ORIGINAL ARTICLEHere’s a fact that’s hard for most Americans to swallow: economic growth is over. Given the finite nature of our planet and its resources, the recent trend of global economic expansion was destined to end. No stimulus package or slashing of social programs is going to flip the economy back to an expansionary trajectory. We’ve hit the proverbial wall, and this will be the defining reality of our lives from now on.
The growth-seeking political-economic system has failed us. Today that system is dominated by Wall Street. “Goldman Sachs rules the world,” trader Alessio Rastani told us in a now-viral BBC interview. I met people like Rastani in researching my book, The End of Growth. At one lavish conference, 800 global investors packed a hotel ballroom to consider climate change. There was no talk of how to avert or mitigate floods and droughts. Instead, the discussion focused on profiting from warming with — no joke — weather derivatives. These folks were just doing their job, despite any private feelings of concern, remorse, or dread. And each was getting paid enough to single-handedly fund a midsize school district.
Both Wall Street and Washington are trying to do something impossible: grow human consumption forever in a world of limited energy, minerals, water, topsoil, and biodiversity, all while protecting and expanding the riches of the top one percent. If economic growth is over, that means we can no longer count on a rising tide to lift all boats. Under these conditions, extreme income inequality is not just unfair, it is socially unsustainable.
It’s strategic to bring protest to Wall Street rather than Washington. We must go directly to the crime scene — not with a request for reforms, but with an arrest warrant from the people.
You courageous people in the #occupy movement are absolutely right in saying the system is broken, greedy, and unfair. But when our discussion turns to replacing the current system, we’ve got to embrace a bigger view of reality than the one held by stock traders and politicians. It’s not just our wealth they want to control, it’s our vision for what is both possible and necessary. We need a post-growth economy that works both for people (all of them) and for the rest of nature: a localized economy based on renewable resources harvested at nature’s rates of replenishment, not a fossil-fueled global economy driven by the imperative of ever-higher returns on investment.
There will be life after growth — and it can be a better life if our nation’s priority is the quality of life of our people and the integrity of the biosphere, rather than stock prices and corporate profits.
With support,
Richard Heinberg
Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute
www.postcarbon.org
Well put Richard. The problem of too much wealth concentrated in too few hands is more than just about social inequality and injustice. It is certainly these, but it is as well about the over-weening privilege and power of those that are part of the top 1% that enable them to exist in an un-real (thus unsustainable) reality disconnected from both the rest of us, the 99%, but also nature itself. This, as you’ve noted, leaves them ill-e quipped to grapple with all the implications of the end to growth. So, social inequality aside, these people and their irrational, unsustainable system must be swept away not just because social justice demands it, but because they stand squarely in the way to a sustainable future. Or, better put, in the way of a transition to sustainability that will not involve a lot of pain and suffering for many people along with the possible ruination of the bio-sphere.
It’s good to find people not characterizing the Occupy Wall Street movement as useful idiots, even if their anti-capitalism stance is a bit misguided. The corrosive element is crony capitalism.
I come from the perspective of one who occupied division president level positions at some major corporations and left to be part of the solution. I have been building a self-sustaining community in rural Tennessee for about six years now.
The journey has been challenging. We have learned much and there is much to do.
We continue to look for innovative, solutions-oriented people to join us.
http://1stvillager.wordpress.com/
It is not a matter of just crony Capitalism. Even textbook Capitalism would still be crisis prone and inequality would be, eventually, roughly the same as now. At the heart of textbook Capitalism (as with any of its variations) is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and for the also-rans to go defunct or be absorbed by the bigger Kahunas. Had we had textbook Capitalism the Banks would have been allowed to fail (look what happened when just Lehman was allowed to fail . . . wholesale collapse was next) and the economy would have been, virtually immediately, decimated. This is why the State stepped in and bailed like mad. The problem with the rate of profit to fall leads to its second problem, which is that Capitalism is based upon growth and the commodification of everything if it can finagle it. It must grow if the rate of profit is to have any chance of, not only holding steady, but advance. Finally, both problems taken together leads it to the fatal problem, which Richard has long been propounding, of the limits to growth on one hand and the erosion of its social, not to mention ecological, base on the other. The OWS movement is a product of this latter tendency and Peak Oil a product of the former. Its contradictions are inherent and would hold whether it is the textbook case or the monopoly-finance Capitalism (read CRIMINAL) we see today.