Does the World Get You Down?

This is my last blog.  The world is so fuXXed up that it is not possible to comment on all its absurdities.  Besides it is too depressing.  The only way to preserve sanity is to look at it with rose colored glasses, so I shall devote myself to things of beauty such as poetry and literature. 

     If you have not seen my historical novel, “The Quest for Land and Fortune,” may I urge you to go to Amazon and get a copy while they last.  It is narrative non-fiction, the people are all real, but what they said to each other and what sort of blogs they might have written, is fiction, I was not there. 

      The New York Times of December 28, 2014, had a section entitled the “Year in Pictures.  I list the cut-lines to illustrate my point.

01/09/2014  Displaced people on ferry led fighting between government forces and rebel in South Sudan.

02/24  Women took shelter from sniper fire in The Ukraine.

02/19  Anti-government protestors burned barricades in The Ukraine.

04/17  A protestor hurled a Molotov cocktail during clashes with police, Caracas, Venezuela.

04/30  A lockdown drill to address the threat of school shootings in a eighth-grade class, Belle Plaine, MN

03/12  A girl was wounded between riot police and anti-government protestors, Istanbul.

05/05  Mourners attended funeral of Julia Izotova, 21, killed during clashes between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists.

05/11  Civil War set of a vast food crisis, among the malnourished were a mother and her 5-month old. Malakal, South Sudan.

07/09  Mexican authorities deported miners on a flight back to El Salvador.

07/24  Relatives look into a hospital operating room at those injured in an Israeli air strike. Gaza Strip.

08/15  Palestinians prayed in the rubble of a mosque. Gaza City.

07/01  A Jewish woman prayed during the funeral for three Israeli teenagers who were killed in the West Bank.

07/02  Migrants traveling toward the US on a train known as “The Beast” because of violent crime.Tenosique, Mexico

09/23  A marina owner on the boat dock in the dried-up Huntington Lake CAL.

08/25  Michael Brown Sr. mourns as his son’s coffin is lowered, St. Peters Cemetery, Normandy.

08/27  Yameen Ritaj, 16, left her abusive husband during her pregnancy. Refugee camp, Jordan.

09/05  Medical workers took James Dorbor, 8, into a Ebola treatment center. Liberia.

011/25  Police clash with pro-democracy demonstrators, Hong Cong.

11/28  Senator Mitch McConnell re-elected from Kentucky. (He has declared global warming a hoax spread by those who dislike his state’s coal.)

10/18  Displaced persons camp where 140,000 have been uprooted. Myanmar.

09/27  A cradle left behind by Kurdish refugees along the Turkish-Syrian border.

11/28  Protest because Grand jury decided not to indict Daren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, Delwood MO.

12/08 Protestors against police brutality in the wake of Michael Brown, Berkeley.

12’16  Women mourn Mohammed Ali Khan, 15, one of 130 students killed during a Taliban attack on a school, Peshawar, Pakistan.

11/18  Ultra-Orthodox Jews listened to a eulogy for a Rabbi Killed in a synagogue by Palestinian gunmen. Jerusalem.

12/06  A four-year-old known as Sweetie, one of thousands, monitored for symptoms of Ebola. Sierra Leone

         I add one event that does not photograph--the new Republican Congress has vowed to cancel Obama's Affordable Care Act.  I suspect that much of the opposition is a continuing racist reaction to the Black President.

See what I mean.  During the Vietnam War, depressed by the daily body count, I stopped listening to network news.  I never began again.  Today, I canceled my subscription to the New York Times.

      Thanks for following my blog.  If you want more, I recommend following Bill Moyers and Robert Reich.

Big Oil Spoils North Dakota

Big oil companies in North Dakota said their impact on the environment would be minimal. They lied.  The citizens of Tioga witnessed the largest land oil spill in recent American history in September, 2013.  Also in 2013, the locomotive of an oil train derailed and exploded in a collision near Casselton.  This year North Dakotans discovered illegally dumped oil filter socks, a source of hazardous radiation. A landfill with waste from oil fields is near the banks of the Missouri River.  Some families experienced dirty drinking water.  “One company, in fact, sued three activist landowners in 2011, seeking damages for trespassing after the men tried to document what they believed was the cover-up of a saltwater spill.”  Federal wildlife agents asked the oil companies to cover their waste pits as migratory birds sometimes dived in.  They were refused.  Thirty percent of the natural gas produced in the state was being treated as a byproduct and burned off, spoiling the air for neighbors.

