Early in the Iraq war the Bush Pentagon predicted that “by 2020 there is little doubt something drastic is happening,” reported Fortune.
“As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of
desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would
emerge. … [W]arfare is defining human life.”
The ticking gets louder … the time bomb grows bigger … the explosive fuel goes global … and 2020 is dead ahead.
Recently the tick-tick-ticking became louder in “The Middle-Class Revolution,” a Wall Street Journal feature by the conservative Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of 1992’s “The End of History and the Last Man”: “All over the world,” he writes in the Journal,
“today’s political turmoil has a common theme: the failure of
governments to meet the rising expectations of the newly prosperous and
educated.”
Failure of government? Since when is it the government’s job to
“meet the rising expectations” of the middle class? What happened to
capitalism? Isn’t this the America where free-market capitalism is the
engine of economic growth and prosperity? A new age where government is,
at best, a tool helping capitalism to thrive? And, at worst, an anchor
slowing capitalists?
The ‘Pentagon 2020’ battle plan
Yes, there is a “middle-class revolution.” Yes, it is spreading
worldwide, putting in place a network of ticking time bombs. But not
only is government failing. Not only is capitalism failing. But Fukuyama
is ignoring the real bomb, buried deep inside this new global
revolution, the new age of global warfare that the Bush Pentagon warned
of a decade ago:
“By 2020 there is little doubt something drastic is happening. …
As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of
desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would
emerge … warfare is defining human life.”
Fukuyama does a great job of analyzing “the theme that connects
recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the
2011 Arab Spring and continuing protests in China, is the rise of a new
global middle class. Everywhere it has emerged, a modern middle class
causes political ferment.”
The middle-class revolutionaries
But the protests have “been led not by the poor” as in many
revolutions throughout history, “but by young people with
higher-than-average levels of education and income,” states Fukuyama.
“They are technology-savvy and use social media likeFacebook and
Twitter.” Even in countries that “hold regular democratic elections,”
he continues, “they feel alienated from the ruling political elite.”
This is gaining critical mass worldwide, and, yes, that may be
great news for capitalism — in the short term — but it is also bad news
for the long-term survival of the planet and for capitalism, because
this angry middle class is adding fuel to the Pentagon 2020 war plans.
Why? Five years ago Goldman Sachs predicted the middle class would
grow by some 2 billion people by 2030. Fukuyama also cites a European
Union Institute for Security Studies prediction that membership in the
global middle class would increase “from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2
billion in 2020 and 4.9 billion in 2030 … mostly in China, India and a
few hundred million in Africa.”
Billions of new consumers: “Corporations are salivating at the
prospect of this emerging middle class because it represents a vast pool
of new consumers,” says Fukuyama. Unfortunately, not only corporations
and their CEOs, economists, marketers and analysts, but the entire
capitalist world tends “to define middle-class status simply in monetary
terms.”
They are wrong.
Middle-class success is breeding anti-government activists
The Pew Research Center and
the University of Michigan’s World Values Survey have found that
“middle-class status is better defined by education, occupation and the
ownership of assets, which are far more consequential in predicting
political behavior.” So, today, the new middle class is “much more
likely to engage in political activism to get their way.” Not just
protests and civil unrest but revolutions — the kind predicted by the
Pentagon a decade ago.
Even among China’s billion-plus. Fukuyama says the Chinese
middle class “now numbers in the hundreds of millions and constitutes
perhaps a third of the total.” But the risks are accelerating. China’s
“industrial job machine,” built by the regime beginning in 1978, “will
no longer serve the aspirations of [a] population” that’s graduating as
many as 7 million college graduates each year, who face job prospects
“dimmer than those of their working-class parents.”
This “threatening gap between rapidly rising expectations and a
disappointing reality” will have enormous implications for China’s
stability. Reading “Middle-Class Revolution” and other Fukuyama works,
it is obvious that the “Pentagon 2020” war scenario is accelerating
everywhere — across Asia, India, Africa, Europe, South America and the
United States — fueled by capitalists who only see population growth as
an opportunity for new consumer markets.
Capitalism vs. Planet Earth
So let’s take a closer look at the Pentagon 2020 scenario, the ticking time bomb hiding in Fukuyama’s analysis.
But don’t wait too long. Next the chaos will spread to America.
Yes, the same kind of middle-class revolution as in Egypt, Brazil,
Turkey, et al. From China, accelerating globally, as more and more
people, in more and more nations, wake up to the failures of governments
and capitalists, and the “threatening gap between rapidly rising
expectations and a disappointing reality” just keeps widening.
These are not new predictions. History tells us the minds of
political, financial and business leaders are too often biased toward
short-term optimism, while minimizing the long-term warnings of
long-term thinkers like Fukuyama. Unfortunately for the masses trapped
in denial, the day of reckoning is rapidly approaching, the day when
reality overwhelms all the happy talk.
War scenario, with no winners
For several years we’ve been developing a working model for
innovation, investing and survival based on the 12-part formula in Jared
Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Diamond
discovered that throughout history a dozen economic factors have defined
the reasons civilizations self-destruct or survive. “What really
counts,” says Diamond, “is not the number of people alone, but their
impact on the environment,” the “per-capita impact.”
In addition to population growth, lifestyle demands increase
with “third-world inhabitants adopting first-world standards,” their own
versions of the American Dream. Diamond details 12 macrotrends that
impacted collapse for earlier civilizations: loss of agricultural lands,
low food production, loss of forests, energy resources, alternative
energies, solar resources, ozone layer, toxic minerals mining and
species diversity.
Diamond’s alarm bells parallel Fukuyama’s, and it’s a blunt
warning about short-term capitalism: “More people require more food,
space, water, energy, and other resources.” As a result, the growing
demands of these new consumers will also trigger more wars, more famine,
more pandemics, more floods and fires, no-growth economics, and, worst
of all, more miscalculations by overoptimistic politicians and profit
excesses of capitalists.
Yes, the Pentagon 2020 war scenario was amazingly prescient,
with a resigned sense of inevitability toward this clash of the titans:
on one side, a myopic cartel of Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma,
big-money lobbyists like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Forbes 400
billionaires like the Koch brothers, all of them aligned against a
ragtag bunch of well-meaning foes like Diamond, Bill McKibben’s 350.org
and the many believers in climate science. But the betting odds heavily
favor the super-rich cartels.
Consumers sucking life from the planet
Yes, the pressure becomes ever more intense as more and more
nations increase consumption of natural resources toward America’s rate.
Warning: Americans consume 32 times more resources, and dump 32 times
more waste than do undeveloped nations. As a result, if all 7 billion
inhabitants of Planet Earth consumed resources at America’s level, we’d
need the resources of six Earths to survive.
And, actually, it’s much worse: Today Planet Earth’s resources
cannot support even 5 billion people, says Jeff Sachs, director of
Columbia University’s Earth Institute, a U.N. adviser and the author of
several books, including “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded
Planet.” So by 2030, with a projected global population of 8 billion,
it’s game over.
Why? Politicians and capitalists are in a state of denial.
Their failings fuel more middle-class anger … as our leaders focus
narrowly on more power and more profits … and keep blowing a toxic
bubble … building to a critical mass … pushing the world ever closer to a
point of no return … adding jet fuel to the Pentagon 2020 war scenario
where, indeed, “there is little doubt something drastic is happening.”
And where, as “the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks … an
ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy
supplies would emerge.” Where “warfare is defining human life.”
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