Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 6, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just
What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse
[The Atlantic, , via Naked Capitalism 7-5-19]
Dolly Lucio Sevier evaluated dozens of sick children at a facility in South Texas. She found evidence of infection, malnutrition, and psychological trauma.
At Ursula, however, the children Sevier examined—like the panting 2-year-old—were “totally fearful, but then entirely subdued,” she told me. She could read the fear in their faces, but they were perfectly submissive to her authority. “I can only explain it by trauma, because that is such an unusual behavior,” she said. Sevier had brought along Mickey Mouse toys to break the ice, and the kids seem to enjoy playing with them. Yet none resisted, she said, when she took them away at the end of the exam. “At some point,” Sevier mused, “you’re broken and you stop fighting.”
….Border Patrol has long maintained that it is not equipped to handle children, who are supposed to be transferred into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement within three days. After that, many kids are housed in licensed child-care facilities that look more like the average public school than a jail. The federal government has attributed slow transfers to the sharp uptick in the number of migrants at the southern border; in May, 144,200 migrants were taken into custody—the highest monthly total in 13 years.
Days before Sevier’s visit, reports of poor conditions at a similar facility in Clint, Texas, drew outrage around the country. Kevin McAleenan, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters the outcry was based on “unsubstantiated allegations regarding a single Border Patrol facility.”
But his own agency’s watchdogs soon contradicted him—the problems are not restricted to Clint.
Predatory Finance
The British Virgin Islands is home to more than 400,000 companies that hold $1.5 trillion in assets…. Even though he helped get it up and running, Geluk doesn’t have permission to scan the whole database. In fact, only two people, a pair of unnamed employees of the BVI’s Financial Investigation Agency, are able to search the entire system, which holds details on about 600,000 owners who have directly or indirectly controlled companies here. It’s thought that roughly a third of all offshore companies globally are registered in the BVI….
The BVI’s place in the dark offshore economy was illuminated by the 2016 Panama Papers leak, in which 11.5 million documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca were released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The disclosures sparked probes worldwide into money laundering, sanctions violations, and tax avoidance, and it didn’t pass without notice that more than half the companies outed in the leak were registered in the BVI. (The scandal should have been called the BVI Papers, more than a few people suggested.) It was clear from the disclosures that BVI regulation was inadequate, and that remains a concern today: Last year, BVI regulators conducted only four on-site inspections of financial firms.
Taxcast: The Corporate Tax Haven Index, Solving the World’s Broken Tax System
Jerri-Lynn Scofield, June 30, 2019 [Naked Capitalism]
The Corporate Tax Haven Index provides one of those really rare glimpses of what actually happens underneath the bonnet of the global economy. It tells several disturbing stories…in what we can only describe as a full frontal assault on the national tax sovereignty of every country on the planet. That’s what they’re doing. They’re attacking the tax regimes of other countries. What it reveals is a really disturbing picture of international failure. We see the powerful European countries and especially Britain lying behind their clusters of tax havens and they have wrecked economies across the world and are now threatening social stability and democracy across the world.
But when countries like India say, no, that doesn’t work for us, we’re going our own way, then it gets very serious indeed. And the G20 simply cannot afford to ignore this any longer. So the road is open for the next steps. And of course the next steps are going to take us in the direction the Tax Justice Network has always been talking about. And that is in the direction of proper apportionment of profits to the countries where the profits are aligned with the economic substance. In other words, we’re moving towards unitary taxation and formula apportionment…And I think we should all welcome the opportunity now to create a framework for taxing multinational companies that suits the entire world, not just the most powerful countries in the world.
Fed’s Stress Test: Should JPMorgan Chase Have Gotten a Second Chance?
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 28, 2019 [Wall Street on Parade]
How many second chances should a criminal recidivist get? JPMorgan Chase has logged in guilty pleas to three criminal felony counts in the past five years; it has a criminally-charged precious metals trader singing to the Feds currently as JPMorgan admits in regulatory filings that it’s under a new criminal investigation in that matter; the bank has paid $36 billion in fines for wrongdoing since the financial crash, including $1 billion for trading exotic derivatives in London with bank depositors’ money and losing at least $6.2 billion of those depositor funds (the London Whale scandal). And in just the past year it has proven that it’s “game on” for more regulatory fines and illicit profits. (See Could JPMorgan Chase Be Hit with a Fourth Felony Count for Rigging Precious Metals Markets?)
