[Peace-discuss] The Rich Stand Accused

[Morton K. Brussel]

Apocalypse soon? This is in line with other articles that seem to be  
appearing more frequently.


 From http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807G.shtml


     The Rich Stand Accused
     By Louis-Gilles Francoeur
     Le Devoir

     Saturday 06 January and Sunday 07 January 2007

Capitalism is the source of social and environmental crises.
     What do global warming, pollution of the atmosphere, streams,  
rivers and oceans, the exhaustion of natural resources, the  
accelerated extinctions of species, deforestation, the liberation of  
GMO into the environment, and - coming soon - the infinitely small  
and practically undetectable pollution of nano-materials have in  
common? Capitalism and the oligarchy that profits from it, as first  
cause, answers Hervé Kempf in a bombshell book published in Paris by  
éditions du Seuil.

     A journalist who specializes in the environment for Le Monde,  
Hervé Kempf has taken his work to the four corners of the planet and  
frequented - as is the privilege of an environmental chronicler - the  
cream of the scientific community, "people who tend to be rather calm  
and steady." Yet, from these contacts and the issues patiently  
compiled for the newspaper where he works, he retains two  
observations, he writes at the outset of Comment les riches  
détruisent la planète [How the Rich Destroy the Planet], which will  
be available in Québec February 6th.

     First, he explained in a telephone interview yesterday, the  
planet's ecological situation is worsening at a rate that neutralizes  
all the efforts of millions of citizens and ecological militants, to  
the point that the planet is in danger of crossing a threshold of  
irreversibility "within the next 10 years," he believes, on the basis  
of the speed at which negative outcomes are piling up.

     The second observation of this attempt to provide a veritably  
comprehensive explanation of the environmental crisis is that "the  
social system that presently governs human society - capitalism -  
blindly, doggedly rejects the changes necessary if we want to  
preserve the dignity and promise of human existence."

     In the same way that the different aspects of the global  
environmental crisis react with more and more synergy - warming  
accelerates the rate of species extinction, as use of fossil fuel  
gives rise to pollution, and consumption to the exhaustion of  
resources - the planetary ecological and social crises are two  
mutually bound-up facets of the same problem.

     "We cannot understand the simultaneity of the ecological and  
social crises if we do not analyze them as two facets of the same  
disaster. This disaster derives from a system piloted by a dominant  
social stratum that today has no drive but greed, no ideal but  
conservatism, no dream but technology. This predatory oligarchy is  
the principal agent of the global crisis," writes Kempf. "The present  
form of capitalism," he adds in an interview, "has lost its former  
historic ends, that is to say the creation of wealth and innovation,  
because it has become a financial capitalism, disparaged even by  
capitalist economists. This capitalism, which destroys jobs by  
rationalizations, new technologies and globalizations, overall and  
everywhere increases the disparities between rich and poor within  
each country and between different countries," the journalist observes.

     This oligarchy he targets is not satisfied with blindly  
consuming and wasting the planet's material resources with its big  
cars, its airplane trips, its unbridled consumption of living  
products, its uselessly vast houses, its unrestrained energy wastage.  
It has also, adds Hervé Kempf, spawned a model of hyper-consumption  
that the lower and especially the middle classes now attempt to  
imitate, just as developing countries try to imitate Western  
countries - even though, whether instinctively or rationally,  
everyone clearly knows that "this ideology of waste" and its drain on  
planetary resources will inevitably come to an abrupt end.

     This course places before the human species the unprecedented  
fact that it has reached or soon will reach the planet's limits,  
which could, through feedback effects, threaten the species' own  
existence. But this course is all the more difficult to arrest, Hervé  
Kempf deems, because it depends on a semi-authoritarian regime ever  
more institutionalized at the planetary level. It even depends, he  
says, on crises like that of September 11 in order to appreciably  
reduce those human rights that had been acquired through elevated  
struggle and to neutralize, even cause to disappear, those democratic  
mechanisms that allow free public debate on the choice of plans, the  
social choices that the workings of the economy repeatedly raise.

     Hervé Kempf rejects all accusations of attempting to take the  
planetary ecological debate from green to red.

     "I am no Marxist," he says, "and have never been, because that  
ideology does not respect human rights. But the Marxists do not have  
a monopoly over the social debate and we cannot, all the same, close  
our eyes to the documented, measured phenomena right in front of us.  
I note the existence of two crises, one ecological, the other social.  
And I observe that they act in synergy. I observe that a minority of  
people benefit from them. And I draw conclusions from these  
observations."

