The Revenge of Karl Marx

Marxism is a discredited ideology.  We get that.  It's been tried, didn't work.  But there's still much to learn from the old German philosopher.  If you leave aside his unworkable solutions and focus on his prophesies about unrestrained capitalism, you get a picture that's eerily similar to what we see enveloping us today.

The creator of the dark, HBO hit series, "The Wire," has written a chilling piece for The Guardian, entitled, "There Are Now Two Americas.  My Country is a Horror Show."

David Simon, The Wire

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.

We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we’re supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?

And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we’re going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.

Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.

It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don’t let it work entirely. And that’s a hard idea to think – that there isn’t one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we’ve dug for ourselves. But man, we’ve dug a mess.

...It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn’t need, and that was the engine that drove us.

It wasn’t just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.

And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.

Labour doesn’t get to win all its arguments, capital doesn’t get to. But it’s in the tension, it’s in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.

The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn’t matter that they won all the time, it didn’t matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It’s astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don’t need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I’m not connected to society. I don’t care how the road got built, I don’t care where the firefighter comes from, I don’t care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It’s the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

...Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.

And so in my country you’re seeing a horror show. You’re seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you’re seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You’re seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

...And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That’s the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.

And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour’s a cost. And if labour is diminished, let’s translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn’t want to go forward at this point without it. But it’s not a blueprint for how to build the just society.

So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody’s going to get left behind. We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.

We’re either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we’re going to keep going the way we’re going, at which point there’s going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody’s going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there’s always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I’m losing faith.

The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn’t there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.

The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what’s a good idea or what’s not, or what’s valued and what’s not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.

 ...I don’t know what we do if we can’t actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I’m arguing for now, I’m not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.

US Navy Predicts Ice-Free Arctic in 2016

At first they told us it would happen late this century.   Then mid-century.   Now the United States Navy expects the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2016.  Let's see, it's 2013.  OMG! That's just another three-years.

An ongoing US Department of Energy-backed research project led by a US Navy scientist predicts that the Arctic could lose its summer sea ice cover as early as 2016 - 84 years ahead of conventional model projections.

The project, based out of the US Naval Postgraduate School's Department of Oceanography, uses complex modelling techniques that make its projections more accurate than others.
A paper by principal investigator Professor Wieslaw Maslowski in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences sets out some of the findings so far of the research project:

"Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3, one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover."

The paper is highly critical of global climate models (GCM) and even the majority of regional models, noting that "many Arctic climatic processes that are omitted from, or poorly represented in, most current-generation GCMs" which "do not account for important feedbacks among various system components." There is therefore "a great need for improved understanding and model representation of physical processes and interactions specific to polar regions that currently might not be fully accounted for or are missing in GCMs."

Those of us - well, nearly all of us,  who live along Canada's southern border - fail to grasp the significance to our immediate future that the warming Arctic holds.  It's not just bad news for polar bears and people who hunt with snowmobiles.  It's a far more powerful Arctic atmosphere that whipsaws our own temperature and precipitation patterns.   It's the new Polar Jet Stream and the Rossby waves that generates.  As Gwynne Dyer put it some months ago:

A “known unknown,” in the case of the Arctic Ocean, is how long it will be before the entire sea is ice-free at the end of each summer. The last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, talked about that happening some time in the second half of this century, but it couldn’t be more specific.
The panel usually underestimates the rate of climatic change, but even the pessimists didn’t think we’d get there before the 2030s. I did encounter one maverick at the National Ice and Snow Data Centre who thought it might happen in this decade, but nobody actually knew. A “known unknown,” in other words.

As for the impact that an ice-free Arctic Ocean might have on climates elsewhere, it would obviously accelerate the global warming trend, but beyond that there wasn’t much to go on. This was the territory of the “unknown unknowns.” Big things might happen to the complex atmospheric system of the planet when a major chunk of it suddenly changes, but nobody knew what.

Now we begin to see the consequences. The polar jet stream — an air current that circles the globe in the higher northern latitudes and separates cold, wet weather to the north from warmer, drier weather to the south — is changing its behaviour.

...a warmer Arctic reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate and polar zones. That, in turn, slows the wind speeds in the zone between the two and increases the “wave amplitude” of the jet stream. The jet stream flows around the planet in great swooping curves, like a river crossing a flat plain, and those curves — Rossby waves, in scientific language — are getting bigger and slower.

This is a recipe for extreme weather. In the old days, the Rossby waves went past fast, bringing the alternating of rainy and sunny weather that characterized the mid-latitude climate. Now, they hang around much longer and generate more extreme weather events: droughts and heat waves, or prolonged rain and flooding, or blizzards and long, hard freezes.

The temperate zone has been seeing a lot of that sort of thing in the past couple of years — much more than usual. It’s cutting deeply into food production in the major breadbaskets of the planet, such as the U.S. Midwest and southern Russia, which is why food prices are going up so fast. This was an “unknown unknown.” Nobody saw it coming.

All the scenarios that the militaries of various countries were working with assumed that climate change would hit food production very hard in the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world, and that is still true. But the scenarios also assumed that the temperate regions of the planet would still be able to feed themselves well (and even have a surplus left over to export) for many decades to come.

 

Nobody saw it coming, indeed.   Nobody who mattered anyway.   Those who did see this coming were derided as alarmists and ignored.   Now it is our new reality and what are we doing about it?  In Calgary they're looking at building floodways and restricting new construction on their ever-expanding flood plains.   Toronto is also talking about finding mechanisms to flow floodwaters into Lake Ontario.    That's all well and good but it fixes a problem somewhat, temporarily.  It solves nothing.

 

Why are we not hearing any calls to action from the Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill?  Is ignoring this going to make it better for the country and our people or is it merely shrewd politics?  Why do I even have to ask?

Why Canadians Need to Lead the Road to a New Order

Every day more of us are realizing that growth-based capitalism and neoclassical economics have failed.  Adam Smith gave the growth paradigm two hundred years and he was right.  Mankind has reached the limits of growth.  We're exhausting our farmland, we're devastating our great forests, we're collapsing our global fisheries and we're draining our life-sustaining aquifers.

Today "more" means finding a way that sees someone else have "less."  This takes many forms.  Reagan ushered in an era of perversion that saw wealth transferred out of the blue and white collar middle class to accrue, unearned, to the upper class.  The markets didn't do that, it wasn't merit based, it was the product of legislation that endowed the select few with subsidies, deferrals, grants and tax relief that represented vast fortunes transferred from the middle class to the wealthiest of the wealthy.  Meanwhile working class citizens saw their wages stagnate, or worse, despite substantial increases in their productivity - another benefit that transferred wealth to the privileged.   More, for a few, meant a great deal less for the many.  Not only was their wealth transferred away from them but, with it, went much of their political power and influence.

