“Recovery” is both immoral and doomed to failure
January 19th, 2009 by Jim JustObama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (press release here) contains much that is admirable. But its glaring shortcoming is its failure to take us in new directions. Its unspoken premise is that the current “recession” can be “cured” and that economic growth can and should resume as usual. The very terms we use to describe the economic phenomena “recession” and even “depression” presume that they are temporary episodes along a long-term never-ending curve of exponential growth.
The plan fails to address what Euan Mearns at The Oil Drum: Europe identifies as the heart of the problem that has led to the unprecedented global economic, social, political and environmental imbalance: The U.S. has been living well beyond its means for over 40 years.
A piece by Jerry Silberman at Energy Bulletin titled “What Strategy for a Green Recovery?” contains a cogent critique of the Obama plan, a few points of which follow:
What the Act does [is] primarily deferred maintenance on existing infrastructure and social programs ignored during the Bush years, and clearly many of these upgrades are needed. A look at transportation funding, however, finds 3x as much, $30 billion, for highways compared to $10 billion for transit. Symmetrically, airports get three times as much as Amtrak, although the admitted backlog need is highest for Amtrak. The underlying assumption is that we will not, and should not move away from the primacy of the private automobile. This is underscored by the huge proportion of research and science funding devoted toward developing electric cars. Missing is the arithmetic of energy consumption not only in cars but in an automotive based land use pattern, and an understanding of the realistic potential for renewable electricity.
The plan’s focus on “shovel-ready” projects to get immediate stimulative impact ensures that most of the money will go to roads and that none will go to the top-to-bottom rebuilding of our rail infrastructure that is needed to make any real difference. We’ve been planning nothing but roads for decades – of course we don’t have shovel-ready alternatives. As Alex Steffen says, regarding transportation: when it comes to greening the stimulus, we’re not only missing the forest for the trees, we’re not even seeing the trees right.
Back to Silberman:
Speaking of energy, the press release does not define renewables, but we know that “second generation” agrifuels are high on the list, and Obama is pushing for increased ethanol, despite the rapidly growing global consensus that any generation of agrifuels is a disaster on several levels. The logic is very simple – since these fuels at best have a dramatically lower net energy than fossil fuels, and growing them will accelerate the destruction of fertile land, because all the nutrients are removed, not to mention the natural ecosystems destroyed, they cannot meet the need. . .
By continuing to fund the chimera of fusion power [and "clean coal" - ed.], the report underscores what it says, in fact very directly: “the next great discovery” is needed to bail us out. This is a classic example of expecting to solve problems using the same ways of thinking which created them. What is really being pursued, or hoped for, is a perpetual motion machine. It’s not there. . .
Over $120 billion is devoted to health care, as supplemental funding for Medicaid, with $30 billion in subsidies to laid off workers to pay their COBRA….in other words, to pay private insurance companies. For that much money, we could establish Medicare for All national health, (HR 676) and put many more billions back in the pockets of workers, and the coffers of state and local governments, and make a real contribution to economic recovery.
Silberman concludes that “recovery” plan whose goal is a return to business-as-usual is doomed to failure:
The most unconscious and fundamental premise of this bill is that within a short time, the US economy will “recover” – new jobs, more cars, increased housing starts, and more energy consumption, albeit with some portion from “renewables”. This is the fundamental premise, and it’s a premise which guarantees its failure.
Sharon Astyk frames it as a moral issue in a most powerful and moving open letter – “Not Advice, but a Warning” – to the incoming president:
[Y]ou stand in Lincoln’s shoes today, having embarked on a project whose price is far too high, and whose moral legitimacy is questionable at best. You’ve decided your job is to save the economy, and to restore the American people to prosperity. . . But that way lies tyranny, and moral failure. To do so represents the tyranny of the present over their posterity – the extraction of resources that will be urgently needed by your daughters and my sons and their children. The direction you’ve taken, which involves salvaging the failed industrial and financial projects of the rich, rather than serving the poorest, represents tyranny as well . . .
It is also impossible to accomplish – you will not restore us to what we were at any time in the recent present, because even then, we were not as we seemed – that is, virtually all the accumulated wealth of the last decade and more that actually percolated down to ordinary people was illusory, debt-based, and based on false assumptions. And all the wealth of the last few decades has been based on a rapidly declining natural resource base that is now not merely depleted, but emptying. You will not restore us to past versions of our prosperity, nor can you carry the moral water of the preservation of the future on the backs of a false and tyrannical promise.
Astyk has it exactly right: a return to what has been considered normal is neither possible nor morally defensible.