Paul Jay at TRNN has a series of interviews posted with Lester Earnest, an early computer innovator. It is well worth watching.
Showing posts with label warmongering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warmongering. Show all posts
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Thursday, December 6, 2018
Daniel Ellsberg interviews
TRNN has a 13 part series posted where Paul Jay interviews Daniel Ellsberg. He essentially says: given current nuclear stockpiles, a nuclear war would set off climate conditions similar to those of the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs. Terrifying.
My comment in part 9:
My comment in part 9:
In this segment and the last segment, Daniel Ellsberg described a nuclear and war-making policy largely determined by (1) a capitalistic military-industrial-complex whose raison d’etre is the pursuit of profit without regard to consequences and, (2) military commanders whose raison d’etre is ‘victory’, pyrrhic and otherwise. The absence of morality is so striking that the only rational conclusion is that the MIC and military consists solely of sociopaths. This would also explain their absolute resistance to rational reform their war planning.
The performance of DJT as POTUS has illustrated the need to consider the mental health status of presidential candidates. This series of interviews highlights the need for a similar mental health review for leaders in other areas including military and industry {such as MIC). Sociopaths might make the best commanders for immediate [hot] combat, but their lack of empathy, morality and remorse makes them unsuitable for high level leadership positions.
My comment in part 13:
For the vast majority of people without bubble hideouts in New Zealand to wait out a nuclear winter, the only rational response to a nuclear strike is to immediate travels *towards* the first strike zone. Should humanity come to such a pass, it will prove itself not worthy of saving and not deserving of any efforts on its behalf. Let the 'true believers' of rapture inherit the destruction they will have wrought.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
U.S. Department of Defense failed audit
My comment at TRNN:
We have enabled a rich and powerful Military-Industrial-Complex to legally bribe politicians, policy makers and regulators through campaign contributions, political action committees, think tanks, ideological foundations, revolving door employment, etc. In return, all American taxpayers are forced to pay for ever more expensive, excessive and often unnecessary military hardware (with a side effect of excessively militarized local police) while less advantaged taxpayers send their children to become war fodder by foreign hands or self-destruction by suicide. We pay with our treasure, we pay with our future in our children, we pay with the future of our grandchildren.
MIC and the military get away with this degree of theft by hiding information. An audit is information about how the military spends its funds. Their audit failure is not an inability to track and report their spending; it reflects an unwillingness by the military to report their spending and allow themselves to be held accountable to our elected representatives. [BTW, elected representatives who have been bought by the MIC and eager the stories told by the military.] It's not about the defense of nation from enemies; it's the offense of military, especially MIC, against Americans and anyone who might interfere with their profits.
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Arms 'Marketing'
Short video of William Hartung at TRNN describing how the MIC profits from war and government policy. My comment:
Name of piece: Code Pink Conference: The Arms Industry Hides Behind Euphemisms (December 29, 2017)
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)
Saturday, August 12, 2017
Both are scary
Eddie Baza Calvo is Governor of Guam. He posted a video of his call with DJT after DJT threatened North Korea with 'fire and fury' to which they said their next missile test would be aimed at Guam which hosts multiple American military bases.
DJT said this to Gov. Calvo: “I can tell you this — tourism, you’re going to go up like 10-fold with the expenditure of no money so I congratulate you.”
... as if he's using the North Korea dispute as a way to generate free media attention to his overpriced vacation resort. This when he's also demanding Mitch McConnell 'get back to work and put Repeal & Replace, Tax Reform & Cuts and a great Infrastructure Bill on my desk for signing.' To DJT, POTUS is a figurehead whose only responsibility is to lounge in front of a television for positive media from Fox News, make a few public appearances/statements/tweets at his leisure and sign anything a Republican legislature can get to his desk. He has no responsibilities to setting or selling policy. Sad!
And if DJT weren't sad enough, Gov. Calvo said, “As an American citizen I have never felt more safe or so confident with you at the helm... With all the criticism that’s going on over there, from a guy that’s being targeted, we need a president like you.”
I hope for the sake of the people of Guam, their Governor was exercising impeccable manners and speaking from his heart.
DJT said this to Gov. Calvo: “I can tell you this — tourism, you’re going to go up like 10-fold with the expenditure of no money so I congratulate you.”
... as if he's using the North Korea dispute as a way to generate free media attention to his overpriced vacation resort. This when he's also demanding Mitch McConnell 'get back to work and put Repeal & Replace, Tax Reform & Cuts and a great Infrastructure Bill on my desk for signing.' To DJT, POTUS is a figurehead whose only responsibility is to lounge in front of a television for positive media from Fox News, make a few public appearances/statements/tweets at his leisure and sign anything a Republican legislature can get to his desk. He has no responsibilities to setting or selling policy. Sad!
And if DJT weren't sad enough, Gov. Calvo said, “As an American citizen I have never felt more safe or so confident with you at the helm... With all the criticism that’s going on over there, from a guy that’s being targeted, we need a president like you.”
I hope for the sake of the people of Guam, their Governor was exercising impeccable manners and speaking from his heart.
Thursday, August 10, 2017
North Korean diplomacy has not failed - yet
To everyone who claims diplomacy has failed... if the goal of diplomacy is to not completely disintegrate the opposing party in a relationship, then diplomacy with NK has worked since the cessation of the Korean War. Although imperfect, a useful metaphor for relationships with foreign countries is that of family relationships which cannot be escaped. Close family members are allies; enemies are contentious ex-spouses/in-laws with whom children are shared. To maintain these relationships, both parties must invest time and effort to communicate. It's much easier with family because there is a higher level of trust; these relationships have a higher tolerance for neglect. The goal of the family relationship is to be up to date with each others lives like keeping up to date on the agenda and goals of allies. To maintain functional relationships with ex-spouses over children (visitation, holidays, privileges, gifts...) for the sake of children may require ongoing negotiation and third party mediators. The ongoing negotiation is the goal of ex-spouse relationship; failure to negotiate can result in abuse and/or crimes of passion. Failure of diplomacy can result in armed conflict and/or nuclear war. It's not fun or flashy but diplomacy *is* the only solution with regards to NK.
Comment at TRNN:
The key statements: "Kim Jong-un is a not a madman... He's very sober, very sane. Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung before him were the same. They have one purpose. Their purpose is to maintain their regime, to continue to be able to drink their Hennessys and their Courvoisier, and to have their women and so forth and so on. That is the sole purpose of the Kim dynasty. It is a very rational purpose, and they're very rational about achieving that purpose."
DJT is also trying to stay in power. He's actually in a decent position: he is POTUS; his party controls all three branches of government; he has money... but he isn't taking rational action to stay in power.
