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Fig. 1 Planet Earth (NASA)

Every educated person on the planet has heard about the threats to human existence imposed by Global Warming. Yet, few of us are knowledgeable enough to explain the basic mechanisms that determine our climate, especially when talking to those among whom are doubting members of the choir. Understanding the essential elements of Global Warming requires effort and an intellectual expenditure, but you can converse intelligently on the subject, while stopping short of explaining the situation on the basis of a thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. Besides, the earth’s climate has never truly been in any form of equilibrium–some positive or negative driving force or energy imbalance has always been trying to change our climate, though, until now, such changes have taken place over millenia, not over the two hundred plus years of the industrial revolution.  Our climate has always been changing, even though the time constants for change are way beyond a human lifetime, and lie properly scaled and recorded within the geological and paleoclimatological record, which gives up its secrets slowly. But once properly deciphered that record reveals a surprisingly coherent history for those willing to put the effort into interpreting the scrolls, or to be more accurate, deciphering the core drillings of oceans and glaciers. Of course, we don’t yet have a complete story. There are large gaps in our knowledge, but we know enough already to be mesmerized by our planetary history and the forces that have shaped our climate. And we should know enough to be alarmed and very wary about our future.

It is now clear that never before in our climate history have we witnessed the kind of experiment now underway–the forcing of our planet to go through something it has never experienced before–a sharp, man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that is now taking place and pushing us towards a climatological precipice that we might not be able to escape. But if we act quickly, this experiment is still under our control, depending on whether we can muster the political will to curb our use of fossil fuels and restore energy balance to keep the planet as it was, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (ppm) or less ; it is now at 387 ppm and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The alternative is that we run the risk of higher levels of carbon dioxide that will trigger the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps and eventually raise our sea level by 270 feet! We are probably not at risk for a sea level increase of that magnitude during this century, but we do run the risk of having this kind of sea level rise take place, and once it starts, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Not only will this massive ice melting proceed out of our control, it will cool the local regions where the melting takes place, impact our weather systems and change the driving forces for oceanic currents. The emergency we must address now has been created by the fact that the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere has a very long half-life and its actions on our planet will be with us for a  very long time. Couple this reality to the fact that we are already seeing weather patterns that reflect Global Warming and you inescapably conclude that our short-term climate does not look good–it will inescapably be more violent. But, we can still do something for the long-term, by acting soon and now is not too early. There is little doubt that if we continue to burn fossil fuels through a business-as-usual mode, our planet will be markedly different and our planetary future will be seriously in doubt. In many ways, that’s the shock–not only that the climate is never in equilibrium, but that it is also super-sensitive to the very fuels we have chosen as our cheapest form of energy. For too long we have assumed constancy in our climate lives: that luxury has now gone, at least the assumption part of it.

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Hubert H. Humphrey 1911-1978

We were overwhelmed  with news that this year is the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, but we heard nothing about Hubert Humphrey, whose birth has also reached the centennial mark this year. But Rick Perlstein, writing in the New York Times OP-ED section today has not forgotten him and his remarks remind us how much better off we would be as a country today if we had elected him as President in 1968 and adhered to his plans for the nation.  Humphrey was a historic labor figure here in Minnesota, before he became a national figure, as he played a major role in forming the Democratic Farm Labor party (DFL), which remains as the prominent Democratic party in Minnesota today. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1948, Humphrey led the Minnesota delegation to the Democratic National Convention. His insistence on a platform favoring a civil rights issue, led to threats from the segregationists that they would walk out if the platform was approved. No one would have blamed Humphrey if he dropped the issue for the sake of party harmony, but Humphrey bounded onto the floor and gave one of the greatest speeches in political history when he said “To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” The motion carried, the Southerners walked out and ran Strom Thurmond for President and Harry Truman eventually won the election, as Hubert Humphrey helped to shape the Democratic Party into the party for civil rights. It was Hubert Humphrey, known as the “happy warrior,” who proved instrumental in getting civil rights legislation passed, through his political skills and tireless energy in the 1960s. Contrast Humphrey’s actions with those of the Republican Party who used the civil rights legislation to successfully recruit southerners into the Republican Party. The segregationist south merely switched parties, and they remain an obstacle today for any progressive legislation.
It was tragic that Humphrey lost to Nixon in the 1968 Presidential race, but Humphrey was scarred by the Vietnam War and the divisive Democratic Convention in Chicago of that year. Humphrey hated the war, but running for the Presidency in 1968, he was tethered to Johnson who insisted throughout most of the election that Humphrey needed to adhere to the Johnson war policies, or face his (Johnson’s) efforts to deny his candidacy important sources of campaign revenue. More than half of the U.S. soldier deaths in Vietnam took place after Nixon was elected. But later, at a time when the Democrats began to think in terms of affirmative action, it was Humphrey’s contention that too many jobs were disappearing in America and that affirmative action could only be effective if job opportunities were broadly available. In 1976, now fighting as a Senator, Humphrey and Hawkins, a Democrat from Los Angeles, introduced a bill requiring the Federal Government to keep the unemployment below 3 percent and if it fell below that number, the government had to supply emergency jobs to the unemployed. At that time, not only did the New York Times endorse the bill, but 70% of Americans supported it and believed it was an appropriate function of the Federal Government. This, at a time, mind you that the country was just four years away from their first dose of Reaganomics. How times have changed.
Both Carter and Clinton, two southern Democrats, lost sight of the New Deal, whose torch Humphrey had carried forward for many decades. In his 1978 State of the Union Address, Carter said that “government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure our literacy or provide energy.” By spelling out what government couldn’t do, Carter in many ways was admitting that maybe it was already doing too much and this attitude helped to infuse Reagan’s policy that “government was part of the problem.” This Republican Mantra carries over still today despite the overwhelming evidence that government does many things better and for less cost than private companies. Our healthcare costs today have been driven higher by the for-profit healthcare industry than any other single factor.

