Brenda Rosser 1st January 2009
2008 is over. For many global citizens this year may one day be described as the year of revelation. A full century of environmental and economic abuse along with political intrigue and deceit may have finally come into full view. It seems unlikely that we will continue much longer to accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals and overexploit our natural resources or take senseless and frightening risks with the employment of new technologies. In the world of politics another range of possibilities is apparent. False pretensions and embedded assumptions of national sovereignty and liberal democracy are unlikely to be accepted without serious questioning in western industrialized nations. With the obvious no longer hidden we may not be as easily fooled ever again. This breakdown of assumed ‘norms’ truly represents the end of an era and it’s happening just at the time a positive feedback loop of Arctic warming kicks in to alter the planetary air conditioner of the Northern Hemisphere [1]. Dramatic and unprecedented social and political change portends in the year that Prince Charles warned the world that we had 18 months to stop climate change. [2]
On 10th September last year the Maidstone Crown Court in the UK decided that “the threat of global warming is so great that [environmental] campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station.” Six Greenpeace activists were cleared of charges of criminal damage [3]. Just as three of these British protesters responded to systemic collapse in the ecosphere (by painting Gordon Brown’s name on the British coal plant’s chimney as a metaphor for political accountability) Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve responded to another global crisis with a slightly more concrete metaphor of his own. Helicopter drops of money were used to bail the rich out with increasingly worthless fiat money and on an absolutely extraordinary scale. The surviving handful of Wall Street banks hoarded cash and refused to lend to each other as their four-decades-long global ponzi scheme of money and credit manipulation fell apart [4]. In turn this banking collapse was prompted by the oligopoly dynamics of concentrated economic power in a small number of corporate networks and conglomerates generally[5]. Fictitious capital [6] grew at an ever-increasing rate and fomented unbelievable distortions in what we are told is ‘economic development’ across the globe but is actually a well-managed path designed to generate dependency on the global corporations along with the stronger states that sponsor them.
In 2008 it became clear to many more people that ‘globalisation’ was not a spontaneous result of ‘free market’ dynamics as we had been repeatedly told. Rather it was revealed to be “the deeply political result of political choices made by successive governments of one state: The United States” [8]. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have used overt and covert means to topple democratically-elected governments around the world [7] and to tilt the balance of political and economic advantage unfairly towards North America in other ways [9].
2008 was the year when conventional wisdom became obsolete. It did not allow us to perceive the essential nature of things nor adequately anticipate the consequences of our actions. In 2008 everything became open to question. The ‘pluralism’ of the two-party system was found to be a delusion. There were no safeguards in place to protect against one group gaining too much power over the whole of society nor even the whole of the planet. How obvious it was that the private sector was not balanced by the public one as we saw ‘leaders’ in one national government after another working to a corporate narrow interest agenda. There are bad men on the Earth, after all.”…if nothing happens even though we’re entering an ecological crisis of historic gravity, it’s because those who have power in the world want it to be this way.” [10]
The gift of 2008 is the revelation of important and critical truths. Its legacy is to come to terms with everything.
