Hanging In The Balance

It’s as hard to tell the truth about one’s countrymen, as it is to tell the truth about one’s family. Doing either is considered disloyal. But when one has tried and been denied innumerable times in one’s own country, there’s no choice except to tell the truth abroad in a universal context.

With two weeks to go before a US presidential election that gives new meaning to the word “pivotal,” there is a palpable feeling that the future hangs in the balance. Not just the future of America, which may already be decided, but the future of humanity, which has not.

The signs and symptoms are increasing by the day that this election has been psychologically and metaphysically determined. I truly hope I’m wrong, since the thought of enduring four more years of Donald Trump makes me wretch.

The very closeness of the race (essentially tied nationally, and a toss up in the battleground electoral states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) between a progressive (if status quo-devoted) woman, and a vile and hateful conduit of collective darkness, attests to the deadness at the core of the American body politic. At least half the American electorate is about to vote for an avowed dictator wannabe.

The global question is whether humankind can muddle through this hydra-headed crisis of our own making, or whether ecological and/or political collapse is unavoidable.

Two regional wars, in Ukraine prosecuted by Putin’s Russia, and in the Middle East prosecuted by Netanyahu’s Israel, could explode into a world war at any time. Indeed, the Netanyahu regime, which has not let up on its genocide in Gaza, may order an attack on Iran just before the election, to tilt the race in Trump’s favor.

Planetarily, a leading scientist just warned that AMOC, the main Atlantic Ocean circulation, which brings warm waters from the tropics north to the Arctic where they are submerged and cycled back, thereby keeping Western Europe warmer than it would otherwise be, is at a tipping point and in imminent danger of collapse. If AMOC collapses, Scotland, for example, could become unlivable.

Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who heads the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, stated the facts: “We have already crossed the tipping point of many coral reefs, which are now in the middle of global die-off. This is very depressing because it is already too late to do anything about it, though marine biologists have warned about the risks for a long time. The Amazon rainforest is also dangerously close to a tipping point. As we speak, it is going through the worst drought on record.”

“This is all driven mainly by fossil fuel emissions and also deforestation,” Rahmstorf said, “so both must be stopped. Yet Trump promises to give the order to “drill, drill, drill on day one of my presidency.” And the United States has already surpassed every other petro state in oil and gas production.

Thus the future of humanity hangs in the balance. Changing course means heeding Cop 16’s dire warnings about the precipitous loss of biodiversity, otherwise known as the Sixth Extinction. It means ending the idiotic separation between the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, which are two sides of the same coin. And it means the global community facing the real possibility of the reelection of an American Mussolini.

Cable and mainstream media in the USA have been filled in recent days with comments from former generals who worked for Trump, such as his chief of staff, John Kelly, quoting him as repeatedly saying during his first term, “I need the kind of generals Hitler had.” Unable or unwilling to look below the political surface of events, the rational commentariat in this militarized nation is reacting with anxiety bordering on panic at the prospect that America, “the shining city on the hill,” is sliding inexorably into the sewer of dictatorship.

There is still total befuddlement as to how a malevolent miscreant could be tied with Kamala Harris with less than two weeks to go before the election. As Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, again asked rather obtusely: “How can so many Americans be blind to who Trump is and what he intends to do?”

After stating the half truth that “many Americans would prefer blowing up the system as a whole – destroying democracy and our institutions of self-government – than settle for gradual change because they feel the system is hopelessly rigged against them,” Reich lists people who have “brought us to the brink of this disaster.”

They include the usual suspects, such as Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, but also people like Jamie Dimon, CEO and chair of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, “a lifelong Democrat who is considered the ‘spokesman’ for American business, whose silence has been deafening.”

“Who else is responsible?” Reich rhetorically asks. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Vladimir Putin were again seeding the election with hackers and bots favoring Trump, as Putin did in 2016.”

With all due respect, Robert Reich, you need to look in the mirror. Back in the early 1990’s, after I was invited to a collapsing USSR by a perestroika exemplar plugged into the ruling nomenklatura, I wrote to Reich during the transition from Bush Senior to Bill Clinton, pleading with them to use the opening and goodwill toward Americans I found among Russians to build “an ecologically and ethically sound market.”

Growing up in the former car capital of the world, Michigan, and witnessing it turn into the buckle on “the rust belt,” I wrote that America could revitalize its manufacturing sector while opening a new market in an ecologically and ethically sound way.

It sounds terribly naïve now, but it would have worked. Reich was good enough to write back (I still have the letter), saying that the Clinton team had discussed my proposal but decided to take a multilateral approach with a focus on China. In other words, they went for cheap foreign labor and flooded the American market with inexpensive consumer goods. That set the stage for the hellish history we’re living in today.

As another commentator opined In the dread-inducing present, “You could argue that electing a woman of color as president would be a radical step forward for the US. But Harris is no radical. In fact, presidential elections rarely lead to radical change. The big difference this time is that Trump’s election would.”

Right, Trump’s election could lead to radical change at the global level, and that’s why it may be necessary. But has the psychological foundation been poured in enough people all over the world to make radical change (that is, a basic change in the course of humankind) possible?

Trump’s re-election after the Biden interregnum will certainly be the end of America as the world has known it, and with it the post-World War II largely US-made international order.

The question is, what will take its place -- more fragmentation, disorder and authoritarianism around the world, or the emergence of a true planetary civilization? There are no bystanders.

© Scoop Media