Academics like Jared Diamond and others reveal that when societies fail, it tends to happen when they're at their zenith and it comes on fast.  It's as though they implode.  One reason for that violent collapse is that societies, as they grow find future growth ever more difficult.  In order to grow ever larger, resort must be had eventually to conjuring tricks, sleight of hand.

We've grown our population threefold since the end of WWII.  We have trebled our numbers in the span of less than one lifetime.  The enormity of that single fact is almost too much to contemplate for most people and so we go on planning for a better tomorrow by ignoring it.  We have to treat our overpopulation problem as what neoclassical economists call an "externality".  You simply don't factor it into the equation.  We do that because we can get away with it, for a little while longer.

Around the world, from Lake Mead and the once mighty Colorado River, to the Middle East and Asia, to large regions of Africa, our freshwater resources are in distress.  We have grown mankind's numbers so massively by turbo-charging our agricultural output through intensive use of fertilizers and groundwater.  It's all been done by sleight of hand.  Now, in many places, over-exploited groundwater resources are nearing depletion.   In some of India's prime agricultural regions they're running out of groundwater even as they find they have so exhausted the soil from overproduction that they now require twice as much fertilizer to obtain a decent crop.  It's a race to the bottom, the precursor to societal collapse.

One of the world's leading NGOs, the Global Footprint Network, analyzes man's consumption of biomass in relation to the Earth's capacity to renew it.  It looks at our ecological footprint, not just our carbon footprint, in terms of whether we can be said to be living sustainably, within the limits of our planet's abilities to support us.   As you might have guessed, the answer is resoundingly "no."

Biomass includes everything we eat. It is what we wear.  It is the wood we use to build our homes and heat our stoves. It is the stuff from which we produce ethanol and bio-diesel.  In its ancient form it is our fossil fuels.   It is also how we cleanse our air, our water and even our soil of man-made pollution.

We're depleting Earth's renewable resources at unsustainable rates.  GFN calculates the date each year on which we go into "overshoot."  That is the day on which mankind has consumed the quantity of renewable resources the Earth produces in an entire year.  Five or six years ago, Overshoot Day fell well into October.  This year Overshoot Day occurred in August.   That means we're using an entire year's production of renewable resources in just under eight months. That, in turn, means we're dependent on the Earth's reserve resources to meet our needs for just over a third of a year.

How do we consume more renewable resources than the Earth can produce?  We go to extreme lengths to do it.  We deplete our freshwater aquifers, pumping them dry.  We pursue and collapse, one global fishery after another, emptying the oceans.  We deforest faster than we or nature can reforest.   We over-exploit our farmland with excessive irrigation and fertilization, in effect poisoning it until it we transform it into useless desert.  We contaminate our air, our water and our land resources far faster than nature can cleanse them, steadily bringing them to the point of toxicity.  And when we, the rich countries, run short we use the advantage of our wealth to just get what we need from the poor countries.

A few years ago the British government released a study showing that the U.K. consumes foodstuffs equivalent to its entire annual agricultural production by Easter.  In a world of permanent food insecurity (U.N. F.A.O.) that means Britain is a global food parasite.

Very soon, within a matter of decades at the outset, climate change impacts are expected to cut global agricultural yields by up to 30%.   Breadbasket states such as Russia, the United States and Australia have already endured terrible crop losses due to climate change.   What happens if that becomes a regular occurrence?

Which brings me to you and me and our country, Canada.   In the assessment of the Global Footprint Network, we are one of just a handful of countries (most of them northern) that remain in a healthy biomass surplus.

Even though our overall biocapacity has declined since 1960 it remains about double our ecological footprint.   That's not very helpful without something for comparison so here's how our neighbour to the south stacks up.

You'll see that, for the United States, the footprint redline hovers way above the biocapacity greenline.   That depicts a nation living on borrowed time.  You might find this surprising, but the U.K. is in worse shape yet.

Britain's last Labour government knew the country was heading for trouble and sought to introduce measures to reduce the nation's ecological deficit but it was too late.   The Cameron Conservatives aren't interested in realities like this.

As for the world, here's another dandy graphic.

This shows that somewhere around 1970, mankind's consumption began exceeding the Earth's resource renewal capacity.   Today we're using 1.5 times resource capacity.  If we keep going on "moderate business-as-usual" mode, by 2050, we'll be needing almost three times the Earth's renewable resource capacity.

What do you think mankind's chances are of reaching 2050 with out civilization more or less intact without decoupling the global economy from the lethal growth model that's driving us now?

If we want to follow the orange line to the one Earth model we must bring our consumption into line with the Earth's renewal capacity.  That means abandoning the growth paradigm, slashing production and consumption, and even more sharply curbing greenhouse gas emissions and other contamination of all forms.

Canada should start the dialogue about transitioning to a new, "steady state" economic order.  We still have the option of living within our means but that's not assured in the long run.   As Gwynne Dyer wrote in his book "Climate Wars," when it comes to climate change, each nation's greatest threat is the country that lies immediately between it and the equator.   Take one more look at the graphs and figure out what that means for Canada.

Actively advocating for a global transition to steady state economics is essential for the peaceful future of our grandkids if they're to have one.   It'll take a federal government with courage and vision with strong support from the provinces but waiting for others to decide our fate isn't much of an option.

The World's Loss

Nelson Mandela, dead at 95.   The world is a poorer place.

Oh Great, Toe Jam Brie - Just Stop It Already

Can't we focus on something else, like a cure for cancer?  Microbiologists have helped produce human cheese.  They've gathered bacterial swabs from various parts of the human body (armpits and toes are the best), grown the bacteria in petri dishes and then added it to milk to create cheese culture.

"So we had donors give us cotton swabs from different parts of their bodies and then I, in the lab, grew those cultures on petri dishes and then took the bacteria from the petri dishes and put it in the milk," [UCLA microbiologist Christina] Agapakis explains.

She says cheese fans might not realize that many of the bacteria types prized in traditional cheese-making are the same as those found on the human body.

"Between the toes, that's where you have lot of similarities with cheese bacteria," Agapakis says. "Toes were a prime location for swabbing. Armpits were another source we were interested in."

