Our only hope against nuclear pollution and annihilation – an informed citizenry

Extremely Cautionary Catastrophes: Fukushima And Chernobyl, By Robert Snefjella, 28 May, 2016, Countercurrents.org “………wherein does our best chance lie of reducing the harm and risk of our nuclear folly? How do we provide the basis by which we could begin to dismantle our folly and reconstruct cultures that are viable.

Those iconic personages Albert Einstein and Dwight Eisenhower are among the many concerned people who have located hope for policy sanity in an informed public:

Einstein found our “only hope” [regarding nuclear technology] in “an informed citizenry” [that] “will act for life and not for death.”

Eisenhower offered that

“only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Note well: they did not base their hope on experts or oligarchs or generals or silly people who are enthralled by the illusion of their own extraordinary intelligence. They based hope on a well informed us.

Implied in Einstein and Eisenhower’s hope is that the broad public, well informed, has a far greater potential repository of creativity and common sense and decency and such – beneficent functionality – than any cult, tribe, institution or faction thereof.

If indeed an informed public is essential, then modern mass media is largely a hope destroyer: the current use of mass media is largely as a ‘public perception management’ tool on behalf of demented control freaks and oligarchic wannabees; most mass media is used to brainwash, sell, propagandize, censor, mislead, confuse. Much of so-called journalism is a real-journalism-free zone. This is lethally dysfunctional and must be overcome. Significant steps in the right direction can be taken via intelligent political initiative, mandating and giving financial and legal aid to priority-sensitive free and full discourse and unfettered information in media.

The real world is challenging enough at the best of times. It requires all the realism and intelligence and heart we can muster. We cannot attain a cultural predominance of sensible public policy via lies and censorship. If we are to salvage any kind of reasonably benign and propitious human prospect, we must achieve a dominant public discourse which is integrity and forthrightness based. Such honesty is the nemesis of criminals and tyrants, but the indispensable basis for sound public and personal decisions. Again, a fully well informed public is our best chance.

And we might use direct democracy mechanisms – that is to say – a fully politically empowered public – to override the pernicious dysfunctions and corruptions of so many institutions. From Paul Craig Roberts’ discerning perspective, every public and most private institutions in the United States are corrupt. [46] The same problem is commonplace in most other countries.

Often the basic source of dysfunction in institutions lies at the executive and managerial level, with political and corporate appointees serving agendas other than the broad public interest. Direct democracy procedures can be used to set primary policies, select real good leaders to executive positions, and to monitor them, and to replace the inadequate or corrupt people that have been appointed or have wormed their way into so many positions of power.

Local and national direct democracy, informed by honest and free and full public discourse, offers the possibility of achieving genuine public-interest and planetary-interest cultural reform.

We might also begin what has become a more and more desperate journey towards cultural sanity by recognizing the artificiality of all financial barriers for undertaking a full effort to fix deadly problems, especially the nuclear one: unlimited credit is just sane policy away. If trillions can be handed to criminal and dysfunctional banks, trillions can be endowed for beneficent and necessary public and earthly purposes. The current global financial system is in effect and in fact a criminal system which predominantly serves narrow private interests, and oligarchic agendas and enterprises; and is parasitic upon the people of the planet, and egregiously, tragically disabling of the human prospect. To transform the current global private-interest-enabling financial system into forms that function as in effect public utilities, serving broad human and earthly interests, is necessary and possible. [47]

Another essential reform is to place corporations under, not over, the public and earthly interest. It is self-destructive madness to allow the narrow interests of corporations to trump essential human needs, and the well being of the biosphere. And those individuals who guide corporations and may reap great financial gain and social and political influence through corporate power, are largely immune from paying an appropriate personal penalty for corporate crimes committed and harm done. This too can and must be corrected.

The over-riding need is to transition to a global diversity of cultures that have in common the attempt to function in harmony with each other and the biosphere: Good people, clean air, good nourishment, good water, respecting and caring about all life on the planet. [48]

If we can’t achieve essential basic improvements, but cling to a culture of deception, criminality, brutality and dysfunction, then the horrors of the last generations, such as the first and second world wars, the horrors of the war of aggression inflicted upon the innocents of IndoChina, the 2011 destruction of beautiful Libya, Chernobyl’s disabled children, the Fukushima catastrophe, a terribly harmed North Pacific, and many more already achieved large crimes and big sorrows, are prelude to even greater horror.

“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” JFK, in his inaugural address. Robert Snefjella is a retired organic farmer ] http://www.countercurrents.org/snefjella280516.htm