It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, July 29, 2022
Why workers are turning to unions
Besides fighting for better wages and working conditions, unions confront favoritism and discrimination when no one else will.
Amy Dennett long endured understaffing, low pay and indifferent bosses in her job at the American Red Cross in Asheville, North Carolina.
But she decided she’d had enough when management’s failure to provide basic resources forced her and her coworkers to build, jury-rig and dig into their own pockets for items needed to operate the blood donation center.
Dennett helped lead a union drive in 2020, resulting in the group’s vote to join the United Steelworkers (USW), and the 24 workers gained raises, greatly improved health care and much-needed equipment even before signing their first contract.
More and more workers like Dennett are realizing that unions fight for them every day, providing a path forward even in tumultuous times like a pandemic.
Gallup surveyed Americans on their confidence in 16 U.S. institutions ranging from the Supreme Court to television news. Over the past year, Gallup found, Americans’ confidence fell in all of them except one—organized labor.
“That doesn’t surprise me. We’re supposed to have faith in our elected officials and other leaders. But it’s a lot easier for a worker to have faith in the guy standing next to them than a guy in some other place you’ve never met who’s supposed to represent you,” Dennett said of the findings, noting that unions helped workers during the pandemic while many of the 16 institutions failed or exploited them.
In stark contrast to all of this, unions stepped up during the pandemic because their members needed them more than ever. They not only empowered workers to secure the personal protective equipment, paid sick leave and affordable health care they needed to safeguard their families but also continued winning the raises and benefits essential for years to come.
Those successes drove Americans’ support for unions to record levels and unleashed a wave of organizing drives among workers who put their lives on the line to keep companies operating during the pandemic.
“These workers have figured out, ‘Hey, I’m essential. I deserve to make enough to pay my bills,’” Dennett said, noting the USW “absolutely changed the dynamic” in her workplace.
Once “blatantly ignored,” she said, workers now have a seat at the table. And no longer do Dennett and her coworkers have to build their own organizers for tape and Band-Aids or scrounge parts for items like television assemblies.
“We ended up with the equipment that we need,” explained Dennett, a collection specialist, noting her coworkers now have quality computer carts like the one she had to buy for herself a couple of years ago.
The USW also represents Red Cross workers in Alabama and Georgia. When a cost-of-living analysis revealed the urgent need for raises in some of those locations, Dennett and her underpaid colleagues also received pay bumps, even before completing their first contract.
Workers’ demand for union representation cuts across all economic sectors, from manufacturing and retail to emerging clean industries and professional sports.
Players in the new United States Football League (USFL) recently voted to join the USW to ensure adequate housing, meals and health care, among other essentials, and to guard against the kinds of nightmares that followed the collapse of the Alliance of American Football in 2019.
That league folded overnight, stranding players in the cities where they were playing.
“There was no transportation home,” explained Kenneth Farrow, president of the United Football Players Association, which advocates for USFL players.
Farrow said the Alliance players got kicked out of their hotels, had to fund their own flights and rental cars and got stuck with ongoing medical expenses for game-related injuries. “There have been quite a few ugly situations,” he said, explaining why the USFL players wanted a union.
Besides fighting for better wages and working conditions, unions confront favoritism and discrimination when no one else will.
With the support of other unions, USW Local 7600 took a stand last year on behalf of thousands of members working at Kaiser Permanente health care facilities in the Inland Empire area of Southern California.
The union challenged Kaiser’s practice of paying those workers, many of them people of color, significantly lower wages than their counterparts performing the same jobs at the health care giant’s locations elsewhere. Some of the Inland Empire workers made 30 percent less than peers in Los Angeles and Orange County.
Kaiser tried to blame the pay gaps on a higher cost of living in Los Angeles, an excuse that fell flat with the USW members.
“I’m from LA. It’s not that much higher,” said LaTrice Benson, an anesthesia technician affected by the disparities.
In the end, Kaiser agreed to commit millions to closing wage gaps for the USW members as well as workers represented by other unions.
“It means the world to me and my colleagues,” Benson said. “We’re sincerely thankful for our union.”
Dennett sees the growing appreciation for organized labor even among the blood donors she works with every day. When she tells them she joined a union, she often gets the same response: “Congratulations.”
Recession Fears Spark Calls to Stop Hiking Interest Rates and Rein In Corporate Greed
"As Americans stare down the abyss of a potential recession, Fortune 500 c-suite executives are doing better than ever," noted one critic, "while their workers' wages have severely lagged behind."
Demonstrators rally in front of PhRMA's Washington, D.C. office to protest high prescription drug prices on September 21, 2021. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
As new government data on Thursday stoked fears of a looming recession—and even led to some claims that the nation is already experiencing one—progressives renewed calls for the Federal Reserve to stop hiking interest rates and policymakers to take on the corporate profiteering driving inflation.
"Reining in corporate greed is the key to bringing down costs for families and kickstarting economic growth."
The Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce released gross domestic product (GDP) figures that show two consecutive quarters of negative growth, which prompted some Republican lawmakers—hopeful to regain control of Congress later this year—to declare that "America is in a recession" and it is the Democrats' fault.
While two straight quarters of negative growth is often seen as a signal of recession, it is not that simple. Harvard University economist Jason Furman pointed out on Twitter Thursday there is "well over a 50% chance that Q1 and/or Q2 gets revised to positive."
