June 7-9th I’ll be in DC for the America’s Future Now conference, run by Campaign for America’s Future. In exchange for letting my readers know about it, I get free registration (but not a free flight or hotel room). Obviously registration is the least of the costs, and it’s not why I’m going.
I’m going for three reasons: first, because Campaign for America’s Future Now is about the most left wing an organization can be and still operate in the beltway. I’m curious to see just how left that is when the hair’s down.
Second, because of the guest list. It includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Alan Grayson, Arianna Huffington, Markos Moulitsas, Van Jones, Gov. Howard Dean, Rep. Donna Edwards, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Richard Trumka, Andy Stern, Bob Herbert, Juan Cole, Digby, Deepak Bhargava, James Rucker, Drew Westen, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Robert Kuttner and Lizz Winstead.
These folks are, with a few exceptions, again, about as left wing as you can be and still expect not to be laughed at in DC (and in a couple cases, a step or two too far left.) I want to hear, from them, where the acceptable left is in DC. What’s the leftmost thing you can say? What’s the leftmost thing you can expect to pass? What do they really think of the Tea Party? What do they really think of healthcare, the just passed primary season, and the upcoming elections? What do they really think about financial reform, immigration and so on.
Not that everything they say will real. There’ll be plenty of pandering, but there’ll also be plenty of revealing moments.
Third, of course, is to meet friends.
If you’re considering going, you can see the agenda here, and the registration is here. And whether you’re going or not, if you’re in DC around then and interested in meeting (I’ll be there on the 6th, leaving the 9th) drop me a line at admin-at-ianwelsh-net.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the beginning of the end of the beginning. Army troops have taken control of the perimeter of the Red Shirt protesters.
The inability, or refusal, to come to an acommodation with the Red Shirts will bear bitter fruit for the future. The bottom line is that the Red Shirts represent a prosperous rising rural class. They elected their man, Thaksin Shinawatra, to lead the country, only to have him removed by a military and they feel they have been shut out unfairly from power.
The army and monarchy are overplaying their hand. They can crush the red shirts in Bangkok, but we’ll see how they do against a rural insurgency. A rural insurgency they are begging for.
Beautiful country (I spent some time there as a teenager). Pity it’s led by a bunch of schmucks.
From Four Sociological Traditions:
Put briefly: Marx’s system rests on the point that labor is the source not only of economic value, but also of profit. In a pure market system, operating under the impulsion of supply and demand, everything exchanges for its own value. Hence arises the conundrum: where does the profit come from? Marx answers: from labor, which is the only factor of production from which can be squeezed more than the cost of reproducing it. This is, technically, the “exploitation of labor,” which means working laborers longer than the number of hours it takes to reproduce their own labor. But capitalist competition impels manufacturers to introduce labor saving machinery, which in turn cuts their own throats. For profit still comes only from the exploitation of labor, and the more that labor is replaced by machines, the smaller the basis of profit becomes. The result, schematically, is a falling rate of profit and a series of business crises. Across these crises, capital becomes more monopolistic as cweaker capitalists are driven out and into the ranks of the workers; simultaneously, productive capacity continually exceeds consumer demand among the displaced and increasingly unemployed workers. (Randall Collins, pp. 54-55, 1994)
One doesn’t have to agree with the underpinnings of all of this (the labor theory of value, and the idea that there is a “lump of work” to be done) to look at it and see the workings of a first class mind, or to notice that where government stops making sure markets stay balanced, that some of what Marx predicted happens. Consider the industry of your choice: whether banking, media, oil or pretty much anything else, and you will notice and inexorable drive towards oligopoly. Take a look at a long term capacity utilization chart, and you will notice that decade after decade, utilization drops. Take a look at wages and include real unemployment and real overemployment (people who want to work and can’t, as well as people who don’t want to work and have to) and see what Marx predicted happening.
Likewise, this doesn’t have to lead to a socialist revolution for it still to contain insight as applicable today as when Marx first formulated his theories.
Mean continetal temp 95-10
Let’s talk a bit more about global warming and climate change. The majority of the American population now thinks that global warming probably doesn’t exist. Part of that is the huge amount of money which has been spent on propaganda, but part of it is that one of the only major areas not experiencing higher temperatures is the continental USA. If you want to be a climate change denialist, America is a great place to live.
It is also true that the speed of global warming has slowed down. This is primarily due to two factors:
1) The sunspot cycle. Solar radiation is currently at its lowest level in some time. Less heat equals, well, less heat.
2) The icecap and glacial dump. The polar icepack being dumped into the oceans has had a cooling effect.
