Newt Gingrich Actually IS Anti-Child... But Isn't That Whole Party? What Would James Speth Say?

Monday Rachel started her show with the video above, about how Newt Gingrich and other Republican reactionaries want to abolish child labor laws. (I didn't make that up; please watch the video.) At the same time, I was busy writing about how I had started re-reading Vance Packard's 1960 classic Waste Makers, about how the new American creed-- a kind of Ayn Randian religion young, impressionable, mediocre conservative minds couldn't get enough of-- was consumption and endless growth for the sake of growth.

"Whether the growth," wrote Packard, "is particularly needed to promote the well-being of the American people is rarely even considered... It is just assumed that any growth is good. Growth is fast becoming a hallowed word alongside Democracy and Motherhood."

Today Republicans have all but given up on-- nay, declared war on-- Democracy and, as far as Motherhood... they still do love women to be barefoot, pregnant and undedicated. When Packard was writing The Waste Makers, Professor David Korten was earning his degree at Stanford and getting ready to move to Ethiopia to start setting up business schools. In his latest book, Agenda For A New Economy he introduces the work of economist James Speth, former administrator of the United Nations Development Program and a dean at Yale's School of Forestry. Korten and Speth seem equally adamant that "the planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it"-- the capitalism that Packard warned us about, the capitalism still fetishized by mediocre conservative minds, like Newt Gingrich's and Paul Ryan's. Korten reminds us that "growth in GDP always increases environmental damage." He quotes a passage from Speth's book, The Bridge to the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability:

To sum up, we live in a world where economic growth is generally seen as both beneficent and necessary-- the more, the better; where past growth has brought us to a perilous state environmentally; where we are poised for unprecedented increments in growth; where this growth is preceding with wildly wrong market signals, including prices that do not incorporate environmental costs or reflect the needs of future generations; where a failed politics has not meaningfully corrected the market's obliviousness to environmental needs; where economies are routinely deploying technology that was created in an environmentally unaware era; where there is no hidden hand or inherent mechanism adequate to correct the destructive tendencies. So, right now, one can only conclude that growth is the enemy of environment. Economy and environment remain in collision.

Korten isn't just trying to scare anyone. He-- and Speth-- have some solutions. "After examining the abuses of corporate power," he writes, "Speth endorses the call to revoke the charters of corporations that grossly violate the public interest, and to exclude of expel unwanted corporations, roll back limited liability, eliminate corporate personhood, bar corporations from making political contributions, and limit corporate lobbying." People want a program and a list of demands from OccupyWallStreet? How about those? It goes right to the heart of the matter-- far more than Obama or a severely conflicted Democratic Party. Korten continues: "Speth is clear that we are unlikely as a species to implement the measures required to bring ourselves into balance with the environment so long as economic growth remains an overriding policy priority, consumerism defines our cultural values, and the excesses of corporate behavior are unconstrained by fairly enforced rules."

Korten wrote that last year-- a year before OccupyWallStreet made Zuccotti Park a household name. It was also exactly 50 years after Packard wrote about the explosion of consumerism in the U.S. He wrote of "general evidence of profusion of material wealth even though there is a substantial residue, numbering millions of families, that remains unquestionably ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed. And the television set may be substituting for adequate food in the family budget." How far have we come in those 50 years-- despite Packard's warning?

Consumption must rise, and keep rising. Some marketing experts have been announcing that the average citizen will have to step up his buying by nearly fifty per cent in the next dozen years, or the economy will sicken. In a mere decade, advertising men assert, United States citizens will have to improve their level of consumption as much as their forebears had managed to do in the two hundred years from Colonial times to 1939.

...What we needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers-- and strategies that would provide products assuring such wastefulness.

Today the Republican "solution" is more yachts and private planes for the wealthy-- subsidized by the tax payers. The GOP wasn't always that fatuous, that demented. There was a short, albeit harsh, recession in 1958, while Eisenhower, a mainstream Republican, was president. Packard explains that "the federal government acted quietly, certainly played a major role" in righting the economy. The Eisenhower Administration did, basically, exactly what the Republican Congress has prevented Obama from doing in the current, far worse, recession. "It poured several billion extra dollars into the economy for such things as pay raises [yes, pay RAISES-- the polar opposite of the GOP politically-motivated agenda for economic catastrophe], farm subsidies, missiles, and highways, thus unquestionably helping to quicken the enfeebled national economic pulse... By 11959, prosperity had returned [and] the massive clot of unemployment began to dissolve into manageable proportions."

Well, I guess that's how far we've come in 50 years. James Speth was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1942, 9 years before James DeMint was born (straight up the I-26 in Greenville, South Carolina). That's about all they have in common. Here's Speth discussing his ideas-- ideas which Senator DeMint doesn't have the capacity to grasp-- at UC, Berkeley in 2008. Enjoy: