BioDiverseCity Land Co-op

Here’s some questions to take into the upcoming Roundtables and other meetings on sustainability. Some of these are posed by this story on Colorado Springs’ severe budget cutting. Budget cutting this severe would most likely impact new programs such as sustainability planning first, so these questions aren’t merely hypotheticals.

Suddenly, the people who have been invisible all this time–the working poor–are made visible by virtue of their diminishing tax payments. Why isn’t the money flowing in to the public coffers so quickly any more?

Something is clearly missing. Missing not only from tax revenue totals, but from the whole “sustainability” movement, I would boldly assert. And I wonder, am I the only one noticing what’s clearly missing?

If you go and review your Natural Step conditions for a sustainable society–and Natural Step is said to be the gold standard–you’ll find this system condition, #4:

“people are not subject to conditions that systemically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.”

Yet, with this deep recession steadily eroding the living standards of working class people everywhere, it’s clear that people most assuredly ARE being subject to conditions systematically undermining our capacity to meet our needs.

You don’t hear much mention of this deepening crash of living standards of working people in the torrent of good news about “sustainability”–locally, nationally or globally for that matter. The prospect for millions upon millions of Americans returning to some sort of right livelihood in which they would like to be engaged is steadily slipping away from millions of us, but the literature is silent on this.

I’d number those millions of us now marginalized to a clearly unsustainable mode of life in the neighborhood of 60 million. Maybe add ten million more to that, I don’t have exact numbers, just a sense of what’s going on. I call this group of us the OtherAmerica: working poor, people without health coverage, children, many youth under 25.

Doesn’t some discussion of what’s happening over here in the OtherAmerica belong in Rountables, seminars, webinars, lectures, and planning meetings on “sustainability?” Who will raise these questions?

This capitalist system no longer has a need for OtherAmerica, neither as producers-workers, nor as consumers. They’re trying to stage-manage this “recovery” with only 80% of the population needing to participate to make it credible. For us in the working poor, sustainability is further away than it was a decade ago, when the esoteric sustainability discussions began among the professional class in academia, in urban design firms, in select sub-committees in city and county governments, and in big non-profit NGO think tanks.

Neither neoliberal nor conservative politicians have any plan to restore to us any measure of dignity, but instead I believe we’re in for a long period of a kind of warehousing, like the Prawns in District 9, a systematic undermining of our capacity to meet our needs. I dread to learn what sort of fate they have planned for us, but I’m sure it will be dreadful.

Neither the Administration’s neoliberal friends-of-bankers, nor the overtly fascist Tea Partiers, have the welfare and well-being of working-class Americans (or workers anywhere) at heart. In fact, during deep recessions, working poor people become a big target market for overt fascists masquerading as right-wing “populists.” You already see an upwelling of this tendency in full effect in the USA, in Europe, and globally.

Yet in this kind of environment, we’re being told by the professional classes that we’re moving full speed ahead toward “sustainability.” A kind of American-exceptionalism Natural Step where only the first three conditions matter. Will the meeting of those conditions be accomplished by a Green Technocracy, guided and led by the leaders of the local plutocracy, whoever these may be in each locality? William Domhoff explained the methodology needed to get at who your local plutocracy may be, in his classic of sociology, Who Rules America?

One important point seems to have been missed, in this headlong rush into a technocratic sustainable geekdom filled with LEED buildings and renewable gadgets all smart-gridded together into a seamless wonderland: The corporations are still behaving as corporations. That is, they are working full-time to slow down or prevent any meaningful progress toward real “sustainability.” Yes, despite the fact that National Public Radio now gladly advertises Monsanto’s commitment to “sustainble agriculture,” in fact, Monsanto is still part of the problem, the crisis of sustainability, not part of the solution.

“Corporations” are not just some kind of hard-working communities of dedicated people fulfilling a mission statement to the benefit of society. They’re a legal creation of the state, aimed at maintaining the power status of their largest shareholder-owners, the wealthiest members of society, affectionately known to Marxists as “the ruling class.” A class understanding of corporations and their peculiar power over us is missing from the sustainability literature.

Threats/Obstacles to Sustainability

As people settle in to the rountables, planning meetings, seminars, and sub-committee meetings, I would urge folks to keep these questions in mind:

Has the mortgage crisis really been solved? How could that be, when Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, quasi-public corporations, now carry the vast majority of mortgages as assets on their balance sheets as banks are bailing on holding them?

How much further will house prices continue to fall, in the face of steady, ongoing erosion of the employment base in this nation? If house prices do continue falling, perhaps as much as 30-40% as the editors of The Automatic Earth blog have suggested, how can we possibly avert an even deeper mortgage crisis?

What is to be done about the steady erosion of real wages–actual purchasing power–of increasingly large segments of the working class who remain employed? Won’t this erode the tax base for all levels of government, whether township, village, city, county, state or federal?

In our local food groups, why is the expression “cheap food isn’t good; good food isn’t cheap” still in use? What does this even say to working poor families whose spending habits have to be “cheap” out of necessity? What can be done to make fresh, healthy, organic food affordable to working poor people?

Why are things being done FOR the working poor–food pantry distributions and the like–rather than BY the working poor, on their own behalf? Why is there so little mutual aid, self-help, co-operative self-organization by the workers for the workers?

Are the neoliberal governors of troubled states such as Wisconsin’s Gov. Doyle really being honest about the depth of the budget crises that still lie ahead? If the bulk of the state budget crises are still on the future segment of the timeline, what will this do to the remainder of the economy? Until now, state employees and to some extent, municipal and county employees, could be counted on as stably employed citizens who could drive a consumer economy, since production stopped being “our thing” in the USA. What will happen to these top-tier workers and their way of life?

“Green jobs” are expected to replace only about 25% of the massive losses in employment since 12/07. What about the rest?

What impact will the peak of global oil production have upon a struggling economy barely able to stave off even worse losses in employment? Why have sustainability groups completely stopped talking about the question of peak oil?

Are we supposed to believe that the problem has gone away, that the predictions were all wrong of peak oil production having already occurred 2005-2006 (Laherre, Simmons, Pickens, Heinberg); to occur in 2010 (Petrobras); to occur in 2012 (Colin Campbell’s original estimate) or even, to occur in 2030 as the ever-optimistic IEA says?

Why is climate change denial politically incorrect, while peak oil denial is the new coolness?

And, finally, when is this problem going to be addressed in the sustainability movement: Tens of millions of us in the USA being “subject to conditions that systemically undermine our capacity to meet their needs.”

At the upcoming meeting, don’t put any your laptop or any heavy objects on that end of the table with the missing leg ,the 4th system condition. And be aware: the building where the meeting is being held is a four-pillar edifice, one pillar missing.

Bobby G.
Central Wisc. USA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Co-operation, Economics, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, Uncategorized, globalization, subcultures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.