One reader of this story recalled a Kids in the Hall sketch where the four were gathered on kitchen chairs and asked where does cheese come from.  With that each took out a knife, scraped beneath their toenails and tossed the scrapings into a coffee tin.  Close enough.

Ben Didn't Bin By Accident.

He's a law professor. He's chief counsel of the PMO and the prime minister's personal legal adviser.  He's just negotiated an under-the-table cash deal with outside counsel on behalf of the chief of staff of the PMO.  When that business is finished, Benjamin Perrin  barely has time to clean out his desk before hightailing it back to the west coast.  Before he's out the door he makes sure to delete all his e-mails pertaining to the quiet cash deal.

Later, when he's confronted over the Duffy-Wright-Harper scandal, Perrin  claims to have had nothing to do with it. (Hint, that's a lie)

For the longest time the PMO denies it has any trace of e-mails written by its former legal counsel dealing with the Wright-Duffy-Harper scandal.   Nothing to see here, move along.  Then, it appears, the RCMP, having read plenty of Ben's e-mails turned over by Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy, grabs a handful of PMO crotch, threatens to do something excruciatingly unmentionable (like toss the office and grab the hard drives or read Magna Carta repeatedly until their ears bled) and - voila - the "lost" e-mails are found. 

Except they weren't ever really lost.  Ben binned'em - or so he thought.  He deleted his e-mails relating to the Wright-Duffy-Harper under-the-table cash deal.  Exactly when isn't clear but may be problematic in its own right for the learned Perrin.  Did he delete them when they were sent or within a day or two afterward or did he delete them in the course of his mandated, pre-departure purge?  Either way, the rules are pretty clear about what may and may not be deleted and Ben ran afoul of those rules.

Chances are Ben left a lot of e-mails.   They would be essential for his successor to, well, succeed him.  It's called continuity.    How many did he choose to retain versus how many did he delete?

It would be helpful, potentially very helpful, to learn if Ben ever communicated with the prime minister by e-mail.   Stranger things have happened.  After all, Nixon was caught with hours of tape recordings.  It's a long shot but, hey.

Ben is in what's known in legal parlance as "a mess."  Right now he's got to be weighing his loyalty to Stephen Harper against his interest in a reasonably bright future.  That's the problem for Steve.  Too many people are in Perrin's situation or something akin to it.  One person might fall on his sword to save Caesar but twelve, or more? 

Don't Count on Slow and Gradual. National Research Council Warns Climate Change will Be Fast and Abrupt.

The U.S. National Research Council has released a 200-page report warning that climate change is coming on much faster than we appreciate and that we have to prepare for 'abrupt consequences' arriving within years, decades at the outside.  

The report, "Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change, Anticipating Surprises," is available at no charge  online here.  Printed copies are $57.

The report says abrupt changes like melting ice in the Arctic Ocean and mass species extinctions have already started and are worse than predicted. It says thousands of species are changing their ranges, seasonal patterns or in some cases are going extinct because of human-caused climate change. Species in danger include some coral; pika, a rabbitlike creature; the Hawaiian silversword plant and polar bears.

Study co-author Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University compared the threat of abrupt climate change effects to the random danger of drunk drivers.

"You can't see it coming, so you can't prepare for it. The faster it is, the less you see it coming, the more it costs," Alley told The Associated Press. "If you see the drunk driver coming, you can get out of the way."

The photograph, by the way, is a now familiar sight to most British Columbians.  It reveals the vast swathes of forest being killed off by Mountain Pine and Lodgepole Pine Beetle infestations that have ravaged the province because we no longer get enough sufficiently cold winter days needed to suppress the parasites' numbers.   What you see in this photograph is exactly what it looks like.

Margaret Wente on Poisoning the Planet

According to Margaret Wente, or at least what she heard from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Athabasca bitumen is a godsend for the poorest, most vulnerable people of the world.

Well, oil is not the devil. In fact, oil and other energy resources are the salvation for billions of impoverished people in developing nations. You can’t have human development without energy. And without energy – which, for the next few decades, mostly means fossil fuels – they will continue to lead miserable, degrading lives. So the next time you hear someone argue that we should leave our oil in the ground, give a thought to the people sleeping in the streets of Calcutta. It would be nice if they could cook their food with solar energy. But that day is still a long way off.

The biggest demand for energy no longer comes from the developed nations, where carbon emissions are actually in decline. It’s coming from India, China and the rest of the developing world, which now account for the majority of global emissions every year. China now emits as much CO2 per person as the European Union. This dramatic shift in global emissions makes the Kyoto Protocol – which is based on the global distribution of emissions in 1990 – hopelessly obsolete.

I won't go on.  In fact I'm just going to close this off now before I'm tempted to say what I think.

Our Afghan War is Still Claiming Canadian Soldiers' Lives

Four suicides in as many days.  You really don't need to know more than that to grasp how badly our government has failed the men and women it sent into fight a useless war in the heartland of the Great Game, Afghanistan.

Think it wasn't a useless war?  Guess who has suddenly become Hamid Karzai supporters?  The Taliban, that's who.  Yes, that's the very same bunch we were supposed to annihilate on behalf of Karzai and in defence of democracy and human rights for the Afghan people.  That Taliban.

Fighting an insurgency is tough on western soldiers.   Vietnam supposedly taught that lesson to the Americans - at least until Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their coven of neo-con Chickenhawks rolled into Washington.

Fighting a losing war against an insurgency is even tougher.   The Vietnam Memorial in Washington contains the names of all those Americans who died in that war.   There are more than 50,000 names dutifully inscribed on those panels.  What you won't see are the names of the more than 50,000 American veterans who took their own lives after that war.   They're every bit as dead and from the same war but, well...

Harper wrung every last drop of political capital he could squeeze out of the broken bodies of our dead and wounded soldiers but the word 'Afghanistan' never crosses his lips any more.  He'd far sooner revel in the fictional glory of the war of 1812 and, besides, he has to get the bunting out for next year's centennial of the Great War.

Romeo Dallaire crashed his car into a stanchion on Parliament Hill.  He said he nodded off from sheer fatigue, having been unable to sleep because of these soldier suicides.  At least somebody cares.

Pricing Natural Capital - Long Overdue

She's the Chief Executive of a mid-sized British investment trust and obviously still believes in the myth of sustainable growth but Katherine Garret-Cox has written an interesting commentary of economic growth and natural capital published in The Guardian.

As the global economy shows signs of coming out of recession, it must be encouraged to do so on a sustainable path, rather than simply storing up problems for the future. If our expansion over the next five to 10 years exploits and erodes our natural capital without any regard to its ability to recover, we run the risk of degradation of local, regional or even global ecosystems and potential economic collapse.

