Difference between Democrats and Republicans...

... from the perspective of the 2020 elections:

planet earth = terminally ill cancer patient suffering great pain

treatment options from Republicans/Democrats:
Republicans: assisted suicide
establishment Democrats (party organization): non-prescription analgesics and smiles
progressive Democrats: try to push patient into remission... that will buy time to try to find a cure

New value system needed

Good interview at TRNN with climate scientist Will Steffen.


My comment:

"All of these [efforts to mitigate climate change] need to be underpinned by new value systems that value stabilizing the earth's systems as the highest priority that any economy must strive for." 

This should be the take home message of every economics course/lecture from now on. Economics and the values of economics must be defined beyond goods/services and financial return. My preferred definition of economies are self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants. Capitalism would not be an acceptable primary economic system under this definition because it is not self-sustaining... using fossil fuels will eventually degrade the environment to the point where it cannot sustain human life as we know it. Placing profit and 'economic growth' above all else is the source of climate change, income inequality, health care crisis and many other social ills. But economies are human made social constructs; humans made/make them, humans can reshape them.

Arms 'Marketing'

Short video of William Hartung at TRNN describing how the MIC profits from war and government policy. My comment:

William Hartung hit the nail right square on the head. A popular meme spouted by many pro-capitalist economists is that in free markets, market forces (consumer spending/consumption) drives what gets produced. But somehow, these same economists never examine the 'market forces' of the planned military arms economy (created by governments, especially by the U.S. government). The planned military economy creates forces of lobbyists and special interests who advocate for constant war and continuous arms race. Instead of buying food, childcare, medical care, education and intact ecosystem for our children and grandchildren, American taxpayers are buying updated nuclear weapons and other military hardware, war game exercises, ill-will from hundreds of foreign military bases and global instability from waging and fomenting war. These are economic decisions and American voters need to understand the spending priorities of their government in that light. 

Another useful tool maybe to redefine what economies are. The word 'economy' has Greek roots meaning house or home. The common definition of economy is focused on production/consumption of consumer goods for the purpose of generating profit, a far cry from house/home. A much better definition would be self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants. This would automatically make some sectors of the modern economy 'uneconomic' because they do not promote well-being... the entire offensive arms/military industrial sector.

Name of piece: Code Pink Conference: The Arms Industry Hides Behind Euphemisms (December 29, 2017)

Fred Magdoff: What Every Environmentalist Should Know About Capitalism

Youtube video of a talk by Fred Magdoff that covers some of the ground I describe in my series. He seems to think an ecologically friendly economy requires more planning than I do but we do seem to see a number of the same problems with capitalism.

Truthout interview with Magdoff. He's more idealistic than I am.

Growing wealth inequality

This article shows the ever increasing wealth gap caused by modern capitalism. It appears to validate my metaphor of capitalism to predation based food chain. As just as pure simple predator-prey models are bound to crash, capitalism is prone to boom-and-bust cycles. For a more stable economy, professional economists should study the full array of biological interactions in ecosystems and how they evolve new ecological niches for additional opportunities for interactions. We might do well to model our economies after ecosystems.

Polluting for Profit

Comment at TRNN at post title, Coal Power Plants are the Largest Source of Toxic Water Contamination: 

Like all forms of industrial pollution, toxic byproducts of coal are driven by economic profit. Producers of polluting fertilizers & agricultural chemicals profit from the sales of these materials to farmers who use it to increase their farm profits. Fossil fuel & petroleum industry extract, process & sell their products for profit. Polluted water, air and climate (including climate change) are all byproducts of profit driven polluting industries. Americans need to understand that mitigating pollution and climate change is not anti-economic. It's a economic evolution analogous to the industrial revolution - change or be left behind. This is particularly important in light of the regressive policies of DJT. The U.S. dominated technological innovation in the past but DJT's retraction from already poor investment in science (cutting funding to FDA, EPA, anti-science rhetoric) and education will decimate any hope of American revival. DJT's business specialty is the making and selling of his brand, *not* cutting edge innovation. He's a good hire to put on a spectacle but lousy at the STEM fields which will drive the economy forward. The choice to pollute [ignore pollution] for profit is an economic decision. The choice to *not* pollute for the sake of profit is also an economic decision. We consumers have the power to influence that choice. Demand transparency; be informed consumers.

