What does the President really prioritize? Well, the folks at the National Priorities Project have a nice little chart of the proposed discretionary budget for 2011. Take a look for yourself…
Proposed 2011 Federal Discretionary Budget
Meanwhile, in the non-discretionary budget, Obama has sponsored a commission whose real mandate appears to be to figure out how to cut Social Security (and probably Medicare).
Priorities, priorities… Blowing Afghanis into a find fine red mist is a priority…
Seriously, Chris, I know you know better. The Feds are not making sure independent scientists and media can’t measure the oil gusher by mistake. Obama wants to downplay how bad this disaster is. If he didn’t, he’d allow scientists to deploy equipment underwater, which he has not allowed. As it turns out, the flow is probably closer to 95K barrels a day, not the 5K BP and the government “estimated”. And yes, those scare quotes are there because I don’t think they mis-estimated, I think they’re just liars.
I wonder what sort of sociopath you have to be to run BP, or the US.
Plus ca change…
June 7-9th I’ll be in DC for the America’s Future Now conference, run by Campaign for America’s Future. In exchange for letting my readers know about it, I get free registration (but not a free flight or hotel room). Obviously registration is the least of the costs, and it’s not why I’m going.
I’m going for three reasons: first, because Campaign for America’s Future Now is about the most left wing an organization can be and still operate in the beltway. I’m curious to see just how left that is when the hair’s down.
Second, because of the guest list. It includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Alan Grayson, Arianna Huffington, Markos Moulitsas, Van Jones, Gov. Howard Dean, Rep. Donna Edwards, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Richard Trumka, Andy Stern, Bob Herbert, Juan Cole, Digby, Deepak Bhargava, James Rucker, Drew Westen, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Robert Kuttner and Lizz Winstead.
These folks are, with a few exceptions, again, about as left wing as you can be and still expect not to be laughed at in DC (and in a couple cases, a step or two too far left.) I want to hear, from them, where the acceptable left is in DC. What’s the leftmost thing you can say? What’s the leftmost thing you can expect to pass? What do they really think of the Tea Party? What do they really think of healthcare, the just passed primary season, and the upcoming elections? What do they really think about financial reform, immigration and so on.
Not that everything they say will real. There’ll be plenty of pandering, but there’ll also be plenty of revealing moments.
Third, of course, is to meet friends.
If you’re considering going, you can see the agenda here, and the registration is here. And whether you’re going or not, if you’re in DC around then and interested in meeting (I’ll be there on the 6th, leaving the 9th) drop me a line at admin-at-ianwelsh-net.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the beginning of the end of the beginning. Army troops have taken control of the perimeter of the Red Shirt protesters.
The inability, or refusal, to come to an acommodation with the Red Shirts will bear bitter fruit for the future. The bottom line is that the Red Shirts represent a prosperous rising rural class. They elected their man, Thaksin Shinawatra, to lead the country, only to have him removed by a military and they feel they have been shut out unfairly from power.
The army and monarchy are overplaying their hand. They can crush the red shirts in Bangkok, but we’ll see how they do against a rural insurgency. A rural insurgency they are begging for.
Beautiful country (I spent some time there as a teenager). Pity it’s led by a bunch of schmucks.
From Four Sociological Traditions:
Put briefly: Marx’s system rests on the point that labor is the source not only of economic value, but also of profit. In a pure market system, operating under the impulsion of supply and demand, everything exchanges for its own value. Hence arises the conundrum: where does the profit come from? Marx answers: from labor, which is the only factor of production from which can be squeezed more than the cost of reproducing it. This is, technically, the “exploitation of labor,” which means working laborers longer than the number of hours it takes to reproduce their own labor. But capitalist competition impels manufacturers to introduce labor saving machinery, which in turn cuts their own throats. For profit still comes only from the exploitation of labor, and the more that labor is replaced by machines, the smaller the basis of profit becomes. The result, schematically, is a falling rate of profit and a series of business crises. Across these crises, capital becomes more monopolistic as cweaker capitalists are driven out and into the ranks of the workers; simultaneously, productive capacity continually exceeds consumer demand among the displaced and increasingly unemployed workers. (Randall Collins, pp. 54-55, 1994)
One doesn’t have to agree with the underpinnings of all of this (the labor theory of value, and the idea that there is a “lump of work” to be done) to look at it and see the workings of a first class mind, or to notice that where government stops making sure markets stay balanced, that some of what Marx predicted happens. Consider the industry of your choice: whether banking, media, oil or pretty much anything else, and you will notice and inexorable drive towards oligopoly. Take a look at a long term capacity utilization chart, and you will notice that decade after decade, utilization drops. Take a look at wages and include real unemployment and real overemployment (people who want to work and can’t, as well as people who don’t want to work and have to) and see what Marx predicted happening.
