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by Peter A. Belmont / 2014-01-14
© 2014 Peter Belmont
Andrew J. Bacevich tells us, quite persuasively, that the USA’s use of military force has not been working since the end of the cold war.
(L.A.Times, Jan 12, 2014).
As Bacevich says, the USA and its leaders are so in love with gadgets that they mistake the “capability” of our war-making gadgets for “utility”. All our recent war-making has been useless, and worse than useless, since it’s been manufacturing enemies faster than it has been removing them. At enormous expense, we’ve spent a decade and more in Iraq and Afghanistan and now we’re pulling out and those countries are being plunged into war. Iraq had been at peace before we attacked it, held together by the ruthless dictator Saddam Hussein. Today the “glue” that the USA removed is gone and Iraq is exploding.
Imagine if all the money the USA spent for those wars had been spent for something useful, better yet, for something absolutely necessary, indeed, something known in 2001 as absolutely necessary—something we didn’t do while we fought our useless “feel-good” wars (“feel-good” for BIG-DEFENSE and some politicians).
As I assume to be common knowledge, the USA spends vast sums every year on “defense” and “intelligence”, the former including an empire of military bases spread over the entire world, the latter including the efforts of the NSA and CIA. And three very important things appear to be true about these vast enterprises: [1] they are very, very expensive, [2] they do not do much to improve American “security” which appears not to be much threatened by the sorts of things “defense” and “intelligence” are good at defending against, and [3] they are totally useless as defense against the one supervening challenge to USA’s security, climate change.
What to do? We must transfer much of the money and effort now being expended (mostly uselessly) on “defense” and “intelligence” to a re-tooling of America’s energy sector, switching as quickly as possible from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy.
We must stop saying, “it’s impossible” and start doing it. It’ll be very costly, as “defense” and “intelligence” are today. Let the arms factories begin to make wind turbines and solar panels. Install them. Wire them into the grids. Get it done. There is no time to lose.
It is not as important to “do it the best possible way” as to get started doing it at all, but in a big way. Getting 10% of electric generation away from fossil fuels each year for a decade would be a good goal.
The sun doesn’t shine at night? Then use solar-power to pump water up-hill during the day and use water-turbines to produce power at night.
The solar-collector technology is too expensive? Nonsense. Failing to counter global warming is too expensive. Besides, a steady high-intensity build-up of green energy infrastructure will spur research and in 5 or 10 years, solar-power will be far more efficient and far cheaper.
Need money for all this? Either close the military bases and bring the soldiers home, or get the countries where they are stationed to pay 75% of the costs. American soldiers have been in Korea since 1950. Korea has become an economic powerhouse. It should pay 100% of the costs of the American military presence from now on. An enormous American military presence sits in Germany. Let the EU pay most of the costs or bring them home.
And stop making airplanes and battleships that are useless against climate change. Reduce traditional “defense” spending—for man-power, for military bases, for acquiring gadgets and munitions, for “defense” and “intelligence” consultants —and spend the money in a real and really useful war to slow down (and prepare to live with) climate change.
Neither “defense” nor “intelligence” should any longer be treated as guaranteed employment for a vast army of people who are not contributing to solving America’s real problems. Neither should they continue to be “get-rich” cash-cows for the millions of businesses, large and small, which provide “contractors” to do the work that soldiers and CIA/NSA professionals could do cheaper, better, more professionally, and without the conflicts-of-interest that come to contractors which wish, at all times, to grow their businesses (whether the USA’s defense needs justify such growth in fact or not).
Would ending the USA’s ever so kindly support of for-profit “contractors” glut the labor market at a time when there are too many unemployed as it is? Yes, indeed. But why do those folks deserve guaranteed paychecks (for useless work) when other Americans are out of work? Better put all Americans to work on useful jobs—designing, manufacturing, building the new energy economy.
The effort to deal with climate change should be viewed as a war—a real war, not a phony war like the wars on drugs or wars on poverty. When the USA tooled up for WWII, the economy bloomed and boomed. We can do it again, this time for the constructive work of remaking America for the era of climate change.
The Era of Climate Change
There is much to do. The era of climate change has begun and may never end. Things—climate and weather problems, rising ocean-water problems, diseases, forestry problems, fisheries problems, water problems, food production problems, and the refugee problems and wars and other violence which will follow upon all the other problems—are already happening. And things will get worse.
We cannot prevent things from getting worse, but by acting we may slow them down and make them get worse slower. Fighting to slow climate change is the ONE thing worth doing as a society today.
So we must not worry about stupidities (like economic competitiveness) if we “go it alone”. If we start fighting climate change in good earnest, China and India will follow, as will the rest. Someone has to go first.
The most important work is ditching dependence on fossil fuels everywhere we can as soon as we can. But we must also deal with the fact that we’ve waited too long (not just America—the world in general has waited too long, but we’ve been the worst) and climate change is already a “happening thing”, as recent storms, cold spells, hot spells, changes in the biosphere including the oceans have already shown.
So cities on oceans need sea-walls or other defenses. There is a lot of thinking that needs to be done.
And by the way, it would be a good thing if we revised the priorities in America so that the best and the brightest stopped becoming hedge-fund-sters and bank-sters and lawyers and became environmental scientists and engineers instead.
Capitalism as Spoiler
Capitalism is not a solution to any “problem”. It is simply a particular social organization. It has morphed due to the concentration of money in a few hands into a mechanism by which those few hands—the hands of the CEOs of the biggest corporations—control the world’s political activity. And that control has not been exercised for the benefit of people or society at large but—as one would expect—has been exercised for the very-short-term benefit of the very rich including especially the 1% (so-called) (or, more likely, the 0.01%) of folks who control those vast corporations (and, of course, those who control a few huge private fortunes and mega-foundations).
We have been trained to regard capitalism as a panacea. Haven’t we all (as a society) gotten richer, don’t we lead better lives, because of the somewhat unfettered operation of capitalism?
Maybe we once benefited from capitalism, but if our society is committing suicide today—as it does, incrementally, day by day, every day we do not act to mitigate climate change—and if it is committing suicide because the control by capitalism prevents a sensible response to climate change—then capitalism has become a killer social disease, no matter how useful and beneficial it may once have been.
Capitalism seems to me largely to blame for the tardiness of the USA in approaching the problem of climate change.
The profits enjoyed by BIG-DEFENSE have kept too much money being spent uselessly on “defense” and “intelligence”, money that could be spent combating and preparing to survive climate change.
The profits enjoyed by BIG-OIL, BIG-GAS, BIG-COAL have been spent, in part, making sure the politicians have refused to act to mitigate climate change.
It appears that corporations and the people who direct them are almost constitutionally unable to look beyond the short term profit-making and power-exercising goals of the corporations to look after the common problems of society.
For this reason, dealing with climate change may not be possible unless and until the political power of corporations is broken. Therefore, reducing or ending the possibility of the exercise of political power by corporations and the very rich should become as urgent in America as dealing with climate change.
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