Generation Hot—Why Aren’t Parents Fighting Climate Change?

Mark Hertzgaard’s recent article, “Parents Need to Act Against Climate Change,” in the Daily Beast, is a moralistic diatribe against parents’ apathy in response to climate change. Since the worst effects of climate change are only just beginning, our kids will be inheriting a lifetime of catastrophic storms, heat waves, droughts, famines and economic hardships. Therefore, he argues, parents should be terrified, outraged and aggressively fighting to reverse the crisis. Yet for the most part they are not.

The current U.S. heat wave—the worst in 56 years—has now encompassed 1,000 counties and is affecting fully one-third of Americans. There have already been nearly 100 deaths (which is significant, but still miniscule compared with the 70,000 who died in Europe’s heat wave of 2003). Ranchers are considering selling off their herds for slaughter early because they cannot afford to feed them. Food prices are expected to rise dramatically. And scientists are claiming that the heat wave, drought, fires in the Southwest and other extreme weather events of the past few years are what climate change looks like.

Climate change is indeed the most significant issue of our day as it threatens life on the planet in the long-term and our living conditions and material wellbeing in the short-term. Hertzgaard is correct in his assessment that American’s are relatively apathetic on this issue. He is also correct that our children, whom he dubs “Generation Hot,” will inherit much more serious consequences than we are currently experiencing if the trend is not reversed.

However, people (parents, children and everyone else) cannot be beaten into action with moralizing and guilt tripping. They will not suddenly jump to the barricades because Hertzgaard, or his organization, have made them feel guilty about leaving a moribund planet to their children.

Nor will partial or inaccurate analyses lead them into action. For example, Hertzgaard suggests that parents “don’t know, or choose not to believe,” the science because the media covers climate change through “political rather than scientific lenses.” This overly simplistic analysis deemphasizes the role of the heavily funded PR machine that the coal and petroleum industries have used to deliberately mislead and confuse the public about the facts, much like the tobacco companies have done to try to convince the public that tobacco is safe.

There are other problems with this analysis, too, like the assumptions that if the media talked about climate change “through a scientific lens” the public would necessarily understand the science, its implications, be outraged and take action. None of these assumptions is necessarily true. The facts about tobacco’s health consequences encouraged some to quit. However, increased regulation (e.g., tobacco taxes, mandated warning labels, laws regulating where and how tobacco could be sold and advertised) together with public health outreach campaigns, have contributed to significantly more dramatic reductions in tobacco usage.

Hertzgaard also suggests that the facts are just too depressing for many parents to face, leading many to ignore them or pretend climate change is not happening. Of course the facts are depressing, while the only solutions likely to reverse the trend involve dramatic reductions (or elimination) of fossil fuel consumption and significant reductions in overall consumption seem hopelessly unlikely in our current economic and cultural climate.

However, I Hertzgaard’s analysis here is dismissive and disparaging. Parents are not the cause of climate change. They are its victims. And while we are all complicit in it by continuing to consume polluting products and services, we have little choice in the matter. We need to get to work and heat our homes and eat, and these are all heavily dependent on greenhouse gas emitting technologies. Changing this requires massive regulation, which depends on the goodwill of a political and economic system that benefits handsomely from the status quo, or dramatic socioeconomic changes that are unlikely to occur without considerable violence and suffering.

Furthermore, while climate change may be the most significant issue of our day, it is still largely a long term problem in most people’s eyes, particularly when juxtaposed with our day to day needs, like putting food on the table, which for most Americans has become much more difficult as a result of the economic crisis. It may be that Americans do indeed recognize the gravity of the climate problem and are not simply shoving their heads in the ground. Rather, they also recognize the socioeconomic challenges of fighting it and the urgency of their own material needs, and choose to go on with their lives with as little disruption and stress as they can.

In many respects, climate change is just another front in the class war the ruling elite has been imposing on the rest of us for generations. The primary beneficiaries of carbon pollution are the industries that are allowed to dump carbon into the atmosphere or sell polluting products without charge (e.g., petroleum, coal, shipping, automotive, construction, owners of large buildings, big agriculture, etc.) They increase their profits by externalizing these costs onto the public. Regulation has not been possible because these beneficiaries of carbon pollution have spent billions of dollars on PR, ads and lobbying to convince the public there is no problem and to convince politicians not to regulate them. Convincing parents to get angry and get into the streets is no more likely to change this than the Occupy movement was in getting Congress to regulate banking.

