As noted in previous posts, it's
nearly past time to begin to implement climate change
adaptation plans at the state and local level. At the national level it's
nearly past time to begin to prepare
adaptation plans including how to handle potential future mass migration and significant economic dislocation.
But when the headlines read
'Governor Moonbeam' Vows to Launch 'Own Damn Satellite' If Donald Trump Ignores Climate Change in which were told...
In
a barnburner speech on Wednesday, Governor Jerry Brown vowed to defy
any attempt by the future President to “mess with” the state’s earth
science programs, telling a group of geophysicists in San Francisco, “We
will persevere.”
“We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the
lawyers and we’re ready to fight,” Brown told the American Geophysical
Union to wild applause. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California
will launch its own damn satellite.”
...it
pretty much gives us a feel for what the political and economic
landscape looks like and it doesn't look like smooth sailing for those Californians who care about their descendants living in the year 2117.
Our beloved Governor Moonbeam
is acutely aware that
climate scientists are anxious over threatened NASA climate science cuts during Trump presidency and
House Republicans have tried to defund Defense Department initiatives to prepare for climate change impacts.
Recently some political
philosophy types rediscovered why it is that the Western World has been
unable to cope with climate change impacts. The reason is 21st Century "Neoliberalism" - a
name coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938 for an alternative ideology.
As
Neoliberalism has evolved, it has become an ideology which asserts that
21st Century market metaphors, metrics, and practices should permeate
all fields of human life. It is an ideology that is winning outside California primarily because its
advocates from Silicon Valley have operated outside the traditional social,
economic and political norms.
Ben Tarnoff, a San Francisco journalist who writes about technology and politics, in a December 2016 article
explains the nature of Neoliberalism in the correct context:
No
industry has played a larger role in evangelizing the neoliberal faith
than Silicon Valley. Its entrepreneurs are constantly coming up with new
ways to make more of our lives into markets. A couple of decades ago,
staying in touch with friends wasn’t a source of economic value – now
it’s the basis for a $350bn company. Our photo albums, dating
preferences, porn habits, and most random and banal thoughts have all
become profitable data sets, mined for advertising revenue. We are
encouraged to see ourselves as pieces of human capital that must
ceaselessly enhance our value – optimizing our feeds and profiles,
hustling for follows and likes and swipes.
If Silicon Valley is
turning our personal lives into a business, then Trump hopes to turn our
government into one. Like all of Trump’s ideas, this isn’t especially
original. For decades, neoliberal politicians of both parties have
promoted the notion that government should not only serve business, but
operate like one. They’ve argued that public services should be
privatized, or at least model the “efficiency” of the private sector.
They’ve claimed that business is the highest form of human endeavor, and
that the role of the state is to empower and emulate it.
It is important to note that Tarnoff earlier
in August 2016 wrote a piece
decrying the planned October 2016 action of the government that turned
over ownership of the internet domain name system (DNS) to the private
sector, again in the correct context in which he explained:
But
the symbolic significance is huge. The October handover marks the last
chapter in the privatization of the Internet. It concludes a process
that began in the 1990s, when the US government privatized a network
built at enormous public expense.
In return, the government
demanded nothing: no compensation, and no constraints or conditions over
how the Internet would take shape.
There was nothing inevitable
about this outcome — it reflected an ideological choice, not a technical
necessity. Instead of confronting critical issues of popular oversight
and access, privatization precluded the possibility of putting the
Internet on a more democratic path.
In that
August
2016 article he explains how the internet was developed and how it was
privatized. He advocates reclaiming "the People’s Platform" to bring it
"under democratic control" so it isn't "used to produce immense
concentrations of corporate power."
Sadly in
December
2016 he was explaining how those corporations implemented Neoliberalism
in our daily lives and were now implementing a government agendas outside California. What
happened in between is Donald Trump was elected President because the world's
latte-drinking urban liberals thought Trump was a buffoon, not a Neoliberal
with memories of adolescent longings for an Ayn Rand
iWorld where
information need not be fact and all information is monetized.
