Christian Parenti January 26, 2012
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Look back on 2011 and you'll notice a destructive trail of extreme
weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year
ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees,
touched off wildfires that burned four million acres and destroyed or
damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture,
particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2
billion—and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of
records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.
About the Author
Christian Parenti
Christian Parenti, a Nation contributing editor, fellow at The Nation
Institute and visiting scholar at the CUNY...
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Related Topics
August Disaster Environmental Issue Human Interest Natural Disaster
New York City Social Issues Technology United States World Bank east
coast In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the
form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its
energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its
rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below
the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.
Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large
swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain,
causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving
Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still
suffering from its worst drought in seventy years. Flooding in the
Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the
property of twelve million others, while ruining some of the world's
largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in
Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most
expensive disasters ever. And that's just to start a 2011
extreme-weather list, not to end it.
Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important
implications for how we think about the role of government in our
future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state
for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder
of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to
our survival.
These days, big government gets big press attention—none of it
anything but terrible. In the United States, especially in an election
year, it's become fashionable to beat up on the public sector and all
things governmental (except the military). The Right does it nonstop.
All their talking points disparage the role of an oversized federal
government. Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist famously set the tone for
this assault. "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government," he
said. "I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it
in the bathtub." He has managed to get 235 members of the House of
Representatives and forty-one members of the Senate to sign his
"Taxpayer Protection Pledge" and thereby swear never, under any
circumstances, to raise taxes.
By now, this viewpoint has taken on the aura of folk wisdom, as if the
essence of democracy were to hate government. Even many on the Left
now regularly dismiss government as nothing but oversized, wasteful,
bureaucratic, corrupt and oppressive, without giving serious
consideration to how essential it may be to our lives.
But don't expect the present "consensus" to last. Global warming and
the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is
going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution
that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar
natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security
firms won't help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private
insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from
vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches,
anarchist affinity groups—each may prove helpful in limited ways, but
for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to
deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.
Consider Hurricane Irene: as it passed through the Northeast, states
mobilized more than 100,000 National Guard troops. New York City
opened seventy-eight public emergency shelters prepared to house up to
70,000 people. In my home state, Vermont, where the storm devastated
the landscape, destroying or damaging 200 bridges, more than 500 miles
of road, and 100 miles of railroad, the National Guard airlifted in
free food, water, diapers, baby formula, medicine and tarps to
thousands of desperate Vermonters trapped in thirteen stranded
towns—all free of charge to the victims of the storm.
The damage to Vermont was estimated at up to $1 billion. Yet the state
only has 621,000 residents, so it could never have raised all the
money needed to rebuild alone. Vermont businesses, individuals and
foundations have donated at least $4 million, possibly up to $6
million in assistance, an impressive figure, but not a fraction of
what was needed. The state government immediately released $24 million
in funds, crucial to getting its system of roads rebuilt and
functioning, but again that was a drop in the bucket, given the level
of damage. A little known state-owned bank, the Vermont Municipal Bond
Bank, also offered low-interest, low-collateral loans to towns to aid
reconstruction efforts. But without federal money, which covered 80 to
100 percent of the costs of rebuilding many Vermont roads, the state
would still be an economic basket case. Without aid from Washington,
the transportation network might have taken years to recover.
As for flood insurance, the federal government is pretty much the only
place to get it. The National Flood Insurance Program has written 5.5
million policies in more than 21,000 communities covering $1.2
trillion worth of property. As for the vaunted private market,
for-profit insurance companies write between 180,000 and 200,000
policies in a given year. In other words, that is less than 5 percent
of all flood insurance in the United States. This federally subsidized
program underwrites the other 95 percent. Without such insurance, it's
not complicated: many waterlogged victims of 2011, whether from record
Midwestern floods or Hurricane Irene, would simply have no money to
rebuild.
Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to
23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control
wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you
decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in
the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?
Facing Snowpocalypse Without Plows
The early years of this century have already offered a number of
examples of how disastrous too little government can be in the face of
natural disaster, Katrina-inundated New Orleans in 2005 being perhaps
the quintessential case.
