California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Worldwide Need For Energy Grows as World Population Grows

by John Lawrence

One factor not taken into account as the world grapples with replacing fossil fuel energy with renewable energy is that the population, and, therefore, the need for energy is growing exponentially with a billion human beings being added to world population approximately every decade. This makes it less likely that we will hit our targets for fossil fuel emissions. One could quantify the number of gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted per year per person on the planet. Obviously, every person has needs that require either fossil fuel or renewable energy although people in more advanced countries are more responsible for the emission of greater quantities of CO² than others. Let's look at world population growth over the years. It took most of human history for our population to reach 1 billion—and just over 200 years to reach 8 billion. It is estimated that earth reached one billion in population for the first time in 1804; two billion in 1927, 123 years later; three billion in 1960, 33 years later; four billion in 1974, 14 years later; five billion in 1987, 13 years later; six billion in 1999, 12 years later; seven billion in 2011, 12 years later; and eight billion in 2022, 11 years later. Notice that 7/8 of the world's population have been added to the planet after the advent of the industrial revolution, after the advent of the widespread use of fossil fuels. If the world's population had not increased so rapidly, planet earth would probably not be facing the dire consequences of climate change at this point in time. Notice also that the addition of a billion people to planet earth is happening over shorter and shorter time spans, the last billion in just eleven years!

Can the defossil fuelization of planet earth proceed at a rapid enough pace to keep up with world population growth? That is a critical question. What is the average energy consumption per capita for planet earth? The U.S. average residential energy consumption per capita in 2021 was about 63 MMBtu. MMBtu is the abbreviation for one million British thermal units. It is the common unit used to measure heating content and the value of a fuel.The world average per capita consumption of primary energy in 2021 was about 76 MMBtu. Total world energy consumption then would be 8 billion times 76 MMBtu. So by 2032 or so add in another billion times 76 MMBtu. Will renewables be able to supply that much energy by 2032? Major changes have to take place in agriculture and building materials in addition to power generation and transportation. The manufacture of steel and cement contribute large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. These building materials need to be replaced but by what? You can't have high rises built out of adobe. In agriculture we have to get away from eating farm animals. Cows burp and fart methane. Pigs contribute a lot of waste products which leech into rivers and streams. Problem is people don't want to give up eating cows and pigs. Consumers won't stand for a mandatory vegetarian diet. 

Consumers want their consumption habits not to change. This means that efforts to rid the planet of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide generation by building materials and agriculture are apt to fail. As the earth warms, humanity is going too slow in its efforts to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. Also the amount of dangerous chemicals going into the environment is threatening civilization. The need for cooperation and collaboration among nations to ameliorate climate change is also being held back by the incessant human penchant for war and violence. The profit motive seems to trump all efforts to build a healthier planet. Sellers want to sell things that are inherently destructive to the planet whether they be food products or other consumer items. If a food contains fat, salt or sugar, it is more palatable, and, therefore, there is a greater demand for it even though it contributes to ill health. There is also an insatiable demand for alcohol and drugs even though they are detrimental to human health. A paradigm change would be necessary to get the plant on the right track in terms of human health and a healthy environment devoid of carbon dioxide production.

Off the Top of My Head

Bidenomics: The US Finally Gets an Industrial Policy

by John Lawrence

The Republican policy that the government should be hands off regarding the economy is out the window. Trickle down is a failed policy. Bidenomics gets the government involved in crucial areas of the economy. The export of jobs to parts of the world where labor is cheapest is replaced with a policy of creating jobs within the US. Deregulation is replaced with regulations to protect the environment and combat climate change. The traditional Democratic alliance with unions is back in vogue. Bidenomics is all about building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up instead of from the top down. Bidenomics is about shaping the economy in a way that is propitious for the middle class and the environment. Infrastructure building is more important than accelerating the consumer economy. Putting our house in order is more important than giving away fattening goodies to consumers. People are being put to work doing jobs which actually make US society a better place instead of encouraging jobs in frivolous pursuits. This is not necessarily what the American consumer wants.The American consumer wants more money in their pockets so they can buy more gadgets and aspire to making millions as a pro athlete or an entertainer. They don't actually want to work at the good jobs Biden is creating building infrastructure or making semiconductors. CNN reported:

Trickle-down economics, which was at the heart of President Ronald Reagan’s policies and continues to be the guiding light of Republican lawmakers, typically revolves around tax cuts for the wealthy and large companies. Supporters say the benefits flow down to middle-class and working Americans, boosting economic growth more broadly. But many experts dispute the effectiveness of this practice at lifting all boats.

Biden argues that supply-side, trickle-down economics has cost jobs and hollowed out the middle class. He has long focused on that group of Americans, serving as chair of the Middle Class Task Force when he was vice president in the Obama administration.

“Folks, let me say it as clearly as I can: (The) trickle-down approach failed the middle class and failed America,” said Biden.

To fund Bidenomics, the president once again calls for ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

The problem is that now that the American people have had  a good taste of Democratic programs, they want more: Republican tax cuts. They want their cake and eat it too. They know that Republicans will have no problem with the national deficits and debts as long as they come in the form of tax cuts. So from the American consumer's point of view they have got about all they can expect to get out of Bidenomics. Now they want a tax break to boot.

The Biden administration has focused on infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors, Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act each include direct funding and tax incentives for public and private manufacturing construction. Biden outlined how states will receive more than $42 billion in federal funding for high-speed internet service, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure law. It is aimed at bringing connectivity to more Americans and closing the digital divide. The administration is comparing it to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act, which brought electricity to homes throughout the country. And 35,000 new projects – including roads, bridges and ports – have received funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law, the White House said.

E.J. Dionne Jr. said in the Washington Post:

Bidenomics has also gone global. One indicator is the exceptional and ongoing debate Sullivan’s speech provoked in proposing a “new consensus” to replace “a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action and trade liberalization as an end in itself.” The old formulas, Sullivan argued, not only failed to address new problems; they didn’t work on their own terms.

“In the name of oversimplified market efficiency,” he said, “entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that made them, moved overseas.” The idea that freer trade “would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He stressed the need for “a modern American industrial strategy” and the benefits of “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships.”

Can the dumbed down and self seeking American people even understand much less appreciate the great things that Bidenomics has brought forth? Biden has changed the narrative on taxes by repeating ad nauseum that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. Big idea: raising taxes doesn't mean raising taxes on everyone and a tax break does nor mean lowering taxes on everyone. The meme about raising taxes which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to Democrats ("tax and spend") and tax breaks which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to themselves has been change by Biden. "Tax the rich" has become the Democrats' motto thanks to Bernie Sanders and AOC.The immense inequality that Reaganomics has resulted in is being addressed by Bidenomics. The American people say "Ho Hum". They are more interested in spectator sports which is exemplified by the fact that news programs on TV are routinely bounced in favor of sports events. In short the American people don't appreciate Biden because they don't take the time to understand Bidenomics.

Biden has done much good for America and Americans. He is the least appreciated great President in American history. It's a reflection on the American people themselves that all they're interested in is their own personal situation. If they are well off, they could care less about social programs that help the poor. If they have a good job, they could care less about the unemployed. American have been taught to be totally selfish and not to care about the wider world or about the improvement of society in general. Corporations by law are only supposed to consider the financial well being of their share holders and nothing else. These attitudes in and of themselves preclude the concerns of minorities, whether racial or economic, because the US is a majoritarian society. In politics the majority rules. Concern about the welfare of minorities and of the world in general and in particular the environment is not a consideration. Meanwhile, global warming is taking out individual families who are victims of tornadoes or other particular manifestations of global warming on a daily basis. It has yet to sink in that perhaps concerns for larger interests than just ourselves might be a paradigm change we might have to make.

For the American people, it's not abut how much Biden has done, it's about how much have you done for me lately, Mr Biden, and, more importantly, how much more are you going to do? If there are many more carrots, then maybe I'll vote for you. Otherwise, I'll take the tax break Republicans are offering. The American national character is selfishness personified. Ayn Rand would be proud.

Off the Top of My Head

Why the Fed's Raising Interest Rates Won't Work

by John Lawrence

Inflation is a supply and demand problem. The Fed only sees it as a demand problem: there is too much demand. Therefore, it seeks to reduce the public's ability to demand by reducing wages and creating more unemployment. Problem is that businesses are short staffed. They are trying to hire more workers, not laying them off. There is no "industrial reserve army" of people competing for jobs. Businesses are competing for workers. The reason why prices are going up (hence inflation) is not that there is too much demand, but that there is too little supply. This is caused by supply chain problems which comes down to the fact that most things Americans consume are produced overseas, mainly in China. Also the sanctions on Russian gas and oil combined with Russia cutting off supplies even beyond the sanctions means that everything that is transported including consumer goods is even more expensive. The problem is that the US does not produce much of what it consumes. Again it's a supply problem. Container ships coming from China raise their rates because gas is more expensive. This makes the goods they transport more expensive. When the major things Americans consume come from China (consumer goods) and Russia (energy costs), America is at the behest of countries that it considers enemies. And so is Europe.

The traditional way of fighting inflation is for the Fed to raise interest rates and drive up unemployment. When unemployment increases, demand decreases because unemployed people don't have as much money to spend. In other words money is withdrawn from the economy. This is of course to the detriment of the unemployed people which are usually those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But as we've seen during the pandemic, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are usually those who are indispensable workers - grocery workers, agricultural workers, truck drivers, nurses, caregivers. The economy cannot function for anyone without their services. So the only way the Fed can achieve its goal is to drive businesses into bankruptcy. Then all those workers will be in the ranks of the unemployed and be forced to underconsume. Actually, the more that Americans consume, the more greenhouse gasses are created. Underconsumption could have a very salutary effect on the atmosphere and the environment.

Another way to withdraw money from the economy in order to reduce demand is to raise taxes. Again taxes are usually raised on the poor and middle class further immiserizing them. Congress refuses to raise taxes on the rich which Joe Biden has proposed doing. This would help inflation to some extent, but the rich don't consume basic items to the extent that the middle class and poor do. So in order to reduce demand to the point where it is more or less equal to supply, money must be taken out of the pockets of the poor and middle class. The other alternative is to increase supply. But since the US is dependent on supply from foreign suppliers, this is not that easy to do. Long range, the solution is for the US to make more stuff, but corporations have settled on a model of getting stuff produced where labor is cheapest and that means overseas.

Off the Top of My Head

According to Biden's BBB Plan, Buyers of Electric Vehicles Would Receive up to $12,500 in Tax Credits

by John Lawrence

So where is this incentive to buy electric vehicles now that gas (in CA) is about $6 a gallon? Now is the time when we need this subsidy, but, alas, the Democrats couldn't even stick together to pass this and other incentives and measures to get off fossil fuels. How about this as an incentive: preventing daily tornadoes in the heartland of the US? As extreme weather gets more extreme, Congress can't even pass programs to combat global warming and the consequent damage that's being done to people's lives and the economy in general. Not to mention the fact that major portions of the population will not be able to get property insurance which is happening right now and will only get worse. If you have a lot of brush around your house, you're an insurance liability. If you live in a flood plain, you're an insurance liability. We are told by people who know that we only have a few years to do something before we can expect catastrophic consequences from climate change and global warming. Yet we are taking our time getting off fossil fuels. There is even regret that we didn't go ahead with the Keystone pipeline.

The New York Times reported:

"In the coming decades, as global temperatures continue to rise, hundreds of millions of people could struggle against floods, deadly heat waves and water scarcity from severe drought, the report said. Mosquitoes carrying diseases like dengue and malaria will spread to new parts of the globe. Crop failures could become more widespread, putting families in places like Africa and Asia at far greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. People unable to adapt to the enormous environmental shifts will end up suffering unavoidable loss or fleeing their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale,[according to a recent UN report]."

We do know the things we need to be doing. It's just that we're not doing them or doing them at such a slow pace that we will still experience the worst effects of climate change. If you think the refugee problem is bad now, climate change will exacerbate and accelerate the refugee problem. People will be fleeing their homes and homelands when it becomes apparent that they can't make a living there. They will be coming to parts of the world where countries are wealthy enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Basically, that means that people will flee poor countries and attempt at all costs to enter rich countries. That's why the US, as the richest country in the world, should be going full speed ahead to transition away from fossil fuels and into a new era that consists of renewable energy production and more environment friendly lifestyles. Instead, Americans are determined to lead lifestyles of maximum consumption right up to the hilt of their financial resources and beyond in a last gasp of over consumption.

Common Dreams reported:

In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC's findings seriously," Pollin wrote, "it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry."

Asserting that "at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing" a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.

The expert proposed starting with "the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips."

"They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies," he wrote. "The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices."

So for roughly half of the defense budget, the US taxpayers could own the oil industry and phase it out at the speed required to save the planet from the worst effects of global warming. Instead we're treated to the Big Oil CEO's defiance that they are not price gouging because prices are set by the world market. Does anyone question why prices have to be set by the world market? No. Obviously, the world market exists to serve the interests of the oil producers, not oil consumers. Maybe the US should get off the world market because we produce enough oil to meet all current consumer demands. So why do we even need the world market? The world market exists to serve the interests of the OPEC nations who won't even open their spigots in a time of crisis, and it exists to serve the interests of the western Big Oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell.

Americans would like to have one more blast of consumption rather than buckle down and do what's necessary to combat climate change, an effort that would be at least as great as the effort and sacrifice put forth to fight World War II. Billionaire's would rather blast off into space than use their money to fight climate change. Their lifestyles are major contributors to the emission of greenhouse gasses. They don't want to be told that they can't overconsume with numerous 27,000 square foot mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. That's the American Dream, or is it. It's soon going to turn into the American Nightmare but probably not for them. They have the resources to escape the worst effects of global warming. Instead the nightmare will be mostly visited on the least among us as well as randomly due to tornadoes, floods and fires.

Off the Top of My Head

Almost as Many Have Died During the Covid Pandemic as in All American Wars

by John Lawrence

Maybe we should have invested more in public health than we have in the military. Compared to the trillions spent on the military, only a pittance has been spent on public health, let alone on promoting peace in the world. 1.1 million have died in all American wars since the founding of the republic. About 927,000 and counting have died from the current pandemic even though a revolutionary mRNA vaccine is available. 675,000 died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 sans vaccine. So many more people have died from pandemics in the US than have been killed in wars. Yet war and the preparations for war are pursued relentlessly while efforts for peace languish. This is not only dumb; it's sick. It goes to show that homo sapiens is one of the stupidest and least empathetic species that has ever evolved. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the human race is right on course fiddling while the earth burns due to climate change. We will continue to fiddle and equivocate playing one upsmanship with each other as the earth deteriorates into an uninhabitable planet. No wonder the billionaires are making plans to get off.

Of course the power structure doesn't really care what happens on planet earth after they die. They will miss by virtue of their own natural deaths the worst of it. They will have lived the American Dream while bequeathing to their grandchildren the American Nightmare. As we continue to pour billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are more concerned about the economy that we are about human survival and what sacrifices that will mean. In November, researchers at the Global Carbon Project estimated that global carbon-dioxide emissions from energy and industry rose 4.9 percent in 2021, after a 5.4 percent decline in 2020. China, India and the European Union all had major increases, suggesting that any climate effect from the pandemic was fleeting. So not even a worldwide pandemic can significantly alter the relentless pursuit of economic growth which produces mega tons of carbon dioxide. Residents of planet earth refuse to change their lifestyles and their aspirations for what they conceive to be a "better life."

In the US consumerism is force fed through advertising just like in France ducks are forced fed to produce foie gras. Facebook makes billions of dollars not selling a product but selling advertising. Amazon at least provides products and the service of delivering those products. The advertising industry is the equivalent of the forced feeding of ducks only the ducks are American consumers who would rather not change their lifestyles of accumulation even if it means that their grandchildren will die a miserable death on a burned out planet. Meanwhile, nations exacerbate tensions among each other and foment wars, the preparations for which cost trillions of dollars which, therefore, are not spent on climate mitigation.

Lifestyles not only of the rich but of the middle class would have to change if the earth is to survive climate change. The production of steel and concrete by current methods produce tons of carbon dioxide. The generation of electricity by coal and gas produces tons of carbon dioxide. Agriculture, mainly cow farts, produces tons of methane. As the earth warms sea levels rise, the Arctic thaws and even more methane is released. It's so anthropogenic! We would be better off going back to the horse and buggy days. The American fetish for progress has produced an ecological disaster. The American lifestyle is an environmental disaster. Meanwhile, the power structure in the US and elsewhere seems bound and determined to accelerate the process of environmental destruction while extreme weather events are passed off as "seen nothing like it but vowing to rebuild." That's the American can-do spirit!

Off the Top of My Head

Why is GDP the Best Measure of a Healthy Economy?

by John Lawrence

GDP measures the amount of money spent on goods and services. The implication is that the more money spent, the better for the economy. GDP does not take into account money spent paying down debt which is something many Americans need to do rather than to consume more goods and services. So what if you devised a more general measure of economic activity including money spent to pay down debt and beyond that money saved. Traditional GDP would then be much less. Horrors, say the politicians and businessmen. People actually being encouraged to save and pay down debts? How unAmerican! You see only the wealthy are supposed to create and maintain wealth. The average slob is supposed to pay up to the limit of their paycheck and beyond. The average slob is supposed to go into debt. How else would Moneytree and other payday lenders make money?

All this talk about getting the economy back to normal. Why get a sick economy back to normal. Better to consume less and save the money. But economists, politicians and corporations don't want you to do that. The only measure they think of in terms of a healthy economy is maximizing GDP which means maximizing corporate profits. The American economy consists of 70% consumer purchases. Now economists are upset that the pandemic has made Americans spend less going to concerts, restaurants, baseball games and cruise ships. They are spending less on tourism and other services. Well, maybe that's a good thing. You can eat a lot healthier by cooking at home. Restaurant foods are loaded with sugar, salt and God knows what else to make them taste better. Taste is the ultimate value, not how the food contributes to your health or ill health.

