Economically driven patterns

A recent article posted at Truthout.org describes an ongoing battle between a Texas rancher name Eleanor Fairchild and TransCanada which has not upheld their agreement to restore her land after building a pipeline through it.

The story brings up issues of corporate power, eminent domain, citizen's / landowner / individual rights, enforcement, unequal power and environmental stewardship.

(1) Eleanor Fairchild's story along with the ongoing protests by Native American tribes at Standing Rock, ND over the Dakota Access pipeline also brings to mind the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers and the U.S. government. Foreign settlers forced Native Americans from their homes, deliberately exposed them deadly pathogens from which they had little defense, stole their land and territory, negotiated treaties conferring certain rights and those treaties often weren't worth the paper they were written on. Whether signed or not, the U.S. government often imposed its will regardless.

And Eleanor Fairchild's story is extraordinarily similar. Her land was trespassed on and damaged before any rights were transferred; then accused of eco-terrorism for defending her land; and after damaging her land to put through their pipeline, failed to honor their agreement to restore her land.

In both cases, larger powers either used the power of the state (military intervention in Native American relationships, treaties between 'states'; judicial system, eminent domain) or the deliberate abrogation of state power of oversight (broken treaties; lack of enforcement/accountability for TransCanada) to force their will on the less powerful.

The U.S. Constitution is the supposed foundation of laws in this country and establishes the concept of equality under the law. In practice, the powerful have always had the law at their backs. Land hungry early settlers used the military to grab land from Native Americans; now power takes the form of paper entities like corporations to grab land and land rights from their owners. (International trade agreements repeat the same pattern - confers greater rights to corporations at the expense of nations and their citizens.) It makes me question if the true intent of the Constitution was the lofty descriptions taught to schoolchildren. The second amendment compromise to appease the slave holding south suggests those who drafted the Constitution had multiple motives, not all of them pure.

(2) A major by-product of corporate profit making activity in this country is environmental degradation - fracking and agriculture pollutes water; oil spills/ fires/ explosions destroy structures, infrastructures, damages air/water quality... And this is reminiscent of the damaged environment of China and the former USSR. In these cases, powerful authorities could and did override the will and wishes of local residents to determine what industries, what individuals and what interests could do as they wish in any given location. In the U.S., government is not making the decisions but its enforcing corporate decisions.

Has the U.S. ever been a state where voters make decisions? These patterns suggest otherwise.

About the minimum wage...

In the recent Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders made the $15 minimum wage a key aim of his agenda. His appointees to the platform committee were able to embed it into the 2016 Democratic platform. Increasing the minimum wage would have a positive effect on the economy - it will increase the circulation of functioning capital in the economy.

But why do politicians always define the minimum wage at a fixed dollar amount instead of indexing it to a updated metric? The current minimum wage of $7.25 was effective as of July 24, 2009 - 7 years ago! Inflation has increased prices across the board for all consumer goods, yet the minimum wage has not increased. The poorest earners have had the least capacity to improve their incomes to meet their daily needs. But instead of resolving the issue once and for all, Congress, more accurately, the partisan politicians in Congress, use the minimum wage as a wedge issue to their own ends. Republicans claim it will hurt jobs and young (meaning teenage)/part time workers. Democrats argue it would increase demand which improves the economy overall. Both sides aim to divide the electorate into pro or con minimum wage increase for party tribalism.

This is harmful and disrespectful of voters and workers and damaging to the economy by allowing the whims of Congress-persons to order the survival and well being of a large swathe of the population. Congress should instead peg the minimum wage to an annual metric. There are several that would work. I happen to think a full time minimum wage should equal half the per capita GDP of the prior year. For example, as of July 2016, GDP per capita was $51,486.00. Round to a easier number - 51,500 - and divide by 2 for $25,750 annual salary. $25,750 annual salary is equal to $13.34 per hour - less than the $15/hr in the Democratic platform but would increase or decrease based on economic performance as a whole. This approach would do much to protect low wage workers from the vicissitudes of public office holders.

When nice is not nice

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly this past Saturday. And like many public figures, death compels hagiographic remembrances...

He was a consistent jurist; he was enthusiastic and lively; he was best friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg; he was steadfast and sincere in his beliefs.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a number of years ago about his friends and which, if any of them, could be considered 'nice'. (Most of our mutual friends are nice; most of his are questionable :).)

The division comes into play over the superficial usage of 'nice' which describes people who are overtly pleasant and polite. These are good conversationalists who do not stir the pot in social situations. But there's the deeper sense of 'nice' which involves a spiritual generosity that goes beyond many people. To be truly nice, there must be an intentional care to not harm others, regardless of a personal relationship. Nice people value their friends, their relationships (with people and the environment) and they behave in accordance with their values. A 'nice' vegetarian avoids leather goods for example. Using this definition, nice people are not obligated to be pleasant but nice people make the very best friends. (By the way, nice doesn't include rigid or judgemental. Many evangelical and fundamentalist religious followers fail in this. I fail when I judge members of religious communities.)

Going back to Antonin Scalia, many of the articles written about him since his death focus on his superficial niceness. But his rulings as a Supreme Court Justice and his legal philosophy run opposite of the deeper meaning of nice.

