Hugo Chávez’s vision of a communal future will inspire generations

The legendary Venezuelan leader died 10 years ago today

Owen Schalk / March 5, 2023 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Hugo Chávez in uniform, 2010. 

March 5, 2023 marks the ten-yar anniversary of the death of legendary Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Only four days earlier, the Biden administration had renewed an executive order, issued by Barack Obama and continued under Donald Trump, labelling Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

While ten years without Chávez has brought innumerable challenges to Venezuela (many of which still persist) it is evident that even without the singularly charismatic persona of El Comandante at the helm, the future envisioned by the Bolivarian Revolution—one of socialism, anti-imperialism, and communal production—remains a tremendous threat to US hegemony in the hemisphere.

Revolutionary, educator, president

Hugo Chávez was a deeply impressive leader whose political adroitness, mediatic skill, and commitment to radical new visions of democracy have not been equalled in the hemisphere since he assumed the presidency in 1999. Not since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 had a Latin American head of state combined the qualities of president, revolutionary, and popular educator so seamlessly—a uniqueness that most Venezuelans admired, as evidenced by the vote shares in every presidential election he contested (he won 56 percent of votes in 1998, 60 percent in 2000, 63 percent in 2006, and 55 percent in 2012).

In his widely viewed Aló Presidente broadcasts, Chávez worked to educate the population about democracy, communes, socialism, and more. Asserting that “it is impossible to have a revolution without revolutionary theory,” Chávez inaugurated a new series in 2009 called Aló Presidente Teórico in which he hosted discussions on socialist transition, guiding the broadcasts using wide-ranging references including Simón Bolívar, Karl Marx, István Mészáros, and José Carlos Mariátegui.

Unsurprisingly, Chávez was a lightning rod for the hatred of Venezuela’s traditional ruling class. A man from a poor family and an Indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan background, his enormous popularity provoked an existential crisis of sorts in the Venezuelan oligarchy that continues to this day. They demeaned him, degraded his supporters, and fear-mongered about his supposedly dictatorial aspirations. Often their attacks were overtly racist.

In 2005, Chávez stated, “Racism is very characteristic of imperialism and capitalism. Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth and curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it is African.”

Officials in Washington shared the Venezuelan opposition’s hatred for Chávez. Their anti-socialist alliance culminated in a failed coup d’état by the Venezuelan oligarchy in April 2002. The coup was supported by the George W. Bush administration.

During their two days in power, the right-wing opposition acted with the flagrant aversion to democracy of which they constantly accused Chávez, dissolving the National Assembly and Supreme Court, dismissing Chávez appointees, suspending all governors and mayors elected during Chávez’s time in power, and voiding the 1999 constitution, which was approved by popular referendum with 72 percent support.

Fortunately for Venezuelan democracy, supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution took to the streets in such force that the military returned Chávez to the presidency. Population mobilization would also be key in opposing the 2002-2003 opposition oil lockout and the failed 2004 recall referendum against Chávez.

The Bolivarian Revolution endures

With Chávez gone and a terrible economic crisis roiling Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution under Nicolás Maduro continued to triumph in most major elections, with Maduro winning the presidential vote in 2013 and 2018, despite the opposition’s victory in 2015 parliamentary elections.

The Bolivarian Revolution continued to triumph even as left-wing political projects across Latin America fell one by one to a resurgent right. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was removed in a military coup backed by the US and Canada in 2009. Embittered elites in Paraguay used a conflict over peasant land rights to remove President Fernando Lugo in 2012. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff fell to a US-backed lawfare campaign in 2016. The Bolivian right-wing led a coup against Evo Morales after he won the 2019 presidential election, leading to one year of dictatorial right-wing rule characterized by massacres of pro-Evo protestors and the persecution of MAS supporters.

Despite some significant gains including the overturning of Bolivia’s right-wing coup in 2020 and the victory of Lula da Silva in Brazil’s 2022 election, the Latin American left remains on its back foot. In Argentina, the popular left-leaning politician Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has faced a lawfare campaign aimed at preventing her from running for president, an election she would likely win. Former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa remains locked out of his country’s politics by the governing conservatives (although local elections bode well for the future prospects of the left in Ecuador). And the elected president of Peru, the socialist-oriented Pedro Castillo, was recently deposed by congress in what most Peruvians recognize as a coup.

But through all this regional turbulence, plus the growing strength of opposition attacks during Maduro’s tenure, the Bolivarian Revolution persists in Venezuela. Why? Venezuelan journalist Clodovaldo Hernández identifies several important reasons:By prioritizing the passage of a new, participatory constitution in 1999, Chávez was quickly able to sideline the Venezuelan right and place more power in the hands of the population, “allow[ing] the Bolivarian Revolution to armour itself against the typical conspiracies of the recently displaced elites.”