Take NK, the goal of diplomacy between international enemies is to have an active ongoing dialog to achieve mutually satisfactory detente. DJT wants a diplomatic 'win', implying the cessation and dismantling of NK's nuclear program. The NK war hawk's see NK as a mortal enemy who threatens our allies. The only way to completely resolve or 'win' the 'NK = enemy' dynamic is either become friends with them *or* take them out of the equation through armed conflict. Become friends with NK is about as rational as expecting DJT to represent the interests of all Americans, which leaves decimating NK through war as the only route to 'wining'. Considering that war in that region of the world could cost millions of lives and destroy economies, war would not be a rational action. The *only* rational action is diplomacy, even if it does no more than delay mutually assured destruction.
BTW, why are [diplomatic] negotiations with NK viewed as 'winning' or 'losing' when labor/employer and defense/plaintiff negotiations are viewed as 'settlements' or 'contracts'? This is propaganda stirs up support for war and it only benefits the military industrial complex.
Saturday, July 29, 2017
The real enemies
Comment at Truthout:
Governments organize people into large collectives so economic leaders can put them to work and skim the fruits of their labor. [CEOs, major stock holders, central committee members (communist countries), etc don’t actually make a product or service that their companies sell for profit. They take credit for the goods made by their workers and are given the value of the goods as payment.] Wars are the forceful taking of other land *and* workers by governments for their economy. Wars are a way for governments to get more workers from whom they can take labor and gift them to their economic leaders.
The common narrative has always been nations are at war but the stakes of war tell a different story. Workers are at constant, unending conflict to protect them/ourselves from the ravages of economic leaders. It’s time to realize that the real conflict is between workers and economic leaders who concentrate their power by profiting from workers. United we workers stand, indeed.
Thursday, March 2, 2017
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.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
It goes back to money...
According to Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, much of internal Israeli policy regarding settlements in Palestinian land is about money. Much of U.S. aid to Israel is military in nature and justified as needed to help Israel defend itself from its enemies, including Palestinians.
It appears there two very powerful lobbies supporting Israel and both are about profiting themselves and not humanitarian concerns. One lobby is the group in Israel profiting from the control of land, property and resources of Israel and Palestine. The other lobby represents American military contractors who profit from the goods and services directly or indirectly given to Israel as aid.
From the linked video:
It's important to remember that 'capitalists' and power brokers can only steal when we (the majority of people) look away. Unfortunately, they are experts at creating distractions - Israelis are distracted with their comfortable life and perhaps some 'keeping up with the Jones' cultural meme. Americans are distracted by social issues - racism, immigration, sexism, 'religious liberty, abortion, etc. We need to learn to look past the distractions and smoke & mirrors and really see what is being stolen from us.
It appears there two very powerful lobbies supporting Israel and both are about profiting themselves and not humanitarian concerns. One lobby is the group in Israel profiting from the control of land, property and resources of Israel and Palestine. The other lobby represents American military contractors who profit from the goods and services directly or indirectly given to Israel as aid.
From the linked video:
SHIR HEVER: And what do Israelis think about this when the government is willing to spend so much money on such a small group of people? Is there protests about it?
GIDEON LEVY: Unfortunately, the Israelis stopped thinking a long time ago, and those issues don't interest anybody and are hardly on their agenda. Israelis are mainly concerned about their next vacation and their next new car and this very regretful but nobody makes the linkage between deep social problems and the money that goes for the settlers. It's somehow the Israelis remain totally indifferent and blind and there is no-one to wake them up.
It's important to remember that 'capitalists' and power brokers can only steal when we (the majority of people) look away. Unfortunately, they are experts at creating distractions - Israelis are distracted with their comfortable life and perhaps some 'keeping up with the Jones' cultural meme. Americans are distracted by social issues - racism, immigration, sexism, 'religious liberty, abortion, etc. We need to learn to look past the distractions and smoke & mirrors and really see what is being stolen from us.
Saturday, December 17, 2016
What is an economy?
According to Wikipedia, an economy is an area of the production, distribution, or trade, and consumption of goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location. This came up because I just listened to the NPR story about the recent surge in black lung disease in Appalachia. It seems that the number of cases of advance black lung disease has hugely increased in the past several years even as coal production has dropped. The story ends with a coal miner saying "...if I had it to do over I would do it again, if that's what it took to provide for my family as long as I have."
That got me thinking of economics on a meta-level: why *do* people work and often choose jobs which endanger their lives. From the coal miner's statement, it's clear that he works because he and his family need to survive. But there's an inherent contradiction in that a job that endangers his life does not support his survival. And that means the standard definition of economy is seriously incomplete. A much better definition would be a self-organizing, self-sustaining social entity that facilitates the production and exchange of surplus goods and services to promote the survival and wellbeing of all participants.
True economies take into account public heath issues and would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which harm public health. True economies would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which endanger nations of individuals. True economies would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which endanger the health of their workers, their children or their near and distant neighbors. True economies would not would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which destroy the life sustaining ecosystem of the planet.
Most of what the modern world calls 'economy' are not economies but more accurately defined kleptocracies which enable a small elite group to concentrate power. The innate consequence of the corruptive capacity of power ensures the elite will further concentrate their power, wealth and influence at the expense of workers and environment. Kleptocracies ensure economies are neither self-sustaining nor promote the survival and wellbeing of all participants.
That got me thinking of economics on a meta-level: why *do* people work and often choose jobs which endanger their lives. From the coal miner's statement, it's clear that he works because he and his family need to survive. But there's an inherent contradiction in that a job that endangers his life does not support his survival. And that means the standard definition of economy is seriously incomplete. A much better definition would be a self-organizing, self-sustaining social entity that facilitates the production and exchange of surplus goods and services to promote the survival and wellbeing of all participants.
True economies take into account public heath issues and would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which harm public health. True economies would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which endanger nations of individuals. True economies would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which endanger the health of their workers, their children or their near and distant neighbors. True economies would not would not support the production, exchange and profiting from goods which destroy the life sustaining ecosystem of the planet.
Most of what the modern world calls 'economy' are not economies but more accurately defined kleptocracies which enable a small elite group to concentrate power. The innate consequence of the corruptive capacity of power ensures the elite will further concentrate their power, wealth and influence at the expense of workers and environment. Kleptocracies ensure economies are neither self-sustaining nor promote the survival and wellbeing of all participants.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Greed and Corruption in military economics
The Real News Network has posted a series of short clips of an interview with Andrew Feinstein, a former South African politician who has written and book called Shadow World which has been made into a documentary film. He describes the secret corrupt deal making that drives military spending and eventually bleeds into insurgent uprisings and 'wars on terror'. In brief, politicians and their friends/family receive kickbacks and bribes from military contractors for purchasing goods and services from said contractors. In the interview, Andrew Feinstein essentially says that in comparison to corruption in military contracting, organized crime is for amateurs.
This is more confirmation of the accuracy of my theory of economics. See here for the relevant links.