Leading investment economists were asked recently about the value derived from ecosystem services and how they have built this into their forecasts – the responses were illuminating. Some said the subject is too big to meaningfully contemplate, others acknowledged it as a problem but were unwilling to think about it.

What Garret-Cox suggests, obliquely, is that investment economists, like all adherents of neoclassical economics, have become detached from reality.   To them, natural capital is an 'externality' that exists outside their frame of reference.   More honestly, they exclude it because it completely undermines their assumptions of perpetual growth.  To them the economy operates independent of the environment, the biosphere, not as a subset of it.   They cannot accept that the economy cannot grow larger than the world and its resources.   Most of our political leadership adheres to their conventional view.

She advocates the valuation of natural capital and its stewardship by business while steering clear of the obvious - the need for governments to both value and price natural capital - the air, water, ecology that belong not to business as some sort of freebie to be taken for granted, exploited and abused as it has so often in the past,  but to the public.  It is by pricing natural capital that you deter its exploitation and its wastage by those who would have it for free.  It is by pricing natural capital that you cut off one head of the corporate welfare state.

Pricing natural capital is a fundamental cornerstone to the implementation of steady state or Full Earth economics.   Garret-Cox is on the right track.  She just doesn't go nearly far enough.

A Different Focus for Christmas

Whew, survived Black Friday, Black Friday Weekend, Cyber-Monday - the lot.  I didn't buy anything.   Didn't even go out to the shops.  Yet my newspapers, the TV programmes and my e-mail accounts were chock full of imperatives that I not miss out on incredible bargains here, there, seemingly everywhere.

Christmas shopping used to be an ordeal, hunting down the latest thing everybody just had to have.   That was especially true when my kids were growing up.

I've switched my buying focus this year and have made the entire shopping experience amazingly easy.   Now I shop from just two categories - consumable or durable.   If it can't be ingested or if it won't last, retaining its utility for years, even decades to come, I don't carry it to the till.

Somebody appreciates fine scotch.  Perfect.  Buy a really, really good bottle of scotch.  There, that's it.  Just one thing, one present.   Something highly appreciated if not outright cherished.

Durables.  Head straight to the kitchen shop.  A quality mandolin or a mezzaluna or a good santoku.  (Here's a tip - the world's absolute best garlic press - the Kuhn Rikon 2315 Epicurean garlic press.  It's gotta be the 2315.)

It's simple.  A good knife should give a lifetime of good service.  It will be one more thing to encourage the recipient to cook quality food at home.   Maybe when they reach for it ten or twenty years from now they'll even remember who gave it to them.

I don't know how many Sony Walkmen I bought as gifts 20-years ago.  I don't remember who I gave them to.  I don't know where they are today and I'm positive neither do the people who received them from me.

For me this year, I've asked for nothing.  That doesn't mean I simply haven't asked for anything in particular.  It means that I have requested nothing, no gift at all. Why?  Well, for the past couple of months I've been looking at all the stuff that surrounds me, envelopes me.   Any direction I turn, there's stuff staring me right in the face.

I can't even recall where some stuff came from any more.  Was it given to me? Did I buy it?  If I bought it, what was I thinking?

The next step was to look at something and try to figure out if I really wanted it? Did it do something useful for me?  Did I enjoy looking at it, art for example?  If not, what was I doing with it?

There were a couple of things that had been given to me and that the givers expect to see in my home when they visit.  I suppose I could have had a garage sale but I'm a poor organizer and I don't like people enough to want to mingle with strangers as they sift derisively through my stuff and try to haggle over the difference between half a buck and a quarter.   So I'm beginning to flag things that I'll be taking over to the Sally Ann's once the holidays are passed and the odds of unintentionally offending a loved one wane.

It's going to be a different Christmas this year.  I don't know, maybe I won't like getting nothing.  Hard to say.  Can't tell without trying.

New Tanker Proposal - Smoke & Mirrors?

As I read the story, two words came to mind - "dry judgment."  That's when a party wins a judgment against another party that has no assets.   The judgment is dry, useless.

The Times Colonist reports that some unnamed, government-appointed panel has released a 66-page report calling for improvements to oil tanker operations  on  the west coast.

The key recommendation, apparently, is the removal of the current $161-million liability cap for an oil spill in favour of unlimited liability.

Okay, sure.  We know the decades old and still ongoing Exxon Valdez tanker catastrophe has already exceeded something in the order of $6-billion and that was a relatively small tanker load of conventional crude oil, not a megatanker spill of the far more troublesome diluted bitumen or dilbit.

Removing the liability cap sounds good - in theory - but it's meaningless if the party responsible doesn't have the wherewithal to pay.   A judgment for six or twenty-billion dollars against a company that has a couple of hundred million in assets is worth a couple of hundred million dollars, no more.

Now, a judgment for twenty-billion dollars jointly and severally backed by Enbridge, the dilbit producer/exporter, and the province of Alberta, well that might just be worth something.  Maybe we'd settle for Jasper or Banff, maybe both.  You get the idea.

Corporatism Goes to War Against Clean Energy

In the United States, corporatism's own 'special forces command' is known as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.   ALEC is the command centre from which marching orders are issued to its shock troops, America's 'bought and paid for' Congress.  Now ALEC is marshalling its forces to go to war against clean energy, especially homeowners who have the temerity to fit their homes with solar energy panels.   They've even coined a pejorative name for these upstarts - 'freeriders.'

Over the coming year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalising individual homeowners and weakening state clean energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama's main channel for climate action.

Details of Alec's strategy to block clean energy development at every stage – from the individual rooftop to the White House – are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington this week.

About 800 state legislators and business leaders are due to attend the three-day event, which begins on Wednesday with appearances by the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson and the Republican budget guru and fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan.
.
 Documents obtained by the Guardian show the core elements of its strategy began to take shape at the previous board meeting in Chicago in August, with meetings of its energy, environment and agriculture subcommittees.

In November, Arizona became the first state to charge customers for installing solar panels. The fee, which works out to about $5 a month for the average homeowner, was far lower than that sought by the main electricity company, which was seeking to add up to $100 a month to customers' bills.

Gabe Elsner, director of the Energy and Policy Institute, said the attack on small-scale solar was part of the larger Alec project to block clean energy. "They are trying to eliminate pro-solar policies in the states to protect utility industry profits," he said.

