The Wealth Gap and the Collapse of the U.S.

The heart of America, the Middle Class, collapsing:

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal.

...

BILL MOYERS: How does this last year compare with what happened after the Great Crash in '29?

JAMES GALBRAITH: It's similar in important respects and different in others. If you look at the trends in world trade and manufacturing, they're very similar. There's been a massive collapse, a collapse which is comparable in scale to 1930. The overall economy hasn't come down nearly as much, and the reason for that is that we have the institutions that were created in the New Deal and the Great Society, institutions of the welfare state, social security. And, of course, there has been the influence of John Maynard Keynes, which gave us the very quick reaction in the form of the expansion bill of the stimulus package. And that also has kept the damage from being as large as it was in 1930 to '32.

So what we're seeing today is distress of a different kind. And I think it's playing out on a longer timeframe. The great wealth that the American middle class built up, over 70 years, largely in their homes, has been terrifically impaired. In many cases, wiped out.

People are upside down in their mortgages. Their mortgages are worth more than the houses that they live in. And that doesn't mean that they're going to default or millions will be foreclosed, but many millions more simply can't sell, can't move, can't change their circumstances, don't have a cushion. And that is a factor that will bring stress into their lives over time.

BILL MOYERS: A long time, right? And this is--

JAMES GALBRAITH: Over a long time, yes.

BILL MOYERS: --not something from which people recover. I mean, my father was about 24, 25, maybe at the time of the Great Crash of 1929 and he never recovered from it for the rest of his life. He never got over that experience. Is that likely to be the case with all these people suffering out across the country now?

JAMES GALBRAITH: The same was true of my grandfather on my mother's side, who was a lawyer whose practice depended upon the prosperity of the 1920s. My mother who lived until last year, never really overcame the attitudes that were inculcated in her in the Great Depression. It will have a -- if something is not done to provide particularly young people, who are looking for work and cannot find it, with an opportunity to move on in life at this stage, it will mark them for the rest of their lives. I think there's no doubt about that.

BILL MOYERS: The NEW YORK TIMES had a story just the other day about community colleges being so crowded right now that they're holding classes up until two o'clock in the morning. What do you make of that? What does that say to us?

JAMES GALBRAITH: It says that first of all, people cannot find jobs. And secondly, they are looking to the educational system to provide them with something to do, and some way out of this dilemma. But until jobs are created, and in great numbers, there will not be places for those people to come out of the community college system and find useful work. That's the problem.

We have a stimulus package, which is helping now, but it will be over with at the end of next year. Will there be a basis for another strong, privately financed expansion at that point? I don't see the evidence for that now. And that seems to me to be something we should be worrying about....

....

JAMES GALBRAITH: To restore what was--

BILL MOYERS: Instead of reform what is.

JAMES GALBRAITH: And I don't think what was can be restored.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that's the objective of the administration's policies? Geithner, Bernanke, Summers, the President himself?

JAMES GALBRAITH: To the extent that there's a defined objective, that's it, yes. I think in the immediate day-to-day work, they've largely been preoccupied with keeping the existing system from collapsing. And the government is powerful. It has substantially succeeded at that, but you really have to think about, do you want to have a financial sector dominated by a small number of very large institutions, very difficult to manage, practically impossible to regulate, and ruled by, essentially, the same people and the same culture that caused the crisis in the first place.

BILL MOYERS: Well, that's what we're getting, because after all of the mergers, shakedowns, losses of the last year, you have five monster financial institutions really driving the system, right?

JAMES GALBRAITH: And they're highly profitable, and they are already paying, in some cases, extraordinary bonuses. And you have an enormous problem, as the public sees very clearly that a very small number of people really have been kept afloat by public action. And yet there is no visible benefit to people who are looking for jobs or people who are looking to try and save their houses or to somehow get out of a catastrophic personal debt situation that they're in.

...

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/103020...

http://www.smh.com.au/business/this-keen-professor-overlooked-by-msm-20090909-fh\
oa.html

"… Then Keen told what must have been a startled TV audience that bankers long
ago ceased being humble lubricants of commerce, and had instead become
parasites. They lend us money to play in a Ponzi scheme, launder the loot
through stock and housing markets – where prices are driven up using the money
they lent us – and then take a slice of the rising prices and call it a
performance bonus.