This is more confirmation of the accuracy of my theory of economics. See here for the relevant links.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Ugliness of Israeli settlements
I am not fond of Abby Martin's Empire files - I find her presentation to be over dramatized, even when I agree with her point of view. But in this instance, even if only a tenth of her report is true, Americans are doing bad things. This episode describes how the state of Israel not only tacitly approves of Israeli terrorism against Palestinians, but it's overtly abetting such activity. And considering U.S. aid covers close to one-quarter of Israel's military budget, Americans are indirectly sponsoring state terrorism.
Be informed. It's necessary to mount effective opposition.
Be informed. It's necessary to mount effective opposition.
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Stand with Water-Protectors
My comment at a Truthout post regarding the North Dakota Access Pipeline:
The colonial NoDAPL battle is another iteration of an economic conflict between two disparate sides; one brings the military and police power of the state, the other brings the voices of an oppresses population. We have and currently see similar (economic) fights all over the country and all over the world. Some examples include international trade pacts (TPP/TTIP) where corporations purchase government influence to negotiate terms to their benefit and develop marketing/propaganda strategies to sell them to the voters of their respective countries. Strong-arming or influence purchasing of local governments for tax benefits/incentives to draw so-called jobs in the form of factories (like cars or airplanes), sports teams (to subsidize stadiums/roads) and retail enterprises (like Walmart stores). International armed conflict where control of economic resources is a significant driver of government directed military conflict - the war in Iraq was at least partially about gaining control of Iraq's oil; it was also an opportunity for arms producers to sell more products to the U.S. military. Even U.S. elections are about corporations buying political marketing/propaganda in the form of campaigns to purchase/persuade voters to their thinking. In all cases, powerful corporations are backed by the institutional and/or military power of governments to exert their will on a weaker opponent.
The true nature of the conflict is powerful corporations/individuals fighting the less powerful to increase their opportunity to increase their power. For the sake of oppressed/repressed people everywhere, we should always stand with them. Many thanks to the water protectors. You are fighting for my rights as well as yours and I stand by your side.
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Economic drivers of humanitarian aid
One of the major themes that run through many of these posts is how entwined economic decisions are with all personal, cultural and political life at essentially all levels. A recent interview at NPR brought to mind some of the links between economics and humanitarian aid.
Firstly, the need for humanitarian aid is often (but not always) the direct or indirect outcome of economically driven policy. Two major examples: (1) war refugees - war is often waged to forcefully take resources from another sovereign nation. Civil wars are internal conflicts for control of resources. All wars have economic winners and losers. (2) climate refugees - victims of climate change intensified natural phenomena (droughts, storms, etc.); refugees whose native ecosystem can no longer grow the food needed for survival. Climate change is the consequence of economies spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through the consumption of fossil fuels to make stuff. The fossil fuel industry and all fossil fuel powered industry have profited from this.
Three telling points/quotes from the interview:
"In your report, you found that conflicts last two times longer than they did in 25 years ago..."
"...the aid sector is bigger than it's ever been before, with 4,500 known relief organizations around the world..."
"...Organizations have become businesses in many ways, held back by interests that are very corporate. Success is not measured in terms of the quality of the aid you provide, or how much you're working in partnership with other NGOs. It's about how many places you're in, how much staff you have, how much is in your budget..."
Put together, it seems that rich powerful players extract wealth from the poor to the point where they exist at the barest edge of survival and forced into the position of needing external aid (aid refugees). These rich powerful people then 'very generously' donate tiny amounts of the wealth they've extracted from the aid refugees to boost their charitable/humanitarian bona fides. But as the linked interview implies, much of this is a scam. The spending of aid money has more to do with boosting the balance sheet of the organization than actually helping people in need.
The worldwide economic system is set up so that resources are stolen from the poor and the supposed return of some of these stolen resources as aid are actually ways to further launder those stolen resources back to the rich. Aside from the immorality and injustice of such a system, it's also environmentally unsustainable. Either human societies lives within the constraints of the planetary ecosystem or the ecosystem will force us to. In case of the latter, recall what Tennyson wrote... "Nature, red in tooth and claw..."
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
The Next Economy
Econology Part 5: The Next Economy
Amongst the majority of Americans, there is little doubt that we live in troubled times and the state of the economy is a large part of our trouble. Rising housing and consumer prices, stagnant wages, significant underemployment and ballooning wage and wealth inequality are all symptoms of an economy in disequilibrium.
The solutions peddled by the political right are the same tax cuts and deregulation which landed us in this situation (see Part 4); the left, lacking a coherent economic narrative, offers laundry lists of disjointed economic reforms (see here and here). This at a time when the economy is so ill that alleviating the symptoms is no more than a temporary palliative, it is time to go deeper and treat the underlying causes of the disease.
***
[This the final part of a series describing an alternative way to look at the economy. It follows directly from Part 4:
Econology Part 1a: It's not the economy, Stupid; it's economics
Econology Part 1b: The depth and breadth of economies
Econology Part 2: The ecology of economies
Econology Part 3: Eleven economics lessons from ecosystems
Econology Part 4: Emergent flaws of Capitalism (1, 2)]
This is the last in a series of essays offering an alternative narrative of economics. In the introduction to this series (Part 1), I discuss how the failure of economics to advance a theory of economics that corresponds to reality has been a major disservice to modern civilization. Part 2 delineated how the ecological water cycle substantially parallels capital circulation in economies. Part 3 listed several lessons of economics that can be extrapolated from the water cycle. Part 4 equated the transition from a functional post-war economy (Figure 1) to today’s distressed economy where many American workers are essentially subsisting (Figure 2) to land desertification where poor agricultural practices reduce once productive land to unproductive desert. Should this economic trend continue, workers will not have the capital resources to raise the next generations of healthy, capable, educated ‘workers’. Losing generations of workers would change the economy on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution, in reverse. Here, to conclude this series, I will present how the economic lessons of the ecological water cycle might be applied to diagnose and resolve some of the persistent short and long term problems in the economy.
The Great Recession and its recovery are atypical in many ways. Despite ‘strong economic numbers’, many workers are still un- or under- employed and the wealth gains of the recovery have been concentrated in the top income bracket. Being as this is the product of a decades long closed door effort to systematically destroy or marginalize the institutions and procedures that protect workers from capital predation, reform efforts should be open to scrutiny so workers can evaluate their goals and efficacy. The first step is to break down the problem into smaller digestible segments: Problems with the economy can be broken down into three levels: first is the immediate needs of workers and opportunities for them to earn a living wage (on the time scale of months). Second is the roughly century long cycle of net growth followed by a global economic downturn; witness the Great Depression and Great Recession. And the third is an economy that is sustainable into the unforeseeable future (centuries and beyond).
[Note: Although the issue of standard recessions is not specifically addressed (primarily because the genesis of these essays stemmed from the unusual trends of the economy), the ideas presented here would be applicable to smaller economic downturns.]
***
I. Immediate needs of workers
In any economy, when working people must choose between the necessities of life, ‘food or medication?’ or ‘rent or transportation?’, it is not meeting the needs of its workers. The only possible cause is the capital in the system is insufficient to cover the needs of workers (compare the blue arrows in Figures 1 and 2).