For 2014, Alec plans to promote a suite of model bills and resolutions aimed at blocking Barack Obama from cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and state governments from promoting the expansion of wind and solar power through regulations known as Renewable Portfolio Standards.

This is What It Means to be Lower-Middle-Class in Today's America. Turning of the Screw.

The rich and powerful have coined a name for them.   They're called the Precariat.   These are blue and white collar workers who work full time for meagre wages that leave them in a state of constant precarious economic vulnerability.  They're dependent on their next paycheque.  It's all that keeps them from plunging, along with their family, into poverty.  Noam Chomsky wrote about this growing class and their plight in Huffington Post.

The venerable, Brookings Institution, no hotbed of pinko radicalism, has just published an essay entitled, "A Dozen Facts About America's Struggling Lower-Middle-Class." 

1. More than half of families in the United States earn $60,000 or less per year.

More than half of America’s working-age families with children under age eighteen (approximately 20.1 million families) have annual incomes of $60,000 or below. This is true whether we consider only earned wages and salary, or if we use a broader definition of pretax, pretransfer income, which also includes some unearned sources of income, such as investment income and alimony payments. Figure 1 shows the distributions for working-age families by (1) earned income, and (2) pretax, pretransfer income. (Neither of these measures includes taxes or transfer payments.).
The blue and green dotted lines in figure 1, corresponding to the right axis, show the cumulative share of families with income under various thresholds. Around 40 percent of families earn $40,000 or less each year, 54 percent of families earn $60,000 or less (demonstrated by the black dotted line), and 76 percent of working-age families earn $100,000 or less. For working-age families with children, earning over $100,000 is the exception, not the rule.
The vertical bars in figure 1, corresponding to the left axis, show the percent of families that fall within various income ranges. About 15 percent of working-age families (or approximately 5.6 million families) earn between $1 and $20,000 a year, while 19 percent of families (approximately 7.1 million families) earn between $20,001 and $40,000. On the opposite end of the distribution, fewer than 3 percent of families earn $260,001 or more.

2. Nearly half of families in the United States live below 250 percent of the federal poverty level.

Nearly one in five American working-age families with children lives in poverty, officially defined as being below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL). Approximately 30 percent of families have incomes that place them between 100 and 250 percent of the FPL. Federal poverty thresholds vary by family size and composition, meaning that families with the same income, but with different household compositions, can be in different positions relative to the FPL.
The U.S. Census Bureau defined the FPL in 2012 for a family made up of one adult and one child to be $15,825 (250 percent of the FPL for this family was therefore $39,563); for a family with two adults and one child, the FPL was $18,480 (250 percent of the FPL was $46,200); for a family with two adults and two children, the FPL was $23,283 (250 percent of the FPL was $58,208); and for a family with two adults and three children, the FPL was $28,087 (250 percent of the FPL was $70,218) (U.S. Census Bureau 2012).
These families’ proximity to the poverty line means that any unanticipated downturns in income could push them into poverty. For this reason, we could reasonably consider these families to be the struggling lower-middle class. Figure 2 illustrates the income distribution relative to the FPL for working-age families with children under age eighteen. Together, these statistics (represented by the dotted black line) reveal that nearly half of American families live either in poverty or in the struggling lower-middle class.

3. Struggling lower-middle-class families are almost equally headed by single parents and married couples.

As illustrated in figure 3, household composition of families in the struggling lower-middle class varies substantially from the household composition of families in poverty. Of families with income below the federal poverty level (FPL) (approximately 7.1 million families), 70 percent are headed by a single parent (61 percent are single female parents), 24 percent are headed by a married couple with one or two earners, and 6 percent are headed by a married couple with no earners.
The composition of the struggling lower-middle class—defined here as working-age families with children under age eighteen whose income places them between 100 and 250 percent of the FPL—is markedly different from families in poverty in terms of marriage and presence of earners. Of families in the struggling lower-middle class (approximately 11.4 million families), 44 percent are headed by a single parent (34 percent are single female parents), 27 percent are headed by a single-earner married couple, another 27 percent are headed by a dual-earner married couple, and 2 percent are headed by a married couple with no earners.

4. Nearly one out of two families in the struggling lower-middle class is headed by an adult who has attended college.

College attainment differs markedly by poverty status. As illustrated in figure 4, 33 percent of household family heads below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) attended at least some college, although just 6 percent of those family heads have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Among household family heads with income between 100 and 250 percent of the FPL, 48 percent have attended some college, and14 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
In stark contrast to those living at or below 250 percent of the FPL, 77 percent of household family heads above 250 percent of the FPL attended at least some college, and about half have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Only a very small share of this group (4 percent) did not earn a high school diploma.

5. Nearly one-third of struggling lower-middle-class families rely on income support from a government program.

6. Roughly 40 percent of children in the struggling lower-middle class experience food insecurity or obesity, or both.

Children from low-income households have high rates of food insecurity or obesity, or both. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) classifies a household as food insecure when it has limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways (USDA 2000).
Figure 6 illustrates the differing nutritional circumstances of children based on their family’s income. More than 10 percent of children in households below the federal poverty level (FPL) are both food insecure and obese, and more than 50 percent have at least one of these conditions. Unfortunately, children in the struggling lower-middle class—children whose family income places them between 100 and 250 percent of the FPL—more closely resemble children in poverty than they do children in higher-income groups (above 250 percent of the FPL). More than 24 percent of children (or approximately 1.7 million children) in the struggling lower-middle class are food insecure and approximately 23 percent are obese; almost 7 percent of these children simultaneously face both obesity and food insecurity. In stark contrast, approximately 85 percent of children (or more than 9.3 million children) living above 250 percent of the FPL face neither challenge. These statistics highlight the diverging nutritional conditions of children by socioeconomic status.
Food insecurity, especially among children, is particularly worrisome given the potential negative effects of hunger during childhood. Indeed, literature in economics and medicine has documented the importance of early-life events, such as nutrition, on adult outcomes such as earnings and mortality (Almond and Currie 2011). Almond, Hoynes, and Schanzenbach (2011) found that during the initial rollout of the program in the 1960s children whose families had access to food stamps while they were in utero and during their childhoods had higher birth weight overall. Recent academic research has also shown that individuals who had access to food stamps had markedly better long-run health (as measured by self-reported health status, obesity, and reported diagnoses of diabetes and other chronic conditions) than individuals who did not have access to food stamps (Hoynes, Schazenbach, and Almond 2012). Among women, this study also found that access to food stamps during childhood improved adult economic outcomes, ranging from increased likelihood of attaining a high school diploma and higher lifetime earnings, to reduced likelihood of being reliant on federal safety-net programs during adulthood.