If
you asked any "smart" progressive or liberal politician or staffer or
press member before November 2016 what a Neoliberal was, probably 90%
would have given you a blank look or fumbled around for words. Not all,
however.
There were some Millennials, not long out of college, who still
retained their ability to read more than 140 characters. In my February
11 post
Hillary Clinton's Dilemma: the Centrist Third Way Policies of Bill's Presidency vs. Young Women I offered this quote from
Clio Chang (
emphasis added)
Is it so outlandish to think that the circumstances in which each
generation grew up would affect their political preferences?
Particularly when those circumstances are of immense historical
importance, like the Great Recession? While those who entered the
workforce during Bill Clinton’s presidency may remember his legacy as an
era of economic prosperity, that wealth hasn’t trickled down to today’s
millennials. Two decades later, they are just as likely to hear
criticisms of Clinton’s policies, such as welfare reform, DOMA,and
mandatory minimum sentences. Indeed, when you take into account the root
causes of the financial crisis, income inequality, and wage stagnation,
the Clinton years start to look like part of a
neoliberal-conservative consensus, as opposed to a liberal outlier
between two Bush administrations. At a time when more young
voters seem to be following all the correct steps for success—graduating
high school, getting a college degree—but are still floundering, it’s
no wonder that they are drawn to Sanders’s stacked-deck rhetoric.
As
Tarnoff noted in his December article, Trump built his campaign around
the premise that his chief qualification for the presidency was his
success as a businessman and promised to make America great again by
bringing business discipline and dynamism to government.
Democrats, who wouldn't want to offend the deluded in their effort to be be inclusive,
offered no coordinated attack on this expression of Neoliberal ideology at least partly because some of their ilk agree with it.
Nor did the mainstream
media offer such an attack because the term Neoliberalism wasn't recognized by the camera-hogs in the mainstream
media. That is understandable, though not forgivable, because sometime in the
early-to-mid-1950's the term "neoliberal" disappeared from normal political
discourse, except in certain tight circles and among those who study
political science instead of celebrity politics.
While
no one was looking, Neoliberal wealthy corporate interests funded
academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of
Chicago and Virginia, plus a series of think tanks including the American
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the
Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the
Adam Smith Institute. They created a transatlantic network of
academics, businessmen, journalists and activists who always hid under
the traditional label "conservative."
As I've explained
in previous posts, in the United States they quietly took over most
state legislatures and executive offices which then allowed them to take
control of Congress. Now they will have Donald Trump as President and
will continue their attempts to take control of European governments.
As British writer, George Monbiot,
explains it:
Its
anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a
major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of
2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers
offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and
education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the
collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to
these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that
they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent
philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power
can there be than to operate namelessly?
So pervasive has
neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We
appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith
describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s
theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to
reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
It
is in the context of Neoliberal values that we can understand that all
persons are free to compete, but the competition is never a fair
competition, because life is not fair, nor should any government attempt
to make it fair or even a little fairer. Overlaid on a biosphere disruption scenario, Neoliberalism almost seems to guarantee a
dystopian future.
In
contrast, Egalitarian Progressivism reached the peak of its influence
in the United States in the first half of the 20th Century, then slowly
faded as the collective memory of The Great Depression faded.
In California, it was epitomized by the Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 signed by Governor Pat Brown which established a system of tuition-free higher education for residents including the University of California, the California State University System, and the statewide community college system. (This was ultimately undone in 1978 by Proposition 13.)
Egalitarian Progressivism involved mixing industrial and technological progress with active
governmental intervention to assure equal opportunity and a proper
balance of
distributive justice. It is
distributive justice that creates a significant contrast with Neoliberalism.
However, Egalitarian Progressivism as it evolved in the 20th Century is complicated.
In his book
Group Dynamics,
Professor Donelson R. Forsyth,
Thorsness Endowed Chair in Ethical Leadership, Jepson School of
Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, explains that "distributive
justice" is about how rewards and costs are distributed among members of
a group (or a city or nation) which takes into account five conflicting "norms"
which typically confront groups. These can be summarized (in a different
order than Forsyth presents them) as:
- Responsibility: Group members who have the most should share their resources with those who have less.
