power-grid | Worldwide, similar experiences occur when electric utilities
deregulate. Percentage increases in residential electricity prices from
2000 to 2010, as a result of deregulation and privatization of electric
utilities, in the following countries are:
Chile,
+166 percent; Canada, +72 percent; Czech Republic, +133 percent;
Ireland, +100 percent; Hungary, +117 percent; Norway, +106 percent; New
Zealand, +203 percent; Sweden, +88 percent; U.S., +42 percent; and the
U.K., +86 percent. Electricity price increases globally after
deregulation far exceed general price and wage gains, making the general
population poorer but power generators and retailers richer.
Cold weather during February 2011 and ineffective weatherization that did not protect the plants caused many Texas electric power plants
to shut down. Electricity prices spiked much higher, and Texas
experienced prolonged and frequent rolling blackouts that primarily
affected residential customers.
During another Texas cold snap in January 2014, two large power
plants unexpectedly closed down because of incomplete weatherization,
which resulted in the danger of rolling blackouts. As a result, Texas
wholesale electricity market prices spiked higher–from a usual $30 to
$100 per megawatt-hour to more than $4,500 per megawatt-hour. Under
existing rules, all generators receive the same $4,500 per megawatt-hour
regardless of their average costs.
The current incentives in electricity markets harm residential
electricity consumers. Texas electricity generators, with multiple
plants on the interconnection grid, receive much more money if they do
not weatherize a few of their plants properly. As a consequence, these
poorly weatherized plants must shut down during cold weather. All
generating plants that remain online receive the spiking electricity
prices, and the generating company makes much more money than if all
their plants were operating properly. This is only one way privatizers
are gaming the Texas electricity market: using laws and rules set up by
their lobbyists.
Seven years ago at the top of the most recent credit bubble, it was
believed that electricity prices would rise dramatically. Consequently,
privatizers overpaid when purchasing electric utilities. Instead, U.S.
natural gas prices unexpectedly dropped–a result of the nationwide shale
gas fracking boom – and pushed many privatized Texas electricity
generating companies into bankruptcy.
Houston-based Dynegy Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2012. Edison Mission Energy,
which operated electric generating plants in 12 states, filed for
bankruptcy protection in December 2012 and exited Chapter 11 in March
2014, when the company sold for $2.64 billion to NRG Energy, which has
operations headquarters in Houston. Texas electricity generating company
Optim Energy
LLC – which is owned by ECJV Holdings LLC, which is owned by Cascade
Investment LLC, a Bill Gates investment company – filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection in February 2014.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Texas Pacific Group and Goldman
Sachs Capital Partners took TXU – at that time, the main electricity
supplier in Texas – private in 2007 in the largest private equity
leveraged buyout (LBO) on record and renamed the new company Energy
Future Holdings Corp. (EFHC), headquartered in Dallas. In one of the
largest nonfinancial bankruptcies in history, EFHC filed a prepackaged
Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2014.
Although these generating companies are dealing with bankruptcies,
they cannot plan for and invest in new power plants to meet expected
electricity demand in Texas. This results in below-standard reserve
margins, which threaten Texas electricity supply and system reliability.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC‘s)
goal is to safeguard North America’s electric power system reliability.
The nonprofit reports on insufficient electrical power level capacity
during peak load periods. Energy emergency alerts indicate electrical
capacity shortfalls and are a leading indicator of inadequate system
reliability. Texas is under increasing stress and has had three NERC
Energy Emergency Alert 2 incidents and two more serious NERC Energy
Emergency Alert 3 incidents since 2006.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ (ERCOT‘s)
reserve margin forecasts for 2014-2023 are used as an indicator of
Texas’ electrical system reliability. ERCOT’s forecast reserve margins
show that Texas will fall significantly below the NERC reference reserve
margin standard of 13.75 percent beginning in 2015 and continuing
through 2023. New electric power plants are not being built fast enough
to keep up with growing electricity demand in Texas because of the
deregulation and privatization of Texas electric utilities. NERC and
ERCOT predict the increased probability of brownouts and rolling
blackouts in Texas.
theeconomiccollapseblog | We are getting a very short preview of what will eventually happen to
the United States as a whole. America’s infrastructure is aging and
crumbling. Our power grids were never intended to support so many
people, our water systems are a complete joke, and it has become utterly
apparent that we would be completely lost if a major long-term national
emergency ever struck. Texas has immense wealth and vast energy
resources, but now it is being called a “failed state”. If it can’t
even handle a few days of cold weather, what is the rest of America
going to look like when things really start to get chaotic in this
country?
At this point, it has become clear that the power grid in Texas is in
far worse shape than anyone ever imagined. When extremely cold weather
hit the state, demand for energy surged dramatically. At the same
time, about half of the wind turbines that Texas relies upon froze, and
the rest of the system simply could not handle the massive increase in
demand.
Millions of Texans were without power for days, and hundreds of thousands are still without power as I write this article.
And now we are learning that Texas was literally just moments away
from “a catastrophic failure” that could have resulted in blackouts “for months”…
Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away
from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for
months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
As millions of customers throughout the state
begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials
with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates
the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was
dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts
across the state.
I can’t even imagine how nightmarish things would have eventually
gotten in Texas if there had actually been blackouts for months.
According to one expert, the state really was right on the verge of a “worst case scenario”…
The worst case scenario: Demand for power
outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing
equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
If the grid had gone totally offline, the
physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could
have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice
president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software
and information company headquartered in Austin.
For years, I have been telling my readers that they have got to have a
back up plan for power, because during a major emergency the grid can
fail.
maxim |Tesla CEO Elon Musk
ridiculed the Texas electrical grid operator for being unreliable after
millions of Texans were left without power during a powerful winter
storm that hit the Lone Star State with historic freezing temperatures.