Of course regulation alone cannot solve the problem. We don’t simply need better rules governing how industries pollute. We need social changes that dramatically reduce or eliminate carbon pollution combined with heavy investment in carbon neutral technologies combined with dramatic reductions in overall consumption combined with stiffer penalties and better policing of industrial pollution. Most of these enormous long-term socioeconomic changes will require directly confronting the ruling elite and capitalism itself and therefore also require comprehensive community and workplace organizing. This is most effectively done by getting into the streets, communities and workplaces and talking to people one on one and listening to their concerns, not by getting on your high horse and talking down to them.

Breaking News: Union Membership is Rising, Declining or Remaining Constant

Unions and union busting are big news lately. Thus, it should be no surprise that much of the media jumped upon a recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on the state of union membership in America. The only thing surprising about the report was how differently it was parsed by various news sources.

The Los Angeles Times excitedly proclaimed that “Union membership grew nationally in 2011,” with unions picking up 49,000 new members. However, before you crack the champagne, the New York Times gloomily declared that “Union Membership Rates Fell Again in 2011.” The NY Times went on to say that the decades-long drop in union membership continued in 2011, falling to just 11.8% of the American workforce, a 0.1% decline from 2010. Life, however, saw this 0.1% as a sign that things were becoming less bad, posting the following headline: “Union Membership Rates Are No Longer Falling.” 

Of course all three conclusions can be true. A drop of 0.1% may indeed be a leveling off after years of sharper declines (after all, 1.4 million union jobs were lost between 2008 and 2010). And if the number of total number of workers increased by more than the number of new union members, then the 49,000 increase reported by the LA Times could still result in a net 0.1% decrease overall, which was in fact what happened.

So is there any real news here at all?

Not really.

Union membership is still the lowest it’s been in decades and the reasons for the decline have not substantively changed. The biggest recent drops in union membership resulted from the massive layoffs and cuts that accompanied the recession, while the longer term trend has been driven largely by downsizing and outsourcing, combined with union busting, none of which shows much sign of abating. Furthermore, even if the decline has leveled off for the moment, continuing state and local budget crises will likely result in more waves of public sector layoffs and consequently more declines in union membership.

It is not just the vagaries of capitalism that have caused the decline in unionism. Unions themselves must take much of the blame for clinging to antiquated, nationalistic and selfish tactics and perspectives that alienate younger workers and divide the working class. The AFL-CIO, for example, has consistently jumped on the nationalistic and racist bandwagon accusing China and other countries of stealing our jobs, rather than working in solidarity with international unions to improve wages and working conditions worldwide.

Or consider the Keystone XL Pipeline that has pitted environmentalists against unions. Why should anyone support a pipeline that will carry crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico? It is dangerous, dirty and will actually increase oil prices because the oil is so expensive to extract from the Canadian tax sands. It will run through one of the richest agricultural tracts in the world, placing the water and food for millions of Americans at risk. Meanwhile, it will worsen climate change by increasing the amount of petroleum being extracted and consumed.

Of course the economy sucks and people want jobs and this project could provide some. But this is like saying that gangs provide jobs and should be encouraged or that child pornography creates jobs and should be promoted.

This brings up another backwards union perspective: Jobs trump all else.

Jobs are a means to an end: getting food into one’s mouth. “Good” jobs are good only in so much as they provide material security at minimal costs to one’s health and wellbeing and even this is an expedient. Many jobs are simply not worth preserving at all. Banking, insurance and real estate speculation serve no common good, while the automotive, petroleum, coal, tobacco and nuclear industries actually cause millions of deaths each year. To demand more jobs in these fields is to demand the proliferation of homelessness, pollution, warfare and preventable deaths, not a very compelling platform for attracting new members.

It is understandable that people are demanding jobs and that the unions want to preserve them. There is no hope in the foreseeable future that the state or society will adequately provide for the unemployed, or pay to retrain them, while the Protestant Work Ethic and American Dream mythology are so deeply embedded in our culture that many people feel degraded, useless or bored when they don’t have a job.

