Saturday, May 29, 2010

America's Chernobyl

I'm old enough to remember the Chernobyl disaster, the worst-ever nuclear accident in human history. It was the moment when the Soviet monopoly-state forever delegitimated itself as an agency of modernization (or even moderate competency).

Now the US Empire is experiencing its very own Chernobyl -- not from a nuclear plant, but from a deep-sea well pouring millions of gallons of raw petrocarbons into the Caribbean.

What was most shocking about the spill aren't BP's lies, prevarications, and incompetence, but the manner in which the entire edifice of petro-fundamentalism has crumbled down. This disaster wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime, "black swan" event, it was the predictable result of incompetent, bought-off Federal regulators (basic safety features were never mandated), Federal policies which systematically privileged petrocarbons over renewable energy (drilling instead of conservation), and above all, the toxic ideology of market fundamentalism (what's good for BP's shareholders is good, and the eco-system be damned).

I suppose this is how postmodern Empires die -- not with a bang, but with a landscape/seascape of ecological ruination.

PBS has a live feed of the spill here).

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Olympus, Meet Kratos

Every world citizen should give thanks to the citizens of Greece, who followed the advice of Kratos, protagonist of Sony Santa Monica's magnificent God of War franchise, and refused to accept the malign dominion of Zeus -- a.k.a. Euroliberalism.

The credit markets of Europe's smaller Mediterranean nations have been getting hammered by bond traders in recent days. But the EU is not a small player in the world economy. It is a behemoth with a 16 trillion annual GDP, the largest single economy on the planet. Just like the BRIC nations, which have vast financial resources and fundamentally sound economies, Europe can defend itself against speculators. The only question was whether it had the political will.

This question has been answered. At long last, the EU rolled out the trillion-dollar bailout package they should've instituted long ago.

This isn't the end of the story. The people of Greece have opened the Pandora's box of transnational democracy: the faint, flickering and yet ineradicable hope for a different and better world is now alight, from the streets of Athens to the forests of Orissa, and from the tenements of Rio de Janeiro to the apartment blocks of Moscow.