Fracking Has Brought the World to the Brink of Disaster

From this video. The original graph contained global warming data through 2010 and predictions after that. The video author added the red dots, which show actual global warming data for 2011–2017. Note that the red dots are not just above all of the scenarios, including the "reference" or "no countermeasures" scenario. They're also above the 5%–95% band of uncertainty around the reference scenario. In other words, in 2010 the authors of the study considered each recorded data point from 2011 to 2017 to be "highly unlikely" at the time the study was published, each one in the 5% least likely of outcomes.

by Gaius Publius

It's worth looking at two recent pieces from the climate front, not for what they say as their main points, but for two smaller points buried within them.

Two Degrees Warming Is a Ceiling, Not a Target

The first piece is by Jeffrey Sachs, writing in Canada's Globe and Mail. His main argument is that Canada should abandon its plans to build pipelines to carry doomed Alberta tar sands to market and instead build out a smart energy grid connected to the U.S. energy grid to leverage and store  both nation's renewable power capabilities.

About that, Sachs writes:

Oil seems to make politicians lose their bearings. The get-rich-quick mentality or too-much-to-lose thinking is very hard to overcome. Thus, two of Canada’s most progressive leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, have both doubled down recently on Alberta oil sands and the pipelines to carry them to world markets. Whether Kinder Morgan’s controversial Trans Mountain expansion through British Columbia is built, or the company steps away from the project, remains uncertain. Either way, the truth is that Alberta oil sands have absolutely no place in a climate-safe world. Investing in them is almost surely to be investing in a future bankruptcy. [...]

One impulse wants to say to Kinder Morgan and TransCanada, “Okay, build the pipelines. Then we will bankrupt you.” But admirers and friends of Canada should speak honestly to friends. “Don’t waste your hard-earned money on the Trans Mountain and Keystone XL pipelines. Spend your money on sustainable projects tapping Canada’s abundant zero-carbon energy.”

Why is bankruptcy of these pipeline projects inevitable? In the long term, global warming will destroy all investment in fossil fuels (or fossil fuels will destroy us, I hasten to add). But in the short term, it's simple economics (my emphasis throughout):

The world already has vastly more proven reserves of oil and gas than it can safely burn, and a glut of reserves at far lower production costs than Alberta’s oil sands. The marginal costs of the oil sands are typically estimated to be around US$60 per barrel, yet the world will find itself awash in US$30-per-barrel oil as world demand is cut back in the future. There is no way that Alberta’s oil will maintain a profitable niche in a world that is ending its dependence on oil.

"Marginal cost" is the cost of producing additional oil after all needed infrastructure is in place. It's the cost of producing "the next barrel" in an ongoing operation. Clearly, $30 oil trumps $60 oil as energy producers chase each other in a desperate attempt to monetize as much of this doomed asset as they can.

Sachs points out that Canada is already a world leader in energy production from renewable sources: "The share of renewables in Canada’s power generation is already among the highest in the world, exceeded only by Norway, New Zealand, Brazil, and Austria, and roughly the same as Denmark. Yet far more is possible."

All good to know. Yet in that piece is this disturbing data point:

Even with the amount of global warming to date (1.1 degrees C above the preindustrial average temperature), the world is experiencing record hot temperatures, devastating heat waves, droughts, extreme floods, and increasingly frequent high-intensity storms and hurricanes. Climate attribution science links these extreme events to human-induced warming. With two degrees or more of warming, the world could well experience a devastating rise in the ocean level, as well as devastating losses and dislocations from crop failures, temperature-linked diseases, invasive species, forest fires, and mega-storms.

Ignore that Sachs' description of where global warming, as measured by atmospheric surface temperature, is today. "1.1 degrees C above the preindustrial average temperature" is way too low an estimation, as I and others have pointed out many times before. See "Global Warming Has Reached Nearly +1.5°C Already," or look at slides 2 and 3 here.

Slide 3 from this presentation showing global warming since 1850 relative to an 1850–1900 baseline. Slide 2 shows the same data as an animated GIF.

Concentrate instead on Sachs' description of a world with two degrees or more of warming: devastating sea level rise; devastating losses from famine, disease, fire and storms. He missed or under-emphasized other catastrophic effects, like economic collapses, the mass migrations we're already starting to see, and the endless wars they will inevitably cause (which we're also already starting to see).

In other words, two degrees of warming isn't a floor for our aspirations ("we hope to stay below two degrees warming"), but a ceiling for our safety ("above two degrees is a world of hurt").

Two Degrees Warming Is Less than a Decade Away

Which leads to the second piece I want to look at, one by Sharon Kelly at DeSmogBlog. It argues, quite effectively, that the "fracked gas" boom — oil and gas extraction from shale formations — took us down a deeply destructive path, not just because it revitalized a dying industry, but because it simultaneously tragically hobbled development of desperately needed renewable energy sources.

To see that point graphically, click to enlarge the two charts below and note what happened in each around 2008, or watch this brief video from the article for the fuller explanation.

What important for this discussion, though, is this (h/t Naked Capitalism for the find):

The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years, says [Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University] in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” which was posted online on April 4.

That's if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today.

As drastic as that sounds, crossing the "two degree warming threshold" in "just 10 to 15 years" underestimates the problem by nearly a factor of two. Two degrees warming is more likely to come in less than a decade, perhaps a lot less.

First, note again that his pre-Industrial baseline is likely too high. The world is closer today to +1.3 or +1.4°C warming than it is to +1.1°C if the actual lows of the pre-Industrial period are considered or accounted for. Dr. Michael Mann's recalculated baseline puts the warming number at +1.2°C as of 2015, and we've seen a burst of warming since. My baseline is a bit lower than his, which means I put "current warming" even higher.

Second, consider the acceleration that no model has successfully predicted. Everything is happening faster than anyone predicted. Click the link in the previous sentence to see a selection of the numerous articles making that point. Among them you'll find this:

Dangerous climate tipping point is ‘about a century ahead of schedule’ warns scientist
 
A slowing Gulf Stream system means catastrophic East Coast flooding will get much worse.

New research provides strong evidence that one of the long-predicted worst-case impacts of climate change — a severe slow-down of the Gulf Stream system — has already started.

The system, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), brings warmer water northward while pumping cooler water southward.

“I think we’re close to a tipping point,” climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress in an email. The AMOC slow down “is without precedent” in more than a millennium he said, adding, “It’s happening about a century ahead of schedule relative to what the models predict.”

"A century ahead of schedule" is your takeaway. Everything in the global warming news is "ahead of schedule" — much of it by a lot. Dr. Ingraffea makes the same point starting at 8:30 in the video. Every scenario in the 2010 paper he discusses, including the "reference" (no intervention) scenario, entirely underestimated what would happen in just the next eight years.

And not by a little — by a lot. The key graph is reproduced at the top. The original graph from the paper contained global warming data through 2010 and predictions after that. Dr. Ingraffea added the red dots in the modified graph above to show global warming data for 2011–2017. The red dots are not just above all of the predictions, including the "reference" scenario. They're above the band of uncertainty around the reference predictions — each one outside the range of outcomes that the models predict are the 95% most certain.

Put another way, the model predicted that each one of the actual 2011–2017 results were less than 5% likely to happen. Each one.