The desertification equivalent would be a parcel of abandoned unproductive agricultural land whose productivity was destroyed by poor land management (Figure 3). Both ecosystem and economic decline were set in motion by the decisions of people in positions of power (predators). The first step to restore the highly productive pre-agricultural ecosystem (Figure 4) would be to promote the growth of native vegetation by mimicking the pre-agricultural climate conditions… so sow the seeds of native plants and water appropriately.
With an ample supply of workers, economies only need increase the amount of circulating productive capital. This would increase worker access to capital and increase both size and productivity of the overall economy (see Part 3 #3). Any single or combination of policies that transfers capital to primary producers would work. These include increasing the wages of low income workers, increasing competition for labor (thus increases wages) by increasing government funded job opportunities (civil service, public sector, infrastructure jobs), and increasing social welfare benefits. The economy would also benefit from the loss of subpar capitalists whose profiteering hinges on an abundance of low wage workers (better known as prey).
II. Centural cycles of global economic downturns
Once the livelihoods of workers is stabilized, economic reform efforts should focus on preventing a future recurrence of a global recession (if two make a pattern -Great Depression & Great Recession-, a third will surely follow). In standard recessions, the decline in productivity is associated with a drop in overall income which reduces the flow of capital in the economy (Part 3 #4). This is followed by a recovery where wages increase in sync with productivity. But the recovery from the Great Recession is unusual in that productivity has improved but wages have not gone up. Improved production without wage growth strongly suggests capital is being deliberately removed from the economy; the capital produced by American workers for their use and consumption is being syphoned away.
Capitalists were only able to execute this economic agenda (detailed in Part 4) by ‘capitalizing’ the three legs of the economy, the production pyramid (Figures 1L and 2L), public reservoir (government) (Figures 1I and 2I) and the financial system (Figures 1G and 2G). The manifold advantages of this are easier to see in a natural terrestrial ecosystem/water cycle (Figures 3 & 4), where these ‘legs’ are clearly the sites where capital aggregates and concentrates. Agriculture desertifies ecosystems by harvesting biomass (remove capital stored in biomass) (Figures 3L, 4L) and depleting natural reservoirs (Figures 3I, 4I) by draining them to increase productive acreage or tapping them to irrigate crops. With low reserves of ground level water, transpired/evaporated atmospheric water vapor never reaches the concentrations needed to form rain clouds (Figure 3G). The little water capital the ecosystem manages to retain (Figure 3E) is eventually lost through export by wind (Figure 3K) to rain on other biomes.
Capitalists use similar strategies to desertification economies. Early in the process, they invest generously in political campaigns to subsume politicians into the production pyramid as subordinates (Figures 5 and 2I). In return, essentially all enacted policy benefits the bottom line of capitalists (see here and here). Capitalism itself confers possession of worker produced capital to capitalist owners and policy reforms which relax safety and wage regulations empowers them to extract ever more worker produced capital (Figure 2L and Part 4). As a result, most of the increased production of the recent recovery has been absorbed by capitalist owners. And the tradition of private (capital) ownership of financial institutions (Figure 2G) provides an easy path for capitalists to siphon the profits of economic predation out of the economy (Figure 2K). To forestall another global recession, capitalist control of the three legs of the economy must be redressed:
(A) Reduce the dominance of capitalist enterprises in the production pyramid (Figures 1L, 2L). [Because much of this melds with economic sustainability, this discussed will continue below. Suffice it to say the inherent predatory nature of capitalists can be checked by allowing workers to compete with capitalist owners (i) over the distribution of worker produced capital through labor unions; (ii) for labor through alternate business models - workers can choose to work for a capitalist enterprise or join a worker cooperative; (iii) for consumers through workers starting their own enterprises and (iv) for the (executive level) jobs held by capitalists.].
(B) De-capitalizing government operations by limiting private election funding. [The larger purpose of government is essentially the same as economies (as defined in Part 1b), to safeguard the present and future existence of a nation for the benefit of its people. On the economic front, governments are stewards of national capital; they allocate national resources to best support the wellbeing of all residents - inject capital into circulation in times of economic downturn and cache undeveloped resources to support the economic expansion of future generations. When private campaign funding is allowed to ‘capitalize’ elections and politics, the priority of public policy is diverted from the wellbeing of all people to the desires of capitalists. This is a betrayal of government and citizenry as well as future generations.]
(C) Reform and reorganize the financial sector to serve the interests of the economy and not the persons who control capital. [Although essentially all financial institutions are owned and operated by private capital, there is good cause to reconsider this long held tradition. It comes down to the fact that currency has no inherent value but rather, symbolizes value. Because banks define the (symbolic) value of money, their actions affect the entire economy. When a bank issues a loan, they define the value of a worker’s labor - a car might be worth one thousand assembly line hours or three hundred doctor hours. Banks decide what businesses/business models might come to fruition and where/what real estate gets developed. Through selective lending practices, banks can increase or decrease the value of the labor of certain groups of workers. By controlling credit, banks are literally economic landscapers; they hold sway over who, what, where and how people live, travel and work.
In addition to the undue influence of banks over the economy, the symbolic nature of currency makes it easy to encrypt. New (risky) financial instruments can be thought of as a series of (hidden) money transfers (like those described here), each linked to a hefty (and profitable) transaction fee. (Think of how language is symbolic - computer language - and how information can be hidden by translating the same information in series to other languages or converting it into code and hiding it further through layers of code keys.) This is how ‘too big to fail’ came about. Economic cryptographers secrete and shield their capital manipulation through complex coded transactions. Regulators do not have decoders to safely deconstruct these financial instruments. (Bankers are propping up the economy with enormous poorly designed financial houses of cards. Regulators are denied the resources to assemble blueprints of these structures so they can’t deconstruct these structures without crashing the entire economy.)
American workers, indeed workers everywhere, need to question the propriety, ethics and wisdom of permitting profit driven capitalists such dominion over currency and the overall economy.]
Reducing the overall influence of capitalists over the three legs of the economy would severely hamper their ability to concentrate sufficient power to trigger another global recession.
[It should to be clear that, although these essays have primarily scapegoated capitalism (as the dominant economic system in the U.S., its excesses account for most of the economic woes in this economy), economic disequilibrium is not exclusive to capitalism. A number of economic systems including state socialism (purportedly, socialist North Korea), oligarchism and facism all engender the concentration of power associated with extreme predatory economics. The common flaw of these -isms is the concentration power. As the aphorism predicts, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ The powerful and greedy will always take and make every opportunity to sequester capital as personal wealth.]
[The next part is based on the extrapolation of the ecohydrological cycle onto the economic cycle. It is presented as a thought experiment of how a future economy might come about.]
