Humans Seem Hell Bent on Committing Mass Suicide -- But There's Still Hope

By Fred Branfman, AlterNet. Posted May 15, 2009.

But although the past may have no relevance to the present situation, policy- and opinion makers confidently propose solutions based upon it.

Conservatives, for example, simply ignore the fact that the private sector has collapsed and continue to support the very "pro-market" policies that created the present crisis. Meanwhile, liberals look fondly back to policies that worked in the Depression of the 1930s, forgetting that America was then a young, isolationist power with a small military and enormous industrial potential. Today it is an aging "late capitalist" global power with a failed banking sector, weak economic base, and is wasting enormous resources waging wars it cannot win and maintaining a global network of military bases it no longer needs.

Who are the people responsible for these economic gambles?

Lawrence Summers makes economic policy, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, his disciple, implements it. But Summers is now violating his previous intellectual position of opposing large government deficits and is trying to convince foreign governments to buy U.S. debt after spending years encouraging them not to do so. The N.Y. Times reported on April 19, 2008, that "Mr. Summers has been sharply critical of current American fiscal policy and the way that Asia sustains borrowing by the United States by continuing to purchase government debt. During a visit to Mumbai in March last year, Mr. Summers warned the Reserve Bank of India of the United States’ ‘unsustainable and dangerous’ current-account deficit."

While serving at the Treasury Department in the 1990s, Summers fought efforts to regulate risky hedge funds and pushed to eliminate the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking, key steps in America’s banking collapse.

You can’t be serious! Why would America put a man who had so harmed the economy in charge of rescuing it?

Summers symbolizes a core American problem: It has few economic, financial or business leaders capable of saving it. Its financial leaders destroyed both their own companies and the American economy. Virtually all its economists failed to predict the collapse of the economy, their minimal responsibility, and even today spurn the advice of the few who did—such as Nouriel Roubini’s call for nationalizing its banks.

But you say that President Obama, the single most powerful human being on Earth, understands this. Can he not turn things around?

Obama is clearly the most gifted leader America has elected in the postwar era. And to his credit, Obama has already proposed investing more in renewable energy than any previous president. But his hands are largely tied. When Franklin Roosevelt took office in March 1933, an economic depression had dragged on for 30 months, unemployment was near 25 percent and the public was desperate for change. Obama took office only a few months after the latest economic collapse became evident, and the public is not yet ready to make the major changes that are clearly needed.

But I read that Obama was elected on a platform of "change."

Although 83 percent of the public wanted a "change" from the previous president’s policies, they are not yet ready to change by undertaking the painful shifts necessary to save their nation and planet. It is encouraging that Americans voted for a future-oriented political leader. But there is no evidence yet that they are ready to secure their future.

OK, here’s another thing I don’t understand. Why is America waging wars abroad if it sees its top priority as restoring its economy at home?

America finds itself in the same position as many other declining empires in their final years: economically weakened at home by self-interested elites and overextended abroad, bogged down in wars it cannot win but is unable to abandon.

The major geopolitical event of the past decade has been the rise in power of violently anti-American forces in the Middle East, largely due to the previous U.S. president’s launching and then bungling two wars. He invaded, occupied and then handed over Iraq to members of the Shiite tribe allied with the anti-U.S. Iran, immeasurably strengthening and emboldening it. He then murdered and tortured innumerable innocent civilians in Iraq, spawning a new generation of anti-American fanatics. After throwing out the anti-American Taliban in Afghanistan, he abandoned it. The Taliban regrouped and now control 70 percent of Afghanistan and, more ominously, a growing area within neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan.

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Fred Branfman is a writer, public policy activist, spiritual seeker and student of psychology. While directing Rebuild America in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 1991, Branfman wrote “An Investment Economics for the Year 2000” and “Industry-led Strategy.” He wrote the “strategic investment initiative” for U.S. Sen. Gary Hart’s mid-1980s run for president. As a Cabinet-level aide for California’s then-Gov. Jerry Brown, he wrote the “Investment in High Technology” and “Investment in People” state-of-the-state initiatives. He also promoted renewable energy while directing Protecting Future Generations in the mid-1990s, and authored the state of California’s SolarCal strategy and “Jobs From the Sun” in 1979 while with the Campaign for Economic Democracy.

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