Yet here we are, with "very unlikely" warming staring us in the face, as we poke at a ceiling we should never go above. That's the real message for today.

GP
 

Clinton’s Speech Shows that Only Sanders is Fit for the Presidency

Since promising Gorbachev "no NATO expansion" the U.S. is pushing NATO to Russia's every European border. If you were the Russians, how would you feel? How would you feel if Russia had missiles in Mexico? Yet we're putting missiles in Poland. Want to put Clinton in charge of that volatile stew?

by Gaius Publius

Hillary Clinton recently gave what her campaign billed as a "foreign policy speech" (transcript here) but was really just a "foreign policy campaign event" — mainly an attack on Donald Trump. Almost all of the news that covered the event covered the anti-Trump effectiveness of it, including a rather fawning Rachel Maddow report.

But there was actual news from that speech, though you had to be looking at what Clinton said about herself, and not what she said about Trump, to find it. Here's Jeffrey Sachs on that speech. He starts with some background (my emphasis everywhere):

Clinton’s Speech Shows that Only Sanders is Fit for the Presidency

Hillary Clinton’s recent foreign policy speech was an attack on Donald Trump but was also a reminder that Clinton is a deeply flawed and worrisome candidate. Her record as Secretary of State was one of the worst in modern US history; her policies have enmeshed America in new Middle East wars, rising terrorism, and even a new Cold War with Russia. Of the three leading candidates, only Bernie Sanders has the sound judgment to avoid further war and to cooperate with the rest of the world.

Clinton is intoxicated with American power. She has favored one war of choice after the next: bombing Belgrade (1999); invading Iraq (2003); toppling Qaddafi (2011); funding Jihadists in Syria (2011 till now). The result has been one bloodbath after another, with open wounds until today fostering ISIS, terrorism, and mass refugee flows.

He then gets to the speech itself. Many have suspected that Clinton would be one of the most warlike modern presidents, on a par with George W. Bush. Sachs says that this speech confirms those suspicions:

In her speech, Clinton engaged in her own Trump-like grandiose fear mongering: “[I]f America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum - and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety - and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit.”

This kind of arrogance - that America and America alone must run the world - has led straight to overstretch: perpetual wars that cannot be won, and unending and escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran and others that make the world more dangerous. It doesn’t seem to dawn on Clinton that in today’s world, we need cooperation, not endless bravado.

Clinton professed her belief “with all my heart that America is an exceptional country - that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth.” Yet surely President Lincoln was speaking in moral terms, not in Clinton’s militaristic terms. Lincoln did not mean that the last best hope of earth should send NATO bombers into Libya, the CIA into Syria, and Special Ops forces into countless other countries. Surely Lincoln would have been more prudent than to push NATO expansion to Russia’s very doorstep in Ukraine and Georgia, thereby triggering a violent response from Russia and a new Cold War.

Sachs points to this part of Clinton's speech:

Clinton: Unlike [Trump], I have some experience with the tough calls and the hard work of statecraft. I wrestled with the Chinese over a climate deal in Copenhagen, brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia, twisted arms to bring the world together in global sanctions against Iran, and stood up for the rights of women, religious minorities and LGBT people around the world.

He then notes that this is a list of her failures. Back to Sachs:

Pure braggadocio. While Clinton “wrestled with China” over a climate deal, she failed to achieve one. While she “brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” she failed to head off the disastrous Gaza War in the first place. While she “negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia,” she championed a remarkably confrontational approach with Russia based on NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia and a new nuclear arms race that will cost American taxpayers more than $355 billion over a decade. While she claims to have “stood up for the rights of women [and] religious minorities,” her Syrian adventurism left Syria devastated, displaced 10 million people, and destroyed the religious minority communities she claimed to defend.

We'll come back to the main point in a minute, but let's pause at "wrestled with Chine over a climate deal." That was at the 2009 failed Copenhagen climate summit.

What Really Happened in Copenhagen in 2009

About Clinton and Obama's role at the Copenhagen climate conference, Sachs is far too kind. I I explained here, it's highly likely that Obama and Clinton actually sabotaged that conference. That's why the Chinese were so furious with him, publicly humiliated him...

“What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal … “

...and sent Obama and Clinton scurrying after them, chasing through the convention hall looking for the Chinese, after they learned that the Chinese had already left for the airport. Obama and Clinton needed some kind of confrontation with them that could be spun as a "meeting." From Clinton's remarks during the first debate (quoted here):

When we met in Copenhagen in 2009 and, literally, President Obama and I were hunting for the Chinese, going throughout this huge convention center, because we knew we had to get them to agree to something.

This is what "scurrying" looks like after a well deserved public humiliation. Now back to our original story.

Clinton Is As Dangerous As Trump

Sachs concludes:

Clinton rightly accused Trump of being unpredictable, yet Clinton is dangerously predictable. She is always trying to prove how tough she is, how tough America is, how exceptional is America’s power. Trump is unqualified to be President because he lacks both the necessary experience and good judgment. Clinton, by contrast, has the extensive experience that proves that she too lacks the good judgment to be President.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, not only offers a vastly better economic program than Clinton, but also a foreign policy based on wisdom, decency, and especially restraint. As a result, the American people trust Sanders rather than Clinton.

Thus his headline — on foreign policy "only Sanders is fit for the presidency," not Trump, not Clinton.

NATO, Russia and the Syrian Conflict — A Prelude to Disaster

I may give this more attention later, but just consider the possibilities of conflict with Russia under Clinton. She wants to be aggressive in Syria and topple Assad. There are multiple forces arrayed against him, and against each other, some backed by the Russians, some backed by other Mideast national actors — and some backed by the CIA while others are backed by the Pentagon. Imagine the mess.

Check out this incredible story from the Chicago Tribune:

CIA-armed militias are shooting at Pentagon-armed ones in Syria

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

"Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it," said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

We can't even keep our own selves straight. Now substitute "Russia" for "CIA" and "U.S." for "Pentagon" in the headline above. Add in a U.S.-enforced "no-fly zone" — which Clinton endorses —  and Turkish interests in Syria, which aren't often American interests, and the presence of Russian jets providing support for their surrogates on the ground. Spice the brew with energy conflicts, pipeline agreements to take oil and gas to the Mediterranean through Syria, and this whole thing could blow up in Ms. Clinton's hyper-aggressive face. And ours.

Finally, consider Russia's already angry point of view. When the Soviet Union fell, the deal with the U.S. was "No NATO Expansion." Here's what happened:

President George H.W. Bush promised Mikhail Gorbachev that if the Soviets let the Warsaw Pact go, Russia would not have to worry about NATO expansion. The U.S. responded to this deal by immediately taking the former Warsaw Pact states into NATO and then moving into former Soviet territory in the Baltics. Nobody could blame new entrants for wanting NATO entry, given their past of Soviet occupation. But, neither could anyone blame Russians for feeling betrayed by the U.S. breaking its word.

Gorbachev was furious (fuller discussion here). NATO is now aggressively expanding right to Russia's border (see map above), with the U.S. backed coup regime in Ukraine applying for membership. The U.S. is also building new missile facilities in Poland:

NATO Ratchets Up Missile Defense Despite Russian Criticism

LONDON — NATO’s European missile defense system will go live on Thursday when a base in Romania becomes operational. The next day, Poland is scheduled to break ground on its NATO missile-defense base.

