Sacramento, California: The Audacity of Homelessneess

Yesterday, the Sacramento Bee reporter, Ed Fletcher, described the forced eviction of a number of homeless people who were living in tents they called home along the American River: "Homeless forced out along river."  There were 150 people living there before Sacramento police removed them under threat of arrest.  The camp had been supported by the advocacy group Safe Ground Sacramento,  http://www.safegroundsac.org/.  Sacramento city officials said that the removal was necessary in order to protect the environment along the American River Bike Trail as well as to appease property owners.  Moreover, the decampment served to enforce, evenly, the City of Sacramento's strict anti-camping ordinance.   One homeless person who identified himself as "Brother Eli", was arrested when he refused to leave compliantly.  He reported that God had told him to live in the camp and added that he did not know where he was going to go.  He had been a carpenter.  He lost his house several years ago, and since then, has had no space or place of his own.  Brother Eli's  dispossession highlights the thin line that separates the category "property owner" from "homeless person." 

Three things are clear from the Sacramento Bee narrative.  First, homeless people are viewed as a threat to the environment.  Secondly, property rights trump human rights.  And finally, law is instituted to protect the propertied from the property-less.  A corollary to this is: The police are there to prevent the homeless from becoming a visible reminder of one of the many contradictions inherent within the mode of capitalist accumulation. Thus, the police are assigned the task of removing this visible impediment to our ability to believe that the market economy is democratic and just.

Why are there homeless people in our State capital?  The capitalist narrative informs us that we will always have the homeless with us and, of course, it will always be their fault.  Marx called the unemployed, "the industrial reserve army." They are there to remind those who have applied successfully to a job creator for the privilege of selling their labor power that they too can become homeless.  However, this year the suffering has become even worse. For the first time in memory, the City of Sacramento eliminated the funding of $700,000 or more that had been slated for winter shelters.  The trickle-down economics from the Wall Street melt down is now reaching the most vulnerable people.  While profits are up, the homeless are down and out in the cold.  Presumably this is their contribution to the "recovery."  But even more sinister is the ruling ideology of personal responsibility.  Or, as summarized by former Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, "If you don't have a job and you are not rich, it's your fault."  Blame the victim and remove them from sight.

The Truth of Green Technology: Conservatives are Dead On

I just read an article in the Nation by Naomi Cline.  We had the distinction of being arrested on the same day at the Keystone XL Pipeline action at the White House this summer.  The article points out, among other things, that conservatives actually have a more realistic view of the coming fossil fuel collapse than do we environmentalists. We have tended to dwell in a world of denial that features living a personal green life style of recycling, installing energy efficient light bulbs and bringing our own bags to the super market.  These little adjustments, to an otherwise energy intensive life style, have always given a modicum of relief from the reality we have been escaping.  For example, I could tell myself, "See.  We're really saving the planet."  Unfortunately we're not.  We're destroying it.  Some of us cling to the fantasy that a newly discovered energy source will be made available through our science and technology.  My sister-in-law,for example, paves the bumpy road of diminishing fossil fuel with the hope that some scientist somewhere will find the answer to perpetual green energy and our culture of consumption will be able then to move on to new glories. 

The conservatives, most notably, the "drill baby drill" crowd are dead on.  The planet has run out of easily accessible fossil fuels.  The remaining supplies are more difficult and expensive to extract.  Irrespective of any meaningful time frame, we are running out and our economy will collapse no matter what we do.  But, to make things worse, if that were possible, the extractive practices now being employed to extend our destructive carbon economy for a few more years, such as deep water drilling and tar sands mining for oil, mountain top removal for coal, and horizontal hydraulic fracking for natural gas, are inflicting irreparable damage on our environment, our life support system.  These desperate extractive practices are called "extreme energy" for a reason. The worst news, however, is that by burning these fossil fuels to get that last gasp of energy, we may be hastening our own literal last gasp.  Let's face it.  If we continue to burn fossil fuels at there current rate, it will spell the end of any climate compatible with life as we know it on earth.  We are losing 200 species per day.  This is planet death.

The civilization we are living in presently and the capitalist economy that has allowed developed nations such as ours to enjoy cars, planes and all manor or power devices that make our lives easier, is about to end.  No matter what we do, it is ending.  Fossil fuels in the form of oil, natural gas and coal, are in finite supply on on our shrinking little blue ball.  These energy sources are the most powerful concentrations of pure energy that we have.  There is no alternative that we can turn to for relief.  I repeat: Our whole economy depends upon them.  There is no such thing as green energy.

I'm writing these thoughts right now while sitting  at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento where my partner of twenty-one years is recovering from a complex surgery.  It was a life saving procedure.  However, in order to get here we had to drive over two-hundred miles down the Interstate 5 freeway that runs the length of the west coast of the US.  The medical center itself in checker boarded with parking lots, massive garages and a network of connecting roads.  The entire complex is designed around the automobile.  And I can visualize a time coming ... no cars.

