Abstract
The deepening global crisis demands a fundamental, and rapid, shift in production, consumption, and lifestyles, overturning many decades of human assault on the natural habitat. The world capitalist system, driven by perpetual growth and resource exploitation, has bequeathed a Hobbesian legacy of decay, turbulence, conflict, and violence engulfing every nation and culture. A degraded ecology negates the capacity of humans to build positively and creatively toward the future. In this milieu, elites gravitate toward a variety of cheery scenarios—technological fixes, “market” solutions, “green” alternatives, spiritual renewal—without challenging business-as-usual, holding to the same corporate agendas that produced the crisis. However, at a time when (in Bill McKibben’s words) “nature is finally pushing back,” such hopefulness amounts to sheer delusion: catastrophe can be averted only through the adoption of a new developmental model, a new economics, a new politics.1 The world now faces a stark and imminent choice—radical change or “barbarism.” At present the ruling interests seem perfectly happy to follow their familiar destructive course—ever-expanding accumulation of wealth and power within a corporate system that concedes no limits to economic growth and resource appropriation.
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Notes
Bill McKibbern, Eaarth (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010), p. 101.
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 476–77.
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See Matt Taibbi, “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle,” Rolling Stone (March 4, 2010).
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Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger (New York: New Press, 2002), p. 26.
On the business structure of Big Pharma, see Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, Critical Condition (New York: Doubleday, 2004), ch. 2.
See Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 214–16.
Sidney Wolfe, et al., Worst Pills, Best Pills (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 6.
Quoted in Peter H. Stone, Casino Jack (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010), p. 179.
See Neal Gabler, op-ed piece, Los Angeles Times (December 6, 2010).
See Johann Hari, “The Wrong Kind of Green,” Nation (March 22, 2010).
See Kevin Drum, “Capital City,” Mother Jones (January–February, 2010), p. 50.
Robert Auerbach, Deception and Abuse at the Fed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).
Robert Scheer, The Great American Stickup (New York: Nation Books, 2010).
Frederick Kaufman, “The Food Bubble,” Harper’s (July 2010), p. 34.
Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010), p. 27.
Peter Irons, War Powers (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005), p. 272.
Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007), p. 259.
Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2007), p. 75.
James Bamford, The Shadow Factory (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 304.
Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 56–57.
Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 281.
Ben Bagdikian’s volume is The Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine (New York: Crown Books, 2004), p. 50.
See Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, eds., Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories, 2009) and Censored 2011 (same press, 2010).
Norman Solomon, War Made Easy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005), pp. 110–11.
Sut Jhally, “Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse,” in Paula Rothenberg, ed., Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (New York: Worth, 2010), p. 621.
See Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), p. 138.
Sebastian Jones, “The Media-Lobbying Complex,” Nation (March 1, 2010), pp. 11, 13.
See Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), especially chs. 10, 11.
John Nichols and Robert McChesney, “The Money and Media Election Complex,” Nation (November 29, 2010).
See Ari Berman, “The GOP War on Voting,” Rolling Stone (September 15, 2011).
Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010), pp. 9–10.
See Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 120–22.
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© 2012 Carl Boggs
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Boggs, C. (2012). The Political Impasse. In: Ecology and Revolution. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282262_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282262_3
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