Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Energy Use in the US & Global Agri-Food Systems

Implications for Sustainable Agriculture

by Shirin Wertime

culturechange.org (June 05 2010)


During the 20th century, access to cheap and abundant sources of energy helped transform the world in countless ways. Extraction of fossil fuels led to a massive expansion in economic growth and agricultural production, and was one of the bases of a six-fold increase in human population. Petroleum, the most sought after fossil fuel, had the largest role in this transformation. Because of its versatility and liquid form, oil is today the world's primary transportation fuel (Heinberg 1) and leading source of energy (Brown 27). Less than 200 years ago, however, all of the planet's food energy was derived from the sun through photosynthesis (Pimentel, Pimentel & Karpenstein-Machan 3) and almost all work was done by human or animal muscle power (Heinberg 2). Practically all of our energy presently comes from non-renewable resources whose stocks are being depleted at an ever-faster rate.

The benefits we derive from oil are so numerous and of such great convenience that we have built our entire way of life around its use. Now we are entering a period of declining oil supplies and rising prices that threaten not only food security for increasing numbers of people globally, but also many aspects of political and economic stability as well - a new phenomenon for a world that became accustomed to growing supplies of oil and relatively stable prices. Unless we begin quickly to a move away from fossil fuel dependence to a different energy regime and a radical lifestyle and societal change, the transition to a post-petroleum world could be devastating for Americans and people throughout the world. Food, the basis of all life, will be at the forefront of this upheaval.

Agriculture is one of many features of modern life that have been drastically altered by the availability of cheap and abundant oil. The American and most other agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of industrialized agriculture under a capitalist system, aided and abetted by government policies, including that of the United States, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices (Altieri 78-9). The technological innovations of the Green Revolution drastically reduced a farmer's labor input time and greatly increased agricultural yields. Thanks to modern mechanization, the time input necessary to raise a hectare of corn is 110 times less than that required by hand-produced crops (Pimentel 464). Since 1950, the world grain harvest has more than tripled. This growth in productivity resulted from a ten-fold increase in fertilizer use, a near tripling of land irrigation, and the development of high yielding crop varieties (Brown 36-7). Countering the benefits of modern industrialized agriculture is the massive amount of fossil energy needed to power the petroleum-fueled farm machinery and to produce indispensable fertilizers and pesticides. Increases in production notwithstanding, the shift to industrialized agriculture has brought about a host of ecological and social problems in its wake.

The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is possible only for as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. The price of food will inevitably climb as oil becomes more and more expensive and drives up the cost of production and transportation. This will disproportionately impact the world's poor, especially those who depend on food assistance and cheap North American grain. Only by taking steps toward creating a sustainable food system of a radically new kind can we hope to attenuate the looming crisis in agri-food systems in this country and abroad. As Patricia Allen argues, any effort to create a truly sustainable food system must take into account the relationships humans have with each other as well as with their environment, which they have molded and influenced in many significant ways (1). Agricultural dependence on fossil fuels is a man-made problem. It will take not just scientific and ecological solutions but also deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us. Before dealing with the implications of oil depletion and rising costs for the agri-food system and human survival, a closer look at the dominant role oil plays in the agri-food system is in order.

Oil is a finite natural resource whose global rate of production will eventually peak and begin an inevitable decline. According to petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, the peak of oil production is passed when about half of the total resources have been extracted. Richard Heinberg notes that the basic concept of Peak Oil is derived from observations over the past 150 years of all older oil fields which have peaked and then declined in output (12). Indeed, the United States, once the world's biggest producer of oil, reached its peak of oil extraction in 1970 and has since experienced declining output (Heinberg 12). Today, ninety percent of the United States' oil deposits have been extracted and the country, once a net exporter of oil, now imports over 65 percent of its oil (Pimentel 459). Worldwide, the discovery of new oil deposits peaked in the 1960s and since 1981 the amount of oil extracted has surpassed the amount discovered by an increasing margin (Campbell). According to the oil giant ChevronTexaco, 33 of the world's 48 major oil-producing nations are already experiencing declining production (Heinberg 13). There is uncertainty, however, as to when exactly global oil production will reach its peak. Some experts believe we have already reached Peak Oil while almost all agree that it will occur sometime during the first half of this century.

Although other sources of energy exist, such as nuclear, coal and wind power, none of these can produce liquid fuels. Some have hailed crop-based ethanol as a replacement for petroleum, but the negatives of ethanol production seriously outweigh any potential benefits. In 2007, one-fifth of the United States' entire grain harvest was transformed into ethanol, but the 8.3 billion gallons of ethanol produced that year could only supply less than four percent of the country's automotive fuel (Brown 39). Moreover, it takes 65 percent more energy to produce 1000 liters of ethanol than the energy that is derived from those 1000 liters. Thus, ethanol production has a negative energy balance (Pimentel et al 15-6). Diverting a large portion of the US grain harvest to ethanol production has serious ramifications for the world's poor. Worldwide, grain prices have increased dramatically, with the price of wheat more than doubling in 2007, setting off food riots in countries across the globe that same year (Brown 40). Ethanol production in its current form has no place in sustainable agriculture because it actually presents a net energy loss and because it is pricing food out of reach for the world's poorest people.

In 2002, the US food system consumed seventeen percent of the country's total fossil fuel use (Eshel & Martin 2). The availability of seemingly unending fossil fuel resources has led to the highly unsustainable situation whereby "the US food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy" (Pfeiffer 4). Much of the food system's heavy dependence on fossil fuels stems from the capitalist structure under which it operates. United States government policies have also encouraged the expansion of large corporate farms and farm specialization by subsidizing over production and the export of goods to international markets. Although large specialized farm owners benefit from economies of scale, they must in turn increase their use of synthetic chemical inputs and petroleum fueled farm machinery, creating a serious dependence on fossil fuels. The use of synthetic fertilizers accounts for twenty percent of energy use on American farms (Brown 34), and annually one billion pounds of pesticides are applied to farms across the nation (Pimentel 463). The dramatic increase in urbanization over the past century, coupled with a move away from mixed farming systems in favor of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) has deprived farms of natural sources of fertilizer and resulted in the massive expansion of commercial fertilizer use (Pimentel 464). The capitalist system encourages the food system's unhealthy reliance on fossil fuels because as long as oil is cheap and plentiful, large profits can be made by ensuring the system remains unsustainable.

Farming itself is the least profitable and least energy intensive segment of the entire economy of agriculture. Of the roughly 2,000 liters of oil required per year to feed each American (Pimentel 459), only one-fifth of that energy is actually used for agriculture, with the rest going toward transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and food preparation and storage (Brown 35). The transformation of farm products into consumer commodities, along with the provision of farm inputs, are the biggest moneymakers in the American food system, and not surprisingly, the sectors dominated by large agrifood corporations. Farmers operating under the capitalist system must sell their products on the open market, which usually means selling to the large transnational corporations that dominate the market. Similarly, there are a handful of large companies that produce the fossil fuel-dependent farm inputs purchased by American farmers. Today, farming only accounts for ten percent of the total food dollar, while 25 percent pays for farm inputs and 65 percent for transportation, processing and marketing (Lewontin 95). A century ago, the value added by farming was closer to forty percent of the food dollar and most farm inputs were produced by the farmers themselves by using draft animal power, storing seeds, and using animal manure for fertilizer (Lewontin 95).

