It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, July 08, 2020
Growing Arctic waves set to menace coasts, scientists say
IVAN SEMENIUK SCIENCE REPORTER PUBLISHED JULY 8, 2020
As summer sea ice disappears in the far north due to climate change, massive swells are expected to roil Canada’s Arctic waters later this century with potentially dire consequences for coastal communities and burgeoning shipping traffic, new research has found.
In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, scientists with Environment and Climate Change Canada project that the average height of the highest waves seen on the Arctic Ocean could increase by nearly two storeys, or six metres.
Closer to shore, the equivalent change is about two-metres higher – enough to batter coastal communities and infrastructure in vulnerable areas. The study also found that floods and other extreme events that currently occur about once every 20 years could show up every two to five years.
“Some of the general patterns were expected but seeing how much it will increase is a bit surprising – I would say alarming,” said Mercè Casas-Prat, a scientist with the climate research division of Environment and Climate Change Canada in Toronto who co-authored the work.
While erosion is already a serious problem for many coastal regions in the North, few studies have tried to quantify the extent to which that threat will grow as climate change eliminates the giant lid of sea ice that currently sits atop much of the Arctic Ocean through the year.
Together with senior scientist Xiaolan Wang, a specialist in ocean wave research, Dr. Casas-Prat set out to investigate the question.
The pair looked at the heights and periods of waves found in the Arctic Ocean between 1979 and 2005 and then used climate models to estimate how much those characteristics are likely to change by 2081-2100, a time when many climate scientists expect that sea ice will be largely absent during the summer months.
With ice removed from the picture, the conditions for the Arctic changes dramatically. More open water means more ‘fetch’, a term that describes the surface area across which wind has an opportunity to generate waves. Ice also suppresses waves because of the additional mass on the water’s surface and protects coastlines, particularly during the fall when Arctic seas are at their stormiest.
To improve the confidence level of their result, the pair ran their projections using five climate models to take uncertainties into account. The changes in wave heights and other characteristics that resulted were large enough to stand out from any differences that arose because of variations between models.
The team went into finer detail than most previous studies by dividing the entire Arctic Ocean into a vast grid of 25-by-25 kilometres square throughout, and 12-by-12 kilometres square at the coasts. The resulting projections encompassed the entire Arctic coastline, including Canada, Alaska, Russia, Scandinavia and Greenland.
“It’s really a step forward,” said Li Erikson, a physical oceanographer with the U.S. Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., who was not involved in the study.
Dr. Erikson added that there were some details that the Canadian study did not take into account, such as the extent of the broad continental shelf that fronts Alaska’s north coast, among other areas. That may serve to limit the height of waves closer to land, she said, but as Earth’s climate warms, the overall trend for the Arctic is clear.
“It’s ground zero up there as far as changes to the globe and where it impacts coasts,” she said.
Dr. Casas-Prat said that another factor the study did not take into account is the effect that higher waves will have on sea ice, rather than vice versa. As polar waters become more disturbed it’s likely that the break-up of the ice will be hastened, contributing to an ice-free ocean in the summer well before 2080.
The most vulnerable areas include the eastern shores of Greenland and Canada’s western Arctic, on the rim of the Beaufort Sea. Communities there, including Tuktoyaktuk, have already been assessing strategies for holding back erosion on shorelines made increasingly vulnerable by melting permafrost. The new study indicates this work will likely need to take into account significantly higher waves as well.
“There’s definitely a huge change that highlights how we’ll need to adapt in future,” she said.
In addition to threats to the coast, the higher waves could menace commercial shipping traffic, which is expected to increase with the absence of ice, Dr. Casas-Prat added.
Donald Trump’s Poll Numbers Hit ‘Largest Partisan Gap’ In Approval Ever Recorded By Gallup
New polling related to approval numbers for President Donald Trump reveals a new record. Approval among Republicans remains quite high for Trump. However, his approval rating with Democrats and Independents has dropped, and that makes for a new record-high gap.
Gallup shared their latest polling revelations on Monday. Trump’s overall approval rating came in at 38 percent, which represented a dip in comparison to what the numbers showed for the president from December 2019 up to this past May. The current overall approval rating hadn’t shifted significantly with this latest round of polling. However, things shifted when broken down by party. The data was collected from June 8 to 30, and it brought both good news and bad for the president.
Approval among Republicans ticked up slightly for Trump. The previous numbers, collected from May 28 to June 4, came in at an 85 percent approval among Republicans. The new data bumped that level up to 91 percent. That six-point gain is certainly good news for the president.
However, Trump’s approval rating did drop among both Independents and Democrats. Among Democrats, Trump’s approval dropped from 5 percent to just 2 percent.
He also suffered a six-point loss among Independents, going from 39 to 33 percent.
Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images
Those new numbers revealed a record-high approval gap on a partisan level. That 89-point difference in terms of Republican approval versus approval from Democrats was the largest partisan gap that Gallup had ever recorded in one survey. This comes less than a week after a different set of polling data presented another record high for Trump. Numbers from Politico/Morning Consult showed the president with the highest number recorded in terms of those believing the country was on the wrong track under Trump’s leadership. According to Gallup, Trump’s previous highest partisan gaps came in January and February, when both sat at 87 percent.
While Trump’s 91 percent approval among Republicans is still a solid number, it is a bit of a drop in comparison to some prior polling periods. Trump’s approval within his party hit a high of 94 percent in late January. The lowest it had been during his tenure was 90 percent, which was recorded both in March 2019 and November 2019.
The president’s current approval rating among Independents was revealed to be tied at its lowest. Trump sat at 33 percent approval in this group in March 2019 as well. This is the lowest approval rating that Trump has seen among Democrats. He hit a high of 7 percent in both January 2020 and April, and his approval among Democrats had ranged from 4 to 7 percent throughout his presidency until this new data emerged. The newly revealed Gallup polling also showed that Trump’s approval rating has dropped to some degree in every group of voters. That includes gender and age breakdowns, as well as splits based on race, level of education, and region of the country.
These numbers would seem to signal that Trump has some work to do heading into the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
WHY IS LOBSTER SO FREAKING EXPENSIVE?
With lobster, nothing is easy, or efficient
Mmmm, lobster. They sure are ugly, but man, they sure are delicious! That’s something we can pretty much all agree on. It’s long been a luxury good, but right now it seems to be as popular as ever: You can find lobster rolls pretty much anywhere thanks to the diaspora of New Englanders who never stop moving out West or South. And of course, lobster itself is a quintessentially decadent fine-dining dish.
But however you eat it, it’ll cost you! Why is this? What is it about this crustacean at the bottom of the Atlantic that has always demanded a giant price tag? Alongside Marianne LaCroix, executive director of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, we cracked open some answers.
COME ON, THEN — WHY IS LOBSTER SO EXPENSIVE?
There are lots of reasons, so let’s start at the top. Lobster is a completely wild fishery. There are no lobster farms — it’s pretty much impossible. LaCroix cites several reasons why: For one thing, they take seven years to grow to market size, which is an eternity in commercial fishing. Secondly, they have a pretty big range; you can’t pack them in tight like a fish farm. One season they’ll be within three miles of shore; another season they’ll be 20 to 30 miles offshore. The result is that they’re all fished for by lobstermen who go out and come in every single day.
SOUNDS LIKE A LOT OF WORK.
It is, and in Maine, there are some inefficiencies deliberately baked into the industry in order to conserve the species — or rather, the resource. Every lobsterman has to own and operate their own boat, hold their own permit and be on the boat (in order to prevent conglomerates); there are minimum and maximum size limits; and the ones that are caught and have a lot of eggs aren’t only thrown back, but tagged by carving a little notch in their fin — this makes them illegal to catch. In fact, if you want to catch lobsters in Maine, there’s a waiting list for lobster-fishing permits.
Other lobster fisheries out of state have seen collapses, so Maine’s measures seem to be working for now. (But of course any sort of economic inefficiency, even well intentioned, will affect the price.)
HOW MANY OF THE LOBSTERS WE EAT HERE ARE FROM MAINE, THEN?
An overwhelming amount! La Croix says 83 percent of all lobster in the U.S. comes from Maine. The rest is mostly from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Canada.
Bear in mind, though, that this is for one particular species of lobster: Homarus americanus — the kind we all know, with the ginormous claws. There’s of course a whole other ocean on the other side of the country, but the Pacific is home to a different lobster: the spiny lobster, which doesn’t have claws at all. It’s fished for, but on a far smaller scale, and nearly all of it is exported to Asia. (Spiny lobster is also found in Florida.) This species is probably most popular in Baja, Mexico, as well as pockets of California.
THEY’VE GOTTA STAY ALIVE AFTER THEY’RE CAUGHT, RIGHT? THAT SEEMS LIKE AN EXPENSIVE PROSPECT.
Yes, it’s one hell of a process if it’s being sent across the country. When they’re shipped, they don’t need to actually be underwater, but they do need to be kept cold and moist, LaCroix says. That’s done with ice packs or gel packs, and they’re usually wrapped in wet newspaper or seaweed, then put in boxes with dividers, a bit like how cases of wine are packaged. From Maine, they’re driven about as far as New York, but beyond that, they’re flown. Shipping one lobster alone could cost $40! Fortunately, they’re shipped in bulk.
As you might imagine, a small amount of lobsters will inevitably die along the way — this is referred to as “shrink” in the industry, and, as with any sort of distribution business, this loss is built into pricing.
Because it tastes better that way. It’s not only rubbery when it’s cooked dead — dead lobsters spoil quickly, attracting a lot of bacteria, and so, it’s a potential public health issue. Those live tanks at markets and restaurants aren’t just for show — they’re pretty much essential.
Keep in mind, though, not all caught lobsters are destined for a tank in a supermarket or restaurant. What usually happens is, when the lobster boat comes into the wharf, a buyer or wholesaler purchases the lobster by the pound, then aggregates some (the stronger lobsters) to a seafood distributor, who then sells them onto supermarkets or restaurants, where, upon arrival, they’ll go back into tanks. Naturally, cost is added at each step along the way, though LaCroix says margins are pretty thin for each layer.
The other lobsters go to a processing plant that’ll cook it, pick the meat out (claws and knuckles, or the coveted tails, which are also sometimes packaged raw), and flash-freeze it using liquid nitrogen. This is sold to consumers and commercially — it’s also how some lobster roll restaurants get their meat, to save them the trouble (and cost) of buying live lobsters, cooking them and breaking them down.
They initially gained status during the Gilded Age in New York City and Boston, and it’s remained that way since then, as lobster is a staple on the menu pretty much anywhere that still has white tablecloths, a consistent symbol of upwardly mobile consumption.
ANY OTHER REASON IT’S SO EXPENSIVE? AND IS LOBSTER WORTH THE PRICE?
Because people actually want to pay a lot for lobster! One study revealed that cheap lobster makes people think it’s inferior or even dangerous to eat. And secondly, people want to pay a lot for it because it’s a luxury good! As the New Yorker pointed out a while back, high prices are part of lobster’s image, “and, as with many luxury goods, expense is closely linked with enjoyment. Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests, but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less.”
There’s another element at play, too: Every restaurant knows that when you add something expensive to a menu (or a top-end item to a brand’s product lineup) it makes everything else look more reasonable by comparison. Thus, lobster isn’t only something people are glad to pay for — it makes the prices on the rest of the menu more appealing. That’s why the price of lobster remains high even when the price per pound that fishermen sell it for falls to very low levels.
So there it is! It’s somewhat economically inefficient (by design) to catch; it’s complicated (and thus expensive) to transport; it plays an important role on a restaurant’s menu; and ultimately, the consumer expects to pay a lot for it.
But if you like lobster, you’ll gladly pay the price.
Adam Elder is a writer in San Diego. He hates author bios, so this is all you get.
Net-zero strategy is “basic question” for every company – Mark Carney
How to prepare for a climate neutral economy is now a “basic question” that every company’s management should be able to answer, says former Bank of Canada/England Governor Mark Carney.
The Covid-19 pandemic is forcing almost all companies to “reset their strategy”, said former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney during a webinar on 30 June organised by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) network.
“That’s happening at a time when the UK, the EU, 125 countries around the world have net-zero [carbon emissions] as an objective,” he added.
‘Net-zero’ means that any emissions of greenhouse gases emitted by a particular jurisdiction or company are either reduced to zero or offset by activities that absorb an equivalent volume from the atmosphere, such as tree planting.
Carney who, since stepping down as Bank of England Governor in March 2020, has become an advisor to the UK Government on next year’s UN climate conference (COP26) and a UN special envoy for climate action and finance added: “This is exactly the time, when […] you say, ‘OK, what is our strategy for net zero?’ It is a basic question for every company in every sector.”
The imperative for a corporate climate strategy is partly driven by demand from investors, Carney said, citing “$130trn of balance sheets looking for [climate change] disclosures”. That figure refers to investors who have expressed support for the recommendations of the international Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which sets out how companies and investors can report on their climate strategies.
This message was echoed by David Blood, co-founder alongside former US Vice-President Al Gore of sustainable finance firm Generation Investment Management.
“We want all CEOs to engage on climate,” he said. “We want them to demonstrate action. We want them to be clear about what their goals are.”
Blood described the transition to a low-carbon economy as “the most significant economic transition in history”. But he warned that time is short.
“This is not a 10 or 15-year journey. This is a five-year journey,” he said.
Blood argued that the pandemic has also raised the profile of social justice issues among investors and has underscored how responsible companies are more resilient.
“That insight gives us encouragement that investors will expect companies to be responsible over the long term […] and that we, as investors, will insist that climate, social justice and the challenges of poverty are addressed as we build back better,” he said.
“The economic opportunities of this transition, both from a poverty inequality perspective as well as a climate change perspective, are extraordinary,” he added, the likes of which he has “not seen in my 35 years of finance”.
Research from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates that ambitious climate action could yield net economic benefits worth at least $26trn by 2030 compared with business as usual.
Content from Energy Monitor.io
Beware the 21st Century Robber Barons
This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia.
Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. (Photo: Screenshot)
Why do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t.
Big corporations have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer. This has become even worse now that thousands of small businesses have had to close as a result of the pandemic, while mammoth corporations are being bailed out.
At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined as fewer workers are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy, allowing corporations to get the labor they need for cheap.
These two changes in bargaining power didn’t happen by accident. As corporations have gained power, they’ve been able to gut anti-monopoly laws, allowing them to grow even more dominant. At the same time, fewer workers have joined unions because corporations have undermined the nation’s labor laws, and many state legislatures – under intense corporate lobbying – have enacted laws making it harder to form unions.
Because of these deliberate power shifts, even before the pandemic, a steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits, and a shrinking portion allocated to wages.
Once the economy tanked, the stock market retained much of its value while millions of workers lost jobs and the unemployment rate soared to Great Depression-era levels.
Watch:
To understand the current concentration of corporate power we need to go back in time.
In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages.
As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act.
In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust.
As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry.
Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.
The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance.
Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation.
Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors.
– The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay.
– The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions.
– High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market.
If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition.
This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile – and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight.
And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy.
Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power.
These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped.
They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story.
The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high.
Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!
And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company’s safety issues.
While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers.
In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are.
Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization.
Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions.
As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives.
Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.”
Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize.
All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees.
This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage.
All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II.
That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment.
The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains.
So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages?
For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment.
Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent.
Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system.
Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies.
Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing.
This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.
Robert Reich, is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the the twentieth century. The author of many books, including the best-sellers Aftershock, The Work of Nations, Beyond Outrage and, Saving Capitalism. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.
Sacrificing People to Corporate Profit
While millions of workaday families have lost jobs, income and their future financial security, corporate bosses and billionaires are surreptitiously building new channels into the system for looting an even greater share of America's wealth.
It's the corporate version of the old political adage "Never let a big crisis go to waste."(Photo: Austin Kirk/flickr/cc)
I think I've figured out the real reason President Donald Trump refuses to wear a coronavirus mask: He realizes that we'd all recognize him as the masked robber who has been moving furtively behind the scenes during the pandemic to rig the rules against workaday folks in order to further enrich corporate elites.
With media attention riveted by COVID-19 body counts and political flare-ups over mask wearing, Trump & Co. have felt free to monkey-wrench labor laws, dynamite environmental regulations, jiggle open the locks on corporate profiteering, manipulate the tax code and generally burglarize our people's commitment to the Common Good. It's like Robin Hood and his Merry Band — only in reverse, stealing from the many to give more to the rich few.
They've even quietly filched the bulk of the government's multitrillion-dollar pandemic recovery program, twisting it so severely that it is dramatically increasing wealth inequality. While you might have received a one-time $1,200 relief check from Washington, major corporations have actually been given the keys to the Federal Reserve's money-printing machine, funneling a long-term giveaway of hundreds of billions of dollars to them.