Far from deserving their salaries, let alone their bonuses, Keen told six
o'clock Sunday viewers, bankers deserved to be paid no more than plumbers, and
to be given less respect. After all, plumbers fix leaks; if bankers did anywhere
near as well, we'd be having a financial ball, not a financial crisis.

That was it. A few simple sentences and the best-laid plans were kaput.

Thus, because an Arab network called, Keen had access to a suit coat and someone
saw him commenting on the subject.

Let's see how much more the prophet comes to grace our screens and talk truth to
power. Might be a long time between drinks.

But with those few words all the spin of G20 was hammered out of the ground. I
suspect the doctors are still looking for the ball.

David Hirst is a journalist, documentary maker, financial consultant and
investor. His column is syndicated by News Bites, a Melbourne-based sharemarket
and business news publisher."

"… Then Keen told what must have been a startled TV audience that bankers long ago ceased being humble lubricants of commerce, and had instead become parasites. They lend us money to play in a Ponzi scheme, launder the loot through stock and housing markets – where prices are driven up using the money they lent us – and then take a slice of the rising prices and call it a performance bonus.

Far from deserving their salaries, let alone their bonuses, Keen told six o'clock Sunday viewers, bankers deserved to be paid no more than plumbers, and to be given less respect. After all, plumbers fix leaks; if bankers did anywhere near as well, we'd be having a financial ball, not a financial crisis.

This tells me the street smarts and criminal mind of the Italian mafia understood the above quote much better than the law-abiding, corporate-washed Homer Simpsons of society. A recent comment by Strabes reflects this:

RH, banks don't take a loss if Jones blows it in Vegas.  When Vegas was run by the italian version of the mafia, sure the anglo banks and the measurable M1 would take a loss.  But now that Vegas is run by the anglo mafia (banks/corporations), Jones losing 10k just shifts the M1 from his bank to the bank behind the casino.  

Brings up an entirely separate topic: what was the mafia?  It was an alternative establishment...partially just an anti-anglo-bank organization.  They didn't want to pay elitists like Rockefeller/Rothschild...back in those days people were aware of how the elite screwed them.  Wanted to keep their money in their own establishment that fed back to their roots in Italy/Sicily.

http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/how-m1-not-fed-balance-m1-expanded/30460#comment-56589

What do you call one hundred bankers at the bottom of Lake Erie? ---- a good start.

Thank you xray, for the video on the collapse of the middle class.  It is a comprehensive view of what ails much of the country today, and will be shared with many others who cannot quite (yet) see the big picture.

• davej's diary :: :: 11-4-2009

As I have been writing about, for decades the real economy has been "financialized" by the Wall Street types -- sold off piece by piece providing short term profits for a very few.  We lost more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities in just the last decade!  If you sell your house you might have some cash in your own pocket for a while but your family doesn't have a place to live and the present state of our economy demonstrates the long term cost of this kind of short-term thinking: a few Wall Street types have a bunch of cash and the rest of us don't have an economy anymore.  

As each factory closes and its jobs are eliminated the companies that supplied machines, parts and supplies also go away.  The effect on those of us still employed (for now) has been profound as we work longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits with ever-higher stress levels.  A few get ever richer, the rest of us have ever-lower standards of living and quality of life.  And our country's ability to bounce back becomes ever more compromised.

Along with others at CAF I have been exploring how We, the People became the servants of Wall Street and what to do about it.  The post Companies As Buy-And-Sell Commodities - Workers, Customers and Country As Costs laid out the pattern of company buyouts and takeovers since Reagan. Here is the company-buyout pattern that has turned into a machine with no human concerns:

buying up good companies, shedding and outsourcing the workers, cutting their pay and benefits, outsourcing and cheapening the product or service, fleecing and mistreating the customers, closing the offices and factories and running up debt.

The post Caught In A Machine That Grinds Us Up talked about the incentives that created this inhuman machine:

I have described here a destructive, unsustainable system that creates company- and society-breaking machines. These exist because of the economic and social incentives that our government has set up and we allow to stay in place. Breaking unions, stealing pensions, outsourcing jobs and squeezing customers all depend on government not enforcing laws and regulations – especially labor, consumer and environmental rules. ...

Certainly there is no incentive at the top to stop this. This system helps a wealthy few get ever wealthier and not feel the consequences. The people who do this are celebrated as "successful." And if they don’t like the resulting devastation to the economy, community, country and world they can just hop into their private jet or yacht to retire to their private island or tax haven.

