Winners Take Everything

 I really should read some definitive works on what we know about the "Bread and Circuses" period of the Roman Empire. According to Wikipedia, 

"It is attributed to Juvenal (Satires, Satire X), a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century AD, and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts. In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace,^[1] by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal originally used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns.^[2][3][4] The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses"  

On fall Saturdays and Sundays in contemporary America, the major circus is American football - either or both NCAA games or NFL ones. But change the calendar a bit and it could be baseball, basketball, or ice hockey. Team sports are particularly the biggest attention grabbers. And yes, I understand the desire to distract ourselves from the mundane or spiritless elements of contemporary lives by being spectators of team sports. As a youth I was hooked on following team sports and playing a few in my neighborhood and schools. Even today at 75 I've been playing competitive softball. So I'm not against team sports as a fun and potentially positive force on us as individuals.

But there are some larger issues of growing concern that are rarely discussed or considered. This is the focus of this brief post. 25 years ago, since I felt there were legitimate concerns that were not being considered or discussed, I wrote in a professional library journal about "Beneath the Surface: The Unintended Consequences of Information Technology". In that context my concerns were with the following:

• Speed
• Info glut
• Cultural amplification
• Alienation and demise of community
• Status
  

With our mesmerization with team sports my concerns are: 

• Increasing commercialization of sports
• Demonization of opponents
• Sole focus on winning
• Solidification of competition as the dominant human driver
• Incredible sums given to some individuals
  
• How all of these are in conflict with the our role as a species in the community of life
  

I happened on a college football game yesterday and saw the violence inflicted on the human body and of course a recent death of a college football player from the affects of a game. There is a celebration of war in the air, where vanquishing the enemy at any cost is an elixir inhaled by players and fans alike. We line up and call our fellow competitors, foes. The frenzy of the mostly white fans, especially the young males, is palpable. Since the cost of tickets is ridiculously high, only middle and upper classes can afford to attend. The enormous sums now going to certain individual athletes, not to mention team owners, is absurd and a driving factor for the increase in ticket prices. Just tune into any of the professional leagues on broadcast tv and note the absence of people of color in the stands as opposed to the participants in the game.

The bleeding of this ethos, that winning is everything, has seeped into the politics of our time. The new administration coming to Washington in a matter of weeks is loaded with the economic winners worth more than $340 BILLION. That's not million, it's BILLIONS or 340,000 millions. The wealth of billionaires already a staggering amount a decade ago has more than doubled since then. This is the outcome you get when you follow the mantra that winning is everything. 

Of course the other side of the coin are the losers. All the rest of us are losers, especially the young and yet to be born who will have to cope with a wounded planet no longer the relatively stable one for human life it has been since we became an upright species.  Given that the rich are responsible for burning grossly more fossil fuels, that destabilizes the climate and ecology that provides us life support, it just adds more proof to the failures of winning is everything.

Now that the winners have purchased control of government here and are preparing to lock-in that control while increasing their personal winnings, the road back to sanity that nurtures and  supports an ethos of cooperation, compassion, and conservation must be our response. Let me leave just one example of what committed cooperative efforts can inspire. 

 Ridwell is a waste reduction business now operating in seven major metropolitan areas - Seattle, Portland, Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Bay area,and Minneapolis-St. Paul. It is now a certified B Corporation but it started out as a neighborhood effort in Seattle

 

"It all started with a son, a dad, and a bag of batteries…

Ryan knew that batteries had chemicals in them so began researching where in Seattle to dispose of them. This was not an easy task. Locations start and stop accepting batteries and it wasn’t until Ryan’s third call that he found a safe destination.

Thinking that neighbors might also have dead batteries, Ryan decided to see if he could take others along the way: a recycling carpool.

Owen was thrilled. He and Ryan started scrounging around their house for other things they could recycle: light bulbs, electronics, clothes hangers, Styrofoam, plastic bags, clothing, and even Halloween candy!

Each time, Ryan and Owen would tell their neighbors so they could also save their stuff from landfills. Pickups got bigger and bigger and eventually word spread beyond Ryan and Owen’s neighborhood.

Soon, the demand was too high to be handled by just a dad and his six year old. Aliya, Justin, and David jumped in to help with pickups, donations, and spreading the word around town.

Still, demand continued to grow and we decided that there just might be enough people who shared our vision of the future. And so we founded Ridwell, a solution you can always count on to get rid of things the right way."

This is the type of win-win-we-all-win approach that is needed.

 

You can read more about this and other efforts in the Pultizer Prize winning author Edward Hume's new book, Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World.