Sixth mass extinction

I've written about how ecosystems are a metaphor/model for economies.

In Part 5 of the series, Figure 6 illustrates that economies rely on functioning ecosystems. In this TRNN interview, Professor Gerardo Ceballos talks about his research suggesting an ongoing mass extinction which threatens the stability of many ecosystems. If only for selfish reasons, the future of humanity requires the preservation of natural environments.

Comments of the day

At Truthout, "Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has compared people with pre-existing health conditions to cars that have been in accidents.":

Life is a pre-existing condition; it always precedes death. According to GOP reasoning, the pre-existing condition of life makes all living persons ineligible for medical insurance. It would seem we must die to become eligible.
/s

At Truthout, Corporate Agricultural Dumping: Growing the Wealth Gap:

Pressure to increase yields due to agricultural dumping also promotes greenhouse gas release and pollution through fossil fuel powered mechanization, transport & production as well as ever increasing use of agricultural chemicals.

At C&L, Trump's 'Pardons' Are A Threat To Democracy:

There is a big problem shared by Antonin Scalia's concept of Constitutional originalism and biblical literalism... language is symbolic. It is not possible for any language to be literally 'literal'. Written and spoken words are *always* subject to interpretation. 

The U.S. Constitution has a literal component in setting the framework of the U.S. government but it is also has an equally important aspiration component, just read the preamble. If DJT or any other politician is permitted to reduce the Constitution to only its literal elements (as would be the case if he pardons his family, cohort and himself), they would negate the founding values and precepts which have forged a collection of disparate individuals, ethnicities, languages and cultures into this country. We would turn in what Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families."

At TRNN, Data, Algorithms & Artificial Intelligence: Where is AI Innovation Taking Society?:

"...intellectual property rights cover a lot of things like patents, trademark, copyright, industrial designs, so basically everything that we touch, at one point or the other, has been impacted by intellectual property." 

Intellectual property is the DNA of economies; just as change in DNA evolves new species, change of information/intellectual property evolves economies. Regulation of intellectual property (patents, trademark, copyright, industrial designs, etc.) determines who controls economies. Corporations and their executives derive their power from control of massive amounts of information (examples: Microsoft, big pharma). Issues of income, wealth and power inequality all derive directly and indirectly from the concentration of power through control of information. True reform requires much greater transparency.

Worst case climate disruption

New York Magazine has published The Uninhabitable Earth, an article by David Wallace-Wells. Read it.

Gaius Publius at Down with Tyranny has published a commentary. My comment:

(1) Fossil fuels are a substitute for organic labor (humans and animals)... think automobiles vs. walking or horse power; hand tools/assembly vs. power tools/robots; even labor intensive harvesting of wind sailing vs. fuel burning ships. 

(2) Burning fossil fuels was/is en economic issue/problem. The economic argument against mitigating the greenhouse effect has won so far. The solution to climate change must also include an economic solution. 

(3) Ecosystems and environments capable of sustaining human life are the seed corn of all economies. Without ecosystems able to grow food crops, economies cannot and will not exist.

Agricultural chemicals are ecological drugs

Comment I left at Truthout post describing a neonicotinoid study conducted under 'real world' conditions of its effects on bee health to mixed results:

These findings are entirely predictable; their ambiguity buys their manufacturers more time to further market them as 'safe'. What the public often doesn't understand is the relationship between agricultural chemical(s) and the ecosystem (crop fields). A useful metaphor:
agricultural chemical :: agricultural condition :: ecosystem/environment/crop field
this relationship resembles -
drug :: disease/illness/infection :: patient

Neonicotinoids are chemicals (agricultural 'drugs') used to treat crops/fields to kill unwanted insects; antibiotics are chemicals (drugs) used to treat patients to kill pathogenic bacteria. But the outcome of a course of antibiotics is not always as intended - they can kill beneficial bacteria; they can't kill resistant bacteria; they may have synergistic or antagonistic side effects with genetics/drugs/diet/smoking/alcohol/etc - in other words, <a href= "https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-drugs-affect-people-differently-understanding-factors-sharma" >drugs do not affect all patients the same way</a>, some respond well, others experience dangerous side effects. By the same token, not all crop fields will respond the same way to the same pesticide/agricultural drug. In some instances (Germany), neonicotinoids did not have the side effect of bee (beneficial insect) deaths; in other cases (Hungary and the UK), neonicotinoid had the side effect of higher levels of bee death. This is true for all agricultural chemicals, including fertilizers, plant/animal hormones, animal antibiotics, pesticides and herbicides.

