Glencore’s Israeli-bound Coal Becomes the Next Test of South Africa’s Anti-genocide Stance

By Allan Boesak, Patrick Bond , Roshan Dadoo 

August 22, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share 

Israel’s fossil-energy supply is among the most damaging components contributing to the genocide underway in Gaza – and to its longer-term maintenance of apartheid, including land-grab settlements in Palestine. The coal-fired power plants at Ashdod and Hedera ports typically supply 20-30% of power to a grid that feeds the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the illegal West Bank settlements.

Last December, South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after Israel began mass murder and bombings against more than two million Palestinians in Gaza in response to the Al Aqsa Flood Operation of October 7 when resistance fighters broke out from the besieged Gaza prison.

The IDF revenge – along with its ‘friendly fire’ and the ‘Hannibal Directive’ that also killed several hundred Israeli civilians near the Gaza border – is so extreme that International Criminal Court prosecutors prepared war-crimes arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention requires all statesto undertake ‘to prevent and to punish genocide’.

Court order to stop empowering Israel

The ICJ has also insisted that all States halt any “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” That logically includes South African state aid – e.g. via Transnet rail shipments, or the depletion of a sovereign natural resource taken from Mpumalanga Province mines – in the form of coal supplies to the Israel Electric Corporation.

In situations of armed conflict, additional international humanitarian and criminal law standards apply to corporations and individual business leaders, who must consider whether their operations contribute to gross human rights violations or international crimes.

A similar vulnerability occurred within a different apartheid system, South Africa’s, in 1985 when financial sanctions (thanks to international solidarity campaigning) and internal United Democratic Front protest from below caused such a squeeze that President PW Botha declared a debt default, imposed exchange controls and shut the stock market. The response by business leaders was to visit Zambia to meet exiled African National Congress leaders, beginning the democratization process as whites finally began to accept ‘one person, one vote’ democracy.

Yet some of the same businesses that enjoyed apartheid profits, e.g. Anglo American and Glencore, went on to empower Israeli apartheid. Even after the Gaza genocide began last October, three massive ships left Richard’s Bay – the most recent on January 20 – carrying dirty coal which fuels both genocide and climate crisis.

Coal-fired genocide

The last year for which United Nations Comtrade data are available, 2021, shows 6.5 million tonnes of coal imported by Israel, of which 50% was Colombian, 36% Russian, 13% South African and 1% Turkish. (In May this year, Turkey imposed full trade sanctions on Israel.) In 2023 the amount of coal consumed by Israel was 5.2 million tonnes.

And according to a June 2024 report by SPGlobal, “Israel imported 1.4 million tonnes of thermal coal in 2024 so far… Colombia accounted for 855,700 tonnes – or 60% of all imports during this period. Other key suppliers included Russia with 247,500, South Africa at 169,200, the U.S. at 86,100 and China supplying 53,000.”  

The Boycott Divestment Sanctions ‘BDS’ strategy called for by the broadest-ever range of Palestinian civil society in 2005, draws on lessons two decades earlier in ending South African apartheid. It has now become urgent for the SA government, trade unions, community organisations, social movements and anti-coal environmentalists to mobilise and end any economic complicity with Israel’s genocide.

In the energy sector we are targeting companies that include Glencore (the main firm selling coal from Colombia) and its Astron Energy subsidiary and main coal-mining partner African Rainbow Minerals, Thungela (formerly AngloCoal) and any other South African firms as well as state owned enterprises such as Transnet that have profited from empowering Israeli apartheid.

Since South African coal has been fueling oppression of Palestine for decades, it is long overdue to bring the damage to a halt and for the guilty firms to pay reparations for past earnings, just as did Detroit-based General Motors for apartheid profiteering in pre-1994 South Africa.

Colombia’s example

On June 8, Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a proclamation to “suspend coal exports to Israel until the genocide is stopped,” on grounds that in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, coal is “an energy supply and strategic resource for the manufacturing of weapons, the mobilization of troops, and the manufacturing of supplies for military operations” – as well as being a major contributor to the climate crisis.

The Colombian Mining Association vowed to disobey Petro and in June-July the coal shipments continued, including from Glencore’s main port on June 25. But Petro has persevered and last week ruled that on Thursday August 22, those shipments must end.

Glencore ‘ethics’

While Colombia’s halt to Israel coal sales will affect 5.1% of exports, in South Africa’s case the equivalent is typically lower than 1%. Earnings from these exports fluctuate with price and quantity: $101 million in 2021; $184 million in 2022; and $78 million in 2023. 

But the costs of coal exports – in terms of local pollution, greenhouse gas damage and depleted hydrocarbons, as well as labour, operating costs and environmental remediation – are far higher than the gross income. Still, any worker or community adversely affected should be first in line for Just Energy Transition funds.

A few weeks ago, at Glencore’s Annual General Meeting in Switzerland, a shareholder asked “if you’re conducting human rights assessments on the use of the coal you’re exporting to Israel to ensure that you’re not held liable”? Board Chairman Kalidas Madhavpeddi replied, “The company supplies to many countries around the world and it’s almost impossible to tell you the answer to your question.” The shareholder followed up, “So you don’t check how the coal is being used?”

The answer revealed the firm’s lack of ethics: “Coal is used in power generation, that’s simple.” The two Glencore directors from South Africa who were there – CEO Gary Nagle and Senior Independent Director (and former SA central bank governor) Gill Marcus – were notably silent.