The billionaire electric car mogul moved from California to Texas in December—following the lead of podcaster pal Joe Rogan—to build a new Tesla factory in Austin.
On Wednesday, Musk tweeted that the state’s energy agency, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), “is not earning that R.”
Meanwhile, the New York Post reports
that Texans have been posting on social media about sleeping in their
Tesla cars to keep warm during the cold nights—thanks to the "Camp Mode"
feature that allows Tesla owners to use the car's climate control for
more than a day without draining the battery.
wfaa | The Texas power outage has become the Texas power outrage. Electricity supply and demand in Texas has really stabilized now. But when it was grossly out of whack over the past several days,
the cost of power in the wholesale market went crazy. It went from
about $50 per Megawatt to $9,000. That didn’t affect retail many
customers because they were on a fixed-rate plan. See explanation of
plan types here.
But if you were on a variable or indexed plan, your rate — and
therefore, your electric bill — may have skyrocketed. One customer
messaged us:
“Mine is over $1,000…not sure how…700 square foot apt I have been keeping at 60 degrees."
“Using as little as possible 1300 sq. ft. house and this is my bill. How is this fair. I only paid $1200 for the whole 2020.”
That tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of their bill, which now stands at $3,801.16.
When your electric company tells you to switch but there has been a hold on switching for over a week now. Using as little as possible 1300 sq ft house and this is my bill. . How is this fair. I only paid $1200 for the whole 2020 year @FoxNews@wfaa@tedcruz@GovAbbottpic.twitter.com/AylTS4m0j4
Then, I spoke with a guy named Ty Williams. He sent screenshots of
his three electric meters (one for his home, one for a guest house, and
one for his office). Last month, his bill for all three was $660. So
far, for this month’s electricity, he owes more than $17,000.
Williams wondered: “How in the world can anyone pay that? I mean you
go from a couple hundred dollars a month...there’s absolutely no
way...it makes no sense.”
ineteconomics | In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity
system. After a few years, the electrical free market, managed by a
non-profit called ERCOT, was fully-established. Some seventy or so
providers eventually sprung up. While a few cities – including Austin –
kept their public power, they were nevertheless tied to the state
system.
The market system could, and did, work out most of the time. Prices
rose and fell, and customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced
some risk. One provider, called Griddy, had a special model: for $9.99 a
month you could get your power at whatever the wholesale price was on any given day. That was cheap! Most of the time.
The problem with “most of the time” is that people need electric power all of the time. And Texas’s leadersknew
as of 2011, at least, when the state went through a short, severe
freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather.
But they did nothing. To do something, they would have had to regulate
the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the
providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be
regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed –
most of the time. In 2020, even voluntary inspections were suspended,
due to Covid-19.
Enter the deep freeze of 2021. Demand went up. Supply went down.
Natural gas froze up at the wells, in the pipes, and at the generating
plants. Unweatherized windmills also went off-line, a small part of the story.
Since Texas is disconnected from the rest of the country, no reserves
could be imported, and given the cold everywhere, there would have been
none available anyway. There came a point, on Sunday, February 14 or the
next day, when demand so outstripped supply that the entire Texas grid came within minutes of a collapse that, we are told, would have taken months to repair.
As this happened, the price mechanism failed completely. Wholesale prices rose a hundred-fold
– but retail prices, under contract, did not, except for the unlucky
customers of Griddy, who got socked with bills for thousands of dollars
each day. ERCOT was therefore forced to cut power, which might have been
tolerable, had it happened on a rolling basis across neighborhoods
throughout the state. But this was impossible: you can’t cut power to
hospitals, fire stations, and other critical facilities, or for that
matter to high-rise downtown apartments reliant on elevators. So lights
stayed on in some areas, and they stayed off – for days on end – in
others. Selective socialism, one might call it.
When the lights go off and the heat goes down, water freezes and that
was the next phase of the calamity. For when water freezes, pipes
burst, and when pipes burst the water supply cannot keep up with the
demand. So across Texas, water pressure is falling, as I type these
words. Hospitals without water cannot generate steam, and therefore
heat; and some of them are being evacuated right now. Meanwhile, ice is bearing down on the power lines.
nakedcapitalism |Ross What do you think was revealed in 2020 that we all intuitively knew but couldn’t actually see because it hadn’t crystallized?
Michael Hudson Well, it’s obvious that the economy
never recovered from the Obama depression after he bailed out the banks,
not the economy. So the question is, how long can the economy limp
along without recovery?
Well, it’s obvious now that the debts can’t be paid, but the
coronavirus only catalyzed that. It’s made it even clearer. So in a
sense, the Biden administration is going to be picking up just where the
Obama administration left off, namely with huge evictions. Obama
evicted about 10 million families. Most of them were black and Hispanic,
lower income families who were the victims of the chump mortgages.
Biden’s going to start his administration by kicking out probably
another five million families. Again, black and Hispanic families are
going to be the big losers because they were the people who had the
highest coronavirus or were the first to be laid off. So it’s going to
begin with a large eviction.
This reverses the trend in homeownership going up to 2008. It’s been
going down, and this is going to continue now. People somehow imagined
that there was going to be a recovery, that somehow we could recover
from the post 2008 breakdown. But now it’s obvious we can’t recover.
You’re going to have the polarization of the economy that has been
occurring for the last 12 years. It will simply accelerate.
Ross What do you think are the megatrends that we
should be looking at in 2021? What do you think is the direction of
travel, if you like, for so-called developed economies?
Michael Hudson Well, the big trend in any economy is
the growth of debt, because the debt grows exponentially. The economy
has painted itself into a debt corner. We can see that in real estate.
We can see that for small business. There’s also almost no way to
recover. The Federal Reserve has been printing quantitative easing to
keep stock and bonds high. But for the real economy, the trend is
polarization and lower employment.