     But he also observes that a large part of the European Left has  
not seen the depth of the links between the two problems, just as  
many ecologists - who restrict themselves to an environmental  
approach - miss half the problem, if not its first cause.

     "If you want to be an ecologist," he writes, condemningly, "you  
have to stop being half-witted," for "the social given remains  
ecology's blind spot" as long as no one dares analyze it from the  
angle of power, domination and wealth relationships.

     "We must," he writes, "get past this hiatus. Understand that the  
ecological crisis and social crisis are two facets of the same  
disaster. And that this disaster is set in motion by a system of  
power that has no other end than the maintenance of the ruling  
classes' privileges."

     Although he does not address the impact of unchecked demography  
on the decline of the planet's "biological services" in his essay,  
Hervé Kempf immediately acknowledges that this factor certainly has  
an impact that is greater overall than any hyper-consumption by this  
oligarchy, composed of several hundred thousand millionaires and  
billionaires who control the bulk of income and of financial capital.  
However, he explains, it's this oligarchy that creates an  
unsustainable model for the planet, the indirect impact of which on  
other social groups exceeds its direct consumption. "And," he says  
dryly, "not all humans have the same impact on the planet at birth: a  
Westerner carries more weight in the planet's fate than a baby from  
Niger or from India."

     It's to put an end to this ostentatious consumption that he  
advocates radical control of wealth through "a ceiling on maximum  
salaries and on the accumulation of wealth," a sort of matching piece  
for the minimum wage, but on the upper side.

     "Everyone," Kempf comments, "knows that China will never be able  
to reach a level of consumption per inhabitant comparable to that of  
the Americans, with two cars per family, three televisions, four  
computers and cell phones, a house three times too big for its  
inhabitants, which generates energy consumption that would be  
sufficient to the needs of ten, even twenty people on other  
continents." The environmental chronicler proposes that a reduction  
of its consumption be imposed on this oligarchy that has globalized  
poverty, so that it no longer feeds this unsustainable dream, which  
numbs the critical faculties of the entire planet to the point that  
it closes its eyes to the wall into which it is careening full speed  
ahead.

     And the reporter, known for his rigor and level-headedness,  
nevertheless concludes: "It is still necessary for ecological  
concerns to be based on a radical political analysis of present  
relationships of domination. We will not be able to reduce global  
material consumption if the powerful are not brought down and if  
inequality is not combated. To the ecological principle so useful at  
the dawning of awareness - "Think globally, act locally" - we must  
add the principle that the present situation imposes: "Consume less,  
share better."

     Ecologists, he adds, have not often conducted an inquiry into  
the "ecological misery" that parks the poor next to industrial  
neighborhoods, polluted and at risk, next to highways or noisy  
activities, in the most insalubrious houses and in sectors generally  
the least well-served by public services, including public  
transportation. It is wrong, he says, to act as though the economic  
system must grow more to bring these people out of poverty or to  
allow more poor people to attain greater wealth. The economic system  
works in the other direction, by monopolizing wealth and power at the  
expense of those who have the least, and of the middle classes that  
dream - ever more vainly - of hoisting themselves into the cocoon of  
the present financial oligarchy, Kempf maintains.

     That's why, he says, we must "bring down the rich" rather than  
pull up the poor, in order to begin to respect the thresholds of  
irreversible deterioration of the planet's resources.

     He takes aim, moreover, at the concept of sustainable  
development and the alibi it now constitutes for governments and  
companies that use it to justify other drains on resources in the  
name of this new rationale that is supposedly harmless for the  
planet. Sustainable development, he writes, has become "a semantic  
weapon to remove the dirty word, 'ecology.' Moreover, is there any  
need to still develop France, Germany, or the United States? The  
concept has meaning, he concluded in an interview yesterday, but only  
in developing countries, because it can help them to avoid a  
development as brutal and lawless as the one we have effected in the  
West. But in the West, he says, the first of our environmental  
responsibilities "consists of reducing our consumption of material  
goods" to attain a level of well-being based rather on values,  
knowledge, in sum on immaterial, but nonetheless very real, riches.

     --------

     More information about H. Kempf's work is available at  
www.reporterre.net.
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