Glencore’s roots are in Marc Rich & Co, a firm central to apartheid-era sanctions-busting and racism-profiteering. After being renamed Glencore, the Swiss firm took a Johannesburg Stock Exchange secondary listing, in which our civil servants own 2% worth, or $1.1 billion. From 2018-22, Glencore was successfully prosecuted under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for widespread bribery across Africa and Latin America. It paid $1.5 billion in fines, in the process revealing deep collusion with notorious Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler in central Africa.

Shir Hever, considered to be Israel’s leading progressive political economist, concludes: “If South Africa now follows in the footsteps of Colombia, it would be such a powerful move, that it could possibly bring the genocide to a halt.”

For these reasons, protests against Glencore on August 22 at its Johannesburg headquarters and subsidiary Astron’s Cape Town site – kick off South African BDS campaigning aimed at disempowering genocide.

(Rev. Boesak, a liberation theologian, was formerly SA Ambassador to the United States; Bond is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UJ; and Dadoo coordinates the BDS Coalition in SA.)

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Defeating the Fascists Is the First Order of Business

In the moral and political struggle to create a future with alternative possibilities, we need to build a united front. Radicalism can co-exist with pragmatic progressivism.

By CJ Polychroniou

August 22, 2024

Source: Common Dreams

As we approach the 2024 presidential election, we are constantly told that this election is pivotal for the future of democracy. This may be so because a second Trump presidency would most likely be far more dangerous than the first. It would be foolish indeed not to take seriously when Trump says things like “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” And we already know what he plans to do with the administrative state: demolish it and replace it with MAGA loyalists. As for his energy policies, ways to cut grocery and mortgage costs, and his strategy to deal with the climate crisis, they can all be summarized with one simple slogan: “Drill, baby, drill.” Consequently, it is imperative that we defeat Trump in November. But as Bernie Sanders said just last week, “it is not the only task for our progressive movement.”

Indeed, there are so many things that need to be done in the hope that we can end predatory plutocracy, lessen the inequities of 21st century capitalism, counter militarism, and reinvent U.S. democracy. On the first day of the National Democratic Convention, all the speakers highlighted with passion the need to defeat Trump in order to protect democracy and the interests of average people. Joe Biden himself told the crowd that democracy prevailed under his watch and now must be preserved.

The only way we can sidestep the power of special interests is through solidarity mobilization and citizen participation.

However, as one would expect from a mainstream political party, the Harris-Walz campaign is not offering an alternative vision for the future, one that would recapture the true essence of democracy. There is a lot of rhetoric about “joy,” “freedom,” and “a better future,” but Harris’s economic plan mirrors many of Biden’s economic initiatives though in an expanded format, such as her ideas for addressing the housing crisis.

Still, this is a step forward as Bidenomics undoubtedly represented “some of the most progressive domestic policies to have come out of the White House.” But let’s focus here on the big subject itself, which is democracy. Indeed, this may be the most propitious time to ask ourselves this: Is the U.S. even an actual democracy? There is plenty of evidence to contend that it is not; in fact, the U.S. was never designed to be democratic, so the obsession of the country’s political leaders, past and present, to portray the nation as the “world’s greatest democracy” should provoke laughter instead of elicit pride. For many years now, the U.S. has been rated by the Economist Intelligence Unit as a “flawed democracy,” while in 2022 the international democracy watchdog Freedom House ranked the U.S. 62nd in the world, “below every major Western European nation… and about even with Panama, Romania and South Korea.”

And how could it be otherwise? First, the U.S. president is not even elected by the popular vote. According to the Constitution—now more than 235 years old and terribly out of touch with contemporary society—members of the electoral college elect the president. Leaving aside the question of the history and evolution of the electoral college, the fundamental truth about the method used to elect the president is that it subverts the will of the people by allowing presidential candidates to win an election without securing more popular votes. In other words, it is possible for a candidate to win a majority of votes nationally but still lose the election because he/she lost the electoral vote.

We saw such outcomes in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016 respectively. In 2000, Al Gore won the most votes, a half million more than George W. Bush, but lost the presidency in the electoral vote. Likewise, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote comfortably, receiving nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but lost the election because Trump clinched more electoral votes. These outcomes should not be seen as paradoxes in a perverse political system, but rather as outright scandals. They speak volumes of the anti-democratic nature of the electoral college and, surely enough, of the undemocratic nature of the sacred text itself, i.e., the Constitution.

The United States has an even bigger democracy problem with the Senate, “an irredeemable institution” that disproportionately benefits small states, which are overwhelmingly rural, white and conservative, and is thus “racist by proxy.” The one state, two-Senators rule is nothing short of a recipe for minority domination.

Moreover, in U.S. elections, the political currency that carries greater weight is not votes, but money. The candidate who spends more money usually wins, and running for president is a terribly expansive undertaking. It costs billions of dollars. The 2020 election totaled $14.4 billion. The 2024 election is on track to be the most expensive of all time, expected to reach nearly $16 billion. What’s more, a handful of wealthy special interests dominate political funding, especially since rulings like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck down spending limits as unconstitutional violations of free speech. Of course, the public is not happy with this state of affairs, as polls have repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority of citizens believe that there should be spending limits for political campaigns. But what the public thinks and wants matters very little in U.S. politics. Scores of empirical studies have shown that U.S. politics is heavily tilted in favor of the rich and that political decisions systematically ignore the preferences of the poor and the working and middle classes.

So, what is to be done? How do we move forward towards ending plutocracy and unleashing the transformative potential of economic democracy? Is the undemocratic nature of the U.S. political system an unalterable state of affairs?