The revolution’s progressive policies, including in the areas of literacy, housing, health care, and land reform, have led to a large degree of popular support, even in the midst of economic crisis. “Without this popular support,” Hernández writes, “the imperialist forces and the domestic right wing would have long ago achieved their goal of destroying the Venezuelan revolutionary process.”

The strength of Chávez’s leadership and his national prestige as an individual.

Chávez reworked Venezuela’s military doctrine and reformed the armed forces to reduce the influence of the United States through its training facilities like the notorious School of the Americas. This “civic-military alliance” foreclosed the possibility of another coup.

The revolution recognized the importance of the domestic media war and encouraged the organization of popular media as a way to break the information stranglehold of large news companies, which were uniformly against Chávez.

Despite having “almost unanimous support from the conglomerate of global capitalism,” the Venezuelan opposition remains a clumsy and schismatic coalition that has proven unable to fundamentally challenge the revolution.


A billboard of Hugo Chávez’s eyes and signature in Guarenas, Venezuela.

 Photo by Wilfredor/Wikimedia Commons.


“Not a one-man show”

When examining the successes of the Bolivarian Revolution, and potential explanations for its endurance, one topic we must take seriously is Chávez’s commitment to a communal future. The Venezuelan communes, often ignored in North American media coverage, represent the backbone of the revolutionary process and one of the most militant, organized, and politically conscious socialist assemblages in the Western Hemisphere.

Chávez himself described communes as “the space from which we give birth to socialism” and the cellular tissue of the Bolivarian Revolution. However, the movement toward local autonomy and worker self-management had been developing for decades before Chávez.

Since at least the 1980s, the traditional political parties in Venezuela had been discredited, and when the state dispatched security forces to massacre hundreds (possibly thousands) of protestors during the Caracazo, the liberal model of representative democracy revealed itself as the velvet glove around the iron fist of capitalism.

The “rejection of the logic of representation,” as Dario Azzellini calls it in Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, caused the goals of the popular movements to crystallize into “self-determination, self-management, and constituent power,” as well as “direct democracy, expressed in the [1999] Constitution as ‘participatory and protagonistic democracy.’” By aligning himself with these pre-existing forces and empowering them through his progressive reforms, Chávez was able to earn the revolution a key ally against the opposition’s assaults.

Due to the often fraught alliance between the state and these grassroots organizations, the Bolivarian Revolution has never been a process dictated by centralized authority. Azzellini characterizes the socialist transition in Venezuela as one of “two-track construction”:
We are speaking of a new way, unheard of in previous struggles and strategies for social transformation, that combines concepts ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ to pursue an anti-imperialist politics of national sovereignty. In this process, the state and its institutions are strengthened, and follow a strategy of active regulation of economic process in a mixed (capitalist) economy. On the other hand, according to the declared normative orientation, movements must assume the central role in the process of change and must have autonomy.

Azzellini adds that the persistence of the Bolivarian Revolution since 2013 proves that it is “a solid transformation project and not a one-man show based on populism.” Rather, it embodies a dynamic alliance (and occasional opposition) between multiple forces, the primary ones being the Chavistas in the state and the comuneros outside of it.

Towards a communal state

Of central importance to the ongoing revolutionary process is the idea of the communal state. The Organic Law of Communes, passed by the National Assembly in 2006, defines the communal state as a “form of social political organization… in which power is exercised directly by the pueblo, by means of communal self-governments with an economic model of social property and endogenous and sustainable development.” The commune is defined as “the basic structural cell of the communal state.”

The theorization of a communal state has a long history in Venezuela. As George Ciccariello-Maher points out in Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela:
It was no coincidence that those who fought against colonial rule and slavery from the very beginning often did so by building communal societies beyond Spanish control, from indigenous communities to the cumbe communities founded by runaway slaves. It is likewise no coincidence that those who today draw upon their inspiration continue to pioneer new forms of communal living and collective production that are compatible with older traditions, showing the ways that this new communal culture—by emphasizing local sustainability over consumerism—is also deeply anticolonial.


When Chávez described the importance of communes in 2007, one of the influences he borrowed from was Simón Rodríguez, an influential teacher of national hero Simón Bolívar. Rodríguez, who lived from 1769 to 1854, “urged the destruction of the existing religious and military powers dominating Venezuela” and the creation of a “toparchy,” or a form of “decentralized local rule” comprised of “small, self-governing units.”

Reinaldo Iturizza, the former Minister of Communes and a strong champion of the communal state, has described Venezuela’s transition to socialism as “toparchic,” indicating the influence of Rodríguez’s thought on communal politics today.

Kléber Ramírez was another influence on the notion of the communal state. Ramírez worked with Chávez during the planning of the failed 1992 coup against neoliberal President Carlos Andrés Pérez. His role was to draft the political documents that would form the basis of the new government if the coup succeeded. In this position, he emphasized the importance of constructing a “commoner state” in Venezuela, which would mean a “broadening of democracy in which the communities will assume the fundamental powers of the state.”