This is conservative economics and the long-term consequences.  Since Reagan supposedly stopped government from "picking winners and losers" our government has indeed been picking winners and losers with Wall Street winning and the rest of us losing.  This brought about a concentration of wealth so severe that a very few now control almost all of the wealth of the country.

Over and over again we see the consequences of conservative economics and Wall Street domination: Short-term profits for a very few with devastating long-term consequences for the rest of us.

We see these consequences now as the economy supposedly enters "recovery" – Wall Street is reaping vast profits and paying astonishing bonuses – enabled by taxpayer dollars – while the taxpayers themselves face loss of houses, raises or  jobs, pensions, health care, etc.  Gains for a few at the expense of the rest of us.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/4/800476/-Wall-Streets-War-Against-the-Real-EconomyWe,-the-People

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The creeping power grab by the executive branch and Federal Reserve

By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns

The power grab at the Federal Reserve is a topic I first broached back in February when the Federal Reserve was creating its alphabet soup of liquidity programs to pull us back from the brink of financial disaster. I was troubled about Fed policy then and I am still troubled today.

I am equally disturbed by what is happening in shift in the balance of power to the executive branch. The Obama Administration seems to be following in the footsteps of the Bush Administration and making its own power grab and Congress has only just begun to wake up to this and start to push back.

At the risk of making this post overly broad, I want to make a few general comments about how executive power in government operates before I take on the specifics of the cases at hand. Everyone who has studied political science is aware that dictators and oligarchies use crises to invoke fear that allows them to usurp power using the cloak of ‘national security’ as a Trojan horse to consolidate power.

I would argue, this is what has just happened in the U.S. post-9/11 and again after the Panic of 2008.....

....

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/11/the-creeping-power-grab-by-the-executive-branch-and-federal-reserve.html

comments:

"I see these developments undermining Americans’ faith in the political process and I hope an appropriate restoration of the checks and balances laid out in the Constitution can be restored."

I’m dubious that faith can be restored at this point. It will at best be a grinding process that will take many years, and be resisted by entrenched powers at every step. But our political system is not designed to have that kind of continuity in the executive or legislative branch. Even worse, the institutional memory of the governance structure today is generally lobbyists, party animals, and the occasional lifer who gains enough power. None of them has any interest in reform.

We may have bouts of reform, like the person who somehow stumbles to church on Sunday morning after Saturday night, but when the time rolls around, we’re going out clubbing again with all our closest friends.

Qualitative easing, or whatever you call it, must end.

It must, but it can’t. Loan qualities are still rapidly deteriorating across the board, particularly in commercial real estate, and few of the losses to date have been recognized because those power grubbing corrupt officials strong-armed FASB into changing accounting law.

Even with all these powerful distortions of reality, Greenlee(Associate Director, Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation) testimony states in his testimony that “higher loan losses are depleting loan loss reserves at many banking organizations, necessitating large new provisions that are producing net losses or low earnings.”

The return on lending for banks is probably, at these interest rates and default levels, a cumulative negative number. If we can’t permit interest rates to rise, because borrowers can’t handle that, then we’ve got one option: reduce the risk. Since risk can’t just magically go away, that means the Fed eats the risk.

And this has indeed been the strategy, as we’ve taken as much risk as possible onto the Fed’s balance sheet. If they want to force banks into lending more, or prevent them from bellyflopping again, they’re going to be taking more and more risk on in the future. If more lending and inflation is a precondition for improvement in the real economy, we can only get there from more borrowing and lending, and the Fed will have to absorb the losses.

It’s no way to run a railroad. I think it’s doomed to failure. But, to me, it’s very clearly the path our corporatocracy has chosen.

....

“If more lending and inflation is a precondition for improvement in the real economy, we can only get there from more borrowing and lending, and the Fed will have to absorb the losses.”

I know that’s their strategy and I know that you don’t believe this is possible. There isn’t really a way to get the type of inflation needed (wage/domestic asset) and all their efforts will result in is bubbles in commodities and such that are actually deflationary in effect. Just as stagflation proved inflation can occur with high unemployment/low growth, so too will monetarism be shown to have no clothes in a high debt environment.

Interview with Joseph Tainter on Collapse | varnelis.net

11-3-2009

 .......