Also, corporate interests are pocketing untold amounts from several little-reported grant programs and tax breaks discreetly created just for them. For example, mysteriously tucked into Trump's first rescue package was a $135 billion tax giveaway, specifically designed for such hucksters as giant real estate developers. Like whom? Well, Trump himself and son-in-law Jared Kushner appear to qualify. Just lucky, I guess. Adding to the peculiarity, this handout has nothing to do with helping America recover economically from the pandemic. Rather, it provides retroactive tax breaks on deals developers cut long before this year's COVID crash.
So, while millions of workaday families have lost jobs, income and their future financial security, corporate bosses and billionaires are surreptitiously building new channels into the system for looting an even greater share of America's wealth. It's the corporate version of the old political adage "Never let a big crisis go to waste."
As directed by their big-business funders, top Republican officeholders across the country have been defying public health experts in past weeks to rush America's workers back to their jobs. But — oops! — the microscopic COVID-19 turns out to be stronger than Trump, the governors and all the CEOs combined, so their impetuous back-to-work commands have caused the crisis to surge again, hospitalizing and killing thousands more Americans.
What to do now? Why, of course, get Congress to protect them! Uh ... not workers and customers but corporate profits. Thus, the White House, such congressional sleazes as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the whole army of Gucci-wearing corporate lobbyists are pushing furiously to pass a law decreeing that corporations cannot be held liable for their profit-driven actions and negligence that sicken and kill untold numbers of Americans.
Crying crocodile tears for those giants guilty of intentionally endangering the public, Larry Kudlow, Trump's corporate-hugging economic adviser, wailed: "You've got to give the businesses some confidence here that if something happens ... you can't take them out of business. You can't throw big lawsuits at them." Gosh, Larry, thanks for your little moral lecture, but what about giving workers and our society some confidence that "if something happens," you can't take away their basic human right to pursue justice?
Besides, why shouldn't We the People hold these economic powerhouses legally accountable? If you preemptively give a blanket pardon to corporate entities that cause deadly harm, you'll give direct financial incentive to executives to forego investing in protective measures for workers and public health. Indeed, the very fact they're insisting that the law must shield them from people who get hurt is an admission that they know the rush to restart their profit machine will sicken and kill others.
That's not just greedy. It's inhumane.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
'Prolonged Recession' Could Be on Horizon as Covid Economic Crisis Leads to State and Local Budget Shortfalls
"We know from the experience of the recovery following the Great Recession just how powerful the economic drag from state and local austerity can be."
A volunteer signals the number of families in a car who need food from the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida during a drive through food distribution event at City of Destiny church. (Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
With state and local governments are facing fiscal disaster as tax revenues are expected to decline alongside stagnant and lessening economic growth, leading experts on Tuesday warned more financial pain could be on the horizon for working Americans without continued assistance from the federal government or higher taxes on the rich.
"Time is running short for Congress to act."
—Liz McNichol, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
"We estimate states alone will see shortfalls of $555 billion in this and the next fiscal year," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) senior fellow Liz McNichol told Common Dreams.
Every state but Vermont is either constitutionally or statutorily required to deliver a balanced budget, making borrowing to make up the difference impossible. That presents further problems with a lack of political will to raise taxes leaving social services cuts the most likely victim of balancing the books.
"State have to balance their budgets and spending cuts were the first place states looked during the last recession, that means they're going to cut back on education spending and healthcare," explained McNichol. "This will hurt state and local economies and their families and communities."
States in fiscal crisis and cuts to basic services loom as coronavirus ravages local economies https://t.co/pHWFq2ZCbG
Reporting from CNBC Tuesday cited data from the Commerce Department as "the latest sign of an unprecedented fiscal crisis gripping virtually every state and threatening basic services including education, healthcare and public safety":
In New York and Nevada, where the coronavirus was raging by March, state Gross Domestic Product plunged 8.2% for the quarter, compared to the national drop of 5%. Other big drops included Michigan at 6.8% and Louisiana at 6.2%. Indeed, no state economy grew during the quarter. The smallest drop was Nebraska at 1.3%.
The consequences of the drops in GDP could be catastrophic, Economic Policy Institute director of research Josh Bivens told Common Dreams.