But there is another reason for unions’ obsession with jobs: it is a cheap and easy way for union leaders to win points with their members. Union bosses are constantly making compromises and deals with corporate bosses, like the UAW recently did in Detroit, to save a few jobs in exchange for pay and benefits cuts. The corporate bosses get increased profits by spending less on their employees, while the union bosses get to hold onto their cushy six-figure salaries and suit-and-tie lifestyles, free from the dirt and grime of the shop floor or classroom. By keeping their members on the job, unions can continue to collect dues that go to the salaries of their officers, and to lobbying and litigation. By ending conflicts quickly and cheaply through compromises and sellouts, unions reduce their bureaucratic and legal costs, leaving more money for their officers’ salaries.

This also helps to explain why unions have engaged in fewer strikes and labor struggles in the past three years than at almost any other time in the past 80 years. On the one hand, strikes are risky and can be expensive if members are jailed or the union is fined, as the ILWU in Longview, WA can attest. Lobbying, politics and litigation are also expensive, but they are easily outsourced to professional hacks, helping to keep the rank and file under control with promises that “our guy” will change things once elected. It is certainly much easier than organizing, which requires large numbers of well-trained organizers to go out into the “field” and actually listen to workers, something that bosses of all varieties, including union bosses, are loathe to do. Who knows, they might hear something they don’t like.

Lastly, mainstream trade unions benefit from the capitalist system and have no interest in challenging it. Indeed, they are dependent upon it. While they may challenge the bosses now and then, they will always send their members back to work under the belief that ruining the boss means their own ruination. Thus, it becomes imperative to union leaders that “peace” is maintained between workers and employers and that bosses continue to be permitted to earn huge profits on their backs, because this is seen as the source of jobs and potential raises. This perspective makes the boss out as the workers’ friend, which any worker can see is patently false.

Oh I love my boss

He’s a good friend of mine

That’s why I’m starving out on the bread line

Hallelujah I’m a bum,

Hallelujah, bum again,

Won’t you give us a handout to revive us again

First printed by the IWW, 1908, becoming the anthem of the Spokane free speech fight

Human Need or Capitalist Greed

It is not only absurd, but dangerous, to believe that jobs are good just because losing a job is undesirable (See the Cry For Jobs, Ruthless Criticism). Of course it is terrible to lose ones income and material security. But simply demanding jobs generally results in compromises and sacrifices in order to get that paycheck rolling in again. Workers accept lower wages, longer working hours, more dangerous conditions, less autonomy, longer commutes just to get back to work.

Jobs do not even necessarily provide material security, particularly if the wages aren’t sufficient to cover living expenses. Even when times were “good” and unemployment was low, prior to the start of the economic crisis, wages and living standards had been spiraling downwards for more than 30 years. Working hours had been increasing, stress growing and leisure time shrinking.

Why do we need jobs? We don’t. We need the things that we can purchase with the income that jobs provide. If these goods and services can be produced in less than 40 hours per week we should all be happy—more leisure time, right?

But it never works that way because the goods and services don’t belong to us, they belong to the bosses, and we don’t get paid the value of the goods and services we produce, but only a fraction of that. Our pay is an expense to the bosses. The more work they can get out of us and the less they have to pay for it, the greater their profits. Therefore, the purpose of work is not to meet human need, but capitalists’ greed and increased worker productivity does not result in more leisure time or increased wages, it results in increased profits.

America’s Billionaires’ Coup (Part I)

The OB Rag just reprinted the following articles from two of Europe’s largest papers, Der Spiegel, in Germany, and the Guardian, from Britain, portraying the U.S. today as a third world banana republic controlled by a billionaire’s coup.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 The articles are interesting for their outsiders’ perspectives and honest portrayal of the rapid and intense decline in living standards for the majority of Americans. However, they also both suffer from the same bogus nostalgia for a nonexistent golden age, in which “West” meant something noble and wonderful, and America was its respected leader.

The Der Spiegel article is reprinted below, with my commentary in italics. The Guardian article will be reprinted tomorrow, as Part II.

Once Upon a Time in the West

by Jakob Augstein / Der Spiegel (Germany) / August 4, 2011

Hate has become a part of the everyday culture of American politics.

This week, the United States nearly allowed itself to succumb to economic disaster. Increasingly, the divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy. In the face of America’s apparent political insanity, Europe must learn to take care of itself.

The “solution” to the debt crisis may actually be the beginning and cause of an economic disaster. It is true that the debt crisis was a fraud and fantasy, used by Republicans to ramrod through spending cuts. But they essentially succeeded. The spending cuts will devastate millions of Americans and exacerbate the real problem with the economy: people cannot afford to pay their living expenses because of slashed wages, unemployment, ballooning mortgage payments and evaporated equity.

