[lbo-talk] catastrophy II

[Dissenting Wren]

Who are we and how do we do this?  Fair enough.  My scenarios implicitly 
supposed a world where a mythical "we" could make decisions that are good for 
"us".  But the point of my post was that the feasible set, even under these 
extraordinarily optimistic and admittedly unrealistic conditions, does not 
include any unambiguously good solution.  Add the constraints of how decisions 
really get made, and the feasible set becomes even narrower.  Far narrower, in 
my estimation.  The odds are overwhelmingly high that we will simply continue to 
burn coal until we all burn.  But working with the very small margin of 
possibility that our future may not be barbarism, it seems to me a reasonable 
step to delineate a feasible set under the most optimistic circumstances and 
then address what needs to be done politically to change the constraints that 
keep us far away from that solution.

----- Original Message ----
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Wed, March 16, 2011 9:01:56 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] catastrophy II

Dissenting Wren

Where does that leave us?

(1) Do nothing and stay on the current path, which means increasing use of
coal 
(electricity usage is growing fastest in India and China; both get 80% of
their 
electricity from coal).  And so we burn.

"We" do 'we"? Who is this "we"? How is "we" to reach a decision on this?
Everyone wants to talk about "we" (or "humanity") because that lets them
utterly ignore (a) the political issues involved and (b) the constraints on
decision making by individual enterprises that I mentioned in earlier posts.

Frankly, it is near lunacy to argue endlessly about what "should" be done
without subordinating that discussion to the political issue of how actual
decisions may be made and carried out.

I was immensely impressed by Chuck's posts: about the best written and the
most illuminating that have appeared on this thread.

But Chuck too prefers to talk about what should or shouldn't be done without
really facing in any concrete way the problem of gathering decision-making
power into hands that can decide without invisible constraints on their
decisions.

A couple decades ago the Eureka Corporation, founded in Bloomington long
ago, gave its last remaining employees (all other manufacturing had already
been moved to the Mexican Border) a choice: accept nearly a 50% cut in wages
& benefits or the last operations in B/N would be closed. The employees
rejected the plan and the plant (just built about 2 decades before that) was
closed.

Suppose the Eureka management had been by some miracle beautiful souls, in
love with and loyal to the population of Bloomington/Normal. So they decided
to stay in B/N and continue to pay top wages. Probably the Eureka company
would no longer exist. THAT is "the problem" if you want to use that word
("problem") which should be confined to elementary school texts and not used
by adults).

Carrol

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