The dramatic rise in monocultures and the increasingly globalized scale of agricultural production have essentially destroyed the localized food infrastructure in the United States. For example, in 1870 almost all the apples consumed in Iowa were produced locally, but a little over a century later that number had dropped to fifteen percent (Pfeiffer 25). In the United States today, less than five percent of food is locally produced (Pfeiffer 68), and so our food travels an average of 1,500 miles before being consumed (Pimentel 467). The transportation of food from farm gate to dinner plate constitutes fourteen percent of the energy used in the entire food system (Brown 35). Transporting a head of lettuce from California to New York City by refrigerated truck requires 4,140 kilocalories of fuel per head of lettuce, while actually growing the head of lettuce consumes only 750 kilocalories of fossil energy (Pimentel 467-8). Given that ninety percent of global transportation is fueled by oil or oil by-products (Heinberg 4), declining oil supplies will most likely impede the transportation of produce internationally, and even across the United States. Fresh produce imports from the Southern Hemisphere will likely be one of the first casualties of rising fuel prices. Ultimately, higher transportation costs will be reflected in the price of goods, placing many of the items we enjoy today out of the reach of a majority of people. On the surface, the United States might appear to be food secure, but a cutoff in transportation would lead to serious local shortages of food and other goods.

Oil production will inevitably decline and eventually come to a halt once all accessible oil deposits have been exploited. As this trend intensifies, industrial agriculture in its current form will become impossible. Already, since 1985, fertilizer production worldwide has declined by 23 percent because of fuel shortages and high prices (Pimentel et al 12). This downward trend will likely continue as petroleum becomes increasingly expensive. Sadly, much of the world's soil has been so degraded by the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that without the continued use of these synthetic inputs, the land cannot produce yields large enough to feed the world's population (Heinberg 5). One study has shown that in the United States, soil is being lost at a rate ten times faster than it can naturally be replaced (Hough). Fossil fuel fed irrigation is leading to water scarcity as countries overpump their underground aquifers to the point of depletion. Irrigation currently accounts for seventy percent of all water use and nineteen percent of farm energy use in the United States (Brown 69). Once groundwater sources are largely depleted, the amount of land available for cultivation will diminish substantially.

Another limiting factor of post-peak agricultural production is population growth. Over the past decade the per capita availability of cropland has declined by twenty percent worldwide (Pimentel 461), and still, 78 million people are added to the planet each year. It will prove increasingly difficult to feed the world with diminishing fertile land and water resources.

Ironically, while 862 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, another approximately 1.6 billion people suffer from excessive caloric intake (Brown 107). In the United States, it is usually the most marginalized among us, the poor and minority groups, who experience obesity and a lack of nutritious food in their diets. The sale of processed food, which makes up 82 to 92 percent of food sales, is entirely subsidized by fossil fuels. By exploiting the availability of cheap energy, the agri-food industry has created a situation in which the most processed, energy intensive food is also the cheapest. The average American consumes a diet of 3,747 kilocalories a day, which is greatly in excess of the FDA recommended intake of 2,000 to 2,500 kilocalories per day (Pimentel 459). By simply reducing their caloric intake and consuming less processed food, Americans could greatly reduce the fossil fuel energy used in food production. Of course, in order to be able to start eating healthier, everyone must have access to nutritious foods, which is not the case in the current agri-food system. Another potential energy savings could come from a transition to diets that are lower in meat and dairy consumption and more seasonally based. Currently, one third of the calories in a typical American diet come from animal sources (Pfeiffer 22). A strictly vegetarian diet of equivalent caloric intake, however, consumes 33 percent less fossil fuel energy (Pimentel 459). These are only a few of the simple lifestyle changes that Americans could adopt to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.

On small farms across the country, agricultural techniques are being implemented to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Harking back to the days of pre-industrialized agriculture, some people have advocated a return to the use of draft animals as a replacement for fuel powered farm machinery. In a post-petroleum world, animal and human muscle power could very well be the most accessible forms of agricultural labor power. Although one horse can help manage 25 acres of farmland a year, that one horse in turn requires one acre of pastureland and 1.5 acres of hayland for its maintenance (Pimentel 464). Furthermore, the additional land that would be required to grow food for draft animals is currently being cultivated to produce food for humans. This needed cropland for draft animals will come from that presently reserved for humans.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of farmers across the country are choosing to adopt organic farming techniques. In the organic farming system, the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is replaced by the use of crop rotation and leguminous cover crops, which naturally replenishes nutrients back into the soil. The application of compost and manure produced on the farm can replace the need for synthetic fertilizers to a large degree. Moreover, a shift to minimum and no-till agricultural practices on about two fifths of US cropland has helped reduce direct use of petroleum based fuel on American farms by 3.5 billion gallons from 1973 to 2005 (Brown 34).

Although the knowledge needed to transition to localized, sustainable agriculture exists, the current structure of power relations and resource control in the United States prevents the widespread move away from fossil fuel based agriculture. Those in positions of power within the United States government and in agribusiness have no interest in altering a system from which they greatly benefit. Without a change in the status quo, however, small local and sustainable producers will have a difficult time competing against the fossil fuel subsidized overproduction of agribusiness which finds its way into our grocery stores. The adoption of sustainable agriculture can only be truly transformational if we broaden its scope to focus on the relationship between social, economic and ecological factors within the agri-food system. In order to move away from conventional agriculture, it is necessary to understand why it functions the way it does and who are the winners and losers in the equation. Sustainable agriculture is not just about practicing organic farming techniques, but rather it is a way to address the structural inequalities in the current agri-food system and to guarantee that all people have access to nutritious and affordable food. Although this vision of sustainable agriculture might seem Utopian and unrealistic given the current nature of things, it is the only acceptable way to ensure the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants.

The fact of the matter is that the present agricultural system cannot be maintained for much longer. Decreasing oil production and rising oil prices will effectively bankrupt the American agri-food system. Without petroleum and all of its benefits, there will be little choice but to revert to a system of local, organic production and consumption. The experience of Cuba with peak oil could possibly serve as a model for a transition to post-peak agricultural production. Cuba, which lost the majority of its oil imports and half of its food imports with the collapse of the USSR, now produces almost all of its food organically (Pfeiffer 56). Urban gardens are an important source of produce, providing over sixty percent of the vegetables consumed by Cubans (Pfeiffer 61). The example of Cuba shows that it is possible to feed an entire nation with organic agriculture, but it also demonstrates the hardships involved in moving away from fossil fuels. In the first few years after the Soviet Union's collapse, the average Cuban's daily caloric intake decreased by 36 percent and protein consumption by forty percent, while undernourishment increased by fifteen percent (Pfeiffer 57). It must be noted that Cuban government policies played a critical role in helping to ensure that the collapse of industrialized agriculture did not turn catastrophic. There has also been a change in attitude towards farming amongst the Cuban people. Cubans now see farming as an important and profitable endeavor and many families have migrated to rural areas to become farmers or have started urban gardens (Pfeiffer 60).

Peak oil is a real phenomenon with the potential to turn our entire world upside down. Modern industrialized agriculture is headed for disaster and unless we begin immediately to change our patterns of agricultural production and consumption, many people will suffer. At the individual level, a lifestyle change is needed whereby we start to consume local products, rely less on oil-powered modes of transportation, eat lower on the food chain, have fewer children and reconnect with the land by participating in the growing of our own food. Structurally there ought to be a return to localized, small-scale photosynthesis-based, appropriate-tech agricultural production and an end to the domination of economic and power structures that place profit above all else. Broad based culture change will be a necessary component of any successful transition to a post-petroleum world. We can no longer afford to live isolated from one another and from nature. Of course, the rate of oil depletion is an unknown variable, and as Richard Heinberg observes the time interval before peak oil occurs will likely be too short to painlessly adapt to a new energy regime and way of life (3). However, if the United States, which is the world's top oil consumer, can drastically reduce its use of oil, we might be able to buy time for the world to transition to a post-petroleum era (Brown 45). Clearly, weaning ourselves off of our addiction to oil will not be easy, but the alternative will be much worse.

____

Shirin Fatemeh Wertime, a 2010 Boren Scholarship winner, wrote this report for a sociology class at College of William and Mary, course # SOCL 440, on 5/11/10. She is the daughter of John Wertime, whose review of Robert Engelman's book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want (2008) appears on Culture Change.

Bibliography:

Allen, Patricia. 1993. Connecting the Social and Ecological in Sustainable Agriculture. In P Allen (editor) Food for the Future. New York: John Wiley, 1-16.