The trend also is that state and local finances are broke, especially
in the biggest cities, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
They’re not getting income tax revenue from the unemployed or closed
businesses. They’re not getting the real estate tax with so many
defaults and mortgage arrears. In New York City there’s talk of cutting
back the subways by 70 percent. People will be afraid to take the
subways when they’re overcrowded with people with the virus. So you’re
having a breakdown not only in state and local finances, but of public
services that are state run – public transportation services, health
services, education is being downsized. Everything that is funded out of
state and local budgets is going to suffer.
And living standards are going to be very sharply downward as people
realize how many services they got are dependent on public
infrastructure.
Ross Which, of course, opens the door for vulture
funds and predatory capital, whether it be private equity, VCs or
whatever else to come in and do public infrastructure deals?
Michael Hudson Well, you’ll have privatizations. The
American economy will be privatized because the states can’t support
their transportation system and other systems. The pressure to privatize
subway and transport system, schools are going to be more privatized,
as jails have been in the United States. So you’re going to have a huge
privatization trend.
theguardian |Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden
hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are
turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate
his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal
or ethical.
When Trump contracted Covid-19, his opponents feared he might benefit
from a sympathy vote. But Trump is not a normal president seeking
voters’ sympathy. He doesn’t do sympathy. He neither needs nor banks on
it. Trump trades on anger, weaponises hatred and meticulously cultivates
the dread with which the majority of Americans have been living after
the financial bubble burst in 2008. Obscenities and contempt for the
rules of polite society were his means of connecting with a large
section of American society.
The reason 2008 was a momentous year wasn’t just because of the
magnitude of the crisis, but because it was the year when normality was
shattered once-and-for-all. The original postwar social contract broke
in the early 1970s, yielding permanent real median earnings stagnation.
It was replaced by a promise to America’s working class of another route
to prosperity: rising house prices and financialised pension schemes.
When Wall Street’s house of cards collapsed in 2008, so did this postwar
social contract between America’s working class and its rulers.
After the crash of 2008, big business deployed the central bank money
that refloated Wall Street to buy back their own shares, sending share
prices (and, naturally, their directors’ bonuses) through the
stratosphere while starving Main Street of serious investment in
good-quality jobs. A majority of Americans were thus treated, in quick
succession, to negative equity, home repossessions, collapsing pension
kitties and casualised work – all that against the spectacle of watching
wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few.
By 2016, the majority of Americans were deeply frustrated. On the one
hand, they lived with the private anguish caused by the permanent
austerity to which their communities had been immersed since 2008. And,
on the other, they could see a ruling class whose losses were socialised
by the government, which defined the response to the crash.
Donald Trump
simply took advantage of that frustration. And he did so with tactics
that, to this day, keep his liberal opponents in disarray. Democrats
protested that Trump was a nobody, and thus unfit to be president. That
did not work in a society shaped by media which for years elevated
inconsequential celebrities.
Even worse for Trump’s opponents, portraying him as incompetent is an
own goal: Donald J Trump is not merely incompetent. George W Bush was
incompetent. No, Trump is much worse than that. Trump combines gross
incompetence with rare competence. On the one hand, he cannot string two
decent sentences together to make a point, and has failed spectacularly
to protect millions of Americans from Covid-19. But, on the other hand,
he tore up Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement that took
decades to put together. Remarkably, he replaced it swiftly with one
that is certainly not worse – at least from the perspective of American
blue-collar workers or, even, Mexican factory workers who now enjoy an
hourly wage considerably greater than before.
Moreover, despite his belligerent posturing, Trump not only kept his
promise to not start new wars but, additionally, he withdrew American
troops from a variety of theatres where their presence had caused
considerable misery with no tangible benefits for peace or, indeed,
American influence.
consciousnessofsheep | The geology of US oil might have been
straightforward; the economics was a little trickier. In the course of
the Second World War, the USA supplied six out of every seven barrels of
oil consumed. Venezuela accounted for most of the seventh barrel; with
small contributions from British Persia and the Soviet Caucasus.
Germany’s oil sources had been inadequate to power its civilian economy;
and its failure to capture and bring online the Caucasus oil in 1942 is the primary reason why it lost the war.
The war-torn economies which emerged from
the ashes of war in 1945, then, were almost entirely dependent upon oil
from the USA. And this allowed an internal American oil cartel – the
Texas Railroad Commission – to extend its price fixing to the entire
world. So long as US oil made up a large part of global oil production,
and so long as US oil fields had excess capacity, the TRC could
regulate the global oil price. If prices began to rise too high, the
TRC would order companies to produce more oil. If prices sank too low,
the TRC would order production cuts. As a result, throughout the boom
years 1953 to 1973, the world oil price remained stable at around $25
per barrel (at today’s prices).
When the US conventional oil
fields peaked in 1970, the TRC lost its ability to prevent prices from
rising by expanding production. This was a boon for Middle East and
North African producers whose production costs were higher than those in
the USA. And although the first – 1973 – oil shock was in part a
response to western support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, sooner
or later the newly empowered OPEC was going to cut supply to drive up
prices.
It is an irony that a capitalist system
which claims to be built upon competition and free markets has proved
stable only in those periods when its source of value – energy – has
been controlled by cartels. Once OPEC-led price stability was regained
in the mid-1980s, the stage was set for the global debt-boom of the
1990s and early 2000s. And with the fall of the Soviet Union and the
apparent conversion of China to state capitalism, for a brief moment the
world seemed content.
Peak oil had not, though, gone away; it
had merely been postponed. Britain discovered this the hard way after
its North Sea deposits – which had once produced more oil than Kuwait –
peaked in 1999. By 2005 – the year global conventional oil
extraction peaked – Britain had become a net importer of oil and gas.