By the way, Bayer is a major drug producer; these are issues they regularly address with regards to drug safety/regulation. Pharmaceutical drugs must have a thoroughly tested/documented safety and efficacy record before they can be marketed to patients. The standard is lower for agricultural chemicals. With their experience and expertise, Bayer should have no difficulty meeting higher safety standards for agricultural chemicals. The question for the public is how much risk is tolerable?

Energy is labor

Controlling/containing climate change is all about energy; all major greenhouse gasses are products of burning fossil fuels. Because economic activity is so dependent on fossil fuels, it has been claimed to keep the planet habitable, we need to shrink the economy. Whether this is true or not depends on the definition of economic activity...

Energy is a form of labor (or labor is a form of energy). Automation + energy = human labor. Easy examples are household appliances: vacuum + electricity = person sweeping with broom; automobile + fuel = human walking. So if energy becomes inaccessible due to climate issues, automation (or other powered machinery) is less available. For producers, the choice is to produce less (less energy) or produce the same or more by employing human labor. Although absolute productivity per worker drops, more people are employed which means more people have money to spend. in other words, economic productivity declines in the face of more economic trade - is that a growth or decline of economic activity?

Regardless, the way we currently consume fossil fuels is unsustainable. It's bad for the climate; it damages the environment when extracted, transported, and consumed.

Circular reasoning

Historian and political economist, Gar Alperovitz, acknowledges the threat of climate change, but his idea to use the Federal Reserve in the form of "quantitive easing, i.e. create money, to take Big Oil companies out of the equation and finance a massive green infrastructure program" is circular reasoning. My comment:

Gar Alperovitz's proposition: A movement to eliminate/minimize the policy influence of the fossil fuel industry by giving them money which they can (and will) use to buy policy influence over another industrial sector... 

Transferring the economic power of the current fossil fuel sector to possibly increasing the economic power of another polluting industry (manufacture/disposal of chemicals, solar panels, agricultural wastes, and drugs are potentially polluting) creates/amplifies another set of pollutants in lieu of heat trapping pollutants.

The climate change issue is an economic issue; so long as profit can be had, the owners of that profit making industry will fight for the 'right to profit'. By maintaining a small group with concentrated power, they will eventually set up another economic imbalance of power that threatens the lives and livelihoods of many workers and their families - in the name of profit. The real solution is to avoid massive concentration of power.

Update: Personal care products are a looming source of water pollution. Prescription drugs are also an area of concern.

Sustainable businesses

Apparently, sustainability has become an teachable issue by one professor in at least one university. It needs to expand. My comment:

This post leaves out the relevant relationship between business and economics: business (in the context of business school) is applied economics. Issues of 'Climate change impacts every resource used by businesses: from agriculture, water, land and energy to workers and the economy' and sustainability are derived from economic principles. The strongest example is economic 'externalities' where economists do not factor the role of environmental services into their models. Thus far, neither business schools nor economists show any ability to evolve their thinking to correspond to the risk of loss of the environmental/ecological services necessary to human life and economies. If economists cannot incorporate sustainability into business, it may be time for other fields of endeavor to incorporate business into sustainability.

One independent reform would be to increase transparency. Consumption drives economic activity. Currently, businesses do not inform consumers of the wage and ecological consequences of goods and services they market; businesses determine the environmental impact of consumption. If consumers know and understand the human and environmental costs of their spending, their consumption decisions would determine the environmental consequences of consumption.

