Globalization cover-up
Joe Stiglitz looks at how “globalization” concealed an agenda for fattening corporate profits at the expense of workers:
Source: INET.
Over to you
A remarkable – in its provenance, not its conclusions – new report from the US government’s Commodity Futures Trading Corporation concludes that “climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the U.S. economy.” It’s top recommendation:
This report begins with a fundamental finding—financial markets will only be able to channel resources efficiently to activities that reduce greenhouse gas emissions if an economy-wide price on carbon is in place at a level that reflects the true social cost of those emissions. Addressing climate change will require policy frameworks that incentivize the fair and effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In the absence of such a price, financial markets will operate suboptimally, and capital will continue to flow in the wrong direction, rather than toward accelerating the transition to a net-zero emissions economy. At the same time, policymakers must be sensitive to the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and other policies and ensure that the burden does not fall on low-to-moderate income households and on historically marginalized communities. This report recognizes that pricing carbon is beyond the remit of financial regulators; it is the job of Congress.
Read the report here.
The eco-fascist virus
When the well-being of people and the planet are viewed as being incompatible, things can get creepy pretty fast:
“We’re the virus.” So read a popular tweet from mid-March praising reports of diminished air and water pollution in countries under lockdown due to the novel coronavirus COVID-19. By mid-April, the tweet, which also suggested that “Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine,” was liked nearly 300,000 times.
Viewed one way, the sentiment that the earth is “healing” itself in the absence of human activity, now endlessly lampooned, points to hopes that the world will change for the better in the wake of the worst worldwide pandemic since the HIV/AIDS crisis. Viewed another, celebrating improvements to the natural environment at the expense of mass human death takes us down a much darker path.
The devaluing of human life—particularly of populations seen as inferior—in order to protect the environment viewed as essential to White identity is at the core of Far Right environmentalism and ecofascist thought. The ecofascist dream is a not just a White ethnostate but a “green” one too….
[E]nvironmental activism doesn’t always align with liberatory politics, as conventional wisdom would have it. In fact, environmental advocacy has deep roots on the Right as well, which many contemporary White nationalist thinkers have sought to reclaim. Importantly, mainstream environmentalism has shown itself to be vulnerable to “fascist creep,” where far-right concepts and approaches to ecological crisis have been adopted by otherwise left-leaning environmentalists.
Read more here.
Follow the money
From Jill Lepore’s account of the invention of the police:
In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964… Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.
Read more here.
Heads, looters win; tails, the planet loses
As fracking firms go bankrupt, the bosses bank their winnings and leave taxpayers on the hook for cleaning up their mess:
The day the debt-ridden Texas oil producer MDC Energy filed for bankruptcy eight months ago, a tank at one of its wells was furiously leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. As of last week, dangerous, invisible gases were still spewing into the air.
By one estimate, the company would need more than $40 million to clean up its wells if they were permanently closed. But the debts of MDC’s parent company now exceed the value of its assets by more than $180 million.
In the months before its bankruptcy filing, though, the company managed to pay its chief executive $8.5 million in consulting fees…
Read more here.
Who knew?
From the IMF’s Finance & Development magazine:
For decades, humanity has tried to run economies, indeed whole societies, as though they were complicated machines that just needed tinkering and control of a few key levers to obtain optimum performance. But lately, we have begun to see the error of such thinking. The myopic behavior and narrow focus on efficiency and shareholder financial returns that have dominated political and economic decision-making for decades have yielded somewhat efficient but largely fragile systems stripped of resilience.
Read more here.
America’s caste system
Isabel Wilkerson writes:
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement….
As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources — which groups are seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.
As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance….
Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential. That any of us manages to create abiding connections across these manufactured divisions is a testament to the beauty of the human spirit.
Read “America’s Enduring Caste System” here.
Making America Sick Again
The data tell the story.
Read more here.
Racism: missing in action in Econ 101
Tim Koechlin writes:
Why are white people in the US richer than African Americans? If an ECON 100 student (or an economics major) has a rich answer to this question, it is unlikely that they learned it from their intro to economics textbook.
With this yawning silence, mainstream economics leaves a profoundly important economic question unanswered. But more than this, the mainstream narrative obscures, ignores and erases many of the essential ways in which the long history of racism in the US has produced and reproduced enduring racial inequality. And more still, it celebrates the power of markets to “punish” and minimize “discriminatory behavior.”
Read more here.
Rethinking work
Half of the world’s work isn’t paid – and therefore isn’t counted in the usual measures of income and economic growth. Nancy Folbre breaks it down this neat video:
Source: Institute for New Economic Thinking. Read more about why definitions of family income can mislead here.
