Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: March 2019 Page 1 of 3

Joe Biden’s Touching Problem

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On March 31, 2019

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So, Biden has someone accusing him of inappropriate touching.

Biden, as a perusal of news photos will show, has always been very, errr, touchy, with women.

Though he hasn’t said he’ll run for President in 2020, Biden is regularly included in the polling and generally runs just slightly ahead of Sanders, with the two of them well ahead of the other contenders. (Polling at this time is largely a matter of name recognition.)

This isn’t a problem which will go away. If Biden runs, more and more women will make these accusations, because Biden has been free with his hands. It may well be that he meant nothing offensive by it, but the fact is that he does it.

How much this matters is unclear. Trump did far worse things, we have tape, and it didn’t matter.

On the other hand Biden is running as a Democrat, not a Republican.

I suspect the wisest course of action for Biden would be not to run. But he’s reportedly upset he didn’t run last time, after seeing Clinton lose.

If he does run, however, this will be a persistent, open sore throughout his campaign, and probably into his Presidency.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 31, 2019

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On March 31, 2019

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Strategic Political Economy

[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 3-29-19]

The most puzzling critiques have come not from Republicans, but from the center left, broadly speaking. They urge policies to reduce greenhouse gases that are perfectly commensurate with the GND framework … but present them as alternatives to the GND framework. (We’ll look at some examples later.)

The connecting theme, the message, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, is this: move more slowly. Accept piecemeal progress rather than a big thing. Don’t push beyond strict carbon policy into social or economic policy….

The only way Democrats can hope to pass any legislation — not big legislation, any legislation — is by radically shaking up the status quo balance of powers. That would mean getting rid of the filibuster, possibly granting statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, reforming the electoral college and voting laws, and possibly expanding the Supreme Court.

Every piece of that reform agenda is big, risky, and unlikely to succeed, and at the end of it there would still be an enormous struggle over climate legislation (even getting 51 Democratic senators to be bold is a challenge). If you were in Vegas, you’d bet against any of this happening.

But let’s be clear: The alternative is not small, sensible, bipartisan steps, as so many pundits and pols are promising. The alternative is nothing. And on climate change, nothing means disaster. Those who would ask us to resign ourselves to disaster should, at the very least, frankly acknowledge the implications.

Incrementalism only works with willing partners on the other side, and there are none. (Emphasis in original)

This last is exactly what Brad DeLong said in an interview at the end of February: A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance:

We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics. Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. He’s all these things not because the technocrats in his administration think they’re the best possible policies, but because [White House adviser] David Axelrod and company say they poll well.

And [Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and company say we’ve got to build bridges to the Republicans. We’ve got to let Republicans amend cap and trade up the wazoo, we’ve got to let Republicans amend the [Affordable Care Act] up the wazoo before it comes up to a final vote, we’ve got to tread very lightly with finance on Dodd-Frank, we have to do a very premature pivot away from recession recovery to “entitlement reform.”
All of these with the idea that you would then collect a broad political coalition behind what is, indeed, Mitt Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy.

And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years?
No, they fucking did not. No allegiance to truth on anything other than the belief that John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell are the leaders of the Republican Party, and since they’ve decided on scorched earth, we’re to back them to the hilt. So the politics were completely wrong, and we saw this starting back in the Clinton administration.

Today, there’s literally nobody on the right between those frantically accommodating Donald Trump, on the one hand, and us on the other.

Re: The Green New Deal: First, Shoot the Economists
CounterPunch 3-29-19 [via Jon Larson]

Not content with having acted as apologists for rapidly accumulating environmental crises, economists are now coming out of the woodwork to give their advice on the limitations of any transition program. In the first, the claim is that ‘we’ can’t afford one. In the second, it is that even if we could afford such a program, it would cause inflation. Both assertions proceed from the premise that Western capitalism is a neutral basis from which to proceed….