- Need: Those in greatest needs should be provided with resources needed to meet those needs, regardless of their input..
- Equity: Members' outcomes should be based upon their inputs.
Therefore, an individual who has invested a large amount of input (e.g.
time, money, energy) should receive more from the group than someone who
has contributed very little.
- Power: Those with more authority, status, or control over the group should receive more than those in lower level positions.
- Equality: Regardless of their inputs, all group members should be given an equal share of the rewards/costs
In the context of American society, economics, and politics,
Egalitarian Progressivism requires that these norms be used giving
priority in the order they are listed above to set the course for the
ship of state. The first four are understood as requirements applied to
keep the ship running. The last is then used to adjust the final heading
- it is the "fairness" standard of mediation that keeps everyone on board and avoids
a mutiny. But it requires commitment and compromise.
"Need" is given a high priority, but it is a word not limited to economics. In terms of the individual perspective,
Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs applies:
During World War II, in order to distinguish themselves from the Nazi and Japanese societies, the Allies adopted the Four Freedoms to which every human
is entitled as elucidated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January
6, 1941 —freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and
freedom from want—as their basic war aims.
Advocates of Egalitarian Progressivism believe that in 1948
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
amplified those Four Freedoms, placing the burden on government, with
the support of every person and organization, to assure that the
physiological and safety needs of all persons are met.
Further
it also placed the responsibility on every person, organization, and
government to see that every person's need for belonging and for esteem
can be met to the extent the group can facilitate achieving them using
the norms of distributive justice.
In the United States
advocates of Egalitarian Progressivism in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century achieved
much through government. But beginning in the mid-1970's under both Republican and Democratic Presidents, that stopped.
It should be clear from the discussion above that
"egalitarian" as used here supports the thought that all humans are
equal in fundamental worth or social status, a thought that logically
requires and supports the dictate that all people should be treated as
equals and have the same basic political, economic, social, and civil
rights.
It does not mean, nor did it ever mean, socialism simply because it acknowledges norms based on how groups
behave and what people need, and suggests folks work it out through democratic governments.
Nevertheless....
In 1938 in Paris two exiles from
Austria, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, discovered a shared
belief that social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, was a
manifestation of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as
nazism and communism. So they coined the term Neoliberalism as a label
for their view.
Hayek, who in a 1944 book argued that
government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to
totalitarian control, in 1947 founded the first organization to spread
the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – supported by
millionaires and their foundations.
This
set the pattern that for the next 50 years was used in the U.S. successfully to create a
funding base to support three decades of a Republican political strategy
to take control of 32 of 50 state legislatures as shown on the map
above, 33 governors offices, both houses of Congress, and the
Presidency.
The problem is, starting with President
Jimmy Carter, there has been a steady shift in the Democratic Party away
from Egalitarian Progressivism - we find terms describing elected
Democrats as New Democrats, Centrist Democrats, Clinton Democrats,
Moderate Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, and Third Way Democrats. Many
leading New Democrats, such as Bill Clinton, started out in the
George McGovern
wing of the Democratic Party but gradually moved toward the right on
economic and military policy, effectively accepting elements of
Neoliberalism.
At the beginning of the 21st Century Egalitarian Progressivism
had no home in either of the two dominant national political parties.
Neoliberal philosophy had seduced Democratic politicians seeking a national
stage, though not all of those active at the State level.
At the state level in Florida, where streets are frequently under water because of rising sea levels and the government is controlled by Neoliberals, the term's "climate change" and "global warming" may not be mentioned in official state documents or by state officials.
On the other hand, the government of California, led by old Egalitarian Progressive Democrats, in 2009 established an extensive program to cope with regional climate change impacts as noted in previous posts.
But California has an advantage. Silicon Valley billionaires, like Hollywood billionaires, like living here and want to continue to be able to live here, even if personal income taxes at their income levels are unusually high. This is a contrast with other locations.
