Politics: Accounting Right in the Upcoming Elections

Dan Warner grew up in Seattle where he also attended University of Washington law school. He moved to Squalicum Lake Road in 1975. He is a professor of business legal studies in the accounting department at WWU.

On politics, one friend has just about given up. He says, “The Republicans are driving us toward the edge of the cliff at 80 miles per hour, and the Democrats at 50 miles per hour.” He advocates voting Green and letting the inevitable crash come sooner than later.

When I mentioned that I was going to use his quote in this article, he elaborated: not that we would all go over the cliff, he thought, rather that the machine would inevitably break down before the final denouement. But I agree with my friend. We cannot go on this way, and, as another political season rolls along, we environmentalists are not optimistic.

For thirty years, well-intentioned people in all the Western democracies have tried to respond to the environmental crisis. Generally speaking, things are now worse than they were. Here in Whatcom County, we struggle with little success to slow the on-going destruction and ruination of this beautiful place.

Our successes are marginal and temporary against the brutal onslaught. The failure–everywhere—to reverse this process of destruction implies that our culture has assumed a pathological mindset, an ecologically pathological paradigm. In short, we are killing ourselves, driving ourselves, literally to a dead end—over a cliff.

As our lakes, rivers, and seashore areas are polluted and their natural bounty tainted, as our soil and ground water is contaminated, as our area’s hillsides are chopped down for housing developments and our precious farmland and rural lifestyle are paved over, as our countryside disappears beneath ever-wider “improved” roadways, as traffic congestion increases, as more and more critical biodiversity disappears so too does our quiet, quietude, sense of place and home and community and decency decrease.

And still, our leaders insist that growth is good, population increase is good, and as a society we believe it. The political will to address the human causes of the “ecocrisis” has not materialized; voters tend to believe that technology will solve the problem. Or they believe that the problems are not real, inventions of the media or “ecofreaks”—radicals who want power to satisfy their own agenda even if they undercut civilization.

The key to reversing this destructive mindset is to inject some decent values into our dominate cultural institution, The Market. (Harvey Cox, in a March 1999 article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled, “The Market as God,” says he capitalizes The Market to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the reverence it inspires in business folk.) Behind our environmental and cultural problems lie economic problems. And behind the economic problem lies a spiritual problem.

Speaking about the recent accounting scandals, President Bush said on July 9 that “Self-regulation is important, but it’s not enough.” That is, the values necessary to control the profession cannot come from the profession; they must come from outside.

The accountants figured the books to make themselves and their clients rich, but left out of the evaluation the broader welfare. They left out community.

Similarly, with our whole economic system, The Market, we are not doing our accounting right. The Market cannot make the necessary evaluations to sustain a good society. The values necessary to control The Market cannot come from The Market; they must come from outside.

As Robert Kuttner in Business Week put it, “The disgrace of the laissez-faire experiment calls for a much more searching reappraisal of the market fundamentalism than has characterized this economic era…. Markets do many things well. But they aren’t so good at policing themselves, or allocating resources in sectors that are natural monopolies or social goods.”

This recognizes that environmental and cultural problems are not primarily economic issues, rather, they are first ethical (value-judgments) and then political. So, if what’s needed is an injection into The Market of non-market values, what will its content be, where will it come from, and how will it get “injected” into the market?

The answer to the first question seems clear in general—the necessary values are not those now prevailing (which are based on “individual utilitarianism,” getting and measuring money and, using it as a social status-assignor by conspicuous consumption). The necessary values are not measurable in money, not materialistic.

They are spiritual values, not necessarily religious, that recognize at base what Albert Schweitzer said: “You don’t live in a world all alone. Your brothers are here too.” This means, I take it, that other people and other creatures and life forms are not just objects, but the subjects of a life that we did not create and that we should respect because we are not gods. We are not infinite. In short, values necessary to temper the ruinous Market are those inherent in kindness, humility, and respect.

Now as to the second and third questions: where are these values to come from and how will they get injected into the system? Some people think the churches should reclaim their former roles as ethical arbiter because, they say, the church is traditionally the best-suited institution to deal with the ethical and political issues.

For a variety of reasons, that is not likely to happen because in Western society churches do not have the necessary moral authority to make this revolution. Some people, recognizing the cultural influence of corporations, say that it is through them, based on some small-group dynamics, that the ethical sense will get injected. That strikes me as laughable—no corporation could consciously nurture the seeds of its own undoing.

The necessary values will not be dictated by the churches, nor can they be forced upon us by environmental intellectualists. It seems they must grow up from the community itself. So, unsurprisingly, we begin to re-examine conservative social values drawn from small business and small-town life where, as Mark Sommer recently wrote, “the face-to-face exchanges of small-scale commerce and community enforce accountability and transparency by their very nature as intimate transactions. Betrayals of trust are soon detected and seldom forgotten.”

The politicians we need to support, then, Democrats or Republicans, are not those advocating another runway at Sea-Tac or another Narrows Bridge or further ruinous widening of Sunset Drive and are not the ones clamoring to bring in new business that increase the population (but leave the unemployment rate unchanged).

These people are well-meaning, but they are reading from a script written 250 years ago for social conditions that no longer exist. Infinite growth in a finite space is not good. It is impossible; it is environmentally, culturally and socially ruinous. What these people do makes things worse, not better. It’s a hard lesson.

We need to support politicians who advocate on behalf of local farmers, not to promote the sale of their produce to Japan, but to promote its sale locally, at the Farmers’ Market.

We need to support local foresters, local fishers, local and smaller-scale business, production, markets and services for local consumption. Only in that way will we be able to rediscover the effect of our lifestyles upon our neighbors, our community, and our environment. Only in that way will we—in time—rediscover sustaining values (let’s hope we have time enough).

And to make that happen we need also then to support local media—this paper, the other alternative presses and radio—whose interest is in the long-term welfare of our community and not in the short-term interest of absentee CEOs and shareholders. Our perception of reality is socially constructed. Today the social construction of reality is consigned to multi-national corporations.

With sincere respect to The Bellingham Herald, the Gannett Corporation (which owns it) cannot really care about Bellingham. A corporation, by its nature, cares about quarterly profits. And pumping up circulation by, directly or indirectly, promoting population growth and increasing ad revenue is a way to increase the profits.

And so the message we get from the local daily newspaper, from all the chain papers, from the chain networks, from the chain entertainment industry is always—however subtly—the same: growth is good, consumption is good. (Read Friday’s “Wheels” section in The Bellingham Herald). For God’s sake, turn off the television!

We shouldn’t be afraid to speak of the decay of a culture dominated by an ideology as harmful as ours is. Political competency, for a democratic society locked in the grips of “ecocrisis,” begins with the ability to consider feasible alternatives to the present fateful direction, with freeing ourselves from the narcotic enchantment through which we wrongly perceive the social reality around us, and from habitual forms of action or inaction stemming from these illusions.

The values necessary to realize those alternatives cannot and will not come from continued expansion of the very institutions whose rise has undermined them. The free market system only works when it truly accounts for its costs, and that can only happen when those costs are recognized and felt. This is true conservatism (I always do wonder what “conservatives” purport to be conserving), and the necessary course for the 21st Century.

To reverse our present course requires an injection of values based on kindness, humility, and respect into our economic system. These values do not flourish in a cosmopolitan setting or amid the hurley-burley of constant chattering noise. They arise naturally in real communities and can only be nurtured locally.

If we’re heading toward the cliff at 80 miles per hour, what we need to do is put on the brakes. Then stop the car, get outside, and vote for leadership who will do the tough accounting to build a real community, instead of another highway.