The affordability argument is a canard: capitalists have already absconded with the “profits” that make a Green New Deal necessary. These profits are either equal to or greater than the cost of cleaning up the environmental mess they created, or the totality of profits is less than their cost in terms of environmental destruction. In the prior, the Green New Deal is affordable. Capitalists have already proven it is by putting its costs in their own pockets. In the latter, three centuries of capitalist production have been a net loser once environmental costs are considered.

Economics as Cultural Warfare: The Case of Adam Smith

Tony Wikrent [Real Economics 3-28-19]

Adam Smith was the voice of the British establishment and the newly minted British commercial oligarchy which vehemently opposed the idea that the United States should attempt to be anything other than producers and suppliers of basic agricultural commodities.

by James K. Galbraith [American Affairs Journal, Volume II, Number 4 (Winter 2018): 79–86.]

Book review of Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, by Robert Skidelsky (Yale University Press, 2018)

In the twentieth century, with the gold standard in retreat, Wicksell and Fisher developed the quantity theory of money—more precisely a quantity of money theory of inflation. What really mattered was not the substance of money but control over how much of it there was. Good control would keep prices stable and debts good. Monetarism, the descendant doctrine of Milton Friedman, would triumph at the Federal Reserve with the arrival of Paul Volcker in 1979, even though Volcker was not himself committed to the theory. Chaos and recession ensued, and monetarism was abandoned in the world debt crisis of 1982. Truly nothing changes and very little is learned, over centuries, in economics….

Skidelsky treats these great monetary battles primarily as struggles over ideas. Yet he is aware that behind ideas lie interests, and that the division of economic ideas into binary oppositions reflects the class opposition between creditors and debtors–one dominant and the other oppressed, but each always necessary to the existence of the other. The fact that ideas follow the interests that can pay for them accounts for much of the recurrence of spurious and indefensible ideas in economic thought. Skidelsky, however, is above all a historian of ideas, so this book is cast largely as an account of ideologies and intellectual debates and not of class struggles. There is no doubt, moreover, that some of the most meretricious zealots in the long history of economists’ service to power and wealth were also among the most fiendishly clever…. In the center and on the right, the field is peopled by pompous mediocrities occasionally exposed as such–as in the film Inside Job. They hold their positions only through the interlocking tribalism of American academic life….

But the facts point to an intractable problem: those whose attention cannot be shifted by the collapse of their own worldview are simply beyond reach. This is a problem for the universities, who are stuck with entire departments of stranded intellects, enclosed upon themselves, well-funded by outside sponsors, and a danger to the sound instruction of students and to the future of the world. In the decade since the financial crisis, not one so-called top economics department has hired a single senior professor who had accurately foretold the calamity to come. It should be evident, by this point, that this is not accidental.

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 3-30-19]

The US quest to “contain” China is becoming a lonely one, and for good reasons. Pressuring allies to bar Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from their fifth-generation (5G) networks could set back their telecom architecture by at least a year or two and cost them billions of dollars. Preventing allies from joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is to demand that they ignore their national interests.

It might be for these reasons that four major European leaders – Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission – have defied US President Donald Trump’s warnings on Huawei and the BRI.

Climate and environmental crises

Economics as Cultural Warfare: The Case of Adam Smith

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On March 29, 2019

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**This Piece Is By Tony Wikrent**

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.—John Maynard Keynes

For over a century now, professional economists have taught that the ideas on which the US economy was built were those of Adam Smith.

I am going to debunk that, and I expect it will cause some people to freak out. For some reason there are many educated people in the US who take it as a personal affront to attack Adam Smith. It’s not that hard to understand–they have had “successful” (read: well remunerated) professional careers based on the fundamentals they were “taught” (read: indoctrinated with) in college. Adam Smith, as the Brahma of modern “scientific” economics, is one of those fundamentals. So allow me to begin by presenting what one of the recognized giants of professional economics thought about Adam Smith.