Altieri, Miguel A. 2000. Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture and the Possibilities for Truly Sustainable Farming. In F Magdoff, J B Foster and F H Buttel (editors), Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review, 77-92.

Brown, Lester Russell. Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. New York: W W Norton, 2008.

Campbell, Colin J. "About Peak Oil" ASPO International | The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. Web.

Eshel, Gidon, and Pamel Martin. "Diet, Energy and Global Warming". Earth Interactions (2005): 1-36.

Heinberg, Richard. The Oil Depletion Protocol. New Society, 2006.

Hough, Andrew. "Britain Facing Food Crisis as World's Soil 'vanishes in 60 Years' - Telegraph". Telegraph.co.uk: News, Business, Sport, the Daily Telegraph Newspaper, Sunday Telegraph - Telegraph. 3 Feb. 2010. Web.

Lewontin, R C. 2000. The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian. In F Magdoff, J B Foster and F H Buttel (editors), Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review, 93-106.

Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society, 2006.

Pimentel, David, Marcia Pimentel, and Marianne Karpenstein-Machan. "Energy Use in Agriculture: An Overviehttp://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
w" (1998): 1-32.

Pimentel, David, Sean Williamson, Courtney Alexander, Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Caitlin Kontak, and Steven Mulkey. "Reducing Energy Inputs in the US Food System". Human Ecology 36 (2008): 459-71.


http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/652/1/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Say What?

by James Howard Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency
(2005)


www.kunstler.com (June 28 2010)


I think America missed something. It must be the time of year, what with inhaling all those fumes from the charcoal starter ... and fueling up the Jet-skis so as to turn a perfectly good mountain lake into something like a Cuisinart on the guacamole setting ... and the rousing evenings in the Nascar parking lots hitting palmetto bugs with your wiffle bat ... and all that anxious waiting for a 10W-40 hard rain to fall on the Gulf Coast states - but President Obama made a very interesting remark when the financial regulation package passed in the senate the other day. He said the bill would make sure that "Main Street is never again held responsible for Wall Street's mistakes".

Whoosh ...

That was the sound of something going over America's head. Something about the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile. And frankly I don't think the president even meant to be coy or deceptive. It just means he doesn't get it either. Never again ...

Never again?

What the fuck?

Why even this time? Why isn't there an army of federal attorneys out there, their teeth bristling with subpoenas, beating the bushes in every lane and skyscraper floor of lower Manhattan (and Fairfield County, Connecticut, not to mention a thousand office parks around the USA) to roust out the grifters and swindlers who took Main Street to the cleaners this time.

The audacity of cluelessness! And the hilarity of "next time".

Earth to President Obama: there isn't going to be a next time. This time was enough to git 'er done. Wall Street - in particular the biggest "banks" - packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind 2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio on the planet. Enough, really, to sink any company even pretending to trade in things more abstract than a mud brick or an hour of labor. What's more, the cross-collateralized obligations between them are so vast and intricate that all the standing timber in North America could not be fashioned into enough pick-up sticks to represent the hideous death-dealing tangle of frauds waiting for the wing-beat of a single black swan to come crashing down.

Go out and get a copy of Michael Lewis's recent book The Big Short (2010) for a close-up view on one micro-corner of the investment world. You will discover that the people fabricating things like synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) had no idea what the fuck they were doing - besides deliberately creating documents that nobody would ever understand, that would never be unraveled by teams of law clerks or secret words or magic incantations or prayers to some dark hirsute deity, and were guaranteed to place in jeopardy every operation of the world economy above the barter level. Sorry to invoke the hoary old metaphor about the horse being out of the barn - but the larger problem is what the horse left behind in a great steaming mound clear up to the rafters. There was nothing to understand in all this crap, except that betting against it was a good idea, and then only for those who placed the earliest bets - because everybody else is going to get just as screwed as those who stuffed their vaults and portfolios with Triple-A rated horseshit.

What banks and governments have been doing for the past eighteen months is a dumbshow meant to distract the public from the fact that the world financial system has been effectively destroyed. There isn't enough money left in the known reaches of the universe to pay off the outstanding claims. In fact, not even close. Everything that proceeds from this fiasco will be in service of impoverishing most of the population and, incidentally, probably bringing down governments and, with them, convenient social usufructs such as due process of law and civil order. What remains - what you're watching right now on CNN or Fox - is just a representation of the former structures of civilized life, what Joe Bageant refers to as "the hologram", a kind of 3-D picture you can see around, that looks like reality, but is actually immaterial, a collective hallucination. It's comfortable living in a hologram - until you discover that you're in one.

In the summertime, when there are weenies to grill and Jet-skis to commit suicide on, the public is usually having too much fun to pay attention to anything. Maybe this is how come summertime is also when lots of bad shit happens, or gets ready to happen. The guns of August ... blitzkrieg ... 9-11 ... the death of Lehman Brothers ...

A few other social notes this week: Something else the public (and, of course, the news media) missed in the General McChrystal affair. It wasn't just that the general badmouthed his civilian superiors. It was that he was not the other thing that an army officer should be: a gentleman. He was a lout who reveled in everything lowest in his own culture. He was a man so disturbed by having to spend a night in Paris at a good restaurant with civilized people that it seems to have driven him plumb batshit. General George Patton - a man renowned for his own profane intemperance - would have boxed Stanley McChrystal's ears for his sheer childishness and assigned him to Graves Registration. When the USA falls apart in a few years, let's hope General McChrystal doesn't ride over the horizon on a white horse with an army of Af-stan vets flexing their neck tattoos behind him.

Oh, and something else: notice that the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher has vanished from the front pages of The New York Times and even The Huffington Post. Nobody gives a shit anymore. Bring it on.

_____

A sequel to my 2008 novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand, will be published in September 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Press. The title is The Witch of Hebron.

Mr Kunstler's biography is at see http://kunstler.com/bio.html.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/06/say-what.html

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Is Sarah Palin Porn?

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A Pathless Land

The Archdruid Report (June 23 2010)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


The discussion of revitalization movements and fantasies of collective redemption over the last two weeks here on The Archdruid Report had an interesting though by no means unexpected result. Several people asked me whether I thought it might be possible to harness some movement of the same broad sort to get people to do the things they need to do to get ready for peak oil.

This is hardly a new idea, of course. Back in the late 1990s, when the first peak oil email lists were taking shape, the idea of organizing a peak oil movement on the large scale came up for discussion now and again, and some attempts were made, though none of them managed to find much of an audience. More recently, toward the middle of the last decade, the Post Carbon Institute launched a network of relocalization groups, which flourished for a while and then suddenly folded for reasons I've never seen discussed. Over the last few years, in its turn, the Transition Town movement has made its own transition from a college project to an international network helping communities put together plans to cope with a future of energy scarcity and strict carbon-footprint limits.

It's fair to say that none of these was or is a mass movement of the kind I was discussing; the earlier examples belong on the same list of would-be mass movements that never got off the ground as, say, Technocracy, while the last is still very much in the early phases of its trajectory, early enough that its final destination is anybody's guess. Still, it's easy to see why the idea of a grand collective movement in the direction of sustainability is so appealing to so many people.

To begin with, the failure of the established order of industrial society, and of the political classes who manage it, is becoming hard to ignore. Consider the way that the world's political leaders have reacted to the implosion of the global economy, or the way that the US government and BP management have reacted to the ongoing death by oil of the Gulf of Mexico: in each case, it's a broken-record sequence of understating the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flatfooted by events, and struggling to load the blame for yet another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times, and even the most diehard supporters of the status quo start wishing that somebody, somewhere, would stand up and demonstrate some actual leadership.