The new post pandemic economy should look a lot different. Instead of consume, consume, consume, more thought should be taken about what to consume. Americans are privileged so much compared to the rest of the world where many people are barely eking out a living. Every day the ranks of refugees due to climate disasters and war grows by leaps and bounds. Every day more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere due to Americans' propensity to consume. Americans binge on consumer products, contribute mightily to global warming and complain if they can't have what they want when they want it. In order to decrease global warming we need to consume less, manufacture less and plant more trees. In fact this would be a great idea to occupy the homeless and give them something to do in return for basic food and shelter. The Civilian Conservation Corps organized during the Great Depression did just that. It gave many people a constructive purpose in life in return for a modest paycheck. They planted trees, built camp grounds, trails and national parks and otherwise contributed to the betterment of society.

Today we have to orient ourselves away from consumerism and towards an economy of restoration of the planet. CO2 emissions and the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are never going to decrease until we consume less and focus our energies on mitigation of climate change instead of just selling products and services. It is time to stop going to Disneyland and to get serious about converting to a green economy before it's too late for our children and grandchildren to enjoy living on a habitable planet.

Off the Top of My Head

Replace Halloween With a Day Honoring Mother Earth and Its People

by John Lawrence

Americans will spend $10 billion on Halloween this year, a day dedicated to goblins and ghouls. There is enough scariness in the world. What the world needs is not a day dedicated to rotting children's teeth, but a day dedicated to preserving the environment so that they have a stable and hospitable planet to live on. Instead of "trick or treat" how about a day of "how can I serve my neighbor?".No other country celebrates Halloween and makes such a big deal and spending spree out of it. In Latin American countries they celebrate Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead honoring their ancestors. This is totally different from American Halloween which celebrates nothing except the selfish acquisition of candy. American Halloween has no socially redeeming value whatsoever.

What are we teaching children by celebrating Halloween? That American life is all about the acquisition of stuff - in this case candy. And if we don't get what we want we will do harm to others. Instead of a trick why not teach children to do a favor for others. Let's eliminate tricks from Halloween. It's teaching children that it's OK to do harm to others if they don't get what they want. Enormous sums of money are spent on Halloween which could be spent for more constructive purposes like providing funds to help the growing number of refugees around the world including the refugees internal to our own country which the homeless surely are.

Greta Thunberg shines a spotlight on global warming every Friday with her school strike for climate. School Strike for Climate (Swedish: Skolstrejk för klimatet), also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, is an international movement of school students who skip Friday classes to participate in demonstrations to demand action from political leaders to take action to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy. Let's make Halloween a day for honoring future generations and Mother Earth. We could also make Halloween a school strike for peace because peace is necessary if the world is to cooperate in meeting the challenge of global warming.

The celebration of Halloween sends all the wrong signals to children. Instead of public service, it sends the message of selfish acquisitiveness. Instead of concern for others it sends the message that, if they don't get what they want, they will do you a disservice. Halloween has no redeeming value. It is just a spendfest on candy and costumes which money could be better spent on more worthwhile goods and services for themselves and others. Instead of candy, children should be taught about nutritional literacy and the value of eating healthy foods. But instead children are carefully taught to disregard any concern for others and even the dangers of self indulgence for themselves. Many eat candy until they get sick. Sugar has no redeeming nutritional value, and Halloween has no redeeming social value whether it be honoring our ancestors as the Mexicans do or honoring a planet suitable for habitation by our children and their children. The world is scary enough with the pandemic and climate change. Instead of honoring scariness, let's celebrate the redemption of the planet and the health of the global population.

Off the Top of My Head

Wanted: A Billionaire to Run Ads Directed at Anti-Vaxxers

by John Lawrence

Interview unvaccinated patients dying with COVID, then interview the Moms, Dads and Children left behind after their Mom, Dad or Child has died from COVID. Put together a powerful ad of people who believed the anti-VAXX lies and then got COVID and died and/or were left behind to grieve. Spend millions running these ads, and pretty soon no one will believe the lies and misinformation any more. These ads should be run on all the channels and social media that anti-Vaxxers and Trump supporters watch. So many of the ads running currently are superfluous, their only purpose being to get you to buy more stuff. Instead of spending billions on private space missions, spend some money where it really influences people to do the right thing - TV and social media advertising oriented toward getting people vaccinated.

Advertising could be transformed into a socially meaningful operation. I don't need to see ads telling me to buy more stuff. Force feeding Americans ads to buy more stuff is part of the problem. Americans are over consuming while the rest of the world is barely eating. Americans need to consume less, but advertising could also have a socially redeeming purpose. I don't know what the ethics are of the government itself running ads on TV and social media, but for sure a private party can run ads of any type and description. So why don't they? Powerful ads could be put together to get people to do the right thing and get the vaccine. Dying parents and crying children might convince people not to follow in the footsteps of the unvaccinated. We need that to get the pandemic under control.

Advertise on all the anti-vaxxers' favorite social media platforms. Facebook will target ads for you. So the buys for pro-Vax ads could be targeted at all the anti-vaxxers. This is not only completely ethical; it will save lives. In fact it would be unethical not to do it since Facebook's algorithms are set up to link anti-vaxxrs together. It should be a no brainer to target antivaxxers with pro vaccination material, and the most powerful and poignant material is the remorse of the dying for not getting the COVID shots and the grief of distraucght wives and children at the loss of their husband and parent. Michael Bloomberg and the Gates Foundation, where are you?

Off the Top of My Head

Our Grandchildren Won't Have to Pay Back Money Spent on a Green New Deal, But They Will Pay With Their Lives if We Don't Do It Now

by John Lawrence

It's a myth that a sovereign country with a sovereign currency and a floating exchange rate has to borrow money to pay its bills. The US can just issue the money. It doesn't need to tax in order to spend. So why isn't the US as well as all the other nations with sovereign currencies such as Japan, Britain and China going all out to supply as much money as necessary to prevent global warming from "going viral" as they say? The only restraint is the question of whether the human and physical resources to do the work are available. In a society such as China, if the government wanted its people to stop whatever they were doing and become part of the work force to forestall global warming, it would be done. In the US it would not be so easy to commandeer workers to leave their jobs as servers, bartenders, chefs, dealers, workers at Disneyland, workers on cruise ships etc to leave their jobs and go to work in Joe Biden's global warming and infrastructure rebuilding work force. The businesses large and small would have a conniption fit like they're having now getting these workers back to work because their pandemic unemployment has not run out.

The only time when workers went all out to solve a major global problem was World War II. Rosie the Riveter and all the others joined the work force to defeat Hitler. They even were willing to defer consumption so that the financial and material resources that were necessary weren't spent in the consumption market thus letting the necessary physical resources be available for the war effort. Today we have a nation consisting of a bunch of spoiled brats who wouldn't do anything the government asked them to do crying that their "freedom" to do whatever they wanted was paramount. We live in a society composed of consumers who demand to be endlessly entertained by movies, TV, theme parks cruise ships, athletes, restaurants, social media and Las Vegas. Half the country works as servers, baristas, bartenders, housekeepers, actors, athletes, dealers, entertainers and such like jobs to entertain the top half. Some of these are highly paid; most are not. Such was the nature of the "full employment" society before COVID hit. It was a full employment society consisting of trivial jobs at minimum wages for the most part. Biden will have to persuade workers to leave their jobs in the "entertainment" industry in order to create actual results in the real world such as building green infrastructure. The entertainment industry will not be pleased nor will the upper half of society which demands to be continually entertained. 70% of US GNP is consumption and a lot of what people want to consume is encompassed by sports bars, travel and tourism, the leisure and hospitality industry in general. The spoiled brats think its their birthright to have such services available, and the last thing they want to do is to roll up their sleeves and join a union.

Together with the presumed right to be entertained, we have a large percentage of the country that has been processed through the military and developed this consciousness that military prerogatives should prevail uber alles. These are the insurrectionists and Trump supporters that want civilian society to reinforce military values such as command and control. They want an autocrat for President. Freedom is the only value that counts for them. Democracy, equality, fraternity, social equity don't matter. They want to preserve the American way of life which, in addition to a right to be entertained wherever and whenever they have the resources to consume, includes also the right to exclude the prerogatives of minorities for social justice. Is it any wonder that the insurrectionists in January 6 contained a large number of current and former members of the military and police forces? Their attitude is that whatever is good for the military is good for American society in general. The military has become a way of life and consciousness for them. They think that, because they served, they are entitled. Spoiled brat militarists I'll call them. The endless wars, bloated military-industrial complex budget and the military bases in practically every country in the world provides the economic and job base of the nation unfortunately.

Biden thinks he is out to prove that American democracy can compete in the civilian world on an equally competent basis with other countries. That will be a hard nut to crack. The US is dooming itself in two ways: the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. Let's take the Second Amendment first. In no other major country in the world do citizens have a right to unlimited uncontrolled gun ownership including military style weapons. This is producing news cycles when, hardly is one mass murder out of the way, than another one comes along to dominate the news. The news channels can hardly keep up with them all. No other society including The US' major competitors would tolerate such a situation. The Second Amendment has become toxic and perverted, and in and of itself is enough to doom the US to second class status. In addition to that the First Amendment has become toxic and perverted, and the major reason for that is social media. Social media makes possible the vicious spread of toxic lies and untruths. Witness Trump's use of Twitter to corral and consolidate his followers around the thesis that he, not Biden, actually won the election. Social media allowed him to rally his supporters based on angry themes and memes connected with white supremacy and a return to the good old days when white, Protestant Anglo Saxons ran the country, the good old days when Negroes knew their place in society, the good old days when you didn't have multiple nationalities and religious groups asserting their rights under the Constitution to live freely and enjoy all the perquisites of American society, the good old days when gas guzzlers were the only vehicles in town and no one need be concerned about anything except maximizing their profits and living the American Dream, where the American Dream consisted of having more stuff than your parents did.

Joe Biden's first 100 days have been remarkable in that he has been able to get as much accomplished with slim majorities in both Houses of Congress. Is this enough though to move America forward at the pace that China, for instance, is moving? China is a more or less unified society. 99% or more of Chinese citizens are on the same page as the Chinese government. China is winning friends and allies all over the world with its Belt and Road initiative while the US withers away its resources on endless wars and confuses its allies with the possibility of radical swings with each change of administrations. China's military budget of $183.5 billion is dwarfed by a US military budget 5 times that amount. The US is a divided country where one of the major parties base their appeal on lies and deception, and its supporters are only too willing to eat it up because it's entertaining and represents military values of command and control. Good government, as Biden has illustrated, is somewhat boring because it is based on solving real human problems. Let's hope that Biden's version of reality based on truth and problem solving wins out over the lies based reality of the other side, and the US, even if it doesn't remain the world's dominant power, can become a constructive member of the world community helping to solve problems at home and abroad.

Off the Top of My Head

Unlike Trump, Biden's New Deal Will Actually Make America Great Again

by John Lawrence, April 4, 2021

GDP is the measure of national economic activity and is composed of 4 components: private consumer consumption, business investment, government investment and net of imports and exports. America's economy is 70% consumption compared to about 50% for most of our western allies. Government spending is about 17% compared to 40-50% for most of our allies. In fact for Norway, Belgium, Finland and France it's over 50%. Joe Biden's infrastructure plan will change all that bringing government spending on infrastructure both material and human more in line with the rest of the developed world. While most of our allies spend around 50% on consumption, America is primarily a consumer economy at 70%. That's about to change under Biden's New Deal. Government consumption and employment will increase while private consumption and employment will decrease. This is a good thing, but Republicans and states' rights advocates disagree. American infrastructure is falling to Third World status while Americans entertain themselves to death. Nothing has been invested and everything has been consumed. Biden's attempted change in these dynamics, which Mitch McConnell has vowed to fight "every step of the way" is a bid to preserve first world status for the US which is rapidly diminishing.

The one thing the US has going for itself right now is the fact that the US dollar is the world's reserve currency. As such the US can spend large sums - trillions of dollars in fact - without fear of the dollar losing its value. So it might as well "go big" on spending because the dollar may not always retain that status. China is becoming the world's largest economy with major spending on infrastructure not only in China, but, with its Belt and Road Initiative, around the world. Meanwhile, what the US has to offer in that regard is using its bloated military to police the world. So if you were President of your country, which would you rather have - policing or investment. The answer seems clear to many, even to many US allies. China is consistent and values stability and unanimity of its citizens. The US government is subject to radical change every 2 or 4 years with deep divides among its populace, and more and more can't be counted upon by its allies even to the extent that a sizable number of US citizens invaded its Capitol! Autocratic countries may be brutal towards political dissidents, but they would never tolerate a threat to their very existence.

Some Americans will have to be brought kicking and screaming into the Biden economy. Just as they were cavalier about wearing masks, they could care less about good jobs at good wages. They just want good beer and football games. Cruises, spectator sports and abundant entertainment is what Americans have come to expect, and they prefer that to safer roads and rebuilt bridges. They are viscerally opposed to doing anything to prevent climate change or global warming. They don't want to work hard to make America great again. They want it all given to them on a silver platter preferably by an entertaining and charismatic President rather than a plodder who has their welfare at heart. There is a looming war between states rights Republicans who want the US to remain a private consumption economy and Democratic neo-New Dealers who want government to play a larger role in investing in American infrastructure, both material and human.There will be more and better paying jobs working in government infrastructure projects than there will be working in the entertainment industry. This infuriates some people.

Taxing the rich also brings Republicans out of the woodwork to proclaim that Biden will end up taxing the middle class as well "to pay for it" even though he has said that everyone making under $400,000 a year will not pay one penny more in taxes. Republican lawmakers will chomp at the bit to naysay that bit of profundity by saying over and over on their media outlets that it is not true. The truth is that Biden wants to construct a stronger safety net while rebuilding and extending American infrastructure, and a lot of Trump supporters just don't care about any of those things. They just want to be entertained and to eat out while watching spectator sports.

Off the Top of My Head

Reparations and Universal Basic Income

by John Lawrence, July 14, 2020

Old Chinese proverb: Give someone a fish, and they will eat for a day. Teach them how to fish, and they will eat for the rest of their life. This is how I feel about cash payouts for both reparations and Universal Basic Incomes (UBI). I am for reparations in the sense of guaranteeing a living wage job for people who are able bodied. If not the social safety net should provide food, housing and medical care free of charge. In kind welfare is always better than cash payouts which can be squandered, gambled away, spent on drugs and alcohol or other foolish items. Besides billionaires and millionaires, black or white, don't need reparations or UBI.

I am for reparations in the sense of affirmative action for minorities and poor people in the sense of providing jobs either in the private sector or by the government as a last resort. I believe government should be the employer of last resort. In Sweden they have a national employment database which tracks every job opening in the whole country. They will do their best to hook you up with one of those jobs. This is not a bad idea. Then if no matches can be found, the government should be employer of last resort. There sure is a lot of work that needs to be done that can only be done by government like infrastructure repair and development, not only in this country but around the world.

China has exported its expertise and workers to the rest of the world to build infrastructure. This creates future trading opportunities for China, but it also guarantees that there will not be an unemployed class in China. China by virtue of its Belt and Road Initiative is a full employment society. The US could do the same. There is much to be done in terms of sanitation, health, education and job development to bring the rest of the world up to even a minimally acceptable standard of living. At the same time everyone, in both developed and developing societies needs to adopt a sustainable standard of living. The New American Dream should encompass not unlimited consumption but reasonable and sustainable consumption. Otherwise, the planet's resources will be rapidly, at least in geological terms, exhausted, and the result will be resource wars, poverty of the majority and over consumption of the few.

There is much work that needs to be done, but the private economy is not concerned with necessary work. It is only concerned with encouraging consumption that produces the most profits. It is not concerned with what is good for the environment. It is only concerned with exhausting resources if that is what produces the most profit in the shortest period of time. We need to be concerned with husbanding the earth's resources so that they are there for future generations. Renewable energy is a must instead of exhausting earth's fossil fuels. The same can be said for agriculture and other consumable items. They need to be harvested in a sustainable way. Forests need to be maintained instead of being clear cut. The environment needs to be protected. Food needs to be grown without being sprayed with chemicals. There are good practices which will sustain, maintain and renew earth's resources in such a way that everyone can be employed and everyone can benefit including future generations.

In the meantime there is much necessary and essential work to be done here at home and around the world in eliminating poverty, building housing along the Habitat for Humanity model, growing organic food, eliminating factory food operations, providing health care. China is building infrastructure, but it is not directly eliminating poverty around the world. That's a niche the US could fill. A good step would be converting the 800 military bases in various countries to hospitals, schools and affordable housing for local and indigenous people, defunding the military and reallocating resources to helping poor countries become developed in a sustainable way rather than exploiting their resources.

Off the Top of My Head

#GreenNewDeal + #BlackLivesMatter = #TheWayForward

Affirmative Action for Blacks, Latinx and Native Americans in a Green New Deal

by John Lawrence, June 29, 2020

Living with the COBID pandemic could be the new normal. Assurances of a vaccine by the end of the year might be meaningless. Here's why: for many viruses including HIV, Ebola, malaria and tuberculosis there are no vaccines available despite years of study and years of effort to develop one. It took 100 years from the first polio epidemic in the US until a vaccine wiped out polio. Just as the Trump administration misled the American people in minimizing the effects of COBID including that things would normalize after we "flattened the curve" and giving dates by which we could "open up", they misled us by raising expectations that a vaccine would be available by the end of the year. Read the book, "Spillover", if you want authoritative scientific information about viruses and how long vaccine development takes if ever.

So, if the pandemic is something we have to live with indefinitely which could well be the case, the economy, in the way it existed before the pandemic, would never be coming back. So how do we create a new economy which works for the American people which, arguably, it was not working before the pandemic despite quasi full employment. Number 1: we refund the CDC and WHO which are the major institutions dealing with viruses and pandemics. Trump tried to defund CDC, and he did defund WHO in the midst of the pandemic. Politifact reported: "As for funding, there’s no question that the Trump administration sought to cut key CDC budget categories. But thanks to Congress, that funding was restored and even increased in bills that Trump ultimately signed." He had better luck and actually did defund WHO.