There are, however, other less noted examples that nonetheless helped
concentrate the minds of government planners. For example, in the
early spring of 2011, a massive blizzard hit New York City. Dubbed
"Snowmageddon" and "Snowpocalypse," the storm arrived in the midst of
tense statewide budget negotiations and a nationwide assault on state
workers (and their pensions).
In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg was pushing for cuts to the
sanitation department budget. As the snow piled up, the people tasked
with removing it—sanitation workers—failed to appear in sufficient
numbers. As the city ground to a halt, New Yorkers were left to fend
for themselves with nothing but shovels, their cars, doorways, stores,
roads all hopelessly buried. Chaos ensued. Though nowhere near as
destructive as Katrina, the storm became a case study in too little
governance and the all-too-distinct limits of "self-reliance" when
nature runs amuck. In the week that followed, even the rich were
stranded amid the mounting heaps of snow and uncollected garbage.
Mayor Bloomberg emerged from the debacle chastened, even though he
accused the union of staging a soft strike, a work-to-rule-style
slowdown that held the snowbound city hostage. The union denied
engaging in any such illegal actions. Whatever the case, the blizzard
focused thinking locally on the nature of public workers. It suddenly
made sanitation workers less invisible and forced a set of questions:
Are public workers really "union fat cats" with "sinecures" gorging at
the public trough? Or are they as essential to the basic functions of
the city as white blood cells to the health of the human body?
Clearly, in snowbound New York it was the latter. No sanitation
workers and your city instantly turns chaotic and fills with garbage,
leaving street after street lined with the stuff.
More broadly the question raised was: Can an individual, a town, a
city, even a state really "go it alone" when the weather turns
genuinely threatening? Briefly, all the union bashing and attacks on
the public sector that had marked that year's state-level budget
debates began to sound unhinged.
In the Big Apple at least, when Irene came calling that August, Mayor
Bloomberg was ready. He wasn't dissing or scolding unions. He wasn't
whining about the cost of running a government. He embraced planning,
the public sector, public workers and coordinated collective action.
His administration took unprecedented steps like shutting down the
subway and moving its trains to higher ground. Good thing they did.
Several low-lying subway yards flooded. Had trains been parked there,
many millions in public capital might have been lost or damaged.
The Secret History of Free Enterprise in America
When thinking about the forces of nature and the nature of
infrastructure, a slightly longer view of history is instructive. And
here's where to start: in the United States, despite its official
pro-market myths, government has always been the main force behind the
development of a national infrastructure, and so of the country's
overall economic prosperity.
One can trace the origins of state participation in the economy back
to at least the founding of the republic: from Alexander Hamilton's
First Bank of the United States, which refloated the entire
post-revolutionary economy when it bought otherwise worthless colonial
debts at face value; to Henry Clay's half-realized program of public
investment and planning called the American System; to the New York
State-funded Erie Canal, which made the future Big Apple the economic
focus of the eastern seaboard; to the railroads, built on government
land grants, that took the economy west and tied the nation together;
to New Deal programs that helped pulled the country out of the Great
Depression and built much of the infrastructure we still use like the
Hoover Dam, scores of major bridges, hospitals, schools and so on; to
the government-funded and sponsored interstate highway system launched
in the late 1950s; to the similarly funded space race, and beyond.
It's simple enough: big government investments (and thus big
government) has been central to the remarkable economic dynamism of
the country.
Government has created roads, highways, railways, ports, the postal
system, inland waterways, universities and telecommunications systems.
Government-funded R&D, as well as the buying patterns of government
agencies—(alas!) both often connected to war and war-making plans—have
driven innovation in everything from textiles and shipbuilding to
telecoms, medicine and high-tech breakthroughs of all sorts.
Individuals invent technology, but in the United States it is almost
always public money that brings the technology to scale, be it in
aeronautics, medicine, computers or agriculture.