The sunspot cycle can change pretty much any time it wants. Probably we’ve got a decade or so at lower heat levels, but that’s not a sure thing. As for the icecap and glacier dump: well, once the ice is gone, it’s gone.
The bottom line is that we are going to see things get worse, more slowly, in terms of temperature rises. We will, however, keep getting crazy weather, changes to weather patterns are an early sign of climate change.
Once the mitigating factors are gone the pace of global warming will pick up again, and it will pick up fiercely.
Now, as for fixing it—there are two main problems. The first is the will to do something. While there may be technical solutions which would reduce the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, there is no will to deploy them on a wide enough scale to matter. This is as true in China as it in the US, and without China and the developing world coming on board, what the US does, assuming it does anything, will not be sufficient (and the US will not do anything, the propaganda campaign claiming there is no Global Warming has been successful.)
The second is that there will come a point where global warming becomes a self reinforcing cycle. With no glacial caps and with the methane released from Siberia, even radical decreases in human CO2 dumping will probably not be sufficient to stop the cycle.
Add to this the severe water shortages we can expect, which will hit large parts of African, a huge swathe of China, much of India and a big chunk of the US, as aquifers are drained down to effectively zero, and you have a recipe for huge loss of life and destabilizing migratory movements.
It is also entirely possible that large parts of the tropics will become effectively uninhabitable, the combination of humidity and temperature will be so high that it will literally be lethal to be outside air conditioningfor any length of time for much of the year.
If world population is only reduced by a billion, I will be amazed. I also expect some serious wars. Our civilization will not go quietly into that long long night.
I don’t usually write about climate change, because as dire as my views are on economics, they’re even more dire on global warming. As I understand the science it’s already too late—we’re going to get hit with runaway temperature increases over the next century, and they are going to make a good chunk of the globe essentially uninhabitable.
Huge climate change events are the sort of events which end civilizations. While it is always possible that something I can’t forsee could occur, of course, it seems to me that we’re on the glide path for disaster. With the best will in the world, and a great deal of competence, we might keep the deaths under a billion or so.
I hope we get that level of competence. Unfortunately, my guess is that by the time we do, by the time things are taken seriously, it will be so far past too late that all we can do is mitigate.
That mitigation, of course, is important, as is every little bit people can do now to mitigate. Every .1 degree centigrade the world’s temperature doesn’t rise by date X is some people who live, some people who live better, some more time to get out act together.
Sometimes our role in life isn’t even “to hold the line” it’s to engage in a fighting retreat, to buy time for others. For most of us alive today, that may be our job. It’s not glorious, it’s not fun, but it is necessary.
[Written as commentary on Sara Robinson’s excellent article on possible futures.]
The reform of the credit agencies, which creates an office in the SEC which assigns securities to the agencies to be rated, rather than the security issuer choosing (and paying) who rates them, is an actual good reform. The Fed audit, while it is more limited than I would have liked, if done properly, should be very interesting. Financial reform is still far from sufficient, but some intelligent good stuff is being passed.
It has been suggested to me that cramming down social security would be a way of letting the bond markets know that the US is capable of making “difficult decisions”.
A politically difficult decision would be, say, raising taxes on the rich. Cramming down SS is just standard soak the middle class neoliberal claptrap. It is totally unecessary. Current projections show a problem 32 years in the future. Any projection out 30+ years is essentially a guess. Add 1% to productivity increases and the entire SS “problem” goes away.
The US may have real spending problems, but they aren’t concentrated in social security.
However those actions which would really reduce those spending problems, like single payer (save 1/3rd per capita costs on health care), or slashing the military (there is no rational justification for spending 50% of the world’s military budget), or moving back to heavy progressive taxation, or increasing the estate tax, are on the table. The only things on the table are actions which hurt the poor and middle class.
There is no crisis with social security. If there is a deficit crisis (due to hot money’s desire for better returns than they deserve) it is because we refuse to do the things which would actually solve the problem. Because anything that impacts the rich or the military or pharma is off the table, apparently all that’s on the table is making ordinary Americans take it in the neck.
So, just no to cramming down Social Security: no increase in the retirement age, no decrease in benefits. If you must make changes, just uncap the FICA tax. There, “problem” solved.
James Galbraith has a good interview with Ezra Klein on the deficit being meaningless, which you should read. A good chunk of the interview is Modern Monetary Theory, though not all.
Let’s put it more simply: the government can print money. IF you owe your debts in your own currency, and that currency is a fiat currency, then you cannot run out of money. You can have some inflation issues, you can have some problems with misallocation of resources, you can
have some issues with currency rates and so forth, but you can’t run out of money.