Owner rights

It seems to me that Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, is of the opinion he and his socioeconomic class 'owns' the taxes paid by American workers to the government. My comment:

There is a presumption among Mulvaney and his ilk that ownership confers additional/special rights. Unfortunately, they've influenced legislators and judges to their side with court rulings like Citizens United which give owners additional rights of personhood through corporate proxies. The 'owners' responsible for the financial collapse of 2007/8 are protected from prosecution. Contrast this to low income and especially low income minorities who own very little and are prosecuted and jailed at much higher rates for less egregious crimes. 

Mulvaney is just expressing this doctrine more openly - owners control everything - wages, profits, spending, workers' health, workers' rights, workers' votes. everything. They should keep in mind what happened to Arthur William Hodge and the French Revolution.

The current administration really needs to figure out who owns what (American public owns the public lands) and who governs what (elected officials and unelected civil servants) and who's direction (voters).

Honest and Open New EPA Science Act

Comment at Crooks and Liars post describing the Honest and Open New EPA Science Act which was 'to inhibit regulations based, in part, on confidential or proprietary raw data.'

The entire premise of the Republican anti-environment stance is their money and power will shield/protect them from the negative impacts of their policies. For the sake of humanity, we desperately need them to learn they are not unique among humans. They are just as susceptible to the pollution they allow to spew into the air and water.

Choke on some pollution indeed.

Unifying Resistance

A comment I posted at Truthout. It pulls together several themes I've written about here:

"Trump is upping his game, and we, as resisters, aren't ready." 

Yes. It's also time to be proactive as opposed to reactive. But we need to understand the reflex to react and how to step back and see the forest to respond proactively. It's important to understand how politics divides people in both obvious and subtle ways. DJT is a practitioner of confrontational divisiveness; he outright declares his rejection of immigrants, Mexicans, unattractive women, prisoners of war, disabled people, etc. Divide and conquer can also be achieved by more subtle tactics, such as when Republicans and Democrats specifically void the needs of the poor by leaving them out of the debate (or DJT spotlighting the educated with his 'I love the poorly educated').  

The modus operandi of the body politic is to act on the interests of the elite at the expense of the larger population by dividing the larger group. Successful opposition would require some degree of unified resistance which is not the case with single issue movements. I would suggest single issue movements make their case under the umbrella of a larger 'meta' theme for the benefit of the larger overall. For instance, demanding that all policy be based on objective evidence would mean the numbers of gun injuries and deaths factors into gun policy and definitions of corporate personhood would correct for the differential influence such policy would confer on owners. Another useful theme would be to define economies as 'production, consumption and exchange of capital for the sustained wellbeing of humanity'. 'Sustained' would entail policy makers incorporate a long view of policy outcomes - think climate change; 'wellbeing' would require some degree of universal healthcare; and the 'economics' of warfare would be completely invalidated. A final theme would be maximize information transparency. The only way a small group (elites) can concentrate power to any extent is through the control of information. They use propaganda (selective/deceptive use of information) to create divides in the larger population and amplify infighting. Information transparency inoculates against propaganda.  

The resistance movement needs to recognize that although Trump is personally repugnant and vulgar, he is only a figurehead. The real adversaries in the long fight are the power elites.

Redress of disproportionate scale

The primary problem with the economy right now is enormous inequality expressed in many ways. On the meta level, the power of corporations to effect ecosystem scale damage threatens the survival of humanity through its impact on the environment - climate change, air and water pollution, fracking triggered earthquakes, water shortages, etc. My favorite example is the power to literally remove mountains by mountaintop coal mining. Bill Nye describes another example where tar sands oil extraction has denuded one quarter of the visible ecosystem in the Canadian province of Alberta.

As regular readers would know, my preferred solution is to make information fully transparent. Controlling information is how corporations concentrate power. There are two other options which would diffuse the ability of corporations to concentrate power. Neither would be as effective as information transparency but its always good to attack large problems from multiple fronts. One would be to force all corporations to have a fixed expiration dates. Corporations are legal entities. The Supreme Court has given them some personhood rights without the limits that natural persons experience with biologically imposed death. Corporate expiration dates would fix that problem. BTW, because corporations are owned by people, the extension of personhood rights to corporations means owners of corporations have more rights than non-owners. Its surprising this isn't seen as a challenge to one-person-one-vote.