The decision by the United States and its allies in Eastern Europe to proceed with ballistic missile defense in the face of increasingly loud Russian criticism is an important stage in the alliance’s new stance toward Moscow.

Those deployments will be coupled this spring with major military exercises in Poland and the Baltics, with significant American participation, and a beefed-up rapid reaction force of up to 5,000 troops....

We've already seen Ms. Clinton's fierce battle style on the campaign trail. She's a take-no-prisoners person. Do we really want Clinton to stir the international pot in the same way she stirred the Libyan pot?

Echoing Sachs, the future of the world could depend on whether we get Bernie Sanders into the White House, because neither of the other two choices are fit for the role of Commander in Chief. Quoting Sachs, "Clinton is intoxicated with American power."

We don't give our car keys to the intoxicated. What applies to Trump in Clinton's speech applies to Clinton herself. Either one of them, in my view, could get us all killed.

Put differently, Clinton now runs the Democratic Party, and you see how heavy-handed she is. Do you want to give her the whole federal government, and its military, with no one looking over her shoulder, no one to report to? The price for that mistake could be very great indeed. Russia and the U.S., both, are still nuclear nations.

GP
 

Fast Track Will Also Apply to TISA, the "Scariest Trade Deal Nobody's Talking About"

An army of lobbyists knocking down the doors of Congress (source; click image for the full effect)

by Gaius Publius

Fast Track is not just a path to TPP ... it's evil all on its own. There's now another leaked "trade" deal, called TISA, and Fast Track will "fast-track" that one too. Want your municipal water service privatized? How about your government postal service? Read on.

Most of the coverage of the Fast Track bill (formally called "Trade Promotion Authority" or TPA) moving through Congress is about how it will "grease the skids" for passage of TPP, the "next NAFTA" trade deal with 11 other Pacific rim countries. But as we pointed out here, TPA will grease the skids for anything the President sends to Congress as a "trade" bill — anything.

One of the "trade" deals being negotiated now, which only the wonks have heard about, is called TISA, or Trade In Services Agreement. Fast Track legislation, if approved, will grease the TISA skids as well.

Why do you care? Because (a) TISA is also being negotiated in secret, like TPP; (b) TISA chapters have been recently leaked by Wikileaks; and (c) what's revealed in those chapters should have Congress shutting the door on Fast Track faster and tighter than you'd shut the door on an invading army of rats headed for your apartment.

Congress won't shut that door on its own — the rats in this metaphor have bought most of its members — but it should. So it falls to us to force them. Stop Fast Track and you stop all these "trade" deals. (Joseph Stiglitz will explain below why I keep putting "trade" in quotes.)

What's TISA? It's worse than TPP. As you read the following, keep the word "services" in mind. TISA protects the right of big money players to make a profit from "services," any and all of them.

The Wikileaks Treasure Trove of TISA Documents

First, from the Wikileaks press release (my emphasis):

WikiLeaks releases today 17 secret documents from the ongoing TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) negotiations which cover the United States, the European Union and 23 other countries including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan & Israel -- which together comprise two-thirds of global GDP. "Services" now account for nearly 80 per cent of the US and EU economies and even in developing countries like Pakistan account for 53 per cent of the economy. While the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become well known in recent months in the United States, the TISA is the larger component of the strategic TPP-TISA-TTIP 'T-treaty trinity'. All parts of the trinity notably exclude the 'BRICS' countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The release coincides with TISA meetings at the ministerial level at the OECD in Paris today (3–5 June). The 'T-treaty trinity' of TPP-TISA-TTIP is also under consideration for collective 'Fast-Track' authority in Congress this month.

Note the breadth of the nations involved (highlighted above), the scale of economic activity covered — in the case of the U.S and E.U., 80% of economic activity — and the fact that TISA, like TPP, will be fast-tracked if Fast Track passes.

Click here to download or read the documents themselves. You'll notice, if you do, that the drafts are marked up with the positions of the negotiators, some of whom propose or agree with provisions, some of whom oppose them. Nowhere in these documents, however, are concerns of citizens addressed. These are agreements negotiated on behalf of corporations by governments to divide up the ways that money will be made.

I want to repeat that:

These are agreements negotiated on behalf of corporations by governments to divide up the ways that money will be made.

As noted, Fast Track will make the final agreements almost impossible to reject by the U.S. Congress. For this reason alone, Fast Track is evil all on its own. Let's look at some of the provisions of TISA.

TISA Will Make It Almost Impossible for Governments to Regulate Services

The problem with TISA? One is that it will make regulation of service activity — including financial services — almost impossible. Michael McAuliff at Huffington Post:

Wikileaks Drops Another Damning Trove Of Secret Trade Deal Documents

The latest trove of secret trade documents released by Wikileaks is offering opponents of the massive deals currently being crafted by the Obama administration more fodder to show that such agreements can impact United States laws and regulations.

The latest leak purports to include 17 documents from negotiations on the Trade In Services Agreement, a blandly named trade deal that would cover the United States, the European Union and more than 20 other countries. More than 80 percent of the United States economy is in service sectors.

According to the Wikileaks release, TISA, as the deal is known, would take a major step towards deregulating financial industries, and could affect everything from local maritime and air traffic rules to domestic regulations on almost anything if an internationally traded service is involved.

Leaked TISA documents include chapters on:

• Air transport services
• Competitive delivery services
• Domestic regulations
• Electronic commerce
• International maritime transport services
• Movement of natural persons
• Professional services
• Telecommunications services
• Financial services
• Transparency

and I'm not sure that's the complete set. It's just what we have in this release.

"Trade" Agreements, Regulations and Profit

The goal of all of these "treaties" is to protect the only thing being negotiated — the right of an investor or corporation to maximize profit from any country it wishes to operate in. I've always stated the concept this way:

In its simplest terms, “free trade” means one thing only — the ability of people with capital to move that capital freely, anywhere in the world, seeking the highest profit. It’s been said of Bush II, for example, that “when Bush talks of ‘freedom’, he doesn’t mean human freedom, he means freedom to move money.”

At its heart, free trade doesn’t mean the ability to trade freely per se; that’s just a byproduct. It means the ability to invest freely without governmental constraint. Free trade is why factories in China have American investors and partners — because you can’t bring down manufacturing wages in Michigan and Alabama if you can’t set up slave factories somewhere else and get your government to make that capital move cost-free, or even tax-incentivized, out of your supposed home country and into a place ripe for predation.

(By the way, "treaty" is hardly the word for these agreements, since nations are never negotiating them on behalf of their citizens. Nations are negotiating them on behalf of the corporations and investors who pull their strings. That's why citizens can't see them until they're signed, while corporate lobbyists have seats at the negotiating table.)

Here's Joseph Stiglitz on how and why these agreements are an attack on regulation:

On the Wrong Side of Globalization

... In general, trade deals today are markedly different from those made in the decades following World War II, when negotiations focused on lowering tariffs. As tariffs came down on all sides, trade expanded, and each country could develop the sectors in which it had strengths and as a result, standards of living would rise. Some jobs would be lost, but new jobs would be created.

