Editorial 10.8, August 2008, by Deirdre Helfferich

Well? What Are We Waiting For?

Sometimes it seems to me that our representatives and officials in government are trying as hard as they possibly can to eviscerate our economy, our health, our environment, our freedom—our future. There is a frightening contrast between word and deed that tells me that many of our leaders are far, far, out of touch:

• The national debt is a staggering $53 trillion—yet the White House (and John McCain, incidentally) assures us that everything is fine, just fine, better than ever.

• The US now ranks behind much of the industrialized world in the quality of our health care. We’ve got the most expensive health care system in the world, yet it’s ranked in thirty-seventh place. The significant difference? We don’t treat health care as a fundamental right; rather, we treat it as a commodity and depend on the marketplace to deliver it. So it’s profitability rather than health that is the bottom line, naturally.

• We’ve let Asia and Europe pull far ahead of us in the technological arena, such as public communications systems (dialup is passé: T-1 broadband connections are standard) and renewable energy research and implementation.

• Alaska is so mesmerized by oil, coal, and mining, that we neglect the renewable resources we have here in abundance, giving them short shrift in funding and consideration. Same thing at the national level: the oil companies, subsidized by various government royalty breaks and tax incentives to explore, lease, etc. (even without actually developing those leases), laugh all the way to the bank with their record-breaking profits, quarter after quarter, year after year—yet extremely modest tax breaks for solar or wind power are limited to two-year spans and, as happened in this session, frequently allowed to lapse.

• Although the latest estimates put a summertime ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2013, changes in attitudes, investment, and legalities are still glacially slow, favoring, instead of reasonable measures to prevent a global catastrophe, the pretense that we can basically continue as before, no prob.

• It is becoming vividly clear that the White House implemented a policy of using torture, politicized the Justice Department, started a war on false pretenses, and so on. Yet, the constitutional remedy for these gross breaches of trust and law, impeachment, has become viewed not as the corrective measure for criminal behavior that it is, but as a political tool for embarrassment, and therefore is “off the table,” ostensibly because “indulging” in impeachment would mire the country in partisan bickering and prevent Congress from getting real work done.

• Alaska politics have proven to harbor a Corrupt Bastards Club, and even our shiny new governor is now smirched.

As Al Gore put it: “I don't remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously.”

You said it, buddy. Yet, even while our country and our state seem to be going into various sorts of financial, technological, and moral nosedives, a few hopeful signs are out there that we might pull out of them yet. For one, several movements have been developing over the last decade to deal with these issues, and they seem to be gaining momentum. For example:

• The clean campaigns movement, which recognizes that mixing too much money with politics results in elected officials who are beholden to their campaign donors (usually large corporations and industry groups) rather than to their public trust—as we’ve seen in Alaska. In Alaska, this is up for vote August 26, with Measure 3: the Clean Elections initiative. The Ester Republic endorses this measure wholeheartedly: it’s one of the best means we have to limit the influence of money on politics—and the subsequent legislation or executive action that is the result of that influence.

• The universal health care movement, which recognizes health care as a basic right that should not be rationed according to how much you make or whether you have more endurance than the insurance company. HR 676: the National Health Insurance Act, is an affordable and sensible approach to making a transition from our current problematic and inefficient system to one that works—and is available to everyone. (See Dose of Reality, p. 22, for details on this proposal.)

• The environmental movement, which has moved into the mainstream. The serious threats of global warming, ocean acidification, species extinction, and so on, are making the public wake up and take notice. Recent developments, such as the rise in the price of gasoline and fuel oil, have galvanized interest in conservation, renewable energy, public transportation, and zero-carbon footprints. The Tanana Valley has a recycling task force and a Natural Step for Communities group.

• The buy local movement and its corollaries such as the locally grown movement. Local markets, farms, and cooperatives are springing up across the country, in recognition of the harmful economic, social, and environmental effects of having just a few large corporate suppliers.

These movements and others that are meeting the problems of our day form a groundswell from the bottom up. While there’s a lot of discussion on the national and state level, the action takes place at the level of communities, neighborhoods, households. Actions by individuals, such as shopping at local independent businesses, joining a CSA, starting a small manufacturing business, bicycling to work, taking the bus, turning off the light, writing a letter to the editor, voting—these all really do make a difference. And the difference is starting to become visible as more people realize that they can’t wait around any longer for somebody else to do it. We’ve got to do it for ourselves.

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