the concrete 9 stories down rather than burn to death. Some apparently 'froze', their skeletons still bent over their sewing machines. Would that the greed-driven connections between Goldman Sachs' Commodity Index and its speculative increases in the price of grain-based food, causing death by starvation, could be so explicitly drawn. Now, after three hundred years of this repeated barbarity, we have China, with the world's largest population going hell-bent down the same road focused on becoming the world's next dominant economy, not on the welfare of its people. Reading Arundhati Roy, India is little better and it is expected to exceed China's population soon. The enormous slums of Mumbai India, substantially created by the same process of driving rural farmers off their small land holdings, abut the skyscraping condos of the rich. All of this vicious imposition on a poor and desperate humanity is, of course, called progress.

In contrast, the object of this Chinese economic disdain, Europe, is the only area on this planet where a sustained effort has been made to insure that capitalism's capacity to produce goods and services is harnessed to human welfare. After World War II, amid its massive destruction, Europe was so focused on making its society and its economy function for human benefit that the British, within three months of the end of the European phase of that war, rejected their charismatic war-time leader, Churchill, and elected Clement Attlee's Labour Party. They, as Wikipedia notes, presided "over a policy of nationalizing major industries and utilities including the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, telephones and inland transport including railways, road haulage and canals. It developed and implemented the "cradle to grave" Welfare State conceived by the economist William Beveridge. To this day the party considers the 1948 creation of Britain's publicly funded National Health Service under health minister Aneurin Bevan its proudest achievement.^[68] Attlee's government also began the process of dismantling the British Empire." That, I suggest, is reform, in contrast to the pusillanimous efforts made in this country.

Recently Al Jazeera presented a video report on China's expanding military might. It showed Chinese military jets flying in formation, not unlike the Blue Angels (What a name for a killing instrument!) of the United States. Chinese civilians, men, women, and children were ecstatic at the display of military might. More often than not, achievement of economic prominence has led to military prominence and then military dominance. The political mechanism for this process is called "national interest." As every "great power" has done, China can be expected to define its national interest in ever widening spheres of influence. America's national interest requires 737 military facilities around the world, often at the host country's reluctant acceptance. The enormous Okinawa military base, occupying a large amount of prime farm land, is a constant source of resentment by the Okinawans. This sequence of economic power being converted into military power and the constant threat of war it engenders is very well know, yet our species has yet to be the fundamental concern of humanity and we repeats this sequence again and again with an ever increasing power of destruction. Indeed, as of this writing it has just been announced that the United States will establish a new Marine base in Darwin, Australia said to be directed at containing China. As Denis Kucinich cried out during the 2008 presidential campaign, "Wake up America! Wake up!," so we need a clarion call to humanity to wake up to the deceptions it practices on itself.

Now let us consider some of the consequences for this planet and humanity as the world's two most populous countries, China and India, rush to produce and consume at the ever increasing rates that human technology can produce.

Not long ago Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute published a small book titled "Who Will Feed China?" to draw attention to the impending global food shortage. The answer is, of course, we all will, but the burden, given the price structure that will govern food distribution and availability, will be the poor of this earth. As noted above, Goldman Sachs is already playing its role in this impending disaster as well as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the agricultural corporate conglomerate converting corn from food to fuel. According to the United Nations, there is already famine in parts of drought stricken Somalia. Delivery of sustaining food is compromised by warring faction, a phenomenon we may expect to accompany food shortages elsewhere. This, again, is a scenario that most of humanity will not take seriously.

Additionally, as wealth and its concentration increases in these two countries, food tastes will move to meat and the vast waste accompanying the consumption of animals will make itself felt, especially in the consumption of water, already in short supply. Add to all this the increasing trend toward agricultural monoculture and the patent control of seed and you have the makings for further sources of conflict. Finally, add to this the still increasing world population and you have the basis for massive conflict, not just over national sovereignty, but over the basics of human life, i.e. food and water, and those conflicts will taking place in the context of weaponry that can destroy civilization if not our species.

In this context the United States, China, Russia, etc. are planning their military strategies in terms of winning any confrontation or, at least, reaching some level of fear-driven mutual detente, however fragile.

Much of this scenario is known with a probability verging on certainty, yet the powers that be do not for a moment consider a policy and practice of cooperation in dealing with the massive problems we humans have created. We will waste enormous portions of what the planet has left fighting for ever-diminishing resources. This is childish schoolyard behavior! Every institution that either practices or promotes practices inimical to the continued survival of our species should be called vigorously to account, whether religious groups against abortion and birth control, the over consuming wealthy of the planet, financiers and their spurious economies of investing money in money and not for human needs, advertisers aiming to induce people to consume the unnecessary, and any number of other destructive practices.

In all of this we are not talking about niceties, but about necessities.

All of this mad rush down the road of unfettered capitalism and the greed, waste and conflict it entails must be stopped. It is clear that competition is, as this list of consequences notes above, a wasteful means to get things done. It also distorts or misses its objectives because it tends to focus on the competitor, not the problem. Cooperation takes far less of human effort and planetary resources to get better things done than does competition. Cooperation to deal with what we have done globally requires that we see with clear and distraction-resistant perception our common human destiny and, if we survive, our common human ability to understand ourselves and our potential for understanding the universe we inhabit. To constantly remind ourselves of our common destiny we need to use this planet as the basic frame of reference in dealing with all that would divide us. This is our common home. This is what we should pledge allegiance to. This is the only frame of reference that can address the massive problems we have created for ourselves. In 1940 Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate running against FDR, articulated his vision of one world so effectively the after the election Roosevelt asked him to become a roving ambassador for Roosevelt's efforts to persuade the nations that would be left exhausted by that conflict, that creation of a world organization would be imperative. Without commenting on what Republicans from Ronald Reagan to G. W. Bush have done to that party since, we need to reinstall Roosevelt's and Willke's vision and articulate the necessities that then and now make it imperative that we change our human mindset from nation, religion, or any other subset of human thought and attachment, to articulating our commonality in fact and in destiny.

Bob Newhard