Ian McDonald
AMERICA'S INSATIABLE appetite for oil is leading to her own ruin and endangering the whole world. The United States produces only 10 per cent of the world's oil but consumes 25 per cent of it. This tremendous gap helps to create the mighty and growing American fiscal and trade deficits which skew the world's economy in a way which is unsustainable. It also makes a highly disproportionate contribution to global warming and distorts American foreign policy into pre-emptive aggression, thereby jeopardising security and stability throughout the world.
Parallel to this growing threat, and considerably exacerbating it, is the full-blown emergence of forces which now dominate political life in America and control what the administration in Washington does. These forces include the influence of huge corporations especially in the drafting and implementation of energy and environmental policies, the neocon ideology which rejects contemptuously international organisations and international treaties and conventions, the military philosophy which favours unilateral, pre-emptive ventures, the escalating influence of evangelical religion on domestic and foreign policy and the growing divide in America along relentlessly hostile and partisan lines.
The coming together of these developments in the present era makes the world an infinitely dangerous place. For the world just to survive, much less to grow into a better, safer, more stable and more uniformly prosperous place, is going to need imaginative and enlightened leadership of the highest order. What is more, an important, if not main, quotient of such leadership will have to come from the United States since that nation is, and will remain for some time, the pre-eminent power on earth. But, given the current situation, it makes one despair to think what a major shift in policies and fundamental change of heart and mind it will take to bring forth leadership in America equal to the challenge of the times. The generation of great American statesmen and far-seeing technocrats which led the way in putting the world together after the second World War has been succeeded by a generation of visionless pygmies not up to the challenge of world leadership.
Special interests have taken over the running of America. Towards the end of his presidency Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, warned against the growing influence of the 'military-industrial complex'. Fifty years later such interests have become vastly more powerful in Washington and are consistently capable of blocking all efforts to find long-term solutions to world problems.
POWER OF US CORPORATIONS
An important indication of the immense power of corporations in America is their astonishing success in getting the government to delay or deflect well-informed scientific predictions about universal problems like the destruction of the environment and the increasing impact of global warming. With exorbitant American energy consumption now added to the rapidly growing energy needs of China and India, it has become clear that oil will become scarcer and more expensive much sooner than previously expected with huge and devastating economic and social consequences throughout the world. Far from summoning the decisive leadership in striving to conserve energy and rapidly find and develop alternatives to oil on a worldwide scale, the US government, at the behest of corporate interests, is busy covering up the facts - and belittling the seriousness of the situation and is merely nibbling at the outer edges of a problem which threatens the world.
Just as frightening a problem is global warming. It is absolutely apparent that this phenomenon is a huge threat to the universal natural habitat as we know it and to human society. Yet the current American administration, under the direction of corporate interests blind to all concerns but instant profit, balks at doing anything significant even to slow down global warming. Ignorant men in denial: let the future generations look after themselves! At the recent G8 conference, George Bush, confronted by unanimous scientific opinion of the need to act urgently, already it may be too late, would only, reluctantly, acknowledge that climate change is a 'long term' challenge. Confronted by a giant problem this is pygmy thinking at its worst.
I am not a pessimist by nature, but as things stand in the world, I am full of fear for my children and grandchildren.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