We need to recognize that the two-party system isn’t about to change anytime soon. But this doesn’t mean that all is lost when it comes to making progress on the social and economic fronts.

Real change is possible and so is a future with alternative possibilities. But change doesn’t happen overnight, and, in politics, it takes winning many different battles for a war to be won. Hence, we shouldn’t reject reform on account of ideological purity or avoid making some compromises because of deep moral convictions if, doing so, means that we fail to take any step forward. “Two steps forward, one step back” is a tactic that often pays dividends in the politics of radical social change.

We need to recognize that the two-party system isn’t about to change anytime soon. But this doesn’t mean that all is lost when it comes to making progress on the social and economic fronts. As experience has shown, serious and committed work at the community level can result in making a real impact on the national stage. The real fight for progressive power starts in local communities, one neighborhood at a time. This is because the only way we can sidestep the power of special interests is through solidarity mobilization and citizen participation.

There is a rich history of claiming citizenship not only in the U.S. but across the globe. We should study closely this history while also seeking ways to deepen democracy through citizen action that unites rather than divides progressives and moderates. As progressives, we need alliances. Reaching out to people with different political views from ours should be encouraged rather than discouraged. And we should all be united in combating the surge of neo-fascism or proto-fascism manifested in the MAGA movement. We must not allow anger over specific issues and concerns to derail us from the immediate goal, which is to keep the reactionary forces at bay. Sometimes we can only win one battle at a time. We should oppose U.S. imperialism and war at every turn while realizing that we can’t dismantle the imperial state with one shot.

In the moral and political struggle to create a future with alternative possibilities, we need to build a united front. Radicalism can co-exist with pragmatic progressivism. We have a world to win, to be sure, but we must first defeat today’s neofascists.

CJ Polychroniou

C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

What Would a Real Renewable Energy Transition Look Like?

By Richard Heinberg

August 22, 2024

Source: Resilience

A “Solarpunk Berlin” by Alex Rommel

Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order.

The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given (1) the current size of the human population (there are eight times as many of us alive today as there were in 1820, when the fossil fuel energy transition was getting underway), (2) the vast scale of the global economy, and (3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made in order to avert catastrophic climate change, a rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.

As we’ll see, the evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe in which an unimaginable number of people will either die or be forced to migrate, with most ecosystems transformed beyond recognition.

We’ll unpack the reasons why the transition is currently such an uphill slog. Then, crucially, we’ll explore what a real energy transition would look like, and how to make it happen.

Why This Is (So Far) Not a Real Transition

Despite trillions of dollars having been spent on renewable energy infrastructure, carbon emissions are still increasing, not decreasing, and the share of world energy coming from fossil fuels is only slightly less today than it was 20 years ago. In 2024, the world is using more oil, coal, and natural gas than it did in 2023.

While the U.S. and many European nations have seen a declining share of their electricity production coming from coal, the continuing global growth in fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions overshadows any cause for celebration.

Why is the rapid deployment of renewable energy not resulting in declining fossil fuel usage? The main culprit is economic growth, which consumes more energy and materials. So far, the amount of annual growth in the world’s energy usage has exceeded the amount of energy added each year from new solar panels and wind turbines. Fossil fuels have supplied the difference.

So, for the time being at least, we are not experiencing a real energy transition. All that humanity is doing is adding energy from renewable sources to the growing amount of energy it derives from fossil fuels. The much-touted energy transition could, if somewhat cynically, be described as just an aspirational grail.

How long would it take for humanity to fully replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, accounting for both the current growth trajectory of solar and wind power, and also the continued expansion of the global economy at the recent rate of 3 percent per year? Economic models suggest the world could obtain most of its electricity from renewables by 2060 (though many nations are not on a path to reach even this modest marker). However, electricity represents only about 20 percent of the world’s final energy usage; transitioning the other 80 percent of energy usage would take longer—likely many decades.

However, to avert catastrophic climate change, the global scientific community says we need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—i.e., in just 25 years. Since it seems physically impossible to get all of our energy from renewables that soon while still growing the economy at recent rates, the IPCC (the international agency tasked with studying climate change and its possible remedies) assumes that humanity will somehow adopt carbon capture and sequestration technologies at scale—including technologies that have been shown not to work—even though there is no existing way of paying for this vast industrial build-out. This wishful thinking on the part of the IPCC is surely proof that the energy transition is not happening at sufficient speed.

Why isn’t it? One reason is that governments, businesses, and an awful lot of regular folks are clinging to an unrealistic goal for the transition. Another reason is that there is insufficient tactical and strategic global management of the overall effort. We’ll address these problems separately, and in the process uncover what it would take to nurture a true energy transition.

The Core of the Transition is Using Less Energy

At the heart of most discussions about the energy transition lie two enormous assumptions: that the transition will leave us with a global industrial economy similar to today’s in terms of its scale and services, and that this future renewable-energy economy will continue to grow, as the fossil-fueled economy has done in recent decades. But both of these assumptions are unrealistic. They flow from a largely unstated goal: we want the energy transition to be completely painless, with no sacrifice of profit or convenience. That goal is understandable, since it would presumably be easier to enlist the public, governments, and businesses in an enormous new task if no cost is incurred (though the history of overwhelming societal effort and sacrifice during wartime might lead us to question that presumption).

But the energy transition will undoubtedly entail costs. Aside from tens of trillions of dollars in required monetary investment, the energy transition will itself require energy—lots of it. It will take energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric vehicles, electric farm machinery, zero-carbon aircraft, batteries, and the rest of the vast panoply of devices that would be required to operate an electrified global industrial economy at current scale.