Despite all of this, yesterday the Federal Reserve announced that it had given JPMorgan Chase a second chance at passing the regulator’s stress test.
Wall Street Banks, In Drag as Trade Associations, Fight Indictments for Manipulating Precious
Lynn Parramore [Institute for New Economic Thinking, via Yves Smith, July 2, 2019, Naked Capitalism]
Lynn Parramore: The shareholder value idea swept the country in the mid-‘80s, in large part through the work of economist Michael Jensen, hired by Harvard Business School in 1985 when you were there. From the start you have opposed it, a position that has gradually found supporters, including Jack Welch, former General Electric chief, who initially promoted shareholder value but later called it “the dumbest idea in the world.” Why is the idea so terrible and how did it take hold?
William Lazonick: Most economists — whether they’re right-wing conservatives or progressives— have deeply misunderstood how firms produce things and the societal role they play. They pass that misunderstanding on to millions of students every year. A lot talk as if “the market” is supposed to magically allocate all the resources in the economy. They don’t see that in reality, business enterprises do this all the time, by investing in research to create new products, for example.
Yet when most economists think of investments in the economy, they think of finance and what they call “capital flows” in the market. Through financial markets, money is supposed to flow to where it is needed. But that’s not the way things actually work! In a capitalist economy, large business enterprises invest in the ability to employ people, to produce things, and also to make profits — all very important economic activities.
Markets are really just the outcomes of these activities. Markets exist because you decide what products you want to buy from these firms, which jobs you want to seek. The markets for cars and for car designers and salespeople exist because we have firms allocating resources in the economy towards the making of automobiles.
Economics in the real world
Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.
Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.
Airbus Widebodies Break Boeing’s Japan Dominance
Adrian Schofield [Aviation Week and Space Technology 7-5-19]
Health Care Crisis
[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-19]
An analysis published Friday by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen shows that “rising enthusiasm for Medicare for All has prompted industry to increase its lobbying against the proposal dramatically,” suggesting that powerful healthcare interests perceive the movement to replace the nation’s for-profit system “as a politically viable threat.”
The new report—entitled Fever Pitch: Surge in Opposition Lobbying and Advocacy Validates the Credibility of the Medicare for All Movement (pdf)—reveals that “between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, the number of organizations hiring lobbyists whose lobbying disclosure forms indicated that they worked on Medicare for All increased by nearly seven times, and the overall number of lobbyists hired increased ninefold.”
Red States that refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA are seeing their rural hospitals close down
Climate and environmental crises
Last Month Just “Obliterated” Temperature Records as The Hottest June to Date
[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 7-5-19]
The study authors call it the great Atlantic Sargassum belt, and suspect it’s likely the result of more nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus, running off the West Africa coast into the ocean in the winter. The belt is also being fed by the same nutrients, from fertilizer runoff and deforestation, running off into the Amazon River and into the ocean in the summer.
The sargassum responds to those extra nutrients like many plants would: It eats them, and grows. The bloom sizes also continue to grow every year because there are sargassum seeds left over from the previous summer.
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Vancouver, Richmond Push to Hold Big Oil Accountable for Climate Damages
[Climate Liability News, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-19]
How Burnsville, Minnesota, cut its carbon emissions nearly 30 percent
[Yale Climate Connections, via Naked Capitalism 7-6-19]
Much of the reduction has come from improvements to the city’s water infrastructure. Energy efficient upgrades to wells, pumps, and water treatment plants have cut way back on the electricity used in treating and delivering water to residents.
The city also switched to LED lighting, has improved energy efficiency, and promotes composting, which can help reduce methane emissions from landfills.
Adding 1 billion hectares of forest could help check global warming
Very technical analysis of an extremely misleading “economic” study purporting to show the cost of fighting climate change is too high to be practicable. Important to bookmark for future reference in rebutting opponents of the new economic golden age we are on the verge of creating with the Green New Deal. “I’m Not Willing to Do That”: Trump Says He Won’t Take Climate Action Because It Would Threaten Corporate Profits
“Saudi-led group of oil-producing countries gets major climate report scrubbed from UN negotiations’
[The Independent, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-19]
“Saudi Arabia has successfully lobbied for a major climate change report to be scrubbed from international negotiations on limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C. The Saudis led a loose coalition of oil-producing nations, including the US, Russia and Iran, that objected to the science behind the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…. The final UN report had just five watered-down paragraphs on IPCC findings, explaining that they were based on the “best science available” without including more concrete information on how countries should reduce emissions targets….. Other recent developments have hampered efforts to tackle climate breakdown, including the UN failing to agree a zero emission target and the release of a draft text from the G20 summit that looks to water down climate change targets.”