I actually prefer a president who is nice in the sense they value much of what I value but not nice in that they are ruthless in fighting to achieve what I want to achieve. But on the Supreme Court, we should have properly nice Justices; humanitarian jurists with impeccable judicial scholarship who interpret the Constitution in a manner meaningful to the issues of today. The late Justice Scalia failed in this regard. Cross your fingers and hope his replacement will be better.

Why do they need to see ID?

Shopping is far from my favorite activity and I had a highly questionable experience recently when exchanging a gift. As it happens, a brand name retailer wanted to see my ID for an exchange... why was this necessary? Legal identification has a great deal of personal information which a retailer has no need to access. Are they building a a marketing database? Are they planning to sell my information?

At this point, I will forego purchasing anything with this brand logo. They have enough on me; I see no reason to allow them more profit.

Note: I should have said I don't carry ID.

A small call for transparency

In the latest episode of Economic Update (Capitalism's Crimes), Richard Wolff's guest, Harry Konstantinidis, said this:

[56:30] “...And that would also help us solve the problem of corruption. You know, if workers, if people knew where their public spending goes, they would probably not spend as much money for military expenditures; they would probably spend more money for schools , for hospitals for things that we need in our everyday life … that’s what Syriza needs to do now and they need to do it fast because we don’t really have much time.”

This is a rare example of an economist (so far as I've observed) inferring a case for greater transparency. And the case he makes is similar to the argument I make in my earlier post, The Next Economy... freedom of information facilitates markets, including markets of government spending. The  reforms which would return the greatest economic impact would be to increase the free flow of all information (whistleblower protection) to democratize consumer activity in markets. In a free market, consumer activity determines producer success, not producer propagandizing to their advantage.

A silly rant...

... but perhaps indicative of profit seeking corporate culture.

My MacBook needs a new battery. Fine. I'm not happy but I'll deal. I also don't have a car so I either walk or take public transportation. Also fine, I deal. But when I called the Apple store to ask if they had the battery in stock, you know, so I didn't have to trek all the way over to the mall for no reason... guess what?

They can't talk to me on the phone because I don't have a service contract!

I ended up going to a small independently operated computer store. They had to order the battery so it'll take a few days but the personal contact beats the electronic Apple voice any day. Especially when the electronic Apple voice isn't willing to answer a non-device specific diagnostic question.

Revolutions, American style

On the most recent episode of the Economic Update radio program, the host said the following...

“…[~2:30]… I wanna go further because I think the issues at stake for working people go far beyond an improvement in wages, working conditions and so on, important and valuable as those are. And let me explain my point of view with an example. There’s is a movement in this country called the tea party and it goes back to something that happened way back in colonial times when folks in Boston, Mass were angry at the taxes imposed on the tea business by the king of England who was the technical leader of the United States at that time since we were still a British colony. Those folks were protesting what a leader that they didn’t like. But the tea party, dumping the tea in the harbor in Boston went on to become something much more important. People began to realize that they didn’t want to be in the position of asking for more or better deals from somebody else. They wanted to be in charge of their own economic wellbeing. And we went on, as a nation, to  revolution against being a part of the British Empire and to become independent. We fought a revolutionary war and we declared our independence because we wanted to be in charge of our own economic destiny. Let me take a second example of where I’m going, slavery. Sure, in the period of slavery in the United States in the southern states, there were many efforts by slaves and others to improve the conditions of slaves: to get them better fed; to get them better housed; to get them better clothes; to save their families from being ripped apart in the slave market and so on. But at a certain point both slaves and those interested in their situation decided that the issue wasn’t appropriately framed as getting a better deal from the master, just like the colonist decided the issue wasn’t just getting a better or lower tax from King George. The issue was: not being a slave, not being a colonial; breaking free of a system that was unacceptable so that you’d be in more charge of your own economic wellbeing as a community. So the issue became not a better deal for the slave; the issue became: let’s end slavery. We can and should have a different system just like the colonists did. And I want to argue that we too face the same kind of situation. That the needs of American working men and women go beyond a better deal and become a question of a better system…”

Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist, proposes socialists models of economic organization as the solution to the inequities and disequilibrium in the current economy. As an economist, he limits his line of sight to the realm of 'the production and consumption of goods and services' only so far as it pertains to human activity.

But, as anyone who has read my series of essays on Econology understands, economies cannot be isolated from their environment. The health of one is directly linked to the robustness of the other.

What's interesting about this examination of the American Revolution and the Civil War is how each conflict is an economic revolution (in addition to armed warfare). The American Revolution overthrew the yoke of taxation by a distant 'kingly' overlord; the Civil War overthrew the yoke of slavery of African Americans in the Confederate south. Both resulted in a massive reorganization of the economy. In many respects, the FDR's New Deal staved off another economic revolution (thereby saving capitalism) by installing some social checks on the excesses of capitalism that resulted in the Great Depression.

The excesses of capitalism which lead up to the Great Recession and ongoing debt crisis in the European Union and Puerto Rico have yet to be checked. The ongoing economic stresses of this inaction and the looming threats of environmental catastrophe on many fronts (climate change, water shortage, pollution...) places ever increasing pressure on the economic/geopolitical system to respond. But regardless of the response of policy makers, economic revolution will occur... the question is whether by force (armed revolt); by movement (geopolitical revolution); by environment (forced adaptation to degraded environment). The choice is up to us, as voters, as consumers and as workers.