The biggest thing that could be done to minimize the bad outcomes for this and future pandemics is to get rid of Donald Trump as President of the US. A Democratic President would refund the CDC and WHO. The second thing would be to take a page out of FDR's book by reinstituting the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which financed the New Deal including many infrastructure projects. In fact the Federal Reserve could finance a #GreenNewDeal without even tweaking the law. With the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) it is now resorting to, it is financing debt relief not only for banks but for hedge funds, private equity funds, bankrupt corporations and even rich individuals. It is taking trillions on its balance sheet with quantitative easing. The SPVs require deal making with the Treasury Department. It would be a very small step for the Fed using a SPV to fund a Green New Deal. The US is about $4 trillion in arrears on infrastructure rebuilding and development. Instead of just bailing out bankrupt institutions the Fed could take a more positive role and actually fund productive development. By the way the RFC actually made money on repayment of loans and user fees as opposed to the Fed which just swallows US debt.

If no vaccine is found for COBID in a timely manner, the whole economy should be restructured because many businesses are not coming back. Many including Herz, J. Crew, Neiman Marcus and Chesapeake Oil have already filed for bankruptcy. A Green New Deal could take up the slack reducing the GDP from 70% consumerism to 50% which would be in line with the EU consumption component of GDP while increasing government investment by 20%. That would represent a full employment economy but it would be reoriented from consumption to building green infrastructure.

Minority hiring for a Green New Deal could be along the lines of affirmative action with African Americans, Latinx and Native Americans being hired first. This would go a long way to reduce inequality in America while being a form of reparations in light of the fact that slave labor built much of this country and Jim Crow redlining was responsible for the fact that black families have not been able to accumulate wealth at the same rate as white families. #BlackLivesMatter plus a #GreenNewDeal could help to restore the balance while at the same time creating a full employment economy.

Off the Top of My Head

A House Built Upon Sand: the US Economy

by John Lawrence, June 26, 2020

The wise man built his house on rock, and it withstood the rains and the floods and the wind. The foolish man built his house on sand and it collapsed. An apt metaphor for the US economy in the midst of a pandemic that is only getting worse. Before the pandemic hit, it was a full employment economy in which half the people couldn't survive a $400. emergency. It was an economy built on consumerism. Consumerism was 70% of GDP. About half the economy was small business, but these jobs and this economic activity was vulnerable. Much of it was non-essential. It was bars (by the way you can drink at home); it was restaurants (by the way you can eat at home). It was travel and hospitality (by the way you can sleep at home if you're willing to make your own bed).

The essential parts of the economy continued to operate even when the pandemic hit. It isn't fair that minimum wage workers were more exposed to the coronavirus, but, be that as it may, with some exceptions these workers did not get sick in higher ratios than anyone else. If more of the jobs were essential, productive and less frivolous, there would have been fewer jobs lost and much less unemployment. The economic house was built on sand and when the pandemic hit, it collapsed. At the same time the fault line of black racism and inequality was fully exposed. It's as if the hurricane of the pandemic cut away the underbrush and exposed this situation for what it is thanks to #BlackLivesMatter.

The Homestead Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln which gave free land to white people allowed whites to build equity and wealth while blacks who were promised 40 acres and a mule after slavery were denied even that. They ended up in many cases working the same land as sharecroppers and living in worse poverty than when they were slaves. After World War II the G.I. Bill aimed to help American veterans adjust to civilian life by providing them with benefits including low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans and financial support. African Americans did not benefit nearly as much as White Americans. Historian Ira Katznelson argues that "the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow". In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.

Additionally, banks and mortgage agencies refused loans to blacks, making the G.I. Bill even less effective for blacks. Once they returned from the war, blacks faced discrimination and poverty, which represented a barrier to harnessing the benefits of the G.I. Bill. So whites were able to build wealth through home ownership while blacks were denied that opportunity. Wealth from home ownership is the difference between the middle class and the poor. Home ownership became the means for the intergenerational transfer of wealth for white people. Each generation of black people started out from zero. There was an intergenerational transfer of poverty instead.

Blacks who were able to get manufacturing jobs after the Second World War did fairly well, but those jobs have by and large fled the country. In the financial crisis of 2008, the Great Recession, blacks were screwed as well. While the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks and mortgage companies hundred cents on the dollar, blacks who needed help paying their mortgages did not get it and were foreclosed on. The government could have bailed them out instead, but it didn't.

So now the country is faced with not only a public health crisis but also an economic, financial and racial crisis which would be much less severe if those manufacturing jobs still existed. The economy is not coming back as it was constructed pre-pandemic. There is no way that small business based on 100% occupancy is going to survive based on 50% occupancy. Many of the businesses like professional sports, cruises and even churches are predicated on high occupancy. People will not be comfortable with high occupancy unless a vaccine is found for COBID, but finding a vaccine is not a foregone conclusion. There are some viruses for which a vaccine has never been found including HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

It takes a lot of money to develop a vaccine, and that money has been lacking from US budgets. There are two obstacles to faster progress, said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic. “One is scientific, and one is embarrassing,” he said. The embarrassing part is the lack of investment. It takes 10 years and more than $1 billion to develop a vaccine — a small fortune for a medical advance but a pittance for a weapons system. While defense research is driven by one mega-customer, the Pentagon, vaccine researchers face a confusing hodgepodge of potential backers. In short the US has spent its money on weapons of war instead of protecting its people from pandemics which are far more deadly than terrorist attacks. 405,000 Americans died in WW II. Over half that amount have already died in this pandemic, and it's getting worse due to American foolishness at the top levels.

There is a chance now for America to start out on a new path, and that path would be more or less what Bernie Sanders and other progressives have identified as their agenda: a Green New Deal would create good jobs for millions of unemployed Americans and it could give priority to black people so that they could get started on wealth building. Low cost housing loans and subsidies could give black people the same advantages they didn't get with the Homestead Act and the G.I. bill. At the same time a Green New Deal would be converting the country to renewable energy and rebuilding infrastructure, both of which are necessary if earth is to remain habitable for the human race. Medicare for All would only bring the US up to the level of most other civilized countries.

We have to reset our priorities, reduce the military-industrial complex and make peace and have cooperation with our so-called enemies. We can quibble about Russia's and China's internal affairs or we can cooperate with them as peers to forestall global warming and create a planet worth inhabiting. We can spend our money on war or we can spend it forestalling future pandemics. The solution to many of our myriad problems is clear, and it doesn't require a revolution necessarily. Reform is all that's necessary to implement Medicare for All. Reform is all that's necessary to implement a Green New Deal. But countries that do not do what's necessary and obvious to meet the needs of the people create a situation in which violence may ensue. It's no longer a question of capitalism vs socialism. Most countries of the earth including Russia and China are a combination of both. I started with a Biblical reference so I will end with one: "Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!" God bless the USA.

Off the Top of My Head

A Jobs Program for Inessential Workers
by John Lawrence, April 30, 2020

Turn inessential workers into essential workers by putting them to work building green infrastructure. This is essential work that is not getting done. Much of the previous inessential work they did is better left undone even in a recovery. It is still inessential. It'll always be inessential compared to what needs to be done in creating and building green infrastructure. Building out solar and wind renewable energy could employ thousands if not millions of people. Repairing roads, bridges, waterways, clean water systems, airports, railroads and all other infrastructure could employ millions. This is essential work that has remained undone despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the US a D rating for infrastructure. High speed rail needs to be built. The widespread adoption of electric cars has to be mandated, and construction of a national electric vehicle charging network to power them has to be built.

Unemployed people still need jobs. Mark Cuban said on CNN this morning that there should be a jobs program similar to that of the New Deal. He is exactly right although he didn't make the necessary connection about the essential work that's still being left undone and the inessential work that doesn't need to be done even in a recovery. Forget Cuban's sports and entertainment enterprises. I hate to tell you that they are basically inessential. What is essential is greatly expanding the public health undertakings of the Federal  government which has been totally behind the curve in this pandemic.

We must ask ourselves what is essential and not go back to a new normal in which all the inessential businesses of the past are brought back just in order to provide employment to the millions who have lost their jobs. The pre-pandemic economy was 70% consumerism. The economy post epidemic should be much less a consumerist economy and much more an investment economy. The four components of gross domestic product are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Of these government spending must be ramped up to provide the essential jobs in infrastructure building as well as in the areas that the pandemic has made clear are indeed essential: health care, education, transportation, agriculture.

Government spending must go up; personal consumption must go down. It's as simple as that. As for business investment, it's a lost cause as business will only do what's profitable for itself as has been made abundantly clear. Investment in fossil fuels and plastics which the big oil companies are making is only destructive to a green economy, not constructive. As far as exports are concerned, the dollar has already been weakened as much as it could possibly be by zero interest rates, so increased exports, although desirable, are not likely to happen any time soon.

Private enterprise knows only one thing in terms of the economy "reopening": get back to consumer spending. It ain't going to happen. People are still afraid of the virus. The pandemic is not over. They will use their money to pay off debts instead of going in debt to the hilt like they are used to. People will save their money instead of entertaining themselves to death. Why? Maybe they have learned their lesson that a high employment economy predicated on the fact that people will always have a job and always have a prepensity to consume is just a chimera. Rather than living paycheck to paycheck, I hope people will understand that there may come a rainy day, and they need to save for that. That lesson has really been brought home by the coronavirus pandemic.

The true heroes are essential workers not the military. The military itself was brought to its knees by COBID-19. There is a lesson there. It's more important to spend our collective money on preparing for the coming pandemic of global warming than on a bloated military. It is more important to house the homeless and guarantee the economic rights of shelter and health care to all Americans as in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is more important to help people all over the world escape from extreme poverty because poverty breeds health crises which then can spread all over the world. It's more important to make peace with our rivals rather than try to control them with military threats and sanctions.

May the next President (and I hope to heaven that it's not Donald Trump) see the light of a more rational, compassionate and humane world, one more concerned about the health and welfare of all the world's peoples. I hope Governor Cuomo's values of being tough, smart, disciplined and most importantly loving spread to every corner of US and world society, and we get on with essential business instead of the inessential business of amusing, entertaining and consuming ourselves to death.

Off the Top of My Head

How the World Could Change When the Current Crisis is Over

by John Lawrence, April 26, 2020

Perhaps we will rethink what is essential and what is inessential. Here's my list of what is essential: 1) Health care; 2) Food; 3) Water; 4) Sanitation (Waste water and trash collection); 5) Education; 6) Transportation; 7) Electricity; 8) The Internet; 9) Grocery stores. 10) Elder care.11) Police, Fire and Paramedic services. Here are some things that are considered inessential now: 1) Spectator sports; 2) Spectator music events; 3) Parades; 4) Conventions; 5) Bars; 6) Restaurants; 7) Barber and beauty parlors; 8) Tattoo parlors; 9) Political campaign events; 10) Large parties like wedding receptions.

Everyone can come up with their own list of what they consider to be essential and what they consider to be inessential. In my opinion the least essential of inessential services are tattoo artists. There are a lot of products and services in our mass consumer culture which are also frivolous and have nothing to do with what is essential or beneficial to human well being.. It seems that the most essential workers are the least paid while the least essential are well paid indeed. Is advertising really essential? You can look up everything you might want or need online using google or amazon. Why do you have to have some irrelevant product or service pounded into you by TV advertising? It's a historical relic. I record most programs so that I can fast forward through the commercials. If I watch a live program, I put it on pause while I do something else for awhile, and then I fast forward through the commercials. In my opinion everything advertised on TV, especially pharmaceuticals, is inessential. They should be prescribed by a doctor. It's the doctor's business to know which pharmaceuticals you need, not yours.

Are hedge funds essential? Is jewelry essential? Are the products of the wedding-industrial complex essential? Many people are having weddings during the pandemic without paying the tens of thousands of dollars that current weddings fashioned by the wedding-industrial complex demand. There are many frivolous consumer items which advertising insists that people need that they don't really need, that are completely inessential. Some are nice to have, but inessential, and some are downright destructive to peoples' health and welfare.

The most essential activity at this time in history is saving the planet from global warming. Production of renewable energy alternatives is absolutely essential. The provision of green infrastructure is absolutely essential. Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground. Getting rid of plastics which pollute the oceans and other waste products that aren't biodegradable is absolutely essential. Rethinking payscales for essential workers like agricultural workers and grocery store workers is essential. If these are the most essential workers, they should be paid more. The same goes for doctors, nurses, certified nursing assistants, the CNAs who do most of the caregiving at nursing homes. CNAs make little more than minimum wage and yet they are exposed to the coronavirus. What this means is that so much that is really essential now is either being ignored or very little money is being allocated to it while huge amounts of money are being allocated to fruitless and frivolous activities.

The most fruitless activity is war and the provoking of war. The trillion dollar annual budget of the military-industrial complex has been shown to be fruitless and meaningless when the real war is against a virus. Unhealthy conditions in poverty stricken areas of the world including refugee camps can breed disease which affects the whole world including "privileged" people in the more advanced nations. Poverty and disease need to be eradicated in all parts of the world. The military cannot do that. Oh, they can be repurposed a little bit to help out with a pandemic, but they can not really do the job that needs to be done. In particular they are vulnerable to the pandemic themselves and all of the weapons of war cannot protect them. The real war needs to be against poverty and disease which are the breeders of war and pandemics. The real war needs to be against global warming. The real essential workers are construction workers who need to be constructing advanced green infrastructure.

What is clear is that real essential workers need to be paid more which argues for a lessening of economic inequality. So much of the wealth is held by people who are absolutely inessential to the health, welfare and betterment of people all around the world. A Green New Deal needs to be prioritized. Wealth needs to be taxed to pay for it. New York state needs to tax Wall Street to make up for its budget deficit. Priorities, priorities. The helping professionals and care workers need to be given more respect and money. Taxing inessential workers like hedge fund managers is what needs to pay for it.

Off the Top of My Head

Where is the Money Coming From for Stimulus and Relief?

by John Lawrence, April 14, 2020

Where are the deficit hawks like the Tea Party who insist on a balanced budget and less government spending? In recent weeks the Federal Reserve has coughed up $1.5 trillion and the Federal government has spit up $2.2 trillion, and there's more on the way. Just 12 years ago the Fed spent $4.5 trillion plus the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Federal government spent to purchase toxic assets from banks. Where is all this money coming from and do we the taxpayers have to pay it back? There's good news and bad news. The good news is that the Fed just created its money out of thin air with a few keystrokes on a computer. When the Fed takes Treasuries and other financial assets on its balance sheet, American taxpayers are not liable to pay back this money. It just disappears into a black hole. On the other hand the $3 trillion that was created on the "fiscal side" by the Congress of the US goes right on the deficit and the debt, and, theoretically, the American taxpayer is liable to pay this money back.

Practically, however, the American taxpayer will never have to pay back the national debt because, with Wall Street acting as the middle man, it will mostly just be transferred to the Fed's balance sheet. They do this in order to add "liquidity" to the economy. That's their rationale at least as cover for this shell game. In practical terms the Fed has taken on the role of not only bailing out the big Wall Street banks but also major "too big to fail" corporations like Boeing which has screwed up so much with its 737 MAX that it will probably never be profitable again.

So you might think that all this free money created by the Fed and even the Congress which went mainly to rich people in 2008 might also be spent on the hoi polloi for relief from the recession caused by the coronavirus. You might also think that Trump's huge tax cut should be reversed so that there is money there for the relief of American taxpayers. Never fear, you indeed can have it all just like the banks and hedge funds have had it all up to now. In its infinite wisdom the Fed and the superannuated Tea Party finally realize that the shell game played by the Fed can also be played to benefit them. Money created out of thin air by the Fed or by the Congress and Treasury Department in cahoots with the Fed can also benefit them, and without their having to pay more taxes.

The tax breaks perpetrated by the Republican party and most recently by Trump have made it necessary for the Fed just to create money out of thin air to keep the economy going. What the chairman of the Fed realizes is that American GDP is made up mostly of American consumer purchases. American consumerism represents 70% of the American economy so if average people don't have money to spend, American business is in deep shit. But no need to raise taxes on the rich to put it in the American consumer's hands so that they can go out and buy stuff. Instead the Fed just creates the money out of thin air and dispenses it to the people just as it had done previously just with the banks. Now the banks are flush, and the economy will go down the drain unless the American people have money to spend so they can keep up their 70% of GDP. George W Bush said, "Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." But, unfortunately, Disneyland is closed.

So why should we ever have to pay taxes again? Let the Fed just give everyone what amounts to a Universal Basic Income. Well, it's not quite as simple as that. The powers that be need to at least keep up the pretense that the government taxes and spends rather than that the Fed just prints whatever money is necessary to keep "liquidity" in the system which now includes the American consumer. That is just considered good fiduciary practice and fiscal prudence and will keep the American dollar more in good standing with the rest of the world than it would be otherwise. In the meantime, although people will lose their jobs and their businesses, the Fed will do its part to see that the American economy doesn't collapse altogether so it will keep the printing press going as long and as much as it takes.

Off the Top of My Head

During WW II, Cars and Gas Were Rationed. Would the American People Accept Such Sacrifices in the War on Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, March 10, 2020

Evidently not. Despite warnings that we have less than 10 years to do something before there is runaway global warming, nothing much has been done. Yet the coronavirus has set the world's consciousness on fire in just a few short weeks. Why hasn't global warming gotten the world so up in arms? During WW II everybody had a job; everybody worked, yet there were government mandated limits on consumption. All kinds of things were rationed especially cars and gas. Yet economic activity expanded due to ramping up the war effort. Today the economy is going into a tailspin because large crowds have been proscribed. All the money that has been added to GDP by music events and professional athletics has gone bye-bye. This is not necessarily a bad thing because people might be better off staying home and reading a good book rather than being out at a sporting event. I know. I know this is a very unpopular opinion.