In the early stages of the transition, most of that energy for building new low-carbon infrastructure will have to come from fossil fuels, since those fuels still supply over 80 percent of world energy (bootstrapping the transition—using only renewable energy to build transition-related machinery—would take far too long). So, the transition itself, especially if undertaken quickly, will entail a large pulse of carbon emissions. Teams of scientists have been seeking to estimate the size of that pulse; one group suggests that transition-related emissions will be substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 billion metric tons of CO2 “with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2”—the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of global carbon CO2 emissions at current rates. The only ways to minimize these transition-related emissions would be, first, to aim to build a substantially smaller global energy system than the one we are trying to replace; and second, to significantly reduce energy usage for non-transition-related purposes—including transportation and manufacturing, cornerstones of our current economy—during the transition.

In addition to energy, the transition will require materials. While our current fossil-fuel energy regime extracts billions of tons of coal, oil, and gas, plus much smaller amounts of iron, bauxite, and other ores for making drills, pipelines, pumps, and other related equipment, the construction of renewable energy infrastructure at commensurate scale would require far larger quantities of non-fuel raw materials—including copper, iron, aluminum, lithium, iridium, gallium, sand, and rare earth elements.

While some estimates suggest that global reserves of these elements are sufficient for the initial build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure at scale, there are still two big challenges. First: obtaining these materials will require greatly expanding extractive industries along with their supply chains. These industries are inherently polluting, and they inevitably degrade land. For example, to produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. The rock-to-metal ratio is even worse for some other ores. Mining operations often take place on Indigenous peoples’ lands and the tailings from those operations often pollute rivers and streams. Non-human species and communities in the global South are already traumatized by land degradation and toxification; greatly expanding resource extraction—including deep-sea mining—would only deepen and multiply the wounds.

The second materials challenge: renewable energy infrastructure will have to be replaced periodically—every 25 to 50 years. Even if Earth’s minerals are sufficient for the first full-scale build-out of panels, turbines, and batteries, will limited mineral abundance permit continual replacements? Transition advocates say that we can avoid depleting the planet’s ores by recycling minerals and metals after constructing the first iteration of solar-and-wind technology. However, recycling is never complete, with some materials degraded in the process. One analysis suggests recycling would only buy a couple of centuries’ worth of time before depletion would bring an end to the regime of replaceable renewable-energy machines—and that’s assuming a widespread, coordinated implementation of recycling on an unprecedented scale. Again, the only real long-term solution is to aim for a much smaller global energy system.

The transition of society from fossil fuel dependency to reliance on low-carbon energy sources will be impossible to achieve without also reducing overall energy usage substantially and maintaining this lower rate of energy usage indefinitely. This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that is uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.
How We Could Actually Do It, In Seven Concurrent Steps

Step one: Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap. We will not reduce carbon emissions until we reduce fossil fuel usage—it’s just that simple. Rather than trying to do this by adding renewable energy (which so far hasn’t resulted in a lessening of emissions), it makes far more sense simply to limit fossil fuel extraction. I wrote up the basics of a treaty along these lines several years ago in my book, The Oil Depletion Protocol.

Step two: Manage energy demand fairly. Reducing fossil fuel extraction presents a problem. Where will we get the energy required for transition purposes? Realistically, it can only be obtained by repurposing energy we’re currently using for non-transition purposes. That means most people, especially in highly industrialized countries, would have to use significantly less energy, both directly and also indirectly (in terms of energy embedded in products, and in services provided by society, such as road building). To accomplish this with the minimum of societal stress will require a social means of managing energy demand.

The fairest and most direct way to manage energy demand is via quota rationing. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system designed two decades ago by British economist David Fleming; it rewards energy savers and gently punishes energy guzzlers while ensuring that everyone gets energy they actually need. Every adult would be given an equal free entitlement of TEQs units each week. If you use less than your entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them. All trading takes place at a single national price, which will rise and fall in line with demand.

Step three: Manage the public’s material expectations. Persuading people to accept using less energy will be hard, if everyone still wants to use more. Therefore, it will be necessary to manage the public’s expectations. This may sound technocratic and scary, but in fact society has already been managing the public’s expectations for over a century via advertising—which constantly delivers messages encouraging everyone to consume as much as they can. Now we need different messages to set different expectations.

What’s our objective in life? Is it to have as much stuff as possible, or to be happy and secure? Our current economic system assumes the former, and we have instituted an economic goal (constant growth) and an indicator (gross domestic product, or GDP) to help us achieve that goal. But ever-more people using ever-more stuff and energy leads to increased rates of depletion, pollution, and degradation, thereby imperiling the survival of humanity and the rest of the biosphere. In addition, the goal of happiness and security is more in line with cultural traditions and human psychology. If happiness and security are to be our goals, we should adopt indicators that help us achieve them. Instead of GDP, which simply measures the amount of money changing hands in a country annually, we should measure societal success by monitoring human well-being. The tiny country of Bhutan has been doing this for decades with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, which it has offered as a model for the rest of the world.

Step four: Aim for population decline. If population is always growing while available energy is capped, that means ever-less energy will be available per capita. Even if societies ditch GDP and adopt GNH, the prospect of continually declining energy availability will present adaptive challenges. How can energy scarcity impacts be minimized? The obvious solution: welcome population decline and plan accordingly.

Step five: Target technological research and development to the transition. Today the main test of any new technology is simply its profitability. However, the transition will require new technologies to meet an entirely different set of criteria, including low-energy operation and minimization of exotic and toxic materials. Fortunately, there is already a subculture of engineers developing low-energy and intermediate technologies that could help run a right-sized circular economy.