The other option is to limit the size of financial institutions. Banks are tools by which corporations collect/borrow the money/capital to become powerful. No one individual has the money to buy the resources to blow up mountains. By pooling the money of many people, banks can collect the needed funds. Smaller banks can't collect as much money. This would not prevent the concentration of power but it would put up additional barriers because it forces the participation of more players who each would/could add their own conditions.

So not as simple as my preferred open information proposal but perhaps good options to add to the tool chest in opposition to concentrated economic power.

No Principles of Economics?

The latest episode of Economic Update, Where Economic Theories Clash, strongly implies something I feared regarding the field of Economics. In it, Richard Wolff called Neo-classical economics, Keynesian economics and Marxian economics 'theories' of economics which implies they have undergone some form of validation or testing (scientific theories are vigorously tested before they are called 'theories'). But in real economies, each of these 'theories' has failed in one permutation or other. This suggests that Economics has no unifying principles. [To use the physical sciences as an example (again): the Theory of Evolution is a unifying principle in biology - it connects all living organisms and justifies the study of model organisms to better understand life; Atomic Theory is a unifying principle of chemistry - it predicts the behavior of all matter.] An example of a possible unifying economic principle is the presumption that functional economies must yield profit; this would have strong implications for capitalism.

This is particularly troubling when it comes to policy. All public policy is economic policy and it is argued and made on the basis of Economic theory. If Economic theory is as poorly developed as implied above, then for all intents and purposes, Economic theory is ideology without basis in empirical principle. As it stands now, the science of climate change has very strong physical evidence backing it and thus should drive energy policy. In its stead, we have nonsense 'economic' arguments that the cost of protecting the biosphere is 'too expensive'. Policy makers are balancing the future of humanity against the profiteering of capitalists at our ignorance. If science can detangle systems as complex as climate to predicted global climate change, it should be able to apply similar methods to answer the question of how to best structure economies for the sake of mankind. Economies should serve humanity not the other way around.

economics is life

Economics is life because economics is how workers provide the necessities of life. In exchange for labor, workers earn the means to purchase food, clothing, shelter and all other sundries. But the policy and practice of economics does not account for the inherent life aspect of economics. Instead, economics is defined as "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services" [Wikipedia]. And this has allowed governments and policy makers to couch the purpose of economic policy only to the end goal of creating capital, another word for wealth and profit.

With a 'pro-economy' argument, essentially every decision of the DJT presidency is intended to generate profits for the owner class without regard for workers. Oil pipelines have been approved at the risk of contaminating the soil and water necessary for human consumption and agriculture. Health care reform to profit insurance providers is under consideration at the risk of workers losing medical insurance or essential benefits with the projected likelihood of decreasing overall life expectancy.

These policies literally put profit over life. And that is completely contrary to the purpose of work. If work cannot provide the means to survive, their is no reason or purpose to work. So the current definition of economics is incomplete. It needs to include a purpose, the survival and wellbeing of workers. And because workers are always making more workers in the form of children, wellbeing has to extend into time, the sustained survival and wellbeing of workers.

Economic policy that must take the long term wellbeing of workers in account would change the nature of geopolitics and culture. It would be a positive change.

Accounts due

It common knowledge that climate related treaties do not count all contributions to greenhouse warming when deciding what industrial/economic sectors to target for mitigation. From a political perspective, this may make sense - for example, the politics and narratives of food production makes it a very difficult sector to modify in terms of public opinion and policy. But it is essential that we remember that the physical, geochemical, chemical and biological phenomena of climate change occur independent of human wishes, wants and intent. Natural systems don't care about human societies and politics. Human contributed changes in greenhouses gases alters natures' normal accounting of global climate. Global accounts, or 'books', cannot and will not change just because human policy decides that certain economic sectors are exempt from greenhouse gas mitigation efforts. By granting exemptions, we are essentially creating a false set of greenhouse gas accounts. The real greenhouse gas/ climate change accounts are kept by planet Earth. Cooking the books to ease the passage of international treaties won't save us when the climate accounts are due.