Today, Britain’s North Sea deposits produce 60 percent less oil than in
1999; and the projected price of the remaining oil is not enough to
cover the decommissioning costs.
By 2005 though, had we but known it at
the time, we had bigger problems to deal with. The experience of the
oil shocks of the 1970s convinced many peak oilers that once the peak of
global oil extraction had been reached, prices would rise remorselessly
as a consequence of supply and demand imbalance. This, indeed, is what
appeared to happen after the 2005 peak was reached:
By 2012, Michael Kumhof and Dirk V Muir
from the International Monetary Fund were anticipating global oil
prices of more than $200 per barrel by 2020. But that isn’t what
happened. Instead, from 2014 the oil price slumped and has been on a
steadily downward trend ever since. The reason is because there is more
to peak oil than geology and engineering.
Indeed, many peak oilers make the same
mistake as economists in treating oil – and energy in general – as being
just another relatively low-cost factor of production. The wage bill,
for example, is always far higher than the energy costs of running a
business. But as economist Steve Keen explains; “capital without energy
is a statue, labour without energy is a corpse.” Or as engineering
professor Jean-Marc Jancovici explains:
“energy is what quantifies change.” Nothing happens in the world
without energy. And when the cost of the world’s biggest primary energy
source – oil – begins to spike upward, the impacts are felt in every
area of our lives.
The story of the 2008 crash is usually
told in financial terms; and is used to blame the victims. The cause of
the crisis, we are told, was so-called sub-prime borrowers taking on
mortgages that they couldn’t possibly pay back. Except, of course,
prior to 2008 they had been paying them back. So what happened
to change their circumstances so that they could no longer repay
debts? The answer is interest rate rises. The banks had based their
lending on the assumption that the economy was stable; that inflation
would grow at around two percent; and that interest rates would remain
relatively low. With house prices supposedly guaranteed to keep rising,
and having securitised the risks,
banks – with the assistance of governments – could extend home
ownership to the masses. But from 2006, central banks had been raising
interest rates; tipping borrowers into default.
Why had the central banks been raising
interest rates? Because from 2005, inflation began to break out of the 1
to 3 percent band that they were charged with maintaining. According
to all of the textbooks they had been brought up on, the central bankers
had been taught that the way to bring inflation back under control was
to raise interest rates. But they – and the economics textbooks – were
wrong. What they believed to be inflation – too much currency chasing
too few goods – was actually an economy adjusting to its first
supply-side shock since the 1970s.
NYPost | Rather than set up shop in New York City, the financial capital of the
world, Rosemont Seneca leased space in Washington, DC. They occupied an
all-brick building on Wisconsin Avenue, the main thoroughfare of
exclusive Georgetown. Their offices would be less than a mile from John
and Teresa Kerry’s 23-room Georgetown mansion, and just two miles from
both Joe Biden’s office in the White House and his residence at the
Naval Observatory.
Over the next seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry
negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals with foreign governments,
Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals often with those
same foreign governments.
Some of the deals they secured may remain hidden. These Rosemont
entities are, after all, within a private equity firm and as such are
not required to report or disclose their financial dealings publicly.
Some of their transactions are nevertheless traceable by
investigating world capital markets. A troubling pattern emerges from
this research, showing how profitable deals were struck with foreign
governments on the heels of crucial diplomatic missions carried out by
their powerful fathers. Often those foreign entities gained favorable
policy actions from the United States government just as the sons were
securing favorable financial deals from those same entities.
Nowhere is that more true than in their commercial dealings with Chinese government-backed enterprises.
Rosemont Seneca joined forces in doing business in China with another
politically connected consultancy called the Thornton Group. The
Massachusetts-based firm is headed by James Bulger, the nephew of the
notorious mob hitman James “Whitey” Bulger. Whitey was the leader of the
Winter Hill Gang, part of the South Boston mafia. Under indictment for
19 murders, he disappeared. He was later arrested, tried, and convicted.
James Bulger’s father, Whitey’s younger brother, Billy Bulger, serves
on the board of directors of the Thornton Group. He was the longtime
leader of the Massachusetts state Senate and, with their long overlap by
state and by party, a political ally of Massachusetts Senator John
Kerry.
Less than a year after opening Rosemont Seneca’s doors, Hunter Biden
and Devon Archer were in China, having secured access at the highest
levels. Thornton Group’s account of the meeting on their
Chinese-language website was telling: Chinese executives “extended their
warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its US partner Rosemont
Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe
Biden).”
The purpose of the meetings was to “explore the possibility of
commercial cooperation and opportunity.” Curiously, details about the
meeting do not appear on their English-language website.
Also, according to the Thornton Group, the three Americans met with
the largest and most powerful government fund leaders in China — even
though Rosemont was both new and small.
The timing of this meeting was also curious. It occurred just hours
before Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese
President Hu in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit.
capitalaspower | According to the theory of capital as power, capitalism, like any other
mode of power, is born through sabotage and lives in chains – and yet
everywhere we look we see it grow and expand. What explains this
apparent puzzle of ‘growth in the midst of sabotage’? The answer, we
argue, begins with the very meaning of ‘growth’. Whereas conventional
political economy equates growth with a rising standard of living, we
posit that much of this growth has nothing to do with livelihood as
such: it represents not the improvement of wellbeing, but the expansion
of sabotage itself. Building on this premise, the article historicizes,
theorizes and models the relationship between changes in hierarchical
power and sabotage on the one hand and the growth of energy capture on
the other. It claims that hierarchical power is sought for its own sake;
that building and sustaining this power demands strategic sabotage; and
that sabotage absorbs a significant proportion of the energy captured
by society. From this standpoint, capitalism grows, at least in part,
not despite but because of – and indeed through – sabotage.
ksjomo | Milton Friedman’s libertarian economics advocating shareholder capitalism has influenced generations trying to understand the economy, not only in the US, but all over the world.