Today, the purpose of trade agreements is different. Tariffs around the world are already low. The focus has shifted to “nontariff barriers,” and the most important of these — for the corporate interests pushing agreements — are regulations. Huge multinational corporations complain that inconsistent regulations make business costly. But most of the regulations, even if they are imperfect, are there for a reason: to protect workers, consumers, the economy and the environment.

What’s more, those regulations were often put in place by governments responding to the democratic demands of their citizens. Trade agreements’ new boosters euphemistically claim that they are simply after regulatory harmonization, a clean-sounding phrase that implies an innocent plan to promote efficiency. One could, of course, get regulatory harmonization by strengthening regulations to the highest standards everywhere. But when corporations call for harmonization, what they really mean is a race to the bottom.

A race to the bottom of what? The least regulation — governmental interference in profit-seeking — that they can get away with. These deals really are just about the money. Stiglitz continues:

When agreements like the TPP govern international trade — when every country has agreed to similarly minimal regulations — multinational corporations can return to the practices that were common before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts became law (in 1970 and 1972, respectively) and before the latest financial crisis hit. Corporations everywhere may well agree that getting rid of regulations would be good for corporate profits. Trade negotiators might be persuaded that these trade agreements would be good for trade and corporate profits. But there would be some big losers — namely, the rest of us.

These high stakes are why it is especially risky to let trade negotiations proceed in secret. All over the world, trade ministries are captured by corporate and financial interests. And when negotiations are secret, there is no way that the democratic process can exert the checks and balances required to put limits on the negative effects of these agreements.

Why are these agreements always negotiated in secret these days? Because they're so toxic. TISA is yet another, perhaps the worst one. And forced deregulation may not be its worst aspect. Here's another reason to regard TISA with suspicion — forced privatization of government-supplied services.

TISA Could Force Privatization of Government Services, Like Water

Privatizing government services is a major goal of the "neo-liberal project" — something always negotiated, for example, by the enlightened elites at the IMF and World Bank before they bail out a country with too much debt, like Greece. Here's the Hellenic Shipping News, quoting a WSJ article:

Greece will proceed with the privatization of the country’s main port of Piraeus, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis plans to tell his eurozone counterparts at a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, backtracking on previous statements from the new leftist government that had pledged to freeze the deal, senior Greek government officials said.

The U-turn comes as Greece’s new leftist, Syriza-led coalition government scrambles to reach a financing deal with international creditors that will keep the country from running out of cash in coming weeks and potentially defaulting on its debts. Since being voted into power just over two weeks ago, the new government has set a collision course with its European creditors by promising to roll back many of the austerity measures and reforms—such as privatizations—that Greece has undertaken in the past five years to secure billions of euros in aid.

I said "neo-liberal project" for a reason. This is not the crazy right wing; these privatization projects are undertaken by people like Rahm Emanuel, backed by people like ex-Wall Street banker William Daley — both of whom are Clinton-Obama–associated Democrats. Parking control is a government service. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel sold that to "investors," many of them foreign. Rahm Emanuel is a "liberal," or more accurately, a classic neo-liberal.

The New Democrat wing of the Democratic Party is also its "New Liberal" (aka neo-liberal) wing. Its members serve Money, have from DLC days onward, just like Republicans do, and privatizing services is a great way to make even more money for people who love only money. It's why the government Postal Service, for example, is being taken apart by both parties.

In Canada they're worried that TISA will force water privatization:

Public Services International has sounded the alarm about [TISA] negotiations in its new report, TISA Versus Public Services: The trade in services agreement and the corporate agenda.

Mitch Jones at Food and Water Watch explains, "Negotiations for TISA began in 2012 when a group of 20 World Trade Organization (WTO) members formed the 'Really Good Friends of Services' (no, I’m not making that up). These Really Good Friends decided to negotiate a new deal outside of the normal WTO framework."

He highlights, "Under TISA, privatization of local water systems would be made easier, and fights against privatization would be made harder."

The report says, "Remunicipalization is significant because it demonstrates that past decisions are not irreversible. ..."

"Decisions are not reversible" is its own topic. David Dayen discussed that a bit in this piece; look for references to "standstill" clauses.

The Road to "Corporate Domination"

Dayen is rarely given to exaggerated prose, yet under a headline referring to TISA as "The Scariest Trade Deal Nobody's Talking About," even he is forced to write:

You begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government when you talk about TiSA, but it really would clear the way for further corporate domination over sovereign countries and their citizens.

And "corporate domination" can only mean domination by the very very wealthy, who use corporate power to feed off the rest of us — my own contribution to exaggerated prose.

Neo-liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs, quoted by ex-federal regulator Bill Black here, agrees, calling these same people and their moral environment "bluntly ... pathological":

I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

That's his contribution to exaggerated prose.

Sachs knows his way around the neo-liberal street, having worked it himself. For example, according to Wikipedia, as an adviser to the Polish government "Sachs and IMF economist David Lipton advised the rapid conversion of all property and assets from public to private ownership." It's not like he's not a fan of the project; it's that he's now appalled by the people who benefit from it.

International agreements like TISA are important tools in an expanded power grab by the hyper-wealthy people who buy and benefit from our elections, and government negotiators are their agents. The only disagreements at the negotiating table involve which country's predator (Nestlé, say) gets to eat which other country's prey (water rights in Oregon, for example). "Trade" agreements empower the predators under color of law.

Fast Track Is Evil All On Its Own

Your bottom line — if Fast Track passes, anything that any President can present to Congress as a "trade deal," for the next three to six years, will almost certainly pass. Fast Track forces the legislative calendar (no delays), forbids filibusters and amendments, and allows just up-or-down votes.

TPP, TTIP (a trans-Atlantic agreement also called TAFTA) and TISA all fall under the "Fast Track" umbrella. But I guarantee, if Fast Track passes, there will be more deals like these. Fast Track is a golden opportunity, and those who love gold, or serve those who do — that's you, Nancy Pelosi — will put it to very good use.

GP

The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."

How the Very Very Rich Fly to St. Andrews

by Gaius Publius

Thom Hartmann has a TV show, The Big Picture, which airs every weekday. Often The Big Picture includes a segment called "Conversations with Great Minds," an excellent watch if you're as much a fan of thoughtful talk as I am. Recently Hartmann interviewed Richard Eskow for his "Conversations" feature, and the result is an excellent two-part video that covers a number of topics.

I want to focus on Part 2, and in particular a section near the end. The whole of Part 2 is embedded below and worth watching all the way through. But notice especially the discussion that starts at 10:15. (If you're interested in seeing both segments, Part 1 is here.)

First the video:

And now a taste of Eskow's comments, from a rough transcript (my emphasis):

[HARTMANN] The Swiss bank UBS says that four one-thousandth of one percent, 0.004% of the world's adult population, controls $30 trillion. The GDP of the United States is $15 trillion. This is about 13% of the entire planet's total wealth. ...How do we deal with this in this age of globalization, when we have American corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars offshore, you've got American billionaires with trillions of dollars offshore? ...

[ESKOW] It's not a simple problem. But one of the things we do first of all is we recognize the scope of the problem and we don't let people scare us away from talking about it, saying "It's class warfare" or "It's demonizing the wealthy" or whatever. ...

200,000 people isn't a lot. 200,000 people is a large tribe or a small town, first of all. Secondly, if you just break out the number of those people that are in Europe or the United States, you've got ... 10,000? United States maybe 4 or 5,000? ... these are the social circles. ...

