Re: The Green New Deal: First, Shoot the Economists

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Note: please do not shoot economists. The title is a metaphor.

Soon to be released research from the United Nations is expected to place species loss, a/k/a mass extinction, as an environmental threat equal to or greater than climate change. Industrial agriculture— vast expanses of monoculture crops managed with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, will feature prominently as a cause. This plant agriculture supplies people with increasingly toxic and processed food and antibiotic and hormone dependent factory farms with animal feed.  Together, these link the model of capitalist efficiency economists have been selling for the last two centuries to environmental crisis.

Understanding the theoretical precepts of Western economics is crucial to understanding these crises. Capitalism is scientific economic production, a method in search of applications. Its object is to maximize profits, not to growth nutritious food sustainably. As industrial agriculture has demonstrated, these objectives are antithetical. Crop yields have increased as the nutritional value of the food produced has declined. But far more troublingly, the narrow focus on profits has led to a form of environmental imperialism where interrelated ecosystems are viewed atomistically.

Mass extinction is largely attributable to the drive for economic control— the expansion of industrial agriculture to feed factory farm animals has been both geographic and intensive. The annihilation of insects through pesticide use on crops has led in turn to the annihilation of the species that feed on them. Interrelated ecosystems are systematically destroyed through a logic that does not ‘work’ otherwise. Leaving ecosystems intact upends it. When value is granted to what is destroyed, industrial agriculture ceases to earn a profit. In a broader sense, this means that it never earned a profit in the first place.

Unlike the narrow technocratic fixes being put forward to resolve global warming, mass extinction points to the systemic problems within capitalist logic. Within it, reconfiguring pieces of the world has a limited impact— so small in fact that the impact is considered ‘external’ to production processes. In an interrelated world, reconfiguring pieces— including annihilating or favoring them, impacts the broader relationships within the system. Were capitalist production not rapidly killing the planet, such esoterica could have remained within the purview of academia.

But it is killing the planet, suggesting that the organizing logic of capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Mass extinction and climate change are related through it to capitalist production. Theory here ties quite precisely to actual practice. Through the production of so-called goods, capitalist industries put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect began. Industrial agriculture used herbicides and pesticides to kill unwanted species and catastrophic species loss began. These problems are of both type and degree. This is why more capitalism won’t solve them.

Recognizing 1) that capitalist production is deeply integrated into how people get by in the world and 2) that abruptly ending these practices would put billions of lives and livelihoods at risk, young socialists in congress have proposed a transition program. A Green New Deal would assure that people’s basic needs are met as a planned transition to a sustainable economy is undertaken. With climate change and mass extinction already well underway, the alternative is an unplanned transition in which the lives of billions of people are put at risk.

Not content with having acted as apologists for rapidly accumulating environmental crises, economists are now coming out of the woodwork to give their advice on the limitations of any transition program. In the first, the claim is that ‘we’ can’t afford one. In the second, it is that even if we could afford such a program, it would cause inflation. Both assertions proceed from the premise that Western capitalism is a neutral basis from which to proceed. Phrased differently, were doing nothing to result in the loss of lives and livelihoods for a billion or more people, the fault would lie with nature.

Were environmental destruction truly ‘external’ to capitalist production, its solution would be simple: stop producing it. For instance, if greenhouse gas emissions are external to fossil fuel production and consumption, they could be foregone. However, were doing so economically viable while maintaining profitability, they never would have been produced in the first place. The social impact of this sleight-of-hand has been to allow capitalists to claim profits based on 1) costs necessary to capitalist production but 2) that would reduce or eliminate profits if they (capitalists) were forced to bear them.

(With apologies, a bit of economic arithmetic is needed to fill out this point:

Profits = Revenues minus Costs), or P = R – C. C = (Cd + Ce); where Cd is direct costs and Ce is externalized costs. This can be rewritten as: P + Ce = R – Cd. Then define Pt = Pd + Ce, where Pd is the direct profit and Pt is the total profit to producers. Here environmental destruction is a direct benefit to the capitalists who produce it through costs not borne by them).

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

The question then is not affordability— paying for a Green New Deal is a political problem, not an economic one. Proponents of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) have argued 1) that government spending is independent of tax revenues, therefore 2) the Federal government could create the resources needed to fund the program. As far as it goes, the Federal government spends resources into existence quite regularly. Challenges from ‘economists’ are 1) whether this could be done on the scale of a GND and 2) whether doing so would be inflationary?

