The Terrible Ethical Calculus of Catastrophe

Ian Welsh, Blog, May 31, 2019, posted by Wayne Morgenthaler Normally I do not re post blogs, however this one points to a critical question that does not need restating -- under a government plan to fix the climate catastrophe, who will the save?  Our government's track record for 30 years does not inspire confidence in the outcome, but that does not mean we can wait.  It is pretty certain that the task ahead will require constant vigilance and popular resistance to programs to save the rich and abandon the poor. Let us say you know a catastrophe is coming, and you cannot stop it and thus save everyone.  What do you do? You start making choices about who to save. Not just their lives, but their stuff and their power. Catastrophes often lead to changes in societies, but sometimes they don’t. The 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression lead to most of the rich losing their money and power. The end result was that the people running society changed, and that the post-war period was the best to be alive in the developed world in history. This happened because Hoover and FDR did not believe in bailing out the rich, and FDR instituted the New Deal and 90%+ marginal tax rates. But while FDR didn’t think the rich should be protected, he did institute deposit protection for ordinary people. If you weren’t rich, you were covered. The 2007/8 crash lead to no such thing, because the priority was saving the rich. Obama, Bernanke and Geithner went out of their way not just to keep the rich, rich, but to hurt ordinary people if necessary to do so. They deliberately hurt householders when necessary to help banks. (See David Dayen’s “Chain of Title” for all the grizzly details. Now this is not to say that Treasury and the Fed should have just done nothing, like in 1929 (though if they had just followed the laws, put in place after 1929, we would in fact be better off.) It is to say they chose to save rich people and not help most other people. So the catastrophe lead to a resumption of the status quo.  Except that it didn’t, it kicked the economy into shit-mode, and the result was Trump/Brexit and the general rise of the right. (Because all the major central banks and governments bailed out the rich and fucked everyone else.) https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-terrible-ethical-calculus-of-catastrophe/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IanWelsh+%28Ian+Welsh%29