This goes back to why I think that our political and economic system is a study in anthropology and sociology, as well as economics and political science. This is a little community, Thom. These people know each other.

These people have shared values and those values are inculcated into the Tim Geithners and the Barack Obamas and the Bill Clintons — and everybody else, or most people, who move up the political ladder do so by hobnobbing with these people. And there is a very distinct tribal kind of culture that develops, with its own folkways, its own values, its own mythology. And until we understand that and then extrapolate that out to the global scene, we're not going to be able to address it.

Every word a true one.

Eskow examined the tribal culture of insiders in excellent detail in a recent and excellent episode of Virtually Speaking. Earlier parts of the "Conversations" segment above cover why both Democrats and Republicans want to cut Social Security. This comment by Eskow at 3:10 is a harbinger of his comments nearer the end:

The culture of Washington, the culture of top politicians and the people they hobnob with and raise money from is a culture that wants to see Social Security cut, so the public has to constantly push back on that.

Eskow also agrees with many of us that there's a split in the Democratic party among insiders, some of whom "get it," get what we've been talking about on these pages and elsewhere; some of whom think that they need simply to "change their rhetoric" (messaging, words, empty promises); and some whom still "have no clue." As I said, a fascinating discussion. Give a listen if you can.

Now let's look further at this "tribe."

Jeffrey Sachs on the Pathological Wealthy

If the rich are a tribe, we should be able to characterize its culture. In a striking piece at Naked Capitalism, Bill Black, the UMKC economist and S&L banking regulator, quotes Jeffrey Sachs on the culture of the Wall Street wealthy.

Here is Sachs, speaking to a gathering at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve in April 2013. In answer to a question, he says this about the character of many individuals on Wall Street and in regulatory roles. Note — much of this is about individuals, humans he knows personally (my emphasis and some reparagraphing):

I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structures need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably.

These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I’m afraid to say, and no party is – I mean there’s – if not both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now, and it’s very, very unhealthy.

Sachs, a "connected, respected insider" (Yves Smith, quoted in the Black article), is a "controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics" (Yves Smith again) and not unfriendly to the Clintons and the Rubins of the world. After all, he was invited to speak at the Philadelphia Fed. He's a former "tough love" adviser to troubled national economies, a globally recognized orthodox economist. Nevertheless, he's appalled by the immorality of people he's met personally, by the "human interactions" he's had with them. "You feel it on the individual level right now, and it’s very, very unhealthy."

A Tribe of Sociopaths — The Paramount Problem of the Age

This is what Eskow means by a "distinct tribal kind of culture that develops, with its own folkways, its own values, its own mythology." They know each other. They tell each other stories of their Randian goodness. They believe in their own "just deserts." Their shared values tell them their greed and aggression trump any need to be moral (there's a word for that). In their hunt for more billions, "nothing should stop them" (Sachs). When he calls their moral environment "pathological," he means that "in a quite literal sense."

The global rich are a tribe of sociopaths, narcissists, and megalomaniacs. Also spoiled and "absolutely out of control" children. You see the same pathology when reading about the Kochs; for example, in this excellent Rolling Stone piece. As Sachs says, this isn't about the left and the right. It's about the rich and the rest.

Their rule is near total, yet their brutal culture and ways are invisible to us. We recognize wealthy players on sports teams, for example, but couldn't name one owner, who writes their checks. I strongly suspect that's by design. The rich act like a criminal biker gang, yet dress in suits and smile at kittens and kids, just like the rest of us do. If they looked like what they were, we'd jail them immediately. Some would fry for murder, and should.

As I wrote elsewhere:

Our image of the very very rich — MacMansions, only scaled up; nice cars, only pricier; like us, but with more toys — is very very wrong. ... They never ride first class because they never fly commercial ... they own airplanes. They don't own homes, they own estates — so many of them in fact that not one is "home" in the normal sense. Now extend that — for most of these people, not one country is home either. ... Real Money lives in the world, everywhere, all of it. And most are loyal to none of it. ...

[Yet they] control most aspects of public life. Whether you live poorly or well, you work so they can be richer. You're fired when they want you fired. You're killed — in their wars; by their poisons; by their unaffordable health care system; by your poverty; by their police — when they want you to die.

Like fish in water, you live with their greed every day. You watch their propaganda (we call it "entertainment"). You vote for their candidates. Their touch and reach is everywhere, yet they're invisible to us. The key to their destruction is to expose their lives to view. 

In a demonstrable way, life on this planet is under the control of fewer than 200,000 people (Eskow) — at the top, a lot fewer than that — all part of a connected self-recognizing tribe whose culture is pathological (Sachs). The truth could not be more blunt or more plain. It's why we're careening off so many cliffs.

This is the paramount problem of the age, and it must be solved — in the context of climate, for the sake of the species itself. And like Sachs, I mean that "in a quite literal sense."

GP

Wait... Why Didn't Voters Vote?

Many of the Democrats who lost their seats-- or nearly lost their seats-- Tuesday had nothing to offer voters, which helps explain why voters stayed away. DCCC Chair Steve Israel had a purposeful "mystery meat" strategy for his collection of lousy candidates-- almost all of whom lost. That excuse for a strategy calls for candidates to say nothing controversial that might make someone (like a Republican) not want to vote for them. Of course, by offering nothing, you not only don't get Republicans to vote for Democrats, you discourage Democrats to even both. So they didn't turn out. That's why consummate centrist Mark Warner came within a few thousand votes of losing his seat to a ridiculous party hack who didn't even bother airing any TV commercials in October and never thought he had a serious chance to win. Democratic voters were just plain not inspired by Warner's insipid, contentless, mealy-mouthed, doctrinaire centrism. Populist and progressive candidates like Jeff Merkley, Al Franken and Brian Schatz won with sizable majorities in their states because they had records of standing up-- unabashedly so-- for working families... and they ran on those records.

working families didn't find much reason to vote

Other than John Rockefeller, who is retiring in January, Mark Warner is the richest member of the Senate, with a net worth of $95.13 million. He's not exactly a raging populist. Merkley and Schatz are blue color guys. We need more like them in the Senate-- a lot more... and a lot fewer multimillionaires. Yesterday Jeffrey Sachs won the day with his HuffPo piece, Understanding and Overcoming America's Plutocracy. Mark Warner should read it before he tries to persuade the Clintons to let him be Hillary's VP nominee. When Sachs explained that what unites the billionaire financiers of the two parties is greater than what divides them, he could have just as well been talking about the super-rich members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. "The much-discussed left-right polarization is not polarization at all," he wrote. "The political system is actually relatively united and working very effectively for the richest of the rich."

There has never been a better time for the top 1%. The stock market is soaring, profits are high, interest rates are near zero, and taxes are low. The main countervailing forces-- unions, antitrust authorities, and financial regulators-- have been clobbered.

Think of it this way. If government were turned over to the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Bechtel, and Health Corporation of America, they would have very little to change of current policies, which already cater to the four mega-lobbies: Big Oil, Wall Street, defense contractors, and medical care giants. This week's election swing to the Republicans will likely give these lobbies the few added perks that they seek: lower corporate and personal tax rates, stronger management powers vis-à-vis labor, and even weaker environmental and financial regulation.

