It’s Not the Economy, Stupid

It's the planet. Capisce?

Image James Cawley, Getty Images via Google Earth

In Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville, the well-known political consultant and strategist, famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That message, initially directed at the campaign staff, grew to be the theme of Clinton’s election. Clinton won, of course, but what I remember fervently wishing was that the ticket was reversed. It was Al Gore’s acceptance speech at the convention that spoke to my heart, not Clinton’s, when halfway through, he touched on the Earth’s growing environmental problems.

From Gore’s speech:

“... I have spent much of my career working to protect the environment, not only because it is vital to the future of my state of Tennessee, our country and our Earth, but because I believe there is a fundamental link between our current relationship to the Earth and the attitudes that stand in the way of human progress.

For generations, we have believed we could abuse the Earth because we weren’t really connected to it. But now we must face the truth. The task of saving the Earth’s environment must and will become the central organizing principle of the post-Cold War world.”

I won’t lie, the two terms Clinton held office were good for me. I was working as a freelance graphic designer and had a few excellent accounts. Money was not a problem as the economy hummed along. Being a freelancer, I could pick my hours to some degree, and as an avid cyclist, I frequently broke away for three or four hour rides. It was just five miles down to the village of Castleton on the Hudson, then a peaceful ten-mile river ride south on route 9J into Columbia County’s lush hills and beautiful historic villages, almost a journey back in time. Doubtlessly I knew I was lucky, and aware that when I eventually looked back I would remember these years as perhaps the best of my life.

Village of Old Chatham, NY, one of the quaint villages I cycled through in beautiful Columbia County, NY.

My awareness of the health of the planet then was okay, but not what it is now. I had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring years before, and have always been a fan of David Attenborough documentaries, although they just make me feel sad now. I had the good fortune to design materials for a local nature preserve that was habitat for a rare and endangered butterfly. That led to work for The Nature Conservancy, but I also worked for Minolta, my most lucrative client. As with any Fortune 500 corporation, I am certain their effect on the planet was negative. They were my bread and butter. That’s my guilty admission.

My awareness of the trouble we’re in now is keen. When I look back (I guess this is what we do as we get older) I wish I had chosen a different career path. Why didn’t I choose forestry, for instance? I love the woods and mountains. Why didn’t I choose writing from the beginning? Why didn’t I choose to be a protector of the planet when I was starting in life as a young man?

The answers are multiple — immaturity being one of them, and perhaps a lack of awareness to all the possibilities, and probably the lazy belief that someone else would surely solve the Earth’s problems. Like many young people, I wasn’t ready to pick a career path, so I chose graphic design as a practical living that fit my abilities.

Now, thirty-two years after Clinton was elected, the planet is on her knees, and it breaks my heart. I regret that I didn’t devote my entire life to protecting her. In those good years professionally, I hadn’t yet grasped the true damage capitalism — or worse yet, neoliberal capitalism, does to the Earth. No form of capitalism is a sustainable model for living on a finite planet, and neoliberal capitalism has brought even more profound wealth inequality, the continued the plundering of natural resources from people in poor nations, and even required the political persecution, imprisonment, torture, disappearance, and execution of hundreds of thousands of people to implement. I wrote about this in The Economy We Need to Save Ourselves. These facts are carefully hidden from us as we blithely pull products off the shelf or hanger. Milton Friedman and the theory of the Chicago School of Economics built on the idea of unregulated markets creating the perfect economy, has instead deregulated unbridled greed and crime. I think they knew all along.

The first exercises of neoliberal capitalism were CIA backed and carried out in Chile under the murderous dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Neoliberal capitalism came to America later under the grandfatherly guise of union breaker Ronald Reagan, and Clinton furthered destructive neoliberal economic practices with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the US–China Relations Act of 2000. These agreements over time destroyed good paying jobs in the US, exploited workers and natural resources in other nations, mandated trade whether it was beneficial to all parties or not, and supercharged the destructive forces of garden variety Keynesian capitalism practiced since FDR’s New Deal, which at least sought reasonable equity for the average worker after the Great Depression. Rather than “lifting all boats” neoliberal economics has raised mega yachts on our overheated and rising oceans.

Gore’s speech continued:

“And just as the false assumption that we are not connected to the Earth has led to the ecological crisis, so the equally false assumption that we are not connected to each other has led to our social crisis. Even worse, the evil and mistaken assumption that we have no connection to those generations preceding us or those who will follow us has led to the crisis of values we face today.”

Indeed, a crisis of values. Thirty-two years later, our leaders still haven’t come clean about climate change, species extinction, or environmental destruction, let alone taken adequate action as we stare into the abyss. Causes vary, with delusion, cowardice, and avarice being among them. Those of you who have read me for a while know that I believe our problems at the root are behavioral. We see this every day from the myopic Cold War thinking of Biden, to the sheer lunacy of Trump, the childish “visions” of Musk, and in the views of our favorite Fox News watching, diverse averse, hater relative buying guns at Walmart. Behavior is one of the reasons I have little faith in the technological solutions being trotted out, falsely promising life isn’t going to change — that EVs, wind turbines, solar arrays, and battery backups will allow business to continue as usual. Bullshit. These inventions, environmental disasters in their own right, don’t get to the heart of the problem, which is needless, brainwashed overconsumption in a system that makes us slaves participating in our own self-destruction. It’s such normalized crazy, most people can’t see it.

The other reason my confidence is low is that the world we live in, completely created by fossil fuels, is coming to an end. It’s been a terrific 270 year or so party for some, and unmitigated tragedy for others. Peak oil originally predicted for around the turn of the century has been extended by fracking technology, which requires more and more energy used on longer and longer horizontal drilling runs, to extract less and less available oil. Oil will become economically unfeasible to extract, in the next two or three decades, that’s a physical and economic fact. Oil scarcity will drive inflation, affect agriculture and supply chains, and dictate whatever we manage to build out in the way of renewable energy because it’s completely dependent on oil to create. We can’t produce steel or concrete without it. We’re not being told the truth or being given a realistic plan to transition to a lower energy world, one that also lowers the temperature of our feverish planet, restores the natural systems that keep us alive, and likely our mental health. We would do well to transition off fossil fuels now, rather than delay what’s inevitable. Fossil fuels have been the biggest bubble ever.

Cause for hope?

Many of us are excited by Biden stepping aside for Kamala Harris. This development has given me a glimmer of hope that Trump and the heinous Christian fascist wet dream called Project 2025 (yes, I called it a wet dream, you fake-prude, dumb fucks) can be stopped for the next four years. This attempt to make the president an authoritarian ruler, strengthened by the Incredibly Not So Supreme Court ruling in Donald Trump v. the United States that a president can’t be held liable for crimes committed when in office is critical to stop if we’re to have a country worth living in, or a planet worth living on. That is our immediate order of business.

Project 2025 seeks to turn government employees into sycophant drones. It seeks to take all bodily autonomy away from women, discriminates against anyone who isn’t white and Christian, overturns all environmental protections, strangles public education and turns Big Oil loose to finish us off. Project 2025 plans the end of democracy, and demented, lunatic, racist Trump is the perfect figurehead, easily manipulated by equally evil, but frighteningly smarter people. All they have to do is cleverly kiss his fat, insecure ass. You and I have many responsibilities to take care of. Getting Harris elected is the first one.