KV: So as civilizations develop, you conclude, they differentiate—for example, by creating highly specialized social roles—and build greater and greater levels of organization that require higher investment of energy to maintain. Eventually the marginal returns on investment decline and civilizations either figure out how to deal with that situation or collapse. You note that from the perspective of humans as a species and hominadae as a family, complexity is quite unusual. Most of our existence has been in small settlements or nomadic groups that have relatively little differentiation and low levels of complexity.

 Today we are living in the most complex society that has ever existed, yet we’ve avoided collapse thus far. Why is that?

 JT: Diminishing returns to complexity are probably inevitable, but collapse doesn’t necessarily follow. Collapses are actually not that common. There are several ways to cope with diminishing returns to complexity. One is to find energy subsidies to pay for the process. That is what we have done with fossil fuels. And it is a big part of why a future crisis in fossil fuels is the most important thing we should be worrying about.

.....

Oil awaits for the economic recovery like everything does. When it does happen, demand will re-ignite at some point and a supply/demand mismatch will resurface. We have a liquid fuel crisis which won't be solved by any Obama mandated venture into wind and solar. There is something called the "inertial nature of energy transition". The inherent massive scale of our modern energy infrastructure precludes us from transitioning swiftly into another energy source, even if that new energy source were superior. We are talking multiple decades in order to transition to any degree, for instance, from the ICE cars that dominate our roads to "electric cars."
Think about the massive scale of the world oil industry.

BEWARE of the SCALE

"It handles more than 30 billion barrels, or four billion tons, of liquids and gases; it extracts the fuel in more than 100 countries and its facilities range from self-propelled geophysical exploration rigs to sprawling refineries, and include about 3,000 large tankers and more than 300,000 miles of pipelines. Even if an immediate alternative were available, writing off this colossal infrastructure that took more than a century to build would amount to discarding an investment worth well over $5 trillion—but it is quite obvious that its energy output could not be replicated by any alternative in a decade or two."
----- Vaclav Smil, Professor University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba

Crude oil makes up 36.4% of the world's energy consumption and about 98% of the transport sector alone.

"Today, replacing only half of worldwide annual fossil fuel use with renewable energies would require the equivalent of about 4.5 billion tons of oil. That’s a task equal to creating de novo an energy industry with an output surpassing that of the entire world oil industry—an industry that has taken more than a century to build." --- Vaclav Smil

 ......

The Wall Street Journal: What is the central message of your movie?

Mr. Ruppert: It is not possible to continue infinite consumption and infinite population growth on a finite planet.

WSJ: So what do you believe needs to be done first?

Mr. Ruppert: Two things are critically important: A real worldwide transparent effort to determine how much oil is really left. Screw state secrets. I don't care what the Saudis, Russians, BP or Chavez want to hide. We have to clean up those books just exactly as the same way that we need to clean up the books on Wall Street. Secondly, we need to establish a second strategic petroleum reserve of refined product for state, county and municipal use because I really foresee a serious oil shock coming as soon as this ersatz recovery starts to push up the global GDP and demand for electricity. We have to make sure we have basic services.

WSJ: In no uncertain terms, you discount all alternative fuel options in the film, calling clean coal a contradiction and ethanol a "joke." How can you be so sure?

Mr. Ruppert: With 800 million internal combustion-powered vehicles on the planet and the fact that oil powers 90% of transportation, there is nothing that replaces what oil does. And transportation, of course, is what makes everything work, from shipping products to shipping people. And you cannot plug any alternative technologies into a 2008 GMC SUV or a 747 airplane. One of the things that I've also stressed is how much energy goes into making products: There's seven gallons of oil in every tire, and all plastics, paints and resins are made from oil.

WSJ: Do you think there's a greater chance of things turning around under the Obama administration?

Mr. Ruppert: No, it's not a matter of political party. It's a matter of energy. And money is useless without energy and money has no respect for power or ideology. We have to reconnect with the requirements that we're living on a planet that's falling apart. And we have to maintain some relationship that's separate from the illusory power of money. Clearly, the power in this country is not in Washington, it's in New York, with the Fed and with Wall Street.

WSJ: How do you see Wall Street playing a role?

Mr. Ruppert: Until you change the way money works, you change nothing. The current economic paradigm calls for infinite growth, from fractional reserve banking to compact interest. So Wall Street needs to somehow help us find an economy that works without requiring more and more consumption.

 .....

