Fundraising
in Extremis
Dmitry
Orlov
24
April, 2012
There
are some important projects that need to be up and running starting
like yesterday, because they are key to human survival.
Unfortunately, they cannot be funded in the usual ways because of the
warped nature of market economics and global finance, which dictates
that the only goal of investing money is to make more money. The
project of averting disastrous outcomes is not a money-maker, per se,
and does not get funded. But shipping in millions of plastic orange
Halloween pumpkins from China every year is a sure bet, and so the
free market prioritizes orange plastic pumpkins above doing what is
essential to keep us all alive. The invisible hand of the free
market, it turns out, is attached to an invisible idiot.
A
good example of this sort of project is shutting down nuclear power
stations before the electric grid goes down and they all melt down à
la Fukushima Daiichi, poisoning land and sea around them for
thousands of years. The electric grid is indeed going down: the rate
of power supply disruptions has been increasing exponentially in the
US. Just recently a large and important piece of central Boston went
dark because of a transformer explosion. The response was to roll in
diesel generators to provide emergency power.
The
transformers within the grid tend to be old, sometimes decades old,
are at this point only built overseas, and, since they are expensive,
there aren't too many spares sitting around. As this infrastructure
ages (as it does, and will continue to do, since there is no money to
update it) such incidents increase in frequency, putting greater and
greater pressure on already scarce and expensive diesel supplies.
Already in many places emergency diesel generators are run not just
in emergencies, but to fill in gaps in the power supplied through the
grid during peak load hours. Diesel is already used for sea and land
freight, as well as for most other heavy machinery, and there is not
much of it to spare anywhere in the world, so the idea of replacing
the electric grid with local diesel generators runs into a very
serious problem almost immediately. In fact, looking at the many
reports of diesel shortages around the world, it already has.
An
extended blackout is fatal to a nuclear power plant. Without a grid
to power, the reactors have to be shut down, but they still need to
be cooled in order to avoid a meltdown. The power to run the cooling
pumps comes from the power plant itself, or the electric grid, or, if
both are down, from, you guessed it, diesel generators. There is
usually only a few days' worth of diesel on hand; beyond that,
cooling water boils out, the zirconium cladding of the nuclear fuel
assemblies catches on fire, and the whole thing melts down and
becomes too radioactive to even go near, never mind clean up.
Worse
yet, most of the 100 or so nuclear power plants in the US are full of
spent fuel rods. The spent fuel is no longer potent enough to
generate power, but a lot of it is still quite hot, and so the rods
are kept in pools of water, which has to be circulated and cooled to
keep it from boiling away. The spent fuel contains decay products
that span the entire periodic table of elements, many of which are
both radioactive and toxic. If the water boils away, the fuel rods
spontaneously combust, blanketing the surrounding countryside with a
plume of radioactive and toxic products of nuclear decay. The
solution is to fish the rods out of the pools, put them into dry
casks, and place the casks deep underground in geologically stable
formations away from seismic zones. This is a slow and expensive
process, for which there is currently no money.
Another,
associated and equally important project, is in helping populations,
especially those in developed countries, transition to a life without
much electricity. In most places, some combination of technologies
based on renewable sources of energy needs to be put into place to
provide electricity for illumination and communications (the only
uses for which electricity is critical). In addition, passive and
concentrating solar installations can provide thermal energy for
domestic and even some industrial uses. This, again, is a
large-scale, expensive project, requiring a high level of funding
over an extended period of time. It is also not expected to be any
sort of money-maker: nobody will want to pay to have their
multi-kilowatt domestic electric system replaced with a few LED
lights and chargers for portable electronics, and go back to washing
dishes and clothes by hand in solar-heated water. They'd rather just
stay comfortable, and then, when that is no longer possible, just sit
silently in the dark wearing dirty clothes.
And
so, where would all of this money come from? Certainly not from
governments: they are too busy bailing out the banks and finance
companies that provide the politicians with their political campaign
funds. That only leaves private individuals, so let's examine them as
a potential source of this critical funding.
Taking
the United States as an example, and going up the economic food chain
starting from the bottom, we have the downtrodden: the various
victims of slavery, genocide, economic exploitation and racial and
ethnic discrimination that made this country great. Let's just call
them “the poor people.” They serve a key function in society:
that of making the slightly less downtrodden worker drones feel
superior, thinking “at least we are better off than they are” and
continuing to labor for a pittance. Funding large projects is not one
of the functions of either of these population groups, although they
may be tapped to provide labor, and they do buy an awful lot of
lottery tickets. Most of them are either destitute, or poor, or
surviving paycheck to paycheck, mired in debt.