Joseph Schumpeter, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, in his last book (which was never finished) History of Economic Analysis (pdf), conceded the importance of Smith’s work, while also eviscerating it (pages 171-184). Schumpeter basically damned Smith’s actual ideas with faint praise, while acknowledging that Smith obtained enormous influence as a peddler of specific economic doctrines. (Much like Milton Friedman and his neoliberal Freedom to Choose of our current national nightmare.)

Schumpeter begins his evaluation of Smith by noting that Sir James Steuart‘s An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) had “more originality and deeper thought than does the Wealth of Nations.” So, why do we remember Smith today, and not Steuart? Schumpeter concluded that Steuart “was never much of a success in England,” as a result of the elite disfavor Steuart faced for being a Jacobite (an adherent of restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne of the United Kingdom). In fact, Steuart was forced to live in exile from 1745 to 1763.

Schumpeter then noted that Adam Smith’s greatest contemporaneous academic achievement was not Wealth of Nations,but A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, which was appended to the 1767 third edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. “Moreover,” wrote Schumpeter, “Smith’s philosophy of riches and of economic activity is there and not in the Wealth of Nations…. the Wealth of Nations contained no really novel ideas and… it cannot rank with Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin as an intellectual achievement…”

Schumpeter concluded that Adam Smith’s undeniable success in Great Britain was due to English elites’ favor for “the policies he advocated–free trade, laissez-faire, colonial policy, and so on.” In other words, Adam Smith was crowned with success for being a prominent apologist for the exploitative brutality of the British empire:

….it was Adam Smith’s good fortune that he was thoroughly in sympathy with the humors of his time. He advocated the things that were in the offing, and he made his analysis serve them. Needless to insist on what this meant both for performance and success: Where would the Wealth of Nations be without free trade and laissez-faire? Also, the ‘unfeeling’ or ‘slothful’ landlords who reap where they have not sown, the employers whose every meeting issues in conspiracy, the merchants who enjoy themselves and let their clerks and accountants do the work, and the poor laborers who support the rest of society in luxury–these are all important parts of the show. It has been held that A. Smith, far ahead of his time, braved unpopularity by giving expression to his social sympathies. This is not so. His sincerity I do not for a moment call into question. But those views were not unpopular. They were in fashion.

In fact, as Smith biographer Salim Rushid details, Adam Smith very carefully and deliberately went about currying favor with Scottish and English ruling elites. Rushid writes”

Smith’s involvement in politics was neither marginal nor ineffective. Strange as it may sound, in today’s parlance he would have been called “street-smart.” He was considered a good judge of what would sell; despite the radicalism of his personal sympathies, Smith tailored his views and his life to be acceptable to the established order. There is little surprise in finding that this cultivation bore fruit and that Smith’s ideas proved serviceable in the defense of conservatism.

Elsewhere, Rushid writes, that during his time: “Adam Smith was not hailed as a new prophet except by some few, but very influential, persons such as Lord Shelburne and William Pitt.” Adam Smith was merely a paid apologist for the ruin and misery Great Britain imposed on millions of colonial people in Ireland, Africa, China, India, and elsewhere. As Philippine economic historian Erle Frayne Argonza wrote in September 2008:

To continue on the theme of laissez faire, a doctrine started by the French physiocrats and systematized further by the Scots, let it be known that the principle of ‘free trade’ generated by physiocracy was largely a doctrinal defense of slave trade…Adam Smith was an ‘intellectual prostitute’ whose services were procured by the British East India Company, precisely for the purpose of crafting in theoretical form the ‘free trade’ doctrine that was to justify, though subtly, the slave trade of that historic juncture.

Schumpeter also very briefly, and very significantly, noted: “that which I cannot help considering relevant, not for his pure economics of course, but all the more for his understanding of human nature–that no woman, excepting his mother, ever played a role in his existence…” In 2012, Katrine Marçal, lead editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, published Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? (English translation: Pegasus Books, 2016), based on one of the most famous sentences in Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” One reviewer, Ed Walker, Assistant Attorney General of Tennessee for consumer protection and securities, explained how the question posed by Marçal devastated Adam Smith’s economic ideas, and all systems of economics based on them.