7. More than one in five children faces food insecurity in thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia.

Food insecurity exists everywhere in the United States, with more than 16 percent of individuals living in households reporting conditions indicating food insecurity. The share of children living in food-insecure households, approximately 22 percent, is even higher. The highest rates of child food insecurity in the country are found in New Mexico and Washington, DC, where roughly three out of ten children live in households that are food insecure. Even in North Dakota, the most food-secure state in the country, one in ten children is food insecure. Furthermore, in thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia more than one child in five is food insecure, as represented in figure 7.
There are regional patterns with regard to child food insecurity: the most food-insecure states are consistently located in the South and the West. Indeed, with the exception of Ohio, all of the states with child food insecurity rates above 25 percent are located in these two regions.

8. Nearly 90 percent of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients live in a household with at least one child, one disabled individual, or one elderly individual.

9. America’s tax and transfer system expands the middle class.

In the United States the system of taxes and transfers plays an important role in determining the amount of income a family ultimately has at its disposal. Taxes (such as federal and state income taxes, payroll taxes, and property taxes) typically reduce family income, but the federal tax system also provides credits (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC] and the Child Tax Credit [CTC]) that can increase the cash income for qualifying families.
Transfer program and targeted tax benefits protect families against economic hardship and supplement low earnings, which for some families could be zero. Some transfer programs provide cash payments, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI); others are in-kind programs, paying a nonmonetary benefit, such as a food voucher in the case of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Figure 9 illustrates how the tax and transfer system changes the distribution of income for working-age families with children. Before taxes and transfers, about 5 percent of families have no income, but this share falls to about 1 percent after accounting for taxes and transfers. Similarly, the share of families with income between $1 and $20,000 falls from over 16 percent to about 12 percent. On the other end of the income distribution, there are fewer families in all of the income groups at $80,001 and above. The direct effect of the tax and transfer system is to expand the middle class by compressing the number of families located at either end of the income distribution and raising the number of families in the middle range.

10. Struggling lower-middle-class families depend on an array of tax and transfer benefits.

Families living in poverty and among the struggling lower-middle class have access to a number of income-support programs. The nature and level of support of these programs changes throughout the income distribution. For families below the federal poverty level (FPL), the major transfer programs are designed to provide for basic needs such as food and health care. In addition, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is designed to subsidize earnings. At higher levels of income, families have access to child-related tax credits and health insurance exchange subsidies implemented by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
As shown in figure 10, struggling lower-middle-class families benefit from the EITC, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), among other tax and transfer benefits. For the single-parent family with two children illustrated in the figure, the total value of benefits falls from about $14,000 just below the FPL to about $7,500 at 250 percent of the FPL.
While these programs undoubtedly improve the economic security of low-income families, the programs’ impacts are not included in the official measure of poverty. A family’s official poverty status is based on pretax income, and thus does not include benefits received through the EITC or the Child Tax Credit (CTC), nor does it include in-kind transfers, such as food stamp benefits, Medicaid, or housing assistance. Consequently, official poverty estimates produced by the U.S. Census Bureau reveal little to policymakers about the effect of these programs on poverty and near-poverty rates. Additional measures of poverty are needed to reveal the impact of the social safety net on economic well-being in the United States (see Blank and Greenberg 2008; and Meyer and Sullivan 2012).

11. A low-income, single parent can face a marginal tax rate as high as 95 percent.

Marginal tax rates for low- and moderate-income families can be exceptionally high. Marginal tax rates are the taxes paid on additional work or investment. Effective marginal tax rates are determined by taxes paid, tax benefits received, and tax and transfer benefits lost due to extra income. For instance, as low- and moderate-income families see an increase in earnings, their transfer payments (such as Medicaid) and tax credits (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC]) are clawed back or phased out. This can raise effective marginal tax rates and make the after-tax return to additional earnings quite low.
In the absence of transfers, marginal tax rates tend to be low—and often negative—for low-income families. Through personal deductions or exemptions, the federal income tax code allows low-income families to exclude a substantial share of their income from taxation. In addition, refundable tax credits—tax credits that can drop a family’s tax bill below zero—often make marginal tax rates negative. For the hypothetical single parent with one child illustrated in figure 11, marginal tax rates including taxes, but not accounting for transfers, are around –40 percent, indicating that these taxpayers would receive an additional 40 cents for every extra dollar they earn. These marginal tax rates turn positive only at earnings of approximately $10,000.
The gap between the light and dark green lines in figure 11 shows the effects of transfer phase-outs on this particular taxpayer’s marginal tax rate. At the Medicaid limit, denoted by the first vertical black line, the phase-out of transfer benefits increases the taxpayer’s marginal tax rate by about 60 percentage points—from around –40 percent to about +20 percent. For this taxpayer, the impact of transfer phase-outs is dramatic and could discourage additional work that moves her earnings beyond roughly $8,000. Depending on family circumstances and program eligibility, there is a wide range of marginal tax rates facing low- and moderate-income households. As shown in this figure, a low-income, single parent can face a marginal tax rate as high as 95 percent.
Academic studies illustrate the complex impacts of tax and transfer programs on worker behavior. For example, the EITC has been shown to provide meaningful incentives for single parents with dependent children to work (Eissa and Liebman 1996; Meyer and Rosenbaum 2001). At the same time, however, the EITC tends to provide a disincentive for married mothers with children to work, since the combined income of a wife and husband reduces (and sometimes eliminates) a family’s EITC benefit (Eissa and Hoynes 2004a, 2004b).

12. The highest marginal tax rates tend to fall on the struggling lower-middle class.

 

2C Target is Too Little, Too Late

The majority of world leaders agree that we must keep global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if we're to avoid catastrophic  climate change.  They agree to that even as they embrace policies far more likely to result in 4C or more of warming by mid-century.  Write it off to cognitive dissonance.

Now a team of eminent climate scientists warn that we've underestimated the problem and even holding the line at 2C won't be enough to avoid global disaster.

The limit of 2C of global warming agreed by the world's governments is a "dangerous target", "foolhardy" and will not avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change, new research from a panel of eminent climate scientists warned on Tuesday.

In a new paper, the climate scientist Professor James Hansen and a team of international experts found the most dangerous effects of a warming climate – sea level rise, Arctic ice melt, extreme weather – would begin kicking in with a global temperature rise of 1C.