He was not just an academic economist, but an enormously influential celebrityconservative ideologue who legitimized ideas for the like-minded, including the belief that ‘greed is good’. Now, shareholder capitalism’s consequences haunt the world and threaten humanity with stagnation and self-destruction.
In 1962, Friedman published his most influential book, Capitalism and Freedom. In September 1970, the New York Times Magazine published his essay, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.
The fiftieth anniversary of its publication has triggered an
international debate of its contemporary significance, especially with
the resurgence of ethno-populist jingoism embracing his neoliberal
economic agenda.
The article -- reiterating the Friedman Doctrine, presuming perfectly functioning markets that only exist in the minds and writings of some economists -- is a manifesto for American shareholdercapitalism. It inspired the counter-revolution against Keynesianism, development economics and other state interventions.
The word ‘competition’ appears only once, in the last sentence. Yet,somesupportersinsist that Friedman was not ‘pro-business’, but rather ‘pro-market’. But, unlike capitalism, the market has been with us for several millennia and has happily co-existed with unfreedoms of various types.
Perfect competition rarely exists due to inherent tendencies undermining it. Hence, various challenges to Friedmanite wisdom. For half a century, information and behavioural economics have challenged his many assumptions, certainly much more than the Austrian School advocacy and defence of capitalism.
Thus, Friedman conveniently ignored ‘market imperfections’ in the real world, although or perhaps because they undermined the empirical bases for his reasoning. So, even if Friedman’s logic was true, reality prevents profit-maximizing firm behaviour from maximizing societal welfare, if not cause the converse.
bMeanwhile, Friedman’s monetarist economics has been discredited, and has little practical influence anymore, especially with the turn to ‘unconventional monetary policies’, particularly after the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Yet, his ideological sway remains strong, as it serves powerful interests.
mattstoller.substack | When I started writing this newsletter on monopoly power, I would not
have predicted that one of the more interesting and popular themes
would be on how market power plays out in the world of cheerleading. And yet, the story of monopolization in cheer is a great example of the problem of concentrated corporate power, because it reveals so much about how our economy actually works.
As
a quick recap, the company involved is called Varsity Brands, which has
monopolized the sport of cheerleading by buying up most major
competitions. Varsity is owned by private equity giant Bain Capital.
What makes this story so useful is that there are no fancy high tech
gadgets in cheer, no possible excuses from economists; it’s just the use
of raw power to extract money from teenagers and their families through
a business conspiracy.
The story also speaks to the power of
advocates to make change. Over the past six months, competitors and
customers have filed multiple class action antitrust lawsuits
against Varsity, all essentially alleging the same anti-competitive
practices from different angles. These cases hit one after another,
building on each other and adding more details to the overall story of
recklessness that occurs under a monopoly.
And now another shoe just dropped.
Last week, Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tricia L. Nadolny at USA Todaydetailed a massive scandal of rampant sexual abuse in cheerleading. There’s a high-profile aspect of this scandal; Netflix’s Cheer celebrity Jerry Harris was arrested
for producing child pornography involving young cheerleaders, with
complaints about him seemingly ignored by the main cheer governing body.
But the scandal is more far-reaching than just Harris. What Kwiatkowski
and Nadolny found was that over a 100 convicted sex offenders who had
raped or assaulted children or otherwise engaged in sexual misconduct
were allowed to work in the cheerleading world, and the two governing
nonprofits of the sport - USA Cheer and the U.S. All Star Federation
(USASF) - did not put these sex offenders on their list of people banned from the sport.
This
kind of abusive behavior happens in every sphere of human activity, so
one might think that abuse is not intrinsic to any particular business
model. Further, these offenders by and large did not work at Varsity,
but at independent gyms and associated companies doing business in the
cheerleading ecosystem, so it’s even easier to see this as an isolated
scandal. And yet, while it may not at first seem like it, this scandal
about predators is part of the same monopoly story that I happened to
hit on in January. This is a story of a theme I’ve hit on in other
industries, or what is known as absentee ownership.
unz |Here’s
your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do “Critical Race Theory”, “The
1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning tell
us about what’s going on in America today?
They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people
They suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws
They alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race war
They indicate that powerful agents — operating from within the
state– are inciting racial violence to crush the emerging “populist”
majority that elected Trump to office in 2016 and which now represents
an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into a
tyrannical third-world “shithole”.
Which of these four statements best explains what’s going on in America today?
If
you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and
explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a
thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad
logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and
arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign.
“Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s
“White Supremacist” warning are as much a part of the Oligarchic war on
America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling of our
statues. All three, fall under the heading of “ideology”, and all three
are being used to shape public attitudes on matters related to our
collective identity as “Americans”.
The
plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation
about their history, their founders, and the threats they face, so they
will submissively accept a New Order imposed by technocrats and their
political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important than
Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the
transformative “Reset” that elites want to impose on the country. The
real challenge is to change the hearts and minds of a population that is
unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive
element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can
expect this propaganda saturation campaign to continue for the
foreseeable future, we don’t expect the strategy will ultimately
succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken,
unflagging and unapologetic.
epsilontheory| Blake: Put.
That coffee. Down. Coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m f**king
with you? I am not f**king with you. I’m here from downtown. I’m here
from Mitch and Murray. And I’m here on a mission of mercy. Your name’s
Levine? You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?
Moss: I don’t gotta sit here and listen to this s**t.
Blake: You
certainly don’t, pal, ’cause the good news is — you’re fired. The bad
news is — you’ve got, all of you’ve got just one week to regain your
jobs starting with tonight. Starting with tonight’s sit. Oh? Have I got
your attention now? Good. ‘Cause we’re adding a little something to this
month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac
Eldorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak
knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Get the picture? You laughing now?