"That's part of why NBER doesn't rely on advance GDP to call recessions," Furman added, referring to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Alex Durante, an economist with the Tax Foundation think tank, told The Hill that "there's this perception, and people are not wrong to have it—it's probably even in my economics textbook from college—that it's two negative quarters of GDP that NBER uses to determine if there's a recession. That's actually not completely true. It actually looks at a wide variety of economic indicators to make that designation."
"They'll look at employment, personal income, durable goods, housing permits, so the GDP is certainly part of it, but they're looking at other indicators, as well," Durante explained.
As Dean Baker, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), detailed Thursday:
The modest drop in GDP reported for the quarter is not good news, but it was hardly a surprise. It also was entirely due to inventory quirks, which will not be repeated in future quarters. Consumption is still growing at a respectable pace, as is investment.
The Fed has been raising interest rates ostensibly out of concern that the economy was growing too fast, causing inflation. This report should help to stem those fears. While people are apparently not so concerned about a recession to keep themselves from taking trips and going to restaurants, they are still not spending down their pandemic savings. The sharp drop in the inflation rate reported in the core [Personal Consumption Expenditures] deflator should also alleviate concerns about a wage-price spiral.
CEPR co-founder and co-director Mark Weisbrot argued in a Thursday opinion piece for MarketWatch that the Fed—which on Wednesday hiked interest rates for the second straight month—will be to blame if there is a recession.
"As many economists have noted, the vast majority of the increase in inflation that we have seen over the past 18 months has been a result of external shocks, most important the war in Ukraine, which has raised food and energy prices (the CPI energy index rose 41.6% over the past year from June); and the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic," Weisbrot wrote.
"Some of these prices have begun to reverse; and in any case it's difficult to see how the Fed's interest rate hikes are going to lower these prices, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell stated last month," he continued.
Critics of the Fed's interest rate hikes—from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) to economists who formerly served in the federal government like Robert Reich and Claudia Sahm—have called on the central bank to rethink its approach, and some have taken aim at Powell.
Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of research and policy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said Thursday that the "GDP report makes it crystal clear that Jerome Powell is willing to push millions out of work and throw away our economic recovery in the name of an arbitrary 2% inflation target he doesn't even believe he can hit."
"We can all agree that fighting inflation should be a top priority," she added, "but asking the workers and families who have been hit hardest by rising prices to also bear the brunt of a potential recession is not just cruel—it's bad policy."
The GDP report came less than 24 hours after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced the Inflation Reduction Act, compromise legislation on climate, healthcare, and taxes. While some progressives have concerns about the specifics on climate, others called on congressional Democrats to swiftly pass the budget reconciliation package, which follows months of obstruction by Manchin.
"Sky-high inflation is a major contributor to the economic slowdown, and nothing is driving up costs more on everyday families than corporate greed," said Kyle Herrig, president of the government watchdog Accountable.US, in a statement Thursday.
"Across industries, we've seen major corporations continue to post record high profits and approve billions of dollars in shareholder giveaways while disingenuously claiming to have no choice but to raise prices so high," he noted. "As Americans stare down the abyss of a potential recession, Fortune 500 c-suite executives are doing better than ever, averaging over $18 million in compensation while their workers' wages have severely lagged behind."
According to Herrig:
Reining in corporate greed is the key to bringing down costs for families and kickstarting economic growth, and fortunately Congress has the opportunity [to] do it. Passing the Inflation Reduction Act will ensure corporations will finally begin to pay their fair share in taxes. This bill will put billions of dollars more into the pockets of Americans by reducing the leverage Big Oil, health insurance, and drug companies have to charge whatever they please—all while creating thousands of new jobs. Congress must not squander the best opportunity they may have for years to create an economy that works for everyone, not just billionaires and greedy corporations.
Unrig Our Economy campaign director Sarah Baron similarly asserted that the legislation "is a significant step towards combating corporate greed and making an economy that works for working people," highlighting the same provisions as Herrig.
"The vast majority of Americans rightly blame corporate greed for driving inflation, so it is heartening to see Democrats unite around a bill that addresses the issue at its source," Baron said. "As the bill is considered by Congress, Unrig Our Economy urges all members to decide where they stand—with corporations or with the hardworking constituents they were elected to represent."
Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens also backed the bill, saying that "the Inflation Reduction Act gets it exactly right: We bring down costs for families by making needed public investments, not pulling back on spending when we need it most."
"We bring down energy costs when we invest in clean energy and lessen our dependence on Big Oil profiteers. We bring down healthcare costs when we use public power to counter Big Pharma and get a fair price for seniors. And we strengthen our democracy and our economy when the largest corporations contribute to these investments, instead of buying politicians to oppose them," she added. "Congress should send the Inflation Reduction Act to the president's desk as quickly as possible."
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The Fed Will Be to Blame if the Economy Crashes Into a Recession
We don't need a recession—which would be devastating—to solve our inflation problem.
The U.S. Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C. on June 22, 2022. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that the central bank is trying to bring inflation down without inflicting too much damage, but the Fed's aggressive rate hikes could tip the U.S. economy into recession. (Photo: Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images)
The Federal Reserve's interest rate policy is one of the most important economic decisions that our government makes. If it were more widely understood, and the Fed were held more accountable, Fed officials would probably be more careful about the downside risks of raising interest rates too much.