Step six: Institute technological triage. Many of our existing technologies don’t meet these new criteria. So, during the transition, we will be letting go of familiar but ultimately destructive and unsustainable machines.

Some energy-guzzling machines—such as gasoline-powered leaf blowers—will be easy to say goodbye to. Commercial aircraft will be harder. Artificial intelligence is an energy guzzler we managed to live without until very recently; perhaps it’s best if we bid it a quick farewell. Cruise ships? Easy: downsize them, replace their engines with sails, and expect to take just one grand voyage during your lifetime. Weapons industries offer plenty of examples of machines we could live without. Of course, giving up some of our labor-saving devices will require us to learn useful skills—which could end up providing us with more exercise. For guidance along these lines, consult the rich literature of technology criticism.

Step seven: Help nature absorb excess carbon. The IPCC is right: if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change we need to capture carbon from the air and sequester it for a long time. But not with machines. Nature already removes and stores enormous amounts of carbon; we just need to help it do more (rather than reducing its carbon-capturing capabilities, which is what humanity is doing now). Reform agriculture to build soil rather than destroy it. Restore ecosystems, including grasslands, wetlands, forests, and coral reefs.

Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.

Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today. But that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed, and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas available for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.

Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning what a real energy transition requires and then educating the people you know; by advocating for degrowth or related policies; and by reducing your own energy and materials consumption. Calculate your ecological footprint and shrink it over time, using goals and strategies, and tell your family and friends what you are doing and why.

Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand: this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifice are required, just as in total war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition, and little prospect for a desirable human future.

Harris’s Failed Opportunity?

By Sonali Kolhatkar

August 24, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Gage Skidmore - Kamala Harris. Flickr.

During her nearly 40-minute-long speech on the final day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her economic plan for the nation as “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”

I deliberately chose not to watch her speech, preferring instead to read it. The ebullience at this year’s DNC was infectious. The Democratic Party is leaning into some of the language of progressive economic populism and is energized by a younger, more enthusiastic nominee. But reading Harris’s speech rather than watching it, helped bring some distance from the joy and clarified that the party is still not embracing the language of progressive economic populism and continues to use the destructive language of the right.

The term “opportunity economy” is itself the problem. It’s a phrase that former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used to defend Donald Trump’s economic agenda in 2019. Florida’s Chamber of Commerce, a staunchly pro-business outfit, has used it as well.

The word “opportunity” means a chance, the creation of circumstances to make something possible. We live in a nation where racial segregation is technically illegal, which means people of color have the “opportunity” to attend elite schools, apply for jobs, build wealth, retire comfortably, and pass their wealth to their children. Those opportunities have existed for decades. But data shows over and over that they don’t translate into reality, especially for Black and Brown people in the U.S. The racial wealth gap, for example, remains high. There are structural barriers that remain firmly in place, and that require very specific government intervention to dismantle. Will Harris embrace such a dismantling?

Harris proudly related during her DNC speech that she “took on the big banks, delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure, and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation.”

But she took on banks as a prosecutor, not as a legislator or executive. And her homeowner bill of rights was, once more, based on the ideas of “opportunity.” In a 2017 op-ed she explained that the bill of rights was based on “six bills designed to give Californians a fair opportunity to work with their banks, modify their loans, and keep their homes.”

Harris pointed out at the DNC that she “stood up for veterans and students being scammed by big, for-profit colleges. For workers who were being cheated out of their wages, the wages they were due. For seniors facing elder abuse.” Again, all were commendable achievements made during her role as a prosecutor and Attorney General of California. Will she stand up for the rights of veterans, students, workers, and seniors, or simply afford them opportunities for justice?

There is a huge difference between “opportunities” and “rights.” The former is a pro-corporate, pro-business term that is perfectly consistent with an individualist capitalist economy that has “winners” who make use of opportunities for wealth-building and “losers” who fail to do so. But “rights” is a word that insists on basic standards of fairness that everyone deserves. It encompasses an idea that capitalism hates: that people have the right to healthcare, childcare, education, homes, good wages, union jobs, and a stable climate. There are no winners and losers.

There was little talk of such rights at the Convention. In fact, even the New York Times noticed that Democrats avoided bringing up Medicare-for-All and the idea that everyone—not just a subsection of the population—has the right to taxpayer-funded healthcare. The Times’s Noah Weiland pointed out, “Her avoidance of a policy that had been central to progressive Democratic aspirations underscores how quickly she has sought to define her candidacy while appealing to more moderate voters, and how Medicare-for-All proposals have effectively left the Democratic mainstream for now.”

Instead of asserting that everyone has the right to taxpayer-funded healthcare Harris said, “We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.”

It sounds as though she and her party have given up on expanding government healthcare to all and instead gone on the defense against the Republican Party’s attacks on Medicare and the ACA.

Harris’s second favorite word, after “opportunity” was “freedom.” She used it a dozen times in her speech, recasting “rights” as “freedoms.” She referenced the “The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.” She also touted, “The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

Clearly, Harris was attempting to reclaim the word “freedom” from the GOP, a formation that has been pulled toward the extreme right by Republican lawmakers who label themselves as members of the “Freedom Caucus.” Freedom is akin to opportunity.

Indeed, Harris’s failure to make a full-throated embrace of progressive economic populism was a failed “opportunity.” The conditions were ripe for her to lean in to language centered on the rights of people given that we have witnessed a cultural sea change on the failures of capitalism.