In more intuitive terms, George W. Bush launched his multi-trillion-dollar war against Iraq without any apparent concern for how to pay for it. Both Mr. Bush and Barack Obama committed trillions of dollars in public resources to bail out Wall Street and the auto industry in the 2008 economic meltdown without any publicly stated plan for how to pay for them. More broadly, the Pentagon is the bedrock of the American economy, doling out hundreds of billions of dollars each year to private military contractors, many with profit guarantees (‘cost-plus’), to fight wars with no known enemy, largely for nominally ‘private’ interests. The Pentagon is also the largest domestic consumer of fossil fuels.

MMT emerged from two branches of economics that are quite distinct from the more implausible fantasies that inform mainstream theories— chartalism and institutional economics. Mainstream studies ‘proving’ that sovereign governments can’t stray too far from balanced budgets assume institutional equivalence between the U.S. in the present and say, Croatia. The MMT people of whom I am aware seem bright. I doubt this is their contention. But even if it were, it has no bearing on what the Federal government of the U.S. can do in present circumstances.

However, the political problems are more vexing. One need not be a Marxist to accept that Western governments serve the interests of the rich. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues have spent their careers collecting and interpreting empirical evidence that supports this conclusion. Given this relationship of economic to political power, a logical leap can be made that those whose wealth derives from destroying the environment will use their political power head off a Green New Deal. And more particularly, to keep themselves from paying for it.

MMT is useful in that it provides options. Either 1) the rich can be made to pay for a Green New Deal, 2) the Federal government can fund it or 3) some combination thereof. In any of these cases, the problem with not politically sidelining the rich is that their wealth and political power comes from environmental destruction. Even if they wrangled out of paying for the transition and cleanup, the survival of the planet depends on shutting down the source of their wealth and power. The liberal theory that this could be achieved through electoral politics usually proceeds from radically understating the problem.

To the extent that maintenance of the status quo can be used to represent a generic ‘moderate’ position, any substantive challenge to the status quo would be extreme by the quantum of the challenge. So, how about doing nothing— no challenge. The planet cooks, mass extinction accelerates, and billions of lives are put at risk. How about implementing only politically feasible solutions given the current distribution of political power. Tweaks could be made as environmental crisis accelerates until survival dictates that more radical measures than would have been needed in the first place are implemented. Moderation in the face of crisis isn’t moderate.

But are climate change and mass extinction really crises worthy of radical and far-reaching action yet? The separate silos of climate and biology emerged from the modular premise of capitalism, the one where the world is an accumulation of smaller pieces, rather than an interrelated whole. However, the causal bases of both in capitalist production suggest they are interrelated, and that the environmental crises already underway are symptoms of a radically dysfunctional relationship with the world based on a fundamentally flawed conception of it.

The IPCC says we’ve got twelve years from six months ago to cut carbon emissions in half or climate chaos will ensue. Sixty percent of the mammals, birds, fish and reptiles on the planet have been wiped out in the last fifty years. Given 1) that these crises are already well underway and 2) the lead-time needed to keep them from becoming apocalyptic for even the human chairwarmers in Congress is a matter of a few years at most, the time for radical and far-reaching action is now. A transition will take place. The choices are whether it will be planned or unplanned. An unplanned transition would indicate complete political failure, with the social consequences that entails.

The problem with moderation is that it implies, against the evidence, that current circumstances will persist into the future. The analytical starting point to solving a crisis is to define the problem. The problems of climate change and mass extinction have been defined. The next step is to develop solutions. If what is politically feasible falls short of what is needed to solve the problems, then the problems as they are currently defined aren’t solvable. Partial solutions leave the problems to be redefined in possibly far more dire circumstances in the future. Regardless of whether action is taken, current circumstances will not persist.

More fundamentally, capitalism is revolutionary, not evolutionary. It doesn’t simply produce new iterations of old technologies. Monoculture planting using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides is an integrated technology that replaced smaller scale, but more environmentally integrated and sustainable methods. The same is true of building technologies once mechanical heating and cooling systems and electric lights were made ubiquitous. Existing technologies were replaced, not ‘improved.’ This is part of what makes transition away from capitalist technologies so challenging— no fallback plan was left once the old technologies were discarded.

The risk of inflation from a Green New Deal, raised by MMTers and a few lefties, deserves some attention. The basic idea is that there is an existing relationship between demand for goods and the quantity of goods produced at relatively stable prices. A Green New Deal would require resources that will initially add to this demand, thereby raising the general price level. A rising price level acts as a regressive tax, burdening those with the fewest resources the most. Having the government fund the GND entirely would be the most inflationary, funding it partially would be less so, and taking the entire funding from the rich would be the least inflationary.