Ramírez described the commoner state as a “government of popular insurgency,” stressing the dialectical relationship between the state and the movements, between those “above” and those “below,” in transforming bourgeois rule into the rule of communality. Needless to say, Ramírez’s idea of the commoner state bears a striking resemblance to the two-track character of the communal state put forward by the Chávez government from 2006 onward.

Chávez lives

As Vijay Prashad wrote in a recent Tricontinental Institute newsletter, Chávez is still very present in Venezuela. His images are ubiquitous in barrios, poor neighbourhoods, and the communes that were the central tenet of his political philosophy.

“[T]he legacy of Chávez was not in his own life,” writes Prashad, “but in the difficult work of building socialism.”

While Chávez’s idea of the communal state was deeply rooted in Venezuelan history, it is certainly a theory that is applicable to life elsewhere. In North America, examples of communal living abound in the cultures of Indigenous peoples, the Métis, and some settler groups.

For many, modern life in Canada and the US may feel socially atomized, thoughtlessly technologized, and politically hopeless. But these ideas of communality can be reclaimed, expanded, knitted into global struggles. In this process, the Venezuelan vision of a communal future is one of many guides.

Even though Hugo Chávez is in his grave, he remains a revolutionary thinker and a popular educator. In his speeches, his writings, and his theories of popular empowerment, Chávez lives.

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com.

E-bike lithium battery investigated as cause of 5-alarm Bronx blaze, fire department says

By Artemis Moshtaghian and Isa Kaufman-Geballe, CNN
 Sun March 5, 2023

The fire blazes in the Bronx on Sunday.FDNY/Twitter
CNN —

At least seven people have been injured in a five-alarm fire in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City thought to have been caused by a lithium-ion battery, according to fire officials.

A civilian and an emergency services worker were seriously injured, and five firefighters received minor injuries, the New York Fire Department told CNN Sunday.

Almost 200 firefighters have been fighting the fire, which started in the roof of the rear part of a single-level commercial building on Grand Concourse and 181st Street, according to the New York Police Department.

FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh told reporters at the scene Sunday the cause of the fire was a lithium-ion battery, which powered a scooter.

Lithium-ion battery sparks apartment building fire

“In all of these fires, these lithium-ion fires, it is not a slow burn there’s not a small amount of fire, it literally explodes,” Kavanagh said. “It’s a tremendous volume of fire as soon as it happens, and it’s very difficult to extinguish and so it’s particularly dangerous.”

Kavanagh said firefighters arrived at the fire around 10.41 a.m., under four minutes after the first call. All seven of those injured in the blaze are considered stable, she said.

“We have been able to not have a loss of life today, but there is extraordinary damage. This entire building behind me is completely destroyed,” Kavanagh said. “The roof is caved in, there’s nothing left, and it is all because of this one single bike.”

The commissioner said more investigation needed into why the bike burst into flames. She said it may have been using an illegal battery.

The scooter was parked inside the rear part of a grocery store. Officials said it’s not yet known who owns the bike.

The worst fires in New York City history have something in common: Immigrant victims

The fire department tweeted video of the fire igniting. The footage appears to be taken from a security camera and shows someone responding to the blaze and shifting the scooter before the flames intensified.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams told Sunday’s news conference: “Our real push is to inform the public that something as simple and seen as recreational can be extremely dangerous and can take the lives of innocent people. This is a real problem we are having in the city.”

Adams added, “A simple battery operated scooter like this, people are leaving in their homes, they’re leaving in their place of businesses, they’re leaving in their restaurants, they leave it parked for the most part in places that really they should not be parked in.”

“The video is chilling, when you see how fast this fire started and spread, it’s just really going to give you a point of pause,” Adams said. He advised the public to only use legal lithium-ion batteries and to not place lithium-ion battery devices inside the home.

Fire officials said the blaze has been mostly extinguished but “pockets of fire” remain. Firefighters will stay on site through the night to make sure the fire doesn’t escalate.

On Friday, Kavanagh said there had been more than 400 fires caused by lithium-ion batteries in New York City in the past four years.

In an opinion piece for a local website, Kavanagh said: “These fires start quickly, grow rapidly, offer little time to escape, consume everything in their path, and are very difficult to extinguish.”

CNN’s Susannah Cullinane contributed to this report.

Let's Be Clear: Social Security Is Not Adding a Penny to US Debt

All those charts and narratives ascribing Social Security the top spender of federal monies—and, thereby, implying the prime cause of the U.S. debt—need debunking.


A woman walks into a Social Security office in Houston, Texas on July 13, 2022.
(Photo by Mark Felix for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

FREDERIC H. DECKER
Mar 05, 2023

Common Dreams

The narrative that Social Security eats up government revenue, driving the federal debt upward, is deeply entrenched in the Republican Party’s psyche. Former-Vice President Mike Pence insinuated such February during a private meeting with business leaders when promoting the age-old Republican wish to privatize Social Security. So maybe Social Security won’t be off the table, as GOP leaders earlier promised, as the current debate over the debt ceiling unfolds.

