Bird that Sings

About a month ago, in the middle of May, our neighbor from the rental unit next door, got his PhD in Wildlife Biology from the prestigious local public university and left town to work for the Feds.

There was a job waiting him in the wilderness of the far north, but as he and his wife were loading up the van, he confided to my wife that the Feds had already let him know he wouldn’t be there long. As soon as he got to his isolated outpost, 500 miles from anywhere, they were going to turn him around and send him to Louisiana.

An earnest, circumspect, tightly wrapped young man not given to hyperbole, he had been having nightmares about the oil spill since it happened and was riven with the sense that it was more than chance sending him into the maelstrom.

It was “the worst environmental disaster in recorded history” he said, and he assured us–before the fact–that all the ostensible attempts of BP to stem the oil flow, from “top kill” on down, were longer than long shots: essentially PR stunts designed to allay the public horror.

The ecology of the Gulf Coast was doomed, he said, and when the loop current reversed in the middle of June, the oil would be making its way out of the Gulf: into the Gulf Stream and the world.

One month later, despite BP and the government’s attempts to calm the public, most of us understand in our hearts that we’ve reached a momentous point of no return in human and planetary history.

It’s not just the oil spill, it’s the melting polar ice caps, it’s the mysterious, scientifically inexplicable dead zones spreading through the oceans and the precipitously collapsing fish and invertebrate populations: seemingly discrete events all crescendoing together towards a terrifying dystopian climax.

For two centuries we’ve used and abused the resources of the natural world on an exponentially increasing scale, and now the natural world is dying.

Dramatic action is called for, yet as always the Obama Administration counsels political safety first.

The twenty billion-dollar BP Gulf restitution fund, proposed by the Administration and accepted–under duress–by BP is, on the face of it, a good step, but it won’t do f*** all to alter the planet’s trajectory towards ecological disaster.

BP is an enormously profitable company–with a thirteen billion-dollar profit last year and an over eighteen billion dollar profit the year before –and to leave it essentially intact to pursue business as usual is a catastrophic misreading of the political moment.

The US government needs to expropriate the American assets of BP: the Arco consumer retail divisions, the drilling and commercial operations, while holding the larger company liable for the establishment and funding of the Gulf restoration fund as well as all the other damages.

Once the US takes control–paying off all the stock and stakeholders of course–God knows we don’t want to spook the markets–the profits from the American holdings of BP, now to be renamed FP for Filthy Petroleum, or whatever, need to be used to directly fund clean energy.

We need to fund both existing clean energy start-ups, and new ones. We need to find ways to utilize and mass-produce solar energy, wind, electric, natural gas and human gas –<em>anything but Nuclear</em>–because accidents <em>will </em>happen. But barring nuclear, we have to do whatever it takes build a clean energy infrastructure now: not in ten to twenty years, but in five to seven.

We need to use this moment to build support for a direct tax on carbon and–in concert with the other nations of the world or if need be alone– to declare a date certain twenty-five years from today, in 2035, for an end to the Age of Oil.

And finally we need to airlift any of our Senators and Representatives who oppose these common sense initiatives for the survival of the planet–and not incidentally the reinvention of our economy–directly to the Gulf and let them see what the status quo looks like. And then leave ’em there.

They can swim back to New Orleans.

Gordon Brown–(with apologies to the Stranglers)

“Gordon Brown, they called him a clown
Just a prat, heart could not be found
But now that’s he’s gone, it won’t be long
‘Til you raise a song to old Gordon Brown”

Well they’ve done it now. A right coalition of the Posh it is, Eton, Oxbridge and all that: Tory-Liberal, where the metro sexual elite meet.

What is most striking to American eyes though is how the clueless Brits desperately sought renewal with American style televised political debates aimed at approximating the vacuity of our own.

When they announced the debates you knew they were heading for trouble and sure enough; there was Nick Clegg, a wide-eyed Nick if ever there was, emerging as the fresh young thing of the moment.

The debates made Clegg into a phenomenon, a cross between Barack Obama, Homer Simpson and the New Musical Express cover band of the week until after a meteoric two and half week rise he, not coincidentally, fell to earth like a burning piece of cosmic crap. Or so he would have if the Conservative Party had managed to come up with a majority on their own in the House of Commons. In the absence of that majority, Clegg’s Liberal Democrats were suddenly thrust into the breach of a hung Parliament.

Nick, who in a fairer world might have made an excellent British consular deputy in Trieste or Ljubljana, is now deputy Prime Minister.

Nick had a choice: to form a minority government and rule with Labour, or go whole hog and rule with the Tories. If he had chosen Labour, they would have bided their time and screwed him royally, but . . .he would have gotten a referendum on some form of Proportional representation–and a fair bit of Labour support for it–and ultimately gone down as the man who saved the Liberal-Democratic Party.