The Center has come under increased scrutiny as larger awareness of fossil fuel funding for denial organizations has grown, borne of the ExxonKnew litigation. Back in 2010, Michaels admitted on CNN that something like 40% of his funding came from fossil fuels.
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Shake Hands with a Mind-Controlled Robotic Arm
[Machine Design News 7-5-19]
A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, working with staff at the University of Minnesota, has made a breakthrough that could benefit paralyzed patients and those with movement disorders.
Disrupting mainstream economics
“Immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment, and Incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks”
[National Bureau of Economic Research, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-19]
From the abstract: “Using data drawn from the 1960-2000 U.S. Censuses, we find a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates. As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose. Our analysis suggests that a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by almost a full percentage point.”
The current fragmented, opaque, and deeply conflicted structure of the U.S. stock market as well as the structure of the giant Wall Street banks that interact in every imaginable way with capital formation in America, is not in the public interest, the national interest or in the interest of capitalism itself….
In a June 3 speech by Brett Redfearn, the Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Securities and Exchange Commission (who is, himself, legally ensnarled in this mess of a market), he described the U.S. market as follows: there are 13 stock exchanges that “collectively execute around 63 percent of volume in U.S. listed stocks but “no single exchange has even a 20 percent market share.” Then there are 32 Dark Pools, also known as “Alternative Trading Systems (ATSs)” which Redfearn politely describe as allowing “their participants to interact in a more discreet fashion.” In fact, the SEC and other regulators have repeatedly charged these secretive Dark Pools, which are owned by the biggest banks on Wall Street, with gaming the system. (See related articles below.) And yet, the Dark Pools continue to flourish under the nose of the SEC…. Add high-frequency traders and algorithms and artificial intelligence software to this mess and it’s easy to see that the iconic American stock market has been replaced with a Frankenstein’s monster version of stock trading….
Under one roof, Wall Street banks are now allowed to perform the following functions: the investment bank is allowed to put corporate mergers together or underwrite a new stock offering and collect millions of dollars in fees. Then the same bank’s research analyst frequently puts out a buy rating on the stock. That buy rating is then communicated to the thousands of retail stockbrokers (today known as financial advisors) that reside in the same bank’s brokerage firm, which feel intimidated into calling up their retail clients and suggesting they act on that “buy” recommendation. That same bank holding company is also allowed to own a giant commercial bank which holds upwards of one trillion dollars in deposits, the bulk of which are Federally-insured and backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer. Under existing law, some of those Federally-insured deposits can be used as gambling casino chips and used to make trades in high-risk derivatives.
Today, the Federally-insured commercial banks of four of the largest Wall Street firms are sitting on a powder-keg of $177 trillion in notional amount (face amount) of derivatives. That breaks down as follows as of March 31, 2019 according to the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency: JPMorgan Chase has $59 trillion; Citibank has $51 trillion; Goldman Sachs Bank USA has $47 trillion; and Bank of America has $20 trillion. (See Table 3 in the Appendix of the OCC report here.)
Information Age Dystopia
“Confessions of a U.S. Postal Worker: ‘We deliver Amazon packages until we drop dead.’”
[Gen, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-19]
“In mid-October, I spoke with a mail carrier who works at a midsize hub of the U.S. Postal Service in rural New England. As a rural carrier associate, they make just under $18/hour in a continuous, part-time position. During the week, the carrier says that between 75 and 80 percent of the packages they deliver are Amazon packages; on Sundays, when no letters are delivered, they deliver Amazon packages exclusively…”
They [the USPS] do a computer-generated route every Sunday, so you show up, and depending on who has ordered packages, they hand you a paper sheet of turn-by-turn directions of what the computer has generated as the most efficient route. It’s wildly inaccurate most of the time. I generally know some of these towns now, so I look at these directions, and I’m like “Well, that’s not even remotely the most efficient path.” But you just have to use it because you can get in trouble if you go off route.
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 7-4-19]
In Wednesday’s opinion, Circuit Judge Jane Richards Roth, writing for a 2-1 majority of a three-judge panel, said Amazon may be liable in part because its business model “enables third-party vendors to conceal themselves from the customer, leaving customers injured by defective products with no direct recourse to the third-party vendor.”