Michael Ruppert on Oil, Energy and 'Collapse' - WSJ.com

 11-4-2009

-------------------------------------------------------

Urban Prairies, Ground Zero De-industrialization, and Paranoia:

Personal bankruptcies surge 9%

Number of Americans filing for bankruptcy continues to climb. Total bankruptcies expected to top 1.4 million in 2009, highest in 4 years.

By Hibah Yousuf, CNNMoney.com staff reporter

http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/04/news/economy/October_consumer_bankruptcy/index.htm?postversion=2009110412

Last Updated: November 4, 2009: 12:50 PM ET

 NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The number of Americans filing personal bankruptcies surged 9% in October and were on target for the highest annual total in four years, according to a report issued Wednesday.

The American Bankruptcy Institute, an industry research firm that relies on data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center, said 135,914 consumers filed for bankruptcy last month. Almost a third of the bankruptcies were filed under Chapter 13, in which consumers are put on a repayment plan of up to five years.

"The nearly 9% increase in consumer bankruptcy filings in October, together with a 7% jump reported in business cases, demonstrates the sustained stress on the U.S. economy," said ABI executive director Samuel Gerdano.

The group forecasts total bankruptcies to exceed 1.4 million in 2009, which would be the highest since 2005. It would also be an increase of at least 30% from last year.

"People are still carrying a lot of debt in terms of credit cards and home equity loans, and unemployment is still rising," said Maureen Thompson, legislative director for the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in Washington. "All of those factors are hitting consumers at the exact same time."

While some Americans are able to survive by tapping into savings and retirement funds, Thompson said many middle-income families are struggling after becoming unemployed for longer than anticipated. And with their homes values lower, interest rates creeping higher and credit lines reducing, they are being forced to declare bankruptcy.

The last time bankruptcies were this high was due to a change in the law rather than deteriorating economic circumstances. In October 2005, Congress implemented legislation making it harder for consumers to prove that they should be allowed to clear their debts in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, forcing more to file under Chapter 13.

To dodge the change, Americans rushed to file for bankruptcy in the months before the law went into effect.

 Thompson said an economy that puts people back to work will begin to lower the number of Americans filing for bankruptcy, but she is "not expecting the numbers to turn around in the foreseeable future."

Kaman:

...many middle-income families are struggling after becoming unemployed for longer than anticipated. And with their homes values lower, interest rates creeping higher and credit lines reducing,....

Thompson said an economy that puts people back to work will begin to lower the number of Americans filing for bankruptcy, but she is "not expecting the numbers to turn around in the foreseeable future."

This is why the supposed "recovery" is such a farce. The government's colossal waste of resources on the financial sector and other various "bailouts" is going to make the coming collapse all the more spectacular. Couple this with the energy tsunami that is coming and you know why Chris Martenson is currently looking for good farm land to become self sufficient.

Here's another article from today that scares the piss out of me:

05 Nov 2009: Analysis

The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction by Fred Pearce: Yale ...

 

...the massive amounts of nitrogen sent coursing through the planet’s ecosystems are growing fast. We have learned to fear carbon and the changes it can cause to our climate. But one day soon we may learn to fear the nitrogen fix even more.

A major international survey published in September in Nature listed the nitrogen cycle as one of the three “planetary boundaries” that human interventions have disturbed so badly that they threaten the future habitability of the Earth. The others — according to the study by Johann Rockstrom, of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and 27 other environmental scientists – are climate change and biodiversity loss.

Nitrogen affects more parts of the planet’s life-support systems than almost any other element, says James Galloway of the University of Virginia, who predicts: “In the worst-case scenario, we will move towards a nitrogen-saturated planet, with polluted and reduced biodiversity, increased human health risks and an even more perturbed greenhouse gas balance.”

The problem is that we waste most of Haber’s fertilizer. Of 80 million tons spread onto fields in fertilizer each year, only 17 million tons gets into food. The rest goes missing, washing into ecosystems. This is partly because the fertilizer is wastefully applied, and partly because the new green-revolution crops developed to grow fat on nitrogen fertilizer are also wasteful of the nutrient. The nitrogen efficiency of the world’s cereals has fallen from 80 percent in 1960 to just 30 percent today.

Artificial nitrogen washes in drainage water from almost every field in the world. It is as ubiquitous in water as man-made carbon dioxide is in the air. It is accumulating in the world’s rivers and underground water reserves, choking waterways with algae and making water reserves unfit to drink without expensive clean-up.