At the same time, for those of us who have been trying to get the message of peak oil out for the last decade or more, the spreading cracks in the great wall of denial can give rise to a certain intoxication. When pundits insist that there's enough oil in current reserves to last 800 years, or that oil discoveries have more than kept pace with extraction rates all along, or that the only limits to the amount of oil we can get out of the earth are economic - all of which statements have appeared in the media in recent weeks, and all of which can easily be disproved by readily available figures or, in the last case, by plain common sense - it's hard to miss the desperation in their words. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", Gandhi said; at this point they're fighting, and some of the peak oil community are starting to think about what victory might look like.

That's a fair question. What would victory look like? Imagine for a moment that the arrival of permanently scarce energy became as much a part of the conventional wisdom in the decades ahead of us as it became, however briefly, in the 1970s. It would be easy enough to blow the dust off the plans and dreams of that latter decade, and there's arguably a real point to doing that, but the world has changed; the reserves of fossil fuels that planners in the Seventies counted on to cushion the descent into a low-energy future have been severely depleted in the years since, and there are twice as many people on this small and crowded planet as there were back then. By any realistic measure, we're in a heap of trouble, and the hope that a mass movement might yield enough enthusiasm and commitment to deal with that heap is an easy one to understand.

Still, that hope isn't one I share. Quite the contrary, I've come to think that the rise of a mass movement centered on peak oil - whether or not it turns into the sort of revitalization movement discussed in the last two posts - might well put paid to any hope of avoiding a profoundly unwelcome future. The best way to explain that sense is an indirect one, and so I trust my readers will have patience with a divagation in the direction of Philadelphia.

I was there a little while back, speaking at a conference at a posh downtown hotel. I'll spare you the details; it was one of those gigs that peak oil speakers dread, the sort of event where you've got twelve minutes in a panel discussion to explain why the future everyone has taken for granted isn't going to happen, and why whatever plans they happen to be promoting need to make room for economic and social collapse, mass impoverishment, and the whole cheerful landscape of a deindustrializing world. Well before your twelve minutes are up, it's clear that you might as well have spent the time reciting texts from the Iguvine Tablets in the original Umbrian; there's a little polite applause, the audience asks a few polite questions, a few people come up to thank you for your speech, and none of the attendees mentions peak oil in your hearing again.

Afterwards, I ducked out of the hotel and walked the streets of downtown Philly, partly to find some comfortable dive for dinner, but mostly to shake off the sense of intellectual mummification that events like that always leave behind. A session of t'ai chi on the grass in Rittenhouse Square startled the pigeons and a couple of transients but left me feeling a good deal less numbed, and I did indeed find a comfortable dive (and had a good dinner there a bit later), but what turned the day around was a couple of lines written in fading gold lettering on a window in an otherwise undistinguished block of shops and offices, announcing to the world the Philadelphia branch of the United Lodge of Theosophists http://www.ultphiladelphia.org/.

I suspect this phrase will mean nothing to most of my readers. The original Theosophical Society (TS) was founded back in 1875 in New York City by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian emigre, and a small circle of American mystics and occultists. Its purpose was to provide an alternative to the dogmatic religion and equally dogmatic scientific materialism of the day, and it offered public lectures and instruction at a time when most other esoteric spiritual groups kept their teachings hidden away behind tightly locked lodge doors. Other groups had tried to do the same thing in various ways for decades beforehand, but for some reason Theosophy caught on where these others failed, and found itself with local groups and a mass following on four continents.

Blavatsky, who by this time was the unquestioned leader of the movement, then found herself facing the same predicament that confronts every spiritual movement that attracts a large following. Of those who joined the Society, only a small percentage were actually interested in studying the philosophy, practicing the spiritual practices, and making use of the rest of what it had to teach; the majority wanted to participate in it for what amounted to social reasons. She responded by reorganizing the TS, creating an Esoteric Section for those willing to commit to daily meditation and study, and using the rest of the Society as an outer court where those interested solely in the social aspects of a mass movement could take part and contribute whatever they could.

That structure stayed in place until Blavatsky died in 1891. The Society broke apart in the years that followed; most of the Theosophical groups that emerged from the confusion kept the same policy, but he largest of the fragments did not. Headed by suffragist and Fabian socialist Annie Besant, this branch - called the Adyar TS, after the location of its headquarters - pursued a mass following, and turned into a full-blown revitalization movement when Besant decided that a boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti, the son of a Hindu servant at the Adyar headquarters, was the next World Teacher, the successor of Buddha and Christ, who would lead the world to salvation under the banner of Theosophy.

In the short term, it was a hugely popular move; the claim that the Adyar TS had a messiah on hand who would shortly launch his career of redemption proved to be a membership magnet of immense power. Chapters of the Order of the Star in the West, an organization launched in 1911 to promote Krishnamurti, sprang up like mushrooms across much of the world. After the First World War, the implosion of Europe's global ascendancy and the betrayal of wartime promises made the dream of a redeemer profoundly appealing. Meanwhile Krishnamurti grew to manhood, trained and prompted for the role he was expected to play. Finally, in 1929, a huge rally of the Order was summoned to be present as Krishnamurti formally began his career as World Teacher.

I sometimes wonder what must have gone through his mind as he mounted the podium that day and looked down at the ocean of upturned faces gazing at him in adoration. My readers might wish to imagine themselves in the same position. There you are, with tens of thousands of people eagerly awaiting your least word, and hundreds of thousands more around the world longing to receive the message you are about to give them. Will you call them to manifest your highest ideals, will you tell them to fulfill your basest desires, or will it be, as it usually is, a bit of both?

It's an intoxicating image, but there's another side to it. Not one of those tens of thousands of people has to be there; not one of the hundreds of thousands is required to listen. They are there for reasons of their own, reasons that mingle high ideals and base desires in the usual human proportions, and if the ideals or the desires you call on them to pursue are far enough from theirs that they see no way of fulfilling their own agendas by helping yours, they will turn away and go looking for another movement that shows more promise of giving them what they want. That's the trap that waits for every mass movement that tries to change society, because the ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things.

Whether this is what went through Krishnamurti's mind is anyone's guess, as he refused to talk about the experience later. Still, by the time he descended from the podium, the elaborate fantasy Besant and her colleagues had built around him, and the revitalization movement that had grown up around that, were blown to smithereens. Truth, he told his listeners, is a pathless land; no messiah can take you there, or lift the burden of thinking for yourself off your shoulders. In front of them all, he disavowed his role as World Teacher and dissolved the Order of the Star in the West. The mass movement popped like a bubble, and all the Theosophical organizations suffered huge drops in membership; Besant's career was effectively over, though she lingered on for a few more years. Ironically, Krishnamurti went on to a long career as a spiritual teacher, but he steadfastly refused to allow any organization to form around him, and I don't know of anybody who claims that he really was the World Teacher.

The peak oil scene is a long way from finding its Krishnamurti, or even its Annie Besant. Still, the future after peak oil is also a pathless land, and as the reality of limits to growth goes mainstream and peak oil speakers find audiences more responsive than the one I faced in Philadelphia, the trap that waits for all mass movements waits for it as well. A survey just splashed over the American media points up the difficulty: a large majority of Americans surveyed agreed that the energy situation was a crisis and something needs to be done, but very few of them were willing to accept a solution that involved gasoline prices going up. The temptation to promise people that they can have a green energy future and still fill their tanks for less than $3 a gallon will be immense; those groups that do this can count on being flooded with recruits, while those that admit that in any realistic green energy future, most Americans will no longer have cars at all, will find themselves in the same sort of situation I encountered at the conference in Philadelphia, trying to talk to people for whom the future might as well be written in Umbrian.

Now it's easy to insist that getting people in the door is the important thing, and once they're in the movement they can be led gradually to more accurate views. The history of mass movements shows otherwise with depressing consistency. The leaders who imagine themselves drawing the masses step by step to some better set of beliefs and behaviors generally find out the hard way, as their predecessors did, that they are the ones who will be drawn step by step into whatever set of beliefs and behaviors will maximize the size and influence of the movement they head - which amounts to whatever set of beliefs and behaviors the masses want them to have. We've already seen some parts of the peak oil scene moving in this direction; the insistence that an optimism that will attract crowds is more important than a realism that can guide a meaningful response comes to mind in this context.