The public has favored shoring up Social Security with more taxes. But, also, concern over federal deficits has increased among both Republican-leaners and Democratic-leaners. Concern over deficits translates into concern over the debt. Consequently, debunking the myth Social Security feeds the debt seems an inherent requirement in gaining support for progressive proposals to reform Social Security. That, in addition to outlining how cutting benefits unduly inflicts harm within the aging population.

Now consider all those misleading charts. Those charts showing Social Security the top spender of federal monies surely don’t help foster favorable public opinion or keep the GOP benefit-cutting hatchet in the sheath. Nor do stories like that February 9 on PBS Newshour when a segment on Medicare and Social Security closed with this on the screen: "Almost a third of federal spending this fiscal year is expected to go toward Medicare and Social Security." PBS Newshour (which I support and watch regularly) is not alone, of course; the spending attributed to Social Security and other social programs is a recurrent theme during this debt-ceiling news cycle. Even the Treasury Department on one website has, at the time of this writing, a bar chart with Social Security the top bar consuming 19 percent of all spending.

Busting the debt myth can start with a report from the Government Accountability Office where stated how for years the Social Security program “built up reserves” from revenue collected that “were invested in federal government securities, reducing the amount that must be borrowed from the public,” including from other countries, to cover federal deficits. (By law surplus funds in Social Security have to be invested in government securities.)

Surpluses were possible, of course, given Social Security is largely funded by its separate payroll tax. Not totally by general revenue as likely some surmise, or haven’t considered questioning, from those typical charts on federal spending.

And, relatedly, not enough is made of this fact: Today, Social Security (formally, the “Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance [OASI] Trust Fund”) actually owns more U.S. debt, $2.7 trillion in Treasury securities, than the top two foreign governments, Japan with securities valuing $1.1 trillion and China with under $1 trillion.

It is true Social Security’s dedicated revenue in 2021 was not alone sufficient to cover benefits paid, as detailed in a recent report by the Social Security Board of Trustees. Although, it was sufficient in the preceding year with additional securities purchased then. But in 2021, the government had to reconcile payment for OASI-owned federal securities cashed in to cover that year’s shortfall. Put differently, installment payments on the loan from Social Security came due. This, admittedly, entailed some additional spending of general revenue. But not in sums making the program a major debt maker, particularly not relative to the deficit amounts caused by tax cuts during the Trump administration.

As outlined in the Trustees’ report (Table II.B1, page 7), $838.2 billion from Social Security’s separate payroll tax covered 84 percent of the $1,001.9 billion in operational costs during 2021. The other revenue sources were the routine interest paid on securities owned, the income tax on Social Security benefits, and $59.1 billion collected from the liquidation of some securities—a liquidation representing a small percent of the 2021 deficit. Granted, the deficit grew in 2021 to nearly $3,000 billion partly from Covid spending, but even if using for illustrative purposes the 2019 deficit amount of around $1,000 billion, the $59.1 billion would only have represented 6 percent of that deficit.

Shortfalls are now predicted to happen regularly each year whereby reserves (that is, owned securities) in the OASI trust likely will be depleted by 2034 if no reforms. Then only an estimated 77 percent of benefits due would be payable. But annual payments on securities cashed in isn’t á priori a dominant driver of deficits and debt, as the preceding paragraph reveals.

Aside from erroneously blaming Social Security for deficits swelling the debt, there is also a related and persistent argument that cutting benefits via raising the retirement age to 70 is necessary to control expenditures given the increasing life expectancy over the decades. But issues around life expectancy, ironically, actually contribute to disproportionate harm incurred by raising the retirement age again. Yes again, since a 1983 law increased the age from 65 to eventually 67.

Research has shown those of lesser means have experienced smaller improvements in mortality over the years. Conceivably, as life expectancy declined during the Covid-19 pandemic, this discrepancy was magnified. In any case, what is known according to the Congressional Research Service is raising the retirement age to reduce costs “would [because of their lower overall life expectancy] affect low earners disproportionately (i.e., reductions in their lifetime Social Security benefits would be considerably larger than for high earners).” By the way, privatization of Social Security would also disproportionately harm the well-being in retirement years of those with lesser means.

Research by the Social Security Administration also revealed that a sizable portion of those retiring before the full retirement age had health problems impairing the ability to work. And these early retirees more likely worked in physically demanding blue-collar occupations. This and other studies led the Congressional Research Service to observe that “early retirees who have work-related health impairment…would be disadvantaged” by an increased retirement age, which worth noting they also were by the earlier increase legislated in 1983.