Just in the past 24 hours I've learned about  two distinctive approaches to building a sustainable future that seem worth delving into. In both tone and depth they appear to be particularly useful for our time. The invoke the spirit of cooperation. Maybe one or both of them will fuel something useful to you.

Rock Creek Institute https://rockcreekinstitute.org/

Berggreun Institute  https://berggruen.org/

 

 

Lost in the Turbulence

 

I want to address a cultural flaw that, in my opinion, underlies our human predicament.

We consume too much. The planet cannot provide everyone on this spinning sphere with the oversized appetites for things that we Americans and many other citizens of the developed world feed. We keep buying more: bigger homes, bigger vehicles, more recreational toys. People, even some environmentalists, believe we just need to replace fossil fuel energy with renewable sources, be it solar or wind. In this view, as long as the power is fossil-free we can continue to consume as we did before without guilt or serious impacts. But remember, those energy forms, too, require resources mined and manufactured, sometimes creating their own hazards in someone else’s backyard, far from our field of vision. This does not even factor in what it is like to do the necessary work along the supply chain to create, assemble or install that which we consume.

As consumers we have responsibilities that we too easily shrug off. That is not to say that the producers do not also have responsibilities for that which they produce. They should in fact take more responsibility, which I will get to shortly. As a longtime volunteer in community recycling programs, we are always gratified that people take the little bit of effort to recycle some of their discards rather than bury them in a landfill. That is a key decision point. Single-stream recycling makes this easy on the resident, as opposed to separating the glass from the metal and plastic and paper. But not sorting it also pushes that work on to someone else. And if you have ever visited a materials recovery facility (MRF), you might be repulsed at the prospect of working there 40 hours a week, at low wages and limited, if any benefits. It is bad enough as only a monthly volunteer at a source-separated site, given many residents’ reluctance to simply rinse an item before throwing it in the mix. Yuck!! ,

As consumers, not only do we need to consume less, but we need to push back on producers to reduce their impacts, both in the production of the product itself and the packaging that we are left to find a home for. Consumer goods should be designed and made to be either repairable for reuse or at least disassembled so that the materials can be easily added to the production supply chain. Better yet, make the producer take the product back at the end of its life and support the reclamation of the packaging they use. That will require that we salvage all that we can and get it into the hands of the nearest responsible manufacturer. Doing so will greatly reduce the amount of energy consumed, whether fossil or renewable based, as well as the demand for mining new materials and the production of additional potentially hazardous waste.

My colleague, Dr. Rex LaMore, proposed some years back, that builders and developers should be required to put money in an escrow account to cover future deconstruction of any building they construct when it reaches its useful end of life. Think of the total embodied energy and materials that went into building a Walmart, Kmart, or Sears store that finally closes shop. What does a community do with that building and the huge concrete or asphalt parking area?

To close this loop—“circular economy” is the new catchphrase--we need to use less. But when we buy we should buy more used and reconditioned products and those with recycled content. To keep the loop sustainable, items being recycled must be clean and sorted to minimize the contamination that hinders reutilization of salvaged materials. This is a responsibility for consumers, especially here in the developed world where we have the biggest ecological footprints. The outrageous and increasing income inequality on this finite and fragile planet demands our attention to this. July 29, 2021 is this year’s overshoot day – a day by which the human family has “exhausted nature’s budget for the year.”

Once upon a time there was a simple technology called a broom or a mop. It was a simple construction of renewable materials. We used these to clean our homes. The vacuum cleaner was invented for the new carpets with longer fibers for which a broom or mop was less effective. The vacuums needed electricity to work (while there were non-electric sweepers like those made by Bissel, once shag carpeting appeared even those were not effective). These vacuum machines are made up of all types of different materials– metal, various plastic resins, electronics, wire, etc.--and aren’t always easy to disassemble. They were probably produced half a world away before arriving at Target or Best Buy and making their way into our closets at home.

Vacuums are simple technologies; I’ve repaired a few myself (that’s how simple they are!). You can even buy new parts like the rubber belts that eventually wear out, if you keep the same machine for a decade or more. But how about that desktop printer? Sure, you have to buy ink cartridges. But once it starts acting up, you’re likely to buy a new one as almost no one repairs them, parts are not readily available, and new ones are relatively inexpensive, at least cheaper than many repairs. But even here we can lessen our footprint by refilling the ink jet cartridges rather than buying new ones.