Next
we have the much smaller group of people who do have a non-negligible
net worth. Since the term “middle class” has become all but
meaningless, let's just call them “the rich people.” This group
is shrinking every day, as more and more people come to measure their
wealth not by how much then own but by how much they owe. If you
think that savings and debt are diametrically opposed, you may be
right, in a strict sense, but only if you ignore the essential
purpose of money for the rich people, which is to make them feel
rich. To feel rich, they need two things. The first includes all
sorts of accoutrements of being rich: flashy cars and clothes, latest
gadgets, women with large silicone breast implants, ski vacations and
so on, and it doesn't matter too much whether these are procured by
spending money or by running up debts; they feel rich either way, or
at least richer than someone else they can look down upon, which is
all that really matters. The second includes the abstract and
addictive thrills of handling large sums of money, be they theirs or
borrowed; the purpose of money is to make more money, and the purpose
of debt is to make more debt. Parting with their savings to avert
disaster and accept a more humble way of living will not make them
feel rich in either of these ways.
Lastly,
we have the über-rich: those who have simply too much money. People
like George Soros or Bill Gates make a big deal of their
philanthropy, promoting democracy or fighting malaria; couldn't they
help? Theoretically they could (they certainly have the money) but we
have to understand what they are. They are vampires. They suck not
our blood, literally, but our time and our toil. We get a “living”
and an increasingly empty promise of retirement (once we are too old
to be useful to them) on an increasingly devastated planet; they get
everything else. The way they confiscate our wealth varies—Soros
stole people's savings by speculating in currency markets; Gates
charged a “Microsoft tax” by foisting on the world a buggy,
bloated and insecure operating system with the complicity of the US
government; the Waltons who own Walmart did it by shipping US jobs to
China while driving small businesses in the US out of business. But
the way they extend their largess does not vary: its purpose is to
make them look like they are good men. To gain some perspective on
what that means, here is a poem by Bertolt Brecht, translated by
Slavoj Žižek:
The
Interrogation of the Good
Step
forward: we hear
That
you are a good man.
You
cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which
strikes the house, also
Cannot
be bought.
You
hold to what you said.
But
what did you say?
You
are honest, you say your opinion.
Which
opinion?
You
are brave.
Against
whom?
You
are wise.
For
whom?
You
do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose
advantages do you consider then?
You
are a good friend.
Are
you also a good friend of the good people?
Hear
us then: we know
You
are our enemy.
This
is why we shall
Now
put you in front of a wall.
But
in consideration of your merits and good qualities
We
shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With
a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With
a good shovel in the good earth.
The
über-rich thus have two functions in society. The main function is
to suck wealth out of the Earth and out of humanity as efficiently as
possible. The ancillary function is to spit some of it back out in a
way that makes them look like the Earth's and humanity's benefactors.
But there is a problem with this balance of payments: in order for
the Earth and humanity to derive a net benefit from their activities,
they would have to spit out as much, if not more, as they suck in. In
the process, they would cease to be über-rich; in effect, they would
cease to exist.
And
here we come to the crux of the argument. The only possible sources
of funding for our project of making the planet survivable for future
generations are the über-rich, but in the process they have to cease
to exist. Brecht's approach is both simple and dramatic, but a more
humane option can be imagined. There is a certain point in time when
people are particularly malleable when it comes to the question of
disposing of their money: on their deathbed. Lying in extremis, one
inevitably ponders the fact that “you can't take it with you,”
thoughts of a potentially unpleasant world beyond death begin to
bedevil the mind... With the right sort of persuasion, dramatic
results are often achieved by priests, heads of nonprofits and other
mendicants. It is at this point that a pitch for saving what's left
of the planet may succeed.
Imagine
our über-patriarch lying in extremis. Arrayed before him are his
various (ex-) wives (in a Western harem the wives are spaced out in
time as well as in space, to abide by the local bigamy laws) and
their various children, all waiting for their bit of the legacy.
There is the leathery old harpy who came first, the now wilted trophy
wife who tried to hold it together with facelifts and implants and
Botox, but now looks like a partially deflated balloon animal, and
the pretty but sociopathic young nymphomaniac that's been keeping him
(and his bodyguards) company of late. They are all hideous in their
hypocritical concern for his well-being/wish for his speedy death.
The children are hideous in their own way: all practiced at the
healthy sibling rivalry in who can do the absolute least to appease
the daddy-monster and avoid being disowned. Maybe somebody becomes
suspicious that the old ogre will leave all the loot to his favorite,
and the favorite is found in the wine cellar, choked to death with a
silk scarf. There is a reason why posh English-language writers write
so many murder mysteries, and it's the same reason that landscape
painters paint so many trees: it's what grows there.
But
then a group of dignified and austere gentlemen arrives and asks for
an audience. They are all bona fide members of a secret society with
which our ailing patriarch is well acquainted, and they lay out a
plan: his legacy is to be added to their war chest, which will be
used to wage total war to win a survivable future. He will die so
that the Earth may live. The lawyer is summoned, the Last Will and
Testament is hastily amended and signed, and the patriarch expires in
bliss.
And
if that doesn't work, then there's what Brecht suggests., speaking at
a regional conference on Afghanistan, called for the immediate
withdrawal of foreign troops from the country and proposed that NATO
use part of its military budget to help revive the Afghan economy..
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