Cutting benefits, in general, subverts the intended purpose of Social Security. And justification for cutting benefits is partly based upon the faulty claim Social Security continually increases the debt, ignoring most expenditures on the program do not entail general revenue. If only charts on federal spending demarcated expenditures on programs by revenue type. The one on general revenue only would show a percentage attributed to Social Security considerably less than advertised in the all-inclusive charts today.Essentially, the Social Security program has not contributed in any markedly way to the totality of deficits and associated debt. Rather, paradoxically, the program has historically loaned the government monies to cover the debt and, thereby, help pay for other federal programs. So, don’t blame Social Security for the sum of existing debt today accumulated over the years.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

FREDERIC H. DECKER is a Maryland-based sociologist and, today, an active writer with commentary appearing across local newspapers nationally. He earned his Ph.D. at Florida State University.

RIGHT WING HAIR ON FIRE

‘I Understand Your Passion’: Painfully Awkward Moment Ensues After MSNBC Guest Calls CPAC a ‘Gathering of Sexual Predators’

By Caleb HoweMar 5th, 2023, MEDIAITE

Lindy Li, a DNC national finance committee member, had MSNBC anchor Yasmin Vossoughian momentarily nonplussed on Saturday’s Yasmin Vossoughian Reports when she described CPAC as a “gathering of sexual predators” and Donald Trump as a “serial rapist.”

In the segment, Vossoughian spoke with Li and MSNBC political analyst Susan Del Percio about CPAC, 2024 GOP hopefuls, and what “woke” means.

After attacking Nikki Haley as “cringeworthy” and a “total sell-out,” Li responded to the discussion about how “woke” is being defined.

“Let’s be clear what anti-woke means. It’s anti-Black,” she said. “And I think people are very reluctant to say it, but I don’t mince any words, and that’s the truth. That’s their way of, you know, sounding the dog whistle without being extremely explicit.”

Li then gave her summary of the annual event put on by the ACU.

“Let’s also not ignore the fact that CPAC has become a gathering of sexual predators. Let’s be honest,” Li said. She went on to bring up accusations against organizer Matt Schlapp and Rep. Jim Jordan, and the investigation into Matt Gaetz. She called Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene an “adulteress” and said Rep. Lauren Boebert “brags about carrying a Glock.”

Speaking about Saturday’s keynote at CPAC, Li said “and then tonight, we have Trump, a serial rapist.”

“This is the party that claims to be the party of Christian family values, And I had nothing to say or do but laugh at that,” she concluded.

About four and a half seconds of awkward silence then preceded some stammering by Vossoughian before she tried to offer a walk-back on the characterizations.

“I, I just — I just want to be clear here, though, you know, that – it’s important to put out there, we, we understand the accusations that have been made against, of course, the former president, Lindy. And of course, I understand your passion in this topic as well. But I want to be clear, of course, that that — none of that has actually rung true as of yet. Just, they’ve all been accusations so far,” Vossoughian managed to say before thanking her guests and ending the segment.

Del Percio, a former advisor to Democrat Andrew Cuomo, did not comment.

The show’s Twitter account did highlight Lindy Li’s appearance on Saturday, but for whatever reason chose a different clip to highlight.

6 scholars explain what a real climate solution is

 2 SLIDES
Researchers say protecting mangroves that soak up carbon is a great climate solution. But they caution against programs that slap carbon offsets onto it as those offsets can be hard to verify.

CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES


BY
Julia Simon
MAR 05, 2023 NPR

Scientists say there's a lot we can still do to slow the speed of climate change. But when it comes to "climate solutions", some are real, and some aren't, says Naomi Oreskes, historian of science at Harvard University. "This space has become really muddied," she says.

So how does someone figure out what's legit? We asked six climate scholars for the questions they ask themselves whenever they come across something claiming to be a climate solution.

A big climate solution is an obvious one

It may sound basic, but one big way to address climate change is to reduce the main human activity that caused it in the first place: burning fossil fuels.

Scientists say that means ultimately transitioning away from oil, coal and gas and becoming more energy efficient. We already have a lot of the technology we need to make this transition, like solar, wind, and batteries, Oreskes says.


"What we need to do right now is to mobilize the technologies that already exist, that work and are cost competitive, and that essentially means renewable energy and storage," she says.

Think about who's selling you the solution

It's important to think about both who's selling you the climate solution and what they say the problem is, says Melissa Aronczyk, professor of media at Rutgers University.

"People like to come up with solutions, but to do that, they usually have to interpret the problem in a way that works for them," she says.

Oreskes says pay attention when you see a "climate solution" that means increasing the use of fossil fuels. She says an example is natural gas, which has been sold as a "bridge fuel" from coal to renewable energy. But natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and its production, transport and use release methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.

"I think we need to start by looking at what happens when the fossil fuel industry comes up with solutions, because here is the greatest potential for conflict of interest," Aronczyk says.

A solution may sound promising, but is it available and scalable now?

Sometimes you'll hear about new promising technology like carbon capture, which vacuums carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it underground, says David Ho, a professor of oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Ho researches climate solutions and he says ask yourself: is this technology available, affordable, or scalable now?

