The Greatest Plunder Ever: a Story

They had planned and tried and failed, and planned and tried and failed, and lain in the weeds and planned and planned some more. Finally, the stars aligned, and by the slimmest of possible margins—one Supreme Court vote—they got in. Everybody assumed that after such a close election their feckless and indifferent Presidential candidate would become the compromiser he had promised to be. But their man in the White House, Dick Cheney, along with his brilliant staff of socioopaths, noting the liberal disarray after the corrupt Supreme Court decision, guided George W. Bush to take an uncompromising, highly ideological position that favored the massive looting that they had been waiting and hoping for.
Part of the looting plan had always been to foster a major war, which created unrivaled looting opportunities for many of them, the aerospace people, the defense contractors, the commodities manufacturers, the consultants and the like. The obvious target was Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq. Not everyone agreed, however, since the confinement tactics pursued by NATO seemed to be working. For months the decision hung in the balance. It was the crafty Cheney who found a solution. While Bush, bored with government and interested in physical conditioning, ignored his security staff and met with his foreign policy advisor only because he admired her good looks, Cheney pored over the intelligence reports. He, along with his pal the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, noticed increasing references to terrorists stealing airplanes and attacking US targets with them. But by isolating the experienced and savvy Secretary of State, Colin Powell, keeping the inexperienced and ineffectual National Security advisor Condeleeza Rice confused, ordering the silly Attorney General John Ashforth to keep the FBI out of it, and intimidating the hold-over CIA director George Tenet, they kept the intelligence buried. Then, sure enough, on September 11, 2001 their efforts paid off, and from that date forward the whole nation was primed for war.
It has been estimated that the war in Iraq will end up costing $4 trillion, and apart from expenditures on the salaries of the troops, virtually all of this money has gone to them or their cronies on a cost-plus basis. But that isn’t all! I have been describing the war first, because nothing else lends itself to such massive looting. But the group’s efforts on the domestic front have been both heroic and highly lucrative as well. They have received gifts of the nation’s natural resources, including national forest timber, grazing lands, mining rights, offshore drilling rights, and even reductions in the miniscule royalties that oil companies have to pay for those rights. They have enjoyed enormous tax reductions, reduced or terminated scrutiny of their tax returns, foreign shelters, and accounting tricks, forgivenesses of past fiscal crimes, and virtual complete freedom from regulation in every area, whether health and safety, food, mining, the financial markets, or labor relations. Then there are the actions in violation of the Constitution, and the tawdry efforts to justify them. The catalogue is so long that it becomes tedious to recite.
The result has been to bring the US to the edge of moral and financial bankruptcy. Never in history has any nation so quickly lost its honor among other nations and peoples. Never in history, short of being conquered in war, has a nation lost so much wealth. Can we recover? Will this evil gang of sociopaths be punished in any way?
These are, to some degree, mutually exclusive possibilities. The new President appears capable of using this crisis as an opportunity to do many essential things that would otherwise have proven difficult to do. Such actions promise to make a substantial fiscal recovery possible; more importantly, to restore the health of the society, which in the course of this evil empire has been severely challenged. But if the new administation becomes diverted by pursuing and bringing to justice this evil gang, the redemptive and transformative possibiities of this Presidency will have been wasted. To be sure, if criminal cases can be made, they should be. If the pursuit of these villains costs them their ill-gotten gains and their peace of mind, so much the better. But this matter cannot be a priority, at a time when crisis and opportunity in equal measure require our full attention and effort.

The Great Democratic Party Non-response

One of my gripes is the complete inability of ordinary citizens like myself to engage with the Democratic Party on a national level, apart from sending them money. I have sent many letters and emails to Congressmen, Senators, and organizations in and around the Democratic party over the years. I even joined one of them, New Democratic Network, because it seemed to promise just such a dialogue. Membership was quite expensive, and I did get to speak from time to time to its leader. But as for participation, nada. Typical, if more extreme than most, was the non-response of Sen. Schumer’s office. In 2004, a number of the residents in my apartment building pledged to donate $10,000 to a deserving Democrat. I repeatedly tried to contact the senator or someone on his staff, even dangling the $10,000 as bait, hoping that they could send someone to one of our meetings to give us their ideas about who to support. We never got any response whatsoever.
Recently, however, I logged onto Obama’s website, change.gov and was most pleasantly surprised by the significant efforts being made there to solicit public input. While I haven’t yet joined any of the groups on the site, I am hoping that this is an exception to the great Democratic Party Non-response.