Instead Nick chose the Tories and now the odds are 50-50 on whether he actually lives long enough to regret it, or whether Cameron and he are carried out of Whitehall with their heads on pikes first, well before a new election can be called. Meanwhile all the issues dear to Nick, proportional representation, civil liberties, the environment, have been ransomed off to some future time, presumably after rising oceans subsume most of the Little Kingdom.

Yet as always in British politics, it didn’t have to be this way.

The roots of the British dilemma actually go back thirty-five years or so, to the early and mid Seventies.

It was in those long ago days, under the rule of Labour PM Harold Wilson that then Secretary of State for Industry, Tony Benn and his deputy, Eric Heffer first proposed a National Enterprise Board. It’s intent was to provide struggling British Industry with investment funding and give the government the ability to take failing firms into public ownership.

However Wilson, after agreeing to the plan in principle tabled it, moved Benn to the Energy Ministry and sacked Heffer. The Industrial plan as presented in Parliament was watered down beyond recognition, and then voted down.

The failure of Labour to reorganize British Industry when it had the chance heralded the end of manufacturing in the first manufacturing country on earth.

Today, even the famed British Auto Industry no longer exists.

The British economy is now over seventy percent service based, and much of that is dedicated to the Financial Services Industry, based in the “City of London.”

All through the end of Tory rule in the Eighties and into the New Labour, Blair years, when Finance looked to be endlessly expanding, this didn’t seem like a bad deal. Now, with Finance seemingly subject to an endless cycle of booms, bubbles and busts and maybe even, dare one whisper, the end of the Capitalist Road, the prospect doesn’t look as bright.

The Tory-Liberal alliance will not want to face that of course. They’re busy planning cuts to public and social services, in a fanciful attempt at alleviating the enormous British budget deficit, even as the gathering tsunami of Finance Apocalypse is sucking up the cold grey sea off the rocks at Lyme Regis.

Labour, now in opposition, seems equally clueless. Unfortunately, in post New Labour Britain, clueless is about as good as it gets, so until the coming Financial collapse sends Cameron and Clegg scurrying for their miserable lives, the best show in Britain will be the battle for leadership of the Labour Party.

Here, the cast of possible entrants alone makes the show worth the price of admission.

There is the redoubtable and fortuitously named Ed Balls, formerly a stalwart of New (capitalist) Labour, now a born again Socialist, or so he says. There is the left wing hope, Irish Jon Cruddas and finally, the two Milliband brothers: former Foreign Secretary and New Labour whiz kid, David Milliband and his younger brother, former Climate Change Secretary, Ed Milliband. David is an already announced candidate for the leadership post and Ed, a likely entry, setting up a Shakespearean “War of the Millibands.”

The Milliband boys are the sons of the late and revered British Marxist theoretician Adolphe “Ralph” Milliband, himself a working class Polish Jewish refugee who escaped from Belgium in 1940 just ahead of the Panzer Divisions.

They are said to have been a very close knit family which makes not only the War of the Millibands, but the politics of the two boys, even more interesting.

In the early Seventies–about the same time that Tony Benn and Eric Heffer were getting the run around–Ralph Milliband came to the reluctant conclusion that the British Labour Party, despite it’s professed Socialism, could not be trusted to stand up for the interests of the Working Class–let alone Socialism, because it was too tied to the political self interest of its Parliamentary members.

An obvious conclusion, but a truism nevertheless. Because of it, Milliband ultimately became a signatory of “Charter 88,” a movement for Parliamentary reform, proportional representation and the creation of a written Constitution that was initiated by Agit-Pop star Billy Bragg among others. Twenty two years later, it is the principals embedded in Charter 88 that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats were championing and which, seen from this distance, seem worth championing.

Since the Little Kingdom keeps borrowing all the worst stuff from us, it seems reasonable to propose that they at least consider some of the best. This would mean abolishing the bloody House of Lords and replacing it with a 100 person Senate elected by–I dunno, proportional representation, to go with a written Constitution.

They should do this, but probably won’t and frankly in their current straits, it doesn’t matter much anyway. The progressive possibilities of the Labour leadership battle, and for what happens to a Labour Party cut adrift after almost twenty years of now discredited New Labour ideology is the thin strand of hope to which UK citizens might cling.

It’s not much, but then as Ralph Milliband taught us and Barack Obama keeps proving everyday, in electoral politics, Hope is just a four letter word.

I was thinking about Rahm Emanuel last Saturday morning and how he’s spreading the word that he’s not responsible for the policy debacles of the Obama Administration (because the White House hasn’t been listening to his tough minded advice).