This change was apparent at the 2024 DNC as well. One need only examine how Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was received this year compared to the last two conventions. When Sanders spoke at the 2016 DNC in Philadelphia, his role was to placate progressives in the party who had supported his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He urged his voters to back Hillary Clinton, the centrist candidate who would go on to lose the electoral college vote to Donald Trump in spite of winning the popular vote. Only months earlier, leaked internal emails from the Democratic National Committee revealed just what the party’s insiders thought of Sanders—and it wasn’t pretty.

Then, four years ago, his role at the 2020 DNC in Wisconsin was to defend Joe Biden’s candidacy against Trump. He remarked, “Many of the ideas we fought for, that just a few years ago were considered ‘radical,’ are now mainstream.”

But this year, even though his role was once more to convince his supporters to back a mainstream Democratic candidate, Sanders’s prime-time address at the 2024 DNC in Chicago sounded remarkably mainstream. The New York Times recognized him as an insider, saying that he seemed to have “a sense of vindication that the Democratic Party, as he sees it, has finally recognized that many progressive causes are broadly popular with Americans.”

Sanders hasn’t changed, but the party’s rhetoric has. Slate’s Alexander Sammon pointed out that, “There were very few themes in Sanders’s speech that other Democratic speakers hadn’t already covered on Monday and Tuesday.” Although the DNC’s tenor was markedly different from four and eight years ago—Sanders now sounded like he fit in, largely because the tenor, if not the substance, of his political leanings have become mainstream.

Meanwhile, Harris’s language of “opportunity agenda” leans right. She shared at the DNC, “My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means. Yet, we wanted for little and she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us, and to be grateful for them.” Such words could easily have been said by a Republican and reflect the party’s ideas about “fiscal responsibility.”

Harris also touted a “middle-class tax cut” in attempting to distinguish herself from Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. But tax cuts for the middle class is a core GOP talking point—even if the party usually delivers for the already-rich in spite of its promises to the not-so-rich.

In truth, Harris is likely more economically progressive than she let on. She has backed the Child Tax Credit, a program that was popular and remarkably effective. But she made no mention of it at the DNC. Her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is known for his economically progressive policies.

Granted, party conventions these days appear to be tailored to appease a sliver of the American public: the undecided voters in swing states whose all-important ballots will help determine who wins the electoral college, and thus, the presidency. In the context of such an undemocratic system, politicians will always feel pressure to tack toward the center, as winning the popular vote does not guarantee victory.

But we live at a time when momentum is building for fulfilling the economic “rights” of people via such ideas as universal basic income plans, and reparations for Black people. A broad movement of progressives has for years demanded that the Democratic Party distinguish itself from the GOP by making a full-throated defense of the values it claimed to stand for. Rather than leaning rightward by using the Republican-style language of “opportunity” and “freedom,” the Democratic Party could lean left and center the “rights” of people.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.


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Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Message from the DNC: The Democrats Do Not Care About Palestinians

The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights where Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the Gaza genocide.

By Mitchell Plitnick

August 23, 2024

Source: Mondoweiss

KAMALA HARRIS SPEAKING TO THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, ON AUGUST 22, 2024. (PHOTO: TWITTER/KAMALAHARRIS)

The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights.

The one positive to emerge from the DNC was that the first panel ever officially sanctioned by the DNC on the subject of Palestinian rights marked a major step forward politically, and was the result of a powerful grassroots movement to get Palestine mentioned in some official capacity at the Convention.

But aside from that small but still significant victory, the Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Protesters outside clashed occasionally with police, and some protesters inside the convention and some associated events caused brief disruptions, but little attention was paid to Gaza on the whole, either from the stage or in the media.

That doesn’t mean the political situation remained stagnant, however, even while Israel was continuing its merciless slaughter, targeting schools and other places of refuge. Unfortunately, the politics have taken an even grimmer turn, leaving little hope that the killing will end any time soon.

Taken together, the recent developments are a recipe for a genocide that will continue for months and ongoing regional escalation.

“Gaza Ceasefire Talks” are the new “Peace Process”

Despite the false optimism peddled by Joe Biden and his flunkies, the latest round of ceasefire talks, though ongoing, have already failed. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken collaborated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to essentially destroy any chance of a ceasefire in the near term.

Blinken announced what he termed “bridging proposals,” to fill the gaps between Hamas and Israel based on the ceasefire proposal Biden presented at the end of May. Blinken did not address the question of why such proposals were necessary when Biden claimed that the plan he presented back then was actually an Israeli one, and that, after that falsehood became too threadbare, repeatedly claimed that Israel had accepted it.

Hamas, in fact, had long since stated it would accept the Biden proposal, as endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. Clearly this was an unexpected turn for Netanyahu, who quickly set about creating new conditions that Hamas couldn’t possibly accept.

On Thursday, an Israeli official told the Times of Israel that Blinken’s bridging proposals “meet Israeli security demands,” which include continuing the genocide, after a brief pause, until Israel “reaches all of its war aims,” and a continued Israeli presence along Gaza’s border with Egypt, the so-called Philadelphi Corridor.

One hardly needs a degree in international affairs to recognize that these are not “bridging proposals,” but are conditions Hamas couldn’t possibly accept. Neither, it should be noted, would anyone else, whether a government or a militant group.

Indeed, these conditions have even quietly undermined the triumvirate of the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt by directly challenging Egypt’s stance, backed by two treaties, that Israel may not remain on the southern border. While neither country has loudly objected to the proposal, neither have they backed it. And Egypt has made it clear they will not accept it.

