This Thursday: Taking on the American uber-fantasy (endless growth)

 Another outstanding offering from the good folks behind the Salem Progressive Film Series.

Thursday, Jan 12, 2012     7 p.m.
How do we become a sustainable civilization? We are addicted to unending growth in a world that has limits.  Individual and public policy decisions today are formed by a powerful, pro-growth cultural bias.  We worship at the Church of Growth Everlasting. Undeterred by the facts, we’re on a collision course powered by denial and the myth that growth brings prosperity.  This film examines the cultural barriers that prevent us from reacting rationally to the evidence that current levels of population and consumption are unsustainable.

Location Grand Theater, 191 High Street NE
Hours Doors open at 6:15p Films begin at 7p
Admission Adults $4 Students $3

The Growth of Degrowth Economics

Image by Lights In The Dark via FlickrLong overdue: sensible thinking about growth on a finite planet.

Related articles

• Goodbye 'Shop Til You Drop' Mentality: Renegade Band of Economists Call for 'Degrowth' Economy (alternet.org)

Word: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Image via WikipediaThe insightful Naomi Klein.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party.  The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit.  Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change.   No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example).  In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback.  For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right.  Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring.  But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right.  This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power.  It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention.  Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get. . . .

The Growth Fantasy

In a bizarre, self-contradicting editorial, the Statesman-Journal manages, in the space of four paragraphs, to show that the paper's editorial staff, despite being in a great position to assess the situation realistically, believe that "growth is just around the corner" and that there is something that John Kitzhaber et al. could do to make that growth happen --- if they only wished to, apparently.

Moreover, the writer fails to explain why in the world, if "a cohesive and strategic plan to further grow private-sector jobs" is needed and can be produced, someone as smart as Kitz refuses to produce it.

Here's the paper, correctly pointing out that we're cutting public sector employment (which has a devastating effect on private sector hiring) before resuming the weird chant for government to "do something" about "private-sector jobs."

The encouraging news is that employment numbers are up 1.5 percent compared with last year.  Overall, Oregon is 13th nationally in jobs growth. But fewer jobs in the public sector and a slow recovery in the housing market are handcuffing economic growth in the state and nation.  The employment gains have come in the private sector as many local government agencies - such as the Salem-Keizer School District - have had to make deep cuts to balance their budgets.


Government's impact on the Willamette Valley explains why the region showed the largest job losses of any Oregon region during the third quarter. Year-over-year job losses were 3.4 percent in Marion and Polk counties, according to the forecast, the worst of the worst.


The governor and lawmakers can look for shiny hues in this forecast, but there's only one truth.

Oregon's economic picture looks ugly. And budget cuts don't address the reality that Kitzhaber and state leaders have not developed a cohesive and strategic plan to further grow private-sector jobs.

Before considering whether such a plan could even be created, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider what it says about the mindset of the people who call for such things:  these people, who reflexively oppose all tax increases (the SJ was reactionary in opposition to Measures 66 and 67, for example), seem to have zero self-awareness about what it means to call for government to produce "a cohesive and strategic plan to further grow . . . jobs."

Government acts in one of two ways:  with force or with money.   The video clips we've seen of government employees clubbing and spraying harmless kids and grandmothers in the face and eyes with pepper spray is one face of government.  Presumably the SJ isn't calling on government to use force on recalcitrant businesses who refuse to hire.

So that leaves the only other mode of governmental influence: the decisions about what to tax or not to tax, and the decisions about how to spend the money collected through taxation.  That is the only other way government works.  Government takes money from some or all and gives it to some or all.

In American history, the idea that government was responsible for creating plans to spur hiring was rare, and would have even been considered anathema for centuries.   The Founders surely and probably most lesser mortals believed that, while government had a role "to promote the general welfare," the idea of government acting directly and intentionally to spur hiring would have been considered a call for corruption, given that we know that employers only hire when it is profitable for them to do so.