Empire Death-Star self destructing
Congress Sniffing Around Botched McKinsey Studies Depicted as Impairing Intelligence Agencies
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 7-3-19; from Politico originally]
For the past four years, the powerhouse firm McKinsey and Co., has helped restructure the country’s spying bureaucracy, aiming to improve response time and smooth communication.
Instead, according to nearly a dozen current and former officials who either witnessed the restructuring firsthand or are familiar with the project, the multimillion dollar overhaul has left many within the country’s intelligence agencies demoralized and less effective.
These insiders said the efforts have hindered decision-making at key agencies — including the CIA, National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
They said McKinsey helped complicate a well-established linear chain of command, slowing down projects and turnaround time, and applied cookie-cutter solutions to agencies with unique cultures. In the process, numerous employees have become dismayed, saying the efforts have at best been a waste of money and, at worst, made their jobs more difficult.
Disrupting mainstream politics
I interviewed Sen. Elizabeth Warren & asked how she will handle the Socialist framing
This just broke: a secret Facebook group of 9,500 CBP officers discussed making a GoFundMe for officers to harm myself & Rep. Escobar during our visit to CBP facilities & mocked migrant deaths.This isn’t about “a few bad eggs.” This is a violent culture. propublica.org/article/secret…
Democratic Party leadership insists on suicide
“Whose Side Is The DCCC On? Bustos Moves Against Progressive Candidates Kara Eastman, Dana Balter And Mike Siegel”
[Down with Tyranny, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-19]
“[Blue Dog Cheri Bustos] is already proving herself the worst DCCC chair in modern history and has turned herself into the most hated Democrat among party activists, something that took Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rahm Emanuel many years to accomplish when they held that title. The Republicans aren’t running anyone against her— why should they? She votes very conservatively and having someone as incompetent as she is head up the DCCC is a dream come true for them. The 50 seats the Democrats could take in 2020 will likely turn into a couple of dozen— at best— under Bustos’ guidance. (Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Bustos isn’t running anyone against her Republican counterpart, Tom Emmer (R-MN), the incompetent head of the NRCC.”
Where is America’s Political Center of Gravity?
Barry Ritholtz [New York Times, via The Big Picture 7-4-19]
450.org
These two articles appear to contradict one another unless there’s some fantabulous convoluted explanation to the contrary.
Airbus Widebodies Break Boeing’s Japan Dominance
Last Month Just “Obliterated” Temperature Records as The Hottest June to Date
Anyone who is truly interested in mitigating the worst effects & implications of climate change, if that’s even possible at this point, has to support a pragmatic and equitable diminishment of air & ocean travel until it’s forbidden almost entirely with a few rare, once again equitable, exceptions.
Taunting Boeing with news of Airbus breaking its stranglehold over Japan is a tacit approval of air travel as a viable industry where jobs should be protected and more jobs created.
If it takes jets falling out of the sky due to the incalculable costs of ever-increasing complexity, so be it.
Stop flying and insist others do the same — especially the holier-than-thous who proselytize about climate change and its ramifications.
Willy
Neoliberal ideology is further along at Boeing than it is Airbus, with all the usual results. I know many who’ve been involved with one or both. If you can’t (or don’t want to) fix/improve/invent/revolutionize it, then fucking outsource it.
and then…
Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals
Happy?
450.org
The issue of air travel’s impact on the environment and its contribution to climate change is avoided even by the most ardent environmental activists because….. Hmmm. Because why? I don’t know. Because they’re cowards, perhaps, or wishful thinkers with their heads in the sand?
The establishment ignores air travel as a concern because it knows air travel is one of several important engines of growth and it’s in this respect that air travel is one of the most pernicious enablers of climate change despite, or above and well beyond, its direct carbon impact.
F*ck Boeing. F*ck Airbus. F*ck the frequent flyers who call themselves progressive environmental activists. F*ck the frequent flyers, period.
It’s Time To Wake Up To The Devastating Impact Flying Has On The Environment
bruce wilder
Headline: Busting Right-Wing Talking Point, ‘Groundbreaking’ Study Shows Federal $15 Minimum Wage Would Not Cause Job Losses in Low-Wage States . . .
subHeadline: A $15 federal minimum wage by 2024
By 2024 !???
Really?
That’s “groundbreaking” ??
enough with faux progressive cheerleading surrender to the worst reactionary impulses, please
enough, already, with teh stupid as a counter to right-wing economics
Look, it does not take a “ground-breaking study” to figure out that the price-level in Mississippi differs substantially from the price-level in Oakland, CA.
