If We'd Been Lucky.

The Big IFs: We are so unlucky that it has come to this. Especially when, had things worked out just a little differently we might have had a chance. If Florida’s voters had swung decisively behind Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential Election. If the Baby Boom Generation hadn’t abandoned their idealism for cycling holidays in France and a renovated kitchen. If the Millennials possessed an attention span just a little bit longer than a goldfish’s. If the Internet hadn’t allowed us all to become so stupid.

NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW. That 150 academics have put their name to a letter urging the government to do something – anything – about  climate change: nobody wants to know. The letter itself is a response to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That report gives the world just 12 years to fundamentally refashion industrial civilisation or face runaway global warming. But, nobody wants to know.

We are so unlucky that it has come to this. Especially when, had things worked out just a little differently we might have had a chance. If Florida’s voters had swung decisively behind Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential Election. If the Baby Boom Generation hadn’t abandoned their idealism for cycling holidays in France and a renovated kitchen. If the Millennials possessed an attention span just a little bit longer than a goldfish’s. If the Internet hadn’t allowed us all to become so stupid.

Al Gore would almost certainly have got Bin Laden before he got America. (The Democrats recognised Osama as a threat, the Republicans were more focussed on Iraq and Iran.) So, no 9/11. No War on Terror. No invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A less crazed world. A real chance that the big global players: the USA, the UK, the EU, China, Japan and the Russian Federation might have trusted each other enough to come together around the science and take climate change seriously.

What would that have looked like? Well, if we’d been lucky, the Big Six would have pooled their resources and “internationalised” the fossil fuels industry. The slow and painful process of weaning the world off oil and coal could have begun – unimpeded by the oil industry’s denialist propaganda.

Encouraged by their success, the Big Six might then have embarked on an equally grand international effort dedicated to moving the world towards the adoption of renewable energy. Unburdened by ruinous levels of military spending, the leading economies would have been free to invest billions in the development of sustainable industrial processes.

The effect on the world’s peoples of all this global co-operation in the name of bequeathing a healthy planet to future generations is readily imagined. The audience for the promoters of jihad would have shrunk away to nothing – especially after the Big Six imposed a just territorial settlement on Israel and the Palestinians and then guaranteed the peace that followed. Rather than the disillusionment and despair that followed the world’s horror-filled descent into post-9/11 extremism, the example of the great powers working together would have engendered a global spring of hope.

Global finance would not have been happy but, in the new atmosphere of “can do” internationalism, the nostrums of neoliberalism would have lost much of their persuasive force. “Globalisation” would have acquired a new and extremely positive set of associations and the electorates of the world’s nation-states would have been quick to punish any political party which set its face against the humane and ecologically-informed values of the new era.

The United Nations, now lavishly funded by the Big Six, would not so much have assumed a greater role in global governance as had that role thrust upon it. At long last, the idea of a single world army was no longer being dismissed out-of-hand by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Indeed, driven by the Big Six, a new World Security Force, composed of contingents contributed by all of the UN’s member states, would soon be standing guard over the Pax Humanitas.

Not that there were very many enemies left to fight. With the production of weapons now a strictly controlled UN monopoly, the promotion and extension of human conflict was no longer a paying proposition. Indeed, because we had been lucky all those years before, the commemoration of World War I became the excuse for a very special international undertaking. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month 2018, the last nuclear weapon in the world was decommissioned.

Except, of course, we weren’t lucky. The world has not drawn closer together, it has grown farther apart. In the eighteen years since November 2000 the urgent remedial effort required to slow anthropogenic global warming has not taken place. The scientists see what’s coming. They’re begging us to, please, do something!

But nobody wants to know.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 November 2018.

Is Trump Preparing To Substitute Bullets For Ballots?

The Constitution In Arms: Alarmed at the steady decline in Trump's poll-ratings, extreme elements of the American Far-Right have begun warning his supporters that the forthcoming Presidential Election will be "rigged" to prevent their candidate from taking office. Already the Republican Party's most notorious political saboteur, Roger Stone, is using words like "bloodbath". Not one to miss his cue, Trump's stump speeches now include repeated references to a "rigged" or "stolen" election.

AS TRUMP’S NUMBERS slump, and Hillary’s surge, the worst elements of the American Right are mobilising in his defence. The Republican Party’s most notorious political saboteur, Roger Stone, is urging Trump to prepare his followers for a “rigged” election. And Trump is listening. To the alarm of election observers and commentators of every political stripe, Trump has taken to dropping the “R” word into his recent stump speeches.

 

“November 8th, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged,” he told American television viewers on Monday, 1 August, “and I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

 

Fears are growing in the Democratic camp that the prospect of losing to Hillary fills Trump with such terror that, rather than concede defeat, he will not shy away from doing irreparable damage to America’s 240-year-old system of representative democracy.

 

Roger Stone, who has a portrait of Richard Nixon tattooed on his back, is nothing if not explicit. In an interview with Alex Jones (a far-right extremist broadcaster and conspiracy theorist) he issued a chilling warning to Trump’s opponents:

 

“Well you have to let them know in advance that you’re not going to stand for it. That if there’s any solid evidence of election irregularities you’re prepared to challenge her swearing in and create a constitutional crisis.”

 

Or something much worse. According to the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher:

 

“In a podcast last week, long-time Trump advisor Roger Stone said that if the election results in November don’t match opinion polls, the Republican nominee should challenge the validity of the election and warned that the unrest could end in a “bloodbath”. “If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate,” he said. “The election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”

 

Roger Stone - Republican Party Fixer.

 

Threats of a similar nature were made in the lead-up to the Republican Convention. Even if, back then, they were directed at the leadership of the Republican Party itself! Historically-speaking, such overt references to political violence are alien to the presidential election process. At the state and local level of American government, however, “election irregularities” are commonplace.

 

Stone’s reference to “voter fraud” is telling. For nearly a decade Republican-controlled state legislatures have been passing legislation specifically designed to make it harder for voters more likely than not to support the Democratic Party to both register to – and cast – their vote. The standard political justification for these so-called “voter suppression” laws is the alleged incidence of fraudulent voting. Expert examination of such claims has pronounced them groundless. Proven examples of voter fraud in the United States are extremely rare.

 

The strongly contested presidential election of 2000 is, however, proof that, even at the presidential level, things can go very badly wrong with the election process. The irregularities surrounding the Florida vote were legion – including strong prima facie evidence of Bush family involvement (in 2000, George W. Bush’s brother, Jeb, was the Florida Governor) in a comprehensive plan to suppress the participation of the state’s African-American voters.

 

A more reckless and less patriotic Democratic Party presidential candidate than Al Gore might have done considerably more to prevent the 2000 election being stolen from him. His party had, after all, won the popular vote by a comfortable margin, and election day exit polls had shown him ahead (albeit narrowly) in Florida. Rather than call his followers into the streets, however, Gore allowed the US Supreme Court to determine the outcome of the election. By the narrowest of margins, the Court voted to declare Bush the winner.

 

Can Donald trump be relied upon to go quietly if the election is won narrowly (or even decisively) by Hillary Clinton? Or will he goad the losing side of the most heavily-armed citizenry on earth into substituting their bullets for their ballots?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of 9 August 2016.