***
III. Towards a sustainable economy
The issue of a sustainable economy takes up an ongoing meme in these essays, the precedence of economics. Desertification is an effective metaphor of capitalism (see Part 4 and above). But capitalism is also literally desertifying the global ecosystem to ‘grow’ economies and further enrich the wealthy. The fossil fuel industry is a prime example:
Extraction and transport of fossil fuels damages environments:
-mountaintop removal coal mining devastates entire mountain ecosystems
-deep water oil drilling is unsafe and places aquatic ecosystems at risk
-hydraulic fracturing contaminates water supplies and promotes earthquakes
-pipelines leak, trains derail, shipping tankers collide, trucks have accidents
Production and consumption of petroleum products damages environments:
-burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon dioxide setting off the greenhouse effect
-chemical industry fabricates novel synthetic chemicals from petrochemicals that damage environments through multiple pathways - toxic to life forms (human and wildlife); pollutes air, water and soil; plastics do not breakdown which increases need for more dump sites
And this is an abbreviated list of the environmental impact of the fossil fuel industry.
The problem is that consumers who purchase and use fossil fuel products often don’t realize their true costs. The economic decision to exploit fossil fuels (and other natural resources) is made by capitalists who realize the immediate profits of exploitation. Consumers don’t see the links between the infinite aisles of subsidized cheap processed food to chemical dependent conventional monoculture GMO agriculture to global warming to the loss of insect pollinators to water depletion/pollution and loss of rainforest ecosystems. Consumers don’t understand the enormous selection of inexpensive fashion comes at the expense of clean air and rainforests.
Capitalists are actively diminishing the human and non-human carrying capacity of the planet with the naively implicit consent of workers and consumers. They do this by quietly and generously ‘externalizing’ the environmental costs of profitable economic activity. When economies inevitably exceed the biocapacity of the planet, the survival of the humanity and perhaps even the human species will be at risk (Figure 6C). There are already numerous red flags highlighting this trend including California’s multi-year drought. And on a national level, China is systematically orchestrating the economic destruction of its environment. In their single minded pursuit of economic growth, the Chinese Communist Party is sacrificing the air, soil, water, forests, wildlife, farmland… in short, every natural resource necessary to sustain life and economy (this is a must read article about the environmental impact of China’s explosive economic growth). Private owners of capital assume their right to profit from their privately held capital supersedes the future lives of everyone else (see here, here and here).
In the absence of proven solutions, the best we can do is to apply the principles of the quintessential of sustainable economies, ecosystems. Though not a unifying theory of economics (its predictions and assumptions have not been substantiated by rigorous testing), the ecosystem based economic cycle can be a useful model of a sustainable economy to help guide future economic reforms.
On the basis of the expanded eco-environment cycle in Figure 6, a sustainable economy has three essential features:
(A) Sustainable economies are conservative in their consumption of environmental resources. This would require shifting away from a materials economy dependent on the production and market exchange of disposable consumer goods to a service economy driven by the exchange of services (repair/refurbish/trade/exchange instead of replace) and experiences. Materials economies are unsustainable simply because the natural resources that feed the supply chain are finite (see green and tan portions of pyramids in Figure 6).
This would also reduce the influence of big money because capital dependent mass production (through ownership of means of production) is how capitalists concentrate the capital produced by their workers. A service economy runs on the skills and imagination of providers more than capital and those can’t be owned by capitalists.
(B) Sustainable economies conserve ecological/environmental services meaning the environmental impact of economic activity cannot be externalized. Extraction/agricultural practices must be environmentally neutral, else the environment must be restored to its original condition post extraction. Manufacturing must utilize closed loop production-consumption streams where discarded consumer waste becomes the primary raw material to produce new marketable consumer goods (Figure 7). Not only would this preserve natural resources (Figure 6, blue arrows) and their recycling services (Figure 6, black arrows), the improvement and expansion of green space would do much to nurture the mental, cognitive and physical health of all people.
(C) Because environments are dynamic, sustainable economies have feedback mechanisms to adapt to and maximize returns within the constantly changing conditions of the environment. In ecosystems, evolution by natural selection fills this role. Biological diversity generated through genetic mechanisms (results in speciation over time) is tested for adaptive value by natural selection. The competition to pass traits onto the next generation, or natural selection, is how ecosystems maximize biological productivity within the constraints of the carrying capacity of the environment. The natural selection underlying ecological succession both constrains ecosystems to operate within environmental resource limits and grants the biological flexibility to generate the complexity that makes food web pyramids highly productivity, resilient and sustainable.
And it just so happens that market economies also have the tools to self-regulate their activity. Business adaptation (adding services for example) and research & development (new technologies, new products) generate variety; market competition can be very effective at facilitating business succession. The problem is capitalist economies often resist competition as competition reduces profits. This is why capitalists take every opportunity to invest in politics; politicians return policies which minimize competition.
One of the most powerful legislative/policy/public relations weapons in the capitalist arsenal is information control. They obtain political power by skewing the prevailing narrative (safety regulations restrict the ‘freedom’ of corporations; taxing the wealthy dis-incentivizes ‘job creation’). Political investment is returned in the form of lax regulatory policy that favors corporate interests. For example, after the West Fertilizer Company explosion in Texas, rule changes allowed corporations to not disclose chemical storage lists; despite reports of negative health effects of fracking (see here and here), government regulators cannot collate complete formulations of fracking fluid.
Furthermore, dis-/mis-information negatively impacts market competition. Without knowing the labor practices of manufacturers, consumers can’t choose to support ethical employers. Without knowing the extraction methods and material sources of manufacturers, consumers can’t choose to support responsible resource management. Without knowing the chemical and GMO content of their food choices, consumers can’t make informed decisions about personal chemical exposure/ingestion. Without knowing how and what subsidies are awarded which business concerns, consumers can’t make informed purchases. In short, an economic policy which tolerates a secretive business culture makes for bad economics. Information control allows unethical businesses to skew market competition and potentially damage the wellbeing of workers and the environment.
The best counterweight to information manipulation is transparency… which means one of the most important economic reforms is to protect transparency of information; at minimum, establish universal whistleblower protection. Perfect information (or as close as reasonable) democratizes markets (including government) so that consumption signals which businesses, ideas and technologies best meets the needs and desires of consumers. This effectively gives every patron of every institution some regulatory authority over that institution; a self-regulating feedback mechanism where the market competition drives succession in the business environment (this is an example of the power of consumer as regulator - mediated through government). When capitalism guarantees the right to profit from private property, economic evolution by free market competition can counter with ‘not at our expense’. In the end, the right to determine the future should be consciously exercised by everyone affected, not by the rich and powerful.