Allowing warming to reach 2C would be simply too late, Hansen said. "The case we make is that 2C itself is a very dangerous target to be aiming for," he told the Guardian. "Society should reassess what are dangers levels, given the impacts that we have already seen."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in its major in October that the world had only about 30 years left before it exhausted the rest of the 1,000 gigaton carbon emission budget estimated to lead to 2C warming. But Hansen and his colleagues warned that the UN target would not avoid dangerous consequences, even if it kept within that carbon budget.

"Fossil fuel emissions of 1,000 gigaton, sometimes associated with a 2C global warming target, would be expected to cause large climate change with disastrous consequences. The eventual warming from one gigaton fossil fuel emissions likely would reach well over 2C, for several reasons. With such emissions and temperature tendency, other trace greenhouse gases including methane and nitrous oxide would be expected to increase, adding to the effect of CO2," the researchers said.
 
"The main point is that the 2C target – which is almost out of reach now, or quickly becoming out of reach – is itself a dangerous target because it leads to a world that is greatly destabilised by rising sea levels and massive changes of climate patterns in different parts of the world," said Professor Jeff Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, one of the PLoS paper's authors.

Oh well, you can't say we weren't warned - all of us, time and time again.   This is one horror story, the greatest in the history of mankind, that we have walked into with our eyes wide open having chosen not to act while we still had time.  To those of you born after 1970, all I can say to you is "good luck."  You'll be living in very interesting times.  To those of you born before 1960, count your blessings.

Rehabbing Wiebo

For most of us, probably, Wiebo Ludwig was a dangerous man, a criminal who blew up oil and gas machinery.  To Chris Hedges, however, Wiebo is to the petro-state what John Brown and Harpers Ferry were to slavery.

The man who waged North America’s first significant war against hydraulic fracturing was from Alberta, an eccentric, messianic Christian preacher named Wiebo Ludwig who died last year. He, with his small Christian community in the remote north of the province, sabotaged at least one wellhead by pouring cement down its shaft and blew up others. The Canadian authorities, along with the oil and gas barons, demonize Ludwig as an ecoterrorist, an odd charge given that they are the ones responsible for systematically destroying the environment and the planet. And as the ecosystem deteriorates—and the drive by corporations to extract the last remaining natural resources from the earth, even if it kills us all, becomes more and more relentless—the resistance of Wiebo Ludwig is worth remembering.

“Wiebo felt that our society was in a spiritual crisis, rather than an environmental or an economic crisis,” David York, whose film “Wiebo’s War” is a nuanced portrayal of Ludwig and his fight with the oil and gas industry, told me when I reached him in Toronto by email. “He felt that our addiction to fossil fuels, rampant consumerism and materialism, addictions, breakdown of family units were all symptoms of a society that has lost its root connection to God. Further, he felt that we are in a kind of end times state, where the forces of good are in a terrible struggle with the forces of evil. He wasn’t so crass as to put a timetable on it, but in his view ‘any fool can see the times.’ ”

That one of our era’s most effective figures of resistance against the oil and gas industry was a devout Christian is perhaps not coincidental. I do not share Ludwig’s Christian fundamentalism—his community was a rigid patriarchy—but I do share his belief that when human law comes into conflict with God’s law, human law must be defied. Ludwig grasped the moral decadence of the consumer society, its unchecked hedonism, worship of money and deadening cult of the self. He retreated in 1985 with his small band of followers into the remoteness of northern Alberta. His community, called Trickle Creek, was equipped with its own biodiesel refinery, windmills and solar panels—which permitted it to produce its own power—a greenhouse and a mill. Its members, who grew their own food, severed themselves from the contaminants of consumer culture. But like the struggle of Axel Heyst, the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Victory,” Ludwig’s flight from evil only ensured that evil came to him.

...“Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. And this is what happened to Ludwig.

...Ludwig’s first acts of sabotage were minor. He laid down nail beds on roads. He smashed solar panels. He blocked roads by downing trees. He disabled vehicles and drilling equipment. But after two leaks of hydrogen sulfide sour gas from nearby wells—which forced everyone on the farm to evacuate and saw numerous farm animals giving birth to deformed or stillborn offspring, as well as five human miscarriages or stillbirths within Ludwig’s community—and after the destruction of two of his water wells, he declared open war on the oil and gas industry. He began to blow up oil and gas facilities. He said he had to fight back to “protect his children.”

...The sabotage did not end with Ludwig’s 2012 death. There are reports of ongoing sabotage along the path of the XL pipeline and in the Alberta oil fields.

“I’d also say that sabotage in the oil patch is one of the oil and gas industry’s dirty little secrets,” York said. “It is widespread, and to many landowners it is a natural consequence of the industry’s attitudes and behavior to those whose land they are occupying. The industry doesn’t make a big fuss because they don’t want to encourage the response.”

...Ludwig said: “We feel weak in all the things we are fighting. I think the match is very unequal. But it’s all right. Instead of griping about it, we might as well give ourselves to it.”

If Harper unleashes his public/private security-intelligence force in support of Enbridge, the Communist Party of China, and the American energy giants who populate Athabasca, we may see Wiebo Ludwig's spirit reborn only, this time, en masse.   Most of us, I'm pretty sure, will draw the line at civil disobedience at the risk of incarceration and possible SLAPP suits, but there are many who have vowed to attack the infrastructure itself.

Former Harper Adviser Denounces Canada as "Rogue State."

In 2006, economist Mark Jaccard was appointed by the Harper government to a seat on the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Today, in Washington, the former Harper appointee spoke out against our government.

The environmental economist delivered a lengthy rebuke of Canada's climate-change performance at the event near the White House, as the Obama administration continued to grapple with whether to approve the Alberta-U.S. pipeline.

"On climate, Canada is a rogue state," Jaccard said.

"It's accelerating the global tragedy ... The U.S. government should reject Keystone XL and explain to the Canadian government that it hopes to join with Canada (on a global climate plan)."

Jaccard was the headline speaker at a summit tied to a well-connected Democratic donor, the so-called "green billionaire" Tom Steyer, and attended by a number of U.S. media outlets.

Freedom of Religion for Corporations? Don't Laugh. Turning of the Screw.

The same, blatantly corporatist US Supreme Court that vested corporations with political rights is expected to next give them religious freedoms.

Corporations, of course, worship only the God of Profit and Sodom, but they can use notional religious freedoms to deny employees benefits like coverage for birth control.

That may sound crazy but some court watchers  believe that the Right-Wing Five will follow the logic of their “corporations-are-people” theories to this next nutty conclusion. After all, if corporations have First Amendment rights of “free speech” when they are financing political propaganda to influence the outcome of U.S. elections, there is a consistency – albeit a bizarre one – to extending to corporations the First Amendment’s “religious freedom.”