One of the reasons that the New Deal worked as well as it did was that Roosevelt and his "New Dealers" didn't wait to spur "private sector jobs" as the SJ says we must -- rather, they looked at the very long list of needs -- the work needing doing -- and the very long list of people needing work, and matched the two directly.  Thus, instead of giving employers twice as much so that they would take on the work and hire some workers (as few as possible, for the lowest wage possible, as is the rule), New Deal programs concentrated on restoring the flow of money by hiring workers directly, to do things for the public good, while priming the capital spending pump with earned wages.

The bottom line, though it will likely be a frosty day in Lucifer's living room before this is discussed in the SJ, is simple:

      GROWTH IS OVER.

What does that mean?  That means that no amount of word-stew, no stellar team of economists and other believers in illusions, no amount of hope or prayer can change the fundamental physical reality that we have long since passed the limits to growth, which is really just a shorthand for "consumption of material resources and use of energy."

Our vast store of wealth is really just the residue of the even vaster process of waste that we began when we figured out how to tap coal and then oil, even as we kept a 17th Century ("The world is empty") mindset while the years flew by, each one bringing about increasingly advanced tools for using more energy and materials faster and faster (for that is, physically, what "growth" means).  For about two and a half centuries now, we have found ever more clever ways to blow through aeons of stored solar energy ("fossil" fuels) while using the best, highest-grade, easiest to mine/capture/drain resources to produce ever more elaborate things -- some good, some bad, but every one of them more energy intensive than the tools they replaced.

Even the few devices that use less energy individually wind up using more collectively, as the net result of each advance means that more people will use the more advanced tool.  As Richard Register notes, you give an American a Prius that gets twice the mileage, the only thing that changes is that the American moves twice as far from work, so that he can afford a bigger house to fill with bigger screens.  Yes, that's hyperbole.  Also pretty accurate.

News flash for the newspaper:  There is nothing John Kitzhaber or all the mavens and gurus (and certainly all the economists put together) can do to promote "growth," thank god.  Now that we're past the limits of growth, we're like an insolvent business that still has a little money in checking -- sure we can spend faster, but that only makes the final reckoning harsher.  We've operated North America like a going-out-of-business concern for 250 years, and we've done such a good job spreading that gospel around the world that China and India have decided to join us in living as if there will be no tomorrow, that the books need never balance -- because who'll be here to audit them anyway?

The challenge for Salem -- and it will have to be done at this sort of local level -- is figuring out how to preserve the social advances of the last 250 years locally, even as the predicate that spurred and allowed all those advances (the unsustainable use of Earth's natural wealth) starts to reverse, remorselessly contracting year upon year, decade upon decade, ever faster.  If you think times are hard now, when the boulder has just barely stopped rolling up the hill, wait until it has some time to pick up speed.

The Occupy Wall Street folks, and their local variants, understand that the economy is not working any more.  Naturally, the pundits atop the media empires scorn the "unwashed hippies" and "60's flashbacks" camping in the parks.  What's most interesting is that the press either misses or pretends not to notice the really interesting problem that the Occupiers point out:  that the economy is producing over-educated people with crushing debts at a tremendous rate, even as we have stopped needing many people to keep the "business as usual" system going.   (Scarier still, most of these people are absolutely dependent on "business as usual" going on as usual, because they have no more knowledge of how to grow food to sustain themselves than they do of quantum electro-dynamics.)

When other countries have an excess of educated young people and no opportunities for them, our press pundits write about how these societies are in peril, because the disaffected youth will forever be harmed by having had no way to join the ranks of responsible adults.  Funny how the remaining few reporters and editorial scribes don't want to think about what it means that a frightening number of 15 - 30 year-olds in this country can not buy a decent job in their own home towns.

Don't forget: Tomorrow Night, Salem Progressive Film Series

Looks to be a great one:   The Economics of Happiness
Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011
7 p.m.
The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance-and, far from the old institutions of power, they're starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm - an economics of localization.

Meanwhile, as the Lords of Finance and Infinite Growth Gamble with the Planet

Image by Cebete via FlickrThey are rewarded for their "value creation" efforts in gold beyond even Midas's dreams:

Robin Hood in Reverse in US: Seven Examples

by Bill Quigley

The rich have been getting richer and the poor and middle have been getting poorer in the US recently. Here are seven examples that show how the US is going through Robin Hood in Reverse.