A Fed that is overly aggressive in raising interest rates is expanding and solidifying the structures of inequality in the American economy, as it has done previously for decades in the past.
People talk about the Fed not being able to bring the economy in for a "soft landing" when inflation is too high. But when the Fed gets it wrong, and pushes the economy into a recession—as it has done in ending the vast majority of economic expansions that have taken place in the United States since World War II—it's not like a couple of bumps on the runway. It's more like a plane crash. Millions of jobs can be lost.
The Fed raised interest rates FF00, 0.00% another 0.75 percentage points Wednesday, continuing its most aggressive monetary tightening in four decades. How far will this go?
The "inflation hawks," e.g. economist and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, say that if "inflation is to be contained, unemployment is likely to rise to somewhere in the vicinity of 6% or more." And he appears to be talking about a recession. The difference between even 6% unemployment and the 3.6% we have today is more than 3.9 million jobs. No inflation spiral expected
Why should anyone sacrifice the future of so many people? The argument is that inflation will otherwise become permanently higher, or even spiral out of control.
But the economists who, with many millions of dollars of resources, produce the most reliable estimates of future U.S. inflation, tell a different story. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) this month projected 3% inflation for 2023. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is projecting 3.5%. And the Federal Reserve itself, in June projected 2.6% for 2023.
Few economists would be scared of these levels of inflation for next year. But the inflation hawks have offered us more to fear than fear itself. What if we have an "inflationary spiral," in which there is some self-reinforcing mechanism that drives inflation continuously upward into dangerous territory?
The most popular version of this is a wage-price spiral, where rising prices cause workers to demand—and somehow get—higher wages, which leads to higher prices and so on. But clearly that is not the world we are living in. Wage growth has fallen from a 6% annualized rate at the end of last year, to just over 4% for recent months. So, there is no wage-price spiral, nor evidence that we are headed in that direction.
Scary scenario B is about expectations: if people or markets begin to increase their long-term expectations of what future inflation will be, that can also spiral upward as prices rise. But that has not been happening either.
The 5 year break-even rate, which is used as a proxy for market inflation expectations, has been about 2.6% since the start of July; about the same as it was a year ago. Solidifying inequality
It is well established that lower-wage workers and Black workers are hit much harder by recessions in terms of both unemployment and lost income. Conversely, in years when the economy is closer to full employment, wage gains are proportionately greater for the lower-paid sectors of the labor force.
So a Fed that is overly aggressive in raising interest rates is expanding and solidifying the structures of inequality in the American economy, as it has done previously for decades in the past.
As many economists have noted, the vast majority of the increase in inflation that we have seen over the past 18 months has been a result of external shocks, most important the war in Ukraine, which has raised food and energy prices (the CPI energy index rose 41.6% over the past year from June); and the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic. Some of these prices have begun to reverse; and in any case it's difficult to see how the Fed's interest rate hikes are going to lower these prices, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell stated last month.
At the press conference Wednesday, Powell said that "having a soft landing is what we're aiming for" but added: "at the beginning we said it was not going to be easy. It was going to be quite challenging to do that. It's unusual. It's an unusual event. It's not a typical event, given where we are."
But the Fed has not explained why a "soft landing"—avoiding a recession—would be so difficult. We do not have a giant real estate bubble as in 2006, or a stock market bubble as in the late '90s. Both of these were so large that it could be shown in advance (and it was shown) that they were unsustainable and capable of causing a recession when they burst.
This time, it's just the Fed's interest rate hikes that are threatening to cause a recession. The Fed should be able to make sure that it doesn't make that mistake.
Higher prices are not being driven by wage increases. They were not driven by federal assistance to people during the pandemic. And Democrats aren't to blame.
People shopping in the egg and dairy case on March 13, 2020 at Whole Foods Market in Vauxhall, New Jersey. (Photo: Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Corporations are raising prices above what's needed to cover their higher costs. These mark-ups have soared. Corporations are getting away with this price gouging because they face little to no competition. And they're using the specter of inflation as a cover.
Most families—who haven't had a real wage increase in years—used the assistance to pay down debt or save for the future. The assistance was barely enough to keep working families afloat. Fact #4: Inflation is not the result of President Biden's or Democrats' policies
Republicans want to blame them for rising prices. But Democrats have tried advancing bills to bring down prices and address corporate price gouging, yet Republicans and a handful of corporate Democrats refuse to pass them.
So don't fall for the corporate myths about inflation.
Higher prices are not being driven by wage increases. They were not driven by federal assistance to people during the pandemic. And Democrats aren't to blame.
Inflation is being driven in large part by record corporate profits. The best way to fight it is to remove corporate incentives to raise prices through a windfall profits tax. And reduce monopoly power through tougher antitrust enforcement.
Know the truth.
Watch:
The enduring tyranny of oil
War, inflation, geopolitical rivalry, and soaring world temperatures.
It may seem hard to believe, but only 15 years ago many of us were talking confidently about “peak oil” — the moment of maximum global oil output after which, with world reserves dwindling, its use would begin an irreversible decline. Then along came hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the very notion of peak oil largely vanished. Instead, some analysts began speaking of “peak oil demand” — a moment, not so far away, when electric vehicle (EV) ownership would be so widespread that the need for petroleum would largely disappear, even if there was still plenty of it to frack or drill. However, in 2020, EVs made up less than 1% of the global light-vehicle fleet and are only expected to reach 20% of the total by 2040. So peak-oil demand remains a distant mirage, leaving us deeply beholden to the tyranny of petroleum, with all its perilous consequences.