The point is that, during WW II people had the basic necessities, and everyone was employed. They just couldn't have the icing on the cake until after the war when rationing was lifted. Then the economy boomed. Perhaps there is a lesson here for how to mobilize a society to get a handle on global warming.  In the few short weeks that government spokesmen have decried cruise ship and airplane travel, green house gas emissions (GHGs) have actually decreased. If the government proscribed these and other activities such as automobile travel (think gas rationing), GHGs would decrease even more rapidly. Then, if the government went on an investment spree in terms of renewable energy the way it did on planes and battleships during WWII, there would be full employment. People would just be limited temporarily until this war is won in how they could actually spend their money just like in WWII.

Then after a totally green economy is achieved fueled by green renewable energy, the barriers on spending money would be lifted. Could this even work? Some authors don't think so. William Greider writes in "Secrets of the Temple":

World War II was a model of the possible. In theory, if a national consensus of purpose developed, if people would accept temporary limits on their economic choices as well as regulatory controls on wages and prices, the nation could literally rebuild itself, almost overnight. With the right choices, America could practically double the productive capacity of its economy and advance innovation and dramatically multiply new wealth and incomes. These economic choices, however, were really political questions: who would take the sacrifices and who would take the rewards? Whose consumption would be restrained and whose production would be encouraged. All this consigned extraordinary powers to government, perhaps tolerable only in war. No one, including the most ardent Keynesian planners, has ever figured out how to recreate a comparable combination of creative sacrifices in peacetime or how to sell it to a free society.

And that, dear reader is the crux of the matter. How do you sell the necessary war time effort to combat global warming to a free society? Sure the coronavirus has had the salutary effect of decreasing cruise ship and airplane travel with the concomitant decrease in GHG emissions. At the same time the stock market has gone into a tailspin. If the same kind of effort were made in behalf of global warming, we could expect the stock market to go into the mother of all tailspins. Is it worth it or should we consign future generations to the fate of runaway global warming and an uninhabitable planet?

Abraham Maslow wrote a book, "Towards a Psychology of Being" in which he identified a pyramid of needs starting with D-needs. D-needs are the basic needs of food, air, water, housing and clothing. You might throw in medical care.Then, as you ascend the pyramid, higher order needs are revealed once the lower order needs are met. At the top he identified B-needs or self-actualization which might mean developing all your latent higher order capacities such as becoming a great musician. What seems to me to have happened though is that society has intervened in this process to impose superfluous needs on people. Let's call them S-needs. These needs have to do with all the materialistic consumption that a commercial society imposes or tries to impose on people through advertising so that Maslow's higher order needs are really short-circuited. That's why I say that staying home and reading a good book might be more beneficial in and of itself than attending  a professional sporting event in addition to protecting one from the coronavirus.

What an enlightened society would do to combat global warming is exactly what America did during WW II. D-needs were well satisfied due to a full employment society in which certain kinds of consumption were discouraged while making sure that everyone was fed, clothed, housed and had adequate medical treatment. Could in Greider's words a " national consensus of purpose develop" in which people felt it was more important to delay certain kinds of consumption in order to develop the green infrastructure needed to get global warming under control? The world needs America's leadership on this because America is largely responsible for the GHGs already in the atmosphere, and, if America will not have a sense of urgency, why should any other nation which is just starting to develop a consumer culture?

Will Americans Sacrifice to Save the Planet from Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, January 21, 2020

President Kennedy famously said,"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." That was in 1961. 59 years later we are faced with a problem - global warming - that can't be solved just by Americans taking action within America. We must now ask, "What can you do for your planet?" Global warming makes nationalistic boundaries irrelevant. We must now think of the planet as a whole and come up with global solutions. We are all related, and we are all connected whether we like it or not. We must give up old rivalries, animosities and lifestyles. Will Americans sacrifice their consumerist lifestyles to save the planet for future generations? Don't bet on it.

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter gave a speech asking for Americans to give up their consumerist lifestyles.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we have discovered that owning things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We have learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Carter put solar panels on the White House. When Ronald Reagan was elected, he promptly took them down. Global warming was not on either of their radars in those days, but those symbolic acts characterize the two parties' attitudes towards global warming to this day. The Democrats believe the scientists and believe we must do something about global warming post haste. Republicans, and Trump in particular, are global warming deniers. Ronald Reagan delivered the following quote: "Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources." It goes to show his ignorance on the matter. He wanted Americans to have more material goods, not less. "They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where — because of our past excesses — it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don't believe that." His dreams were all involved with material accumulation, of course.

George W Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks was "go out and shop!" Time magazine wrote:

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush didn't call for sacrifice. He called for shopping. "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Taken on its own, this wasn't such a horrible sentiment. But Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich has made a convincing case that it was part of a broader pattern of encouraging financial irresponsibility. "Bush seems to have calculated — cynically but correctly — that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as Commander in Chief from becoming more than a nuisance," Bacevich wrote in the Washington Post in October. Now we're paying the bill.

So the issue of global warming does call for sacrifice. It calls for sacrificing gas guzzlers and instead driving hybrid or full electric cars or taking public mass transpostation. It calls for eating less meat because the factory farm production of cows pollutes the planet compared to eating the same grains that are first run through a cow. It calls for a less consumerist lifestyle, reusing plastic bags and getting away from one use items. It calls for recycling as much waste as possible. It calls for cutting back on air travel and jet fuel pollution. It calls for working with people in the rest of the world, instead of trying to control them, for a common cause and common purpose. It means cutting back on the world's worst polluter - the US military.

All of the measures that need to be taken call for a less consumerist society instead of a using it once and throwing it away society. It calls for young people to join the Peace Corps, a green oriented Peace Corps, instead of a polluting military. It calls for solutions to the problem of waste production by young entrepreneurs. It calls for replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and doing this with a sense of urgency because we don't have much time left to get it right. The Green New Deal encompasses all these concerns. Ramping up this effort must be undertaken with the urgency manifested in the buildup for World War II. All of this will decrease economic activity as we've known it because less things will be bought and sold and more will be reused. We must replace a throw away society with a sustainable society for the future whatever sacrifices in profits and business activity must be made.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Will Run on the Economy

by John Lawrence, January 20, 2020

What's not to like about the economy? Lowest unemployment in 19 years. The stock market is through the roof. Low income workers have made the biggest gains in wages. According to the Wall Street Journal: "The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings grow more than 5% in the second quarter from a year earlier, more than the national median gain of 1.7% for all workers, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow almost 6%, and younger workers’ pay grew almost 3%." So is trickle down really working?

The Fed stands by to give more money to the rich if the economy shows a sign of faltering. The Big Banks are too big to fail. Unlimited prosperity, right? Except all this economic growth is adding to rather than subtracting from global warming.  More people are traveling while jets are spewing more jet fuel effluent into the atmosphere. The automobile industry has a huge investment in fossil fuel cars. Every year more carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere as oil still predominates in world markets. The American as well as the Chinese consumer economy is providing more middle class goodies each year which are tossed away creating more and more waste. Plastics are piling up in the oceans. More and more weedkillers are used to grow crops whose residues end up in human blood streams. Feed lot animals are fed a diet of antibiotics to make them grow quicker so they can be slaughtered sooner. This creates the situation in which they are not really useful for overcoming human diseases any more. The American way of life, which the whole world aspires to, is polluting the planet and despoiling the atmosphere, but it keeps the economy churning. Entrepreneurs are thinking up even more ways to sell us useless products and vapid entertainment.

The economy is predicated on waste, inefficiency and destructive weapons production including nuclear weapons. More and more money goes into the military-industrial complex to develop more and more expensive planes and battleships which are so complex they don't work half the time. But we are promised a computer fix after they alter a few lines of code. And all those people making a living off the military-industrial complex waste would be out of a job if peace broke out. All those people involved in the labyrinthine insurance industry would be out of a job if Bernie's Medicare for All came to fruition. The economy thrives on inefficiency and waste. If things were done rationally, so many people would be out of a job that the economy would grind to a halt.

Wall Street is not about to change its policy of promoting companies which seek maximum short term profits instead of sustainable growth that benefits all stakeholders including Mother Earth who in the final analysis is the most consequential stakeholder. But Americans and humans in general don't want to tighten their belts in order to save the planet. They would rather have short term profits and growth particularly if it can be tailored to fit into their lifespans. After their death all hell can break loose, but they won't be here to experience it. They had a good life at the expense of future generations. Ta ta, future babies. Trump will win because people care more about their present life than they do about the future generations of life on earth. Besides all those people in the military-industrial complex, which in the larger sense includes anyone who has ever been in the military, will vote for Trump because association with the military, whether pecuniary or not, represents masculine pride, virility and vanity. Ayn Rand would approve.

Off the Top of My Head

Climate Change is Threatening the World's Food Supply

by John Lawrence, August 17, 2019

A new United Nations report details how climate change is making it more difficult for people to be able to feed themselves especially in poorer parts of the world. As diets tend towards more beef, beef cows are replacing land previously used for growing crops. Raising beef uses ten times more resources than poultry, dairy, eggs or pork. Besides that cows belch and fart methane. According to a New York Times article: "Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars."

Fortunately, there are now some alternatives to the beef cow which deliver the same meaty product sans cow - Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Some smart people have figured out how to create a burger which tastes like a hamburger without running a lot of fodder through a cow. Both are plant based products which look, taste and feel like the real thing. If these products become widespread, the beef cow could be eliminated from the planet, and this would reduce carbon emissions. It would also free up many acres of land on which crops could be raised that would more efficiently feed people.

Both burgers are vegan, halal and kosher. It's unclear at this time whether or not the ingredients are organic and non-GMO. Soy is one of the main agricultural products that is genetically modified so that it can be sprayed with glyphosate (Monsanto's Roundup). cnet reports: "The Impossible Burger contains mostly organic ingredients, while the Beyond Burger doesn't. The Beyond Burger is strictly non-GMO, whereas Impossible Foods recently faced backlash about using genetically modified ingredients that contain the pesticide glyphosate." Well then, how can it be mostly organic, and how can the Beyond Burger that's non-GMO not be?

The New York Times article continues: "Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes." Already people are migrating all over the world as they face food shortages and eventual starvation.

“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.

The report said that activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.

And the emission of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

Citizens of planet earth take notice. Unless you change the ways you're conducting business, planet earth is not going to be able to sustain you. Consumer oriented lifestyles must be replaced by lifestyles that are more sustainable. Plant based alternatives to beef are a step in the right direction. More birth control would be another to reduce the population. Conversion to renewable energy on a large scale would be the third. Airplanes and the military are large greenhouse gas emitters. All these steps and more must be undertaken if humanity is to survive on planet earth. Humanity is under threat of extinction from just 120 years of industrialization and fossil fuel development. It is time to change course or the earth will cease to be habitable. Whoever thought that the automobile and the airplane were good things?

Off the Top of My Head

Has Recycling Gone by the Wayside?

by John Lawrence, July 12, 2018

China won't take American recycling trash any more. Recyclers complain that people put all kinds of stuff in their recycling barrel that can't be recycled. California, that prides itself on recycling, has to wake up to the fact that most of what they thought was recyclable ends up in the landfill. The world is literally becoming one huge trash heap. We have huge plastic gyres or garbage patches in the oceans. Sea life is becoming entangled in it. The LA Times says California has a recycling crisis.

Those disturbed by the amount of trash they produce have been able to assuage their guilty consciences by making sure every potential recyclable item ended up in the blue recycling bin. Surely there could be no long-term environmental toll if every empty plastic soda bottle and chipboard six-pack carrier was diverted from the landfill and remade into a cozy fleece jacket or an organic chemistry textbook.

What a lovely story. Too bad it's about as true as a happily-ever-after fairy tale. Recycling has never been the solution to the problem posed by empty beer cans, plastic takeout containers and other single-use items, just a way to mitigate the effects enough to pretend that all this waste is not really wasteful. But reality is becoming harder to ignore now that the foreign market for our trash is collapsing. Hallelujah to that, as it might just be the impetus needed to force society to confront the disposable culture that is trashing the planet.

The article states that the only way to solve this crisis is to stop making so much trash. Easier said than done. Every packaging item would have to be biodegradable. Recycling efforts would have to go into overdrive. Who is to pay for a really proficient recycling system? Taxpayers? Taxpayers could care less until they personally are inundated with trash. Until then, recyclables will continue to be deposited in landfills because there is not enough profit to be made by private companies to recycle stuff. And Third World countries are getting tired of going through our trash in the hopes of finding something valuable. China is moving beyond the kind of society that's interested in doing that. The US will attempt to find some poorer society that is willing to do so. After all in the really poor countries, that's how the poorest of the poor make their living - going through trash dumps.

The article continues:

And we owe it all to China. Up until just a few weeks ago, China was the single largest market for the world's recyclables. About two-thirds of the yogurt cups, soda bottles and magazines tucked into curbside recycling bins and crushed into bales were loaded onto cargo ships bound for China and other countries, where they were remanufactured into shiny new products and shipped back to the U.S. But China has its own refuse to worry about, and officials there announced last year that they no longer wanted to import the world's trash, especially the plastic kind. Then in May, China temporarily shut down all imports of recyclable material and warned that it would impose tough, permanent restrictions by the end of the year. The U.S. and other nations are still scrambling to figure out what to do with the rapidly growing trash bottleneck.

The culprit of this whole dilemma is plastic. Plastic, once considered the long awaited boon to mankind, has turned out to be the world's boogieman. There is nothing worse for the environment in terms of consumer items than plastic. Thank you Dupont and your dastardly chemists! We'd have been better off without all those hifalutin, college educated scientists. Thank you US cultural and industrial conditions for creating a consumer society which generates tons of trash instead of the simpler society of independent small agricultural units, as Jefferson envisioned, in which each family grew its own food instead of buying it in a plastic package at the supermarket.

The article continues:

While Vietnam, Indonesia and some other countries still buy recyclable materials, there's no market on the scale of China. Meanwhile, bales of mixed paper (cereal boxes, junk mail and the like) and plastics are piling up in warehouses up and down the state. If a buyer can't be found soon, the bales will probably have to be taken to landfills to make room for the next wave of paper and plastic because the U.S. doesn't have the remanufacturing facilities to process it here.

It's a crisis, certainly. But it's also an opportunity to enact meaningful, and necessary, policies that would otherwise face too much public resistance. Even before this development, California's recycling rate (that is, the percentage of recyclable material that didn't get tossed in landfills) was on the wane, down from a high of 50% in 2014 to 44% in 2016.

The fact is that no one wants our trash any longer. Boo Hoo. We're going to have to solve this problem on our own. Is there a college degree in trash economics? I don't think so. Scientists are fixated on coming up with the next widget in order to become billionaires instead of solving outstanding environmental problems. So we will all probably end up drowning or suffocating in our own trash. A fitting end to the most destructive species on the planet which doesn't care about the planet or the collective. It only cares about personal profit and aggrandizement. But that is what will lead to our downfall and eventual extinction.

 

Shopping Online Now Americans' Favorite Way to Shop

by John Lawrence

Brick and Mortar Stores on Their Way Out. Malls Becoming Ghost Towns.

from: purplelynx.com

The American retail landscape is changing. Stores are closing all over America. In April, Payless ShoeSource announced that about 400 of its roughly 4,400 stores would be closing immediately. The closures took place in nearly every state across the country. Now as part of its ongoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, Payless has announced the closure of 112 more stores. The discount footwear chain is also petitioning the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri to allow the shuttering of another nearly 300 stores. If approved, that would bring the total number of stores closed to over 800.

Over the Memorial Day holiday, RadioShack closed more than 1,000 stores across the country. After 96 years in business, consumer electronics retailer RadioShack will have just 70 corporate and 500 dealer stores nationwide — down from 7,300 at its peak. “At the end of this month, RadioShack will be closing its doors at all but 70 retail store locations as we migrate to RadioShack.com and we cannot thank you, the RadioShack family, enough for sharing in the journey throughout the years,” the company said in a news release.

Bankrupt clothing store Wet Seal shut down all of its 171 stores, according to the Wall Street Journal. A message on the retailer’s website read, “Thanks babe, it’s been real.”

After more than 50 years in business, The Limited closed all of its nearly 250 stores across the country on January 8. The retailer indicated that its website would live on, but no merchandise is for sale.

Consumer Credit Card Debt Over a Trillion?!

from WalletHub:

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve released a new report, which WalletHub used as the basis for its Q1 Credit Card Debt Study, concluding that U.S. consumers repaid $31.5 billion in credit card debt during the first quarter of 2017. This first-quarter paydown is a 14% improvement relative to the same quarter last year. But it is 5% below the post-Great Recession average Q1 paydown. Based on these early returns, WalletHub projects that we will end 2017 with more than $60 billion in new credit card debt. That would mean we’d owe well over $1 trillion in credit card debt overall. With that in mind, here are some tips that consumers should follow to reach debt freedom as quickly and inexpensively as possible: Make a Budget & Stick to It – Rank-order your expenses and trim the fat until the amount you earn exceeds the amount you spend.   Build an Emergency Fund – Your goal should be to gradually save about a year’s worth of after-tax income through monthly contributions to an emergency account.   Improve Your Credit – A higher credit score will help you save on everything from loans and lines of credit to insurance policies.   Transfer a Balance – You can save a boatload on finance charges by transferring your debt to a 0% balance transfer credit card.   Pay Off Your Most Expensive Debt First – Devote the majority of your monthly debt payment to the balance with the highest interest rate, while making minimum payments on any other balances you may owe. Then repeat.   For the full report and a complete explanation of these tips, please visit: http://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-debt-study/24400/

 

We're Addicted to Economic Growth and It Will Be the Death of Us

From Post Carbon Institute    By Asher Miller, Rob Hopkins October 2, 2013

The idea that economies must keep growing is an underlying cause of the climate crisis.      