When Hubert Humphrey died of cancer in January 1978, the last courageous warrior for the New Deal was gone, though Ted Kennedy carried on in a climate that was increasingly hostile to government.  What we encountered after that was deregulation, elimination of manufacturing jobs, the financialization of America and the increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor and the stagnation of Middle Class incomes.  Under the overdose of too much Republican rule, our government is no longer viewed as an instrument of wealth redistribution, one of its main functions under the philosophy of the New Deal. Today we have a Republican Party that has been so ideologized, that they believe all government involvement has been a mistake–let private enterprise do it instead. In other words, the Republican party of today would prefer that we have no Erie Canal (supported by New York State, which created Buffalo New York and allowed New York City to develop into America’s greatest shipping port), no transcontinental railway (accomplished with government investment under Lincoln), no Social Security System (FDR), no interstate highway system (Eisenhower), no civil rights legislation (Johnson), no Medicare or Medicaid (Johnson) and no national healthcare patchwork system (Obama): in fact they are trying very hard to undo the last item on the list.  Imagine the country that might have been if Humphrey had been elected in 1968. First, he wanted very badly to end the Vietnam War, so that tragic war would have ended without the inhumane bombing strategy that Nixon and Kissinger brought to the table.  Second, Humphrey wanted to insure that America would be a strong source of manufacturing employment and wealth and he would have strongly opposed many of the deregulatory changes that led to our current economic collapse. So, if we have to endure an unending level of praise for a president (Reagan) whose actions led to the destruction of a government that once aspired to be fair, and whose actions led to a complete  ruination of  the concept of public service, let’s at least remember someone who held public service as an act of the highest possible esteem and lived his life as an exemplary model of a public servant. In Minnesota, after eight long years of Governor Tim Palenty, now a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, we can see in Minnesota the disastrous ruination of a state that was once proud to live and foster the standards that led to Humphrey’s political career. Today, in light of what we see all around us, what wouldn’t we do to let history roll the dice again, beginning with the election of 1968? I confess that I was very strongly against Humphrey in the election of 1968, though I voted for him because of the odious nature of his opponent. To me, Humphrey was too obligated to Johnson’s war policy, which at the time was all that mattered. But, in retrospect, one can now realize that the outcome of the 1968 election began to seal the future of America as it tilted towards social and political disintegration.

For those of you more interested in Humphrey’s life and political impact, there is an excellent two-hour documentary “Hubert H. Humphrey: The Art of the Possible” available and you can go here for general information on the film as well as a more complete description of his life and its impact. A truly remarkable public servant and a model for all who aspire to public service as a tool for social good, not as a tool for destroying government functions.

RFM

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Tahrir Square, 2/11/2011 (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

One-half of the Cold War ended dramatically when Mikhail Gorbachev let the Soviet Union disintegrate as he looked for peaceful alliances and a soft landing. But, the other half of the Cold War, our half, kept on going. America was unprepared for unilateral Soviet withdrawal from the Cold War. Russia was such a nice, easy enemy. But when they collapsed, we needed the Cold War to continue–it was our excuse for maintaining our hegemony over what we called “the free world.” The CIA had missed the clues of Soviet decline, despite the fact that signs of Soviet collapse had been present all along. Russia was a “superpower” in name only, granted by her huge nuclear arsenal. On the other hand, that was good enough for government work. The Soviets were a wonderful enemy to have: we simply don’t have enemies like that anymore. They were easy to deal with and easy to identify, as they all wore over-sized top coats.  We got used to enemies who don’t like democracy and when confronted with that possibility among our adversaries, we didn’t know whether to kiss them or throw stones. But, the Soviets were perfect for us; in fact we helped create and shape them into what we needed. They allowed us to build an unimaginable arsenal of weapons, as they responded in kind and they also occasionally invaded a Soviet block, whenever their citizens tried to reverse the boundaries created by WW II, thinking of course that we would support the revolutionaries looking for democracy and rejoining Europe. Think again–we were not for freedom and democracy, but rather dominance and stability.  The good thing about the Cold War was that, when it ended, when the Soviet Union threw in the towel, the borders were exactly the same as they had been at the close of WW II, with a divided Germany and a group of Eastern European buffer states that the Red Army had moved through on their way to defeat Hitler in Berlin. But the Cold War was not without very heavy costs. Not only did America keep remaking itself into an increasingly more militaristic country, but millions of lives were lost along the way, as America pursued wars in Korea and Vietnam, thinking at the time that we were fighting Russian expansionism. When huge enemy weapons caches were discovered during the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson assumed they would turn out to be made in the Soviet Union and provide proof of his belief that he was standing up to Soviet communism and aggression. So, he was surprised to learn that in fact those weapons were made in the USA–all stolen from arms shipments we sent to our soldiers and surrogates in Vietnam. Our enemies in Vietnam were number one, ourselves, and number two, a country of peasants that wanted to have a unified nation while formed by breaking the bonds of colonialism–pretty much the end of the story.