The versatility of this approach allows societies to evolve economies that meets the needs of its people within the constraints of their environment according to their values and cultural norms. Some of the inevitable policy adaptions include new metrics of productivity, essential needs, and environmental sustainability to allow consumers to evaluate corporate practices; reconsideration of the social benefits of infinite corporations (legal protections skews market competition between capitalist corporations and other business models); rethinking of private ownership of banks/financial institutions to democratize credit; redefinition of wealth to differentiate between leisure time and accumulation of capital; possibly new ways to support research to socialize benefits of socially funded information gathering; and liberalize ownership of intellectual property to make it more open to market selection. (Current intellectual property rules limit competition by allowing capitalist owners to (i) squash competing technologies and (ii) restrict innovation by patent trolling.)
If markets and production were democratized (through market selection and liberal financing of business models) the evolution of the economy would entail a significant social revolution. In fact, the drop in demand for independent regulators would immediately decrease the size of government resulting in greater personal autonomy… perhaps to the degree of a libertarian society (much as that pains me to admit).
As an aside, one of the most destructive and environmentally damaging human pursuits is the production of military armaments and armed conflict. Most wars are armed competitions initiated to control economic or natural resources. Capitalists would prefer to form business relationships which allow them to profit by production (the predation model described in Part 2); think global trade pacts. However, they reserve the option of profit by nationalized armed robbery, better known as war; when an invading force essentially parasitizes the invaded nation. What capitalists forget in their pursuit of capital is that economies do not exist in isolation. Economic and environmental (pollution) exchange brings all economies of the world into a unified single unit (Figure 8). This means the danger of economic excesses, regardless of economic system, (see Parts 1-4) and their solutions (see above) apply on a global scale. Cultivating the wellbeing of workers worldwide for limited and selective predation makes for far better economics (more productive) than the parasitic economics of war. Sustainable economies have no incentives for warmongering.
***
This ends my series of essays of a ‘big picture’ economic narrative. Thank you for reading.
Safeguard your foundations and they will nurture you in return.
I’d like to say a word of thanks to Richard Wolff for his program, Economic Update. Prior to spotting the similarity between ecological and economic cycles, I had only a cursory interest in economics. Professor Wolff’s explanations confirmed much of the understanding I garnered about economics from the water cycle and gave me the confidence to formulate this series. Any errors are mine alone.
Amongst the majority of Americans, there is little doubt that we live in troubled times and the state of the economy is a large part of our trouble. Rising housing and consumer prices, stagnant wages, significant underemployment and ballooning wage and wealth inequality are all symptoms of an economy in disequilibrium.
The solutions peddled by the political right are the same tax cuts and deregulation which landed us in this situation (see Part 4); the left, lacking a coherent economic narrative, offers laundry lists of disjointed economic reforms (see here and here). This at a time when the economy is so ill that alleviating the symptoms is no more than a temporary palliative, it is time to go deeper and treat the underlying causes of the disease.
***
[This the final part of a series describing an alternative way to look at the economy. It follows directly from Part 4:
Econology Part 1a: It's not the economy, Stupid; it's economics
Econology Part 1b: The depth and breadth of economies
Econology Part 2: The ecology of economies
Econology Part 3: Eleven economics lessons from ecosystems
Econology Part 4: Emergent flaws of Capitalism (1, 2)]
This is the last in a series of essays offering an alternative narrative of economics. In the introduction to this series (Part 1), I discuss how the failure of economics to advance a theory of economics that corresponds to reality has been a major disservice to modern civilization. Part 2 delineated how the ecological water cycle substantially parallels capital circulation in economies. Part 3 listed several lessons of economics that can be extrapolated from the water cycle. Part 4 equated the transition from a functional post-war economy (Figure 1) to today’s distressed economy where many American workers are essentially subsisting (Figure 2) to land desertification where poor agricultural practices reduce once productive land to unproductive desert. Should this economic trend continue, workers will not have the capital resources to raise the next generations of healthy, capable, educated ‘workers’. Losing generations of workers would change the economy on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution, in reverse. Here, to conclude this series, I will present how the economic lessons of the ecological water cycle might be applied to diagnose and resolve some of the persistent short and long term problems in the economy.
The Great Recession and its recovery are atypical in many ways. Despite ‘strong economic numbers’, many workers are still un- or under- employed and the wealth gains of the recovery have been concentrated in the top income bracket. Being as this is the product of a decades long closed door effort to systematically destroy or marginalize the institutions and procedures that protect workers from capital predation, reform efforts should be open to scrutiny so workers can evaluate their goals and efficacy. The first step is to break down the problem into smaller digestible segments: Problems with the economy can be broken down into three levels: first is the immediate needs of workers and opportunities for them to earn a living wage (on the time scale of months). Second is the roughly century long cycle of net growth followed by a global economic downturn; witness the Great Depression and Great Recession. And the third is an economy that is sustainable into the unforeseeable future (centuries and beyond).
[Note: Although the issue of standard recessions is not specifically addressed (primarily because the genesis of these essays stemmed from the unusual trends of the economy), the ideas presented here would be applicable to smaller economic downturns.]
***
I. Immediate needs of workers
In any economy, when working people must choose between the necessities of life, ‘food or medication?’ or ‘rent or transportation?’, it is not meeting the needs of its workers. The only possible cause is the capital in the system is insufficient to cover the needs of workers (compare the blue arrows in Figures 1 and 2).
The desertification equivalent would be a parcel of abandoned unproductive agricultural land whose productivity was destroyed by poor land management (Figure 3). Both ecosystem and economic decline were set in motion by the decisions of people in positions of power (predators). The first step to restore the highly productive pre-agricultural ecosystem (Figure 4) would be to promote the growth of native vegetation by mimicking the pre-agricultural climate conditions… so sow the seeds of native plants and water appropriately.
With an ample supply of workers, economies only need increase the amount of circulating productive capital. This would increase worker access to capital and increase both size and productivity of the overall economy (see Part 3 #3). Any single or combination of policies that transfers capital to primary producers would work. These include increasing the wages of low income workers, increasing competition for labor (thus increases wages) by increasing government funded job opportunities (civil service, public sector, infrastructure jobs), and increasing social welfare benefits. The economy would also benefit from the loss of subpar capitalists whose profiteering hinges on an abundance of low wage workers (better known as prey).
II. Centural cycles of global economic downturns
Once the livelihoods of workers is stabilized, economic reform efforts should focus on preventing a future recurrence of a global recession (if two make a pattern -Great Depression & Great Recession-, a third will surely follow). In standard recessions, the decline in productivity is associated with a drop in overall income which reduces the flow of capital in the economy (Part 3 #4). This is followed by a recovery where wages increase in sync with productivity. But the recovery from the Great Recession is unusual in that productivity has improved but wages have not gone up. Improved production without wage growth strongly suggests capital is being deliberately removed from the economy; the capital produced by American workers for their use and consumption is being syphoned away.
