It’s a conundrum when what gives you life, kills you, like poisoned breast-milk. As a culture, we nurse at a toxic breast on this cusp of the world’s warmest ever decade, when unregulated atmospheric carbon is raising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, melting glaciers, causing catastrophic droughts, hurricanes, floods and storms and aside from some worry and casting of blame, do nothing. Not once, in all the campaign chatter about “growing the economy” has a single candidate mentioned the connection between the millions of “jobs” they are promoting to win votes and the fact that many are directly harnessed to destruction of the global commons. Governor Romney speaks glowingly of the vast amounts of untapped energy “available” to America---coal, oil, nuclear, pipelines, etc. as if they were unalloyed gifts of a bountiful Creator who had never created shadows. As if they themselves were not the toxins coagulating the nourishment we are offered at the breast of the Planet.
The “12,000,000 jobs” that are bandied about as campaign slogans, make no mention of their contribution to carbon buildup or global warming or future environmental destruction; they make no cost of the shadow effects of damaged health, poisoned air, food, and water, as if either it is too inevitable to mention, or as if there is nothing to be done. It is as if the Individual and Collective will, locked in stuggle, are momentarily frozen like two Indian-wrestlers applying equal and opposite forces, creating a momentary stasis.
Except that they are not equal and opposite. The destructive capacity of Nature, the droughts, deaths, desertification, destruction by storm and fire, the social dislocations as millions flee flooding and search for fresh water are unquenchable, and yet, we paltry humans, struggle against this implacable fate and growing knowledge, like willful children insistent on getting our way; brooking no opposition or call to reasons, distracting ourselves with games and diversions even as the house is catching fire.
Millions of humans earn their livelihoods actively destroying the environment through the creation of plastics, the burning of toxins, oil, coal, clear-cutting; the manufacture and release of noxious chemicals---loosing slews of ‘apparently free’ carbon into the atmosphere, swaddling the earth in an insulating comforter, raising the temperature as certainly as the Sun melting hoar-frost in the mornings.
Not one candidate for President has seen fit to even mention the subject of Global warming in the season’s Election debates. The Koch Brothers, their political minions, and other science-deniers, who realize full well that their larders are stuffed only to the degree that more people buy and use these products, use their enormous power to remove regulations which might impede their use and protect the public from them. Yet because we are apparently immobilized by fear of even questioning the sanctity of the “job;” because we are apparently unable to even consider living with less indulgence and wealth---no one mutters a word of reproach or apparently alters their patterns of consumption.
Normally, when a Nation undertakes a vast collective action for its own survival; for instance World War II--- sacrifices are implicit. Everyone bought War Bonds, rationed Butter, Lard, Coffee, Sugar, tin, aluminum etc., to free resources for the common effort against Fascism. It was patriotic to sacrifice, and shameful not to. We face a currently daunting global threat to our existence today, and fighting it will require vast changes and sacrifices, and much rethinking of commonly held assumptions. One among them must be relationship of “the job” to participation in the National wealth.
Normally employment is pyramidal. Resources are “owned” ( a euphemism for historically expropriated) and become the raw materials which will be transformed by human labor into processes and products. The employer pays each employee something less than their time is actually worth and keeps the difference as part of his profits, directly benefitting from their uncompensated labor. Employees are humans with nothing to sell but their labor, and this historical inequity is currently sanctified as “job-creating” and offers men and women, with no other resources, the ability to beg for employment and label their enforced indignity “dignity”. No one ew apparently ever question how it came to be and why it continues to be permitted that the Common wealth can be expropriated by some and used as the basis by which they can then exploit others, and how, by making the off-loading of pollution and toxins "legal", the public itself is forced to bear the burden of that exploitation with no compensation. That’s the small point.
The fact that pursuit of these jobs may be killing not only the workers, but their employers, neighbors, and entire commons as well is never allowed into public discussion or calculations of social benefits. Short term strategies abound. Polluters have correctly strategized that in the near-term they can reap profits and escape before the consequences come marked as ‘overdue.’
Eventually there will be a day of reckoning, and to make substantial changes, America will be forced to grapple with the fundamental question of how we will parcel and distribute National wealth without the mechanism of “the job” as the regulatory mechanism. This will become true particularly when catastrophes force us to discontinue numerous industries which are contributing to our destruction. It was Richard Nixon who first proposed a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. I’m not sure what the problem was that he was trying to solve, but we may be overdue for reconsidering that option.
The millions of souls mining coal, uranium, manufacturing plastics and chemicals et al are not going lay down and sacrifice themselves like Al Capp’s “shmoos” who willingly turned themselves into milk and butter for the hungry. If we as a Nation need to end those industries, we have to be able to offer those workers some share of the national wealth to support them while we overhaul the culture. We have to be able to prevent the banks and mortgage holders from exploiting fixed debts if their incomes must necessarily fall, so they do not lose their homes. We need to win them as allies and actively prepare for a new future together. The only way we can do that is by protecting their livelihoods- in effect, paying them not to work. From this perspective the social communes and experiments of the 1960’s made imminent good sense.Thinking our way through not only the mechanisms to do this, but the social mores and adjustments required, though incredibly complicated, will be far less complicated than mass degradation and extinction.I don’t know how Capitalism will eventually deal with this collision, but I can see it coming and it will force changes in the simplistic Free-Market models currently afflicting us.
A similar model needs to be employed with environmental issues. When the Nation decides to stop clear-cutting trees, it is unfair to ask the loggers and mill-hands to unilaterally bear the costs of that decision. It is National wealth, a National expense, and the Nation must willingly share it. We could put those same souls back to work clearing creeks, replanting trees, building Salmon runs, and repairing centuries of extractive forest practices; rebuilding the Salmon and fishing industries with Government subsidized jobs. Who would pay for that? Not the private sector certainly. Their mandate is individual---to increase shareholder wealth. Only the Government has an interest in the collective well-being. We need to begin wrestling with the contradictions and conundrums of this dynamic, because, as the prophetic Mr. Dylan reminds us, “We’re “doing 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street.”