Look Deeper, Mr. Moyers
by Stan Cox
It’s enough to make your hair stand on end and your eyes bug out. Not only is the Earth in peril, but some people who hold sway over the fate of the planet believe that soon the whole place is going to go up in a blaze of brimstone anyway — and they can’t wait to watch it happen!
Bill Moyers, in the March 24 issue of the New York Review of Books, paints a scary picture indeed. With a greeting of “Welcome to the Rapture!”, Moyers writes about the vast numbers of Americans who believe that an imminent end of the world is predicted in the Book of Revelation and about their energetic support for the Bush administration. He draws this conclusion:
A powerful current connects the administration’s multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.
Moyers is right: It “sends a shiver down the spine.” But the Earth was headed down a highway to hell long before Bush was elected or the Armageddon Clock started up. Triumphant capitalism, performing precisely to specifications, is showing itself fully capable of pulling off an ecological apocalypse, with or without the help of superstitious scripture-twisters.
When it comes to shining a light on some of the most alarming outgrowths of capitalism, Moyers is a master. But in going after the Bush administration’s scorched-Earth environmental policies, its “multinational corporate cronies”, and those hallucinatory crackpots brandishing their biblical licenses to plunder, he missed the root cause of the problem:capitalism’s addiction to perpetual growth.
Full Article:counterpunch.org
March 15th, 2005 at 9:36 am
"Ecological economics, a heretical branch of the discipline, has demonstrated conclusively that if we’re to live within our material means, planet-wide, we must (1) limit our species’ rate of reproduction, (2) hold our "throughput" of resources and wastes down to a sustainable level, and (3) set upper and lower limits on monetary wealth and income. These policies make up a package; following only one or two of them won’t do the job."
* well, the job of "slowing population growth" is indeed a priority and they can cover it up under the guise of "saving the planet" – but what this means is keepign in check the #s of non-white people who are the fastest growing population groups on the planet. western environmentalist arguments can be too easily manipulated(and ARE) to justify whatever sick and wicked policies the west deems necessary.
they are based on the same racist assumptions and egotistical point of view.
March 15th, 2005 at 9:37 am
look deeper steve cox, maybe you can’t.
March 17th, 2005 at 11:18 am
Well this is exactly the problem-Here are India and China wanting to get in on the Western-style gravy train of ridiculous over-consumption, and OF COURSE in any population die-off, natural or un- it is absolutely non-whites who will be the first to die. Africa is atthe beginnings of a massive one right now.
With coal-burning and fossil fuel burning, it feels to me that whoever is ‘in charge’ is deliberately bringing on a ‘crisis’ which will result in billions dead, and you are right, few of them will be white.