By Steve Clark
The catastrophe in Japan now overshadows the crisis in Libya which came in the wake of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, both unresolved and unsettled. These are just the current, momentary calamities in a world skating on the edge of socioecological collapse and a threatening dark age.
What about oil prices breaking the $100 a barrel threshold? Or the tottering financial houses in Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain? Last summer, the BP explosion and oil spill threatened the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. A few months earlier, the earthquake in Haiti caused massive devastation that remains tragically unaddressed.
As much as these events display the world’s incapacity to address its crisis, so too do countless thousands of steady, on-going situations such as the global food shortage, the AIDS crisis, the scourge of women’s deaths in childbirth, the war in Afghanistan, the genocide in Darfur, the…
As a concentrated example, the catastrophe in Japan is instructive. Directly caused by a natural disaster (the huge earthquake and resulting tsunami), the catastrophe was aggravated by its location in a highly populated and technologically developed region. The lucky ones, tens of thousands of people, were instantly impoverished while thousands of unlucky others were suddenly killed. In this highly developed country, refugee operations will go one for years.
And that doesn’t yet account for the possible meltdown of two nuclear reactors, both of which are already spewing harmful radiation but could get far worse. The worst case scenarios are devastating for Japan and possibly disastrous for Canada and the U.S. on the next landmass eastward in the path of prevailing winds.
Whatever the scale of the nuclear disaster, Japan, among the world’s five largest economies (depending on how you measure), will now be mired in relief and rebuilding which will take years, even decades to succeed, if indeed it can succeed. For a decade the country has endured a stagnant economy and declining standard of living. From where will the capital come to invest in the future?
Perhaps, like Haiti, northern Japan will be left alone to endure its wounds. Like the Pakistani victims of last summer’s monsoon floods, northern Japanese will be left to their own devices.
Or not. The resiliency of the Japanese and their government is well-known. As a people, they are known to stick together. And, as a nation, they are still among the world’s richest. Perhaps, in this devastating catastrophe they will find the means to dig themselves out.
If so, they will be the exception to the rule, the rule being, once on the downslide, reversing the slide is next to impossible.
Americans, despite our faith in our exceptionalism, would do well to grasp this reality. Well, perhaps, in Wisconsin last month we did. Finally, we stood up and said enough is enough. We did something. We fought for ourselves because the corporations and financial elites aren’t doing it for us. Indeed, they are scouring the land, scraping off whatever they can in their own desperate effort to fortify against the onslaught of the world’s crisis. In Wisconsin, however, when they came for the public worker unions, they finally bumped up against a structure with some resources to fight back.
So, here the world and we American progressives now stand. The mounting global crisis presses in from all sides and in all kinds of ways. The corporate, financial and energy elite are hoarding wealth, speculating on the ebb and flow of the crisis and avoiding any responsibility for the general situation. Indeed, they are consolidating their hold on the U.S. government, refusing it the initiative and financial capacity to be proactive while they mount an escalating assault on the savings and earnings of American workers.
Desperate, we drew a line in Wisconsin, though we still lost that battle. But can we win the war? Can we force accountability on the big banks and energy corporations? Can we force them to fund systemic, worldwide problem-solving along the local-global nexus? Can we empower civil society and the global grassroots in time to save our world and prevent the next dark age?
With few exceptions, today’s problems are global ones, manifest, of course, in local circumstances. Their solutions require a sustained worldwide response. We need a funding stream (a funding torrent!) for systemic problem-solving organized by civil society and implemented at the global grassroots. The wealth of global commerce must be taxed, not to off-set the deficits of western treasuries, but to invest in real crisis management along the local-global nexus. It is the global banking system’s duty to collect these funds through a fee on every electronic commercial transaction. Those are the funds that can save our world.
But before the banks will do that, the world’s people must first mobilize a global consciousness movement to press this demand. Here in the U.S., we must inject this demand into American politics. We Americans drew the line in Wisconsin, but defense is not enough. Like a tsunami, corporate interests are rolling over us. We need to sharpen our demand and astutely direct the counter attack.