"I think people who don't work in this space think we have all these technologies that are ready to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for instance. And we're not there," Ho says

If it's adding emissions, it's not a climate solution

These days all kinds of companies, from airlines to wedding dress companies, might offer to let you buy "carbon offsets" along with your purchase. That offset money could do something like build a new wind farm or plant trees that would - in theory - soak up and store the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of taking a flight or making a new dress.

But there are often problems with regulation and verification of offsets, says Roberto Schaeffer, a professor of energy economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. "It's very dangerous, very dangerous indeed," he says.

He says with offsets from forests, it's hard to verify if the trees are really being protected, that those trees won't get cut down or burned in a wildfire.

"You cannot guarantee, 'Okay, you're gonna offset your dress by planting a tree.' You have no guarantee that in three years time that tree is gonna be there," he says.

If you make emissions thinking you're offsetting them, and the offset doesn't work, that's doubling the emissions, says Adrienne Buller, a climate finance researcher and director of research at Common Wealth, a think tank in the United Kingdom, "It's sort of like doubly bad."

If a solution sounds too easy, be skeptical

Many things sold as carbon offsets - like restoring or protecting forests - are, on their own, great climate solutions, Buller says. "We need things like trees," she says, "To draw carbon out of the atmosphere."

The problem is when carbon markets sell the idea that you can continue emitting as usual and everything will be fine if you just buy an offset, Buller says. "It's kind of a solution that implies that we don't have to do that much hard work. We can just kind of do some minor tweaks to the way that we currently do things," she says.

Schaeffer says there is a lot of hard work in our future to get off of fossil fuels and onto clean energy sources. "So people have to realize there is a price to pay here. No free lunch."

It's not all about business. Governments must play a role in solutions, too

We often think of businesses working on climate solutions on their own, but that's often not the case, says Oreskes. Government often plays a big role in funding and research support for new climate technology, says June Sekera, a visiting scholar at The New School who studies public policy and climate.

And governments will also have to play a big role in regulating emissions, says Schaeffer, who has been working with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 25 years.

That's why all the scholars NPR spoke with for this story say one big climate solution is to vote.

Schaeffer points to the recent election in Brazil, where climate change was a big campaign issue for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula won, and has promised to address deforestation, a big source of Brazil's emissions.

There's no one solution to climate change - and no one can do it alone

Aronczyk wants to make one thing clear: there is no one solution to climate change.

"We're human beings. We encounter a problem, we wanna solve that problem," Aronczyk says, "But just as there is no one way to describe climate change, there's no one way to offer a solution."

Climate solutions will take different forms, Sekera says. Some solutions may slow climate change, some may offer us ways to adapt.

The key thing, Aronczyk says, is that climate solutions will involve governments, businesses, and individuals. She says: "It is an all hands on deck kind of a situation."

 [Copyright 2023 NPR]

U$A

Child Labor and Immigration

Mostly a policy lament.

STEVEN L. TAYLOR · SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2023 ·

Via WaPo: A cleaning company illegally employed a 13-year-old. Her family is paying the price.

At 13, she was too young to be cleaning a meatpacking plant in the heart of Nebraska cattle country, working the graveyard shift amid the brisket saws and the bone cutters. The cleaning company broke the law when it hired her and more than two dozen other teenagers in this gritty industrial town, federal officials said.

[Since the U.S. Department of Labor raided the plant in October, Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired to clean the facility, has been fined for violating child labor laws. The girl, meanwhile, has watched her whole life unravel.

First, she lost the job that burned and blistered her skin but paid her $19 an hour. Then a county judge sent her stepfather to jail for driving her to work each night, a violation of state child labor laws. Her mother also faces jail time for securing the fake papers that got the child the job in the first place. And her parents are terrified of being sent back to Guatemala, the country they left several years ago in search of a better life.

I suspect that this case, and others like it, are a bit of a Rorschach Test. Some will see it as a corporation exploiting desperate people, while others will see a family who shouldn’t be in the United States (and who exploited their own child by letting her work).

I will state from the onset that I am more sympathetic to desperate people whose desperation leads them to engage in, well, desperate behavior, but will certainly acknowledge that there are reasons to lay some blame in their direction. Packers paying a fine and the consequences for the family are ultimately not equivalent in my mind.

A sweeping investigation of Packers found 102 teens, ages 13 to 17, scouring slaughterhouses in eight states, part of a growing wave of child workers illegally hired to fill jobs in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries. Driven in part by persistent labor shortages and record numbers of unaccompanied migrant minors arriving from Central America, child labor violations have nearly quadrupled since 2015, according to Labor Department data, spiking in hazardous jobs that American citizens typically shun.

[…]

Packers has faced no criminal charges, despite evidence that it failed to take basic steps to verify the age of its young employees. Last month, it quickly resolved the case by paying a $1.5 million civil fine. The families of the teen workers, by contrast, have been exposed to child-abuse charges and potential deportation. None have applied for work permits and the protection against deportation that is available to the child workers, fearing retaliation in a company town where almost everyone’s job is somehow tied to the meatpacking industry.

