Guest Blogger Cameron Atwood — Part Two: Why Aren’t We Moving?! – Practical and Philosophical Obstacles to Achieving A Renewable, Efficient and Sustainable Energy Infrastructure
Here is Part Two of Cameron Atwood’s article discussing: Where are we going now? Where do we want to go? Where do we need to go? What stands in our way?
Taxpayer Sacrifices for Our Continued Inefficiency and Dependence
There are many closely related grounds for urgently arriving at a more enlightened energy strategy. In another example of cruelly regressive wealth transfer and force projection, $1.05 trillion has been borrowed from present and future taxpayers to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 – averaging a drain of more than $116 billion per year. (This doesn’t include the tragic human cost, or the loss of productivity and treatment costs as a result of that butchery.)
This sum (with the addition of our gargantuan regularized “defense” spending) is being spent on a “global war” that is said to be waged against a tactic – terrorism – rather than against an actual nation or body of men. Several of our generals have quite openly confessed (often shortly before being replaced) that our strategy is continually producing many more terrorist recruits than we’re killing. This strategy of ours thus increases the probability that we will be attacked more often and more vigorously long into the future here at home.
The question begs: Is the true goal really citizen safety, or is it the preservation of access to the rich resources in the region for western transnational energy interests? If the national product of Iraq was carrots, would we be there now?
Here’s an example of the financial sacrifice on a smaller scale to show some of what we’re really losing in these wars:
Based on approved amounts through the end of Fiscal Year 2010, the taxpayers in Los Angeles County have paid $33.1 billion for the two wars since 2001.
For the same amount of money, we could have provided Head Start funding for 439, 825 children for each and every year since 2001. By the way, according to figures from the State of California, Department of Finance, that’s about equal to the entire population of children aged three, four and five, in any year from 2004 through 2007 in the whole of L.A. county – and that’s the most populous county in the United States.
Then, on the other end of the scale, we can also consider the Bush/Cheney/Paulson bankster bailout that opened our treasury to the tune of $12.3 trillion (see Bloomberg’s news reporting) – that’s a tidy sum of $41,000.00 for every American man woman and child, paid as ransom to the “too big to jail” on Wall Street.
Oh, but there’s no real money to spend on a national program for energy efficiency.
We’re Now Headed… Where?
Will our government be of, for, and by the People? I said myself – at the time of that fateful “Citizens United” vs. FEC decision – that it would prove to be the death of our long ailing democratic republic. That assessment continues to solidify.
We’re now hearing the audible death rattle of books and print media, and we’re looking at the already half-accomplished fateful destruction of net neutrality. On the horizon is the corporate government version of George Orwell’s dystopian media nightmare – the continual revision of all available history and information. We’ll soon be arriving at a condition where inconvenient truths will be far more instantly shunted down an increasingly inaccessible rabbit hole, while convenient and useful lies will be ever more shamelessly and seamlessly paraded and trumpeted.
Whenever a new authoritarian regime kills a democratic republic, it always uses and/or manufactures great crises to facilitate and mask its seizure of power. In a state of fear, confusion, desperation and delusion, a population falls far more easily into the grip of such domination. Most people have the intellect to identify this process; they’re simply in an artfully constructed information bubble, and preoccupied with the distorted reflections projected onto the inside of that bubble.
In the present “jobless recovery” from our Great Recession, a telling tactic is taking shape. Currently (and predictably), key elements of the media debate are being framed, conducted and concluded in such a way as to turn up the boil in the public bloodstream – in an atmosphere that is devoid of the necessary background to correctly target the ensuing steam and pressure. You may have noticed the recently mounting corporate media coverage of the “fraudclosure” practices of the banking sector, and the hidden $45 trillion dollar sinkhole that may soon yawn beneath our national foundations.
Only since the White House changed hands has it been advantageous for those entities controlling the corporate media to shed a very bright and carefully angled light on this colossal festering cockroach of a scandal, and thereby poison the popular perception of the party that’s now in power. In my estimation, this long-overdue swell in ‘public interest’ reporting on this issue is the direct result of recent polls indicating that the majority of Americans, deluded by the corporate media echo chamber, now wrongly lay the blame for the banking crisis at the feet of Obama and the current Democrat Congress.
This astonishing fiction (which our pinstriped media jackboots have so cunningly nurtured within the public mind) has been and will continue to be used to manipulate popular sentiment and direct it against the remaining fragments of genuine opposition that still exist within the party in power. We saw this clearly in the last election, in which our country was pushed back once again onto a more fascist heading.