The richest of the rich pay for the political system-- putting in billions of dollars in campaign and lobbying funds-- and garner trillions of dollars of benefits in return. Those are benefits for the corporate sector-- financial bailouts, cheap loans, tax breaks, lucrative federal contracts, and a blind eye to environmental damages -- not for society as a whole. The rich reap their outsized incomes and wealth in large part by imposing costs on the rest of society.

...The evidence is overwhelming that politicians vote the interests of their donors, not of society at large. This has now been demonstrated rigorously by many researchers, most notably Princeton Professor Martin Gilens. Whether the Republicans or Democrats are in office, the results are little different. The interests at the top of the income distribution will prevail.

Why does the actual vote count for so little? People vote for individuals, not directly for policies. They may elect a politician running on a platform for change, but the politician once elected will then vote for the positions of the big campaign donors. The political outcomes are therefore oriented toward great wealth rather than to mainstream public opinion, the point that Gilens and others have been finding in their detailed research. (See also the study by Page, Bartels, and Seawright).

It's not easy for the politicians to shun the campaign funds even if they want to. Money works in election campaigns. It pays for attack ads that flood the media, and it pays for elaborate and sophisticated get-out-the-vote efforts that target households at the micro level to manipulate who does and does not go to the polls. Campaigning without big money is like unilateral disarmament. It's noble; it works once in a while; and it is extremely risky. On the other hand, taking big campaign money is a Faustian bargain: you may win power but lose your political soul.

Yes, yes, yes, of course there are modest differences between the parties, and there is a wonderful, truly progressive wing of the Democratic Party organized in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but it's marginalized and in the minority of the party. So many Democrats have their hand in the fossil-fuel cookie jar of Big Oil and Big Coal that the Obama administration couldn't get even the Democrats, much less the Republicans, to line up for climate-change action during the first year of the administration. And how do Wall Street money managers keep their tax privileges despite the public glare? Their success in lobbying is due at least as much to Democratic Party Senators beholden to Wall Street as it is to Republican Senators.

Is there a way out? Yes, but it's a very tough path. Plutocracy has a way of spreading like an epidemic until democracy itself is abandoned. History shows the wreckage of democracies killed from within. And yet America has rallied in the past to push democratic reforms, notably in the Progressive Era from 1890-1914, the New Deal from 1933-1940, and the Great Society from 1961-1969.

All of these transformative successes required grass-roots activism, public protests and demonstrations, and eventually bold leaders, indeed drawn from the rich but with their hearts with the people: Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. Yet in all of those cases, the mass public led and the great leaders followed the cause. This is our time and responsibility to help save democracy. The Occupy Movement and the 400,000 New Yorkers who marched for climate-change control in September are pointing the way.

Working class voters can smell that Jeff Merkely is part of that-- and that Mark Warner is not... and not even close. 




UPDATE: Republicans Are Laughing At Israel And The Beltway Democratic Leaders

Looks like mealy-mouthism didn't work for the pathetic Republican wing of the Democratic Party (aka, the self-proclaimed centrists like DCCC chair Steve Israel, DSCC chair Michael Bennet and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They should all be fired and made to sit in the corner and keep their traps shut. Israel, with his mystery meat "strategy" of keeping candidates from talking about a progressive Democratic economic vision-- which he abhors-- was the biggest failure of all. Republican strategists can't stop laughing.

Republican operatives still relishing their Senate election victory offered some unlikely criticism of their Democratic opponents’ campaigns Thursday.

“They sidelined the president,” Rob Collins, the Executive Director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) told reporters at a backslapping post-election briefing. Instead, Collins argued, Democrats shouldn’t have been scared off by Republican attempts to tie Obama to their candidates.

Collins said NRSC polling had long identified the economy as the issues voters cared about most, and one where Democrats stood to gain. “We felt that that was their best message and they sidelined their best messenger,” he said. Collins added that in many states, Democratic candidates had positive stories to tell. “In Colorado, unemployment is 5.1 percent and they never talked about it,” he added.

“They were so focused on independents that they forgot they had a base,” Collins said of Democratic Senate candidates. “They left their base behind. They became Republican-lite.”

...“I can’t remember a Democrat who spent any kind of money in a significant way talking about the economy,” he added. “If I had a choice between talking about the number one issue we saw in every single poll, and talking about a single issue, I would be talking about the number one issue.”

A friend of mine, a white southern Democrat and a local elected official told me that the career-oriented Beltway Democratic elite are losing the middle class. "Too much narrow issues and not broad economic statements," said of the campaign Steve Israel and Michael Bennet (and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) put together. "The middle class is scared; they're afraid. How many of us wake up every day and even though we have jobs, wonder if you got fired, how would you make ends meet? Wages in general don't allow cushions to anyone. A medical problem can bankrupt you. People with children feel this fear every day... not enough solid broad economic platforms to the people that are going to vote."

Monday Bits-- Colbert's Sister Going To Congress? Will Nestlé And Wall Street Ever Be Held To Account?

PPP shows Elizabeth Colbert Busch opening a more significant lead (16% as of this afternoon) over disgraced ex-Governor Mark Sanford in the first district congressional special election. Voting is on May 7th in the carefully gerrymandered red district, who's voters gave Obama 40.2% in November, while right next door in the 6th district-- into which the state's racist legislature dumped every African-American voter they could find-- Obama won 70.9%. Although John Boehner endorsed Sanford on April 9, less than a week later the NRCC, which he controls, announced that due to Sanford's on-going behavior issues, it would no longer support him or invest in his race, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars being poured into the district by the DCCC and their House Majority PAC. The new DCCC as:



I don't know if Colbert Busch will wind up voting with Republicans half the time. but it's what I suspect from watching the campaign. Still, that's better than voting with Republicans 100% of the time, which is what we can expect from Sanford. She's already come out in favor of marriage equality and her approach to Chained CPI was pretty good as well: “Not only does President Obama’s plan fail to put our finances back in order, it would cut benefits for our seniors, which is wrong. I believe that our seniors earned their Social Security by putting money away every single paycheck for a lifetime-- knowing that they could count on Social Security when they retired... Simply put, Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit, and politicians should keep their hands off the trust fund."

Our Contest Ended Today

Nick Ruiz (FL) wound up with 50 donors so he won the $1,000 PAC check from Blue America. Daylin Leach (PA) had 40 donors, Carl Sciortino (MA) had 38 donors, Andy Hounshell (OH) 31 donors and Ken Sanders (TX) 29. The average donor contributed approximately $53. And the Saving Social Security page now has $9,140 on it. We randomly selected one contributor to thank with the 311 platinum award disc. And that winner is Joyce Bullock from Glenside, PA, who contributed $12.


Wall Street And It's DC Allies Will Enslave Us All... If We let Them

Jeffrey Sachs isn't a radical. He's a kind of mainstream economics professor at Columbia University. The audio on this video was shot April 17 at a conference, "Fixing the Banking System for Good." It sounds like he's almost come around to a less corporate/establishment point of view about how corrupt and criminal Wall Street is, even to the point of advocating out loud the need for "separating the politicians from the (Wall Street) crooks, but maybe that's so close together that they can't actually be separated; maybe it's just the same community." Maybe?