The key to doing this, to using the printing power, is to use it in ways which either don’t lead to massive increases in exports, or which lead to reducing dependence on exports. Likewise you need to always remember that while money as such matters less than people think, actual real productive capacity matters much more. If you’re building aircraft carriers, those people and other resources cannot be used to build other things. If you’re building yachts and $50,000/night hotel rooms, those people and resources cannot be used for other things.
Money is how you allocate resources, how an economy decides what to do. If price signals are distorted, and they are right now, you wind up spending a lot of resources on things which are not productive-which do not build up the real productive capacity of the economy, instead of the largely useless, and indeed destructive financial sector, which, at its current state of development, has gone from being a symbiote to a parasite on the economy.
I just finished reading the Nesbitt Burns Investors Guide to Avian Flu. It’s a good report, but the advice to investors is limited (basically, expect a flight to safety such as gold and US treasuries and keep money on the side to buy up distressed properties after the pandemic). They do a very good job of detailing the history of flu pandemics, the current state of preparedness and the likely consequences. (They’re essentially the same as the ones I discuss in my essay in the FluWiki, but Sherry Cooper and Donald Coxe run through them in much more detail and style.)
The more I look into this the more pathetic it all seems. Our society, as a whole, has no surge protection – no ability to take shocks. We have no excess beds, no excess equipment, no excess ability to produce vaccines or medicines, nothing. Everybody has worshiped at the altar of efficiency for so long that they don’t understand that if you don’t have extra capacity you have no ability to deal with unexpected events. And now some people are suing the Ontario government for their SARS handling, which I fear will perversely make the government less willing to do what needs to be done rather than more, when a crisis hits.
Public health care in a pandemic or epidemic is a triage operation. You isolate people and you shut things down deliberately, and people are going to die because of the decisions you make. If nurses and doctors decide that their own lives are more important than those of the sick, or if ordinary citizens decide to break quarantine or travel restrictions, then there could be complete disaster. The moment of the SARS outbreak that caused me the most fear was when there were reports of people fleeing Beijing. In a real pandemic situation all that would do is spread the disease further and kill even more people.
In a pandemic no one should be out and doing things who doesn’t need to be. Take food – it should be delivered to each person’s door and left there, once the delivery person leaves, the occupant comes out to get the food. No interpersonal contact which is unecessary.
When I was approached to write about the economics of a pandemic my first thought was “find out what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic”. Apparently Coxe thought the same thing and his conclusion is that because our society and economy is so much more integrated and so much more connected (for example the flu had to spread by ship back then), and so much more “just on time” that it isn’t really a model you can use. We’ll likely get hit harder, faster and because many locations have such limited inventories, relying on getting it as they need it, the supply disruptions are likely to be much worse. I can’t find any flaw with his argument.
The lack of urgency on the part of governments is rather distressing:
It is hoped the Canadian studies will begin late next summer. February’s federal budget set aside $34 million for production of trial batches of an H5N1 vaccine. But Canada’s flu vaccine manufacturer, ID Biomedical, still has not been given the go-ahead to do the work.”We’re close to entering into a contract. Hopefully it will be done shortly,” Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said Monday.
The company has said it would take 12 months from contract signing to vaccine delivery, because it must build and license a special high-biosecurity facility within its existing vaccine plant.
Now I don’t know the details of what is required to set up such facilities but I’m not getting a huge sense of urgency from government here. The contract should be signed now and whatever is necessary to build extra facilities should be done, as well as whatever is necessary to get them up and operating faster. I do understand that biosafety is an absolute necessity, but getting these facilities up too late is as good as “never”. Let’s be frank, 34 million is peanuts – how much money did they lose trying to create the gun registry (a database no larger than many commercial databases succesfuly brought in for much less.)
I would suggest to politicians that if an influenza pandemic does occur and people decide you didn’t do everything you could to prepare for it, that at the very least you will no longer have a political career. At the worst, well, you won’t be alive to worry about it.
There aren’t enough respirators; there aren’t enough hospital beds; there isn’t enough vaccine production capacity or antiviral production capacity. There is so little being done to deal with those deficiencies that there might as well be nothing being done (doubling produciton isn’t what is necessary, it needs to be ramped up by orders of magnitude. If it’s never used, oh well, it’s better than building a bridge to nowhere in Alaska which even Alaskans don’t want.)
I don’t know when they’re will be an influenza pandemic. No one does. It’s an odds game. But right now the odds aren’t so good. It’s time to spend some money and buy some insurance against the possibility. Put the facility in your riding and tell your constituents how you just got them some jobs.
But do it.
(This is a reprint, at a reader’s request. You can find part one of Economics of a Flu Pandemic here.)