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

The following is excerpted from the new report,Climate After Growth: Why Environmentalists Must Embrace Post-Growth Economics and Community Resilience by Post Carbon Institute and Transition Network.

On November 14, 2012, just days after his re-election and two weeks after Hurricane Sandy flooded New York City, President Obama was asked by the New York Times about climate policy, specifically the possibility of a carbon tax:

I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don't think anybody is going to go for that. I won't go for that.

This short statement reveals the raw political calculus that prevents the Obama Administration--and really, most every national and international political body--from meaningfully addressing the climate crisis. Obama's comments reflect the underlying assumptions of politicians on both sides of the aisle (at least those who recognize that there is a climate problem) and conventional thinking across virtually all sectors of society.

The benefits of--and need for--economic growth are so widely assumed that they are hardly ever debated. And yet, maintaining perpetual growth on a finite planet is impossible--logically, physically, and yes, economically. Nevertheless, our Western way of life seems to depend on a shared belief in economic growth. And so most politicians, economists, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens continue to prop up this irrational view.

In our view, President Obama's widely shared judgment that addressing the climate crisis is secondary to getting "back to normal" is wrongheaded--not only because it implicitly underestimates the severity of the climate crisis, but also because it presupposes that the old economic "normal" can be revived. In fact, the "normal" of robust economic growth is gone and won't return, at least in the long term (as we'll show in this paper). But without recognition of that fact, and without a viable alternative to the growth paradigm, significant progress in climate policy is highly unlikely. And without climate policy, we are headed toward global catastrophe.

The environmental community recognizes that truly meaningful national and international climate policy solutions are currently politically infeasible. But the source of the intransigence is often attributed to political partisanship and the corruptive influence of moneyed interests--most notably the fossil fuel industry, which has used lobbying, campaign contributions, massive advertising, and similar tactics to shift public perceptions and exert political influence.

Therefore, the strategies employed by many in the organized climate movement (particularly after painful failures in 2009 and 2010, at COP15 in Copenhagen and the US Senate) have centered on pursuing state and regional policies, and on growing a citizen movement to stand in vocal, active opposition to the fossil fuel industry. On both these fronts the environmental community has accomplished a lot.

But the growth imperative is the underlying cause of the climate crisis. As long as the climate movement leaves it unchallenged, meaningful climate policy won't come until it's too late, if at all. If we (politicians, businesspeople, environmentalists, and ordinary citizens alike) continue to prioritize growth above all else, we will refuse to do what is required to address the climate crisis--which is to cut fossil fuel use dramatically. To put it plainly, we're hooked on economic growth and economic growth is hooked on cheap fossil fuels.

Cheap fossil fuels--particularly oil--grease the wheels of our globalized, consumerism-based economy. Of course, we must correctly price fossil fuels (internalizing their environmental costs instead of externalizing to other sectors of the economy and future generations), and we must concurrently commit to a massive build-out of renewable energy production and embrace energy efficiency. But it is difficult to imagine accomplishing this without a reduction in that pillar of conventional economic thinking--Gross Domestic Product (GDP)--in at least the OECD nations.

The good and bad news is that the growth paradigm is already in its death throes thanks to fundamental changes occurring in the very systems (energy, climate, and economy) that have supported it for the last century. The transition to a new paradigm will be challenging, but the sooner we act the better chance we have of managing it. Thankfully, models are already emerging for making our communities healthy, vibrant, and resilient without the need for perpetual economic growth.

In this paper we argue why the changes taking place in our energy, climate, and economic systems constitute a new (post-growth) "normal" and why a different kind of growth is absolutely critical to addressing the climate crisis: the growth of smallscale, local efforts aimed at responding to these changes by building community resilience.

The New Normals

We have entered an era of "new normals" not only in our economy, but in our energy and climate systems, as well. The implications are profound:

The New Energy Normal. The era of cheap and easy fossil fuels is over, leading the industry to resort to extreme fossil fuel resources (tar sands, mountaintop removal coal mining, shale gas, tight oil, and deepwater oil) to meet demand. Unfortunately, these resources come with enormous environmental and economic costs, and in most instances provide far less net energy to the rest of society. They also require much higher prices to make production worthwhile, creating a drag effect on the economy. As a result, high energy prices and economic contraction are likely to continue a back-and-forth dance in the coming years.

The New Climate Normal. Climate stability is now a thing of the past. As extreme weather events grow in severity, communities are increasingly adopting strategies that build resilience against the effect of these and other climate shocks. At the same time, we must take dramatic steps if we hope to avoid raising global temperatures more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, this would require a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions per year, starting now -- a rate so significant that it can only be achieved through dramatic reductions in energy use.

The New Economic Normal. We've reached the end of economic growth as we've known it in the US. Despite unprecedented interventions on the part of central banks and governments, the so-called economic recovery in the US and Europe has been anemic and has failed to benefit the majority of citizens. The debate between stimulus and austerity is a distraction, as neither can fully address the factors that spell the end of economic growth the end of the age of cheap oil, the vast mountains of debt that we have incurred, the diminishing economic impacts of new technologies, and the snowballing costs of climate change impacts.

These fundamental changes in our energy, climate, and economic systems require unprecedented (and previously politically untenable) strategies. Yet this new reality is still largely unrecognized. As long as our leaders' predominant focus remains on getting back to the days of robust economic growth, no national or international climate policies will be enacted to do what is required: cut fossil fuel use dramatically.

Instead of focusing on achieving climate policy within the economic growth paradigm, the US environmental community must embrace strategies that are appropriate to these "new normals."

Responding to each of these new energy, climate, and economic "normals"  will require one common strategy: building community resilience. Efforts that build community resilience enhance our ability to navigate the energy, climate, and economic crises of the 21st century. Done right, they can also serve as the foundation of a whole new economy -- an economy comprised of people and communities that thrive within the real limits of our beautiful but finite planet.

Thankfully, innovations that build community resilience are cropping up everywhere, and in many forms: community-owned, distributed, renewable energy production; sustainable local food systems; new cooperative business models; sharing economies, re-skilling, and more. While relatively small and inherently local, these projects are spreading rapidly and creating tangible impacts.

Growing the community resilience movement to the national and global scale that s needed will require the full support and participation of the US environmental community. Specifically we need to:

• build the capacity of groups -- large and small -- who are leading these efforts;
• support the growth of a global learning network; and
• enable local investments to flow into community resilience enterprises.

By making community resilience a top priority, environmentalists can offer an alternative to the "growth at all costs" story, one in which taking control of our basic needs locally has multiple benefits. Community resiliencebuilding can create new enterprises and meaningful work, and increase well-being even as GDP inevitably falters.

It can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels, while addressing social and economic inequities. And it can strengthen the social cohesion necessary to withstand periods of crisis.

On their own, community resilience projects can't overcome all the environmental, energy, economic, and social equity challenges facing us. That will require coordinated global, national, regional, community, business, neighborhood, household and individual efforts. But the community resilience movement can help create the conditions in which what is now "politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

How the environmental community responds to the risks and opportunities of the new energy, climate, and economic "normals" will make an enormous difference in its success, and in the fate of humankind.

Read the full report at Post Carbon Institute.

Asher Miller is executive director of Post Carbon Institute.

Rob Hopkins is the originator of the Transition concepts and co-founder of the Transition Network.

What To Do about Global Warming: "Austerity," Not On A Global Government Scale But An Individual Private Scale?

By Nicholas C. Arguimbau

15 December, 2012, from Countercurrents.org

No question, avoiding serious temperature increases from greenhouse gas emissions is one of the most difficult tasks facing humanity today, likely the most difficult it has ever faced. While the UN, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank and scientists all over the world are predicting doom if major actions are not taken before 2020, the earliest the governments, on their presently-planned time framework, will have implemented anything at all. There is ZERO evidence of progress towards dealing with the problem in the public sector or the energy industry. Greenhouse gas emissions are going up at a rate that is faster every year, when they should have been going down for decades. The Economist reports (December 1, 2012) that international climate negotiations are a "Theatre of the Absurd," and "Climate policy is going nowhere fast." An enormous amount of progress needs to be made by 2020, a difficult task indeed, but if the citizens of the planet stop waiting for the public sector, perhaps ridiculously simple, too. When it is boiled down to the basics, all you need to know is a tautology: the way to reduce emissions is to reduce emissiions.

It is an immense relief that the urgency is now understood broadly, in business circles as well as among those they might have passed off a few years ago as "environmental extremists." As with any addiction, the first step in curing the addiction to fossil fuels is recognizing the addiction. That has been a long time coming, and as a consequence, the problem has been enormously exacerbated. We are faced now with too many people using too much stuff, and almost no time to change, but there is finally a consensus, except among our moribund governments, that action NOW is essential.

But what to do? The way to reduce emissions is to reduce emissions. But then people start putting on conditions that take over, like, "We can’t reduce emissions if that will reduce total energy use," or "We can’t reduce emissions if that will slow "economic growth." Demands that were reasonable in other times may be literally impossible to fulfill now. Unrealistic optimism about growth of the economy as a guideline for what steps are or are not feasible is the hardest of all illusions to escape.

We have all had the giddying experience of the post-World-War-II climb: we have come close to unraveling the ultimate secrets of the universe, we have literally reached for the stars, we accomplished a miraculous Green Revolution, we produced this marvel, the Internet, we have made intercontinental air travel commonplace, we invented antibiotics, we ended forever the scourge of smallpox, we invented the computer and it took over the world. But that half century was two million years coming, and with unprecedented costs: the exhaustion of fossil fuels, the destruction of the world's great forests, the mining of all but a small fraction of phosphorus and potassium, two of the handful of elements essential to all life, the draining of the earth's great underground water supplies, the development and rapid degradation of virtually every farmable acre on earth - the list goes on, You’ve heard it before. My personal summary of the situation in first, "The Imminent Crash Of the Oil Supply. . .," which Market Oracle was kind enough to post on its site as the "financial analysis of the week" two years ago (and which for reasons I do not have room to discuss except a little below, is unaffected by illusions that the United States is "awash in oil" and about to become "Saudi America"); and second, "Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?" . In short, and as the latest post on Market Watch by Brent Arends points out, "The End of the World and How to Profit from it,"  the halcyon days of 3% and greater world annual GDP growth are almost certainly over, So we can no longer solve any problem by throwing enough money and technology at it, assuming that whatever the cost, we could pay now, borrow if necessary, and today’s bank-breaker would be tomorrow’s pocket change.

This includes the global warming problem. The way to reduce emissions is to reduce emissions, regardless of the formal means we use - a carbon tax, "cap and trade," traditional regulation, voluntary conservation, etc. There are essentially two devices for reducing emissions: (1) technofixes like increased engine efficiency and "sustainable energy sources" (you know, hybrid engines, solar power and so forth), with total consumption unchallenged in the interim, and (2) simple reduction of consumption (driving less, turning down the thermostat, having fewer babies and toys, etc.) The first route can be followed without built-in reduction of energy-industry profits, The second likely cannot. If reduction of energy industry profits is "off the table" for government negotiators, then they can easily find themselves in a "theatre of the absurd."

The first route is neither economical nor fast, so we had better rethink whether it can be a "nonnegotiable demand." You need to invent the technofix, then you need to manufacture it, then you need to replace the old with the new. Invest in latter-day Edisons. Invest in factories. Invest in retooling. Either the government pays or the public pays. Good things, but money and credit and keeping particular segments of the economy happy, have their limits, as we are discovering after the wild ride of debt accumulation since 1980. Picture scrapping all the cars on the road and replacing them with ones that use one quarter the fuel, if that is possible. Maybe 150 million cars at $20k each. $3trillion, yes? Not necessarily a U.S. job-creator either, given out-sourcing. Picture scrapping 100 million CO2-generating home furnaces plus the means for delivery of the fuel, and replacing them with electric heaters run on carbon-free electricity. Who is going to design the heaters? Who is going to pay for them? Maybe $2k each. And where are the three terawatts, in round numbers, of sustainable electricity we need to replace fossil-generated power? Solar and wind? No; at present they are too intermittent and only a fraction of grid energy can be replaced with them. We need to invent and produce and install economical storage devices for sustainable energy, thus far a hopeless task. Not to mention maybe $30k per household times 100 million households. $3trillion? Nuclear? Either too unsafe or too costly, probably both. And you’d better believe, not in MY back yard. Fusion? The primary concept is to pack hydrogen in a steel chamber at a temperature and pressure comparable to the center of the sun without any leaking out and melting the chamber, so you can duplicate the process in the sun of turning hydrogen into helium. The fusion scientists would grumble about this explanation but would have to admit that it’s right. They’ve been trying to do this for half a century and will probably figure out in another half century that it’s a really klutzy way to get simple solar energy.

And the cost of the three terawatts assuming we could design something that would work? Depending on what you’re building, maybe $5 per watt, $15 trillion for three terawatts of something we haven’t invented yet. Hmmm. That’s a trick. Guaranteed it won’t happen before 2020. Then there’s the retooling of all the factories and public buildings, construction of thousands of miles of public transit . . . I guess we’re talking $20-40 trillion, simply to permit us to go along as we have without limiting growth, all to be spent or borrowed NOW. Talk about a fiscal cliff. Try selling the idea in Washington or Europe right now. It’s pretty to many folks to dream of the economy growing at breakneck speed and $40 trillion being invested in the private economy NOW. But it’s not going to happen. The magic word now is "austerity."

So look at the second route. "Austerity" at the personal level? Close, but more a change of priorities, although radical. Some initial thoughts about what to do:

Stop eating beef, which costs roughly thirteen times more greenhouse emissions than chicken, 57 times as much as potatoes. Anyone can cut out beef right now and get spending money in the process. That’s a surprisingly large fraction of our ghg emissions (worldwide more than the entire transportation sector), often more than from our car. If all Americans were to give up beef, they would arguably accomplish more than all the government global warming programs to date.

Splurge in some new woolens and turn the thermostat down to 50 degrees. Here in chilly Massachusetts that will reduce your heating fuel consumption by over half. 100% in warmer places. Not everyone’s piece of cake, but it puts a lot of money in your pocket. Look what only 0.8 degrees C of warming has done to the world, and if we don’t do these things we’re talking 4 degrees or more. The critters out there have it right: Good coats to keep their bodies warm and the rest of the world cool.　

Anyhow, this is just practice for what Mama Nature will force on us shortly as the fossil fuels disappear.

And they will. Thought all that had changed with shale oil? Not yet and probably not ever. With all the brouhaha, they are only turning out 800,000 barrels per day, 1% of world demand, and they’re losing money because it costs too much to get it out of the ground. The people who are saying it will be a "go" are basing that on the GDP growing at 3.5%/year so we can pay double and be happy without pain. Also, they aren’t taking into account that shale oil wells run dry much faster than conventional ones. There are no solid figures as to the actually retrievable shale oil, with estimates ranging, astonishingly, from 4.3 billion barrels (the pittance currently estimated by the United States Geological Survey) to six trillion barrels in the view of some industry people. The "Saudi America" idea seems to come from a grim reality - that by 2020, Saudi Arabia’s oil production may be down to what shale oil production may be up to, with no net gain. And then there is reality: American demand for and consumption of petroleum is dropping at 4.5% per year according to Polczer, "America’s Missing Barrels", Petroleum Economist, April 24, 2012. This is precisely the rate predicted in "Imminent Crash," above; it is masked by our economic morass and by our large-scale use of alcohol as a gasoline additive. So it is at least premature to conclude that "peak oil" is no more.

And by the way, if we are becoming "Saudi America," we are setting ourselves up to be the ultimate climate terminators - if there is a substantial amount of shale oil or tar sands oil that can be gotten out of the ground economically, it has to stay there anyhow. So regardless of what’s there, we’ve got to cut our emissions NOW. The way to cut emissions is to cut emissions.

And then there are the cars, which cost us something like $8,000 each to run annually, a trillion dollars per year, give or take, nationally. If we’re thinking "austerity" is going to be forced upon us, that’s certainly a good place to start. Our grandfathers or great-grandfathers didn’t have cars at all and neither did the folks who settled the continent. Take the backed-up commuter traffic. Thousands of cars, all going in the same direction, and because they are barely moving, unlike the commuter train that goes sailing by, there’s time to take a look. Most likely there’s not one in sight without four empty seats. So everyone should be able to find a less wasteful vehicle. And apparently close to four out of five clogging the road could be carpooling. It’s only a matter of computer-aided logistics. There are carpool lanes in many cities, you know, and they don’t jam up. And if you’re not commuting, then stay home except for necessities. Is there any earthly reason not to carpool with your neighbors for groceries? There. That should be good for at least a 50% cut in your gas bill. And if you’re a businessman, you should be able to invent a system for making carpooling simpler, and market it. Because everyone will be saving in a big way on their gas bills and their carbon counts. A little difficult, but not impossible; failing to do it only postpones the inevitable a few years. And how about giving out public transit passes as alternatives to coupons? I don’t know, but the twentieth century wasn’t the only century.

And if you stop buying "stuff" that is unnecessary or comes from unnecessarily far away, that’s another big cut. Buy local, employing what’s left of the workforce not already overseas. Your "i-phone" (what do the damn things do, anyhow?), if it’s got the Apple or Microsoft or HP or Samsung brand name on it, should have the Fox.conn brand name, because that’s the company that makes ‘em all. They’ll come from Fox.conn to the US on massive diesel freighters that are completely unregulatable as to how much they pollute the atmosphere while they’re on the high seas. So the less you buy from China (or anywhere in East Asia) the less diesel fuel you’re responsible for. The same is true, of course, if you live in the Northeast and buy vegetables and fruits from California and Florida.

Dunno, but that’s a recipe for cutting personal American carbon emissions by half, RIGHT NOW, and if we don’t do it now, Mama Nature will do it for us in about 25 years and the cost of 25 years of indulgence will be thousands, likely millions of years of a devastated planet. We’ve been waiting decades for someone else to tell us what to do, and they never have. This is real; I’ll give links discussing every fact in this harangue to anyone who asks: [email protected].