I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that They have no responsibility to pay taxes, they have no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to people… counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent and they have a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

...[T]he financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I’m afraid to say… and both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption, as far as I can see, [is] everywhere...

And Speaking Of Antisocial, Nihilistic Greed... Nestlé

Nestlé has been claiming for some time that it invented the medical uses of herbs that have been used medicinally for centuries. And they want patents.

The world’s largest food company, Nestlé, is seeking a patent on the use of Nigella sativa to prevent food allergies, claiming the plant seed and extract when they are used as a food ingredient or drug. Commonly known as habbat al-barakah in Arabic, and frequently called “black seed,” “black cumin” or “fennel flower” in English, Nigella sativa is an ancient food and medicinal crop.

The Swiss giant’s claims appear invalid, as traditional uses of Nigella sativa clearly anticipate Nestlé’s patent application, and developing country scholarship has already validated these traditional uses and further described, in contemporary scientific terms, the very medicinal properties of black seed that Nestlé seeks to claim as its own “invention."

It was already being used in King Tut's time, when the Swiss were still sheltering and shivering around open fires in Alpine caves, gnawing on bones.

In claiming use of Nigella sativa against food allergies, Nestlé’s scientists have not innovated beyond what was already known in traditional medicine from Egypt to India and beyond. Moreover, prior to Nestlé’s claim, researchers in those countries used formal scientific methods to demonstrate the efficacy of traditional use of black seed to treat allergy symptoms.

Those simple facts, however, have not deterred Nestlé from advancing its claim. In November 2011, Nestlé’s patent application in Europe was published. Other national (or regional) applications may exist but have yet to be published. Recently, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) released a search of scientific literature related to the application, and found problems with Nestlé’s claim to have made an invention, citing some of the same research that is noted in this report. The PCT opinion, however, is not binding on national patent offices, and Nestlé may submit modified claims. Thus, while the opinion is a blow to Nestlé’s application, it doesn’t mean that the claims are dead.

Like well-known biopiracy cases before it, such as patents on uses of neem, Nestlé’s unashamed attempt to appropriate traditional knowledge reflects an ethical lapse and shows profound problems with the company’s intellectual property practices. It can be hoped that Nestlé’s claim will be turned down by patent authorities, but the fact that patent claims over traditional knowledge that preceded it have result in patents shows that intellectual property offices sometime share industry’s disrespect for traditional knowledge. Indeed the fact that a corporation with the resources of Nestlé would pursue a patent on such an obviously pilfered “invention” at all is indicative of the need to improve patent review standards so that such applications are not worth filing in the first place.

Fighting for people over profits is how the blog SumOfUs introduced Nestlé’s ambitious claims.

In a paper published last year, Nestlé scientists claimed to “discover” what much of the world has known for millennia: that nigella sativa extract could be used for “nutritional interventions in humans with food allergy."

But instead of creating an artificial substitute, or fighting to make sure the remedy was widely available, Nestlé is attempting to create a nigella sativa monopoly and gain the ability to sue anyone using it without Nestlé’s permission. Nestlé has filed patent applications-- which are currently pending-- around the world.

Prior to Nestlé's outlandish patent claim, researchers in developing nations such as Egypt and Pakistan had already published studies on the same curative powers Nestlé is claiming as its own. And Nestlé has done this before-- in 2011, it tried to claim credit for using cow’s milk as a laxative, despite the fact that such knowledge had been in Indian medical texts for a thousand years.

Don’t let Nestlé turn a traditional cure into a corporate cash cow.

We know Nestlé doesn’t care about ethics. After all, this is the corporation that poisoned its milk with melamine, purchases cocoa from plantations that use child slave labor, and launched a breast milk substitute campaign in the 1970s that contributed to the suffering and deaths of thousands of babies from poor communities.

Is Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson the reason we can't have any serious discussion of the functioning of government?

Would it help if "No Relation" occasionally read a book by someone peddling something other than the mindless platitudes of conventional economic wisdom? You know, I really don't think so.

by Ken

Okay, I've overdramatized. No, of course, Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson isn't the reason we can't have any serious discussion of the functioning of government. He's much more a symptom than a cause of the problem(s). But if you don't think the problem is made worse by having a venue as august as the Washington Post offering license to pontificate on finance and economics to someone who knows, well, perhaps less about these subjects than anyone on the planet, then we disagree.

(It's true that the Post maintains a whole roster of people as inexpert on the subjects they're engaged to analyze. This is what I mean by "No Relation" being more a symptom than a cause of the problem. They've got a whole lot of symptons there.)

In my Wednesday post, "Step right up and vote for that 'transparent faker' Willard Inc. and the unknowable contents of his campaign Mystery Box," writing about the 13-installment symposium on the election published in the current (November 8) issue of the New York Review of Books (in that post I also included a laboriously assembled linked list of the 13 individual pieces), I ventured that "Jeffrey Sachs's piece may be the most important" of the 13 and formally reserved the right to return to it. Tonight we're returning back to it.

I characterized the subject tackled by Sachs, who's director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (and author most recently of The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity), as --

the insanity, built into our political system, of operating the U.S. government, "the world’s largest enterprise, with $3.7 trillion in outlays, $2.5 trillion in revenues, and 2.1 million civilian workers," and "also the most complex, operating in every sector of the world’s largest economy, in every country of the world, and in every possible setting: markets, technology development, social programs, basic science, and much, much more" without any kind of planning beyond our day-to-day seat-of-the-pants partisan brinksmanship.

Sachs naturally explains his case way better than I can:

The US federal government is the world's largest enterprise, with $3.7 trillion in outlays, $2.5 trillion in revenues, and 2.1 million civilian workers. It is also the most complex, operating in every sector of the world's largest economy, in every country of the world, and in every possible setting: markets, technology development, social programs, basic science, and much, much more.

A behemoth of this size requires goals, plans, strategies, and budgets that look forward for years, even decades. This is especially true in our era, when unprecedented shifts in technology, demography, the world economy, and the physical environment require deep structural changes in our economic and social life. Old skills and sectors are obsolete. The energy, health, and education systems require large-scale overhauls. And yet we operate almost blindly, month by month, fiscal cliff by fiscal cliff, without any clear pathway ahead.

Imagine running the largest global Fortune 500 company, Royal Dutch Shell (at around one fifth the federal government revenues), without plans, strategies, and budgets. Some companies may try it but they don't last long. The federal government has the advantage of the Federal Reserve's printing press (which has been covering much of the deficit as the Federal Reserve buys up Treasury bills and bonds) as well as a constitutional monopoly on power. Still, these should be no excuse for running the government like a bumper-car derby, pushed and pulled by the random collisions of competing interests and factions.

To put it mildly, our system isn't set up terribly well to accomplish much of this sort of planning.

The game of politics has almost completely overshadowed the hard work of governing. Most of the time of President Obama and his congressional counterparts is taken up by campaigning and fund-raising, posturing and messaging, negotiating and horse-trading on short-term transactions, and occasionally debating real issues of importance, such as government's responsibility for supporting the poor and elderly. Yet none of this political activity substitutes for public management, which means the arduous task of defining goals, and then planning, strategizing, and budgeting toward them.

