from tomdispatch...
Long-time literary agent Richard Kahlenberg wrote
me that Chick [Ernest Callenbach] had left a final document on his computer, something he
had been preparing in the months before he knew he would die, and asked
if TomDispatch would run it. Indeed, we would. It’s not often that
you hear words almost literally from beyond the grave -- and eloquent
ones at that, calling on all Ecotopians, converted or prospective, to
consider the dark times ahead.
We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in
the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying
carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly
extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our
former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its
profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must
seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national
consequences -- which means moving capital and resources abroad,
wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked,
“Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his
meaning has come clear.
The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge,
technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise:
highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through
“productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from
domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that
the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the
economy can still produce (or import).
Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.”
When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut
back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to
shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless,
and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico,
where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of
desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.
Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual
future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such
societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military
control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all
kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its
worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative
equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain
fairly democratic.
The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule
unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third
World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated,
ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social
Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the
elderly.
As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent --
petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and
spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important
government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed
to invent outrageous events.
We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet.
Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable
ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the
overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.
very articulate, very eloquent and very disturbing... Labels: capitalism, ecological disaster, elites, empire in decline, Ernest Callenbach, financial services industry, Karl Marx, looters, plutocracy, super-rich, third world, TomDispatch
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