"We think that if the federal government fails to address the coming state and local government shortfalls, it will guarantee a prolonged recession and several years of excess unemployment," said Bivens. "We have noted estimates of the state and local shortfalls between now and the end of 2021 hover around $1 trillion, and if we do nothing to close that gap, we'll end 2021 with roughly 5 million fewer jobs in the US economy than we otherwise would have had."
"We know from the experience of the recovery following the Great Recession just how powerful the economic drag from state and local austerity can be," Bivens added, "in that recovery state and local austerity by itself likely prolonged a full recovery of the national unemployment rate by about four years."
Bivens added that the unprecedented nature of the coronavirus crisis and economic fallout make it unlikely that one can even predict the level of disaster facing governments.
"Estimates of state and local shortfalls are based on historical experiences during recessions," said Bivens. "But the unique nature of the current recession means that these estimates of the help state and local governments will need are probably significantly too low."
States are already cutting back, according to CNBC, with California and New York in particular slashing billions in social spending from their budgets to manage the revenue shortfalls.
"The unique nature of the current recession means that these estimates of the help state and local governments will need are probably significantly too low."
—Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute
But as National Association of State Budget Officers director of State Fiscal Studies Brian Sigritz told the network, federal aid could defray some of the shortfall.
"If we do see additional federal aid, it could lessen the need for budget cuts in some of these areas, such as public safety, healthcare, education, transportation," said Sigritz. "Also, additional federal aid would help with the overall rebounding of the national economy."
CBPP's McNichol acknowledged that it was also possible that state's raising taxes on richer residents could help to offset GDP losses with the least harmful effect on the economy.
"People who have benefitted the most from the current economy have savings they can use to pay higher taxes," she said.
Bottom line, said McNichol, state and federal leaders need to take action to ensure social services survive the crunch.
"Time is running short for Congress to act," McNichol said. "States need fiscal relief to address these budget crises."
Pandemic Capitalism
Pervasive inequality is a chosen catastrophe. It’s time for a rethink.
The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. (Photo: Flickr/Andy Roberts. CC BY 2.0.)
I was a canary in the economic coal mine.
It was a normal workday. I woke up and started my daily routine. Brush, shave, shower, dress… Except that morning’s routine stopped when I found myself face down in the shower. Scared and confused, I called out to my wife. She helped me up and got me to a doctor, who found me to be in good health. I spent the rest of the day resting, while feeling relieved by the diagnosis.
The next morning I was a bit apprehensive about the shower. The fear was warranted. I woke up on the floor again, more confused than the day before and terrified. My doctor suggested that I ‘put my affairs in order.’
That was ten years ago. The driving force was stress that stemmed from financial challenges. When outflows exceed inflows, the well eventually runs dry. Our remaining resources were circling the drain. Pride and an unjust economic system had us in a trap. I eventually broke.
We live our lives shackled to the ideas of dead economists.
My story isn’t unique. Millions of people live like this. Our porous safety net leaves us to fend for ourselves. Our myths tell us that we’ve failed in a system that’s built for success.
We live our lives shackled to the ideas of dead economists. It’s a natural occurrence. It takes time, effort, and resources to galvanize human systems. New ideas take hold, become dominant, and ossify. Those who benefit try to maintain their place. But complex systems aren’t static. The longer and harder the status quo is maintained, the greater the system contorts. Eventually, it breaks and reforms. The question is how.
The current flavor of ‘no holds barred’ capitalism sits at this precipice. For years, it has extracted everything within its reach. It has exploited our natural resources and damaged our ecosystems. It has claimed our time and effort, and even our hopes and dreams. All these things have been treated as resources to be mined for a system that’s systematically designed to benefit the few.
The main idea underpinning the current version of capitalism is blindingly simple: you only have to remember one thing - that your job is to maximize profits. And you only have to accept one lie - that in doing so, you benefit the collective. That might be tough to swallow, but there’s a good trick involved: buying in uncritically allows you to believe that your self-interest is benevolent. That so many people are willing to do so is captured by Upton Sinclair’s famous quip, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The result is an absurdist cargo cult in which the haves take ever more while telling themselves that manna is surely falling from heaven upon the masses. Growth remains the answer even in an era of environmental breakdown. But it’s a brittle system that’s collapsing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Our food system is a prime example.
Problems arose early on in the pandemic as conditions in meatpacking plants played to the strengths of the virus. By late April 2020, 5,000 workers had tested positive and dozens of plants had closed. Millions of animals were led to slaughter with no intent of feeding people. Instead, they were killed in service of mitigating financial losses. At a time when hunger was rife, we learned that a system built for efficiency was indifferent to challenges beyond its balance sheets.