The pursuit of a mass movement is not the only option we've got, fortunately, and other options - one of which I plan on exploring in detail in next week's post, and in the weeks to come - offer a great deal more potential for viable change. Still, one of the simplest was on display in the quiet little library and meeting room of the Philadelphia United Lodge of Theosophists. The ULT stayed aloof from Annie Besant's shenanigans, and has quietly continued to follow the original plan of the movement, offering lectures and opportunities for study to those who are willing to learn. I went there after dinner and took in a talk and a lively discussion about certain points of Theosophical teaching, and had a fine time. Druidry and Theosophy are by no means the same thing, but there's enough common ground to make for congenial conversation, and you don't come through the kind of traditional occult training I had back in my misspent youth without knowing your way around Theosophical ideas. When I walked back to the hotel that evening, the day felt a lot less like a waste.

Still, the moment that remains with me happened before the meeting, while I was chatting with some of the Theosophists. One elderly African-American man mentioned that a few years back, considering the state of the world, he and his wife had decided to give up their car. Of course, he admitted, it involved some changes, but Philly public transit got them where they needed to go, and he found that doing without the costs of car ownership left him with so much money left over at the end of the month that at first he kept checking to make sure he'd paid all his bills.

I thought about him as I took the train home the next day, and I also thought about the Amish family seated behind me on the train, father and the boys in white shirts and black hats, mother and the girls in bonnets and ankle-length dresses, talking quietly to each other in the German dialect everyone around here calls Pennsylvania Dutch. The lesson I took from them is that it's the choices of individuals that ultimately make any difference that's going to be made. It's tempting to think that the social pressure of a mass movement can lead people to make changes they aren't willing to make on their own, but in practice, that's not the way it works; instead, what generally happens is that sooner or later, those who hoped to lead the world to some shining future en masse find themselves sitting in the smoking crater left by the total implosion of their dreams, wondering what happened. It would be unfortunate, to use no stronger word, to have that sort of fiasco replicated in the peak oil movement.

_____

John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/pathless-land.html

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Monday, June 28, 2010

Stock Markets Will Lead to the Extinction of Humans

by Devinder Sharma

Ground Reality (June 22 2010)


An Australian scientist who helped in eradicating smallpox has sounded a death warning. Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, has claimed that human race will be unable to survive population explosion and unbridled consumption. "Humans will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years, Fenner is quoted as saying. "A lot of other animals will, too."

Fenner's chilling prediction should not be taken as yet another sensational news. I think any sensible leader, and I am not talking of only political leadership, should be able to get the message straight and loud. If you remember, Mahatma Gandhi had said that the Earth has enough for man's need, but not greed. Prince Charles had more recently warned of 'monumental problems' if the world's population continues to rise at such a rapid pace. Probably what the Prince did not mention was the greed of the growing population through increased consumption will create the grave crisis.

Unbridled consumption is the foundations for the 'growth economics' that has become the Bible of the modern neoliberal economics. In reality, growth economics is nothing but violent economics. It unleashes violence against natural resources, against the climate, against the nature, and also against fellow human beings. It shifts natural, physical as well as financial resources from the hands of the poor into the pockets of the rich and elite. We have been often told that twenty per cent of the world's population of haves controls and uses the resources of the eighty per cent of the have not. Globalisation further strengthens that monopoly control.

In fact, globalisation has simply brought together all the haves from each country. In simple terms, each country has a North and a South, the North depicting the percentage of the bold and beautiful population. Globalisation has brought the North together. They have joined hands to usurp the world's resources, to snatch whatever lies in the hands of the South. Globalisation has actually brought the rich and the crooked together.

Blame it on the burgeoning population, but it is the twenty per cent elite that is destroying the world's resources. In the quest for more wealth they have succeeded in very cleverly changing the rules of the game. They began by first co-opting the economists, and then spread their wings to include the media. The economists laid out the ground rules. They began by designing GDP as an indicator of growth. They crafted it so deftly that we accepted an indicator of personal wealth to be a pointer to national development. They made everything, including global climate, look like a commodity to be sold and exploited.

I am reminded of what the milkman of India, Dr Verghese Kurian, had once said. One species that should disappear from the face of the Earth, and the Earth will be a wonderful place to live in, are the economists.

I am in complete agreement.

After the world became convinced about the virtues of GDP, the mainline economists and the consultancy firms worked out the stock market. I think there is no other innovation (if you don't like to use the word invention) in recent times that has not only influenced but hastened the process of unbridled consumption than the emergence of the Wall Street. In fact, the consultancy firms may refuse to accept it now, and for obvious reasons, but Stock Market will lead the world towards the extinction of human race that Fenner has warned us.

I am amazed at the way the Stock Markets work. These markets have commodified everything. Much of the world's environmental ills are a direct fallout of the Stock Market. Stock Markets will squeeze every drop of water (or other natural resources) out of the planet. There is a price for everything, including the air you breathe. In the days to come you will see Wall Street beginning to trade in synthetic life. Craig Ventor is already pitching for it. I will not be surprised if the human genes too are traded sooner than I expect.

Stock market is certainly not sustainable. The economic meltdown (economists refused to call it economic collapse) that the world witnessed in 2008 and 2009 was the outcome of a systemic failure in the Stock Markets. But the lure of money was so strong, that even the mightiest of the governments refused to let the faulty system go. In a globalised world, the economic bailout package became a necessary evil. As someone said, it amounted to privatising the profits, and socialising the costs. Everyone willingly participated. With the media being a beneficiary of this corrupt system, no dissenting voice could be heard.

If the tax-payers had refused to bailout the collapse of the markets, the world would have taken the first step towards making a correction for the better of the humanity. It didn't happen.

Such an unbridled consumption will be the beginning of the end of the world. In fact, the process is already on. Only the economists refuse to see it, and since the economists have been paid to be quiet, the media too refuses to spot the evil. Stock Markets have already caught the fancy of the media, and they are projecting it as an indicator of economic growth. And as I said earlier, growth economics is nothing but violent economics. While the economic benefits would be reaped by the rich and the crooked, you and me will have to live with the violence it unleashes. I am not sure how many of us will survive this violence.

Fenner is therefore right when he says that humans will probably become extinct within 100 years. Humans will certainly disappear from the face of the Earth, I don't doubt it. But by the time the Stock Markets succeed in plundering the Earth's resources making it absolutely inhospitable for the man to survive, the rich and the elite would have escaped to the moon.

Technological developments will by then make it possible for the humans to survive on the moon.

_____

Devinder Sharma is an Indian journalist, writer, thinker. He is well-known and respected for his views on food and trade policy. Trained as an agricultural scientist, Sharma has been the Development Editor of the Indian Express, the largest selling English language daily in India at that time. He quit active journalism to research on policy issues concerning sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and intellectual property rights, environment and development, food security and poverty, biotechnology and hunger, and the implications of the free trade paradigm for developing countries. For more, see http://www.mindfully.org/devindersharma/Sharma-Biographical.htm.

http://www.countercurrents.org/dsharma220610.htm

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Twenty-Two Reasons

Why American Working People Hate the State

by James Petras

www.lahaine.org (June 17 2010)


Why does the rightwing attack on "Big Government" increasingly resonate with working people? Liberals claim wage and salaried workers are acting against their "self-interest", citing government welfare programs like social security and unemployment payments.

Progressives argue that workers hostile to the state are "racists", "fundamentalists" and/or irrational, blinded by misplaced fears of threats to individual freedoms.

I will argue there are many sound, rational, material reasons for working people to be in revolt against the state

Twenty-Two Reasons Why Working People Hate the State

1. Most wage and salaried workers pay disproportionately higher taxes than the corporate rich and therefore, millions of Americans work in the "underground economy" to make ends meet; thus subjecting themselves to arrest, and prosecution by the state for trying to make a living by avoiding onerous taxes.