 

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Yes, Gender and Minority Prejudice Exists

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On March 27, 2019

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Everyone once in a while this question comes up, and there’s someone who just refuses to see it.

Many years ago, what made it clear to me were the resume studies. They all run as follows: identical resumes are sent out, with the only difference being names. Perhaps the names are male or female; perhaps they are studying racial bias and they obviously ethnic or white, “John Smith.”

Every time some variation of this study is run the results come back that women or minorities get less interviews.

For example:

On two different occasions, Speak With a Geek presented the same 5,000 candidates to the same group of employers. The first time around, details like names, experience and background were provided. Five percent selected for interviews were women.

You can guess what happened next, right? When identifying details were suppressed, that figure jumped to 54 percent. (See the update at the bottom please, this may not be accurate.)

Or, for ethnicity:

As part of a different study from 2011, researchers sent out almost 13,000 fake résumés to over 3,000 job postings. The academics went back to this data at the start of 2017 and found that people with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani-sounding names were 28 percent less likely to get invited to an interview than the fictitious candidates with English-sounding names, even when their qualifications were the same.

Perhaps the best, and one of the oldest, is about auditions:

In the ’70s, The New York Times notes, symphonies started having musicians audition behind partitions, and researchers at Harvard and Princeton found (PDF) that when blind auditions were used, the odds of a woman being hired by an orchestra jumped from 25 percent to 46 percent.

There are plenty more where these came from.

Prejudice exists. It is important. It is unfair. I am a strong believer in blind resumes, auditions, and tests. The old fashioned civil service exams cut out a lot of bullshit. Not all of it, of course, tests still have biases, but they reduce bias a lot.

It’s a simple position to hold that everyone should be treated fairly, and that if something is extraneous to ability to do a job, as gender almost always is, and ethnicity virtually always is, it shouldn’t be a factor. This is especially true because, as a society, we insist on distributing goods and services through money, and money, for almost everyone, through jobs. Prejudice, thus, matters a lot.

I’m not a big fan of identity politics, for a variety of reasons. But it is insane to pretend that forced identities and prejudice don’t exist and don’t matter and that it isn’t important to deal with them. I’d prefer to deal with them in large part (but not entirely) by changing how we distribute goods and services, because making it a game of musical chairs with only a few good chairs and not enough chairs for everyone means that someone will always lose, and lose badly.

When there are losers whose fate is shitty lives, a good chance of homelessness, illness and death, the game gets nasty. Less nasty games, with less nasty consequences, lead to less nasty playing. Maybe half of the jobs we do either outright make the world worse off or a net washes which we could do without in a better-designed society. But to live in that society, we’d have to stop distributing the majority of resources through jobs.

Still, again, to pretend that prejudice doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter is jejeune. It exists and it matters a lot and those on the sticky end of the wicket know it and are mad, as they should be.

Update: The curse of shoddy research strikes. It appears the resume study for men and women in STEM may not be a good one. Read here for more.

I’ll talk about this more in the future.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Placing the Precautionary Principle Before Profit

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On March 26, 2019

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**This Post Is By Eric Anderson**

The overwhelming majority of Americans simultaneously live in two states of denial. The first, psychological denial, enables the second – the illusion we live in something other than a State of denial.

We live in psychological denial because we continue to think that we all share the equal right to opportunity, when in fact, the profit held by the 400 richest people in America exceed the profit held by two-thirds of American households. We live in denial because we continue to think those 400 people earn their profit, when in fact, by externalizing the byproducts of production they are subsidized at the expense of our safety, health and well-being. And we live in denial because we continue to think our politicians democratically represent us, when in fact it’s far from hyperbole to say 400 oligarchs represent us.