[…]

Packers officials said they have dismissed all the minor workers and fired two managers in Grand Island. They accused “rogue individuals” of using counterfeit documents to prove that the children were of legal age and emphasized that the 102 workers made up a tiny share of the company’s 17,000-member workforce. The full statement from Packers is available here.

For anyone who has paid attention to this general topic will recognize the broad outlines here. Companies need employees and immigrants need work. Both either break, bend, and/or ignore the law to make the transaction happen. Once someone gets caught the company basically says “whoops” and pays a fine, and the employees (and often their broader communities) tend to suffer very direct consequences.

Let me pause and note that there is no easy solution to any of this. The easiest of them all is “seal the border” (or similar formulations) and it is an utter impossibility. As I have noted on multiple occasions, there are too many legitimate transactions across the border to “seal” it or “close” it in any meaningful fashion. Calls to “seal” the border are just a way of saying “I wish this problem would go away” with all the efficacy such a statement implies.

What I am constantly struck by when I read stories about immigrants and immigration policy are the very real market forces that help drive all of this behavior. There is a market for labor in this country that is not being satisfied and there is a supply of labor south of the border willing to do the work in question. There is also a very real demand for security and opportunity in many people living south of the border (especially in places like Guatemala and El Salvador) and the ample supply of security and opportunity in the United States. Combining these two push-pull circumstances means that US policymakers have some very, very powerful forces to contend with if we are going to find solutions to deal with this situation in any way that actually makes it better.

(I have held this view for decades, in fact).

Instead, we remain in a spiral of nonsensical approaches. We don’t want to really deal with the labor demands (which would include better enforcement of existing labor laws and, quite frankly, things like paying better wages to attract workers, but that would lead to higher prices that no one wants to pay). We don’t want to figure out a better way to allow labor to enter the country legally. We don’t want to pay to increase the bureaucracy needed to deal with migrants.

We really don’t want to do anything.

And I realize that at the base of my assumptions about this situation is that migrants are going to come and we need to figure out how to deal with that fact. This automatically makes the “seal the border” faction of the population want to ignore me as being an “open border” type. But the issue to me is simple: the empirical reality is that migrants are going to come. If the US really is the land of opportunity, the land of the free and the home of the brave, as well as a shining city on a hill, people are going to come. Desperation is a major motivator. Indeed, it seems to me that the desire for self-improvement, broadly defined, is a major motivator for a lot of humanity and human history shows that people will endure much to improve the lives of their children.

While I have no easy solution (and if an easy solution was possible in a Sunday morning blog post, well, the problem wouldn’t be inspiring blog posts), I will say this: if we had a flooding problem you solve that problem through the construction of dams, levies, dikes, canals, and the like to control the flow. Such systems do not guarantee universal fixes, but it allows for control of the flow of water, to help stop catastrophic flooding and to help direct the water where needed. You don’t just send out the bucket brigade while complaining that we need to “seal” the horizon.

I suspect that if we had a more rational process to deal with migrants, it would be possible to better control the flow (but it would never stop the illegal crossings).

Instead, we refuse to really do anything.

THE REPUBLICAN CHILD LABOR AGENDA

 BY ERIK LOOMIS

 

/

 

ON MARCH 5, 2023

 

/

 

As Timothy Noah notes, the rise of child labor in America is directly connected to Republican policies on the issue, as in Republicans are objectively pro-child labor.

Child labor is back. The Labor Department’s wage and hour division recorded a 37 percent increase in 2022 in the number of minors employed in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which outlawed most child labor way back in 1938 and imposed strict limits on the rest. The 37 percent increase was over the previous year. Over the previous decade, the number of minors employed in violation of the act was up 140 percent. 

The surge in child labor reverses what had been, for most of the past 20 years, a significant decline in the number of minors employed in violation of the FLSA. Nobody knows exactly why the numbers started to climb in 2015, but probably it was because the labor market was getting tight. The unemployment rate, which had been falling since 2010, dropped in 2015 to 5 percent, which was then considered full employment. Workers were getting hard to find. The unemployment rate has since fallen further to 3.4 percent. 

The violations began piling up just as Republican state legislators, many of them newly in the majority, went on the attack against child labor restrictions, pressing in various ways to expand the number of work hours and work settings available to teenagers aged 14 to 17. (With exceptions for farm families, child actors, and a few others, child labor under age 14 is illegal.) One Wisconsin bill went so far as to ban the phrase “child labor” from state employment statutes, requiring that the offending term be replaced by “employment of minors.” A bill introduced in Iowa last month would allow 14-year-olds to work in meatpacking plants. If the youngster gets hurt due to his own negligence (whatever that means at 14), the meatpacker will be indemnified against civil liability. 