2. The state provides generous multi-year tax exemptions for corporations thus raising the tax rate for wage and salaried workers or eliminating vital services. The state's inequitable tax revenue policies provoke resentment.

3. High taxes combined with fewer and more expensive public services, including growing costs of public higher education and higher health charges, feed popular antagonism and frustration that they and their children are being denied opportunities to get ahead and stay healthy.

4. Many working people resent the fact that their tax money is being spent by the state on endless distant wars and to finance bailouts of Wall Street instead of investing it in reindustrializing America to create well paying jobs or to aid unemployed or underemployed workers unable to meet mortgage payments and facing eviction or homelessness. Most workers reject the inequitable budget expenditures that privilege the rich and deny the working people.

5. Working people are appalled by the state's hypocrisy and double standards in prosecuting "welfare cheats" for taking hundreds but overlooking corporate and banking swindlers, and Pentagon military cost overruns of hundreds of billions. Few working people believe there is equality before the law, implicitly rejecting its claims of legitimacy.

6. Many working class families resent the fact that the state recruits their sons and daughters for wars, leading to death and crippling injuries instead of public service jobs, while the children of the rich and affluent pursue civilian careers.

7. The state subsidizes and upgrades public infrastructure - roads, parks and utilities - in upper end neighborhoods while ignoring the demands for improvements of low income communities. Moreover the state locates contaminants - incinerators, high polluting industries et cetera - in close proximity to workers housing and schools.

8. The state holds the minimum wage below increases in the cost of living but encourages and promotes excess profits.

9. Law enforcement is strict in high end neighborhoods and lax in low income communities resulting in higher rates of homicides and robberies.

10. State imposes constraints on labor organizations struggling to secure wages and benefits and ignores corporate intimidation and arbitrary firings of workers. The state encourages corporate mergers and acquisitions leading to monopolies but discourages collective action from below.

11. State economic institutions recruit policymakers from banks and financial houses who make decisions favoring their former employers, while wage and salaried workers are excluded and have no representation in economic policy positions.

12. The state increasingly infringes on individual freedoms of social activists via the Patriot Act, arbitrary arrests, and grants impunity to police violence and punishes whistle blowers, rejecting citizen reviews with punitive powers.

13. The state is highly responsive to and increases funding for the military-industrial complex, the relocation of multi-national corporations overseas, and the high income Israel lobby while cutting funding for public investment in productive activity, applied technology and high tech job training for US workers and salaried employees and their children.

14. State policies have increased inequalities between the top ten percent and the bottom fifty percent for decades, turning the US into the industrial country with the greatest inequalities.

15. State policies have led to declining living standards as wage and salary earners work longer hours with less job security, for a greater number of years before receiving pensions and social security and under greater environmental hazards.

16. Elected state officials break most campaign promises to working people while fulfilling promises for the upper class/corporate banking elite.

17. State officials pay greater attention and are more responsive to a few big financial contributors than to millions of voters.

18. State officials are more responsive to payoffs from corporate lobbies protecting corporate profits than to the health, educational and income needs of the electorate.

19. State-corporate links lead to deregulation, which results in contamination of the environment leading to the bankruptcy of small businesses and loss of many jobs, as well as the loss of recreational areas, spoiling rest and recreation for working people.

20. The state increases the retirement age rather than increase the social security payments by the rich, with the result that workers in unhealthy work environments will enjoy fewer years of retirement in good health.

21. The state judicial system is more likely to render favorable decisions to wealthy plaintiffs with high paid, politically connected lawyers against workers defended by inexperienced public defenders.

22. State tax collectors are more likely to pursue wage and salary tax payers than upper class corporate executives employing accountants with expert knowledge in tax loopholes and tax free shelters.

Conclusion

The state in its multiple activities, whether in law enforcement, military recruitment, tax and expenditure polices, environmental, pension and retirement legislation and administration, systematically favors the upper class and corporate elite against wage, salaried and small business people.

The state is permissive with the rich and repressive of the working and salaried employees, defending the privileges of the corporations and the impunity of the police state while infringing on the individual freedoms of the working people.

State policies increasingly extract more from the workers in terms of tax revenues and provide less in social payments, while lessening tax payments from Wall Street and inflating state transfers.

Popular perceptions of a hostile and exploitative state correspond to their everyday practical experiences; their anti-state behavior is selective and rational; most wage and salaried workers support social security and unemployment benefits and oppose higher taxes because they know or intuit that they are unfair.

Liberal academics and experts who claim workers are "irrational" are themselves practioners of highly selective criticisms - pointing to (shrinking) state social benefits while ignoring the unjust, inequitable tax system and the biased behavior of the judicial, law enforcement, legislative and regulatory system.

State personnel, policy makers and enforcement officials are attentive to and responsive and deferential to the rich and hostile and indifferent or arrogant toward workers.

In summary the real issue is not that people are anti-state, but that the state is anti the majority of the people. In the face of the economic crises and prolonged imperial wars, the state becomes more brazenly aggressive in slashing living standards in order to channel record levels of public funds toward Wall Street speculators and the military industrial complex.

While liberal-progressives' remain embedded in 'neo-keynsian' statest ideology, outmoded in the face of a state thoroughly embedded in corporate networks, the New Right's "anti-statest" rhetoric resonates with the feelings, experiences and reasoning of important sectors of wage and salaried workers and small businesspeople.

The attempt by liberals and progressives to discredit this popular revolt against the state, by pointing to the corporate financing and rightwing manipulation behind the anti-statist movement is doomed to failure, because it fails to deal with the profound injustices experienced by working people today in their daily dealings with a state, largely administered by liberal corporate-militarists. The absence of an anti-statist left has opened the door for the rise of a mass based 'New Right'.

A 'new left' will emerge from civil society when it recognizes the pernicious exploitative role of the state, and is capable of dealing with the powerful ties between liberalism-militarism-corporate "welfarism". The revival and expansion of the debilitated public welfare programs for working people can only take place by dismantling the current state apparatus, and that depends on a complete break with both corporate parties and an agenda that 'revolutionizes' the way in which politics works in America.

http://www.lahaine.org/petras/index.php?p=1811&c=1

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

Sunday, June 27, 2010

I am in denial

but I know children are dying

bilbo.economicoutlook.net (June 12 2010)


Governments around the world are being stampeded by financial commentators and international organisations (IMF, OECD, G-20) to implement austerity programs to get their "deficits under control". All sorts of horrendous predictions are being touted in the press daily by the deficit terrorists who focus their gaze on charts showing movements in financial ratios - such as the deficit to GDP and public debt to GDP ratios. They largely ignore history and when they do invoke it they introduce erroneous analyses which do not apply to the issue at hand. They erroneously conflate the Eurozone with sovereign monetary systems. And they never let up. But in all the talk of austerity the real dimensions of the problem get lost. That is what today's blog is about - getting our focus down to the fact that thousands of children will die as a result of these unnecessary austerity programs which are just designed to satisfy the ideological hangups of the (mostly) high income and wealthy elites in our societies.

The Editorial {1} in the New York Times on June 9 2010 was fairly to the point - The Wrong Message on Deficits. It said:

The whip-deficits-now fever is running hot on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, politicians are understandably spooked by investors dumping government bonds in the wake of the Greek meltdown. But the sudden fierce enthusiasm for fiscal austerity, especially among stronger economies, is likely to backfire, condemning Europe to years of stagnation or worse.

The United States is running the same very high risk. Democrats have soured on job creation and economic stimulus in favor of antideficit rhetoric, which Republicans have long seen as the easy road to discontented voters in a confusing election year.

The Editorial notes that the "economic crisis isn't over" and cites the appalling unemployment that remains even though share markets have been recovering and some real economies are growing again, albeit slowly. They rightly conclude that "for everybody to slash public spending when growth is faltering and unemployment remains stubbornly high risks undercutting the goal of fiscal probity by slowing economic growth and reducing tax revenues".