Prior to the pandemic, 37 million Americans - 11 million of them children - lived in food-insecure households, meaning that they weren’t able to afford healthy food for their families. In June 2020, Feeding America, a national network of food banks, estimated that another 17 million individuals were at risk of joining that group. An April survey of mothers with children age 12 and under found that the percentage who were running out of food - and lacked enough money to purchase more - had jumped from an already dire range of 15-20% to around 40%.
The result? Millions of animals were slaughtered for naught, while millions of people lacked proper sustenance. That outcome was the result of ‘good business decisions.’
Back in April 2020, nearly a third of renters didn’t pay their rent on time, a significant increase over 2019. States put eviction moratoriums in place as the wave of unemployment unfolded, but those protections are expiring. Amid a global pandemic, millions of people are at risk of being turned out into the streets. Why?
The pervasive inequality we live with—in a system that tells us it will provide everyone with abundance—is a chosen catastrophe, a designed failure that’s thrust upon the many.
The answer is simple: doing otherwise would refute the central premise of capitalism - profit. Its ideology is a one-trick pony that only knows one answer - more.
For years, millions of people have struggled ever harder to survive in the maw of a relentless economic system that tells us that coming up short is a matter of personal failure. But we know that’s a lie. The pervasive inequality we live with—in a system that tells us it will provide everyone with abundance—is a chosen catastrophe, a designed failure that’s thrust upon the many.
It’s time for a rethink.
The current system is dying, but it won’t go quietly. We can allow it to continue thrashing about and possibly give rise to something even darker, or we can fight to build something better. The stirrings are out there in communities that are shifting towards justice and equality. Learn from them and push for such changes wherever you are. The situation is dire, but there’s opportunity in it.
Kenneth Boulding once claimed that “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Fortunately, Amsterdam is moving away from such madness by embracing Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economy,” which shows us how to provide for everyone’s essential needs while living within our ecological means.
If we can’t live within planetary limits, humanity is a failed project. If we can’t provide everyone’s necessities, humanity is a misnomer. Those are table stakes. Raworth’s ideas are fundamental pillars that underpin my new book on “Pandemic Capitalism” and promising alternatives. We ought to consider such possibilities in the context of the lockdowns. When most people were told to stay home from work, the people who fed you and took out your trash were deemed to be of the utmost importance; it’s just that capitalism has long treated them otherwise.
If we use this moment to rethink our economic systems, we should start by thinking about what we value and what we ought to reward. At minimum, shouldn’t people who are working in “essential” roles earn a living wage?
Let’s put this in context with recent reports on Gilead’s COVID-19 treatment, Remdesivir, which is becoming a sought after treatment for people hospitalized with the virus. A study of the medication found it shortened hospital stays by about four days, while reducing mortality and serious adverse events for hospitalized patients by around 5-6%.
When the firm’s pricing of a typical course was set at $2,340 it was met with outrage. Gilead’s Chairman and CEO, Daniel O’Day, penned an open letter in which he portrayed the choice as an act of benevolence. As he put it, Gilead would normally “price a medicine according to the value it provides,” before claiming that the medicine would save US patients approximately $12,000 in hospital charges. I don’t believe Upton Sinclair would’ve taken the bait.
Salk and Sabin declined personal fortunes. By contrast, Gilead took $70 million in taxpayer assistance to develop their drug and then charged taxpayers thousands of dollars to access it. They did so while explaining that it was a ‘bargain’ that they’d only offer in the moment’s extreme circumstances.
These are the ‘normal’ but absurd outcomes of capitalism as we know it. Taking essential services and research out of corporate control is a necessary step. Universal Basic Incomes are another. With those, everyone would be guaranteed a reliable income stream. If we’re able to implement an economic system rooted in these alternatives, the reduction in striving will help us foster more Salks and Sabins.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought the tyranny of our economic system into sharp focus. We have a choice to make: will we reclaim our independence?
Chris Oestereich lectures on social innovation at Thammasat University. He founded the Wicked Problems Collaborative, a press focused on humanity’s biggest challenges, and co-founded the Circular Design Lab, a systemic design laboratory. His latest book is Pandemic Capitalism.
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