Only a few of these Dickensian pro-child-labor bills got enacted, but some did. In June, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu signed into law a bill that allows 14-year-old busboys to clear tables where liquor is served and expands from 30 to 35 the number of hours 16- and 17-year-olds may work during the school year. These restrictions had “become too cumbersome,” New Hampshire Deputy Labor Commissioner Rudolph Ogden explained to The New Hampshire Bulletin. Sununu is weighing a presidential bid in 2024. Working campaign slogan: Bring Back Warren’s Blacking Factory. (Just kidding.)

With this political backdrop, it’s little wonder that an investigation published Saturday by Hannah Dreier of The New York Times revealed a “shadow work force” of migrant children “across industries in every state”: 12-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee; 13-year-old girls washing hotel sheets in Virginia; a 13-year-old boy in Michigan making auto parts on an overnight shift that ends at 6:30 a.m.; a 12-year-old working for a Hyundai subsidiary in Alabama (this last courtesy of Reuters). The good news is that the Cheetos you’re snacking on or the Fruit of the Loom socks warming your feet may have been manufactured right here in the United States. The bad news is that they may have been made with child labor. It’s no longer just a Third World practice, or a bad memory from How the Other Half Lives.

Worried about the debt: Tax the rich

BY AMY HANAUER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 03/05/23

Supporters of taxes on the very rich contend that people are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic with a bigger appetite for what they’re calling “tax justice.” Bills announced Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in California, New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Washington and Connecticut vary in their approaches to hiking taxes, but all revolve around the idea that the richest Americans need to pay more.

Republicans are using the need to raise the debt ceiling to demand cuts to spending. They are not showing much enthusiasm for saying what spending to cut and for good reason. Americans, it turns out, support most of what the federal government spends money on.

When President Biden said during the State of the Union that some Republican politicians want to cut Social Security and Medicare, it generated boos from Republicans in the room. But what would they support cutting? Many won’t say, probably because Social Security, Medicare and other health care and the military are the bulk of what’s in the federal budget.

For those concerned about the debt, here’s a better idea. Do more to tax rich people and corporations.

In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly cut and rarely raised taxes on wealthy people or corporations. Over 80 percent of the tax cuts passed since 2000 went to the wealthiest 40 percent. Nearly two-thirds of those went to the wealthiest 20 percent and most of that to the richest five percent. This enriched the uber-rich and simultaneously ballooned the deficit, fueling today’s debt ceiling drama.

The corporate minimum tax and other reforms in last summer’s Inflation Reduction Act show we can break that pattern. In contrast to the Bush and Trump eras, Biden-era tax changes raise hundreds of billions of dollars to preserve the planet, improve people’s health and reduce the national debt. But the increased revenue from last summer’s reform is just the beginning of what’s needed to catch up to what people and communities deserve.

In the State of the Union, the president proposed changes that would add revenue and improve tax fairness. The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax would phase in for those with wealth over $100 million, requiring they pay at least a 20 percent tax rate on all income including unrealized capital gains. Currently, the very wealthy can accumulate capital gains and pay no taxes if they don’t sell their assets. Correcting this could raise over $350 billion over a decade from only the extremely wealthy.

The president also proposed expanding the tax on stock buybacks from 1 to 4 percent. The tax hasn’t slowed stock buybacks, which are at record levels. Forecasters conservatively estimated that the 1 percent level will raise about $75 billion over 10 years. Increasing the rate to 4 percent will further increase revenue for public needs.

There are other ways, beyond those the president proposed, to raise more while addressing inequality. On the corporate side, we could close the loophole corporations get for offshoring jobs and tax huge “passthrough entities” that are currently allowed to dodge the corporate income tax. Each would raise hundreds of billions over a decade.




On the individual side, we could raise hundreds of billions of dollars by eliminating the tax break for capital gains income, making investors pay the same rate on income from wealth as workers pay on wages. And we could tax capital gains on assets at the point of inheritance, so dynastic wealth doesn’t permanently escape taxation, generating over $100 billion.

If Congress chooses, it could use some of the proceeds for debt reduction. And we’d still have more resources for essentials that citizens of other nations get, like low-cost college, universal paid leave and quality childcare.

The United States used to channel much more corporate profits toward broad support for the economy and society that made those profits possible. In the middle of the 20th century when economic growth was fastest and most broadly shared, corporations paid dramatically more, and the U.S. put more toward tackling collective challenges

Corporate profits hit a new record of $2.8 trillion in 2021. Yet, corporate income taxes now cover just 10 percent of federal revenue, down from more than 30 percent in the 1950s High egg prices: Getting to the bottom lineThe performative politics of Marjorie Taylor Greene

The U.S. ranks sixth from the bottom among peer nations in the share of resources spent on public needs (less than a third of GDP). In contrast, European countries put closer to half of their economy into societal investments. That’s why our competitors have universal health care, universal parental leave and lower poverty. And it pays off: People live longer throughout western Europe than here.

As one of the most prosperous countries in human history, we have enough resources for our collective needs. By better taxing corporations and the wealthiest, we can generate revenue to improve family security, strengthen our communities, and reduce the debt too.


Amy Hanauer is the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.