You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money for their names. You
can’t close the leads you’re given, you can’t close s**t. You ARE s**t!
Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it ’cause you are going OUT!
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
The
truth is that unless you are really rich, you work for Mitch &
Murray. Yes, that includes you, Vox writer changing the world one
smarter-than-thou opinion at a time. Yes, that includes you, tech
start-up developer kicking back in your flair-bedecked WeWork cubicle.
We
don’t feel the crushing power of the Mitch & Murray pecking order
as palpably as the salesmen berated by Alec Baldwin feel it, because the
language of David Mamet has been replaced by the language of Dick
Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The modern Mitch & Murrays don’t browbeat us. They nudge us.
They convince us that a set of steak knives is a darn good outcome,
that it’s a promise kept rather than a threat delivered. Coffee’s not
just for closers. No, no … coffee is for EVERYONE. In fact, let’s put
some caffeine into everything you drink. Something nice and caffeinated
to wash down that big slice of office birthday cake.
Most importantly, today’s Mitch & Murray writ large — the system
of Mitch & Murrays — provides credit to the non-rich, essentially
limitless credit for anything that’s intangible or depreciates quickly,
anything that lets the non-rich FEEL rich. How about a nice dinner out?
New smartphone? You deserve it! How about a couple of years of graduate
school? More than a couple of years, shooting for a tenure track
position? [Heh, heh] I mean … why certainly, even better!
Go on, try the eggs. They’re delicious.
The pecking order is real. It is beautifully masked in modern human
society, but no less brutal and no less cruel than in the chicken coop.
How
do you escape the pecking order? How do you quit Mitch & Murray?
Well, you can make a lot of money. That’s the tried and true method.
Enough money to build a walled garden around you and yours, expanding it
as you can to take in others. F-you money. Somewhere between merely
rich and really rich should do the trick, depending on how many
generations you want to protect within those walls. Unfortunately,
that’s a big gulf these days, that distance between merely rich and
really rich, and it’s getting wider every day.
But there’s another way.
No
matter how much money we have or don’t have, we can reject the idea
that we can be Someone Who Matters to the World and instead embrace the
idea that we must be Someone Who Matters to the Pack. Now maybe your
pack IS the world. Probably not, but maybe. If it is, then be bold and
matter to the world. But more likely it’s your family. More likely it’s
your friends. More likely it’s your partners and employees. More likely
it’s your church. More likely it’s your school. More likely it’s your
country. It’s damn sure not your political party. It’s damn sure not an
oligarch.
Why should we reject this notion of being Someone Who
Matters to the World? Because that’s the shiny lure that the Nudging
State and the Nudging Oligarchy dangle in front of bright young things.
And bright not-so-young people, too. The shiny lure of mattering
is how they set the hook — which is debt — and that’s how they reel you
in. Because once you’ve got that hook in your mouth … once you’re up to
your eyeballs in debt … it’s soooo hard to ever get free. I know of
which I speak. So do a lot of people reading this note, I bet.
The
simple truth is that we can’t escape the pecking order. We can’t escape
economic inequality and the hard-wired impulses to brutality and
cruelty used to support inequality. Not for long, anyway. Walled gardens
never last.
“American Airlines Group
Inc. said it would shed 19,000 workers by Oct. 1 as the carrier
prepares to downsize to cope with the coronavirus pandemic’s blow to
travel demand, which isn’t expected to rebound for years. The
reductions include 17,500 furloughs of pilots, flight attendants,
mechanics and others, as well as 1,500 cuts from management and
administrative ranks. Airlines received $25 billion in federal aid to pay workers through the end of September to avoid mass layoffs. Unions and airline officials have advocated for another round of funds to keep employees on the job through March 2021.“
Doug
Parker, American Airlines CEO and Chairman of the Board, wrote a letter
to his employees today that pretty much defines high-functioning
sociopathy.
I’m going to reprint excerpts from that letter
– which is couched in the saccharine vocabulary of modern team-speak,
but is in truth a shakedown letter to employees and a ransom note to the
US government – and then I’m going to tell you a few things about Doug.
Dear fellow team members,
We respect and greatly appreciate the sacrifice these team members have made, and continue to make, for American and their fellow team members.
Even with those sacrifices, approximately 19,000 of our team members will be involuntarily furloughed or separated from the company on Oct. 1.
The one possibility of avoiding these involuntary reductions on Oct. 1 is a clean extension of the PSP.
If
you haven’t already done so, you can let your elected officials know
just how important a PSP extension is to you, your families and our
economic recovery.
The American Airlines team is no stranger to adversity, and in adversity, we always come through.
We will come out on the other side of this crisis. Until then, take heart that we will get through this together.
The professionalism and care this team has shown over the past six months has been nothing short of extraordinary. We are all American
Airlines, and we will survive, and one day, thrive again. Thank you for
all you are doing now, and tomorrow, to carry us through.
Know who’s not sweating the October 1 firing line? Know who’s surviving and thriving just fine, thank you very much?
Doug Parker, that’s who.
Here
are some fun facts about Doug Parker and his “leadership” of American
Airlines since he became Chairman and CEO of the company in 2013, after
its merger with US Airways. All of this (and more) can be found in a
long note I wrote on the airline bailout back in March.
alternet | The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with
politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most
capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich
who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated
extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at
least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of
legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among
those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage
runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as
the 2020 election looms.
The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists
who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a
small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are
the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the
micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the
major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the
key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.
Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to
themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay
packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the
social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners
and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges.
Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow
chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The
owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to
shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.
However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo
capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when,
for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians
whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse
capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government
spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways.
If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable
levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for
example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from
capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net
revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist
hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each
with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism
would disappear.
Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent
employees from forming just such political majorities. During its
recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts
between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics),
capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how
best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism
altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.
To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small
social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those
alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all
emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests
or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist
minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is
with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a
military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for
anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors.
Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established
minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large
anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military
dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such
alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus,
fascism has arrived.
During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by
imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains.
Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and
results of the capitalist economic system and especially its
characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To
that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with,
to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and
use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.
In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the
capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc”
with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the
capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the
anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally,
for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic
power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing
parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and
beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep
anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social
movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge
capitalism’s hegemony.
nakedcapitalism | The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband the city’s police
department on June 26, a little more than a month after George Floyd
died after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for
almost nine minutes. Chauvin, along with three other officers who were
there when Floyd was killed, has since been fired from the force and is
now awaiting trial for Floyd’s death.
The city council vote does not automatically mean Minneapolis will no
longer have a police department, of course. After a series of steps,
the public will be asked to vote in November on an amendment regarding
whether or not this course of action is the right one.
In June, a competing vision of police reform had been on the table in
Minneapolis. Just as community-led initiatives were gaining traction,
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced in June that his
department would be using “real-time data” to overhaul its operations.
The work would be driven not by local grassroots groups, but instead
by a Chicago-based company called Benchmark Analytics. Chief Arradondo
announced on June 10 that the Minneapolis Police Department “would
contract with Benchmark Analytics to identify problematic behavior
early,” according to local NBC affiliate KARE 11.
Red flags flew up instantly, however, when this arrangement was made public.
For one thing, Benchmark Analytics is a private firm that promises to
deliver an “all-in-one solution to advance police force management,”
according to the company’s website, primarily through the use of
algorithms that supposedly predict which officers may end up behaving
“problematic[ally]” on the job.
This approach was at odds with the reallocation of resources from the
police department to social services that many community leaders in
Minneapolis and other cities are pushing for.
Another bone of contention involved funding, as it was reported that
Benchmark Analytics’ reform model would be paid for by the Minneapolis
Foundation, a philanthropic group led by a former mayor of the city,
R.T. Rybak.
Activists, however, quickly seized upon the fact that not only did
the proposed contract with Benchmark Analytics appear to have
materialized without any public oversight, but Rybak himself is a
founding board member of the firm. This prompted the Racial Justice
Network to launch a petition criticizing “conflicts of interest” in the
Minneapolis Foundation’s involvement in police reform.
On June 25, Rybak announced that the Minneapolis Foundation “has
dropped its involvement.” A Minneapolis Police Department spokesman also
said that “the department is trying to find alternative funding” for
the Benchmark Analytics program; Mayor Jacob “Frey said if the city
doesn’t find other funders, it will see if the program can be done with
existing money.”
It seems unclear so far whether or not another funding source for
Benchmark Analytics has been found. But in a July 14 interview with
Minnesota Public Radio, while Mayor Frey did not mention Benchmark
Analytics by name, he did tell radio host Cathy Wurzer that his plans
for police reform will center on an “early intervention system that…
uses evidence and data gathered by the University of Chicago.” (This
description seems to align with the work of Benchmark Analytics, which
is owned in part by the University of Chicago.)
Frey told Wurzer that the data gathered is intended to help the
Minneapolis Police Department “weed… bad apples out” by predicting
“which officers are more likely to have some sort of critical incident
in the future.”
The push to bring in Benchmark Analytics was not the first time
either Rybak or the Minneapolis Foundation has attempted to use power
and wealth to push privatization plans on city residents—even though
they often claim they are acting on behalf of marginalized people of
color.
For evidence of how this approach can fail the public, look no further
than the Minneapolis Public Schools, where a similar cast of characters
and strategies have already been used to shake up the district’s
schools. These “reform” efforts took Minneapolis schools down a failed
path, and they stand as a warning sign of how attempts to rehabilitate
police forces, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, can be subject to the same
sort of misguided thinking and exploitation by opportunists.
Wizards at War VII - January 10, 2008 - I interpreted the current livestock manangement process now underway through a rather simplistic and brutal lens:
Population cull resulting from large scale thermonuclear war (Joseph George Caldwell)
The thesis of this book is that when fossil-fuel reserves deplete in a few years, the global human population of Earth will drop to about 500 million people or less -- a small fraction of the current six billion. The future is one of global ethnic war and the end of the modern industrialized world. The book examines a "minimal regret" population strategy that shows promise as a sustainable, environmentally sound basis for world population. This population consists of a single industrialized nation of five million people and a hunter-gatherer population of five million.
If I simply compare the level of investment and preparation dedicated to a zero-sum, minimal regret population scenario for resolving the earth's ecological crisis vs. the systematic crash aversion strategy outlined by Lester Brown - it appears that exponentially more has been invested in the former than in the latter......, (and levels of additional investment continue unabated)
Can America Survive -May 9, 2014 - my view/interpretation of the exact same material had shifted somewhat, but still nothing remotely approaching the sophistication with which we observe the intentional and systemic deflation of global human civilization by a small minority of global elites.
foundationwebsite | The answer, quite simply, is no – not in its current form for very long,
and perhaps not in any form at all for very long.This book describes why pending changes in energyavailability, cultural changes brought about by recent massive
immigration, the global populationexplosion, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, technology and materials
will combine to bring an end to the United Statesas we currently know it – soon.
In the past four centuries, the world human population has
skyrocketed, from about half a billion people to six billion at the present
time.Population projections from
various sources suggest that, barring a major change of some kind, the
population will continue to soar, to nine billion or more by the year
2050.In the past half-century – less
than a lifetime -- the population of the UShas exploded from about 150 million to over
270 million.This explosive growth
occurred despite the fact that fertilityrates in the US dropped to low levels – it is the result of
uncontrolled immigration.