But the larger systems push back against this. When something breaks our tendency is to just get a new one.  It is more “cost efficient” to just replace old with new. Sometimes the immediate cost is cheaper, but environmentally it’s not. It’s the same with accidents. When a car is “totaled” it simply means the financial cost to repair it is more than the resale value of the car. But the environmental cost of producing a new car, or a new roof, or a new anything is almost always higher, because the extra energy and mining and manufacturing of new materials, but it’s externalized. Even the insurance system reinforces this because they only look at out-of-pocket expenses, so why repair a few damaged parts when it costs as much to replace the whole dang thing? And we accept it, because we are hooked into thinking of “out-of-pocket” costs as the primary test. I suffer from it too, even as I decry its impact.

Another underlying force we should push back on is the distinction between “wants” and “needs.” The advertising industry works on sparking the “wants” and then pushing that to a “need” level. Perhaps if we asked ourselves a question like the following before we jump down the consumer rabbit hole we might pause: “If I don’t buy this item now, in ten years will I have felt my life was diminished?” If our lives are that connected with things as opposed to experiences and relationships, will we really find true fulfillment and meaning? If we look at our brethren in the developing world, what would we be willing to reduce so that they might have a little more security? Could we lower the thermostat one or two degrees in the winter and raise it one or two in the summer? Would we pay a little more to keep local responsible businesses thriving in our communities? Might we turn off lights when we aren’t using them? Will we pay a bit more to support responsible businesses, which endeavor to lighten their impacts and share with their workers and local communities?

As the world community comes together this November under the umbrella of the United Nations Climate Summit, we owe it to these neighbors who suffer as a result of our own energy and resource consumption to make some commitment to fairness and justice. Perhaps we can begin to look inside ourselves to see what we are called to do – to take care of each other and conserve what we have.

A Sinkhole That Is Pulling Us All Down

While most local papers probably did not splash the news on their front page or headline their evening news last week, our largely bought Congress just gave the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) a sizable raise in thanks for their contributions and lobbying pursuits. President Trump's initial budget request for the Pentagon was for a sizable $54 billion increase for the military last February. This proposed hike to $668 billion, while sizable by any measuring stick, was not enough for our Congressional members (with rare exception). This past week in their rush to show their true patriotism (cough, cough) they upped the ante by a most generous $32 billion taking it to an even $700 billion.  Of course, they will now all be able to tout how they are strong on defense as they hit the campaign trail. But put this in the perspective of the new budget proposal as the National Priority Project just did and your eyes might water as we invest in permanent war.



Of course, when they dream this stuff up they aren't thinking of budget balancing or deficits or least of all the robbery of our treasury so that we can't rebuild our infrastructure, care for our veterans or seniors, provide better education and health care and develop our communities with renewable energy and other green technologies that make living in the future better for everyone. Never mind either that those types of investments in real human security produce way more jobs per $1 billion dollar of investment than does equal money spent on the military.

But perhaps this isn't enough reason to balk at suggestions from MIC lobbyists to throw more money into weapon systems.For any willing to follow any of the many who shine the light on military waste and corruption there is plenty more reason to plug the leaks of our tax dollars into their coffers. William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and one of those who have toiled for years to follow the money in the MIC showed in a post last week how some of this game is played. In this piece he lays out the influence peddling in the nuclear weapons arena as just one example. To get your blood pressure up a little more read any of his earlier works or reports to see how corrupt the system is.





Or from a slightly different angle take a look at a report last week from the dedicated folks at the Project on Government Oversight. This highlights how even when we empty our purses for the Pentagon,  requesting how those dollars are performing is a bit too much to ask. The fact that the Pentagon has escaped any complete audit for decades might give you a hint. A few of those crazy (yes bipartisan members) have asked that such an audit be required before we hand over any more money.



The almost total capture of the Congress by the myth of more military spending means a more secure world should be easy to show. 16 years of war in Afghanistan and thousand of American lives lost, which are dwarfed on the losses sustained by the Afghan people, have made the country and its people no better off. Trillions of dollars for regime change in Iraq (or was it weapons of mass destruction - seems like we did the mass destruction with our relentless bombing)  in Iraq destroyed the country.

Yet, each budget cycle the relentless, and may I suggest stupid, belief that only adding more force will solve the problem is a pompous American belief. You don't need to believe me. Read what military people themselves say. Three I look to are Andrew Bacevich, William Astore, and Danny Sjursen.



But let me suggest the sinkhole of military spending is about to take an exponential leap based upon recent actions by the MIC in partnership with their key friends in Congress. A report in last week's trade publication for all things military, Defense News, gives a glimpse of what's to come - "Congress to MDA: Prepare for Spaced-Base Missile Attacks" . Yes, that's right - Congress is calling the shots on this, not the Pentagon. Earlier this year I saw hints of this when I noticed a new piece of legislation co-sponsored by my own Senator Gary Peters. A recent addition to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Peters and his conservative colleagues propose and elaborate on a space based military presence in their S.1196 "Advancing America's Missile Defense Act of 2017".