Then on Sunday morning, I started thinking about Rahm again when I read that the Dead Zones in the Ocean, especially the Pacific and especially the Pacific Northwest, are spreading rapidly, alarming scientists who don’t know why. And then, when I read that Rahm apparently referred to Liberals pushing Obama from the Left—especially on health care— as “fucking retards,” I thought that we needed to find Rahm an appropriate diminutive as well. Let me suggest here, “The Little Putz.”

 

            You can see the reason of course, behind the Little Putz’s off handed dismissal of Move-on/Daily Kos/MSNBC types. For anyone to have believed that Barack Obama was something more than a symbolic change candidate, implies for me at least, a level of credulity one generally attributes to pre-schoolers.

            The Little Putz was never taken in; he understood Obama. He also understood—or thought he understood—what it took to pass a tough-minded package of reforms through a dysfunctional Congress.

The big problem with the Little Putz is that he’s fighting the last war.

For the past generation Democrats could argue that in the words of Reggae poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson, “all we’re doing is defending.”

            Starting with the election of Ronald Reagan and running all through the Clinton and Bush years, the Republican free market fundamentalist argument has been in ascendance. Democrats have had to defend every inch of the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society; of what used to be called the American Way. While economically, culturally, socially, and environmentally the period has been one long unmitigated disaster—which the Democrats have largely acceded and bought in to—politically they’ve held their own surprisingly well. As a Democratic attack dog par excellence, the Little Putz was well suited for duty in this period.

            Now, with the collapse of the market fundamentalist model, everything has changed and Obama was supposed to represent that change. That he doesn’t is actually a larger tale in which the Little Putz plays a . . . smaller role.

 

In retrospect, even if people had understood that Obama’s was an impossible candidacy it wouldn’t have mattered. Who would have been elected in his place?

            No, we deserved Obama, just like we deserve the “magical and revolutionary” Apple I-pad and now we’ve got them.

However the principal flaw in Obamaism is its structural inability to incorporate the politics of class. This is not because President Obama and his advisors are stupid, it’s because the Obama campaign was not, and could not be about Class and still win an election.

A black candidate who campaigned on the basis of uniting the white and non-white working class against a failing system that rests, Atlas like, on its’ stooped shoulders, would seem a frightening, angry candidate to almost everyone else.

Nonetheless, the inability of Obama to talk about class in an authentic way means the Administration is ceding the terms of the conversation to others and in that spirit, I am put in mind of a long ago conversation with my late grandparents in their apartment in Northeast Philadelphia.

Both of them had been working class radicals when they were young but over the years their politics had evolved into a cranky, slightly paranoid, cold war liberalism. It was in this latter incarnation that I experienced them.

On this particular occasion I found them both insisting—surprisingly—that if I wanted to understand the Russian Revolution, I had to read Maxim Gorky’s “Mother.”

They became quite adamant about it, which made it difficult to understand my grandfather, whose accent was more or less impenetrable in the best of circumstances. But now they were on either side of me, shouting and gesturing in my face, “Read “Mother!” they insisted, “it’s the Truth!”

 And so I did.

I have to admit, given the build-up, at first “Mother—the book” was disappointing. “Mother” appeared to be a standard agit-prop recounting of the horrible lives of Russian workers and peasants in the run-up to the failed Revolution of 1905. The “Mother,” an illiterate, habitually battered widow of a drunken worker at first listens in with trepidation to the political meetings her worker-activist son conducts at their modest cottage.

But then she has her epiphany. The Mother is not sure about all the political jargon the young people use, but now she tells them fervently that yes, they have to tell the people “the truth.”           

What the Mother means by this is the big truth of the powerlessness of the people in the face of the grinding poverty that rules their lives, and the political-social autocracy that enforces its rule.

I think this is also “the truth” my grandparents were talking about and the Mother’s epiphany inevitably led me to my own.

The revolt against the inchoate sense of one’s own powerlessness is the true source of populism, whether of the right or the left. However this populist impulse to “the big truth” can lead to 9/11 conspiracy theories just as easily as it can lead to the insistence of the Tea Parties that the government has been taken over by Banker loving Socialists.

In this political environment, attacking the Republicans for their obstructionism is almost useless and an attack dog like Rahm Emanuel is as well. People do not want politics as usual; they want the truth.

The big failure of Obamaism is not the failure of The Little Putz to enact a modest package of reforms through Congress, nor the let down for liberals who wanted something more. It is the bigger, and almost inevitable— given the fairy tale nature of their campaign—failure of the Obamaites to construct an honest political narrative—the truth— that speaks to the powerlessness of people over a world gone horribly wrong.