For some perspective on this, recall that, in those pre-fracking days at the start of the century, many experts were convinced that world petroleum output would hit a daily peak of perhaps 90 million barrels in 2010, dropping to 70 or 80 million barrels by the end of that decade. In other words, we would have little choice but to begin converting our transportation systems to electricity, pronto. That would have caused a lot of disruption at first, but by now we would be well on our way to a green-energy future, with far less carbon emissions and a slowing pace of global warming.
Now, compare those hopeful scenarios to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). At the moment, world oil production is hovering at around 100 million barrels daily and is projected to reach 109 million barrels by 2030, 117 million by 2040, and a jaw-dropping 126 million by 2050. So much, in other words, for “peak oil” and a swift transition to green energy.
Why global oil consumption is expected to hit such heights remains a complex tale. Foremost among the key factors, however, has certainly been the introduction of fracking technology, permitting the exploitation of mammoth shale reserves once considered inaccessible. On the demand side, there was (and remains) a worldwide preference — spearheaded by American consumers — for large, gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. In the developing world, it’s accompanied by an ever-expanding market for diesel-powered trucks and buses. Then there’s the global growth in air travel, sharply increasing the demand for jet fuel. Add to that the relentless efforts by the oil industry itself to deny climate-change science and obstruct global efforts to curb fossil-fuel consumption.
The question now facing us is this: What are the consequences of such a worrisome equation for our future, beginning with the environment?
More oil use = more carbon emissions = rising world temperatures
We all know — at least, those of us who believe in science — that carbon-dioxide emissions are the leading source of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) responsible for global warming and the combustion of fossil fuels is responsible for the lion’s share of those CO2 emissions. Scientists have also warned us that, without a sharp and immediate decline in such combustion — aimed at keeping global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era — genuinely catastrophic consequences will ensue. Those will include the complete desertification of the American West (already experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years) and the flooding of major coastal cities, including New York, Boston, Miami, and Los Angeles.
Now consider this: in 2020, oil accounted for more global energy consumption than any other source — approximately 30% — and the EIA projects that, on our present course, it will remain the world’s number-one source of energy, possibly until as late as 2050. Because it’s such a carbon-intensive fuel (though less so than coal), oil was responsible for 34% of global carbon emissions in 2020 and that share is projected to rise to 37% by 2040. At that point, oil combustion will be responsible for the release of 14.7 million metric tons of heat-trapping GHGs into the atmosphere, ensuring even higher average world temperatures.
With CO2 emissions from oil use continuing to rise, there’s zero chance of staying within that 1.5 degrees Celsius limit or of preventing the catastrophic warming of this planet, with all it portends. Think of it this way: the stunning heatwaves experienced so far this year from China to India, Europe to the Horn of Africa, and this country to Brazil are only a mild foretaste of our future.
Oil and the war in Ukraine
Nor are heat waves the only perilous consequence of our still growing reliance on petroleum. Because of its vital role in transportation, industry, and agriculture, oil has always possessed immense geopolitical significance. There have, in fact, been scores of wars and internal conflicts over its ownership — and the colossal revenues it generates. The roots of every recent conflict in the Middle East, for example, can be traced back to such disputes. Despite much speculation about how peak-oil-demand scenarios could theoretically end all that, petroleum continues to shape world political and military affairs in a critical fashion.
To appreciate its enduring influence, just consider the multiple connections between oil and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
To begin with, it’s unlikely that Vladimir Putin would have ever been in a position to order the invasion of another well-armed country if Russia weren’t one of the planet’s top oil producers. Following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, what remained of the Red Army was in shambles, barely capable of crushing an ethnic insurgency in Chechnya. However, after becoming Russia’s president in 2000, Vladimir Putin imposed state control over much of the nation’s oil and gas industry and used the proceeds from energy exports to finance the rehabilitation and modernization of that military. According to the Energy Information Administration, revenue from oil and natural gas production provided, on average, 43% of the Russian government’s total annual revenue between 2011 and 2020. In other words, it allowed Putin’s forces to build up the vast stocks of the guns, tanks, and missiles that it’s been using so mercilessly in Ukraine.
No less important, after his military’s failure to take Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Putin would certainly have lacked the ability to continue the fight without the cash he receives every day from foreign oil sales. Although Russian petroleum exports have declined somewhat due to Western sanctions imposed after the war began, Moscow has been able to find clients in Asia — notably China and India — willing to buy up its excess crude oil once destined for Europe. Even if Russia is selling that oil at discounted prices, the undiscounted price has risen so sharply since the war began — with Brent crude, the industry standard, soaring from $80 a barrel in early February to $128 a barrel in March — that Russia is making more money now than when its invasion began. Indeed, economists at the Helsinki-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air have determined that, during the first 100 days of the war, Russia earned approximately $60 billion from its oil exports — more than enough to pay for its ongoing military operations in Ukraine.
