#global mess

The link is to a really long story in the Sunday (November 13, 2020) New York Times Magazine. I know there’s a paywall that will block access to the story unless you have a subscription or have purchased the print edition. I read part of this story, and was totally impressed by the introduction, so I’m posting it here for you. It’s a great piece of writing, creating a catalog of all the crap that circulating around all of us these days:

The era we are now in the midst of might be defined, most notably, by the omnipresence of disaster. Plagues, droughts, floods, toxic air and water, wars, massacres, famines, earthquakes, heat waves, wildfires, recessions, dust storms, despotism — slow-motion nightmares are crashing into fast-moving catastrophes, each one amplifying the next.

I live in California’s East Bay, where disaster is a constant threat. In some cities, houses are succumbing to lengthening wildfire seasons, while people living in tents breathe air poisoned by the flames. Seasons of drought are starting to blur into one long era of aridification. Tectonic plates rumble frequently, reminding us that the Hayward fault underneath us is due to cause a major earthquake. Elsewhere, mere weeks after unprecedented heat waves scorched the country this spring, apocalyptic floods began engulfing Pakistan and are ongoing. Tropical hurricanes continue to reshape coastlines in the Gulf of Mexico, their names lingering like ghosts long after their winds have quieted: Katrina, Harvey, Maria. A virulent combination of governmental corruption and the debt traps of the global finance system have contributed heavily to starvation-level food shortages in Sri Lanka. Authoritarian leaders have unleashed mass state violence against protesters in Iran, while far-right extremists clamor violently against democracy in the United States. Disaster is so ubiquitous that the idea of an aftermath has started to lose its meaning. Covid’s brutal, blurry slide from pandemic to endemic is an example that underscores one defining truth of our reality: Our disasters don’t exactly end; they evolve. And if we are to outlast them, so must we.

In one respect, we already have: Knowing that hellish dangers lie around every corner has made us better at anticipating and bracing for them. We can detect the warning signs earlier, and as a global society we’ve improved at mobilizing in response. But the world we knew — where “100-year floods” happened roughly once a century — is ending.

I lead the Headway team at The New York Times, which explores global challenges through the lens of progress. We wanted to understand how people around the world approach rebuilding in this state of continuous disaster. Everywhere we looked, long-simmering crises had reached breaking points: For example, a hurricane that on its own would be an emergency hits a brittle food system misshapen by colonialism, sparking a crisis. These ruptures carry both the threat and possibility of broader transformations. Disasters compress time, and in a world besieged by them, dramatic shifts occur: For planners and architects and officials, whose work typically unfolds over years, disaster recovery requires and enables otherwise-unthinkable haste. For survivors, unfathomable loss creates what the psychologist William James called an “awful discontinuity of past and future.” This essay is part of a special issue of The New York Times Magazine about rebuilding. In creating it, we found ourselves widening the lens, from singular dislocations caused by disaster to the wider possibilities for change that emerge as society seesaws between creeping calamities and sudden shocks.

Part 3 of the loaded dice digs further into the notion of a “free market” and its twin terrorist the “invisible hand”. Both of these concepts are still core to mainstream economic thinking and national government strategies, yet both of these socioeconomic concepts are known to be flawed. It is essentially a viewpoint that suggests the holders of capital to be supreme, able to dictate; influence and direct markets at their whim, whilst at the same time condemn State intervention (unless it requires some form of “bail-out” to be received by “friendlies”), thus the irony of a “free market”. The “invisible hand” nonsense is really where mainstream economic thinkers and academics, as well as powerful corporations, & “Weak, Lazy, Unthinking” Government leadership allow free reign to those predisposed to either having capital, or have access to it. In effect suggesting State, or government involvement be minimal.

 This kind of viewpoints, strategies and actions work against global imperatives of fairness, equality, transparency & governance. Last week we noted that “blaming” the elite or the “1%” is unfair, since each of us still contributes to the current global mess. The loaded dice in this sense refer to what systemic economists call “Banksters”. These are large institutions like Banks, Insurance agencies, Assurance agencies, Ratings agencies, Multi-lateral institutions, etc., that use other people’s money to lend only to the elite, blue-chip types thereby entrenching the skewed developmental trajectory of wealth creation. Greece 2014-2015 is a typical example where a mere 10% of the bailout funds were directly applied in support of the Greek government. Most of the funds were used to bailout “club-members”, be they individuals or corporations, under the rather dumb notion of “too big to fail”. Typical models sure to perpetuate poverty & subjugation of all global citizens. These are the subtleties evident in “games that are rigged” or social systems being played out with a “loaded dice”. Consider now, that we add to the mix, the same mechanistic, control-seeking thinking of large corporations across various sectors, including our global oversight bodies, then the entangled web of systemic oppression should be self-evident.