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There’s no shortage of political blather in this year’s mid-term
election campaigns, but most of us yearn for substantive discussion of
the serious problems we face. What should the politicians be
discussing? The University of Texas at Austin asked faculty members
who teach about politics “to analyze, examine and provide their
perspectives” on key political issues for the university’s web site,
with new essays posted each weekday throughout the campaign season. http://www.utexas.edu/know/2010/10/04/mid_term_elections/

Below are my contributions, three short essays that raise critical
questions about economics, empire, and energy that are routinely
ignored by most politicians.

———————–

Economics: Doing business as if people mattered

by Robert Jensen

When politicians talk economics these days, they argue a lot about
the budget deficit. That’s crucial to our economic future, but in the
contemporary workplace there’s an equally threatening problem — the
democracy deficit.

In an economy dominated by corporations, most people spend their
work lives in hierarchical settings in which they have no chance to
participate in the decisions that most affect their lives. The typical
business structure is, in fact, authoritarian — owners and managers
give orders, and workers follow them. Those in charge would like us to
believe that’s the only way to organize an economy, but the cooperative
movement has a different vision.

Cooperative businesses that are owned and operated by workers offer
an exciting alternative to the top-down organization of most
businesses. In a time of crisis, when we desperately need new ways of
thinking about how to organize our economic activity, cooperatives
deserve more attention.

First, the many successful cooperatives remind us that we ordinary
people are quite capable of running our own lives. While we endorse
democracy in the political arena, many assume it’s impossible at work.
Cooperatives prove that wrong, not only by producing goods and services
but by enriching the lives of the workers through a commitment to
shared decision-making and responsibility.

Second, cooperatives think not only about profits but about the
health of the community and natural world; they’re more socially and
ecologically responsible. This is reflected in cooperatives’ concern for
the “triple bottom line” — not only profits, but people and the
planet.

The U.S. government’s response to the financial meltdown has
included some disastrous decisions (bailing out banks to protect
wealthy shareholders instead of nationalizing banks to protect ordinary
people) and some policies that have helped but are inadequate (the
stimulus program). But the underlying problem is that policymakers
assume that there is no alternative to a corporate-dominated system,
leading to “solutions” that leave us stuck with failed
business-as-usual approaches.

It’s crazy to trust in economic structures that have brought us to
brink of economic collapse. But even in more “prosperous” times, modern
corporations undermine democracy, weaken real community, and degrade
the ecosystem. New thinking is urgently needed. Politicians who talk
about an “ownership society” typically promote individual ownership of a
tiny sliver of an economy still dominated by authoritarian corporate
giants. An ownership society defined by cooperative institutions would
be a game-changer.

None of this is hypothetical — there are hundreds of flourishing
cooperative businesses in the United States. The United States
Federation of Worker Cooperatives, http://www.usworker.coop/,
provides excellent information and inspiring stories. In Austin, a
cooperative-incubator group, Third Coast Workers for Cooperation, http://thirdcoastworkers.coop/, offers training and support for people interested in creating democratic workplaces.

Putting our faith in institutions that have become too big to fail
has failed. Institutions that are too greedy to defend can’t be
defended. Cooperative businesses aren’t a magical solution to the
critical economic problems we face, but a national economic policy that
used fiscal and tax policies to support cooperatives would be an
important step on a different path.

———————–

Empire: Affluence, violence, and U.S. foreign policy

by Robert Jensen

The United States is the most affluent nation in the history of the world.

The United States has the largest military in the history of the world.

Might those two facts be connected? Might that question be relevant in foreign policy debates?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for such discussion in the campaigns;
conventional political wisdom says Americans won’t reduce consumption
and politicians can’t challenge the military-industrial complex. Though
not everyone shares in that material wealth, the U.S. public seems
addicted to affluence or its promise, and discussions of the role of
the military are clouded by national mythology about our alleged role
as the world’s defender of freedom. Business elites who profit
handsomely from this arrangement, and fund election campaigns, are
quite happy.

There’s one word that sums this up: empire. Any meaningful
discussion of U.S. foreign policy has to start with the recognition
that we are an imperial society. We consume more than our fair share of
the world’s resources, made possible by global economic dominance
backed by our guns.

Today the United States spends as much on the work of war as the
rest of the world combined, and we are the planet’s largest arms dealer.
Professor Catherine Lutz of the Watson Institute for International
Studies at Brown University reports in her book

The Bases of Empire
that we maintain 909 military facilities in 46 countries and overseas
U.S. territories, and we have more than 190,000 troops and 115,000
civilians working at those sites. That’s in addition to U.S. bases,
military personnel, and contractors occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.