Does it seem fanciful that we would reduce our carbon emissions by half overnite through conservation? Not really; ours are twice Europe’s, and they are hardly hurting. That will do for this week. Does it seem fanciful that we could settle the North American continent without a drop of oil? Of course, but we did it. Does it seem fanciful that we could destroy 90% of the earth’s species, perhaps including ourselves and leave the planet devastated without making a serious effort to avoid it? Yes, but we are about to do that also. So if we are going to do something in the near future that now appears fanciful, let it be positive.

We’ll all have to muddle through with some help from our friends. We can start by finding out our carbon footprint and how it compares to those of our neighbors and countrymen. Try a footprint calculator, which should include a pretty comprehensive and detailed coverage of your activities, because everything we do costs carbon. Carbon heating the earth and creating Katrinas and Sandys and massive drought and destroying the polar icecaps and acidifying the oceans, and it’s hardly begun.

Here’s a carbon footprint calculator: Carbon Footprint. I don’t know that it’s the best, but it’s a start. (It will also invite you to buy "offsets" so you won’t have to feel guilty - that’s where we part company.) It will tell you what you can do and hopefully convince you that you can and should reduce your fingerprint to 80% below America’s current norm. If everyone does that, the global warming problem is at least not going to get worse. Humankind can’t figure that out and see it’s better than destroying 90+ % of the world’s species and leaving our grandchildren a barren desert? We all need to know our carbon footprints and start cutting. Hopefully people in business and government will work not only to do it for themselves, but to make it easier for others. Of course no one gets to wait for that, which to date hasn’t happened. The problem to date with global warming is that everyone has been waiting for someone else to act. I mean everyone - the governments, the oil industry, small businesses, conservation organizations, consumers. NO MORE!

Let’s be clear about this idea that investing in conservation is MUCH cheaper than investing in new energy sources, with an example. In VERY round numbers, and it doesn’t matter too much how it works, the capital cost of a power plant is around $5 per watt of production capacity, generally not less than $3 nor more than $10, and then there’s the fuel, or if the power plant is truly sustainable, there is something else like sunshine. The cost of compact fluorescents is about $.06 per watt saved, or if you only light them 4 hours per day, then $0.36 per watt saved, and there isn’t any fuel. Less than ONE TENTH the initial cost and no fuel?. And how many really wonderful woolen sweaters could you splurge on every year with the savings from turning down the thermostat? There’s just no comparison in the costs. Investing in energy conservation is MUCH more cost-effective than investing in energy consumption. The fundamental idea behind "alternative energy" is to cut carbon emissions only when the alternative shows up on the scene, so your energy use never decreases.The idea of cutting consumption hasn’t been popular because everyone has been hung up on increasing or at least maintaining consumption. That’s called "economic growth." We can’t be afraid of threatening "growth" if ultimately it is growth of carbon emissions that threaten life itself. The time for buying or borrowing our way out of problems is behind us, or, if under some fantastical circumstance it’s also ahead of us, then there’s no time to wait.

There’s an element of "feel good but don’t make a difference" in this unless we’re all careful. It comes back to the footprint calculator. Everyone needs to recalculate their footprint with an eye to reducing it SOON by 80%, and at least say 10%/year without fail. Businesses can help with accurate and complete carbon costs marked on everything they sell. This is a war. We all worked together to cut energy consumption in World War II, so we can all do it now.

How did we get into this mess? Dunno. Of course business has traditionally wanted consumers to consume, not to conserve. And the mainline "conservation" groups are disturbingly quiet about conservation, just as they are disturbingly quiet about population. I guess sometimes people become so afraid of looking "extreme" or of not being able to pay the mortgage because what they need to say won’t be paid for, that they forget where they’re going. Pretty sad. Conservationists won’t push conservation? No, they won’t. See "Bill McKibben Is Wrong, We Must Not Forget That ‘We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us’", Countercurrents Editor's Picks, Energy Bulletin. And if you’re not fed up with getting sent to read things I’ve written, then about the moral issues here, there is "A Greeting For 2012: Looking Back At Durban And Other Progressive
Failures, And 'Occupying' Ourselves," By Nicholas C. Arguimbau.  Bill McKibben says explicitly that he won’t push conservation. And he’s far from the only one.

The point of all this is that we ALL have responsibility for global warming, and, if everyone keeps pointing the finger at everyone else, we are doomed. It just happens that the only ones who can do enough, quickly and economically enough, are the consumers; even if that weren’t true, everyone else - government, industry, even the traditional "conservationists," have dropped the ball, leaving the consumers left to play. Everyone else, if there is anyone else, has to help them in the onerous task. NOW. Technofixes - alternative energy, efficient engines, things that let us go on doing what we did before but with less carbon - will help, but we have to come up with money to buy them before they’ll help. Standing alone they will be too little, too late, and VERY expensive. We CANNOT go on doing what we did before if the planet is to survive.

The governments may begin to act, now that unprecedented pressure is on them, but even if they do, the technofixes approach alone or arguments about whether we can afford it, are all too likely to prevail until it is too late. And there is out there among the earth’s 7 billion or the United States’ 300 million, a Gandhi - a person of vast energy, vast integrity, vast compassion, vast intelligence, who could come forth as a leader to help us along. That would be a plus.

But we cannot wait for the Second Coming while the Four Horsemen are about. So let’s get on with the show.

Nicholas C. Arguimbau is a semi-retired semi-tired lawyer with licenses to practice before the California Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court. He takes pictures and writes, and gets his dogs out to sniff the mushrooms, but less than is good for them or him.

Capitalism’s Grossest Win: The Final Triumph of Black Friday

Friday, Nov 23, 2012 04:00 AM PST from Salon.com 

From Plymouth Rock to Thanksgiving at Best Buy: The Puritan ethic went spectacularly astray, all for an iPad mini

By Andrew Leonard

(Credit: SeanPavonePhoto / Shutterstock.com)

For wily veterans of a decade of Black Friday doorbuster sales, 2012 was the year that the last semblance of a boundary between the actual day of Thanksgiving and the formal commencement of the holiday shopping season finally collapsed. It wasn’t just the decision by some of the biggest retailers to move their opening hours earlier than ever before. For many customers, the exact time when the doors were unlocked was irrelevant, because Thanksgiving had already become completely subsumed in shopping mania. What difference does it make if the doors open at 8 p.m. or midnight, if you were already in line days earlier?

Consider the example of the Kelley family in Fort Myers, Fla., so determined to sacrifice nothing of their quality of life while in quest for the perfect deal that they showed up in front of the local Best Buy’s doors on Monday, equipped with a dinner table.

This is what we call not messing around:

“[Over the years] we’ve pretty much gone from not sleeping in a tent to a tent and slowly progressed to where we’ve got everything that we remember we need,” said Sean Kelley, who is ready to have his Thanksgiving feast in line, [as reported by WSVN.com in Miami/Fort Lauderdale.] “On Thanksgiving, mom comes out with the china and the plates, and we’ve got everything you have on a normal Thanksgiving table.”

That’s some real can-do American pioneer spirit right there, worthy of the Puritan settlers who struggled through fierce New England winters to bequeath us our most indigenous of holidays. The merger of festival and fantastic flat-screen TV deal makes sense: The United States is the greatest consumer society that has ever existed on this planet. Shopping is the lifeblood of our economy; capitalism as we know it would founder if we all stopped buying stuff. In this context, “buying nothing” on the very day that the Christmas shopping season traditionally begins would be foundationally unpatriotic. And if that means passing the gravy while standing in line in front of Wal-Mart, so be it.

But there was also something deeply disturbing at the sight of so many Americans waiting this week to get into stores that were already open. Black Friday’s metastasizing control over our popular culture is propelled by a poor economy and reminds us how millions of Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or fall over the past decade. We wouldn’t be so desperate to be first through those doors if stretching every dollar to its furthest possible extent didn’t mean so much, right? And union activists attempting to organize Wal-Mart workers wouldn’t have targeted Black Friday for a nationwide strike if the day wasn’t so resonant for the national economy, right?

Black Friday has it all: Exploited workers! No Thanksgiving holiday for you, Wal-Mart stock boy, to go along with your rock-bottom wages and nonexistent healthcare! Consumer product superabundance! Just deciding which of the proliferating tablet offerings to buy this year is a task that will intimidate even the savviest shopper. Violence and greed! Even as you are reading these words, someone, somewhere, got a little too frisky with the pepper spray while reaching for that half-off Sony Bravia.

It’s a toxic mix that tells us too much about the state of our own culture. The kickoff to the shopping season is crucial to the overall health of our economy, but at the same time the annual spectacle is sending strong signals that something is deeply wrong. Since when did celebrating Thanksgiving while in line to buy an iPad Mini represent the apotheosis of our culture?

- – - – - – - – - -

Every time Black Friday rolls around, I always wonder how the German sociologist Max Weber, author of “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” would have explained what’s been happening outside our biggest big box stores over the past few hours. Because buried deep down beneath the jumble of tents and maddening crowds are things he might have recognized as crucial to the evolution of capitalism, profit-inculcating values like thrift and frugality and self-denial. Perhaps Weber got a little too enthusiastic about the supposed correlation between Protestantism and capitalism-friendly habits, but he didn’t get it all wrong. Black Friday strikes chords that many Puritans would thrill to: It rewards sacrifice and discipline.

The very name Best Buy is an obvious shout-out to Calvinist frugality. What could be more true to America’s deepest cultural roots? The Wal-Marts and Targets and Macy’s can compete on price, but they don’t have a chance at that level of semiotic purity. In its bland profundity, the title “Best Buy” is more American than baseball or apple pie. It’s both a comforting promise, and a call to arms. In a country where 70 percent of the economy is accounted for by consumer activity, the notion of the “Best Buy” is the ultimate in potency. It’s the Platonic good, except that you can actually touch it.

Surely Weber would also have appreciated how the urge to profit forces a constant froth of innovative thinking, itself the wellspring of capitalist progress. Take the “doorbuster,” for example. Limiting your best deals to the first handful of people through the door has proven so effective a motivator that some of the biggest chain stores now have multiple doorbuster events throughout the entire weekend, opening and shutting their gates like automatic garage doors with terminal cases of the hiccups.

GeekSugar reports Kmart’s plans:

An Early Thursday Doorbuster begins at 6 a.m. Thanksgiving Day and runs until 4 p.m. Stores will reopen at 8 p.m. on Thursday and close at 3 a.m. early Friday morning, marking the beginning of the Late Thursday Doorbuster deals. Stores open again two hours later, at 5 a.m. Friday morning, and run until 11 a.m. for Friday Doorbuster deals, which are effective through Saturday.

Get in line. The doors open. Grab the best deals. The doors close. Get back in line again! New deals! It’s a perpetual motion machine. It’s the very perfection of retail capitalism, simultaneously imprisoning and liberating consumers in a revolving door of alternating denial and satisfaction.

The sound of that revolving door is the sound of the throttling engine of a mighty world economy. Sure, it’s scary when those doors first crack open, and that tide of human flesh grabs at everything in sight. But it’s also kind of awesome. The sterile alienation of Cyber Monday can’t compare to the gladiatorial thrill of real human contact.

But the weirdest thing about Black Friday, the part that Weber might have had the hardest time explaining, is how fine the line is between thrift and greed. Consider the case of 19-year-old Ashley Wagner, who started camping outside a Best Buy in Saginaw Township on Monday morning. No china on the dinner table for Wagner, who took a week off from her job at Taco Bell to make sure she didn’t repeat last year’s disaster, when she was second in line.

With a generator, a can of Pringles and some Little Debbie snack cakes, Wagner said she’s ready for the week ahead. On Thanksgiving Day, Wagner’s mom will deliver a hot meal from the Turkey Roost restaurant in Kawkawlin.

“Being first in line ensures me I will get what I want,” said Wagner. Her door-busting dream: a camera for her mother, a laptop for her brother, and a flat-screen TV and some Dr. Dre headphones for herself.

I’m sure I wouldn’t mind a pair of Dr. Dre headphones under my own Christmas tree, but I don’t think taking a week off from your job to stand in line to nab a deal on some stylin’ audio equipment is an example of either thrift or frugality. Let’s not even get into the data that suggest that Black Friday’s prices aren’t invariably the lowest available, that the whole thing is just one magnificent con job. Whether or not Wagner gets what she wants, there’s no escaping the grim reality of that can of Pringles and Turkey Roost hot meal.

It’s convenient to criticize the retailers for their encroachment on turkey time and their shameless stoking of greed and bad mob behavior. But the Best Buys of the world wouldn’t be swinging their gates wide open if customers didn’t keep clamoring to get in. We’re locked in a mutual embrace and neither side is willing to let go.

Next year, look for Best Buy to begin delivering turkey dinners directly to the waiting shoppers. Indeed, I’m surprised it hasn’t already seen the market opportunity. Who needs a mom to bring over the mashed potatoes, when the market is more than ready to provide?

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Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

Why You Shouldn’t Shop at Walmart on Friday

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today’s dollars, including health and pension benefits.

Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

There are many reasons for the difference – including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.

But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits.

At the peak of its power and influence in the 1950s, the United Auto Workers could claim a significant portion of GM’s earnings for its members.

Walmart’s employees, by contrast, have no union to represent them. So they’ve had no means of getting much of the corporation’s earnings.

Walmart earned $16 billion last year (it just reported a 9 percent increase in earnings in the third quarter of 2012, to $3.6 billion), the lion’s share of which went instead to Walmart’s shareholders — including the family of its founder, Sam Walton, who earned on their Walmart stock more than the combined earnings of the bottom 40 percent of American workers.

Is this about to change? Despite decades of failed unionization attempts, Walmart workers are planning to strike or conduct some other form of protest outside at least 1,000 locations across the United States this Friday – so-called “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day in America when the Christmas holiday buying season begins.

At the very least, the action gives Walmart employees a chance to air their grievances in public – not only lousy wages (as low at $8 an hour) but also unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, excessive hours, and sexual harassment. The result is bad publicity for the company exactly when it wants the public to think of it as Santa Claus. And the threatened strike, the first in 50 years, is gaining steam.

The company is fighting back. It has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board to preemptively ban the Black Friday strikes. The complaint alleges that the pickets are illegal “representational” picketing designed to win recognition for the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. Walmart’s workers say they’re protesting unfair labor practices rather than acting on behalf of the UFCW. If a court sides with Walmart, it could possibly issue an injunction blocking Black Friday’s pickets.

What happens at Walmart will have consequences extending far beyond the company. Other big box retailers are watching carefully. Walmart is their major competitor. Its pay scale and working conditions set the standard.

More broadly, the widening inequality reflected in the gap between the pay of Walmart workers and the returns to Walmart investors, including the Walton fammily, haunts the American economy.

Consumer spending is 70 percent of economic activity, but consumers are also workers. And as income and wealth continue to concentrate at the top, and the median wage continues to drop – it’s now 8 percent lower than it was in 2000 – a growing portion of the American workforce lacks the purchasing power to get the economy back to speed. Without a vibrant and growing middle class, Walmart itself won’t have the customers it needs.

Most new jobs in America are in personal services like retail, with low pay and bad hours. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the average full-time retail worker earns between $18,000 and $21,000 per year.

But if retail workers got a raise, would consumers have to pay higher prices to make up for it? A new study by the think tank Demos reports that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

And, in the end, retailers would benefit. According to the study, the cost of the wage increases to major retailers would be $20.8 billion — about one percent of the sector’s $2.17 trillion in total annual sales. But the study also estimates the increased purchasing power of lower-wage workers as a result of the pay raises would generate $4 billion to $5 billion in additional retail sales.

This seems like a good deal all around.

America the Possible: Breaking the Chains of Consumerism

Published on Monday, September 10, 2012 by Common Dreams

by James Gustave Speth

The following is an excerpt from the recently published America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). The book, written as the third volume of Speth's award-winning American Crisis series, calls for deep, transformative change in a dozen areas of national life, including a reimagination of our political economy, a halt to debt-inducing consumerism, and a host of prescriptions for our bad case of affluenza. This appears with the kind permission of the author.

The path to a new political economy leads straight away from consumerism and commercialism to a very different world in which getting and spending, material possessions, and overall consumption have a decidedly circumscribed and modest place in everyday life.

In her insightful book, A Consumers’ Republic, Lizabeth Cohen documents that American consumerism as we know it did not just happen. It is not something in our genes or human nature, at least not wholly. Referring to the era of postwar prosperity that lasted approximately from 1945 to 1975, she notes that “this period of unprecedented affluence did much more than make Americans a people of plenty. Undergirding the pursuit of plenty was an infrastructure of policies and priorities, what I have dubbed, for shorthand, the Consumers’ Republic. In reconstructing the nation after World War II, leaders of business, government, and labor developed a political economy and a political culture that expected a dynamic mass consumption economy not only to deliver prosperity, but also to fulfill American society’s loftier aspirations.”

A consumer society is one in which consumerism and materialism are central aspects of the dominant culture, where goods and services are acquired not only to satisfy common needs but also to secure identity and meaning. Framing this situation as a matter of consumer sovereignty--where the customer is always right--is misleading. Consumption patterns are powerfully shaped by forces other than preformed individual preferences--forces such as advertising, cultural norms, social pressures, and psychological associations.

Consumerism is not, and should not be confused with, consumption that satisfies essential human needs. Consumerism is the faith that meaning, identity, and significance can be found in material, commodity consumption, which in turn requires money. But since meaning and self-realization cannot be found there, nor basic psychological needs so met, consumers remain unfilled and are driven ever on to seek more possessions, which requires still more money, all of which is well understood by marketers. Richard Layard refers to the “hedonic treadmill” to describe the phenomenon whereby people become habituated to their new incomes and their new toys. “When I get a new home or a new car, I am excited at first. But then I get used to it, and my mood tends to revert to where it was before. . . . Advertisers understand this and invite us to ‘feed our addiction’ with more and more spending. However, other experiences do not pale in the same way--the time we spend with our family and friends, and the quality and security of our job.”