Collectively these issues — and too many more to mention — equate to living in a State of denial. The State denies our right to financial well-being. It denies our children their right to an ecologically sustainable future. And it denies we, the people, our right to collectively choose the rules by which we govern ourselves.

But if we are the State, which our Constitution tells us that we are, then how did we get here? How did we allow the few the right to amass such obscene wealth at the expense of the many? How did we allow the few the right to condemn our children to ecologic disaster? And how did we come to allow the few the right to represent the many?

I submit that we arrived at this sordid chapter in American history because we collectively forgot that there are no rights, without attendant duties. Simply put, the many failed in their collective duty to ensure that the few uphold their duty. We failed by obsessively focusing on our own rights. We allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many before looking to our well-being. But for the sake of our progeny, it is time the many force the few to do their duty. That duty is to place the precaution principle before profit.

The precautionary principle states: Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm.

The principle’s wisdom is demonstrated by the resilience of several age-old adages. We have long been warned to look before we leap. Warned to save nine stiches, by making one in time. Warned to avoid a pound of cure, by taking an ounce of prevention. And warned that it’s better to be safe, than sorry.

For example, beginning in the 1970’s many economists and business leaders began a thought crusade promoting market efficiency, proceeding on the untested theory that, if allowed to become obscenely wealthy, the benefits afforded the rich through deregulation would “trickle down” to everyone else. In hindsight, however, it’s not difficult to argue that the theory presented “an uncertain potential for significant harm.” And indeed, we have been harmed by the political backlash ensuing from the unprecedented economic inequality that has resulted. Would the many not have been better served by a policy prohibiting this neoliberal agenda until it’s proponents had shown it presented no appreciable risk of harm?

So too, in response to overwhelming public dismay over the ecologic destruction wrought by a century of unbridled capitalism, Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law on January 1, 1970. Unfortunately, NEPA is all sound and no fury. It requires only Federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of their actions, and to engage all practicable measures to prevent environmental harm. A hard look? All practicable measures? Would we be facing the civilization threatening crisis we call anthropogenic global warming if, instead, we had required the prohibition of all activity posing a risk of significant ecological harm unless the proponent of the activity showed that it presented no appreciable risk? Would we really be worse off today for having placed precaution for our delicate ecology, over profit for the few?

And finally, we hear no end to the furor over the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC. But the process of rubber stamping rule by oligarchs arguably began in 1976 with the Court’s ruling in Buckley vs. Valeo. There, it was decided that money and speech are synonymous under the 1st Amendment. And two years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court recognized corporation’s right to put that money where their mouth is, concluding that the value of speech in the course of political debate does not depend on the identity of the speaker. But two issues go unspoken in these decisions. The first is the volume of speech. The many are only allowed to turn the volume of their speech up to 1. But the few richest among us are allowed to turn the volume up to 11. The second is the duration of speech. The many only speak as long as they live. While the few, through their corporations, are allowed to speak in perpetuity. Would not the many be better served by a policy that prohibited such legal assault by the few until it’s proponents had shown that it presented no appreciable risk of harm to our democracy?

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau states “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil for one who strikes at the root.” Make no mistake; there is no greater evil than a society that allows the few to profit at the expense of the many by exacting our equality, our ecology, and our democracy. Surprise, surprise — money is the root of the evil that bedevils us. But the good news is that the time tested, common sense cure has been right in front of our faces all along. We must demand a Constitutional Amendment forever enshrining the precautionary principle in the Constitution as a shield for we, the people, against the incessant pursuit of profit by the few. No better remedy for our ills exists. The many must begin to do their duty, and force the few to place the precautionary principle before profit.

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The Mueller Report: Who Cares?

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On March 25, 2019

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I’m running a little late on this one as I found out Friday night that I had to be out of my place Tuesday. My landlord was not up to fire code, and the city was (is) going to shut the place down on Tuesday. So, a scramble to find a new place, though in the end I found something nicer in a better location.

