Population Control II

As of right now, there are far more people alive than our planet can accomodate. Another two to three billion will spell a disaster far worse than what we have to fear from other global threats. Desert golf courses with man-made water hazards are emblems of how commerce over-rules common sense. There are more and more news stories chronicling the tendency to privatize water here in the U.S. and in other nations around the world. In effect, air is already privatized since, outside of rural areas where pollution is not as great a problem as it is in the inner cities, communities with fresh air tend to be those with the highest income levels. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to initiate a so-called congestion tax which would set up barriers to all but the most affluent drivers thus preserving an enclave, what in Mexico is called a zona rosa for the richest New Yorkers. The borough of Manhattan, no less than the desert golf course, has come to be a locus of unimpeded over-development. No empty lot, former parking lot or block of older buildings is safe from being converted into a luxury apartment building. Little regard is given to aesthetic considerations although Bloomberg disingenuously presents himself as an advocate for "green" buildings. Rather than impose limits on building in Manhattan, the mayor chooses to keep all but his fellow upper class cohorts out.

Since the Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution against socialism was initiated and then replaced by globalized capital, the tendency to privatization has proceeded apace on every continent. Since the idea that "a rising tide floats all boats," (one of the conceits that drives this school of economic development), became the catch-phrase for international capitalism, it has become clear that, like Orwell's insight that "some are more equal than others," some boats are far more sea-worthy than others. (Coincidentally in keeping with this metaphor was the Chinese notion that leaving a state-run industry for the vagaries of the private sector came to be referred to as "jumping into the ocean.") The Chinese quickly abandoned their grey and blue Mao jackets for Armani suits after Mao died. That is, some Chinese got to wear Italian tailoring. Far more typical of China than its ascendent upper class (though small as a percentage of China's enormous population, in effect, at an estimated 60 million, roughly the population of France) are the millions of young girls toiling in factories at pennies per hour. The vast majority of the Chinese still reside in rural areas and must pay for their children's schooling. Many of those young girls send their wages back to the farm so that a younger brother can buy books and pencils. One of the paradoxes of history: public schools in the West; private schools in the land that only a few decades ago had declared a cultural revolution.

Although almost never discussed in mainstream media, the abandonment of socialist ideals by countries like Russia and China is really no mystery. No doubt one factor was the trillions of dollars spent by the U.S. in its cold war effort--every imaginable form of spying, propaganda, sabotage and covert (at least to most Americans) activity was employed from the very inception of the Soviet Union. But there is, I believe, a far more important factor. Countries as vast and populous as Russia and China would need far more than fifty or seventy years to convert significant numbers of people to the socialist ideal. Even Marx acknowledged this when he saw the need for a "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is clear now that in countries that took the socialist path, there was always a significant percentage of the population--probably a majority-- just waiting it out until conditions returned where they could abandon the drudgery of collective efforts and resume the pursuit of wealth--or at least some of the tinsel (bling?) that capitalism dangles before the drooling masses. In China, Mao's body was still warm when the word was let out that "it is good to be rich," a notion that, historically, few Chinese ever doubted. In Russia, Mercedes-Benzes driven by Georgian mafiosi quickly began to clutter the streets of St. Petersburg (once Leningrad). A hallmark of the counter-revolution was to dissolve as rapidly as possible all (or as much as they could get away with) regulation of private enterprise. Despoilers of the planet are now far more free to do their mischief without looking over their shoulders at government regulators. And another key ingredient in the neo-conservative mix is the imposition of a taboo on any talk of population control. Global capitalism needs those bodies.