      The oil drillers are lightly regulated by the three-member North Dakota Industrial Commission composed of the Governor, Attorney General, and the Agricultural Commissioner.  In their eagerness to gain great wealth, the state largely let the oil companies police themselves.  The oil companies made contributions to the governor’s campaign in 2012, a total of $550,000 from oil-related executives.

         A family signed a lease and saw their first well drilled in 2008.  Then June, 2011, they were informed that Burlington Resources intended to create a 30,883 acre oil production unit that would override their lease agreement.  Instead of receiving royalties for their land, the revenues would be split by all owners in the mega-unit. The mega-unit would include part of the Little Missouri State Park (three storage tank batteries inside park boundaries). The family learned that their consent was not required.  Only 60 percent of the unit’s owners were needed, and Burlington together with the Federal government land already amounted to 60%.  This freed Conoco Phillips, successor to Burlington, from boundary lines that required 200-foot set-backs from the borders of each production unit.  The companies would not have to negotiate easements or rights of way for pads, roads, and pipelines.  Dec 20, 2013, the commission approved the mega-unit.  This amounts to private eminent domain—taking of land by private companies for their own benefit.

             Source: New York Times, Nov. 23, 2014

Neo-liberals and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)

Cass Sunstein was appointed head of OIRA from 2009-2012 and led it to delay and eviscerate a host of environmental regulations.  Pres. Reagan created the office ostensibly to improve decision making by insisting on benefit-cost analysis of all rules, but industry used it to escape and delay regulation.  An example of its over-reaching and bizarre twists is to count lost pleasure from smoking as an off-set to health benefits of reduced smoking.  Besides, early death saves health care costs over the smokers' lifetime they claim! All of this is justified by the neo-liberal championing of what they call liberty-enhancement. If some want to kill themselves, they should be free to do so.  This is a neat trick that diverts blame from systemic corporate malfeasance to individuals. 
   This is documented in Robert Kuttner, "Obama's Obama" Harpers, December 2014." A must read by those interested in good government and avoidance of the siren song and paternalism of the neo-liberals. Obama does not come off well. Sunstein and Obama prove once again that smart and wise are not the same thing.

WW I and other Idiocies

It is the 100^th anniversary of WW I, one of the bloodiest and unnecessary wars in human history.  The excuse for the war was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke by a crazy man.  The Austrians demanded compensation (as if there is compensation for murder).  When it was refused, countries began to take sides based on historical and cultural ties—not unlike kids choosing sides on a playground.  The tragedy was compounded by the generals who did not understand machine guns.  Wave after wave of soldiers were sent to slaughter on both sides.  The eventually “victorious” Allies demanded huge reparations from the Germans. The consequence was bitter resentment that provided the base for Hitler’s rise.  We ignored the push-back of human emotions.

      Among the other idiotic moves was the drawing of uninformed boundaries in Africa.  We are still living with the consequences such as ethnic wars. Another result was a revulsion against war that resulted in Western delayed response to the armed invasions by Hitler.

The New Abolitionists

The exchange value of a particular commodity is a matter of property rights.  Exchange value is not an immutable fact, but rather an artifact.  Change the rights and it changes exchange values.  An existing exchange value cannot be used to justify the property rights that produced it.  Rather it is a moral question about what kind of world we want to live in.

Chris Hayes writing in The Nation (May 12) draws a parallel between the loss of wealth of slave holders after the Civil War and the potential loss of the value of coal and petroleum reserves if we reduced mining and pumping.  He calls supporters of carbon regulation “The New Abolitionists.”  Before we shed crocodile tears for the dramatized losers, let’s ask what would have happened if humans had had the right to be free of slavery and now carbon emissions.  What compensation would you require to become a slave?  The cotton plantation owners could not afford to buy out these humans. 

Likewise, what compensation would environmentalists require to sell the right to pollute?  The oil companies and the strip miners could not afford to buy them.  Hayes calls our attention to the losses to them and assumes they own the right to pollute and drive people and their earth support system to extinction.  Property rights are the issue to be decided and no dollar signs that are produced by assuming one side owns are relevant.  It is ultimately a moral question and cannot be deduced from any exchange values.

Ukraine

Why would a people who got free of Russia now want to join the dictatorial Putin?  Is it just to have access to Russian oil?