Likewise, this doesn’t have to lead to a socialist revolution for it still to contain insight as applicable today as when Marx first formulated his theories.
Mean continetal temp 95-10
Let’s talk a bit more about global warming and climate change. The majority of the American population now thinks that global warming probably doesn’t exist. Part of that is the huge amount of money which has been spent on propaganda, but part of it is that one of the only major areas not experiencing higher temperatures is the continental USA. If you want to be a climate change denialist, America is a great place to live.
It is also true that the speed of global warming has slowed down. This is primarily due to two factors:
1) The sunspot cycle. Solar radiation is currently at its lowest level in some time. Less heat equals, well, less heat.
2) The icecap and glacial dump. The polar icepack being dumped into the oceans has had a cooling effect.
The sunspot cycle can change pretty much any time it wants. Probably we’ve got a decade or so at lower heat levels, but that’s not a sure thing. As for the icecap and glacier dump: well, once the ice is gone, it’s gone.
The bottom line is that we are going to see things get worse, more slowly, in terms of temperature rises. We will, however, keep getting crazy weather, changes to weather patterns are an early sign of climate change.
Once the mitigating factors are gone the pace of global warming will pick up again, and it will pick up fiercely.
Now, as for fixing it—there are two main problems. The first is the will to do something. While there may be technical solutions which would reduce the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, there is no will to deploy them on a wide enough scale to matter. This is as true in China as it in the US, and without China and the developing world coming on board, what the US does, assuming it does anything, will not be sufficient (and the US will not do anything, the propaganda campaign claiming there is no Global Warming has been successful.)
The second is that there will come a point where global warming becomes a self reinforcing cycle. With no glacial caps and with the methane released from Siberia, even radical decreases in human CO2 dumping will probably not be sufficient to stop the cycle.
Add to this the severe water shortages we can expect, which will hit large parts of African, a huge swathe of China, much of India and a big chunk of the US, as aquifers are drained down to effectively zero, and you have a recipe for huge loss of life and destabilizing migratory movements.
It is also entirely possible that large parts of the tropics will become effectively uninhabitable, the combination of humidity and temperature will be so high that it will literally be lethal to be outside air conditioningfor any length of time for much of the year.
If world population is only reduced by a billion, I will be amazed. I also expect some serious wars. Our civilization will not go quietly into that long long night.
I don’t usually write about climate change, because as dire as my views are on economics, they’re even more dire on global warming. As I understand the science it’s already too late—we’re going to get hit with runaway temperature increases over the next century, and they are going to make a good chunk of the globe essentially uninhabitable.
Huge climate change events are the sort of events which end civilizations. While it is always possible that something I can’t forsee could occur, of course, it seems to me that we’re on the glide path for disaster. With the best will in the world, and a great deal of competence, we might keep the deaths under a billion or so.
I hope we get that level of competence. Unfortunately, my guess is that by the time we do, by the time things are taken seriously, it will be so far past too late that all we can do is mitigate.
That mitigation, of course, is important, as is every little bit people can do now to mitigate. Every .1 degree centigrade the world’s temperature doesn’t rise by date X is some people who live, some people who live better, some more time to get out act together.
Sometimes our role in life isn’t even “to hold the line” it’s to engage in a fighting retreat, to buy time for others. For most of us alive today, that may be our job. It’s not glorious, it’s not fun, but it is necessary.
[Written as commentary on Sara Robinson’s excellent article on possible futures.]
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