Between 1948 and 1979, the richest 10 percent of families in the US claimed 33 percent of average income growth. Between 2000 and 2007, the richest 10 percent claimed a full 100 percent of average income growth in the US, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Business taxes were cut from 46 to 34 percent 25 years ago, according to Pro Publica. But today 115 of the big 500 companies listed on Standard and Poor’s Stock Index paid federal and other taxes of less than 20 percent over the last 5 years according to David Leonhardt of the New York Times.

General Electric’s tax rate for last year was 7 percent according to Pro Publica.

The top 5 percent US households claim 63 percent of the entire country’s wealth. The bottom 80 percent hold just 13% of the growth, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Last year, John Paulson, a hedge fund manager “earned” $4.9 billion, according to the New York Times. Ten years ago it took 25 such managers to collectively earn that much. Last year the top 25 hedge fund managers pocketed (a much better word) a total of $22 billion. It would take over 440,000 people each earning $50,000 a year to match that amount.

A federal development program intended to help poor communities, the New Market Tax Credit, instead funnels up to ten billion taxpayer dollars to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs and Prudential to build luxury hotels, office buildings and a car museum. Bloomberg Markets Magazine pointed to the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago which was renovated for $116 million. Prudential got $15.6 million in tax credit from the US Treasury for helping fund the project because the hotel was in a census zone that included two colleges which housed a lot of lower income students.

According to the Financial Times, there are now more people living in poverty in the US than at any time in the last 50 years. Foreclosure filings were nearly 4 million in 2010, up 23 percent since 2008 according to RealtyTrac.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com

For those who like Fantasy & Sciency-Sounding Fiction

Greater Salem-Keizer
Local Government Forum

March 15, 2011, 6:30 - 8:30pm
North Salem High School Auditorium
765 14th St NE • No RSVP necessary

The forum will allow local government entities to share their economic forecast with each other and discuss what measures seem likely to be taken as a response.

Featured speakers include:

• City Manager Linda Norris, City of Salem;
  
• City Manager Chris Eppley, City of Keizer;
  
• Steve Dickey, Director of Transportation Development for Cherriots;
  
• Marion County Administrator John Lattimer;
  
• Chemeketa Community College President Cheryl Roberts; and
  
• Salem-Keizer Public Schools Superintendent Sandy Husk

Moderator: Bill Church, Executive Editor of the Statesman Journal will field written questions from the audience.

Event coordinated by the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce
Questions? Contact Jason Brandt 503-581-1466 ext. 304
===========================================

Ok, so this is interesting. Not at all obvious why local governments need to appear under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce or, given their huge PR budgets, have an employee of the corporate press ready to "field" (filter) questions from the taxpayers when the subject is economic forecasts, but it's a good step that they're doing it, to a point.

One of the more interesting questions is why the local transportation poobahs are not included, since the biggest deal in town is the proposal to blow $400-$650 million on a totally unnecessary, monstrously large, third auto-bridge over the Willamette, despite a persistent DECLINE in driving across the Northwest and the upcoming second round of recession caused by our unwise (suicidal, actually) dependence on fossil fuels. The SKATS (Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study) folks are the only ones with forecasts that matter, since their resolutely autistic forecasting model is built from the start to justify continual expansion and never-ending sprawl. The price of oil (and, thus, gas) doesn't even appear in the SKATS travel demand model, so the fact that we're getting hammered by $100+ per barrel oil right now means nothing -- just like a severe autistic person, once the model decides it wants a new bridge, no amount of reasoning with it can change its view.

The other interesting omissions from the forecasting party: Marion-Polk Food Share, the people with the best and most-current picture of the real economic situation in the area. Another one: Someone from the real-estate industry specializing in foreclosures (25% of Oregon home sales last year, and scheduled to spike even higher).

And if you want to have some big fun, come and ask this: Before telling us any more new economic projections, please review all your agency's past economic projections from, oh, 2004 onward. Tell us the date you made the projection and what it included, so that we may evaluate your past performance in this area as we hear your new projections.