Lest anyone think ‘fascist’ too strong a term, let me present an inclusive dictionary definition of fascism:
A form of government characterized by the merging of business leadership and the state, rigid one-party rule by the extreme right-wing emphasizing strong centralized power, with militarism, an aggressive nationalism, and the suppression of all opposition.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think for a moment that the GOP is at all alone in this confederacy for corporate government. Both parties have abandoned their traditional values… Gone from the GOP: fiscal responsibility, decentralized authority, and defense of the Constitution… Gone from the Democrats: civil liberties, adherence to the will of the people, and the promotion of the greater good of the population… I’m quite well aware that the Dems are pocketed almost as thoroughly as the Repubs; the Dems are simply a little less proud of that fact than the Repubs are, and the Dems are far more firmly obliged by their constituency to make a show of defending Main Street (at least by the meager force of their rhetoric).
Our great nation began as a cluster of lethally invasive European colonies along the coast of an inhabited continent. With the support of only a third of our people – and decisive assistance from the French crown – we established a birthright then unknown in human history. Unique among nations, we claimed a liberty that was torn from the claws of an avaricious king by the blood and treasure of hallowed patriots, and handed down to us enlarged and developed by wise stewardship, popular struggle and progressive reforms. We are now meanly losing that precious liberty to faceless inhuman greed machines draped in a thin skin of legality – to objects of property.
I’m reminded of an ancient observation – that of the 1st Century Greek historian and essayist Plutarch, “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
Our government was founded upon human liberty and upon human rights to possess property, and yet five imprudent individuals – with a majority of one on our nation’s highest court – have now deemed objects of property to be equal with humanity, and brashly surrendered our human rights and liberty to be possessed by those objects of property.
Those objects now have the means, not just to influence, but to exclusively control our legislature, our selection of national leadership, and our courts both high and low. Those objects already shape and define nearly every other aspect of modern life, and are swiftly consuming and destroying the vast natural web upon which all of us will always depend.
In short, we shall now be owned, and devoured, by our things.
A Glimmer of Hope
I’m a staunch political independent. I voted for every single GOP candidate who has attained the Oval Office from Reagan to the elder Bush – I also voted for Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama. I have great admiration for the stated ideals of both parties, but I will never again vote for a GOP candidate until the party fully returns to its core values and abandons it’s ignorant and wayward careening toward a fascist state. I hold Democrats to the same standard.
This is why I’m encouraged by the widespread survival of many American lawmakers in the recent election who firmly believe (and act upon the beliefs) that Americans care about one another and about future generations… that we all need to help each other to be the very best that we can be… that we must all work and contribute and invest collectively and cooperatively to achieve a greater common good that we all enjoy… that those very privileged among us who are far more successful must contribute an equitable share of their affluence, to ensure that those who struggle at the margins have the opportunity to grow and prosper and play their part… that we must protect and preserve the natural resources and ecological services that allow our continued survival and prosperity.
Unlike those appeasing and co-conspiring Blue Dogs who fared so very poorly in the voting booths this past November, it was these compassionate, tolerant, free-thinking and enlightened public servants who have in large measure survived the onslaught of the economic royalists. They have demonstrated that the social Darwinist, dog-eat-dog, law of the jungle mentality is not the only game in town.
Similarly, those calloused, cash-stuffed corporate-elite candidates here in California – Whitman and Fiorina – have both failed to gain the trust of the wider electorate, and have succumbed to a more progressive and cooperative spirit. Indeed, another very comparable phenomenon was seen in the defeat of the heavily oil-backed attempt to destroy citizen-backed emissions and efficiency standards.
The corporate structures we assembled and supported now exert and inflict increasingly visible, pervasive and injurious dominance upon the people and creatures of the world… Yet, again and again, despite an astonishing expansion in the control these rampant man-made objects have been given, people still continue to achieve small victories in defense of themselves and the future. Here and there, the desire of people to behave as family members, and not as predatory animals, has shone very brightly. We still collectively have the power to alter our course – but for how long – and will we succeed?
What lies before us is the task of wresting national and global governance from those rabidly rebellious objects of our own making, and firmly barring them from ever again usurping our legitimate place within the realms of governance and policy.
Can the kindly spirit of the village win out over the cunning spirit of the wolf?
Time – and our efforts – will tell.