Already unlimited corporate money in campaigns has drowned out regular human citizens in terms of who (or what) has the bigger say in the outcome of elections, so why shouldn’t the religious choices of corporations override the personal and moral judgments of people who work for the corporations?

...whatever the Five do, you can count on them wrapping their reasoning in their claims to be devotees of an “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution or as “strict constructionists.”

The reality, though, is that the Five’s modus operandi is to reach an ideological conclusion about what they want to do based on their political opinions or partisan needs and then find some legal-sounding language to wrap around the ruling.

Some day people need to realize that extending rights to corporations is not a zero-sum game.  Rights given to corporations are rights that citizens are forced to share.   They become diluted rights, ineffective rights, rights lost to the ordinary and diverted to the most affluent.

This is, again, a turning of the screw.

If the Bottom10% Kept Pace With the Top 1%. Turning of the Screws.

Where would America's minimum wage be had it kept pace with the spiralling income increases enjoyed by the top 1%?   Imagine what that would mean to McDonald's and Walmart workers.  It would be like night and day.

 

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If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as the earnings of the top one percent of Americans the federal wage floor would be  more than triple the current hourly minimum of $7.25. Instead, the minimum wage has been lower than a poverty wage ever since 1982.

The stagnation and collapse of minimum wage purchasing power has helped drive the divergence between the wealthiest and poorest segments of the U.S. workforce. As minimum-wage jobs have provided less and less stable economic footing for working people, the wealthiest sliver of the country has seen astronomical gains in their compensation. If instead the federal minimum wage had grown at the same rate as one-percenter earnings, it would sit at $22.62 per hour today — 212 percent higher than the current wage floor.

A 212 percent raise may seem outlandish, but previous research indicates American workers have just about earned it. Worker productivity has  more than doubled since 1968, and if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity gains it would have been  $21.72 last year. From 2000 to 2012 alone workers boosted their productivity by 25 percent yet saw their earnings fall rather than rise, leading some economists to label the early 21st century  a lost decade for American workers.

When will people finally say "enough"?

China is Off to the Moon, India Shoots for Mars

The two emerging economic superpowers, China and India, are heading for the planets.   China has launched a robotic lander, the "Jade Rabbit", intended to prowl the surface of the moon, in part to look for mineral resources.

India has launched a budget Mars mission costing just $73 million aiming to show that India can do spacework on the cheap.   India's Mars probe is by far more difficult and challenging than China's.

Speaking Frankly

This is a giggle.  Frank magazine has hired underemployed senator Patrick Brazeau as a freelance reporter.  A magazine representative tweeted that they've filled out an application for Brazeau to receive a Parliamentary press pass.  Apparently they look forward to him covering the Senate expenses scandal.

Ha, ha, ha... chortle.

Corporatism Sinks Its Claws into Democracy's Throat

Anyone who thinks that democracy is not under attack in Canada and elsewhere is, frankly, delusional.  Anyone who thinks that we're not under attack by corporatism and its political allies is naive.  Anyone who thinks this is a war we can win without hitting back is steeped in nihilism.

A new report from the Washington-based, Center for Corporate Policy, reveals how corporate giants have partnered with private-sector spooks and government intelligence services to spy on activist groups and NGOs.  In Canada we know them as our federal government's spy agencies and the energy producers and pipeline operators they serve against opponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline.

We are strangers, outsiders to this corporate-political state.   Within it we have no place, no voice, no vote.  We've already been labelled enemies of that state.  If we don't fight back, this fascist state will supplant our democracy and we will become, essentially, stateless.

The CCP report is entitled, "Spooky Business, Corporate Espionage against Non-Profit Organizations."  It serves as an indictment against a range of corporate malefactors from Burger King to WalMart, BAE, Bank of America, McDonalds, Monsanto and Chevron, among others.

The top target of the forces of corporatism is, not surprisingly, Greenpeace.

In the US, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have partnered with private industry via an entity called InfraGard.

But it's not just the FBI. According to the new report, "active-duty CIAoperatives are allowed to sell their expertise to the highest bidder", a policy that gives "financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation's top-level intelligence talent. Little is known about the CIA's moonlighting policy, or which corporations have hired current CIA operatives."

The report concludes that, due to an extreme lack of oversight, government effectively tends to simply "rubber stamp" such intelligence outsourcing:

"In effect, corporations are now able to replicate in miniature the services of a private CIA, employing active-duty and retired officers from intelligence and/or law enforcement. Lawlessness committed by this private intelligence and law enforcement capacity, which appears to enjoy near impunity, is a threat to democracy and the rule of law. In essence, corporations are now able to hire a private law enforcement capacity - which is barely constrained by legal and ethical norms - and use it to subvert or destroy civic groups. This greatly erodes the capacity of the civic sector to countervail the tremendous power of corporate and wealthy elites."

Gary Ruskin, author of the report, said:

"Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is an egregious abuse of corporate power that is subverting democracy. Who will rein in the forces of corporate lawlessness as they bear down upon nonprofit defenders of justice?"

At Last, Harper PMO Coughs Up Perrin E-mails.

Will miracles never cease?  An act of outright resurrection in the prime minister's office.   E-mails once pronounced deleted have been raised from the dead.

The e-mails are those of Benjamin Perrin, former PMO chief counsel and legal adviser to Stephen J. Harper himself.

The lost are now found.  It was all a mix-up, a simple error, could happen to anyone.  At least that's the cover story for why the PMO told the RCMP that the Perrin e-mails pertaining to the Wright-Duffy-Harper under-the-table cash scandal had been deleted.  It's not clear whether the PMO got that idea from Benny or someone else cooked up the story.

You may recall that Perrin has only addressed the affair once and that was to deny any and all personal involvement.   Somewhat later Perrin was fingered by disgraced former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, as one of four top PMO aides in on the deal.  Eventually it was revealed that Perrin in fact negotiated the deal with Duffy's lawyer, Janet Payne, and created a paper trail of correspondence and e-mails.

Which begs the question of what young professor Benny had in his highly-educated mind when he issued his pretty unequivocal denial.  It sounds like the sort of thing one might expect from a person in panic at being caught in the headlights on a dark road.

It's interesting that the Privy Council Office letter notifying the RCMP of the discovery of Perrin's e-mails is shown as copied to Robert W. Staley of the law firm, Bennett Jones.   Could be that Perrin has also lawyered up.