We've gotten so used to the breakdown of actual governing that the public is not aware of what's gone. The prevailing interpretation is that our government is broken because of political gridlock. There is some truth to that, of course. Yet one of the main reasons that it's gridlocked is that running the government is now viewed as nothing more than an extension of electoral politics, which in turn amounts to little more than a clash of competing interest groups that finance the politicians and try to keep their teams in power. If the government were approached differently, as a complex venture requiring serious planning, budgeting, and strategy, the process itself of governing would actually rescue the government from the current political trap that keeps it so dysfunctional.

"Some government agencies still work brilliantly," Sachs says, citing NASA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But they're "not the norm," he says.

The government is mostly led by appointees or elected officials with little technical knowledge, less management experience, and an expected job duration of a few years at most, often culminating in a lobbying position on K Street after leaving government. The alternation of power between the two political parties does almost nothing to compel better managerial performance.

As our problems have gotten more complex in a more global, technological, and environmentally unstable era, the two parties have adopted increasingly naive ideological positions to justify their chronic managerial failures.

"The Republicans' answer, of course, is that no management is needed: the market will do it."

Their increasingly absurd elixir of tax cuts and deregulation is supposed to solve any problem: poverty, pollution, unemployment, health care, climate change, and even national security. Fortunately, it looks like the public is not buying this nonsense.

And the Democrats?

Sadly, President Obama and the congressional Democrats have had their own mythology that the economic problems will generally sort themselves out without long-term plans and with short-term patches such as a bit more demand stimulus. Democrats rightly believe in government, but they give little evidence that they believe in public management. The stimulus legislation in 2009 was a $900 billion hodgepodge thrown together in a few weeks, on the mistaken and panicked grounds that even a few months of delay for planning would have meant a great depression. And even if fear itself could justify the rushed first stimulus package, little can justify the continuing resort to short-run measures—temporary tax cuts, temporary spending programs, repeated quantitative easing—that have done almost nothing to restructure the economy. Keynesian stimulus policies have become the substitute for strategy, planning, and implementation.

Sachs declares himself "an Obama supporter," but worries about the prospect of "four more years of improvisation." There would be, he suggests, "a narrow window in which Obama can lay out real and long-term options for the country, before those options are overwhelmed by the deepening economic, social, and environmental crises wracking the US and the world." And he asks us to "consider three pivotal issues that will likely determine our country's well-being for decades to come: energy, health care, and skills."

I'm sorry to skip over Sachs's investigation of the situation in each of these sectors. It's the heart of the matter, and you really owe it to yourself to read it for yourself. But we really can't get into that here. He proceeds to register horror at the expectations aroused by Willard Inc.'s mangling of these issues, to the extent that he even touched on them, in his campaign and in the first debate (you know, the one he "won"). But he's not all that confident that President Obama ("a very smart, honest, and ambitious leader") can be counted on to take charge in a productive way.

[S]uccess will require a very different second term. America's deepest problems are structural, not cyclical. We need to reinvigorate government for the twenty-first century, and to put away childish things, just as Obama once promised to do. Obama has faced childish opposition, it is true, but grown-up leadership that eschews gimmicks could recapture the support he needs to begin leading the nation away from its current morass.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DOPE LIKE "NO RELATION"
BLUNDERS HIS WAY INTO REAL-WORLD ISSUES?

What "No Relation" has done, besides parlaying the accident of his last name (as I've written before, I believe he'd have no career if he were forced to announce himself as Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson, since I'm quite persuaded that lots of people believe, to the contrary, that he's a "chip off the old block," the legendary economist) and a bunch of mindless "conventional wisdom" economic platitudes that he hasn't either the inclination or the tools to evaluate. Like, for example, the familiar right-wing shibboleth that "government can't create jobs." In "No Relation"'s cosmos, only rich white moguls who suck the life out of the economy can create jobs.

Economist Dean Baker, co-founder (with Mark Weisbrot) of the economics think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, took him on the other day on the CEPR website.

Robert Samuelson Takes on NYT Editorial Board: Government Does Not Create Jobs!

Thursday, 25 October 2012 15:53

Robert Samuelson was sufficiently outraged by a NYT editorial claiming that the government creates jobs that for the first time in his 35 years as a columnist he felt the need to attack a newspaper editorial. Samuelson called the NYT view "the flat earth theory of job creation" in his column's headline. Since on its face it might be a bit hard to understand -- there are lots of people who do work for the government and get paychecks -- let's look more closely at what Samuelson has to say on the topic.

Samuelson tells readers:

"It's true that, legally, government does expand employment. But economically, it doesn't — and that's what people usually mean when they say 'government doesn't create jobs.'

What the Times omits is the money to support all these government jobs. It must come from somewhere — generally, taxes or loans (bonds, bills). But if the people whose money is taken via taxation or borrowing had kept the money, they would have spent most or all of it on something — and that spending would have boosted employment."

Okay, so we can at least agree that all of those people working as teachers, firefighters, forest rangers etc. do legally have jobs. That seems like progress. But let's look at the second part of the story:

"the money to support all these government jobs. It must come from somewhere."

Yes, that part is true also. But the last time I looked, the money to pay workers at Apple, General Electric, and Goldman Sachs also came from somewhere. Where's the difference?

Samuelson tells us that if the government didn't tax or borrow or the money to pay its workers (he makes a recession exception later in the piece) people "would have spent most or all of it on something -- and that spending would have boosted employment."

Again, this is true, but how does it differ from the private sector? If the new iPhone wasn't released last month people would have spent most or all of that money on something -- and that spending would have boosted employment. Does this mean that workers at Apple don't have real jobs either?

The confusion gets even greater when we start to consider the range of services that can be provided by either the public or private sector. In Robert Samuelson's world we know that public school teachers don't have real jobs, but what about teachers at private schools? Presumably the jobs held by professors at major public universities, like Berkeley or the University of Michigan are not real, but the jobs held at for-profit universities, like Phoenix or the Washington Post's own Kaplan Inc., are real.

How about health care? Currently the vast majority of workers in the health care industry are employed by the private sector. Presumably these are real jobs according to Samuelson. Suppose that we replace our private health care system with a national health care service like the one they have in the U.K. Would the jobs in the health care no longer be real?

If our new system was as efficient as the one in the U.K. we would not even need any additional tax revenue to pay for it. According to the OECD, the whole expense of the U.K., system, $3,433 per person in 2010, is less than the $3,967 per person (in 2010) that the government already pays for health care. So by replacing a less efficient private system with a more efficient public system will the government have eliminated all the real jobs in the health care sector?

It keeps getting harder and harder to figure out what is supposed to be a real job in Robert Samuelson's world. If the government requires drivers to buy auto insurance, do the people at the auto insurance companies have real jobs? Suppose the insurance companies were run by the government? Suppose that they were private but drivers paid for most of their insurance via a tax on gasoline? (You can have differential rates so that dangerous drivers pay an additional premium.)

How about when the government finances an industry by granting it a state sanctioned monopoly as when it grants patent monopolies on prescription drugs. Do the researchers at Pfizer have real jobs even though their income is dependent on a government granted monopoly? Would they have real jobs if the government instead paid for research out of tax revenue and let drugs be sold in a free market, saving consumers $250 billion a year?

Robert Samuelson obviously thinks there is something very important about the difference between working for the government and working in the private sector. Unfortunately his column does not do a very good job of explaining why. It would probably be best if he waited another 35 years before again attacking a newspaper editorial.

#