To further punish Moscow, the 27 members of the European Union (EU) have agreed to ban all tanker-delivered Russian oil by the end of 2022 and cease its pipeline imports by the end of 2023 (a concession to Viktor Orbán of Hungary, which gets most of its crude oil via a Russian pipeline). This, in turn, would eliminate the monthly $23 billion that EU countries have been spending on those imports, but could, in the process, drive global prices higher yet, an obvious boon to Moscow. Unless China, India, and other non-Western buyers can be persuaded (or somehow compelled) to eliminate Russian imports, oil will continue to finance the war against Ukraine.
Oil, Ukraine, and the global inflationary tsunami
The connections between oil and the war in Ukraine don’t end there. In fact, the two have combined to produce a global crisis unlike any in recent history. Because humanity has become so thoroughly reliant on petroleum products, any significant rise in the price of oil ripples through the global economy, affecting nearly every aspect of industry and commerce. Naturally, transportation takes the biggest hit, with all forms of it — from daily commuting to airline travel — becoming ever more costly. And because we’re so thoroughly dependent on oil-powered machines to grow our crops, any increase in the price of oil also automatically translates into increased food costs — a devastating phenomenon now occurring worldwide, with dire consequences for poor and working people.
The price data tell it all: From 2015 to 2021, Brent crude averaged around $50 to $60 a barrel, helping to spur automobile purchases while keeping inflation rates low. Prices started rising a year ago, driven by growing geopolitical tensions, including sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, as well as internal unrest in Libya and Nigeria — all major oil producers. Nevertheless, the price of crude only reached $75 per barrel as 2021 ended. Once the Ukraine crisis kicked in early this year, however, the price shot up rapidly, reaching $100 per barrel on February 14th and finally stabilizing (if such a word can even be used under the circumstances) at the current rate of approximately $115. This huge price spike, a doubling of the 2015 to 2021 average, has substantially increased travel, food, and shipping costs, only compounding the supply-chain problems sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic and fueling an inflation tsunami.
An inflationary tide of this sort can only cause distress and hardship, particularly for less affluent populations across the planet, leading to widespread unrest and public protest. For many, such hardships have only been compounded by Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain exports, which has contributed significantly to rising food prices and increasing starvation in already troubled parts of the world. In Sri Lanka, for instance, anger over high food and fuel prices combined with disdain for the country’s inept governing elite sparked weeks of mass protests that culminated in the flight and resignation of that country’s president. Angry protests against high fuel and food prices have swept through other countries as well. Ecuador’s capital, Quito, was paralyzed for a week in late June by just such an upheaval, leaving at least three people dead and nearly 100 wounded.
In the United States, distress over rising food and fuel prices is widely seen as a major liability for President Joe Biden and the Democrats as the 2022 congressional elections approach. The Republicans clearly intend to exploit public anger over soaring inflation and gas prices in their campaigns. In response, Biden, who promised while running for president to make climate change a major White House priority, has recently been scouring the planet for additional sources of petroleum in a desperate drive to lower prices at the gas pump. At home, he released 180 million barrels of oil from the national strategic petroleum reserve, a vast underground reservoir created after the “oil shocks” of the 1970s to provide a cushion against a time like this, and lifted environmental regulations prohibiting the summer use of an ethanol-based blend known as E15, which contributes to smog during warmer months. Abroad, he’s sought to renew contacts with the previously pariah regime of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, once a major oil exporter to the United States. In March, two senior White House officials met with Maduro in what was widely viewed as an attempt to restore those exports.
In the most controversial expression of this drive, in July the president traveled to Saudi Arabia — the world’s leading oil exporter — to meet its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. MBS, as he’s known, was viewed by many, including analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency (and Biden himself), as the person ultimately responsible for the October 2018 murder in Turkey of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist.
The president insisted that his principal motives for meeting MBS were to bolster regional defenses against Iran and counter Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East. “This trip is about once again positioning America in this region for the future,” he told reporters in the Saudi city of Jeddah on July 15th. “We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China to fill.”
But most independent analysts suggest that his primary objective was to secure a Saudi promise to substantially increase that country’s daily oil output — a move they only acceded to after Biden agreed to meet MBS, terminating his pariah status in Washington. According to press accounts, the Saudis did indeed agree to boost their rate of production, but also promised to delay announcing the increase for several weeks to avoid embarrassing Biden.
Ending the enduring tyranny of oil
It’s telling that the “climate” president was so willing to meet the Saudi leader to obtain the short-term political benefit of lower gas prices before American voters go to the polls this November. In truth, though, oil still plays a far deeper role in White House calculations. Although the United States no longer relies on Middle Eastern oil imports for a large share of its own energy needs, many of its allies — as well as China — do. In other words, from a geopolitical perspective, control of the Middle East remains no less important than it did in 1990 when President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm, this country’s first Persian Gulf war, or in 2003, when his son, President George W. Bush, invaded Iraq.
Indeed, the government’s own projections suggest that, if anything, by 2050 (yes, that distant year again!), Middle Eastern members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, could actually command a larger share of global crude oil production than they do now. This helps explain Biden’s comments about not leaving a vacuum in the Middle East “for Russia or China to fill.” The same line of reasoning is bound to shape U.S. policy towards other oil-producing areas, including in West Africa, Latin America, and the offshore regions of Asia.
