This Rare Historical Moment

By Kenny Ausubel, Conscious Choice. Posted October 21, 2002.

When Frances Moore Lappe posed the question of why societies finally abandoned the divine right of monarchies, she found the reason was that people simply stopped believing in it. Ideas have real power, much greater than political or economic structures. It's what I like to call the B.S. factor -- belief systems.

And everywhere you turn these days, belief systems are crashing and burning like a meteor shower. From Enron to Arthur Andersen to the Catholic Church and even major-league baseball, people's faith in institutions is disintegrating.

People in this country are realizing that we have the best government money can buy. When Bush Lite proudly kicked off his regime as America, Incorporated, you have to wonder why he didn't propose reconstituting the Senate and the House as Fortune 100 and Fortune 500. If we enforced truth-in-advertising laws, Senators and Congresspeople would wear jumpsuits like race-car drivers sporting the logos of corporate sponsors. Then we could easily distinguish the Senator from General Electric and the Congressperson from Disney.

Corporate economic globalization contains the seeds of its own destruction, and we may well be witnessing the beginning of the decline and fall of the corporate empire. Enronitis is systemic. Arthur Andersen globalized fuzzy math, the arithmetic of corporate accounting in 1995, and they're going to have a heck of a time doing a factory recall. Whenever people say free trade, I always ask if free is a verb. What we actually have are highly managed monopolies that epitomize crony capitalism and insider trading as a way of doing business.

The rest of the world is certainly onto it, which is why European and Japanese capital is begining to flee U.S. companies. Consumer confidence is not looking too promising either when three-fourths of American citizens think big business has too much influence over government and society.

Around the world today people are rising up in defense of the Earth and demanding a democratic process over the decisions that affect our lands, our communities, and our lives. The pro-democracy movement is gaining momentum worldwide, and recent events indicate that it is only going to pick up steam, far sooner than many people may have expected.

Just over the last couple of years, countries across Latin America have generated a political groundswell against the failed experiment of so-called "free-market" capitalism. Popular uprisings have derailed the privatization of state-owned companies and utilities, because 44 percent of Latin Americans still live in poverty and the number of unemployed workers has more than doubled in a decade. And with China's acceptance into the WTO, the next giant sucking sound from the South is going to be jobs leaving Mexico for China.

It's going to get even dicier because the never-ending war on terrorism is anathema to economic globalization, which is predicated on the free flow of goods, services and workers across borders. This time they've shot themselves in the foot, or actually a little higher.

Ecology does not recognize national borders, and planetarization demands that we create a restorative economy grounded in healthy ecosystems and job creation. It also calls upon us to celebrate the world's rich diversity of cultures, and to forge a working community of nations committed to social justice. Without social and economic justice there can be no peace with the Earth.

This rare historical moment offers us a gleaming opportunity. It's up to us to step into the breach with alternatives, with solutions that work. We are finding over and over again that solutions residing in nature surpass our wildest conception of what's possible. There is great hope in how little we know and what little we do know.

We can start with a Marshall Plan to hasten the extinction of petrochemicals. Even oil executives acknowledge that we have entered the beginning of the end of the Age of Oil. Large companies including BP, Shell, Daimler-Chrysler, and Ford are making sizeable commitments to renewable energy, though it's still marginal to their core business. The emerging alternative energy industry may well mimic the vertiginous expansion of the oil industry just 100 years ago. Wind and solar photovoltaics grew around ten-fold in the past ten years.

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