Most of the man-made nitrogen fertilizer ever produced has been applied to fields in the last quarter-century. Nature has some ability to reverse man-made fixing of nitrogen, converting it back into an inert gas — a process called denitrification. But last year, Patrick Mulholland of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee reported that the system is being overwhelmed. Many rivers in the U.S. are now so nitrogen-saturated that they are losing their ability to denitrify pollution.

Most of this excess nitrogen ends up in the oceans, where it is killing whole ecosystems. Excess nitrogen is the cause of the growing number of oxygen-depleted “dead zones” in the oceans, says Mulholland.

Why should a fertilizer kill? It is just too much of a good thing. It over-fertilizes the water, producing such large volumes of algae and other biomass that it consumes all the oxygen in the water, causing the ecosystem to crash. Coastal bays, inlets and estuaries around the world are succumbing.

A study earlier this year found that algal blooms dump domoic acid, a neurotoxin, onto the ocean floor, where it persists for weeks. “The first signs are often birds washing up on the shore or seals acting funny, aggressive and twitching, looking as if they were drunk,” says Claudia Benitez-Nelson of the University of South Carolina.

Notoriously, fertilizer running down the Mississippi-Missouri river system creates a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Typically, around 20,000 square kilometers of ocean forms a layer without oxygen or fish – killed by the nitrogen fix.

The number of dead zones has “spread exponentially since the 1960s,” says Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point. He counted more than 400 in a study for Science last year. They now cover a quarter of a million square kilometers, usually where rivers discharge large amounts of fertilizers and sewage into relatively enclosed oceans.

You find these dead zones in the waters between Japan and Korea; in the Black Sea, where an invasion of alien jelly fish in the 1980s wiped out most native species; off the tourist beaches of the northern Adriatic; in Chesapeake Bay and the ocean waters off Oregon; and in the semi-enclosed Baltic Sea, the largest dead zone in world.

....

Outside Europe, few initially took up chemical fertilizers to intensify their farming. It was usually cheaper and easier to expand farming — draining marshes, ploughing prairies and clearing forests. But by the 1960s, as world population soared, fertilizer manufacture took off, and plant breeders developed new lines of high-yielding crops that responded best to the nitrogen fix. During this “green revolution,” there was an eight-fold increase in global production of nitrogen fertilizer from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Today, of 175 million tons of nitrogen applied to the world’s croplands in a year, almost 50 percent is from chemical fertilizer. It has raised the “carrying capacity” of the world’s soils from 1.9 people per hectare of farmland to 4.3 — and 10 in China, where applications reach twice anything seen in Europe.

This is a profound change to the biochemistry of life on Earth — and to our own bodies. Today, much of the nitrogen in our bodies comes not from biological sources but from giant chemical factories. We are, in a real sense, as much chemistry as biology. Vaclav Smil, the distinguished Canadian researcher into food and the environment at the University of Manitoba, calls the nitrogen fix “an immense and dangerous experiment.”

Besides fertilizer, we are also making biologically available nitrogen by burning fossil fuels. Power stations emit nitrogen oxides that create acid rain, the environmental scourge of industrialized countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Nitrogen oxides in the air are also potent greenhouse gases, adding to global warming, and even reach the stratosphere, where they join chlorine and bromine compounds in eating up the protective ozone layer.

“Most of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are receiving doses of nitrogen from the air and in water at levels known to damage many species,” according to Gareth Phoenix of the University of Sheffield in England. Yet the issue has never been addressed by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

.....

We have four col­lid­ing ‘lin­ear’ sys­tems, all push­ing against the ‘cir­cle’ of our blue mar­ble float­ing through space, planet Earth: human pop­u­la­tion explod­ing; increas­ing lev­els of fos­silized car­bon being con­sumed, with its waste (mostly CO2) put in our atmos­phere; increas­ing num­bers of food ani­mals for all us humans pro­duc­ing unsus­tain­able lev­els of waste that is also alter­ing the envi­ron­ment; and an atmos­phere absorb­ing all of this about to trip over into an unsta­ble state, which could ren­der life on the planet unin­hab­it­able for us and most other com­plex life forms.

