PC: Morning Charlie. Have some coffee. Joe, do you want coffee?
JQ: Sure Phil.
CQ: How about hot chocolate.
PC: Oh yeah, that’s what I’m having. Since we’ve got rain on our dawn patrol. Although rain has gotten a lot more interesting than it used to be, eh?
CQ: Droughts will do that.
PC: Yes. But now is the winter of our wet content. Here you go, Joe. Here you go, Charlie. These south windows are big, aren’t they. I like looking at rain out the window. Here Joe, you can put those right here on the carpet. Good.
(pause. slurping.)
PC: So, Charlie, I’ve been thinking that we can’t afford to bog down like we kind of are. We have to go fast, so maybe we can’t afford to fight capitalism anymore. They’ve rigged the numbers and rewritten the laws.
CQ: So, let me guess, now you want to make saving the world a capitalist project? Make it some kind of canny investment opportunity?
PC: This is why you are one of my trusted advisors, Charlie. You can guess what I’m thinking right after I say it.
JQ: Ha Dad.
CQ: Ha yourself.
PC: So yes, that’s what you do. Without conceding that private ownership of the public trust is right, but only conceding it has bought up so much of the next thirty years. Heck it supposedly owns the world in perpetuity. We’ll change that later. Right now we have to harness it to our cause, and use it to solve our problem. If we can do that, then the capitalism we end up with won’t be the same one we began with anyway. The rescue operation is so much larger than anything else we’ve ever done that it will change everything.
CQ: Or so you hope!
PC: It’s what I’m going to try. I think we are more or less forced to try it that way. I don’t see any alternative. If we don’t get infrastructure and transport swapped out as fast as possible, the world is cooked. It’s like our First Sixty Days never ended, but only keep rolling over. It’s like sixty days and counting all the time. So we have to look to what we have. And right now we have capitalism. So we have to use it.
CQ: I don’t see how.
PC: Well, capitalism has a lot of capital. And a lot of it they keep liquid and available for investment. It runs into trillions. And they want to invest it. At the same time there’s an overproduction problem. If they make more than they can sell of things, they’re screwed. So all capital is on the hunt for a good investment, some thing or service that isn’t already overproduced. Looking to maximize profit, which is the goal that all business executives are legally bound to pursue, or they can be fired and sued by their board of directors.
CQ: Yeah, but crisis recovery isn’t profitable, so what’s your point?
PC: My point is there’s an immense amount of capital looking to invest! Because capital accumulation really works, at least at first, but it works so well it stops growing so fast, and without maximum growth you can’t get maximum profit. So you need to find new markets. And so, this has been what has been going on for the last few hundred years, capital moving from product to product but also from place to place, and what we’ve got now as a result is uneven development. Some places were developed centuries ago, and some of those have since been abandoned, as in the rust belts. Some places are newly developed and cranking, others are being developed and are in transition. And then there are places that have never been developed, even if their resources were extracted, and they’re pretty much still in the Middle Ages. And this is what globalization has been so far—capital moving on to new zones of maximized return. When that declines, they look around to see where they might alight next, and then they take off for there.
CQ: The World Bank, in other words. That’s what I told them. I lost my mind. I took off my shoe and beat on their table.
PC: That’s right, that meeting was reported to me, and I wish I had been there to see it. First you laugh in the President’s face, and then you scream at the World Bank in a fury. That was probably backward, but never mind. I’m glad you did it. I think the decapitation is going rather well over there. Their midlevel was stuffed with idealistic young people who went there to change it from within, and now they’re getting the chance.
CQ: I hope you don’t tape these conversations.
PC: Why not? It makes it a lot easier to put them in my blog.
CQ: Come on, Phil. Do you want me to talk or not?
PC: You can be the judge of that, but right now I am enjoying laying out for us the latest from geographic economics. Capital finds a likely place to develop next, and off it goes, see? Place to place. The people left behind either adjust to being on their own, or fall into a recession, or fall into a full-on rust belt collapse. Whatever happens to them, global investment capital will never again be interested. That’s the point at which you begin to see people theorizing bioregionalism, as they figure out what the local region can provide on its own. They’re making a virtue out of necessity, because they’ve been developed and are no longer the best profit. And somewhere else the process has started all over.
CQ: So soon the whole planet will be developed and modernized and we’ll all be happy! Except for that fact that it would take eight Earths to support every human living at those levels of consumption! So we’re screwed!
JQ: Dad.
PC: No, that’s right. That’s what we’re seeing. The climate change and environmental collapse are us hitting the limits. We’re overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet, or the consumption level, or what have you.
CQ: Yes.
PC: And yet capitalism continues to vampire its way around the globe, determined to remain unaware of the problem it’s creating. Individuals in the system notice, but the system itself doesn’t notice. And some people are fighting to keep the system from noticing, God knows why. It’s a living I guess. So the system cries: It’s not me! As if it could be anything else, given that human beings are doing it, but that’s what the system claims anyway, It’s not me, I’m the cure! and on it goes, and soon we’re left with a devastated world.
CQ: I’m wondering where you’ll take this. It’s not sounding that good.
PC: Well, think about both parts of what I’ve been saying. The biosphere is endangered and therefore so are humans. Meanwhile capitalism needs investment opportunities. So saving the biosphere IS the next investment opportunity! It’s massive, it’s hungry for growth, people want it. People need it.
CQ: People don’t care.
PC: No, people care. People want it. And capital always likes a desire it can make into a market. Heck it will make up desires if it needs to, so real ones are welcome. So it’s a perfect fit of problem and solution.
CQ: Phil please, don’t be perverse. You’re saying the problem is the solution, it’s double talk. If it were true, why isn’t it happening already?
PC: It isn’t the easy money yet. Capital always picks the low-hanging fruit first, as having the best rate of return. Maximum profit is usually found in the path of least resistance. And right now there are still lots of hungry undeveloped places, and we haven’t yet run out of fossil carbon to burn. You know the reasons—it would be a bit more expensive at the start, so the profit margin is low, and since only the next quarter matters, it doesn’t get done.
CQ: Right, and so?
PC: So that’s where government of the people, by the people, and for the people comes into the picture! And we in the United States have the biggest and richest and most powerful government in the world! It’s a great accomplishment for democracy, often unnoticed—we the people have got a whole lot of the world’s capital. We’re so big we can PRINT MONEY! So we have the power to pay for things. So we can aim capitalism in any direction we want, by setting its rules, and by leading the way with our own capital into new areas, thus creating the newest region of maximum profit. So the upshot is, if we can get Congress to commit federal capital first, and also to erect certain little strategic barriers to impede the natural flow of capital to the path of least resistance but maximum destruction, then we might be able to change the whole watershed.
CQ: How many metaphors are you going to mix into this stew?
PC: They are all part of a heroic simile, obviously, having to do with landscape and gravity. A very heroic simile, if I may say so.
JQ: Heroic!
PC: That’s right Joe. You are a good kid. You are a patriotic American toddler. So Charlie, can you write me some speeches putting this into inspiring and politically correct terminology?
CQ: Why do you have to be politically correct anymore? You’re the president!
PC: So I am. More coffee? More hot chocolate?