World Wealth Distribution is Skewed

One percent of the world's population owns 45 percent of the wealth.  Absurd!
At least the President of France has proposed a substantial tax on the super wealthy.
How long will we put up with this before people revolt.  Maybe they already are, and we call them terrorists.

Air Force as Show Business and Special-Interest Politics

At the end of WW II a task force was assembled to study the role of the Air Force in winning the war.  John Kenneth Galbraith was a member of the team.  It concluded that the Air Force was of limited impact and that it was the infantry that had to do the work.  “Attempts at daylight precision bombing in World War II proved ineffective.  The bombers suffered heavy losses, and the enemy had to be defeated the old-fashion way with massive armies slogging across Europe….” The same battle is going on again.  The Air Force wants new, big and super-fast fighters that cost $1.5 trillion each.  Yet, it was the cheaper, slower and more maneuverable A-10 that provided air support to our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Probably, the speedier fighters account for many of the civilian casualties that the Afghans complain about.  Fast planes and drones lack the necessary field of vision to distinguish friend from foe.  The Air Force is determined to eliminate the A-10.  Harper's reports that “Legislators with A-10 bases in their districts who might ordinarily attempt to save those jobs, were offered special inducements by the Air Force.  Thus Michigan’s Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services committee, has been guaranteed a squadron of aerial tanker planes that will provide substitute employment.”
    The military-industrial complex is fleecing us again. I wish Levin had asked for high-speed rail lines rather that jets.

Source: Andrew Cockburn, “Tunnel  Vision,” Harper’s, February 2014.

The End of Normal

James Galbraith in a lecture at Michigan State University this week argues that after the recent financial crisis, the economy cannot return to the old normal.  The economy will not recover on its own and public policies seem inadequate.  He calls the period 1940-70 a Golden Age.  The recovery lasted until another crisis in 1980 in Russia and Asia.  The rich gained at the expense of the poor.  A pseudo-golden age unfolded after 2001 until the disaster of 2007.
     What is different now that makes return to normal doubtful?  Changing geo-physics.  While fracking and natural gas offer some respite, energy costs are multiples higher than before.  Our military power seems unlikely to insure stability as witnessed by Iraq and Afghanistan. The picture is clouded by climate change and rising coastal flooding already in train. Technological change is making people redundant--we simply do not need as many.
      Much of our apparent growth was in the financial sector as almost everything of value over time was turned into an immediate source of great profits for traders and banks--accounts receivable was a historic transformation now dwarfed by life insurance premuims, mortgage payments, derivatives, etc.  Of course, the growth of the financial sector has led to grossly unequal wealth.
     Galbraith argues that a change in thinking and expectations is is order to avoid the violence exhibited by Greece as people protest austerity.  How will we learn to live with slow growth?
More in future posts. I would like to hear ideas from my readers.

Osama bin Laden

May 2, 2011, the US killed Osama bin Laden, President Obama's top priority. The US has a tendency to believe that one leader is responsible and if he can be killed, the terrorist threats would be eliminated.  Instead bin Laden's assassination created  even more hatred and zeal in terrorists groups and now there are dozens all around the world.  

Syria

I think Thomas Freidman has it right.
"Many Americans also understood that when it came to our record in the Arab/Muslim world since 9/11, we were 0 for 3. Afghanistan seems headed for failure; whatever happens in Iraq, it was overpaid for; and Libya saw a tyrant replaced by tribal wars. I also think a lot of people look at the rebels in Syria and hear too few people who sound like Nelson Mandela — that is, people fighting for the right to be equal citizens, not just for the triumph of their sect or Shariah."

Accountants must act in public interest in Britain.

A British court ruled that accountants must act in the public interest rather than helping merger raiders from pocketing a large part of the assets of firms going bankrupt. NYT Sept. 12, 2013
Sometimes good sense rules.

Jobs

Johnny Cash sings a song in which he says “St. Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.”  This thought now dominates popular thinking .  But why is it that jobs depend on capitalists any more than returns to capital depend on labor?  Did you ever try to build something with only dollar bills?  Confusion on this point leads to local governments subsidizing companies to locate in their jurisdictions to the extent that taxpayers give back much of their wages in taxes. And then they bitch about taxes.

It leads to Congressional representatives objecting to reduced military spending and base closing because it reduces local employment.  But the money would be spent for other goods providing equal employment.  Instead of subsidizing military production, we should help employers and employees by sharing the costs of transition.  Contrary to much economic thinking, reallocation of labor and capital is not costless and if it is not shared, political action freezes assets in old lines of production.