...Going fur­ther, how­ever, Hart­man places a sig­nif­i­cant amount of blame on the eco­nomic and reli­gious ide­olo­gies under­pin­ning mes­sianic beliefs in both the human dom­i­nance of the bios­phere and the right­eously priv­i­leged place of ‘free-market’ cap­i­tal­ism within it. He traces the degra­da­tion of gov­ern­ment by the free mar­ket econ­omy back to the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, and in par­tic­u­lar Pres­i­dent John Adams’ belief in the power of a small rul­ing elite where wealth and power can be con­cen­trated. He fol­lows the power of this polit­i­cal idea into the post-war Chicago school of cap­i­tal­ist eco­nom­ics that influ­enced for­mer Fed­eral Reserve Chair­man Alan Greenspan’s neolib­eral faith in the per­fec­tion of unreg­u­lated eco­nomic mar­kets. As he lev­els now-familiar num­bers about the con­trol of resources in the United States, where the top 1 per­cent of fam­i­lies hold 49 per­cent of the wealth, he alleges that acolytes of neolib­er­al­ism have staged a suc­cess­ful “coup” over the will of the Amer­i­can peo­ple, and it’s one that most Amer­i­cans “don’t even know happened.”

Hart­man is very good at locat­ing the con­tem­po­rary philo­soph­i­cal source of this coup in its free mar­ket mythol­ogy. The resur­gence of this myth comes from the shared pop­u­lar­ity between fic­tion read­ers and eco­nomic elites with the rad­i­cally lib­er­tar­ian and objec­tivist ideas of Ayn Rand, who advo­cated the “virtues of self­ish­ness” and with whom Alan Greenspan was a close friend. Any­one inter­ested in neolib­er­al­ism, Glen Beck, and the Repub­li­can Party would be advised to read this chap­ter. Hart­man chal­lenges this myth by being blunt about the role of the fed­eral government’s his­toric and con­tem­po­rary sub­si­dies, through the tax­pay­ers, to author­i­tar­ian cor­po­ra­tions. “When the cor­po­rate oli­garchy reaches out to take over and merge itself with the pow­ers and insti­tu­tions of gov­ern­ment,” he writes, “it becomes the very def­i­n­i­tion of Mussolini’s ‘fas­cism’: the merger of cor­po­rate and state inter­ests.” This fas­cism is the force that pre­serves the strength of those insti­tu­tions that orga­nize our bio­cul­tural war against the bios­phere, even as it claims only to be ser­vic­ing life’s “growth.” Hart­man sees this force as explic­itly con­nected to older bio­cul­tures of reli­gious patri­archy, and he believes the evo­lu­tion of our global bio­cul­tures as neces­si­tat­ing a new plan­e­tary ethics of gen­der and human reproduction.

Indeed, the tran­si­tion from Thresh­old to The End of Food occurs at the nexus of fas­cist gov­ern­ment, human repro­duc­tion, and oil con­sump­tion. Each of these sys­tems are pred­i­cated on infi­nite growth, and each depends on the other to achieve it. The fas­cism of an infi­nitely expand­ing cap­i­tal­ism has replaced reli­giously man­dated repro­duc­tion as the pri­mary ide­ol­ogy jus­ti­fy­ing human dom­i­nance of the world, and has in turn con­structed a food pro­duc­tion sys­tem that has suc­cess­fully sup­plied enough calo­ries for ever more repro­duc­ing humans. A golden bil­lion of these humans mate­ri­ally ben­e­fit from that fas­cism, even where it directly degrades life for the bot­tom two or three bil­lion. Still, the expo­nen­tial con­ver­sion of the planet’s inor­ganic and organic mat­ter into edi­ble plants and flesh has already become per­haps the sin­gle largest event on Earth since the meteor that killed the dinosaurs some sixty-five mil­lion years ago. The sys­tem that makes this pos­si­ble isn’t big­ger than us; it is us. “The biggest dri­ver of all these processes that are tear­ing our planet apart and putting all life at risk,” he writes, “is the increase in human bio­mass. There is roughly one tril­lion pounds of human flesh on the planet right now.” Hart­man recruits a famil­iar graph of pop­u­la­tion num­bers to illus­trate where this tril­lion pounds came from, but he uses it with far more insight than most by link­ing it to our shrink­ing era of cheap oil. The growth in human pop­u­la­tion was a result of cheap oil, cheap fer­til­izer, cheap pes­ti­cides, and a food dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem that “lets a per­son in Iowa have a lunch of Tilapia fish grown in ponds in China, let­tuce and toma­toes grown in Mex­ico, wine imported from France, and a fruit cup of berries imported from Chile and straw­ber­ries from Nicaragua.” Since the human pop­u­la­tion relies so much on oil, he par­en­thet­i­cally points out that, “indi­rectly, most of us are actu­ally eat­ing oil.” Sim­i­larly, Michael Polan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we are always also eat­ing corn; Roberts would argue that oil helps us to grow a lot of that corn.