Without constant government planning and subsidies, American
capitalism simply could not have developed as it did, making ours the
world's largest economy. Yes, the entrepreneurs we are taught to
venerate have been key to all this, but dig a little deeper and you
soon find that most of their oil was on public lands, their technology
nurtured or invented thanks to government-sponsored R&D, or supported
by excellent public infrastructure and the possibility of hiring
well-educated workers produced by a heavily subsidized
higher-education system. Just to cite one recent example, the
now-familiar Siri voice-activated command system on the new iPhone is
based on—brace yourself—government-developed technology.
And here's a curious thing: everybody more or less knows all this and
yet it is almost never acknowledged. If one were to write the secret
history of free enterprise in the United States, one would have to
acknowledge that it has always been and remains at least a little bit
socialist. However, it's not considered proper to discuss government
planning in open, realistic and mature terms, so we fail to talk about
what government could—or rather, must—do to help us meet the future of
climate change.
Storm Socialism
The onset of ever more extreme and repeated weather events is likely
to change how we think about the role of the state. But attitudes
toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which stands
behind state and local disaster responses, suggest that we're hardly
at that moment yet. In late 2011, with Americans beleaguered by
weather disasters, FEMA came under attack from congressional
Republicans, eager to starve it of funds. One look at FEMA explains
why.
Yes, when George W. Bush put an unqualified playboy at its helm, the
agency dealt disastrously with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Under
better leadership, however, it has been anything but the sinister
apparatus of repression portrayed by legions of rightists and
conspiracy theorists. FEMA is, in fact, an eminently effective
mechanism for planning focused on the public good, not private profit,
a form of public insurance and public assistance for Americans struck
by disaster. Every year FEMA gives hundreds of millions of dollars to
local firefighters and first responders, as well as victims dealing
with the aftershock of floods, fires and the other calamities
associated with extreme weather events.
The agency's work is structured around what it calls "the disaster
life cycle"—the process through which emergency managers prepare for,
respond to and help others recover from and reduce the risk of
disasters. More concretely, FEMA's services include training,
planning, coordinating and funding state and local disaster managers
and first responders, grant-making to local governments, institutions
and individuals, and direct emergency assistance that ranges from
psychological counseling and medical aid to emergency unemployment
benefits. FEMA also subsidizes long-term rebuilding and planning
efforts by communities affected by disasters. In other words, it
actually represents an excellent use of your tax dollars to provide
services aimed at restoring local economic health and so the tax base.
The anti-government Right hates FEMA for the same reason that they
hate Social Security—because it works!
As it happens, thanks in part to the congressional GOP's sabotage
efforts, thousands of FEMA's long-term recovery projects are now on
hold, while the cash-strapped agency shifts its resources to deal with
only the most immediate crises. This represents a dangerous trend,
given what historical statistics tell us about our future. In recent
decades, the number of Major Disaster Declarations by the federal
government has been escalating sharply: only twelve in 1961, seventeen
in 1971, fifteen in 1981, forty-three in 1991, and in
2011—ninety-nine! As a result, just when Hurricane Irene bore down on
the East Coast, FEMA's disaster relief fund had already been depleted
from $2.4 billion as the year began to a mere $792 million.
Like it or not, government is a huge part of our economy. Altogether,
federal, state and local government activity—that is collecting fees,
taxing, borrowing and then spending on wages, procurement,
contracting, grant-making, subsidies and aid—constitutes about 35
percent of the gross domestic product. You could say that we already
live in a somewhat "mixed economy": that is, an economy that
fundamentally combines private and public economic activity.
The intensification of climate change means that we need to
acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it.
Think of what's coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism.
After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations
of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off
compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change.
We are already at 392 ppm. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels
immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the
atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades. In other words,
according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly
chaotic and violent weather.
In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that
private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small "d"
democracy and "community" may be key parts of a strong, functional and
fair society, volunteerism and "self-organization" alone will prove as
incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive
challenges now beginning to unfold.
To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale
and mobilizing society's full range of resources. In other words, Big
Storms require Big Government. Who else will save stranded climate
refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue
efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?
It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.
More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/165885/why-climate-change-will-make-you-love-big-government
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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