Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

millennial hope S 177
United States in 2005–2006 had 17.5 million students and 2.7
million faculty and staff, spent $364 billion, and added $28 billion
to their endowments (Eagan et al., 2008, p. 8). In other words,
schools, colleges, and universities have considerable leverage on
our possibilities. Were they to exercise their leadership not only
to educate generations of ecologically literate change makers but
also to use their buying and investment power to build local and
regional resilience, they could greatly speed the transition to a
decent future.
The third transition is far more diffi cult: the reform of our
political life. We live amidst the ruins of failed isms. Communism
and socialism surely failed, but for different reasons. Capitalism as
it is presently practiced, however, is not far behind in the race to
oblivion. The fi rst two failed because they promised too much
and delivered too little at too high a cost. Global capitalism of the
neoliberal variety is failing because it delivers too much to too
few far too destructively. With enough historical perspective, the
differences among these three systems will seem very small, rather
like those minute doctrinal quarrels that fueled religious wars
over the centuries. They differ mainly about who owns the means
of production, but not a whit about the priority of economic
growth. In the meantime, neoconservative devotees in the United
States have dismantled much of the capacity for governance in a
fi t of what Vaclav Havel calls “market madness,” which “can be
as dangerous as Marxist ideology” (Havel, 1992, p. 66). In fact,
ideologues of the extreme right in their neocon phase bear a distinct
intellectual and behavioral resemblance to the communists
of the Soviet Union. Both cultivated the arts of ruthlessness and
manipulation without a fl icker of self-doubt about their particular
ends justifying their means.
The solutions, long obvious to serious students of democracy,
are to end the new gilded age in jackboots by removing money
changers from the electoral process once and for all, along with
the infl uence peddlers who descend like locusts on Congress.