WORD: Bageant on fire

Deer Hunting with Jesus mindmap. Image by Austin Kleon via Flickr

Wow.

Capitalism wouldn't be around today, at least not in its current pathogenic form, if it had not caught a couple of lucky breaks. The first of course, was the expansion of bloodsucking colonialism to give it transfusions of unearned wealth, enabling "investors" to profit by artificial means (death, oppression and slavery). But the biggest break was being driven to stratospheric heights by inordinate quantities of available hydrocarbon energy. Inordinate, but never the less finite. Consequently, the 100-year-long oil suckdown that put industrial countries in the tall cotton, now threatens to take back from subsequent beneficiary generation everything it gave. The Hummers, the golf courses, the big box stores, cruising at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic -- everything.

You'd never know that, to look around at Americans or Canadians, who have not the slightest qualms about living in that 3,500 square foot vinyl sided fuck box, if they can manage to make the mortgage nut, or unashamedly buying a quadruple X large Raiders Jersey because, hey, a guy's gotta eat, right? Why don't I deserve a nice ride, a swimming pool and a flat screen? I worked for it (sure you did buddy, your $12,000 Visa/MasterCard tab is proof of that).

The doomers and the peak oilers gag, and they call it American denial. Personally, I think it is somewhat unfair to say that most Americans and Canadians are in denial. They simply don't have fucking clue about what is really happening to them and their world. Everything they have been taught about working, money and "quality of life" constitutes the planet's greatest problem -- overshoot. Understanding this trashes our most basic assumptions, and requires a complete reversal in contemporary thought and practice about how we live in the world. When was the last time you saw any individual, much less an entire nation, do that?

Compounding our ignorance and naiveté are the officials and experts, politicians, media elites, and especially economists, who interpret the world for us and govern the course of things. The go-to guys. They don't know either. But they've got the lingo down.

Somehow or other, it all has to do with the economy, which none of us understands, despite round the clock media jabbering on the subject. Somehow it has to do with this great big spring on Wall Street called "the market" that's gotta be kept wound up, and interest rates at something called The Fed, which have got to be kept smunched down. The industry of crystal gazing and hairball rubbing surrounding these entities is called economics. . . .

General Custer relied on a survey much like this before his last campaign

"Gosh, this isn't anything like our planning survey said it'd be." Image by jshyun via Flickr

For accurately reflecting sheer, undiluted, jaw-dropping obliviousness, this survey has to take the prize:

Your Input Is Needed!

Decision-makers from the Cities of Salem, Keizer, Turner and Marion and Polk Counties are working together to develop an Economic Opportunities Analysis (EOA) for the Salem Keizer region. A regional EOA identifies the regional competitive advantages and opportunities for long term economic growth. EOAs generally are created to ensure that there is enough land to meet regional employment and community objectives.

Your input needed on the regional economic study. Weigh in! Take the five minute survey now at http://bit.ly/cmUuTF”. The online EOA Survey will be open until July 30, 2010.

You can find additional information at www.mwvcog.org/planning/eoa or contact Suzanne Dufner the Council of Governments at (503) 540-1616 or sdufner@mwvcog.org.

Thank You!

Kimberly Moreland,
Senior Planner
503.588.6173, x7511
kmoreland@cityofsalem.net

Read over the questions and answers and you see a survey that's more accurately described as a push poll -- the chance for business groups to stuff the ballot box with votes for government to do more of A, or B, or C, depending on whether the voters personally benefit the most from A, or B, or C.

What are the real barriers to economic development in Salem-Keizer? How about:

(a) that the bedrock source of America's wealth and preeminence (oil) is at or near the final peak production rates (meaning that an inexorable, unstoppable decline begins, just as huge nations like India and China are wanting to ramp up demand);

(b) that peak oil means the end of economic expansion in a system designed to require continuous expansion and very badly suited to contraction, which will wipe out huge stores of capital;

and (c) that this occurs just as we need to invest massive amounts of capital in renewable and non-carbon-based energy supplies to have any prayer of limiting the destruction of climate chaos.