The word “West” used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West, and those who would like to use the word — along with Europe and the United States in the same sentence — should just hold their breath. By any definition, America is no longer a Western nation.

West may have meant “democracy” to some, but they were not paying attention very well. “West” included fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. West included imperialism and wars of aggression by most Western countries, especially the U.S. Europeans may have once idealized American civil liberties as stronger than their own, but the U.S. still has greater civil liberties than many European countries (even if it has far fewer than a decade ago).

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically — in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The governments of the U.S. and European countries have always been in the hands of the elite. The difference between today and the “golden age” is that unions have been so weakened that there is virtually no resistance to the greed and hubris of the wealthy. They are now unabashedly attempting things that they could only dream of doing just a few years back. In terms of militarism, there has been another change that has emboldened the U.S.: the collapse of the U.S.S.R., which served as a counterbalance with the ever present threat of the Cold War turning hot or even nuclear, should the U.S. go too far in its imperialist endeavors.

The country’s social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country’s total income for themselves — 25 years ago that figure was 12 percent. It also possesses 40 percent of total assets, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

Call it a “coup” or whatever you want, but it’s still essentially just capitalism. Capitalism has always been class war declared by the rich against the rest of us, and the capitalists have always been winning this war. The difference today is that they are using weapons of mass destruction. They are fighting more aggressively than ever and meeting very little resistance.

Economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, has written that America’s path is leading it towards the “status of a banana republic.” The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark. This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good. When a company like Apple, which with €76 billion in the bank has greater reserves at its disposal than the government in Washington, a European can only shake his head over the Republican resistance to tax increases. We see it as self-destructive.

Again, a weak labor movement makes all this possible. Wages have been steadily declining for the past 40 years in terms of buying power. As companies relocate overseas to exploit cheaper labor, competition for jobs increases and wages in the U.S. are undermined. With declining wages and purchasing power, Americans have become more dependent on cheap imported consumer products, accelerating the loss of domestic jobs. Meanwhile, automation and technological advances have pushed productivity to its highest levels ever, making workers superfluous, leading both to increased profits for the bosses and downsizing for workers. Rather than sharing the increased profits with workers or allowing them to relax and let the machines do the bulk of the work, bosses are pocketing the profits AND jettisoning the workers. The latter further increases competition for jobs and brings down overall wages.

The same applies to America’s broken political culture. The name “United States” seems increasingly less appropriate. Something has become routine in American political culture that has been absent in Germany since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policies of rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Bloc (in the 1960s and ’70s): hate. At the same time, reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology. In this new American civil war, respect for the country’s highest office was sacrificed long ago. The fact that Barack Obama is the country’s first African-American president may have played a role there, too.

When was reason ever a universal trait of American culture? World War I? World War II? Scopes Monkey Trial? Internment of Japanese-Americans? Jim Crow? Fear of vaccines? Salem witch hunts? Communist witch hunts?

The West, C’est nous

There’s no deliverance in sight. One can no longer depend on politics in America. The reliance of Congress members on donations from the rich has become too great. Nor will there be any revolutionary storming of the Bastille in America. Popular anger may boil over, but the elites have succeeded in both controlling the masses and channeling their passions. Take the Tea Party, which has enjoyed godfather-like bankrolling from brothers and billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch and found a mouthpiece in Rupert Murdoch’s populist, hatred-stirring Fox News.

One never could depend on politics in American (unless they were wealthy). The difference today is that this has become very transparent to nearly everyone.

From a European perspective, it all looks very strange: it’s a different political culture. There are other rules at play, different standards. More and more we view America with the clear notion that we are different.

Still, America’s fate should serve as a warning: We must protect our political culture, our institutions and our state. The success of Thilo Sarrazin, with his anti-Muslim message, shows that even Germany isn’t free of the kind of cultural coldness that can eventually ossify the vital functions of the political system. Our society has already made significant and deplorable steps on the path towards growing inequality and de-democratization.

Nevertheless, at least one good opportunity springs from America’s fate: The further the United States distances itself from us, the more we will (have to) think for ourselves, as Europeans. The West? That’s us.

These last few paragraphs could be read as: “The European ruling elite now thinks of the American ruling elite as unstable and dangerous, a threat to their own wealth and power.”