Many Americans mistakenly believed that, once the Cold War was over, we would get a big “peace dividend” because we didn’t have enemies anymore. Without enemies, what’s the point of having such a big military? Besides, the Pentagon was built during WW II and fabricated with non-reinforced concrete, because it was supposed to be torn down at the end of the war. So, why not tear it down now, forty five years later and save ourselves huge costs. Why not a peace dividend? After all, we are an island nation without natural enemies on either border, so why do we need a global defense structure? At least that’s what a few people thought. But the notion of a peace dividend was profoundly mistaken and naive. The purpose of the Cold War was to establish American hegemony, through a confrontation that we started with the Soviets only weeks after FDR died when Truman assumed leadership of the country. The end of the Cold War meant that, until we could find some new enemies, we would have to be the emperor with no clothes. The truth had to come out of course and those Americans who wanted to believe that we fought the Cold War to defend our liberties and freedoms and prevent tyranny by the Russians, needed to have their own political party to continue on with such beliefs and eventually, God granted that they should have the Tea Party. And so, they assembled under the fig leaf of hypocrisy and created a domestic enemy in the form of illegal and legal immigrants. As far as the foreign enemy is concerned, no need to worry. GW Bush was able to provide that with Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars and new enemies (we have never defined the enemy in Iraq, because we didn’t have one–that war was created by our lust for controlling more oil). Both of those wars are now much longer than WW II and there is no real indication that either one of them will soon be over. We may be thrown out of Iraq, but, if so, what are all those big bases and diplomatic offices we built there going to be used for. The drive for American hegemony continued unabated when the Cold War ended. In fact we had new opportunities. For example now that the Soviets were no longer our enemies, we could hegemonize them and their new surrounding states. And, we did, as we helped to setup a plutocracy that bought, but mostly sold, the assets of that country and acquired a whole new set of enemies among the Russian population.  The only requirement for continued American dominance was that the real motivation behind our quest had to be shielded from the American public or we couldn’t become the new Rome. Americans didn’t want to hear that the first Gulf War was all about oil, so one had to float the idea that Saddam was committing acts of atrocity in Kuwait, by throwing babies out of their incubators. In the process of our continued march towards complete hegemony of the world, we divided it up into sectors, each assigned to a specific geographical command structure within our military, including (from Wikipedia)

• United States Army Central headquartered at Fort McPherson, Georgia
• United States Army North headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas
• United States Army South headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas
• United States Army Europe headquartered at Campbell Barracks, Germany
• United States Army Pacific headquartered at Fort Shafter, Hawaii (eventually to be merged with the Eighth Army).
• United States Army Africa headquartered at Vicenza, Italy

In the process, we created a global distribution of military bases that numbered more than 700, but that astronomical number includes only those for which we were willing to admit. The real number is classified.

There are many observers of the American scene who believe that, with the public revolutions taking place in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan, American hegemony is disintegrating before our eyes and we are unequipped for alternative strategies. A few weeks ago, when Egypt erupted, stocks connected to Saudi Arabia dropped and if something similar to what is going on in Egypt, should migrate to that country, which still has the single largest source of oil,  the American empire would suddenly be one without any clothes again. Nudity is unbecoming to a member of the Tea Party. Now that an entirely new era has started for the Egyptian people, the rest of the world stands in awe of their achievements and shares in the belief that no matter what the future holds, the Middle East will never be the same again and America’s role is being shaped by new forces that it cannot control, but needs instead to find a place on the right side of the conflict. Freedom and democracy are supposed to be in our DNA, but remnants of those feelings are hard to find after seventy-five years of militarism.

Tom Englehardt is a keen observer of American hegemony and Cold War history; he comes from an academic career in journalism and teaches at the School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He often writes on his own blog, TomDispatch, and a few days ago wrote an article entitled “Pox Americana“ in which he dissects how the false choices of American dominance led us into so many failures that we cannot reconcile, yet we continue to commit the same kinds of errors, somewhat like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day“: you get up and repeat the same experiences every day, because you don’t know how to do otherwise.  It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic and if it weren’t so costly to Americans and the people of the countries we have insisted on dominating. Is it all coming to an end now and if so, will it be possible for Americans to recognize how the revolutionary events of today in the Middle East are going to impact on us tomorrow? These next few years will perhaps be the most critical years for our future and the future of the planet. Will we be teacher who learns while teaching or a student who teaches without learning? We can’t do both and where was there room for military action in Tahrir Square?

RFM

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