Without going too far into the weeds, this construction 1) narrowly defines inflation in terms that benefit the rich, 2) gives credence to the conspicuously failed capitalist conception of market pricing and 3) assumes that the form and function of political economy that would emerge from a GND would resemble its starting point. In the first, asset price inflation, a/k/a the wealth of the rich, goes very far in explaining why the rich are rich and the rest of us aren’t. This isn’t simply a matter of rising stock prices. Relative to corporate earnings and a host of other measures, stock prices are about as inflated as they have ever been. Why isn’t this inflation considered problematic?

Next, the relation of environmental crises to capitalist production implies that market prices are already wildly unrelated to the real costs of capitalist production. One way of measuring this distance is to add back the cost of a Green New Deal needed to clean up the mess. With a robust GND and luck, life on the planet continues. Without them, sayonara cruel world. In a narrow sense the MMTers and a few lefties have a point. If existing market relations remain intact and a GND increases demand for goods, goods price inflation will likely result. But market prices that reflect the true costs of production would mean the end of capitalism. Inflation is a relatively small part of the larger problem.

Given the relationship of capitalist economic theories to potentially world-ending environmental crisis, capitalist economists have little to offer related to a Green New Deal. In defense of their realm, their practice has been to serially understate environmental problems and then offer the same canned ideology they were indoctrinated with decades ago as cautionary tales. The question for a GND should be: what is needed to transition from the environmentally apocalyptic path we are on to long-term sustainability while insuring that everyone— every last person, has their material and social needs met?

Again, please do not shoot economists. Love them for their humanity. The title is a metaphor.

Trump's threats are backfiring and bringing more desperate migrants to the border

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

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EL PASO, Texas — Hundreds of migrants have spent days sleeping outside under the bridge connecting El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, wrapped in foil blankets to keep them warm during 50-degree nights. Some say they’ve been there up to five days, despite claims by immigration officials that they are being released in a day or two.

This is the new crisis at the border, one that the Trump administration seems eager to expose with immigration officials uncharacteristically open to allowing TV crews film the makeshift shelter.

On Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke showed up and asked border agents if the purpose if the shelter itself is a stunt. “Are we trying to send the message by having people in the open air, behind concertina wire and barbed wire and fencing with reporters allowed to go up and transmit these images,” he told VICE News. “It invites the question: are we trying to send a message by the way that we’re warehousing people at their most desperate moment?”

The president has championed hard-line immigration policies under the theory that they will deter Central American migrants from coming to the U.S. But instead of deterring migrants, Trump’s tough rhetoric may be doing the opposite: triggering a rush to the border by fueling a sense of “now or never” that has contributed to the highest number of undocumented migrants entering the U.S. in more than a decade.

“The more attention Central American migration gets, the more people start to panic and feel the door to the U.S. is going to close, and they should go now while they still have the chance,” said Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin.

The cycle is in overdrive.

More than 100,000 undocumented migrants are expected to cross the Southern border this month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, driven by an unprecedented number of parents coming with their children. Overwhelmed, the agency has diverted 750 agents from the major points of entry to the border itself to help with the surge, while acknowledging that the immigration system is at a “breaking point.”

Migrants gathered inside the fence of a makeshift detention center in El Paso, Texas on Wed. March 27, 2019. (Photo by Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirjsten Nielsen sent a letter to Congress asking for more funding for detention facilities along the border. She also said she would seek legislation that would make it easier to deport unaccompanied minors back to their home country and “allow” Central American migrants to apply for asylum in the U.S. from their home country.

On Friday, President Trump threatened on Twitter to “close the Southern Border” next week if Mexico “doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States.”

Even assuming Trump could “close the Southern Border” — billions of dollars of cross-border trade are at stake — and any attempt would likely end up in the courts and drag on for months. Meanwhile, Trump may be inadvertently spurring yet another mass wave of migrants, and in particular families.

Catch and release

Already, the initial wave of asylum seekers has snowballed. Because so many migrant families are arriving to the border at once, there is not enough space in detention facilities to hold them. As a result, most spend a few days in detention and are released. They are given a notice to appear at a future court hearing, but in the meantime they can start working and enroll their kids in school.

From their new homes around the U.S., these asylum seekers are relaying the news to friends back home: reaching the U.S. wasn’t so hard — especially if you come with kids, Leutert said.

“The larger the numbers the easier it feels”

“The larger the numbers the easier it feels. Because when you arrive in a large group of people you are processed very quickly. It’s become a selling point for smugglers. That if you show up with your whole family, you will be held for a couple of days and released to start your life.”

The message is being heard across Central America, including El Salvador where it reached the ears of Julio Hernández Ausencio, a farmer who was struggling to survive after a drought devastated his crops and made it impossible to support his family.