Moreover, the buildings that comprise the massive medical complex are fed by electrical power and heating centrally delivered from a sub-complex known as Plant Services.  When I walk to the Kiwanis Family House past this hub of energy distribution with its steaming cauldrons wafting vapors into the evening sky, I am struck by a feeling of tentativeness.  It's the same feeling I get toward the end fall, before the first few snow flakes sprinkle the forest with sparkles.  The daylight changes and the shadows lengthen.  It is a feeling like "this is going to end." 
We have a choice.  What we don't have is time.  We must pull the plug on the carbon culture now.  By any means possible.  It is going to end one way or another.  It will be an end that ends us or it will be a controlled end that allows for life to continue and sustainable cultures to thrive once again.  Every place on earth where civilization and capitalism have invaded, sustainable cultures that have endured millenia are obliterated for the privileged entitlement of the capitalistic monster.  The climate is capitalism's greatest market failure.  The cost of polluting does not appear in the ledgers or the bottom lines.  The cost of environmental degradation is considered an external.  The cost is being factored in by the relentless consistency of planetary physics.

UN Climate Change Talks in Durban, South Africa

Beginning last week and continuing through this Friday, the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa are being held.  http://www.cop17-cmp7durban.com/.  Ostensibly, the purpose for the Conference of Parties, known also as "COP 17", is to address global warming caused by emissions of CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels.   In reality the Conference of Parties delegates are meeting among themselves, with themselves, and by themselves. Science is being ignored, despite the overwhelming evidence compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/.  These representatives of the 1% are merely staging this event that they would have us believe is an earnest effort to solve the climate crisis.  However, in reality they are seeking creative ways in which they can manipulate markets with off sets, or whatever, in order to continue unabated fossil fuel extraction and burning.  Meanwhile, outside, in the streets of Durban, being ignored by the ruling elites, are the climate conscious citizens of the planet.  They are busy organizing and planning for actions to counter the inaction by the Conference of Parties.  The governments of the world are being held hostage by the fossil fuel industry.  The money involved is in the trillions.  On the other side of the scale the earth's atmosphere is in the balance.  It is near the oft-mentioned tipping point.  It cannot continue to absorb CO2.  We have altered the atmosphere of the planet to such a degree that it will take millions of years for it to return to the stable state in which human civilization evolved. Meanwhile, the US media, conveying  the ideology of the ruling elites, has devoted only slight attention to the Durban conference, relaying the impression that climate change is a trivial matter.  The greatest of all capitalist market failures is the climate.  Costs related to climate and pollution are externalized and not recorded in balance sheets or in stock holders' meetings.  The US delegate, Todd Stern is shamelessly denying the truth that it is the United States that is sabotaging the the entire process and seeking to delay any significant reductions in CO2 emissions until 2020.  The science says that we will be 2 degrees Celsius warmer by then.

We don't have much time.  The collapse of the fossil fuel economy has already begun.  Fewer people are driving, teenagers are finding it impossible to afford the luxury of individual transportation.  Ironically, the high speed rail system approved by voters in California just three years ago, is now threatened by voter turn around.  This is exactly the wrong time to abandon alternative transportation systems that have the potential of reducing automobile use.  By listening to the ruling elites representing themselves at the "Conference of Polluters", one would be prompted to believe that they are not living on the same planet as we.  It is time to bring down the carbon economy while we still have a climate that resembles the one in which all life on earth evolved. 



I just read a great piece by Noami Cline in the November 28th edition of The Nation.  We shared the privilege of being arrested on the same day at the White House during the Keystone XL Pipeline action this summer.  She points out that climate deniers, so called, have a more realistic view of what the end of the carbon economy will look like.  And it is sobering for them.  The climate change deniers are not comforted by the false viewpoint that our world economy will experience a soft landing if we move gradually and painlessly toward renewable energy options, toward sustainable culture.  All cultures encountered by Western European colonialism were originally sustainable.  Capitalism must destroy sustainability.  Capitalism by its very nature is not sustainable; it is always reaching beyond itself toward what it presumes to be inexhaustible planetary resources.  In order for us to survive as a planet, let alone as a species, we must face the reality that fossil fuel based energy sources contain concentrations of power that will never be available to us through alternative means.  These reserves are being depleted and energy companies are stretching technology and bludgeoning the earth to extract what remains ... extreme energy.  This is "fracking", to extract natural gas from shale, deep water drilling, tar sands mining ... basically the destruction of the earth in order to keep the fossil fuel economy grinding on.  The point is that if we continue to burn this stuff, life for those who survive on earth will be impossible.

In Durban, South Africa this week the 1% are doing nothing to prevent catastrophe.  It is up to us, the citizens of the planet, to stop them.  We must occupy, act and stop the madness.  Explore the Deep Green Resistance, a strategy to save the planet.  http://deepgreenresistance.org/