Response to Herve Kempf's "How the Rich are Destroying the Earth."

This is a response to an interview with Le Monde's environmental correspondent Herve Kempf, who has written a book entitled "How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth." One of his points in the interview was that environmental feeling is much stronger and more advanced in Europe than in the US. Having been an active Sierra Club member since the 60s, and aware of the environmental movement's history, I can remember when environmentalists were called conservationists, and their main concern was with preserving wild places. It was primarily from this start, here in the US, that modern environmentalism emerged.

As the stunning ferocity and broad human impact of environmental problems has become clearer, the nature of the required response from different countries has also diverged substantially. Europe, for reasons having nothing to do with virtue or intellect, has developed in a much more population-dense way than the US. Consequently, it now has less opportunity to curb its pollution than the US, while the US faces far more severe dislocations to make the progress it needs. Hence Americans are more cautious, on the whole. At the same time, however, we have a far greater opportunity to make a large impact, and to develop profitable businesses as a result.

Another point Kempf makes is to define capitalism as an ideology that views human motivation as entirely selfish, and competition in the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of all. I strongly disagree. Capitalism refers to a way of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services that depends on substantially unregulated private entities seeking to sustain and, if possible, enrich themselves in the process. At the other extreme, of course, are command economies in which an authority has the right, usually circumscribed by tradition, to direct the creation and distribution of goods and services. Nevertheless, I think capitalism is a term so fraught with pejorative implications that it is best avoided. I have just finished writing a history of the origins and ancient development of business, and tried very hard never to use the term.

Gloom and doom

The imminent end of the world as we know and want it is now virtually assured. This catastrophe is not due to global warming, disease, or nuclear war, although these are likely to be immediate causal factors. Paradoxically, it is due to two interlocking developments of the 20th century, each of which seemed and under the right circumstances could be extremely beneficial: the rise of popular democracy, and the conversion of economies to competitive private enterprise-driven systems.
The vesting of governmental power in people selected through and responsive to popular democracy has normally been thought to be a great advance, in that it gives the weak and afflicted a voice in public affairs, and therefore a share in the distribution of benefits. Not only is this system fairer than autocratic forms of government, it is economically wiser as well, since the distribution of benefits enlarges markets and increases society’s wealth. Unfortunately, however, the growth of popular democracy has not been accompanied by a similar improvement in popular civic, moral, and practical education. The result, therefore, has been to empower a mass of people whose personal development remains childlike; they are little concerned for their communities, consider the most primitive forms of selfishness and cruelty to be entirely natural and justified, and for lack of worldly understanding remain credulous and easily led.
At the same time, private enterprises have become the principal economic actors. These are marvelously efficient and effective engines of economic activity, and have propelled western economies to previously unimaginable heights of prosperity. They are now doing so in the rest of the world as well. But they are also, by design, oriented toward relatively short-term profits for themselves, and will relentlessly seek to influence governments on their own behalf. Their managers want to gain power as against owners and workers, and they want terms of trade that reduce their costs, subsidize their operations, and refrain from actions that they or their managers dislike.
With the world population now so large, and the environmental impact of economic activity so great, the combination of an ignorant and credulous electorate and a wealthy and selfish business community has become deadly. The business community uses the organs of publicity and persuasion in society to lead the electorate in the directions it prefers. As the de facto leader of the world, however, business is extremely defective. The top managers have an even shorter-term focus than their businesses, and despite the occasional public-spirited exception tend to wield their corporate power for personal gain without regard to any greater good. But even if management’s goals were better aligned with those of the corporation, the result would be similar. In effect, as was true in the Dark Ages, we have delivered worldly power to people who use it unwisely and selfishly. Unfortunately, under modern conditions the entire world is now the community that bears the consequences.