Capitalists were only able to execute this economic agenda (detailed in Part 4) by ‘capitalizing’ the three legs of the economy, the production pyramid (Figures 1L and 2L), public reservoir (government) (Figures 1I and 2I) and the financial system (Figures 1G and 2G). The manifold advantages of this are easier to see in a natural terrestrial ecosystem/water cycle (Figures 3 & 4), where these ‘legs’ are clearly the sites where capital aggregates and concentrates. Agriculture desertifies ecosystems by harvesting biomass (remove capital stored in biomass) (Figures 3L, 4L) and depleting natural reservoirs (Figures 3I, 4I) by draining them to increase productive acreage or tapping them to irrigate crops. With low reserves of ground level water, transpired/evaporated atmospheric water vapor never reaches the concentrations needed to form rain clouds (Figure 3G). The little water capital the ecosystem manages to retain (Figure 3E) is eventually lost through export by wind (Figure 3K) to rain on other biomes.
Capitalists use similar strategies to desertification economies. Early in the process, they invest generously in political campaigns to subsume politicians into the production pyramid as subordinates (Figures 5 and 2I). In return, essentially all enacted policy benefits the bottom line of capitalists (see here and here). Capitalism itself confers possession of worker produced capital to capitalist owners and policy reforms which relax safety and wage regulations empowers them to extract ever more worker produced capital (Figure 2L and Part 4). As a result, most of the increased production of the recent recovery has been absorbed by capitalist owners. And the tradition of private (capital) ownership of financial institutions (Figure 2G) provides an easy path for capitalists to siphon the profits of economic predation out of the economy (Figure 2K). To forestall another global recession, capitalist control of the three legs of the economy must be redressed:
(A) Reduce the dominance of capitalist enterprises in the production pyramid (Figures 1L, 2L). [Because much of this melds with economic sustainability, this discussed will continue below. Suffice it to say the inherent predatory nature of capitalists can be checked by allowing workers to compete with capitalist owners (i) over the distribution of worker produced capital through labor unions; (ii) for labor through alternate business models - workers can choose to work for a capitalist enterprise or join a worker cooperative; (iii) for consumers through workers starting their own enterprises and (iv) for the (executive level) jobs held by capitalists.].
(B) De-capitalizing government operations by limiting private election funding. [The larger purpose of government is essentially the same as economies (as defined in Part 1b), to safeguard the present and future existence of a nation for the benefit of its people. On the economic front, governments are stewards of national capital; they allocate national resources to best support the wellbeing of all residents - inject capital into circulation in times of economic downturn and cache undeveloped resources to support the economic expansion of future generations. When private campaign funding is allowed to ‘capitalize’ elections and politics, the priority of public policy is diverted from the wellbeing of all people to the desires of capitalists. This is a betrayal of government and citizenry as well as future generations.]
(C) Reform and reorganize the financial sector to serve the interests of the economy and not the persons who control capital. [Although essentially all financial institutions are owned and operated by private capital, there is good cause to reconsider this long held tradition. It comes down to the fact that currency has no inherent value but rather, symbolizes value. Because banks define the (symbolic) value of money, their actions affect the entire economy. When a bank issues a loan, they define the value of a worker’s labor - a car might be worth one thousand assembly line hours or three hundred doctor hours. Banks decide what businesses/business models might come to fruition and where/what real estate gets developed. Through selective lending practices, banks can increase or decrease the value of the labor of certain groups of workers. By controlling credit, banks are literally economic landscapers; they hold sway over who, what, where and how people live, travel and work.
In addition to the undue influence of banks over the economy, the symbolic nature of currency makes it easy to encrypt. New (risky) financial instruments can be thought of as a series of (hidden) money transfers (like those described here), each linked to a hefty (and profitable) transaction fee. (Think of how language is symbolic - computer language - and how information can be hidden by translating the same information in series to other languages or converting it into code and hiding it further through layers of code keys.) This is how ‘too big to fail’ came about. Economic cryptographers secrete and shield their capital manipulation through complex coded transactions. Regulators do not have decoders to safely deconstruct these financial instruments. (Bankers are propping up the economy with enormous poorly designed financial houses of cards. Regulators are denied the resources to assemble blueprints of these structures so they can’t deconstruct these structures without crashing the entire economy.)
American workers, indeed workers everywhere, need to question the propriety, ethics and wisdom of permitting profit driven capitalists such dominion over currency and the overall economy.]
Reducing the overall influence of capitalists over the three legs of the economy would severely hamper their ability to concentrate sufficient power to trigger another global recession.
[It should to be clear that, although these essays have primarily scapegoated capitalism (as the dominant economic system in the U.S., its excesses account for most of the economic woes in this economy), economic disequilibrium is not exclusive to capitalism. A number of economic systems including state socialism (purportedly, socialist North Korea), oligarchism and facism all engender the concentration of power associated with extreme predatory economics. The common flaw of these -isms is the concentration power. As the aphorism predicts, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ The powerful and greedy will always take and make every opportunity to sequester capital as personal wealth.]
[The next part is based on the extrapolation of the ecohydrological cycle onto the economic cycle. It is presented as a thought experiment of how a future economy might come about.]
***
III. Towards a sustainable economy
The issue of a sustainable economy takes up an ongoing meme in these essays, the precedence of economics. Desertification is an effective metaphor of capitalism (see Part 4 and above). But capitalism is also literally desertifying the global ecosystem to ‘grow’ economies and further enrich the wealthy. The fossil fuel industry is a prime example:
Extraction and transport of fossil fuels damages environments:
-mountaintop removal coal mining devastates entire mountain ecosystems
-deep water oil drilling is unsafe and places aquatic ecosystems at risk
-hydraulic fracturing contaminates water supplies and promotes earthquakes
-pipelines leak, trains derail, shipping tankers collide, trucks have accidents
Production and consumption of petroleum products damages environments:
-burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon dioxide setting off the greenhouse effect
-chemical industry fabricates novel synthetic chemicals from petrochemicals that damage environments through multiple pathways - toxic to life forms (human and wildlife); pollutes air, water and soil; plastics do not breakdown which increases need for more dump sites
And this is an abbreviated list of the environmental impact of the fossil fuel industry.
The problem is that consumers who purchase and use fossil fuel products often don’t realize their true costs. The economic decision to exploit fossil fuels (and other natural resources) is made by capitalists who realize the immediate profits of exploitation. Consumers don’t see the links between the infinite aisles of subsidized cheap processed food to chemical dependent conventional monoculture GMO agriculture to global warming to the loss of insect pollinators to water depletion/pollution and loss of rainforest ecosystems. Consumers don’t understand the enormous selection of inexpensive fashion comes at the expense of clean air and rainforests.
Capitalists are actively diminishing the human and non-human carrying capacity of the planet with the naively implicit consent of workers and consumers. They do this by quietly and generously ‘externalizing’ the environmental costs of profitable economic activity. When economies inevitably exceed the biocapacity of the planet, the survival of the humanity and perhaps even the human species will be at risk (Figure 6C). There are already numerous red flags highlighting this trend including California’s multi-year drought. And on a national level, China is systematically orchestrating the economic destruction of its environment. In their single minded pursuit of economic growth, the Chinese Communist Party is sacrificing the air, soil, water, forests, wildlife, farmland… in short, every natural resource necessary to sustain life and economy (this is a must read article about the environmental impact of China’s explosive economic growth). Private owners of capital assume their right to profit from their privately held capital supersedes the future lives of everyone else (see here, here and here).