And, they note that there is now evidence that the world economy is slowing again as the budget cuts take their toll. They conclude that:

Right now, for the most robust economies - the United States, Germany, Britain, Japan - slashing budgets is the wrong thing to do.


Meanwhile, the Nikkei News for Thursday, June 10 2010 (you need a subscription so it is pointless to link) announced that DPJ's Fiscal Hawk Gets To Work As MOF Chief. The Report said that:

Yoshihiko Noda, the newly appointed chief of the Ministry of Finance, has long been considered one of the staunchest fiscal conservatives in the Democratic Party of Japan. Noda is eager to rebuild Japan's finances with a motto of "there should be no talk of policies without talk of funding sources". After the DPJ took power last September, Noda was named senior vice finance minister. He was front and center in cutting budget requests from ministries and agencies, rankling fellow DPJ lawmakers who formulated the requests.


So it might be a case of Sayonara Japan ... it was nice knowing you! Back to 1997!

I also recall this article (June 9 2010) - The Dark Side Of Stimulus - by one Thomas Cooley, who is a retired academic from NYU and a regular Forbes columnist {2}. The article introduces a new term into the debate - deficit deniers.

Cooley notes that the recovery from the "deep recession" is not happening very quickly despite the "staggering ... fiscal package" that the US President introduced. He concludes that:

But now people are realizing that there is a dark side to this spending orgy. It has to end, and then we have to pay the bill. If we need any reminders that the day of reckoning is coming we have only to look to Europe. There is no point in arguing about how many jobs have been created or saved by stimulus spending. We don't get to rerun history, so we won't know what the path of employment would have been absent the stimulus package.

I am wondering who the we is who has to pay the bill. The bill is already being paid - the real loss of incomes and the persistently high unemployment. The only bill is a real one.

However, if governments insist on pretending they have to "finance" their spending and follow the path the UK is now taking (among other nations heading down the austerity path) then the real bill will be the lost real income arising from the cuts in public spending, the lost private command on real resources arising from the tax hikes. These costs will enormous.

Further, the only way of calibrating the worth of the fiscal interventions is to estimate outcomes such as "how many jobs were saved". We can roughly estimate the extra spending impact on GDP and hence employment growth. The important point is that in focusing on jobs we are displaying the appropriate priorities. In focusing on largely irrelevant aggregates such as the size of the deficit or the public debt ratio, we are exhibiting a wrong set of policy priorities.

Cooley notes that:

... nothing will solve the problem except economic growth. The problem we face is that the extraordinary deficits we created are likely to restrain economic growth in the future. We do have to honor that debt.

It is true that economic growth will reduce unemployment and, by definition, it increases incomes. But there is no robust empirical evidence that shows that rising deficits are associated with falling economic growth. The evidence points the other way. The fact that the US government has to honour the public debt is supportive of growth because the interest payments provide a higher income flow than if the funds were left in non-interest bearing reserves.

The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) camp have been referring to the likes of Cooley as deficit terrorists. Cooley has his own term for those who think deficits are beneficial (when necessary):

There are deficit deniers out there, like Paul Krugman, who think we can and should ignore deficits for a long time to come because we can continue to borrow at such low interest rates. This is the same behavior for which they excoriate households who accumulated too much mortgage and credit card debt. They also blasted Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke for enabling this irresponsible behavior by keeping interest rates too low for too long. But by all means let the Government borrow and spend at our current low interest rates to keep this economic recovery alive.

MMT tells us that the size or continuity of budget deficits per se are not a sensible focus of analysis. The budget outcome is driven strongly by fluctuations in private spending. So a rising deficit usually indicates a slowdown in private spending. The discretionary component of the budget outcome should signal the extent to which the non-government sector desires to save (that is, withdraw spending from the income flow).

That spending gap has to be filled or else economic growth declines. There is no magic solution out there.

Further, while households may have taken advantage of low interest rates to over-borrow, that point is irrelevant to the question of public borrowing. There is no credible analogy between households (who use the currency) and a sovereign government (which issues the currency). The former are always revenue-constrained while the latter is never so.

The institutional structures that sovereign governments voluntarily erect to give the impression they are financially constrained are ultimately meaningless. They can be changed by the very government (in almost all cases) that they seek to "constrain". A sovereign government can always service its public debt obligations whereas a household cannot.

Cooley makes another fundamental error:

There is certainly some truth to the view that we can kick the can down the road for a bit longer. Why? Because the US dollar is and will continue to be the world's reserve currency. It means that the US can run a persistent current account deficit because other countries need dollars for reserves.

Whatever the international status of the US dollar is is irrelevant to the capacity of the US dollar to net spend in its own currency. All sovereign governments (who issue their own currency) can buy whatever is available for sale in their own currency at any time of their choosing. There is nothing special about the US government in this regard.

And ... all sovereign governments can purchase any idle labour in their economies and put it to productive use any time they choose to do so.

Cooley continues to misrepresent the monetary realities:

This is also why we find it easy - even now with staggering deficits - to sell US Treasuries at low interest rates. Every time markets get shaky, as they have in recent weeks, there is a flight to the safety of US Treasury obligations. That reaffirms the belief in the long-term credibility of the US and the viability of our debt.

The high demand for US Treasuries certainly keeps the yields down given the way the auction system works. And the US dollar is seen as being a safe haven. But any sovereign government can engineer low public debt yields if it coordinates the central bank and treasury operations appropriately.

Cooley doesn't think this will last though because markets will eventually work out that the US deficit is not on "a sustainable fiscal path". To get there the US government has to "cut spending and increase revenues".

After drawing false analogies between the US and the fiscal plight of the Eurozone countries he says:

Markets and consumers are much smarter than politicians. That is why they are jittery. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the stimulus has not delivered the big bang people hoped for and that we can't afford more stimulus.

The stimulus has delivered less than imagined because they have been continually hamstrung by the deficit terrorists. In nations with the largest fiscal stimulus packages things are better. By introducing pressure on governments from the early stages of the crisis the terrorists have conspired to derail the recovery.

But then what would I know ... I am just in denial.

Anyway, this is just another one of the torrent of articles coming out which are pushing this line that austerity is needed and the larger and quicker the adjustment the better. But I have been reading some interesting research papers lately on the impacts of the stimulus packages and the likely impact of the austerity programs.

Fiscal stimulus proportions

UNICEF and other agencies have been doing work on the impact of the fiscal interventions, in particular the social protection measures that were introduced.

This UNDP paper - Social Protection in Fiscal Stimulus Packages: Some Evidence - by Zhang, Thelen and Rao {3}, found for the 35 countries studied, that, on average they:

... spend about 25% of their stimuli on social protection measures. In total, this amounts to about 653 billion US dollars, almost one percent of 2008 global GDP.

So not a lot at all. They also found most of the social spending was on infrastructure and there was no real focus on women (and their children) who take the brunt of any economic crisis.

The following Table {4} is derived Table 1 in the UNDP paper referred to above. It shows the size of the fiscal stimulus as a percentage of 2008 GDP by the countries that the UNDP studied. I ranked them highest to lowest.

The point I have regularly made when confronted with claims like those outlined by Cooley - that the fiscal stimulus hasn't worked - is to note that the fiscal response has been relatively muted. They retort (shouting) asking whether I am blind - pointing to some public net spending ratio that has gone upwards. I reply that the ratios just tell me how deep the crisis has been.

I then say that the pools of unemployment tell me whether the fiscal response has been too much, just right or too little. And the unambiguous conclusion is that the fiscal responses have been inadequate by considerable margins.

The following graph {5} uses the data on the size of the fiscal stimulus as a percentage of 2008 GDP and plots the change in unemployment rates between 2008 and April 2010 against it. The data for the unemployment rates is from the World Economic Outlook database {6} as at April 2010. The plot only includes those nations for which the IMF published unemployment rates.