We've seen the planning mindset shown in this survey before: it's the same one that got the US mired in Vietnam and that General Custer displayed before his grand finale: a complete and total failure to engage with reality and a fantasy belief that planners can make plans and set goals without considering the forces that would tend to work against attainment of them.

Book of the Year to 3/31: IOU: Why everybody owes everybody and no one can pay

Cover via Amazon

If you want to understand why the City of Salem's budget is collapsing faster than a Minnesota freeway bridge -- and to get a really good, crisp, clear and even witty education in the arcana of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and all the other mumbo jumbo terms that you've heard about -- you can not possibly do better than with John Lanchester's excellent book.

Lanchester does an outstanding job revealing the complete intellectual bankruptcy of economics, which has been taken over by the kind borderline autism that we associate with pimply teens just discovering Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and Ayn Rand ... who makes a footnote appearance as a Charlie's Angels devotee in IOU.

This is a great book for the person who is allergic to financial stories, because he keeps bringing it back to how and why people in places like Salem are going to suffer for the sins of the SOBs, and how taking trillions of dollars from the victims of skullduggery and giving it to the crooks who victimized the rest of us in the first place came to be thought necessary, for example.

Publisher Comments:

Part economic primer, part fiscal and historical analysis, New Yorker and London Review of Books contributor John Lanchester offers his brilliantly witty, succinct overview of the current financial crisis.

For most people, the reasons for the sudden collapse of our economy remain obscure. I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete and devastating financial implosion, and how the decisions and actions of a select group of individuals had profound consequences for America, Europe, and the global economy overall. John Lanchester begins with The ATM Moment, that seemingly magical proliferation of cheap credit that led to an explosion of lending, and then deftly outlines the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history — from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages — Lanchester draws perceptive conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism's deepest flaw, and, most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned.

Weaving together firsthand research and superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for the expert and casual reader alike. I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book — it may well provoke anger, amazement, or rueful disbelief — and, as the author clearly reveals, we've only just begun to get ourselves back on track.

Review:

"With clarity and a conversational style often (sometimes deliberately) lacking in the financial industry and its coverage, British journalist Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) takes readers on a comprehensive global tour of 2008's economic meltdown, focusing on each guilty parties' contributions to-and missed opportunities to halt-the worldwide crisis. Starting with the political buildup and then marching through the field of 'banksters,' regulators, mortgage companies and everyone else in a position to know better, Lanchester illustrates exactly how loans from predatory and incompetent players wound up being sold as triple-A investments, and how a subsequent housing market dip toppled the financial system. By prioritizing the financial sector and tenets of laissez-faire capitalism (to the point that it 'became a kind of secular religion'), those in charge of the markets failed to identify the growing systemic dangers; meanwhile, those responsible to the public acted as if benefits for financial institutions also benefited every economic participant, no matter how small. Laypeople seeking to understand the crisis, and what it means for their own bank account, will find Lanchester's volume an oasis of understanding in a sea of partisan spin and convoluted financial language." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Word

Funny, if economagical thinking had any relevance in the real world, there would have been oceans of oil available at $150/barrel. Image via Wikipedia

From an ASPO interview with Jeremy Leggett:

Leggett: I think it’s entirely appropriate for the entire economics community, with the notable exception of the very few economists who saw the financial crash coming, to go back to the drawing board. I mean they got that whole thing catastrophically, systemically wrong. And I was shocked but pleased to see on British television news the other night the head of the economics faculty at the University of Chicago saying, when asked, what are the implications of the financial crash? He said, we have to go right back to the drawing board, I’m paraphrasing, but he was as strong in his wording as this. “We got everything wrong at a systemic level. We should be full of humility and by golly we’re going to do it. Our whole discipline has been has been on flawed assumptions.” And that’s what they have to break.

We hear this from the economists now about peak oil: that the price mechanism works, that simply when oil prices go up, they’ll go out and they’ll find more oil; it’s there under the ground isn’t it? Economics will find the oil. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And we know this. But they have to take some of the humility that is absolutely required of them as a result of the financial crisis and bring it to a re-examination of what they’re saying about peak oil.