A single national minimum wage is going to be too low in Los Angeles or Seattle and possibly too high in Alabama or rural Indiana.
The right policy is to adjust the standard to the local price-level matrix. The political problem is that if you open the door to such a policy, the conservative Democrats representing business interests in the areas of the country where the poor and working classes are most powerless will cooperate with Republicans in screwing them . . . again.
As far as the Econ 101 economics argument is concerned — the supposed trade-off between a wage floor and availability of jobs — it can be answered even in Econ 101 terms, because the minimum wage is so low in real terms after years and years of no increase in the Federal standard that increasing the wage rate, even if it results in a loss of hours worked, would still tend to increase workers’ incomes. People might work somewhat fewer hours and earn more money. That is obviously the case for most of the country and can be framed in conventional Econ 101 terms.
There are somewhat more sophisticated ways of understanding the relationship of wages to work in managed work environments that would suggest there may well be a sweet spot range, where raising the wage might actually result in more hours of work as well as more income. But, that “technicality” is not even that important to the politics, even if it is important to reforming the academic economics.
The political problem is having the balls to call out exploitative cruelty for what it is. This is a struggle over the distribution of income and power. Wages at the bottom have been shoved down by the worst elements of political society to serve the interests of the very few.
“Breakthrough studies” are not going to convert celebrity pundits (who are themselves often millionaires) whose bread is buttered by the corporate executive class. Nor are they going to convince blue dog congress critters put into office by the Democratic establishment feeding off the crumbs thrown them by the donor class precisely for the purpose of frustrating policy that serves the general welfare or public good.
And this kind of “tribal” cheerleading is very misleading. “Look, “we” progressives are winning!” Except we’re not winning. $15/hour (maybe, but probably not for lots of the country that needs it most) in friggin’ 2024, five years from now, is NOT winning! My local McDonald’s (southern California) is advertising a starting wage of over $15/hr right now. And, the effective political organizing in Congress is delaying and obstructing.
We “progressives” need to be a lot more realistic, which means tougher and more pessimistic among other things. To win, we need to be able to tell the truth about the simple fact that we are losing. And, this is losing, folks. 2024, my ass
Hugh
BTW re the June jobs numbers,
Private sector job growth in June, not seasonally adjusted (as in what really happened as opposed to the official seasonally adjusted numbers) was 1.050 million. This number is in range for recent years. Net job creation (Jan-June job creation minus the previous Dec-Jan end of the year job drop off) was 1.446 million. This is the worst number in the last six years. It is less than but within range of only 2016, but more than 400,000 fewer than my reference year 2014. And of course in 2014 the US adult working age population was smaller than it is now (1.1 million less)
The Total Nonfarm (private plus government sectors) job creation tells a similar story. May-June job growth 707,000; net job creation 1.104 million. These numbers are also the worst in the last 6 years, 400,000 fewer than in 2014. They are 300,000 fewer than just the private sector numbers because they are beginning to show the seasonal job losses related to the end of the school year. The majority of these losses (a million plus) traditionally show up next month.
Anyway when you hear all the language about “strong, good, beating expectations” job growth in news stories just be aware that this is BS put out by people who know nothing about jobs numbers but routinely report them as gospel.
Dale
The continued quiet support of the aviation industry is bad news. But the real bad news is the lack of any discussion by the media of overpopulation issues. It is a fox and rabbit issue; as long as the rabbit (fossils fuel use) population keeps growing, so will the fox population (humans). In the natural cycle of events this would take care of itself. But this time it may be too late for the world as we know it. The UN has reports a 60% drop in the numbers of animals on the planets since 1970. The numbers for certain insects are even worse. I’m beginning to be glad I’m 71. This isn’t going to end well.
Herman
@450.org,
There is a class element at play. Many environmental activists are affluent so they likely fly more frequently than poorer people so of course they won’t rail against flying since it is an environmentally destructive activity that they engage in. This is one of the reasons why I am so disillusioned with the environmental movement.
Plenty of rich environmentalists will harangue some poor shmuck for eating a cheeseburger while they fly to exotic locations on vacation and buy all sorts of gadgets that require the environmentally destructive mining of rare earth metals by people working in deplorable conditions. This is why I doubt anything serious will be done about the environment. Too many people will have to accept major lifestyle changes and very few people are willing to accept this.
bruce wilder
Flying for recreational travel has been one of the greatest enhancements of my personal life enabling me to see and experience far away places. I am not rich by American standards and I long ago concluded that i could not handle regular business travel, so maybe not so many trips over decades. But, i have been flabbergasted by the “carbon impact” estimates i have see for long-distance jet travel. I have no way to independently evaluate these estimates. If they are accurate, air travel dwarfs almost any other single thing we choose to do as individuals in quantitative impact on the climate.
