Kevin Phillips on Diane Rehm show
By Lorna Salzman

Today, October 9th, Diane Rehm on NPR questioned three people: a Wall St. Journal columnist, William Greider of The Nation, and author Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money and numerous other books on politics and economics.

There was little noteworthy or new on this show, with one exception. Phillips, in the middle of a short discourse prompted by a caller, mentioned casually in passing that ecological problems were not caused by capitalism.

This only proves how disconnected some people are from reality. And this is not just a casual man in the street. This is an author of numerous books on economics and politics who should know better. So let's ask Phillips some questions.

We have pollution coming out of coal fuelled power plants everywhere on earth, with China bringing one a week on line. Coal not only produces particulate pollution and sulfur dioxide but carbon dioxide, which is responsible for global warming. The reason China is building these plants is not to create pretty scenery or monuments or to keep people employed. They are building them to provide MORE electric power which in turn fuels factories and businesses which need energy (as well as natural resources) to manufacture things which in turn they will sell at a profit or export to America, where consumers snap up their cheap products (manufactured with cheap labor and underpriced energy, in a desperately polluted country).

The more coal you burn, the greater the pollution as well as the industrial production. The result overall is economic growth: growth in the mining and burning of coal, growth in the industries that expand and manufacture more things because of the abundance of electric power from coal; growth in the consumer economy as people buy more of the products of these factories; and of course growth in the pollution, particulates, carbon dioxide and the wastes that the end consumer has to dispose of.

When asked to define capitalism, none of the interviewees mentioned growth. They mentioned freedom for markets. This seems remarkable, given the fact that right now, due to the credit crunch and failing housing market, everyone is frantic and hysterical over the fact that businesses are selling less and consumers are buying LESS. In other words, economic growth is slowing down. This is bad for business and capitalism. Yet so-called experts can blithely both ignore the exigency of economic growth and the fact that it causes pollution. Capitalism and growth are synonymous. Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?

Phillips may be one of those majestically uninformed people who thinks that environmental pollution or degradation is just an accident, or just the mistakes made by a nasty polluter who will be made to clean up his act sooner or later, or just a temporary aberration.

Let's take another example: loss of biodiversity. We are, according to biologists, in the middle of the sixth great extinction, mainly caused by the destruction of habitat. What is destroying wildlife habitat? Mainly conversion to profitable human uses such as agriculture, ranching, timber, housing development, recreation, resorts, etc. This year the Amazon lost three times as much rainforest to development and conversion as it did last year. The large fish in the oceans are 90% gone due to overfishing and loss of coastal and estuarine habitats to development such as marinas and retirement communities and golf courses as well as condominiums.

I don't know what you call this kind of development for profit except Economic Growth. Yet Kevin Phillips can say on public radio that capitalism has nothing to do with our ecological problems and not be contradicted. Of course he is not alone. There are still millions of Americans, liberals, progressives and minorities among them, who are clueless about the connection of economic growth and capitalism (which is ineluctably tied to growth) to ecological problems. Pick up any newspaper or magazine, turn on any radio or TV show, listen to any discussion about the economy or politics, and I will wager that you will not hear the term "economic growth" mentioned.

Americans are absymally educated and abysmally informed about what is going on around them, and few of them care about anything that doesn't affect their pocketbook today. The notion that the growth of debt and consumer spending and wild ventures for profits - true across the whole spectrum of our country, not just the super-rich - hasblo no bearing on environmental problems is truly mind-boggling, as is the reverse as spouted by Phillips: that capitalism, a system that survives ONLY on growth, has no relationship to our ecological problems.

Small wonder that our country is in turmoil, when the so-called experts like Phillips and Greenspan are looked to for guidance and advice.

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