A consumer society is one in which the human tendency to compare ourselves with others is grotesquely exploited. This human tendency to compare ourselves with others has not escaped the attention of humorists. There’s the joke about the Russian peasant whose neighbor had a cow while he did not. He had lived a good life, and so God asked how He could help. The peasant replied, “Kill the cow!” Numerous studies confirm that happiness levels depend inversely on one’s neighbor’s prosperity. People constantly compare themselves with others, and if everyone is better off financially, then no one is any happier. Comparative position is what counts, not absolute income, so rising incomes can leave just as many unhappy comparisons.

Consumerism thus has a doubly negative impact. It is the beating heart of the growth system. Private consumption expenditures in the United States, for example, are about 70 percent of gross domestic product, and consumer spending is the principal driver of the economy and its expansion. When the Financial Times observed that “the stamina of shoppers will be crucial for global growth,” the emphasis was on consumers serving the economy, not the other way around. Second, consumerism gives rise to a host of social pathologies. On the squirrel wheel of getting and spending, with the longest hours on the job in the OECD, and with both parents often at work, we Americans are neglecting the things that would truly make us better off, including personal relationships and social contact. Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, two leaders in the field of positive psychology, point out, “The quality of people’s social relationships is crucial to their well-being. People need supportive, positive relationships and social belonging to sustain well-being.”

In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, sociologist Robert Lane believes Americans suffer from “a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life. There is much evidence that for people lacking in social support of this kind, unemployment has more serious effects, illnesses are more deadly, disappointment with one’s children is harder to bear, bouts of depression last longer, and frustration and failed expectations of all kinds are more traumatic.”

Our families, friends, and true companionship are thus among consumerism’s principal casualties. We have channeled our desires, our insecurities, our need to demonstrate our worth and our success, our wanting to fit in and to stand out, increasingly into material things--into bigger homes, fancier cars, more appliances and gadgets, and branded apparel. But in the process, we’re slighting the precious things that no market can provide. We are hollowing out whole areas of life, of individual and social autonomy, of community, and of nature, and, if we don’t soon wake up, we will lose the chance to return, to reclaim ourselves, our neglected society, our battered world, because there will be nothing left to reclaim, nothing left to return to.

Amitai Etzioni sees the excesses of consumerism also at the roots of our current economic troubles: “The link to the economic crisis should be obvious. A culture in which the urge to consume dominates the psychology of citizens is a culture in which people will do most anything to acquire the means to consume--working slavish hours, behaving rapaciously in their business pursuits, and even bending the rules in order to maximize their earnings. They will also buy homes beyond their means and think nothing of running up credit-card debt. It therefore seems safe to say that consumerism is, as much as anything else, responsible for the current economic mess.”

Cohen also highlighted the ironies inherent in the faith that “a prospering mass consumption economy could foster democracy.” What actually happened was we witnessed “a decline in the most critical form of political participation--voting--as more commercialized political salesmanship replaced rank-and-file mobilization through parties.” She also notes, “The Consumers’ Republic’s dependence on unregulated private markets wove inequalities deep into the fabric of prosperity. . . . The deeply entrenched convictions prevailing in the Consumers’ Republic that a dynamic, private, mass consumption marketplace could float all boats and that a growing economy made reslicing the economic pie unnecessary predisposed Americans against more redistributive actions.”

The creation of the Consumers’ Republic represented the triumph of one vision of American life and purpose. But there has always been another American vision, what historian David Shi calls the tradition of “plain living and high thinking,” a tradition that began with the Puritans and the Quakers and that provides the tradition on which to build a better America for tomorrow. This tradition that sees America as a republic of virtue has always been in tension with the allure of unfettered purchasing, of America as the venue nonpareil for consumer appetites indulged shamelessly and unapologetically. In his book The Simple Life, Shi described how the concept of the simple but good life “has remained an enduring--and elusive--ideal. . . . Its primary attributes include a hostility toward luxury and a suspicion of riches, a reverence for nature and a preference for rural over urban ways of life and work, a desire for personal self-reliance through frugality and diligence, a nostalgia for the past, a commitment to conscientious rather than conspicuous consumption, a privileging of contemplation and creativity, an aesthetic preference for the plain and functional, and a sense of both religious and ecological responsibility for the just uses of the world’s resources.”

If the creation of American consumerism was a project of the country’s political and economic leaders after World War II, as Cohen concludes, it should be possible to build a counter project aimed at something better. Overcoming our bad case of national affluenza is important if America is to achieve a host of goals: reducing its ecological footprint, expanding investment in public goods, bolstering retirement security, reducing corporate power, undermining our growth fetish, expanding civic engagement, focusing resources on vast social and economic disparities at home and abroad, and improving the social and psychological well-being of individuals and families.

Etzioni properly asks what should replace the worship of consumer goods and argues that “the two most obvious candidates to fill this role are communitarian pursuits and transcendental ones.” “Communitarianism,” he writes, “refers to investing time and energy in relations with the other, including family, friends, and members of one’s community. The term also encompasses service to the common good, such as volunteering, national service, and politics. Communitarian life is not centered around altruism but around mutuality, in the sense that deeper and thicker involvement with the other is rewarding to both the recipient and the giver. . . . Transcendental pursuits refer to spiritual activities broadly understood, including religious, contemplative, and artistic ones. . . . Communitarian activities require social skills and communication skills as well as time and personal energy--but, as a rule, minimal material or financial outlays. The same holds for transcendental activities such as prayer, mediation, music, art, sports, adult education, and so on.”

Juliet Schor has also offered a path forward, one she calls “plenitude.” It has four key features: moderation in hours of work, self-provisioning, environmentally aware consumption, and restoring investments in one another and community. In sum, “work and spend less, create and connect more.”

What policy agenda would help move America beyond consumerism? First, there are attractive steps, including some described elsewhere in this book, that would help immensely: eliminating wasteful subsidies and imposing limits on virgin materials entering the economy and on emissions, toxics, and other residuals discharged to the environment; requiring full-cost, honest prices, with border tariffs to protect U.S. producers and workers from unfair foreign competition from countries not fully internalizing costs; imposing a surtax on high-end consumption spending along with various luxury taxes; promoting new for-benefit corporations and corporate transformation generally; providing high-quality public services, infrastructure, and amenities; moving to much greater social and economic equality and security; conducting educational and social marketing campaigns that not only provide accurate information to consumers but also address deeper issues such as the shortcomings of consumerism; promoting sharing, renting, and collaborative consumption instead of owning (“do more, own less, rent the rest”); attacking waste and throwaway, made-to-break culture by requiring producers to take back products at the end of their useful lives and to design products for durability, easy repair, and even instructive conversation; imposing tight regulation on “easy credit,” predatory lending; and promoting initiatives to shift cultural norms that promote consumerism.

Two additional steps are essential. First, we need to put in place a set of new policies that will eliminate overwork and lead to a shorter work-year. Just as America legislated a forty-hour workweek, we can also legislate a thirty- to thirty-two-hour (or four-day) workweek. A take-back-your-time package of initiatives should also include measures to protect part-time workers and favor work sharing; guarantee longer, paid vacations; restrict the use of overtime; and provide for generous parental and caregiving leaves, worker sabbaticals, graduated retirement, and the option of early retirement. Allied with these measures should be support needed for non-income-generating “leisure” activities (continuing education, hobbies, recreation, family and community activities, politics, volunteering, music, the arts, reading, self-improvement, and so on).

Second, we must put advertising in its place, which should be a small place. Advertising is one of the world’s most pernicious businesses. In the United States, advertising expenditures grew from $60 billion a year in 1960 to $260 billion in 2004 (in 2003 dollars), or about half of total world spending on advertising that year. In 1983, at the behest of the Reagan administration, the Federal Communications Commission deregulated advertising to children on television. One year later, the ten best-selling toys all had ties to television programs. Between 1983 and 2011, marketing aimed at children swelled from a $100 million-a-year endeavor to a $17 billion-a-year juggernaut. The average child in the United States today sees twenty thousand commercials annually. Meanwhile, ads have invaded air travel, movie theaters, video games, comic books, postseason bowl games, public schools, universities, clothing, and popular songs. And that’s not all: “Wizmark’s ‘Interactive Urinal Communicator’ plays 10-second promotional messages to the ‘ever elusive targeted male audience you are constantly aiming for.’” The Internet is the largest segment, but “out-of-home” advertising now exceeds radio, newspaper, and magazine advertising combined. Finally, there is the advent reported in the April 23, 2011, issue of The Economist of “gladvertising” and “sadvertising:” “a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it.”

These folks show us no mercy, and we should return the favor. A good start would be a ban on advertising to children in grade school, as is now done in some Nordic countries and Quebec. We should also severely restrict out-of-home advertising, especially in schools. Vermont has made a strong start with its ban on highway billboards. It should be unlawful to circulate mail-order catalogues except on request. To ensure greater truthfulness and relevancy in advertising, a committee of the corporation’s directors should be required to attest to the accuracy and relevance of all claims in major ad campaigns, and accuracy and relevance should be closely policed by the appropriate federal agencies, with fines levied when appropriate. Television and radio should be required to make time available so that the public can challenge advertising pitches and commercialism generally, much as Adbusters and others now do. Finally, advertising costs should be disallowed as a business expense for tax purposes.

There is no magic bullet with which to slay consumerism, but measures like these will carry us a good distance toward that goal.

James Gustave Speth is a professor at Vermont Law School and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research and advocacy organization. His most recent book is, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy. A former dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, he also co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. His previous books include: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability and Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.

The Walmartization of America Redux: How the Relentless Drive for Cheap Stuff Undermines Our Economy, Bankrupts Our Soul, and Pillages the Planet

Published on Friday, December 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by John Atcheson

If you want to know why the middle class disappeared and where they went, look no further than your local Walmart.  People walked in for the low prices, and walked out with a pile of cheap stuff, but in a figurative sense, they left their wages, jobs, and dignity on the cutting room floor of the House of Cheap.

Welcome to the logical end point of Reagonomics.  Welcome to Ayan Rand’s nightmare vision of morality, where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing; where predatory behavior is celebrated and the notion of community is blasphemy.

It’s a sprint to the bottom. Lower wages; dangerous working conditions; more pollution; greater liquidation of natural capital; more global warming; less happiness. (photo: Carlos Fernandez)

In his excellent documentary, Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, Robert Greenwald carefully documents how Walmart’s giant box stores lower wages across the entire retail sector, impose high social and economic costs on the states and communities in which they operate, and destroy local businesses. 

Yet the low prices – which come at such a high cost – are irresistible to American consumers.  Walmart has virtually cornered the retail market and amassed astounding wealth in the process.

But it’s not just Walmart.  Big box stores now rule across the board in the US retail economy in everything from electronics to pet supplies. And it’s not just retail. The entire US economy is now organized around the notion that getting us cheap stuff – the more the better – is the sine qua non of economic policy.

There was a time when corporations understood that paying their employees a living wage had economic and societal benefits.  Henry Ford famously said he wanted his employees to be able to afford to buy the cars they made and launched six decades of prosperity.

The labor movement helped create a social and economic compact in which workers shared the wealth they generated.  When workers had enough money to consume, they stimulated economic growth.  When production was as important as consumption, the economy flourished, the common worker had dignity, and the means of production were valued. 

But that compact has been sacrificed at the Alter of the Cheap, and we no longer produce, we merely consume. 

Our main economic activity has become the ceaseless churning and manipulating of the vast capital the old system produced.  No value is added, some is skimmed off by the uber rich with each churning.  It’s a colossal, self-limiting, Ponzi scheme.

The rich and the corporations have no allegiance to the US or its workers, and so they take the fruits of their skimming and either sit on it, or invest it overseas, where the cheapest goods can be made.

Job creators?  Sure.  But not good jobs, and not here.

When they’ve skimmed all they can from the US consumer, they’ll focus on the emerging middle class in China, India and elsewhere, leaving us to sit among the decaying detritus of cheap stuff we can no longer afford, searching in vain for the happiness we thought we were buying.

It’s a sprint to the bottom.  Lower wages; dangerous working conditions; more pollution; greater liquidation of natural capital; more global warming; less happiness.

Globalization – the handmaiden of Cheap at All Costs – is celebrated as a solution, when it is the problem.  And even astute economists seem unable to realize that when another country’s comparative advantage is based on environmental crimes, low pay, and inhuman conditions, then comparative advantage doesn’t operate the way it’s presented in textbooks and abstract econometric models. 

Globalization has enabled corporations to leave the old economic compact based on equitably shared wealth behind. For example, in the US, CEO pay is once again soaring, while the average wage earner hasn't kept up with inflation.

Just as Walmart has driven down wages throughout the retail sector, the Doctrine of Cheap has driven down wages for the developed nations, and it will cap them at unjust levels in the developing world. 

And the dirty little secret hiding behind the globalization façade is the devastating affect it is having on the environment.

For example, this week, Bejing suffered from air pollution so severe, that the airport was shut down.  It’s easy to ignore this kind of environmental insult when it’s “over there.” But the carbon and soot and filth generated in China ultimately reaches us. 

At the scale of human economic activity we’ve reached, we suffer the environmental consequences of our purchases no matter how cheaply or how far away they are made.  In a world were humans have become a global force of nature, “there” is “here.”  Climate change is exhibit A in how insults to our commons affect us all.

But the dirtiest little secret of all, is that we – the 99% -- enable this race to the bottom.  Our addiction to cheap stuff and our desire for more, more, more is the fuel that feeds this destructive Ponzi scheme.

But there is good news here, too.  If we are the enablers of the Walmartization of America, we have the power to change course. 

How?

We are the marketplace, and we decide who wins and who loses by where we park our money, what we invest in, what we choose to buy and who we choose to buy it from. 

Think about it.  We purchase about $80 billion dollars worth of stuff a day, not including what we spend on our homes, cars and normal household bills. 

We hold a total of $17.5 trillion in retirement funds – the single biggest source of money the big banks, Wall Street, fat cats, and assorted other speculators use to play their very own version of hi-risk Texas hold ‘em. 

The real power in our economic and political system resides with us, the 99%, if we have but the wit, wisdom and courage to seize it.

So forget Wall Street.  Let’s occupy the whole damn marketplace.  Let’s vote with our dollars and our values.  That’s an election they can’t buy.

John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals. He is the author of a fictional Trilogy that centers on climate change. The first book will be available on Amazon in January. Atcheson's book reviews are featured on Climateprogress.org.

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Gloom Grips Consumers, and It May Be Home Prices

from the New York Times

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Published: October 18, 2011

ORLANDO, Fla. — Ernest Markey lost his stone-cutting business in 2009. He then sold his home for half a million dollars less than its value at the peak of the housing bubble and moved with his wife, Marie, to a smaller home in a less affluent suburb. They gave up two new cars and bought one. Used.

The Markeys have since patched together a semblance of their old life, opening a new stone-cutting shop. But they do not expect that they will ever recover financially from the loss of equity in their old home.

“For two years I kept thinking that things would get better,” Mr. Markey, 51, said as he stood in his empty store on a recent weekday. “Now I think the future doesn’t look so good.”

The United States has a confidence problem: a nation long defined by irrational exuberance has turned gloomy about tomorrow. Consumers are holding back, businesses are suffering and the economy is barely growing.

There are good reasons for gloom — incomes have declined, many people cannot find jobs, few trust the government to make things better — but as Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, noted earlier this year, those problems are not sufficient to explain the depth of the funk.

That has led a growing number of economists to argue that the collapse of housing prices, a defining feature of this downturn, is also a critical and underappreciated impediment to recovery. Americans have lost a vast amount of wealth, and they have lost faith in housing as an investment. They lack money, and they lack the confidence that they will have more money tomorrow.

Many say they believe that the bust has permanently changed their financial trajectory.

“People don’t expect their home to regain value, and that’s really led to a change in consumer attitudes about the economy that we’ve just never seen before,” said Richard Curtin, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan who directs its Survey of Consumers. The latest data from the survey, released Friday by Thomson Reuters, shows that expectations for economic growth have fallen to the lowest level since May 1980.

In Orlando, a city that trades in upbeat fantasies, the housing crash has been particularly painful. The total value of area homes has fallen below the total mortgage debt on those homes, according to the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic. In the parlance of the real estate world, Orlando is underwater, a distinction matched by Las Vegas.

“I don’t know that it’s going to get better. We just have to get used to it,” said Sherry DeWeese, whose home in Ocoee, a northwestern suburb of Orlando, is worth less than she paid for it 13 years ago — and about a third of its value at the peak of the market. “It was nothing to buy whatever we wanted. Now we just think about what we really need.”

Economists have only recently devoted serious study to how a decline in housing prices affects consumer spending, not least because this is the first decline in the average price of an American home since the Great Depression. A 2007 review of existing research by the Congressional Budget Office reported that people reduce spending by $20 to $70 a year for every $1,000 decline in the value of their home.

This “wealth effect” is significantly larger for changes in home equity than in the value of other investments, such as stocks, apparently because people regard changes in housing prices as more likely to endure.

A recent paper by Karl E. Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College, and two co-authors estimated the decline in home prices from 2005 to 2009 caused consumer spending to be $240 billion lower in 2010 than it otherwise would have been. That figure is equal to about 1.7 percent of annual economic activity, enough to be the difference between the mediocre recent growth and healthy growth. And it does not include all the other effects of the housing crash, including the low level of new home construction, that are also weighing on the economy.

Roy Pugsley, who owns a pool supply store in Winter Garden, another suburb here, said that he made 2,500 fewer sales during the first eight months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2007. That translates to one less person walking through the doors to buy chemicals or toys or spare parts in each hour that the store is open.