It doesn’t take much imagination to suggest, then, that oil is likely to play a crucial role in American foreign and domestic policies for years to come, despite the hopes of so many of us that declining petroleum demand would foster a green-energy transition. No doubt Joe Biden had every intention of moving us in that direction when he assumed office, but it’s clear that — thank you, Joe Manchin! — he’s been overpowered by the tyranny of oil. Worse yet, those who do the bidding of the fossil-fuel industry, including virtually every Republican in Congress, are determined to perpetuate that tyranny at whatever cost to the planet and its inhabitants.
Overcoming such a global phalanx of oil-industry defenders will require far more political muscle than the environmental camp has yet been able to muster. To save the planet from an all-too-literal hell on earth and protect the lives of billions of its inhabitants — including every child alive today or to be born in the years to come — petroleum tyranny must be resisted with the same ferocity that anti-abortion forces have employed in their campaign to protect (or so they claim) unborn fetuses. We must, like them, work tirelessly to elect like-minded politicians and advance our legislative agenda. Only by fighting to reduce carbon emissions today can we be sure
Hungry polar bears are eating garbage instead of seals as their habitats melt away
“Education, the implementation of polar bear-proof methods of waste storage, law enforcement and the provision of adequate resources at the community level are required to mitigate this potentially increasing problem.”
As climate change erodes the icy habitats of polar bears, they are left stranded from their usual food sources for longer periods of time. So instead of filling up on seals, a new study has found that polar bears are supplementing their diets with garbage, which is expected to become a growing threat to the species.
A new report from Canadian and U.S. scientists published in the journal Onyx outlines how polar bears are beginning to turn to humans’ trash as a food source, which could lead to more regular and/or unpredictable human-polar bear conflicts as the animals search for food.
“Bears and garbage are a bad association,” said study co-author Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta, as reported by Reuters. “We know that very well from a brown bear and black bear perspective, and now it’s an issue developing with polar bears.”
Polar Bears International
Polar bears usually hunt seals, but they need ice to do so. As temperatures rise and the ice melts earlier and refreezes later, polar bears are stuck on shore for longer amounts of time. Their time to hunt is shortening, leaving the animals hungry. So they turn to landfills and other sources of garbage to satiate their hunger, similar to the way brown bears and black bears already come into communities in search of food.
Polar bears, which are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, have been recently spotted in several Arctic communities looking for food. In February 2019, the report stated there was a “mass invasion” of polar bears in Belushya Guba, Novaya Zemlya, Russia, when 52 polar bears came to feed in an open dump. Further, the bears attempted to get into local buildings.
Another 60 polar bears were found scavenging in an open dump in the 600-person village of Ryrkaypiy, Chukotka, Russia in December 2019. The bears remained in the area until the sea ice refroze in the fall.
The trash diet can make the polar bears sick, and they could choke on materials like plastic wrappers.
“Bears don’t know all the negatives that come with plastic ingestion and the diseases and toxins they’re likely exposed to in a (landfill) setting,” Geoff York, study co-author and senior director of conservation at Polar Bears International, said.
But their proximity to humans and potential for conflict is a big risk. People may kill the polar bears to protect their communities. Scientists expect these risks to rise in the coming years as global temperatures continue to rise and human populations extend farther into the Arctic. For example, the human population of Nunavut, Canada is slated to grow 31% from 2014 to 2043. This area is home to thousands of polar bears.
While waste management could help, it can be a challenge for these remote, Arctic communities. The ground is too cold to bury the trash, and the cost to haul the trash away is too high.
“Education, the implementation of polar bear-proof methods of waste storage, law enforcement and the provision of adequate resources at the community level are required to mitigate this potentially increasing problem,” the study said, noting that measures taken to reduce conflicts between brown and black bears and humans could be replicated for polar bears. Scientists also say federal funding will be important to providing better waste management for remote communities in the affected areas.
The Corporate Oligarchs Have Put Humanity on a Path Toward Self-Annihilation
We are stumbling—seemingly oblivious—into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it's not here. Buffalo skull in Death Valley, California. (Photo: Getty/stock photo/Tetra Images)
The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia's attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing to crops worldwide. This is both a crisis and an opportunity.
Let's start with the basics. Food is the raw material that makes people. More food, more people; less food, fewer people.
Hundreds of millions have become climate refugees and radical weather is destabilizing governments around the world.
This is a basic law of nature. The insect-eating bird population around us, for example, is a fraction today of what it was 20 years ago because its food—the insect population—has been decimated by pesticides and loss of habitat (their food source), over the past few decades.
Pick any species and the law of nature is the same: more food produces population growth while less food shrinks population (often in brutal ways). It's why areas like desert and scrub that produce little food were, over the past millennia, lightly populated, whereas areas rich with food like forests and seacoasts carried large human populations.
Throughout our lifetimes (and the past four centuries) human population has steadily grown because we hadn't yet hit the new ceilings the agricultural and industrial revolutions gave us to produce and distribute food.
However, this halcyon era is coming to an end because of the climate crisis, provoked by 60 years of senior executives in the fossil fuel industry lying to us and buying off politicians while making trillions pouring their poisons into our atmosphere.
This should not shock us when it happens all around us and millions are starving and homeless, although it almost certainly will because most of the human race has lived for so long within the food abundance created by the widespread use of fossil fuels starting in the 19th century.
Humans reaching the limits of food's ability to sustain population is not a new story; it's as old as humanity itself.