The idea that Israel would remain in the Philadelphi Corridor is an explicit violation of a 2005 agreement governing that strip of land which forbids Israeli deployment there. Israel has called for scrapping that agreement entirely and revising the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Egypt has categorically refused these requests and warned that continued attempts to implement them could endanger the treaty entirely.

With the latest failure of ceasefire talks, the threat of an attack on Israel from Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and the rest of the Axis of Resistance rises again. But with the passage of time since the assassination of Hamas’ lead negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran has given the United States the time it needed to redeploy forces to bolster its naval and air defenses of Israel. This has the potential to render an attack on Israel, which remains highly likely, largely symbolic, like the one in April. But should the Axis decide that is insufficient, it also increases the risk that a more significant attack could spark a regional conflagration that the U.S. could also be drawn into.
Diminishing hope for Harris

The refusal by the Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign to have a Palestinian-American speaker address the DNC was just the latest misstep by a party that, even when it recognizes its need for progressive, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian voters, cannot bring itself to confront its own devaluation of Palestinian lives, especially in Gaza.

This wasn’t complicated. The Uncommitted Movement and other Palestinians and Palestine advocates in the party just wanted someone to speak to the audience about the suffering in Gaza and the need for a ceasefire. It could easily have been a moderate voice, one which aimed at the hearts of the audience, crafting a speech calling for an end to Israel’s slaughter that even the pro-Israel wing of the party couldn’t have overtly attacked.

Instead, they froze Palestinians out while giving the space to the parents of an Israeli-American hostage, who, while both-sidesing the conflict (quite understandable given the situation of their son) and very clearly focusing on the Israeli hostages, showed more empathy for Palestinians in Gaza in their speech than just about anyone else at the convention. That is a shameful comment on the Democrats, on the Kamala Harris – Tim Walz ticket, and on the party as a whole, including many of its so-called progressive members.

The decision to silence Palestinian voices while centering the awful suffering of an American Jewish hostage and his family sends a strong message to the Democratic base that the lives of Israeli Jews matter just as much as they should while the lives of Palestinians matter not at all.

There was no political necessity for this. AIPAC and donors might have been unhappy about a Palestinian speaker, but they wouldn’t have just dumped Democrats because there was concern expressed for civilians in Gaza. And that wasn’t the only concerning signal from Harris at the DNC.

Haile Sofer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and Harris’ former national security adviser, declared with confidence that Harris will never halt or condition military aid to Israel. She made the statement at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee on the sidelines of the DNC.

Sofer is a significant figure in both the Democratic Party and the Jewish community, and she does not have a reputation for making policy statements without any basis in fact. Her proximity to Harris lends this statement a good deal of credibility, even though she was not specifically speaking on Harris’ behalf but merely giving her own estimation of Harris’ views. She knows those views well since she helped shape them.

Somewhat less credible, but still very concerning, was Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider who told the same audience that Ilan Goldenberg, who was hired just last week by Harris as her liaison to the U.S. Jewish community, told him that Harris will not try to re-enter the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.

Schneider is a somewhat less reliable source. He is more given to bombastic statements, misunderstandings, and poor judgment than Sofer. He also has a reputation here in Washington for not always thinking much before he speaks. Moreover, the statement itself is widely open to interpretation, both in terms of what Goldenberg might have meant (he may well have been merely trying to assuage fanatical pro-Israel concerns over his own stance on Iran, for example) and in terms of how Schneider himself is reading it. In other words, it’s a bit concerning, but it’s far from certain that this reflects Harris’ actual thinking on policy.

The trouble is, Harris isn’t giving us any reason to hold out hope for a better Middle East policy than her current boss has. All the early signals are negative. The much-touted “empathetic tone” that Harris has tried to adopt is not only wearing thin and fading as time goes on, but it also reflects little more than a greater ability than Joe Biden has shown to deceive the American public with sweet-sounding words that thinly veil a genocidal policy in Palestine, a militaristic approach to Iran and the broader region, and pure indulgence of our criminal and brutal allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It is disappointing and dangerous that, in the face of progressives, Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and a whole lot of anti-genocide Jews and allies almost begging the Democrats to stop taking their votes for granted and just give them some reason to vote for Harris rather than just voting against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris is failing to even get over even that remarkably low bar.

Interest Rate Cuts Now Could Help Workers. But That’s Not Who the Fed Serves

By Gerald Epstein, CJ Polychroniou 

August 24, 2024

Source: Truthout

The Federal Reserve hasn’t changed interest rates since July of last year, after 11 hikes between March 2022 and July 2023 in the hope that higher borrowing costs would slow down consumer and business demand so inflation rates would drop. It kept the benchmark interest rate unchanged in its latest meeting ending July 31, 2024, but Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the first rate cut in four years “could be on the table” in September. Nonetheless, the Fed has faced criticism for its refusal to lower rates, though inflation rates have moved steadily lower. By tightening monetary policy, the Fed hurts consumers’ financial lives and even increases unemployment. So why has the Fed been so reluctant to cut interest rates?

The main reason, argues renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, is because the Fed is “more sensitive to the needs of the wealthy few than the rest of us.” As such, the Fed’s claim that it is an independent government agency is a complete myth. Epstein is professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of the recently published book Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (University of California Press, 2024).