“I knew if I came alone they wouldn’t give me the opportunity to stay in the United States. But if they saw me enter with my little girl, they would give us the chance to start a new life,” said Hernandez.

Hernandez paid $7,000 for a smuggler to take him and his 11-year-old daughter to the U.S. He said it usually costs $7,500 per person, but because they wanted to turn themselves in to U.S. immigration officials instead of sneaking across the border they got a better price.

As officials struggle to cope with the crush of asylum seekers, Customs and Border Protection began this week releasing asylum-seekers instead of turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — returning to a practice Trump derisively called “catch and release” when he was a candidate and promised to end. Also, many asylum seekers are being released without ankle bracelets to monitor their whereabouts because there simply aren’t enough.

How crackdowns help smugglers

Andrew Selee, director of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. said that at every turn Trump’s crackdown on migrants has turned into a selling point to smugglers, starting with the now-abandoned family separation policy.

“It created a new cycle of migration around the fact that the U.S. government could not separate families and children. The smugglers take news that people have already heard and sell it as truth,” he said.

Trump’s fixation on the migrant caravan in the fall may also play a role in the current spike of asylum seekers. The caravan was tiny compared to the overall number of migrants entering the U.S. Around 6,000 Central Americans travelled with the caravan; this week, federal agents apprehended 4,000 migrants crossing the border on a single day.

But the attention that Trump gave the caravan – including sending troops to the U.S. border to stop it – elevated its profile and highlighted a new way for Central Americans to reach the U.S. without paying smugglers.

Selee thinks smugglers responded by cutting prices and finding new ways of delivering families to the border, including via express buses that take a week or less. That’s contributed to the large groups of 100 or more migrants that have been turning themselves over to Border Patrol agents.

“Among some people in Central America there is this sense that if they are going to migrate, they better do it now because at some point the U.S. government will really succeed in stopping them,” Selee said.

But Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University who studies human smuggling and migration, disputed the idea that Trump’s policies have backfired. She said Trump’s goal is getting a wall built along the border – whether or not the wall stops Central American migrants.

“These new caravans have helped Trump make a point and support the further militarization at the border,” she said. As for the spike in migrants seeking asylum: “This is perfect for Trump. It’s helping him get his wall built. That’s the bottom line.”

Additional reporting by Roberto Ferdman

Cover image: Migrants held in temporary fencing underneath the Paso Del Norte Bridge await processing on March 28, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has temporarily closed all highway checkpoints along the 268-mile stretch of border in the El Paso sector to try to stem a surge in illegal entry. (Photo by Christ Chavez/Getty Images)

Agnès Varda’s Films Made the Invisible Visible

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

PARIS—There’s a scene at the beginning of Faces Places, Agnès Varda and JR’s unassuming 2017 documentary of their road trip around France, when the film director and photographer meet a woman who refuses to move out of her home in public housing once built for families of coal miners, even though the local authorities want to move her elsewhere. Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave who died on Friday at 90, and JR, the globe-traveling large-scale photographer, take the woman’s portrait, then blow up the image and paste it on the facade of her house.

When the woman comes out of the house to see what they’ve done—sees such a big image of her own face—she begins to cry. Her tears are complicated. But mostly they are about what happens when a person accustomed to being ignored feels seen. Faces Places is a film about making people feel recognized, about making the invisible visible.

I’ve thought about Faces Places, and that scene in particular, a lot in the past few months—ever since demonstrators wearing yellow safety vests have gathered weekly across France, especially at roundabouts on the margins of cities, to protest a fuel-tax hike and the rising cost of living. The “yellow vest” movement is about many things, but above all it is about a desire by citizens to feel seen, to feel recognized and appreciated (in their case by President Emmanuel Macron). Faces Places is not a political movie, but it’s a close and therefore telling look at la France profonde, or the rural and provincial France that so often feels left out of the national conversation in a country whose cultural and political life is centered in Paris.  

Faces Places wasn’t the first time Varda had trained her camera on the marginalized in France, making them central, even beautiful. Her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I was about people in France who scavenge for food—for potatoes that have begun to sprout, for vegetables left behind after outdoor markets. In the movie, which Varda shot from 1999 to 2000, people are still using French francs. It was just before the euro came into use in January 2002. She filmed dumpster divers and rural outcasts. After the release of The Gleaners and I, Varda presented it around France and held public conversations with the audience about the issues it raised, such as food distribution, food waste, and social exclusion. The film had captured the air du temps, or the spirit of the time.

