Failure at Copenhagen?

Ecofascism and the Death of Leadership

By Michael Pyska

The Copenhagen climate conference was a complete and utter failure. Despite U.S president Obama's announcement Friday that the ‘accord’ signed in Copenhagen was a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough", prominent politicians everywhere continue fail in their efforts to provide the world-changing leadership we so desperately need.

Either Obama is so caught up in his own doctrine of hope to understand the urgency of his task or he thinks he can sell failure as "modest success" to a public that waits each and every day for any sign of real systemic change?

Not only does the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord’ not include overall emissions targets or deadlines, but also fails to include legally binding protocols or measures. The 'agreement' these industrial-state politicians reached merely suggests limiting global warming to a maximum of 2C above pre-industrial times. But the agreement fails to say how to actualize this vague goal. Without binding legal mechanisms or emissions cut targets there is no way to actually achieve this espoused goal of limiting an increase in global temperature.

World leaders and corporate sponsored politicians failed to deliver a legal framework in Copenhagen that will help our species reduce the world's greenhouse gas emissions causing devastating climate change.

i can envision the wealthy 'elite' now gathering in their $2000 suits to discuss corporate salaries and their next public relations attack against scientific data. But their is a storm coming – and even corporate managers, technocrats and bankers won’t be able to spend or talk their way out it. These ecofascists will continue to increase their influence on institutions and resource transfer systems, but their investments and opinions will be come irrelevant.

The Copenhagen meetings were good for at least one thing: a wide range of resistance and NGO groups came together to support the issue of climate change – forming previously non-exiting links and alliances. Thousands of human rights groups, environmentalists and anti-poverty campaigners have now rallied and reorganized in order to bring climate change within their direct sphere of concern. Politicians’ continued failures are now galvanizing a worldwide movement that will continue put immense pressure on world leaders in the coming months.

If the Copenhagen debacle can teach us anything it is that now, more than even, we must continue to fight and struggle against all those systems of domination and appropriation that seek to silence and brutalize us. The time for talk over people. Either join the coming battles or get the fuck out of the way.

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Thinking Otherwise

Thoughts on Bailing Out Detroit

By William Irwin Thompson

Since the bailout of Wall Street did not seem to go as planned by Congress, and the banks ended up hoarding the money instead of re-animating the credit system, we should think twice before bailing out the incompetent management of Detroit. New York Times columnist David Brooks is right when he says we should allow the Schumpeterian winds of creative destruction to do their work, let the two or three corporations declare bankruptcy, and allow new forces to buy up their assets and retool the factories and workshops for green vehicles, wind mills, solar collectors, and the return of suburban trains and urban street cars to our over-stretched cities. Small cities like Zurich--where I have lived-- with its Swiss punctual system of trains, trolleys, and streetcars, and not L.A.--where I have also lived--are the wave of the future.

Feeling Schumpeter's chill wind at its back, Japan invested in innovation in automotive engineering and has given us the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic. GM ignored the oil crisis of the 70's, and inspired by Papa Bush and his first Gulf War, has given us the Hummer, the Escalade, and the Yukon. Giving GM executives more money will not improve their thinking or imagination. Like the Republican party handlers of a corporate mind-set who convinced McCain to abandon his reputation for straight talk to adopt an advertising campaign based on Joe the Plumber and attacks ads smearing centrist Obama as a terrorist, or even worse, a socialist, these General Motors executives will use the money for advertising their old products as Green and nature-loving. Republicans feel that America should be a corporate oligarchy and that the helots can be made to believe what they want them to through the power of media and advertising: witness, Fox News. The prosecution rests its case.

But this year's election proved that even American stupidity has its limits and that we will not always buy frozen shit-on-a-stick if it is labeled an organic Fudgecicle. Joe the Plumber may have gotten a book deal by his pretending to be something other than a paid plant in the crowd, but by the time his book comes out, it may be as wilted as last month's arugula at Whole Foods.

The people we should bailout are the white and blue color workers who are out of work because of management's incompetence. We should provide them with the funds to go to community colleges and make up for the bad education they had in high school to retool themselves as the new workers for a knowledge economy.

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