As I wrote in Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, eight hundred years ago a group of Melanesians sailed to the islands they called Aotearoa and we now call New Zealand. When they first arrived, around the year AD 1200, humans had never before inhabited that island paradise.
Food was everywhere for the taking, particularly a large flightless family of birds called the moa (similar to ostriches). There were so many of the birds, and they were so easily approached, that the archeological record shows that during the first few hundred years of occupation the islanders didn't even need weapons.
No bows and arrows, no spears, no specialized weapons of any sort can be found in the archaeological record from those early times: the birds and many other large animals were so docile that people simply walked up and clubbed them to death with a stick or broke their necks.
A dozen different species of New Zealand moa birds, weighing from under fifty to over five hundred pounds each, provided meat and eggs well in excess of the food needs of the initial Melanesian explorers.
This abundance of food led to a golden age of peaceful human population expansion on New Zealand. The few dozen initial settlers became hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, all feasting on the huge moa birds.
As their populations grew, the Māori killed the moa in huge numbers: in the Otago District, an ancient killing field was found at Waitaki containing more than ninety thousand moa skeletons. The bones suggest that the birds were clubbed or their necks were wrung.
While this is the largest moa boneyard, several other similar ancient sites have been discovered around New Zealand in the past few decades: as many as a million moa birds, representing hundreds of millions of pounds of meat, were killed by the early settlers, now known as the Māori (or "moa-eating") people.
The Māori population grew and over the next 300 years Māori people spread all across the 103,000 square miles of New Zealand. They lived in peace and harmony, convinced the gods had intentionally brought them to this island and thus showered them with its blessing of a seemingly unlimited supply of food.
But, as inevitably happens to cultures who think they can defy nature, the times of moa for the Māori came to an end. Their moa feast lasted for three to four hundred years but came to an abrupt end with the death of the last moa bird and thus the final and total extinction of all twelve Moa species.
The islanders then began eating other local animals, and in short order they exterminated or brought to the brink of extinction the huia, takahe, and kakapo, all birds ranging from the size of modern chickens down to the size of pigeons.
Along the coast, Māori people hunted the three-ton elephant seal to extinction within those first four hundred years, exterminated the half-ton sea lion (Phocartos hookeri), and from all but the most remote regions wiped out the three-hundred-pound New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri).
Turning to fish, the Māori soon endangered even the ubiquitous snappers, as the archeological record shows the fish skeletons and the hooks used to catch them declined in size rapidly over a hundred-year period following the extinction of the moa.
The easily killed large animals all exterminated, the Māori turned to what were considered famine foods by their seafaring ancestors: roots, tubers, frogs, ferns, rats, and small birds. Along with this change in their diet came a dramatic shift in Māori culture.
Around AD 1400—roughly four hundred years after their initial colonization of New Zealand—the Māori people began building fortresses and constructing tools for organized warfare. The forts, called pas in the Māori language, proliferated across the island.
We find new lands or new resources, exploit them mercilessly until they're exhausted, then fall back into famine and war until a new homeostatic culture/lifestyle is achieved.
The primary cultural values of Māori society shifted from cooperation to fighting and killing other humans for the scarce resources left on the island. The arts of war became elaborate, and each community spent enormous time and effort making their pa an impenetrable fortress. Shortly after birth, Māori boys were dedicated to the god of war.
Over the next two hundred years, the Māori's war-bent culture achieved an uneasy stability. They had moved from population explosion in the face of huge food resources to near-famine conditions, then to farming sweet potatoes in the lowland valleys and building forts for standing armies.
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to reach New Zealand and encounter the Māori people, just weeks after he had mapped nearby Tasmania. On December 16, 1642, he wrote in his journal about his one and only encounter with the Māori.
He sent a small group of his men out in a cockboat to meet the natives. Without warning, the Māori attacked Tasman's sailors as soon as the boat was close to their canoes:
"In which fray three of the Zeehaen's men were left dead and a fourth owing to the heavy blows mortally wounded. The quartermaster and two sailors swam towards our ship and we sent our shallop to meet them, into which they got alive. After this monstrous happening, and detestable affair, the murderers left the cockboat drift, having taken one of our dead in their canoe and drowned another."
What Tasman discovered was that among the Māori protein was in such short supply that they had passed the last human cultural barrier to a food source: cannibalism.
Tasman watched helplessly as his one crewman taken alive by the Māori was beheaded on the beach. The Māori recovered the bodies of the others and roasted them. Horrified, Tasman named the cove Murderer's Bay and sailed away, never to return.
This story of humans wiping out the resources that sustain them has been repeated over and over again throughout human pre-history. It's far more the norm than the exception.
For the first few hundred thousand years of our history (more or less) modern humanity worldwide was limited to an estimated 5 million or so humans. As Daniel Quinn would say, we "lived in the hands of the gods," repeatedly booming and busting our own local populations as we spread to new territories, discovered new food supplies, and then depleted them.
Here in North America the arrival of humanity around 15,000 years ago coincided with a mass die-off of large, easily killed food animals including:
woolly mammoths
Columbian mammoths
American mastodons
three types of ground sloths
glyptodonts
giant armadillos
several species of horses
four species of pronghorn antelopes
three species of camels
giant deer
several species of oxen
giant bison
Scientists are still debating whether changes in climate or the human over-hunting "Pleistocene overkill" was most responsible for the extinction of so many animals in such a short period; odds are it was both, as this was toward the tail end of the Ice Age and the climate was rapidly changing.