A few months ago, on a gloomy Sunday afternoon in January, I went to hear Varda speak about The Gleaners and I after a screening at the Cinémathèque Française, which was holding a retrospective of her work. I wanted to hear Varda talk about how she chose her material, how she framed it, how she figured out who would be the center of a film and who would be peripheral. Her hair was white on top, and red-brown at the bottom, her signature look. She was jolly and generous with the audience’s questions. “I don’t look for subjects,” she said of her films. “I wait for subjects to find me.” Sometimes she took years to find a project. “Chance has always been my best assistant,” she said.

Varda said that The Gleaners and I was the first time she’d been able to use a small, handheld digital camera, new to the market, and it was easier to get inside people’s lives without an invasive film crew. “People didn’t see the camera so they didn’t know it was cinema,” she said. She had wanted to pay attention to people who were “invisible.” And she did. One of those people was her. For the first time, she put herself in front of the camera. “I felt like I had the right to put myself in the film,” she said. She was nearing 70 and had become interested in the process of aging. People aging, potatoes aging. At the end of her talk, someone shouted from the audience, “You are young, Madame Varda!”  

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: The Final Countdown

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

What We’re Following Today

It’s Friday, March 29.

‣ Linda McMahon, a former pro-wrestling executive and the current head of the Small Business Administration, will reportedly resign from her position to chair President Donald Trump’s super PAC, America First Action.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

Will the Public Ever See the Mueller Report?: Attorney General William Barr said he plans to share with Congress Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report by mid-April, if not sooner. In his letter to Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Jerry Nadler, heads of Congress’s two judiciary committees, Barr also said that he will not share the contents of the report with the White House before releasing it, and noted that his summary of the findings from last week was “not an exhaustive recounting” of Mueller’s report, which is nearly 400 pages long.

But that doesn’t mean the public will see the review in full, reports Natasha Bertrand. “Between the withholding of grand-jury and privileged material and the redaction of classified information, the public could be left with a shell of the original report.”

Listen to this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, in which the staff writers Edward-Issac Dovere and McKay Coppins discuss what all this means for 2020.

Remember the Pee Tape?: Many of the president’s critics were disappointed last week when Barr declared that Mueller’s investigation all but cleared the president of wrongdoing. But the “seeds of the disappointment” were planted two years ago, when BuzzFeed News first published an unverified—and unverifiable—dossier compiled by the British-intelligence operative Christopher Steele, argues David Graham. The salacious document “set the stage for the political response to investigations to come—inflating expectations in the public, moving the goalposts for Trump in a way that has fostered bad behavior, and tainting the press’s standing.”

Call Me a Socialist!: Joe Sanberg, a multimillionaire investor, might be running for president.  Sanberg supports Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, increased regulation, and expanding the social safety net. He has no name recognition, but in an election where Trump has painted the Democrats as radical socialists, Sanberg thinks he has an edge: “Good luck to them if they want to call me a socialist, because businesspeople aren’t socialists,” he told Edward-Isaac Dovere.  

— Elaine Godfrey and Madeleine Carlisle

Snapshot

Three-year-old Ailianie Hernandez waits with her mother, Julianna Ageljo, to apply for the nutritional-assistance program at the Department of Family Affairs in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. The island’s government says it lacks sufficient federal funding to help people recover from Hurricane Maria amid a 12-year recession. (Carlos Giusti / AP)

Ideas From The Atlantic

Barbara Bush’s Long-Hidden ‘Thoughts on Abortion’ (Susan Page)
“In 1980, when George H. W. Bush was making his first bid for the presidency, Barbara Bush covered four sheets of lined paper with her bold handwriting, then tucked the pages into a folder with her diary and some personal letters. She was trying to sort out what she believed about one of the most divisive issues of the day.” → Read on.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Is Confusing Taxpayers (Mark Mazur)
“Although the most recent IRS data show that average income-tax refunds are closely tracking the average refund from last year, taxpayers have been complaining in interviews with journalists and on social media that their refund is smaller than expected or that they unexpectedly owe additional tax. Given that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was all about tax cuts, how can this be?” → Read on.

Quit Harping on U.S. Aid to Israel (James Kirchick)
“U.S. assistance to Israel demands far less—in both blood and treasure—than many other American defense relationships around the world.” → Read on.

What Else We’re Reading

‣ An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden (Lucy Flores, New York)
‣ Our President of the Perpetual Grievance (Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker) (? Paywall)
‣ Former Trump Family Driver Has Been in ICE Custody for 8 Months (Miriam Jordan, The New York Times) (? Paywall)
‣ Is Pete Buttigieg a Political Genius? (Alex Shephard, The New Republic)
‣ The Blue State Trump Thinks He Can Flip in 2020 (Alex Isenstadt, Politico)

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