It's clear to this reader that the authors of this bill drink from the "technological optimism" fountain. Those that drink from this fountain believe that whatever ails us, there is a technological solution. And not only are they sure of its success, they are unencumbered by consideration of any 'unintended consequences' or what economists refer to externalities. Neither of course do they consider, to borrow another economics phrase, 'lost opportunity costs'. There can be little doubt that these grand plans come from the many millions the MIC invests in lobbying. For an excellent consideration of concerns with 'technological optimism' read economist Robert Costanza's provocative look at the future through various lenses in "Four Visions of the Century Ahead: Will it be Stark Trek, Ecotopia, Big Government of Mad Max" written on the eve of this century.

This bill has no price tag of course. But once we are shown that we can't live without it, to oppose it will mean you are 'soft on defense'. The F-35 boondoggle, perhaps the Pentagon's largest cost overrun of all time (and the planes are still not fully operational) has parts of it built in moire than 400 of the 435 Congressional districts. That's not accidental. If a Congress person argues to cut funding for a failed program, the threat to local jobs has them rethink that originally prudent consideration. The MIC knows this.

That notion is alive as a perfect example in my own beloved state of Michigan. Here all but one member of the Michigan delegation signed on to a letter to the Pentagon to select Ft. Custer, near Battle Creek in southwestern Michigan as home to a new Ground Based Missile Defense System. Battle Creek area like many in Michigan can use a hand, and Ft. Custer is underutilized. But this proposed $3.2+ billion project was not requested by the Pentagon. A Union of Concerned Scientists report highlighted other problems with the addition of a third ground based missile defense site (existing sites are located in Alaska and California). Number one being that the likelihood of it working is questionable. Oh, and two, the Pentagon hasn't asked for additional sites.

This is a textbook example of how MIC works. First ingredient is fear. You absolutely need to be afraid of some possibility to occur for which the weapon system must be developed and deployed.. Since the West coast already has two of these sites, of questionable effectiveness - to perhaps save us from missiles launched from N. Korea, China, Russia or Pakistan, now we need protection from the Iranians, who no doubt think that if they launch a nuclear missile (they don't have), they could possible take out all of our missiles scattered around the world, many on moving submarines. Once the fear is established then you need Congress to bring home the bacon, or pork. So the race is on to see who can win the prize.

Now as a Congressional member it may seem like a worthy effort to secure the missile system for your backyard, but a wise soul might entertain some second thoughts. If you really want to bring jobs to your community there are a few problems with this. The major component of the system is, you guessed it, missiles. These are made by our friends at Boeing. So they won't be built here. Then there is the concern that money invested in military doesn't produce  near as many jobs for dollar of investment as does education, health care, infrastructure or green technologies. All of which would make the world a bit better off. And all of which become lost opportunity costs if the money is diverted to these weapons systems. But then, there is the fact that the chances of these expensive systems actually working in a real event are slim. Seems like a high-risk, low profit investment.

And we really haven't even discussed perhaps the biggest elephant in the room - outright military waste. The Pentagon did a study over five years and found $125 Billion in waste. It tried to hide the report but it was just last December by the Washington Post. One can only wonder how much additional waste might be identified with an audit of all of its operations including more than 800 military bases scattered around the world.

I don't believe in simply criticizing without offering alternatives, or in my parlance "possibilities". So here is one such possibility. At the end of the Cold War there was an expected 'peace dividend' that we never received. There was talk and consideration for a brief time of something called "economic conversion". The idea was to convert existing facilities to non-military community development opportunities so as not to disrupt the closure of a facility on a local community. The emphasis was also on decent employment for those who would otherwise lose jobs from the closure. Base closure has become almost impossible, largely because of the impact on the community and no civilian  reinvestment in the community. Legislators fight fiercely to protect their community regardless of the overall benefit to the country.

Providing economic conversion funds that are managed locally by communities will relieve the Congress of fighting for programs none of us need and do not make us safer. We should reduce funding for the military and shift it towards conversion that builds stronger communities with emphasis on green technologies, enhanced education and health care, and other local infrastructure improvements. All of which create more jobs. That's where we'll find real security. Now we need to elect members of Congress who can look beyond the paid lobbyists and seek out real alternatives to war and militarism. Otherwise we'll all be sliding into that sinkhole.



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