The tremendous global populationincrease has been brought about by the development of technology
to utilize the energystored in fossil fuels, such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal.Petroleum and gas reserves will be
exhausted, however, by about 2050, and coal reserves will not last much beyond
that date if industrial development continues to expand worldwide.
Look around you.If
you live in the USor other economically developed country, every man-made thing you
see or see happening is a product of the expenditure of energy, and most of that energy is
derived from fossil fuels.To establish and maintain our present lifestyle requires
prodigious amounts of energy – an amount equivalent to about 8,000 kilograms of
oilannually
for each man, woman, and child living in the country.Pre-agricultural man lived “off the land,” consuming only the
bounty of nature.Agricultural man
could produce about 10 calories of energy with the expenditure of about one
calorie of energy.Industrial man, it
has been estimated, uses over ten calories of energy to produce a single
calorie of food!The present system is
not only exquisitely wasteful, but it is completely unsustainable.Most of what you see in the industrial world
is a transitory illusion made possible by a one-time windfall supply of energy
from fossil fuels that were accumulated over millions of years.When the fossil fuel reserves deplete in
about 50 years, the modern world will simply disappear along with them.
Whatever age you are, if you were raised in a town or a
small city, go back to where you lived as a child and observe what has happened
to the nearest natural field you played in.Chances are it is now urban sprawl – pavement, concrete, and steel.For each immigrant admitted to the US– legal or illegal – about an acre of natural
land is permanently destroyed, by roads, buildings, parking lots, houses,
schools, and other structures that take the land out of production – both for
wildlife and for agriculture.Last year
the US admitted 1.2 million more immigrants.That represents the complete destruction of another .6 million
acres of farmland, forest, and pastureland.Who cares?Certainly not the people in charge – they want more people
because it makes more money, and they are not particularly concerned with the
concomitant destruction of the environment!
Industrial activity at the massive scale of the present is
causing substantial changes to Earth’s environment. By now, everyone knows that
the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by
industrial activity is increasing substantially every year, and that the
planet’s climate and weather are controlled by these concentrations.Large-scale industrial activity is causing
substantial changes to the planet’s environment – land, air, water, and ecology.In view of the established relationship of the planet’s climate
and ecosystem to these concentrations, it is possible that man’s industrial
activity could cause dramatic changes in the sea level, and trigger another ice
age or create a lifeless “hothouse.”And for what good reason?What
is the good purpose of burning all the planet’s fossil fuelsas fast as possible, when it risks the destruction not only of
mankind but of much other life on the planet as well?The answer is “None.”This activity cannot continue at current levels without risking dire
consequences, even apart from the issue of depletion of fossil fuel reserves
and other nonrenewable resources.To continue to do so is the height of folly.
This book describes the current situation and its predicted
course.For the US– and any other overpopulated, multicultural, high-energy-use country -- the futureis one of war, social fragmentation, and dramatic population
reductions.Power will consolidate in a
single dominant ethnic group; others will be eliminated or reduced to slaveryor serfdom.
This book is not “just another book” on the human population
“problem.”Thousands of books have been
written on the problems of human population, energyand the environment.The real “problem” is that everyone is talking about the problem
and no one is doing anything about it.Proposed solutions to date have either failed or been ignored.Environmentalists and ecologists continue to
wring their hands while the planet croaks.This book identifies a radically new approach to the problem – one that
offers the promise of reducing the risk of ecological destruction to a low
level.It identifies an approach to
population policyanalysis and a course of action that will bring an end to the
massive environmental destruction being caused by human industrial activity and
significantly increase the likelihood of the survivalof the human and other species.
The author of this book has a career that includes both
militarydefenseanalysis and economic development.He worked for about fifteen years in defense applications and
about fifteen years in social and economic applications.His work in military applications includes
ballistic missilewarfare, nuclear weaponseffects, satellite ocean surveillance, naval general-purpose
forces, tactical air warfare, air/land battle tactics, strategy, civil defense, military
communications-electronics, and electronic warfare.His work in social and economic development applications includes
tax policyanalysis, agricultural policy
analysis, trade policy analysis, health, human resource development, demography, development of systems for
planning, monitoring and evaluationof social and economic programs, and educational management
information systems.He has lived and
worked in countries around the world.He holds a PhD degree in mathematical statisticsand is an expert in mathematical gametheory, statistics, operations research, and systems and software
engineering.The analysis presented in
this book is derived from years of experience related to, and years of analysis
of, the population problem.
The organization of this book follows a logical progression,
starting with a description of the current state of the planetand human population.Current trends in human population growth are identified.The relationship of human welfare to energyavailability is described, and the futureavailability of energy is discussed.The role of economicsto population growth is examined.Policies for determining what the human population size should be are
identified.A new approach to population
policyis introduced; it is called the “minimal-regret” approach.The likelihood of nuclear waris considered, and the damage that would result from a limited
nuclear waris
estimated.The impact of this war is
assessed for the United States, Canada, and other countries.An assessment is made of the likelihood that
the United States and various other countries will prevail after a nuclear
war.The relationship of the minimal-regret
approach to nuclear war strategies and the postattackenvironmentis discussed in detail.
The main text of the book is generally nontechnical – as
much as it can be for subjects (population growth, economics, energy, nuclear war) that are technical in
nature.Technical discussions are
presented in appendices.The appendices
include graphs and tables in support of the arguments presented in the text.
The research underlying the population policyapproach introduced in this book was conducted over a four-year
period.During the course of doing the
research, a large number of books and articles were reviewed and analyzed.The bibliography includes a list of about
600 books that were reviewed.To keep
the message of this book as succinct as possible, little description is given
of the content of these books.Instead,
the most relevant publications are simply listed. Little space is allocated to
describing the state of the environmentor other population policies – just enough to provide a context
for the new material presented.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...