Curiously,
for decades many American billionaires have been buying large ranches in the group of
states pictured at the left, running from the Canadian border to the
Mexican border. These 1,000± acre ranches can, of course, be impacted by
drought, wildfire, blizzards, etc. But with proper site planning and
building construction, they represent the best locations to escape the
long term dislocation impacts on America of climate change.
In addition to protecting themselves and their families, how will Neoliberals additionally engage adaptation to a disruption of the biosphere? What would they do if the scene below were the picture of a
continuing disaster - one that we knew would last a century or more?
Would
their first response be to study how to monetize the situation for
corporate profits? If it couldn't be monetized directly
would we see the equivalent on the internet of the billboard war which
would generate corporate revenue from social media?
Would
the symbol of U.S. migration policy be a picture like this and the
experience similar to what Florence Thompson describes (click the
picture):
Consider
the pictures of Florida in the previous post with two more feet of tidal water in the
middle of a heavy rainstorm 25 years from now, then realize flooding
like this is going to happen - indeed has happend - in New York City and other coastal cities
of the United States absent billions spent on flood control projects
that likely will not be enough 50 years after their completion:
Exactly how will a government dominated by people who believe in Neoliberalism prepare?
Or will that government prepare? After all, the core of Neoliberal philosophy is everyone is responsible for themselves. After all,
for decades billionaires have been buying large ranches ...oh I already said
that above.
Well... It needs to be repeated as those ranches are
in the best locations to escape the long term regional dislocation impacts of climate change. It will isolate the Neoliberals from the unwashed
masses should the need arise.
Warnings about this scenario have been offered. The late journalist, author and activist
Jane Jacobs was described as one of the most prescient writers of the 20th century before her last book, titled
Dark Age Ahead, was released in 2004.
The New Yorker reviewer Paul Goldberger
called the book,
"a despairing look at the state of things, and like everything Jacobs
wrote, it is a curious combination of plainspoken common sense based on
simple, empirical observation of the world around her, and broad
generalizations about the nature of cities and cultures." It was not recommended
light summer reading for the masses.
In her 2004 book
Jacobs warns of an increasing distrust of government, worsening
environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging
gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as
signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age.
“Cultural
xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural
vigor,” as “self-imposed isolation” leads to “a fortress mentality,” she
writes. That mentality transforms logic into myth, Jacobs writes, with a
conservatism that “looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for
guidance and a worldview.”
This has insidious impacts
on society. She cited the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave, which killed hundreds of
mostly elderly Chicagoans. Comparing two studies, one by the
United States Department of Health and the other by Eric Klinenberg a
sociology graduate student who wrote his thesis on the disaster, she
argued that the federal study was unconsciously biased by the prevailing
political and economic ideology, neoliberalism, which promoted
individualism to the point of becoming completely oblivious to community
and social factors. For Klinenberg these were factors that
ultimately helped some avoid death and resulted in others dying.
In 2004, a time when latte-drinking intellectual pundits were celebrating the
end of history and extolling the virtues of a "flat" world of economic
globalization, Jacobs
ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and
populist backlash.
A
more recent review said Jacobs' 2004 book "serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump."
One serious concern about the Neoliberals is expressed by Jacobs in her assertion that "cultural
xenophobia" leads to “a fortress mentality.” A fortress is a tool of war.
As we know the Trump administration
appears paranoid when it comes to trade. There is no open acknowledgment that when your military is shooting at your existing and
potential customers,
it’s very difficult to serve and be served by those same individuals. Open trade makes war less likely.
The Neoliberals have monetized warfare directly by
privatizing it - not by selling goods to the military as in pre-1980's
wars - but by privatizing the military. As I noted in a previous post
former Navy Seal Erik Prince,who founded the firm of Blackwater USA now known as
Academi - the American private military company - is the brother of Betsy DeVos, the Trump nominee for Education Secretary who advocates privatizing education.
So one potential Neoliberal response to a biosphere disruption crisis is the fun and profitable distraction of war. The upside of war is that it reduces the problem of human overpopulation that contributes to the biosphere disruption.
Before closing out this series, how technology used by a huge human population affects the biosphere disruptions deserves further review.