Mr. Pugsley said business actually increased in the early days of the recession; customers had told him they were spending more time at home. But now people buy only what they need for maintenance. “People realized that it wasn’t going to get any better, and they stopped spending on their pools, too,” he said.

At Milcarsky’s Appliance Center in the adjacent town of Longwood, business now comes from people remodeling their own homes rather than builders, and customers are picking cheaper models, said Doug Morey, a sales manager.

“People who might have bought that” — he taps a stove with chunky burners, designed to look like it belongs in a restaurant kitchen — “are double-thinking it. Everyone has had to cut back.”

That means Milcarsky’s has cut back too. The company, which employed 26 people three years ago, now has about a dozen workers, and they are making less in salary and commissions.

“I might like to think that I’m middle class, but I’m not. I’m not anymore,” said Rae-Anne Crotty, a customer service manager at the store. She now shops for groceries at discount stores, she said, and buys gifts for her children at Christmas but not on their birthdays.

It remains the prevailing view of economic policy makers that economic activity will eventually return to the same trajectory as before the recession. Mr. Bernanke and others have said that they see no evidence of any permanent change in the economy. Previous bouts of economic pessimism, as in the early 1980s and early 1990s, went away once growth picked up.

But many people in the Orlando area do not share this confidence, at least not when it comes to their own prospects. Instead, like the Markeys, they are settling into lives of less prosperity.

The couple moved to Orlando 12 years ago from central Massachusetts in search of opportunities. The business Mr. Markey created, Stone Giant, grew to include two factories and 60 employees, and it installed granite countertops in up to 15 new kitchens every day.

His new company, Winter Park Granite, now installs two kitchens on the average day. He has eight employees but cannot afford health insurance for them or himself. The family income last year was less than a third of the $175,000 that he and his wife made in 2007, their last good year.

And he sees little room for growth. He has stopped spending money on advertising.

“We’re never going to get that big again,” he said. “I was someone employing people and taking people to the good life. Now I’m just trying to survive.”

We Don't Need More Stuff; We Need a Different Way of Distributing the Stuff We Have.

by John Lawrence

Everyone is talking about how to get the economy moving again and how to create jobs. President Obama talks about "winning the future." This means more education, more entrepreneurialism, more new industries, more new products for consumers to buy. Surely, all this new economic activity is exactly what we need or is it? Since the GDP of the US is dependent on consumers consuming to the tune of 70% of the entire economy, it stands to reason that for the economy to expand, consumers need to consume more. But wait a minute. We are already stuffed to the gills with products rammed down our throats by TV advertisers. Maybe what we need is less consumption. Americans are already experiencing an epidemic of obesity. We should be consuming less fast food. But that would bring the profits of McDonald's down. They might even have to lay off employees. Their stock might plummet. Wal-Mart offers us a plethora of cheap crap made in China. But if we stopped buying it, Wal-Mart's profits would go down, their stock price would tumble and the Dow Jones average might even find itself in bear market territory. Everyone agrees that this would be terrible for the economy. But it might be good for the citizens.

I say we need to participate less in the market economy and be more self-subsistent. This would result in a decrease in GDP, but an increase in citizen independence. The more we rely on ourselves to fulfill our needs, the less we rely on the market economy and the better off we are when that economy goes kerflooey. The recent economic meltdown was all about Wall Street and their shenanigans. It was of paramount importance to bail out Wall Street and then all good things would follow. Such was the conventional wisdom. Only good things didn't follow. People's homes were foreclosed on en masse even when banks couldn't prove that they held title to the houses. Main Street, the middle class - they were not protected at all. The culprits who caused the crisis were bailed out. The average citizen who lost his job and his house and maybe even his wife was not bailed out at all. In fact Republicans are doubling down on destroying what remains of the safety net which might have helped these unfortunates to maintain the skeleton of a half way decent way of life. Congress has continued to sponsor and uphold legislation that encourages corporations to outsource jobs. The budget is to be balanced on the backs of the poor and middle class and not by asking the rich to contribute a little more. We are rapidly retreating to the Dickensian era where to ask for a little more porridge was to be answered with a "certainly not!"

What we need is not more consumption of cheap Chinese produced crap or even newly minted crap from our own entrepreneurs. What we need is a better system of distributing the immense amount of stuff that we are already capable of producing. And in particular we are in need of a more widely distributed system of ownership so that profits redound to the average citizen and not to the upper .1% who are becoming immensely wealthy far beyond their needs while the poor and middle class are being reduced to penury and poverty. What we need is a government that looks out for the little guy, not one who is all for the competitive struggle to produce more and more goods and win the future that way. How about winning the future by taking back our ability to be self-sustaining? We need to return to an era when people produced a large amount of their own food by growing it themselves instead of relying on the marketplace of consumer provided food by large agricorporations which use pesticides, herbicides and hormones to provide us with food which in most cases will not kill us right away. That will take place in 30-40 years when cancer sets in. But in a lot of cases of e coli and salmonella brought on by filthy conditions for animals in factory farms, it will kill us or sicken us immediately. So profits are concentrated in the hands of a few corporations instead of being widely distributed which would take place if there were widespread family gardening which also produces healthier foods. If everyone farmed to some extent, we would all be better off but GDP and corporate profits would decline because we wouldn't be participating to such a great extent in the market economy.

Sociologists decry the fact that in many parts of the world people are living on $2. a day. But those in this category that are rural may in fact be 98% self-subsistent. In other words they are providing for their own needs without participating in the market economy or are only participating to the tune of $2. a day. On the other hand the urban poor who are living on $2. a day may not be in a position to be self-subsistent, and they are truly poor because they have to meet all their needs by means of the market economy and $2. a day doesn't go very far. Just recently many Americans met probably 75% of their needs without participating in the market economy. Take my grandparents, for example. My Grandfather lived and worked on a small dairy farm. They had chickens and hogs and a large garden. So they provided perhaps 90% or more of their own food instead of buying it at the market. They sold milk into the marketplace in exchange for dollars which they used to purchase what they could not provide for themselves. Instead of buying oil or gas, my grandfather farmed with horses and he grew the fuel that they consumed with the result that he did his own energy production and did not have to depend on Exxon Mobil or Chevron for energy. And as a bonus horses did not pollute. Since chemicals were not available, his farming was organic by default. He learned carpentry and built his own buildings with the result he didn't have to hire a contractor. They were largely self-sufficient and self-subsistent. Of course, they made their own clothes instead of buying them in a store. Women had a whole variety of functions within the household instead of vying for jobs in the marketplace, another way in which they were self-sufficient. They actually weathered the Great Depression quite well since they weren't dependent on the market economy. Even my parents who had government jobs as teachers, the kind that Republicans are attacking today, raised chickens and had a really large garden from which they provided much of their own food. And women used to bake instead of buying prepared foods.

So maybe the answer to the economic malaise that we find ourselves in today will be solved not by creating new industries to manufacture more and better stuff but by figuring out ways to be less dependent on the marketplace and more self-sufficient. Profit centers need to be more widely dispersed instead of profits ending up in the hands of the Fortune 400. Think about it: when you participate in the market economy, the money you spend ends up in the hands of a very few and select group of corporations and wealthy individuals and families. These individuals, families and corporations have effectively captured government through their paid lobbyists so that government operates solely in their interests. Jefferson envisioned a country of independent yeoman, small farmers and craftsmen. In today's America, there are hardly any such people. Instead most rely on a job to provide them with income which they use to provide for all their needs by purchasing goods and services in the marketplace. As more and more people lose their jobs because the jobs are outsourced or are replaced by automated machines, there is no place to go but down. But the self-employed, the self-sufficient and self-subsistent will be able to provide for themselves and their families irregardless of what is happening in the marketplace. Those absolutely dependent on wages to make a living are already becoming neo-serfs needing two or three minimum wage jobs to make a go of it. The worst off are dependent on charity.

 

 

Wal-Mart Buys San Diego

by Al Norman

Called Wal-Mart's "#1 Enemy" by Forbes Magazine

Posted: February 4, 2011 07:43 AM, in Huffington Post

It's clear now who is running San Diego.

Wal-Mart needed only 8 weeks and maybe thirty thousand dollars to scare the daylights out of the City Council in San Diego. One local official in San Diego, California called it a "dark day for democracy."

In December of 2010, the City Council voted to override a veto by the Mayor of a zoning ordinance that requires certain big box stores over 90,000 square feet to study their impact on the local economy, on wages, and on traffic. It was a watered down ordinance at best -- but there was one "citizen" who didn't appreciate the City Council vote. Wal-Mart began portraying the ordinance as an outright ban on superstores, and the corporation hired professional signature collectors to put the issue on the San Diego ballot. Wal-Mart knew that San Diego could not financially afford to hold a referendum, so all the folks in Bentonville had to do was throw a head fake. It worked.

Cash-strapped San Diego would have to swallow hard to come up with the $3.4 million cost of a referendum. Wal-Mart put the City Council neatly in a box. The City Council voted 7-1 to rescind the ordinance -- not because they had a change of heart -- but because fighting Wal-Mart was not worth millions of dollars to the Council.

For several years, anti-big box residents have been trying to keep huge stores out of San Diego. In November of 2006, the City Council took an initial vote to ban retail stores of more than 90,000 square feet that use 10% of their interior space to sell groceries or other merchandise that is not subject to sales tax. This ordinance was modeled on similar ordinances in California -- most notably Turlock -- where Wal-Mart failed repeatedly to challenge the law in the courts.

Predictably, Wal-Mart threatened a voter referendum on the big box ban in San Diego. The Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, told reporters at the time that he would veto the new cap if it went through its required second vote. In early June, 2007, the Council took its final vote to pass the new ordinance. Mayor Sanders vetoed it, and Wal-Mart threatened that it would hire people to gather signatures to put the measure on the ballot in the form of a referendum.

Wal-Mart's threat was enough. One Councilor switched her vote for the ban, to against the ban. The San Diego Union-Tribune called this change of heart a "surprise twist." The vote on the override was a 4-4 tie, so the Mayor's veto killed the big box ordinance. The head of the San Diego Neighborhood Market Association, which represents 2,000 small businesses in the city, said her group was disappointed by the Council's decision to reverse their vote.

But City Councilors did not give up. They came back with a diluted ordinance that simply required large stores to conduct impact studies before being permitted. They said they wanted to "put something in place that also protects small businesses by doing an economic impact report and allowing the communities to have a greater oversight of that process."

Repeating history, Mayor Jerry Sanders vetoed the milder economic impact legislation at the end of November, 2010. "I do not believe it is the City's role to determine where consumers may shop or to provide a competitive advantage to certain retail businesses," Sanders said in his veto message.

Councilor Todd Gloria, who was the lead sponsor of the economic impact ordinance, needed to round up five votes for the measure. This time around, the City Council voted to override Mayor Sanders, and the new ordinance was on the books. But well before the override vote, Wal-Mart began its menacing behavior. The retailer took out full page ads in the Union-Tribune saying the City Council was just carrying water for the unions, and urging San Diego voters to "be a voice for choice."

By mid-December Wal-Mart had launched what the newspaper called "a furious campaign" to gather at least 31,000 signatures to overturn the ordinance. The Arkansas-based corporation hired private firms to gather signatures for them as shoppers left other Wal-Mart stores in the area. Their professional gatherers amassed 54,000 signatures in no time.

Because there were no elections slated in 2011, the city would have to hold a special election, and taxpayers would pick up as much as $3.4 million for Wal-Mart's vote. Wal-Mart's opponents called on the company to pay for the referendum -- since it was the company which stood to gain hundreds of millions in new sales if the big box law was overturned. But the chances of having Wal-Mart foot the bill were as dim as finding Sam Walton selling moon pies in aisle 12.

This week, the City Council once again caved to Wal-Mart. The vote to repeal their November ordinance was 7-1. City Council President Tony Young pointed out all the better uses the city could find for $3 million. "It's been a really tough fight," he told the Associated Press, "but we also have to keep in mind that we do have a fiduciary responsibility to the city of San Diego."

After the vote, Wal-Mart was puffed up like someone who had just won a big pot at Texas Hold'em -- with nothing in the hole. "Thanks to this vote," a company spokesperson said, "we will be able to provide the people of San Diego with improved access to affordable and fresh food, particularly for those living in underserved neighborhoods."

The lone holdout was City Councilor Marti Emerald, who told her constituents, "My vote is not for sale." And Councilor Todd Gloria, who had championed the watered-down ordinance, could only mutter: "Let's be clear, this is a dark day for democracy."

Wal-Mart has fought similar ordinances across the country, arguing that local officials have no right to limit the "freedom to shop," as if this was enshrined in the Bill of Rights somewhere. The company's attempts to challenge such laws in the courts have all failed, so buying elections is the next best option--and less costly. With corporate free speech a bottomless well, fighting Wal-Mart is like going up against a candidate with a massive campaign war chest. Wal-Mart's attitude is that they are too big to fail.

For now, San Diego has been bought and sold by a large corporation. But the day after the vote, a State Senator from San Diego, Juan Vargas, vowed to submit legislation in Sacramento that would accomplish the same goal as the short-lived San Diego law.

"What I did not like," the Senator told the Union-Tribune, "was that one company and one company alone had the power to scare the City Council into changing its mind and that is what happened. That's not right. That's not the way government should work. One company should not have the power to do that."

When Wal-Mart learned of Vargas' initiative, the company told the media that state lawmakers should focus on solving "the state budget woes" instead of "trying to thwart the will of the people." But Wal-Mart should keep its corporate money out of politics, and go back to selling cheap underwear. Cities and towns have the right to limit the scale of large projects, as a way to mitigate adverse impacts on local businesses, traffic, and property values. It's a fundamental local control power.

To "Citizen" Wal-Mart, everything is for sale -- including public policy. If the company doesn't like your local laws, it will lay out some cash to change them. The large retailer's intrusion into local, state and national politics has indeed brought 'dark days' to our democracy.

Al Norman is the founder of Sprawl-Busters, and author of "The Case Against Wal-Mart," and "Slam-Dunking Wal-Mart." His website, http://www.sprawl-busters.com, can also be found on Facebook.

The Fly in Obama's Ointment on Jobs

by John Lawrence

President Obama is waxing ebullient on the jobs front. He's partnered up with GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and they are both proclaiming that the US will again be a robust manufacturing and exporting nation. They have rejected the model for the US as a mainly consuming and service oriented nation. That's all to the good. But Obama seems to have placed too much faith in the corporate CEOs. He seems to think they're going to stop outsourcing, and, out of the goodness of their hearts, they're going to start creating jobs here at home. But the official US government still has in place laws and policies - and in particular tax policies - that actually encourage outsourcing. Nancy Pelosi, when the Democrats controlled the House, said after passing a bill which would have reined in outsourcing: "In this legislation, which is job creating, it closes the loophole which has allowed businesses to ship jobs overseas.  Can you believe that we have a tax policy that enables outsourcing?  So if you have one thing to say about this bill to your constituents, you can say that today, you voted to close the loophole to ship U.S. jobs overseas and giving businesses a tax break to do so. It is not right. It will be corrected today.” This was in May, 2010. Of course, this bill never made it into law because it was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. Sorry, Nancy.

Closing the loophole that has allowed businesses to ship jobs overseas? Well, sorry to say that loophole was never closed! President Obama though wants us to believe that, regardless of that loophole being closed, CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt are going to be nice guys and create local manufacturing jobs here in the US even though it is going to lower their profit margins, even though the loopholes for shipping jobs overseas are still open! Is he being naive? And then there is this from Robert Reich:

General Electric and other companies are signing up for deals with China involving energy and aviation manufacturing. But much of this will be done in China. GE’s joint venture with Aviation Industries of China, to develop new integrated avionics systems (which presumably will find their way into Boeing planes) will be based in Shanghai.

Will the real GE please stand up? Corporations are required by law to maximize their profits. This means that they will lower their expenses by getting the cheapest labor wherever they can get it. And American labor is relatively expensive compared to Chinese labor. So Obama is skating on thin ice. His bravado overlooks the underpinnings of law that give American corporations huge incentives for creating jobs overseas and outsourcing American jobs. Sure, GE wants to sell to the Chinese. But this doesn't mean that those products will be exported from the US. In the last ten years 42,000 American factories have closed. Millions of jobs have been lost. And now Mr. Nice Guy, Jeffrey Immelt of GE, is going to forego maximizing profits and his salary and his duty to shareholders in order to do a favor for President Obama and create some jobs in the US? What game is he playing? Mr. President, where are the legal underpinnings that would make sure that this will happen? You have a Congress that won't even close loopholes that would encourage job creation in the US. Do you have the feeling you're teetering on the brink? You said you've moved us back from the abyss. But have you? The abyss still looms because now for sure with a Republican controlled House, no loopholes that encourage and enable outsourcing will ever be closed unless and until Democrats control both Houses and the filibuster rules have been changed. Mr. President, you are whistling Dixie, in the dark, and past the graveyard too!

As President Obama touts the jobs being created at GE's Schenectady plant we have this dated January 14, 2011: "Solar Panel Maker Moves Jobs to China":

BEIJING — Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States. But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

It looks like the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing. It seems like not only does China have cheaper labor, but they have more government support for American companies that want to build plants and create jobs there! The US on the other hand has no industrial policy, no set of incentives in order to have companies, domestic or foreign, build more plants in the US. And there are no unions to speak of that would fight for the rights of American workers. America, for all intents and purposes, has been deunionized starting with Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers which effectively put their PATCO union out of business.

In "19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep", Michael Snyder says:

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe.  All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing.  It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.  But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America.  Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period.The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled, and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

The US is embarked on its own destruction thanks to the "small government" mantra of the Republican controlled Congress. Small government means no industrial policy except by lobbyists seeking special favors for their particular corporate sponsors. It means that US government policy will favor US business but not necessarily US workers. Unless and until the US can adopt policies which favor job creation in the US, US workers will be left out in the cold. And President Obama's soaring rhetoric about cooperation with CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt will be just that: rhetoric.