And since most of the prof­its from this oil consumption-human repro­duc­tion nexus goes to elite pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions, Hart­man sees the best pos­si­ble move­ment to regain con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion as one that rad­i­cally renews our com­mit­ment to democ­racy. In this new democ­racy, the pri­mary func­tion of gov­ern­ment would be to pro­tect “the com­mons,” or what Hart­man calls “the stuff we all share,” includ­ing the air, pub­lic places, and pub­lic insti­tu­tions. In order to accom­plish this, he prag­mat­i­cally sug­gests that gov­ern­ment revoke a law grant­ing “cor­po­rate per­son­hood,” which legit­imized the legal right of cor­po­ra­tions to shift con­trol of com­mon resources to pri­vately held wealth. Cor­po­rate per­son­hood stems from an 1886 US Supreme Court deci­sion, Santa Clara v. Union Pacific Rail­road. In that deci­sion, court reporter and for­mer rail­road pres­i­dent J.C. Ban­croft Davis added a note to the case claim­ing that Chief Jus­tice Mor­ri­son R. Waite had said “cor­po­ra­tions are per­sons,” and thus should be granted human rights under the Four­teenth Amend­ment — the one that, of all things, promised equal pro­tec­tion and due process under the law after slav­ery. For Hart­man, the first legal step toward a real demo­c­ra­tic sys­tem might begin by insert­ing the word “nat­ural” before the word “per­son” in the Four­teenth Amendment.

Given this logic, the key to under­stand­ing fas­cism in the United States isn’t to study the gov­ern­ment, but to study the econ­omy; and if one stud­ies the econ­omy, one must turn to the pro­duc­tion of “super­abun­dance” through the mod­ern food sys­tem. The suc­cess and health of this sys­tem is the key to under­stand­ing the pop­u­lar­ity of fas­cism in the United States. If you are what you eat, then eat­ing in this sys­tem is a sig­nif­i­cant lever one pulls for either fas­cism or democ­racy, even though, quite per­versely, the less choice one has about what one eats the more likely one is eat­ing in a sys­tem built on a fas­cism of cheap oil. This is the case because, in effect, the cheaper one’s food the more likely the food is the prod­uct of author­i­tar­ian cor­po­ra­tions that have used cheap meth­ods of “just-in-time” pro­duc­tion to get that cheap food to one’s home. This food comes from cheap oil, cheap labor, and cheap ani­mal life. Fur­ther­more, it has “exter­nal­ized” the costs of waste like car­bon diox­ide out of the price one pays at the store. The price of this car­bon pol­lu­tion comes in addi­tion to other forms of pol­lu­tion: toxic water, increased muta­tions in human-animal dis­eases and viruses, and the destruc­tion of vast ecosys­tems for the mono­cul­ture fields of corn, soy­beans, and cat­tle. Con­sumers don’t pay for these costs in the price of a Coke, but they pay a price by breath­ing fouler air, by destroy­ing diverse forms of life, and by pay­ing higher med­ical costs for any num­ber of vis­its and treat­ments for one’s bod­ily degra­da­tion from the con­sump­tion of the cheap food, or from the can­cers that appear as human biofeed­back within the toxic ecosystem.

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Our Planet, Our Selves | The Advocate

Danger From Two Directions: Ourselves and Nature.

Human technology is becoming more powerful all the time. We already face grave danger from nuclear weapons, and soon molecular manufacturing technologies and artificial general intelligence could pose new existential threats. We are also faced with slower, but serious, threats on the environmental side: Global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation/desertification, ecosystem collapse, etc.

 Looking back and saying “Things have been fine so far, why worry?” is not satisfactory. We’ve only recently acquired technologies that can quickly and easily kill vast numbers of us while compromising the viability of the Earth (if only temporarily), and new more powerful technologies (that have huge upsides too) are on the horizon. Also, because of a kind of anthropic principle, we know that if we’re sitting here saying “Nothing too bad happened before”, it means we’re still alive to think about it; we’re a biased sample.