Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

A Green Economy  

2 Responses to “A Green Economy”

1. (adam) says:
   May 16th, 2005 at 9:42 am

   Maybe. It’s hard to tell whether we have a genuine capitalist system, or crony capitalism as discussed by RFK Jr. What he says is that if the prices of the goods genuinely reflect the cost of cleaning up after themselves, then the prices will reflect that.

   This is from an article in Rolling Stone that became the seed his book Crimes Against Nature:

   George w. Bush seems to be trying to take us all the way back to the Dark Ages by undermining the very principles of our environmental rights, which civilized nations have always recognized. Ancient Rome’s Code of Justinian guaranteed the use to all citizens of the “public trust” or commons — those shared resources that cannot be reduced to private property — the air, flowing water, public lands, wandering animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.

   When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages, feudal kings began to privatize the commons. In the early thirteenth century, when King John also attempted to sell off England’s fisheries and erect navigational tolls on the Thames, his subjects rose up and confronted him at Runnymede, forcing him to sign the Magna Carta, which includes provisions guaranteeing the rights of free access to fisheries and waters.

   Clean-air laws in England, passed in the fourteenth century, made it a capital offense to burn coal in London, and violators were executed for the crime. These “public trust” rights to unspoiled air, water and wildlife descended to the people of the United States following the American Revolution. Until 1870, a factory releasing even small amounts of smoke onto public or private property was operating illegally.

   But during the Gilded Age, when the corporate robber barons captured the political and judicial systems, those rights were stolen from the American people. As the Industrial Revolution morphed into the postwar industrial boom, Americans found themselves paying a high price for the resulting pollution.

   RFK Jr. endorses genuine capitalism where the costs affect the market. He continues:

   Growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism to democracy. But as we’ve seen from the the Bush administration, the latter proposition does not always hold. While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.

   America’s most visionary leaders have long warned against allowing corporate power to dominate the political landscape. In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln lamented, “I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers behind me, and I fear the bankers most.” Franklin Roosevelt echoed that sentiment when he warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling power.”

   Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures.

   Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush competition by controlling government. The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many informative lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. In Spain, Germany and Italy, industrialists allied themselves with right-wing leaders who used the provocation of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents and turn government over to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives to run ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly corporations to swallow media outlets, and they enriched the wealthiest classes, privatized the commons and pared down constitutional rights, creating short-term prosperity through pollution-based profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini’s inside view of this process led him to complain that “fascism should really be called ‘corporatism.’ “

   We have a system now where profit making corporations are subsidized to continue manufacturing their polluting products, and the government/taxpayer pays to clean it up.

   The polluter should be forced to clean up his own mess. His customer will share the burden and the ecological truth will affect the market.

2. (karma432) says:
   May 16th, 2005 at 10:23 am

   Very good point.

   However there are other ecological costs besides pollution that are not being represented such as resource depletion–oil, fresh water, and arible land being the most critical. The true cost of oil will only hit the marketplace when it starts running scarce, and by then it will be too late to make a smooth transition to any alternative.

   The comment about corporatism makes me think that what we have today could be called democratic corporatism. Wereas in communism–in Stalin’s words–it wasn’t who voted that mattered, but who counted the votes; in democratic corporatism it isn’t who runs for office that matters, it’s who funds him. If you don’t get the corporate money, you don’t make it out of the starting gate.

   –Tim

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