C. J. Polychroniou: The Federal Reserve has generated a lot of controversy by deciding at the July Federal Open Market Committee meeting to keep its benchmark interest rate unchanged. Obviously, the central bank is determined to attain its 2 percent inflation objective even though its 23-year high interest rates are having a significantly negative impact on the economy and on consumers’ financial lives. Indeed, the Fed’s high interest rates are counterproductive. They drive up housing prices, including rent; make it more difficult for people to pay down their debts; and even the unemployment rate has started to tick up. What’s going on here? Why is Fed Chairman Jerome Powell refusing to cut the short-term interest rates even as inflation falls?

Gerald Epstein: You are right. For quite a while, the Federal Reserve’s high-interest rate policy has been harmful for most people and even counterproductive in terms of its ostensible objectives: reducing the cost of living for most Americans. These high interest rates are also interfering with other important needs. For example, as Jen Harris wrote in The New York Times, they are discouraging important investments in green energy such as wind power projects, because these projects tend to have large up-front costs and long-term pay-offs. So, the question is: Why has the Fed kept rates up so high and for so long? A key reason, at least until recently, is that these high rates have had big pay-offs for banks and other financial institutions that have been able to charge higher interest rates while reaping rewards from big capital gains in the stock market. At this point, however, with the major drops in inflation and the weakening state of the economy, even big financial institutions have been calling for rate cuts. So why has the Fed refused to cut rates? Probably the main reason is that they fear a backlash from their major constituents, big finance and the wealthy top 1 percent, if they lower rates too quickly. In other words, they are much more sensitive to the needs of the wealthy few than to everyone else. Compounding this bias is the fact that the Fed’s policy is informed by a profoundly mistaken economic theory: Their view, shared by most mainstream macroeconomists — such as former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers — is that the Fed controls inflation to a large degree by influencing the “public’s” expectations of inflation, and that they do this by their inflation fighting “credibility.” And what determines this credibility? Their willingness to hurt workers if they try to raise their wages too much. It is a sort of central bankers’ “macho” contest that Jerome Powell and other central bankers want to win. A major problem with this, from a theoretical point of view, is that there is very little, if any, evidence that expectations — credible or otherwise — have much impact on inflation, especially at the relatively low levels at which it is occurring these days.

To what extent does the stock market influence the real economy of goods and services? And should the Fed be blamed for the stock market rout in early August?

In principle, the stock market can influence the “real economy” in a couple of ways. The market can affect decisions that investors make as to how much and where to invest in the real economy — in plants, equipment and technology. And second, the value of the stock market can affect how “rich” people who own stocks feel. This so-called wealth effect can impact how much people are willing to spend on goods and services, or how much they are willing to borrow to do the same. Of course, since it is rich people who own most of the stock (though middle-class Americans also have some of their pensions and other savings in the stock market), this wealth effect will mostly impact the consumption of the wealthy. Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm have argued that, in recent years, this wealth affect has had a powerful impact on consumption demand, and indirectly on inflation.

Donald Trump warned Powell in mid-July not to cut rates before the election. Obviously even Trump himself understands that cutting interest rates would boost the economy and the Democrats’ odds of a victory in November. Is the Fed an independent government agency or a political institution?

The Fed is of course a political institution, and the claim that the Federal Reserve is inherently “independent” is a commonly stated attempt to obscure this fact. The Fed is political both formally and informally. It is formally political because it is a “creature” of Congress. The U.S. Constitution allots to Congress the power to manage the U.S. “coinage” and currency and, by founding the Fed in 1913, the Congress delegated various powers of monetary management to the Fed. But, since the power lies with Congress, they can expand, curtail or change these at any time.

Similarly, over time, the president has been given by Congress the power to make appointments to the Federal Reserve governing body. So, the president has been delegated certain powers over the Fed by Congress. None of these, however, have formally given the Fed any political independence whatsoever. As such, the formal independence of the Fed is a complete myth — one, however, that the Fed and others are obsessed with promoting. The process by which the Fed promotes its independence demonstrates the second, informal sense, in which the Fed is highly “political.” As I show in my recent book, Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, the Federal Reserve cultivates powerful constituencies to expand and protect its “independence” from the government. This constituency consists primarily of the big banks and other financial institutions and their mouth pieces in the press and business. They are very successful in promoting this idea. It is not unusual to hear from pundits that the Federal Reserve is mandated to be “independent.” But the reality is that the Fed is highly political, dependent on big finance for support, and, in turn, the Fed is incentivized to give big macroeconomic and regulatory support to these banks. This is a political quid pro quo on a massive scale.

The claims about mandated Federal Reserve independence have become louder recently since Donald Trump has occasionally announced that, if he becomes president again, he will get rid of Fed independence. Of course, if Donald Trump got control over the Fed … he would certainly try to use the Fed to do his bidding at the expense of the rest of us. But the same would be true of the Defense Department, or the Environmental Protection Agency or the Commerce Department. The response is not to say that these all should be independent. The response should be to say that these agencies should be staffed by experts who have mandates to carry out laws in the public interest.

Fed Chair Powell has said that a September rate cut is on the table. How likely is that to happen, and would it have any impact on mortgage rates and rent prices and on consumers’ financial lives in general?

At this point, it is very likely since, as I said before, with inflation now tamed and the economy slowing down, even banks and other financial institutions are urging the Fed to cut the interest rate. When they speak, the Fed surely listens. And yes, mortgage rates would come down … in fact, we are already seeing them fall in anticipation of such cuts. As for rental prices, that is a more complex story. As long as private equity firms and other big financial companies can buy up rental properties and use algorithms and other mechanisms to keep rents high, a simple interest rate cut will not broadly work to lower rates or increase sufficiently the availability of rental housing. Here, bolder and more real economy interventions will be necessary to make a dent in this major problem.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.