The military is there to project power, not promote peace. We
regularly use these destructive forces, especially in the Middle East,
home to the largest and most accessible energy reserves. Flimsy cover
stories about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, or
self-indulgent tales about U.S. benevolence toward the people of the
region, cannot obscure the reality of empire. The invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq were unlawful, in direct violation of
international law and the U.S. Constitution, but such details are
irrelevant to empires.

Terrorism is real, of course, as are weapons of mass destruction.
Law enforcement, diplomacy, and limited uses of military force need to
be vigorously pursued through appropriate regional and international
organizations to lessen the threats. Most of the world supports such
reasonable and rational measures.

In its global policy — especially in the Middle East — U.S.
policymakers prefer force, not only though invasion but also by backing
the most repressive Arab regimes in those regions and unconditional
support for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. In the short
term, this cynical and brutal strategy has given the United States
considerable influence over the flow of oil and oil profits.

But these policies, which have never been morally acceptable, also
aren’t sustainable. Just as the age of affluence is coming to a close,
so is the age of U.S. domination of the world.

That need not be bad news, if we can collectively tell the truth
about our own greed and violence, and begin to shape a new vision of the
good life and a new strategy for living as one nation in the world,
not the nation on top of the world.

———————–

Energy: Recognizing how much isn’t there

by Robert Jensen

Will America’s energy crisis be solved by more aggressive pursuit of
fossil fuels or by more vigorous development of renewables?

In this campaign season, there are politicians on all sides. Chants
of “drill, baby, drill” ring out, while others sing the praises of wind
and solar, and some argue we must try everything.

Unfortunately, politicians don’t seem willing to face a more
difficult reality: There is no solution, if by “solution” we mean
producing enough energy to maintain our current levels of consumption
indefinitely.

To deal with the energy crisis we must deal with a consumption
crisis, but politicians are reluctant to run a campaign based on a call
for “less” — the American Dream, after all, is always “more.” But,
whether the public and politicians like it or not, our future is about
learning to live with less, starting with a lot less energy.

In the United States, we have been living with the abundance
produced by an industrial economy, all made possible by the concentrated
energy of fossil fuels. We tell ourselves this is the product of our
hard work, but our life of plenty was made possible by the incredible
energy stored in coal, oil, and natural gas. How long can that
continue?

It’s true that there’s a lot of coal in the ground, but burning all
that coal means an acceleration of global warming and climate
disruption. Easily accessible reserves of oil and gas are quickly being
exhausted, and while geologists can’t tell us for sure when the wells
will run dry, we should be thinking in decades, not centuries.

High-tech schemes for extracting oil from tar sands or “fracking” —
hydraulic fracturing, a process of injecting water and chemicals deep
underground to force out pockets of gas — are so ecologically
destructive that they should be abandoned immediately. The same for
most deep-water drilling; the Gulf disaster of the past year is a
reminder that no matter how sophisticated the technology, we cannot
control these processes. Nuclear energy presents the same trade-offs,
magnified by our inability to dispose of the deadly waste safely.

There are more reasons to be positive about renewable energy
sources, and intensifying research funding for wind, solar, geothermal,
and biomass energy is the sensible move. But the reality to face there
also is one of limits: None of those technologies, alone or in
combination, will ever replace the energy stored in fossil fuels. The
belief that because we want that energy we will create ways to produce
it is the most naïve technological fundamentalism.

The most important step in dealing with our energy crisis is to
realize just how much isn’t there. Either approach — believing that we
can drill our way or invent our way out of the predicament — is
magical thinking. Instead of fantasies of endless abundance, we have to
recognize that a radical shift in the way our lives are arranged is
necessary for survival. The most obvious of these arrangements we need
to change is our car-based culture, but it doesn’t stop there. If there
is to be a livable future, we need to commit in the present to major
changes in our entire infrastructure.

The solution to the energy crisis can be stated simply: We must move
around less and consume less. That means the solution is not only
about where we get our energy, but how we define ourselves.

———————–

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas
at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource
Center in Austin. He is the author of

All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009);

Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007);

The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005);

Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and

Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
(Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film
“Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” which
chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist.
Information about the film, distributed by the Media Education
Foundation, and an extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff
are online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html