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There are lots of things that require collective action to change infrastructural systems.
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But, air travel for a vacation is a matter of individual discretion in a way that functioning routinely in established systems of power generation by electric utilities is not. Driving a Prius is quantitatively trivial. Flying from New York to New Delhi is apparently far from trivial.
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It has taken a while to sink in for me personally. And, i honestly mourn that such travel will be a rare, probably non-existent part of my future. But, if the estimates of impact are real, i do not see any other moral course.
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On a side-note, substantially reducing contrails could raise global temperature appreciably. Just another way we are screwed, i guess.
Z
Dale,
I agree that the crux of our problems on this planet is overpopulation and I never hear it discussed in the media. I hear it written about on this board, Hugh mentions it quite a bit, but I hardly read of it being discussed on other places on the internet. Mind you that my primary source for news is the Daily Links on Naked Capitalism and this board. I rarely read the Naked Capitalism comments, but I haven’t noticed them supplying many links on it and I’d imagine they would if they were out there.
It looks too late to control now, there are too many people already, and as impolite as it may be to say it, our best hope as a species on this planet, our best hope for all life on this planet, is that some sort of deadly virus sweeps across the world and kills a substantial part of the human population and leaves the rest of life unscathed. The two world wars slowed its progress, damaged two generations, but with nuclear weapons world wars are no longer feasible so it’s either going to be some sort of plague or ugly ecological collapse. The oceans worry me the most.
We are about to find out if this ball of life, which we call home, has enough innate intelligence to save itself.
Z
Willy
According to the IPCC aircraft currently cause about 3.5% of global warming from all human activities. It’s projected to rise to 15% within 50 years but something tells me that by that time air travel could be looking more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CZ8fejXB7Y
Maybe hoping. Kinda looks like fun.
Hugh
It is kind of amazing that the IPCC does as well as it does, considering how it is internally staffed and structured and how its work can be gamed politically by fossil fuel producers and industrialized countries.
It is good to see more analysis/criticism of “markets.” It is also nice to see the “we’re the smartest people in room” mystique of companies like McKinsey get punctured. These guys couldn’t organize a two car parade. I think MBAs and consultancy firms are two of the worst things that ever happened to the country. These people have this idea that if it works in a Powerpoint presentation, it must work equally well in reality –without ever bothering to look, or even glance, at what the underlying reality is.
450.org
Willy, too funny. “Beautiful places to see,” indeed. Humanity reduced to tinned sardines.
Perhaps air travel is left untouched as a holy grail because it helps keep the aerosols in the atmosphere and its substantial masking effect. Without the aerosol masking effect, we’re inarguably toast.
Look at the remediation plans currently being batted around. The one discussed in this video link extracts CO2 from the atmosphere for a mere $2 trillion per year. What a bargain and think of all the jobs it will help create. Who said you can’t have your climate change and eat it too? Growth at any cost.
Climate Change Is Already Irreversible
450.org
Note that I used the word equitable for a reason. Current strategies to potentially reduce air travel involve taxing the hell out of it. That’s not equitable. That means air travel will be for the rich only, and sorry, but that’s obviously not fair and only furthers the disparity between rich and poor. Carbon taxes have this propensity. They’re not progressive and a drop in the bucket for the rich. The rich can continue to live like unabashed sadistic pigs while the poor grovel at their feet for a few measly crumbs.
Air travel must be diminished and ultimately eliminated for any and all. Kim Jong-un gets it. That’s why he travels everywhere by train because he wants to lessen his carbon footprint. If only Trump would follow the example set by his bffl and refrain from flying all over kingdom come every week or several times a week with his prodigious entourage.
When Pigs Fly
Z
The Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia case has the potential to cause plenty of problems for our rulers. The billionaire was friends with Trump and the Clintons. I tend to doubt that either of them participated in pedophilia, but other elites probably did (Alan Derschowitz is supposed to be heavily involved) and Epstein is reported to claim that he videotaped some of their escapades to gain leverage on them. If Epstein starts dropping dimes on his pals it could become too explosive to cover up and even cause a shift of perspectives among their media mouthpieces.
Z