And while you don't want to conclude too much from a simple scatter plot, there appears to be the relationship emerging that theory would predict. The larger the stimulus the better the unemployment outcome. I am sure that a more thorough statistical analysis of this relationship controlling for other influences would confirm the simple message being portrayed in the graph.

The Losers

In all this talk about fiscal austerity - being pushed to make the bond traders happy - they who represent the wealthiest individuals in our societies - you will rarely read anything about who will be the beneficiaries and the losers.

We know from the privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s that spectacular transfers of wealth occurred. Governments paid huge sums to private financial organisations to execute the sales. Governments also agreed to heavy discounts on the true net worth and expected net income flows flows from the public enterprises being sold off because they didn't want the embarassment of a non-sale.

But who are the losers?

In its Global Economic Prospects 2010 {7}, the World Bank estimates that the global economic crisis pushed fifty million more people into extreme poverty in 2009 and a further 64 million will be added to this pool by the end of this year.

This paper - Crises and the Poor: Socially Responsible Macroeconomics {8} - by one Nora Lustig from the Inter-American Development Bank is worth reading to get an idea of how economic crises damage the prospects of the poor. It was written in 2000. While her documentation of the implications for crisis on the poor is interesting, I don't endorse her take on macroeconomics, which often wanders too far into the foibles of mainstream macroeconomics.

She does make on interesting point which is consistent with MMT. Lustig notes that "a flexible exchange rate" regime softens the blow of crises from a "pro-poor perspective". She notes that fixed exchange rate systems promote quantity adjustments to an external crisis (which in the labour market means unemployment) whereas flexible exchange system tends to make adjustments via real wages (import prices rise). In trying to defend a fixed parity, nations resort to harsh domestic policies which exacerbate poverty.

In this UNICEF paper - Inclusive Crises, Exclusive Recoveries, and Policies to Prevent a Double Whammy for the Poor {9} - Ronald Mendoza argues that:

When it comes to aggregate economic shocks, the poor and the near-poor often face a double whammy. First, they are often among the most adversely affected by the shock, suffering from crisis effects that push them and their children (the next generation) deeper into poverty. Second, the poor and near-poor are also the least equipped to participate in and benefit from the subsequent recovery.

You can read a lay-person summary {10} of the paper also.

While most of the research in this area of enquiry is focused on less developed (developing) nations, the research in advanced countries reveals similar outcomes. The poor are less exposed to crisis in the advanced nations and there are better safety nets.

But a person plunged into long-term unemployment in the US or Australia faces a high chance of becoming poor (relatively in this sense) and losing a significant proportion of the assets they had built up while working (housing, et cetera). Their children also inherit the disadvantage that they grew up with and face major difficulties in later life.

So it is not just a developing country problem - although in the poorer nations the impacts mean death in many cases. In poorer nations, a crisis has devastating impacts. Mendoza notes that "tens of thousands of children in some of the poorest countries in the world could die, paying the ultimate price as a result of this crisis".

But the recovery is also fraught for the poor.

Mendoza notes that:

During a typical crisis episode, spending on the social sectors are often cut at precisely the time when these resources are needed the most. It is not uncommon that social spending suffers the largest cuts, and that part of social spending that has the greatest benefit for the poor is most retrenched ... we do know from past crises that families often have to sell off what little productive assets they might have, reduce health-seeking behaviour, pull children out of school, take on more debt, and in dire cases, eat less or less nutritious food in order to cope with the income shock. All these coping strategies hinder the ability of poor families to quickly recover.

This is the point that Lustig also emphasises.

The other point that Mendoza makes is that the meagre funds that:

... do allocate to the social sectors are now also at risk, as public budgets across the world are squeezed by declining tax and other revenues. If the food crisis, fuel crisis and financial crisis were the first three waves of crises - then the fourth wave is an impending public finance crisis now sweeping across developing and even some industrialised countries.

You will rarely read anything like this is the daily financial debates about how much austerity to impose. While the erroneous construction of the monetary system by the deficit terrorists has an intellectual curiosity about it - that is, I wonder about motives, et cetera - the reality is much more important.

Even Mendoza thinks there is "an impending public finance crisis" sweeping the world. In general, there is no public finance crisis (Eurozone nations excluded). Sovereign nations should be focusing fiscal policy on improving domestic outcomes, in general, and ensuring, in particular, that the weak and vulnerable in their nations are protected. That is what public purpose is about.

If you just spend each day reading and debating at the level of the evening finance report then you will quickly lose sight of the human dimension of the crisis.

Mendoza's focus (in UNICEF) is on children and he says:

Tomorrow's youth - today's children and infants - are at risk. Roughly about half of the developing world faces imminent or anticipated youth bulges within the next twenty years ... They are infants and children in some of the poorest countries today - many of the very same countries struggling to cope with the aftershocks of the food and fuel price crises, as well as the global slowdown.

Stock markets will bounce back; but children who miss an important window of nutrition, education, and care will shoulder the scars of the recent crises for the rest of their lives. Stronger social budgets, more nuanced and gender responsive policies, and where necessary support from the international community, could help to ensure that social and economic recovery from the most severe crises in recent history will be much more inclusive than in the past.

I was thinking about that statement in the context of the so-called intergenerational debate and the spurious arguments about transferring the burdens of public debt onto the next generation.

I have said it often but you cannot say it enough - the burden we are transferring to the future generation is the diminished opportunities they will have as a result of growing up in poverty. But it a burden that is also being borne now - every day - and manifests are malnutrition, lack of education and the other related pathologies that accompany poverty and social exclusion.

The austerity programs typically focus cuts in the areas where the poor are most reliant on public support.

Conclusion

Lustig says that:

Macroeconomic crises not only affect the current living standards of the poor, but their ability to grow out of poverty.

Governments have a responsibility to use fiscal policy in a pro-poor manner and that "crisis prevention has to be a top priority of any anti-poverty strategy". This requires governments do not cut "pro-poor" programs during a crisis or in its aftermath. They should implement viable safety nets.

The Job Guarantee {11} is one such safety net and ensures that any person who can work and wants to work is able to access a socially-appropriate minimum wage at all times. This policy is the first thing any sovereign government should implement. The first policy that a non-sovereign government should implement is to make themselves sovereign, then introduce a Job Guarantee.

Governments should always use counter-cyclical net spending to advance social protection. Failure to do this not only impacts now but stifles human capital development in the future and thus ensures that poverty is transferred between generations.

Lustig says that:

Permanent reduction in the stock of human capital of the poor, due to malnutrition and deteriorating skills, might also lead to lower economic growth. Socially responsible macroeconomic policy in crisis avoidance and crisis response can contribute simultaneously to lower chronic poverty and higher growth.

So the New York Times editorial is largely correct (although they did say some nations should still implement austerity programs). No nation should implement discretionary cutbacks in net public spending at a time when the economy is in crisis. No exceptions!

But then I am just in denial - although I wonder how many children died today because of the crisis and the poor response by governments?

The Saturday Quiz will be back sometime tomorrow - even harder than last week!

That is enough for today!

Links:

{1} http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/opinion/10thu1.html?hp

{2} http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/08/finance-economy-stimulus-anxiety-opinions-columnists-thomas-cooley.html?boxes=businesschannelsections

{3} http://www.undp.org/developmentstudies/docs/socialprotection_fiscalstimulus_march2010.pdf

{4} http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Size_of_Stimulus_Table_2008_GDP.jpg

{5} http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Fiscal_stimulus_change_UR_2008_2010.jpg

{6} http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/weodata/download.aspx

{7} http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDECPROSPECTS/GEPEXT/EXTGEP2010/0,,contentMDK:22438006~pagePK:64167689~piPK:64167673~theSitePK:6665253,00.html

{8} http://www.netamericas.net/researchpapers/documents/lustig/Lustig2.pdf

{9} http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/files/Inclusive_Crises_Exclusive_Recoveries.pdf

{10} http://voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5157

{11} http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/job_guarantee/JobGuarantee.cfm

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http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=10239

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/