This phrase was the punchline to Ronald Reagan's cruel joke about the nine most dangerous words in the English language. Well, maybe it's getting to the point that those words can be used in a positive way. Paul Waldman, in an online article at The American Prospect, writes:
As hard as it may be for many progressives to accept it, scarred as they are by years of GOP abuse and the tepid, apologetic stance of their own allies, the time has finally come for them to defend, without reservation, the idea of a vigorous, engaged government. They can finally say, without fear of disastrous political consequences, that sometimes government is not the problem, it's the solution.
On the other hand, Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune, writing in the New York Times op-ed page on August 6, seems to want us to not think about solutions:
Economic power lies with central bankers, global corporations and high-rolling masters of the universe. Military power is constrained by mutually assured destruction and the 24-hour news cycle. What remains are image, perception and identity.
That is, just watch the political fun and games, and strutting, and symbolism; don't worry about global warming, the end of cheap oil, mass extinction, the dying oceans, rivers, and lakes, and the deforested landscapes. The "central bankers, global corporations and high-rolling masters of the universe" will be sure to keep business-as-usual going, and there's nothing we can do about it.
In contrast, in the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly, James Galbraith argued that government must be rebuilt as a force for good. In the conclusion of a review of books by Benjamin Barber and Bill McKibben, he wrote:
Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush's FEMA, is no one's idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government -- the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics -- has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.
Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards -- against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture -- will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel, and the long food production chains McKibben warns against will, indeed, have to be shortened. At the same time, a new project of physical, technological, and urban social engineering will have to get under way.
(Thanks to Colin Wright for the Waldman and Galbraith references.)
Here at Gristmill, Sean Casten has written about the "regulatory capture" that Galbraith mentions, and Ron Steenblik has been warning of the "predation" of massive subsidies that lead us to a less sustainable society, such as subsidies for corn ethanol. For both of those phenomena, the problem is that the "masters of the universe" have gotten control of the governmental machinery and taken it away from the rightful decision-makers, the citizens of the country.
So why are no major environmental or progressive groups advocating sweeping visions or comprehensive programs for moving our society to a more sustainable path? Matt Miller, writing on August 5, 2007 in The Financial Times, says that:
Over three decades, America's conservative movement has so deftly shifted the boundaries of debate to the right that even modest adjustments to the market system can be cast as the second coming of Marx without anyone blushing.
The public is not as scared as people think, because, according to polling, they favor public investment to solve our environmental problems. With the bridge collapse in Minneapolis and extreme weather sweeping the world, putting more strain on infrastructure, I think we are seeing the political pendulum swing away from Reagan's interpretation of his punchline.
Comments
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GreenEngineer Posted 10:20 am
08 Aug 2007
My opinion:
The reason that we have a corrupt federal government is that we have little citizen engagement.
The reason we have little citizen engagement(aside from the state of perpetual overwork and distraction that characterizes the modern life) is that the federal government is too big, too abstract, and too obtuse for the average person to get engaged with. In fact, as far as I can tell, much the same problem exists (to a lesser degree) at the state level. The only place that I have seen the level of citizen engagement required to effectively guard against corruption is at the local level.
The only solution that I see is to take as much power as possible away from the feds and the states, and restore that power to the level of local governance. Of course, this would make it even more complicated to impose sensible environmental policy, because environmental issues cross political boundaries. But it's the only way that I can see to restore citizen engagement in the political process: make politics happen on a level where the average citizen can see it, experience it, be involved in it, and influence it.
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:15 am
08 Aug 2007
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Colin Wright Posted 4:42 pm
08 Aug 2007
Of course, unlike Cohen, Dewey was a passionate believer in democracy.
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Colin Wright Posted 5:12 pm
11 Aug 2007
The climate collapse--which may bring the flooding of New York, Boston, London, Calcutta, and Shanghai--will be a calamity next to which the end of the Soviet Union will seem very small. Long industrial chains, for jet aircraft, automobiles, telecommunications, electricity, and much else, will crumble, as they did in the USSR and Yugoslavia, particularly if new interior boundaries form and countries break up. And interior boundaries will form, as those on the high ground seek to defend it. The demographic effects will be similarly dire: Older, urban males (like me) with no survival skills will die. Rural New England will turn into a deforested exurban slum.
Piecemeal, band-aid solutions and tinkering with markets will no longer suffice. We need to open people's eyes to what we are facing. It's not because of some love of Big Government that some of us are proposing radical solutions.
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Colin Wright Posted 5:25 pm
11 Aug 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:24 am
12 Aug 2007
"Older, urban males (like me) with no survival skills will die."
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Colin Wright Posted 6:14 am
12 Aug 2007
Yeah, the Head for the Hills rhetoric does seem a little over the top, something we'd expect from Kunstler, and not an academic (with an even more famous father).
But you probably saw this map of Florida under water in Hansen's recent piece in New Scientist. You'll stop laughing when the cold waters of Puget Sound start lapping around your ankles! You do live on higher ground, don't you?
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sunflower Posted 7:51 am
12 Aug 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:32 pm
12 Aug 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jonathan M Feldman Posted 2:53 am
13 Aug 2007
Second, whether the market or government does a good or bad job depends on accountability structures. With respect to the government, voting power is more decentralized and distributed than stock ownership. As a result, the government should be associated with somewhat more accountability, even though elected officials can be bought off.
Third, if ownership were more distributed, then corporations might better serve environmental concerns, particularly if owners were potential victims of environmental "externalities," e.g. pollution. Ownership and not markets might be the problem, but markets themselves have not solved the global warming problem.
Fourth, if the government or markets fail, we need to explore how they can succeed better. Social scientists rarely ask such questions, because then they would have to worry about how organizations are designed, alternatives in design, and this kind of stuff is rarely taught well if at all. Our politicians and many academics know nothing about it.
In any case, I agree with Rynn.
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Jonathan M Feldman Posted 6:21 am
13 Aug 2007
When we say "markets work fine" is this what we mean?
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Jonathan M Feldman Posted 8:21 am
14 Aug 2007
-- Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
There is a basic problem in the contemporary discussions of rights. A basic principle in democracy has been taken over by technocratic policy think, namely the concept of "emissions rights." This legal innovation has begun to concept the most basic ideas of American society namely the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This idea of the right to life from the U.S. Declaration of Independence includes the right to maintain one's life which is being violated by polluters.
When polluters are given the "right to pollute" they are potentially violating the "right to life." Thus, emissions "rights" have are not exclusively a question of markets, but a question of politics as well. Citizens in Western Europe and increasingly the developing world recognize that the U.S. uses far more energy than its share of the world population and also disproportionately contributes to global warming and other environmental ills. Therefore, treating the right to emissions and market solutions as some kind of "internal" U.S. debate misses the larger problem which is whether the "right to pollute" that is traded within the U.S. violates the rights not only of U.S. citizens, but citizens elsewhere.
This does not mean that government is always more efficient or productive than markets. The Soviet case, however, pointed to the limits of a centralized state which we also have in the Pentagon as Jon Rynn and others have noted. Rather, independently of the efficiency of markets, if companies are more efficient or productive by violating my or your rights to life free from health reducing pollution, then efficiencies are irrelevant.
The increasingly technocratic education that some get in policy schools, economics departments, and engineering programs probably explains why some people can go on about "rights" and assume that it only refers to the "right" to pollute.
Note: Try re-reading or reading the Declaration of Independence.
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