Right then, Mueller. I haven’t written much about “RussiaGate.” There are other people who have done a better job, taken a closer look.

The Barr letter (pdf) summarizes the finding. Mueller found that the Trump campaign was not engaged in a conspiracy with Russia to steal the election, although the Russians did try to effect the election. He punted on whether Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice, and Barr, as one would expect, decided that obstruction had not occurred.

I’m not going to go into the weeds on this. Trump is clearly corrupt and clearly meets the emoluments bar for impeachment.

I never liked RussiaGate, for a number of reasons:

The DNC Hack Information Was Correct

I think that for ordinary people the fact that the DNC was trying to fix the primary for Clinton over Sanders is actually more important that the fact that the scuzzy behavior was discovered by hacking.

Mueller Is a Republican

I really don’t understand this fetish for thinking Daddy Republicans will take down other Republicans. I’m not saying Mueller is corrupt or looked the other way, but why keep expecting Republicans to do your job for you?

It Distracted from Real Problems

Clinton just ran a bad campaign. She didn’t campaign in the key post-industrial battleground states which cost her the election and she ceded the populist economic argument to Trump, among a number of errors. She just isn’t a good campaigner. She lost a Primary to Obama which was hers to win, she lost against Trump, the Presidential candidate with the highest negatives of any candidate since polling. She was just a bad candidate.

But more to the point, acting as if Trump was more important than bad campaigning, gerrymandering and voter suppression puts attention away from issues that Democrats could actually learn from and do something about onto a spooky “evil” foreigner. The demonic Putin, who despite leading a state which is much smaller than the US, the EU, or China in terms of population and GDP, is apparently the Dark Lord reborn and from whom all bad things follow.

If Russian interference made the difference it made the difference because the election was so close that everything made the difference, and because there were real American problems (and wrongdoing at the DNC) to exploit.

Russiaphobia Is Baaadddd

Russia may be a declining great power, but it is still a great power with a LOT of nuclear weapons and one into whose sphere of influence the US has been aggressively pushing. A lot of Russians genuinely think America wants war with them. They’re scared.

And, yeah, a scared declining great power with a lot of nukes is… baaaaddddd.

Concluding Remarks

Trump is corrupt and has engaged in illegal activity. Mueller was never needed to prove that, because he does much of it openly. He never did get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions, which is mostly what Russia wants (and which I think should be gotten rid of), and when you look at substantive actions has done little that is good for Russia. I actually would like better relations between the US and Russia, to avoid war and possibly nuclear war and so on, so I think this is bad, but it’s all a sideshow.

If Democrats want to impeach Trump, you can do it now. Can’t convict in the Senate, but he’s clearly guilty and they can drag him through the mud any time they want: He’s corrupt and rotten to the core. (In ways that are more obvious than Obama’s terrible corruption, because Obama waited to be paid off until after he was out of office, just like Bill Clinton.)

Russiagate, whatever validity it has, was always bad politics and a way of avoiding real problems. Democrats need to stop expecting Daddy Republicans and the FBI to save them and take steps to win and defeat Trump themselves.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 24, 2019

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On March 24, 2019

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**This post is by Tony Wikrent**

Economies Adding the Most to Global Growth in 2019
Barry Ritholtz [The Big Picture  3-19-19]

‘Full-Time Freelance’ Is Just the Industry Standard

[Splinter News 3-14-19]

On Monday, David Tamarkin, the site editor at Epicurious, a Condé Nast food publication, tweeted out a job posting for an editorial assistant. The position, Tamarkin wrote, was “full-time freelance,” meaning the person filling the job would work 40 hours a week and perform the duties of a full-time employee. After two days of online outrage and backlash, including users virtuously snitch-tagging the New York State Department of Labor, Tamarkin tweeted on Wednesday that the position would indeed be eligible for benefits.