As David J. Meltzer chronicles in his brilliant new book First Peoples in a New World: Populating Ice Age America, multiple DNA-identified groups of humans moved across North and South America over the following ten thousand years. Many of them simply vanished, their DNA gone forever, leaving not a single descendant to this day.
This boom-and-bust cycle has been the story of humanity since the first modern humans began migrating out of east Africa across that continent, up through the Middle East into Europe and Asia, and across the frozen Barents Straight to the Americas.
Periodic famine has been the norm for humanity throughout most of our history. We find new lands or new resources, exploit them mercilessly until they're exhausted, then fall back into famine and war until a new homeostatic culture/lifestyle is achieved.
It's the most logical explanation, some anthropologists argue, for why Native American societies placed such a high premium—reported in the era of first contact with Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries—on sustainability. Their distant ancestors had wiped out local food supplies producing famine, inter-tribal conflict, and war.
Most of the subsequently-rebuilt cultures and systems of governance were intentionally designed to prevent a repeat of those traumatic experiences. The most well-known of those is the Iroquois Confederacy that Ben Franklin so admired.
Which brings us to today.
While the agricultural revolution increased the world's population—because farming is so much more efficient at producing food than hunting and gathering or even pastoralism—we'd still only reached a bit over a half-billion people worldwide when Europeans first arrived in North America.
The subsequent industrial revolution—powered by fossil fuels created by hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis (fossil fuels are simply fossilized plants)—dramatically ramped up our ability to grow and transport food.
Thus, we hit 1 billion people in 1800, 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1986, 6 billion by the turn of the century, and today are on the verge of 8 billion people.
Fossil fuels were turned into fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to grow more food on the same amount of land. They power our planting and harvesting machines, allowing a single person to do a job that previously would have required hundreds, each driving a horse or ox.
In 1820, for example, 72 percent of the American workforce were farmers. By 1850, because of the Cotton Gin and new plowing technologies, that number fell to 64 percent of the American workforce. In 1920, as gasoline- and diesel-powered internal combustion engines began showing up on farms, only 30 percent of us worked on farms. Today, farmers are fewer than 2 percent of us.
And, like the Moa birds, the era of cheap fossil fuels and a stable climate that enabled 2 percent of us to feed the other 98 percent is drawing to a close. Fossil fuels are getting harder to find and more expensive to produce, while climate change is reducing crop yields, melting glaciers that are the source of irrigating rivers, and drying up above-ground reservoirs.
Will humanity prevail over the forces of greed and destruction and help salvage our biosphere while reinventing our culture and world?
We are stumbling—seemingly oblivious—into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it's not here.
And it's changing how we live, how we govern ourselves, and the nature of relations between nations.
Already, hundreds of millions have become climate refugees and radical weather is destabilizing governments around the world: the Arab Spring, for example, started because the desert across north Tunisia and Syria had moved south and wheat farms were turned into scrub-land, causing the price of that staple food to explode.
A Tunisian falafel street-vendor lit himself on fire in protest, triggering uprisings across the region. The Arab Spring and its subsequent democratic collapse in Egypt and now Tunisia are harbingers of things to come in other parts of the world.
The growth of a food supply parallels the growth of a population. It's one of the few laws of nature that has always applied to humans, even though we ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist.
The agricultural and industrial revolutions, by increasing the available food supply, exploded the world's human population. Over the last two hundred years, advances in medical science and hygiene have additionally reduced the death rate while a whole variety of technologies have increased our food output.
But, like the Māori, we're approaching the end of the free ride. Food, energy, and housing are starting to get very expensive; most of the world has already leaped into this maelstrom.
This isn't run-of-the-mill inflation: it's what happens to an economy when a basic commodity—in this case, the most basic commodity, food—becomes scarce.
The entire GOP refuses to even discuss climate change, while they and Joe Manchin stuff their pockets with fossil fuel money. Meanwhile, the end-stage crisis that's been building ever since the fossil fuel companies learned this was coming and started aggressively lying to us about it—while funding the Reagan Revolution—has arrived.
What happened to the Māori, or Native American communities who overhunted 10,000 years ago, was local. This is now planet-wide. There's no place left to go and start over.
If you thought it was a disgusting spectacle to see the Bundy family stealing federal lands and water at gunpoint, you ain't seen nothing yet. Water wars between states and regions are just around the corner, and soon large parts of America will begin to lose population as their water supplies vanish.
Will we, like the ancient Maori, devolve into an authoritarian and war-based society? Or will we, like the Iroquois, Hopi, and Wendat people, make a conscious decision to live within our means, stop destroying our environment, and fine-tune our governmental systems to meet the needs of all of our citizens?
We are not without resources, and it's always a mistake to bet against human ingenuity. On the other hand, we are facing an unprecedented level of avarice mobilized by billionaires and corporations with more power and wealth than the world has ever seen.
Will they win, and, in the process, set human civilization back millennia? Or will humanity prevail over the forces of greed and destruction and help salvage our biosphere while reinventing our culture and world?
The hour is late, but, scientists tell us, not too late. Our fate—and that of the planet—is still in our hands. This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.
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