In the absence of proven solutions, the best we can do is to apply the principles of the quintessential of sustainable economies, ecosystems. Though not a unifying theory of economics (its predictions and assumptions have not been substantiated by rigorous testing), the ecosystem based economic cycle can be a useful model of a sustainable economy to help guide future economic reforms.
On the basis of the expanded eco-environment cycle in Figure 6, a sustainable economy has three essential features:
(A) Sustainable economies are conservative in their consumption of environmental resources. This would require shifting away from a materials economy dependent on the production and market exchange of disposable consumer goods to a service economy driven by the exchange of services (repair/refurbish/trade/exchange instead of replace) and experiences. Materials economies are unsustainable simply because the natural resources that feed the supply chain are finite (see green and tan portions of pyramids in Figure 6).
This would also reduce the influence of big money because capital dependent mass production (through ownership of means of production) is how capitalists concentrate the capital produced by their workers. A service economy runs on the skills and imagination of providers more than capital and those can’t be owned by capitalists.
(B) Sustainable economies conserve ecological/environmental services meaning the environmental impact of economic activity cannot be externalized. Extraction/agricultural practices must be environmentally neutral, else the environment must be restored to its original condition post extraction. Manufacturing must utilize closed loop production-consumption streams where discarded consumer waste becomes the primary raw material to produce new marketable consumer goods (Figure 7). Not only would this preserve natural resources (Figure 6, blue arrows) and their recycling services (Figure 6, black arrows), the improvement and expansion of green space would do much to nurture the mental, cognitive and physical health of all people.
(C) Because environments are dynamic, sustainable economies have feedback mechanisms to adapt to and maximize returns within the constantly changing conditions of the environment. In ecosystems, evolution by natural selection fills this role. Biological diversity generated through genetic mechanisms (results in speciation over time) is tested for adaptive value by natural selection. The competition to pass traits onto the next generation, or natural selection, is how ecosystems maximize biological productivity within the constraints of the carrying capacity of the environment. The natural selection underlying ecological succession both constrains ecosystems to operate within environmental resource limits and grants the biological flexibility to generate the complexity that makes food web pyramids highly productivity, resilient and sustainable.
And it just so happens that market economies also have the tools to self-regulate their activity. Business adaptation (adding services for example) and research & development (new technologies, new products) generate variety; market competition can be very effective at facilitating business succession. The problem is capitalist economies often resist competition as competition reduces profits. This is why capitalists take every opportunity to invest in politics; politicians return policies which minimize competition.
One of the most powerful legislative/policy/public relations weapons in the capitalist arsenal is information control. They obtain political power by skewing the prevailing narrative (safety regulations restrict the ‘freedom’ of corporations; taxing the wealthy dis-incentivizes ‘job creation’). Political investment is returned in the form of lax regulatory policy that favors corporate interests. For example, after the West Fertilizer Company explosion in Texas, rule changes allowed corporations to not disclose chemical storage lists; despite reports of negative health effects of fracking (see here and here), government regulators cannot collate complete formulations of fracking fluid.
Furthermore, dis-/mis-information negatively impacts market competition. Without knowing the labor practices of manufacturers, consumers can’t choose to support ethical employers. Without knowing the extraction methods and material sources of manufacturers, consumers can’t choose to support responsible resource management. Without knowing the chemical and GMO content of their food choices, consumers can’t make informed decisions about personal chemical exposure/ingestion. Without knowing how and what subsidies are awarded which business concerns, consumers can’t make informed purchases. In short, an economic policy which tolerates a secretive business culture makes for bad economics. Information control allows unethical businesses to skew market competition and potentially damage the wellbeing of workers and the environment.
The best counterweight to information manipulation is transparency… which means one of the most important economic reforms is to protect transparency of information; at minimum, establish universal whistleblower protection. Perfect information (or as close as reasonable) democratizes markets (including government) so that consumption signals which businesses, ideas and technologies best meets the needs and desires of consumers. This effectively gives every patron of every institution some regulatory authority over that institution; a self-regulating feedback mechanism where the market competition drives succession in the business environment (this is an example of the power of consumer as regulator - mediated through government). When capitalism guarantees the right to profit from private property, economic evolution by free market competition can counter with ‘not at our expense’. In the end, the right to determine the future should be consciously exercised by everyone affected, not by the rich and powerful.
The versatility of this approach allows societies to evolve economies that meets the needs of its people within the constraints of their environment according to their values and cultural norms. Some of the inevitable policy adaptions include new metrics of productivity, essential needs, and environmental sustainability to allow consumers to evaluate corporate practices; reconsideration of the social benefits of infinite corporations (legal protections skews market competition between capitalist corporations and other business models); rethinking of private ownership of banks/financial institutions to democratize credit; redefinition of wealth to differentiate between leisure time and accumulation of capital; possibly new ways to support research to socialize benefits of socially funded information gathering; and liberalize ownership of intellectual property to make it more open to market selection. (Current intellectual property rules limit competition by allowing capitalist owners to (i) squash competing technologies and (ii) restrict innovation by patent trolling.)
If markets and production were democratized (through market selection and liberal financing of business models) the evolution of the economy would entail a significant social revolution. In fact, the drop in demand for independent regulators would immediately decrease the size of government resulting in greater personal autonomy… perhaps to the degree of a libertarian society (much as that pains me to admit).
As an aside, one of the most destructive and environmentally damaging human pursuits is the production of military armaments and armed conflict. Most wars are armed competitions initiated to control economic or natural resources. Capitalists would prefer to form business relationships which allow them to profit by production (the predation model described in Part 2); think global trade pacts. However, they reserve the option of profit by nationalized armed robbery, better known as war; when an invading force essentially parasitizes the invaded nation. What capitalists forget in their pursuit of capital is that economies do not exist in isolation. Economic and environmental (pollution) exchange brings all economies of the world into a unified single unit (Figure 8). This means the danger of economic excesses, regardless of economic system, (see Parts 1-4) and their solutions (see above) apply on a global scale. Cultivating the wellbeing of workers worldwide for limited and selective predation makes for far better economics (more productive) than the parasitic economics of war. Sustainable economies have no incentives for warmongering.
***
This ends my series of essays of a ‘big picture’ economic narrative. Thank you for reading.
Safeguard your foundations and they will nurture you in return.
I’d like to say a word of thanks to Richard Wolff for his program, Economic Update. Prior to spotting the similarity between ecological and economic cycles, I had only a cursory interest in economics. Professor Wolff’s explanations confirmed much of the understanding I garnered about economics from the water cycle and gave me the confidence to formulate this series. Any errors are mine alone.
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