Wage growth for low-wage workers has been strongest in states with minimum wage increases

[Economic Policy Institute 3-18-19]

Low-wage workers in states that increased the minimum wage between 2013 and 2018 experienced wage growth at a rate 50 percent faster than those in states with no minimum wage increases. Check out EPI’s new interactive map to see the count of workers in each congressional district that would receive wage increases if Congress passes the Raise the Wage Act of 2019.

Record U.S. trade deficit in 2018 reflects failure of Trump’s trade policies
By Robert E. Scott [Economic Policy Institute 3-18-19]
California Jury Finds Roundup Caused Man’s Cancer
[NPR 3-19-19]

A San Francisco federal jury unanimously agreed on Tuesday that Roundup caused a man’s cancer — a potentially massive blow to the company that produces the glyphosate-based herbicide currently facing hundreds of similar lawsuits…. The verdict is the second in the U.S. to find a connection between the herbicide’s key ingredient, glyphosate, and the disease. In August, another San Francisco jury determined Roundup had caused cancer in a former groundskeeper. It also decided Monsanto, the company that developed the popular weed killer, deliberately failed to warn consumers or regulators about the product’s risks.


Monsanto’s Weed Killer is “Substantial Factor” in Cancer, Says Jury
[Spinter News 3-22-19]

Monsanto is about to face 11,200 more trials over the potential carcinogen in Roundup, which has prompted legislation to limit the chemical’s use

Executives in custody as China chemical plant explosion death toll reaches 47, with 640 injured

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 3-22-19]
Lambert Strether notes: “Oddly, or not, there seems to be no talk of arresting the executives responsible for the petrochemical fire in Houston.”

Disrupting mainstream economics

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Is There Hope For Mitigating Climate Change?

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On March 22, 2019

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I’ve always felt that the last thing which came out of Pandora’s box, hope, was the worst thing to come out. People wouldn’t put up with the evils of the world so readily if they didn’t feel hope.

Most recently, in America, Obama ran on “hope” and did, well, very little to help most people who voted for him. (And rather a lot to hurt them.)

So, what hope is there for dealing with climate change?

What, I think, there clearly isn’t, is hope that we avoid serious and catastrophic consequences. The methane in permafrost will be released and we are going to get hit hard.

People will die, it will be bad. For some people very bad.

Combined with ecological collapse there is an outside, but still real, chance that we will destroy our civilization or wipe ourselves out.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the generational cohort is changing. The Boomers are giving way to the Millenials (Xers, of whom I am one, never counted for much politically.)

As Stirling Newberry explained, old people don’t much care about climate change because they’re going to be dead before the worst of it hits.

Young people do.

And the Overton window is shifting: even if Pelosi (old) sneered at the Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got it talked about and taken seriously. Multiple Presidential candidates are for some version of it.

What is possible; what is acceptable, is changing.

The Green New Deal is no different from what many people have suggested in the past: refit the entire economy to be as carbon renewable as possible. Make every building as close to energy neutral as possible, use renewable energy, etc..

We had the technology in the 90s, heck we had much of it before then. AOC’s plan is, in broad strokes, identical to what I used to propose Democrats run on back in the 2000s, when no one took it seriously.

So, yes, there is hope.

The other piece of hope is that things get really bad; catastrophically bad, as soon as possible. We need to lose millions of people to climate change and ecological collapse in an obvious and terrible way, so everyone else wakes up.

That’s not nice, but this is a boiling frog situation: we need something to happen that makes people panic and realize that they can’t take their time fixing this.

As long as it seems like a slow change, we will tend to put off the very radical change that is needed.

Fortunately, I’m almost certain climate change will be discontinuous and that bad things will happen off schedule and before we expect them to. In one sense that’s bad, especially if whatever happens is so bad we can’t recover, but if it doesn’t, it’ll be exactly what we need.

Grim, but that’s where we are.

Hope? Yeah, there is some. But only if we seize the chances we will be given.

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