Planned Obsolescence-- Is Caveat Emptor All We Got?

Lately, there's no end to Boehner and his House cronies inveighing against the regulatory system. A constant thread is that regulations kill jobs and that particular lie predates Boehner by many decades. The GOP has always been the party of caveat emptor-- let the buyer beware. The breezy Marketplace look at planned obsolescence barely scratches the surface. Key word there is "barely." Is it only former GOP Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert among Republicans who sees the dangers and the folly in this extremism against consumer and environmental protection?

The House is moving forward with three bills that would cripple the regulatory system.  The bills are not going to become law this Congress, but they show how far a party in thrall to its right-most wing is willing to veer from what has long been the mainstream. The critical question is whether and when more moderate voices-- centrist Republicans in Congress, sensible business leaders and the largely centrist American public-- will recognize the damage being done and raise their voices to call it to a halt. Clearly, that’s not going to happen in the House itself.
           
...[T]he bills before the House would prevent the system from working: they are a recipe for failure. The bills are sometimes described with the mild term “regulatory reform” but these measures have as much to do with reform as Communist re-education camps had to do with education.  

In the case of the REINS Act, in particular, the analogy is all too apt: “reform” is simply a euphemism for an effort to break the system and remake it according to ideological prescription that will leave it permanently hobbled.

When the Geoff Davis' deranged REINS Act came up for a vote on December 7, it passed 241-184, not only every single Republican-- including those who pose as "mainstream conservatives"-- voting AYE, but 4 of the most virulently right-wing Democrats joining in as well (corrupt and fanatic anti-consumer Blue Dogs John Barrow, Dan Boren, Mike McIntyre, and Collin Peterson).

When I was 12 I had dinner with Vance Packard, author of The Waste Makers and the friend of a friend's father. I read his book at the time and I'm re-reading it now in light of all that's happened in the intervening 4 decades. A lot has happened, some of it in direct response to Packard's powerful exposé of "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals." The Federal Trade Commission and some states have moved in against some forms of deceptive practices by manufacturers-- but I was actually shocked to see how thin the protections are.

A review of Packard's book says it was the first "to probe the increasing commercialization of American life—the development of consumption for consumption's sake. Packard outlines the ways manufacturers and advertisers persuade consumers to buy things they don't need and didn't know they wanted, including the two-of-a-kind of everything syndrome-- 'two refrigerators in every home'-- and appeals to purchase something because it is more expensive, or because it is painted in a new color. The book also brought attention to the concept of planned obsolescence, in which a 'death date' is built into products so that they wear out quickly and need to be replaced. By manipulating the public into mindless consumerism, Packard believed that business was making us 'more wasteful, imprudent, and carefree in our consuming habits,' which was using up our natural resources at an alarming rate." The examples go on and on and some still seem shocking while others are so ingrained into American society that they are barely noticeable today. Last night I was making notes as I read and I want to share a few paragraphs that inspired me to send letters to a few Members of Congress asking if these situations have ever been addressed legislatively.

The ideal of a "lifetime" product, which once was the shining goal of makers of a wide range of home products, was reduced for most to a memory. When we asked Mrs. Brady [editorial director] of Consumers Union for a list of the products still designed to last a lifetime, she responded: "I can think of only one-- the piano... There is no doubt whatsoever that until recently very good rugs have lasted from generation to generation. Today, ten years is the commercially promised life for a good wool rug."

...A part of the trouble with modern carpeting was that the manufacturers had downgraded quality and fought off quality standards. Another problem was the introduction of tufted carpets, which could be made much faster and cheaper than woven carpets. The makers of woven carpets reduced the quality of their rugs in order to compete more effectively with the tufted rugs. Another reason for the deterioration was that much of the carpeting was being bought by big housing developers who tended to install the cheapest floor covering they could in order to increase profit margins.

... An official of the Automobile Finance Association in testifying at a Senate subcommittee hearing told of a survey he had conducted with association members on the state of the automobile industry. He quoted one member as responding: "The quality of today's automobiles does not compare favorably with past years... The price of the product continues to go up and the quality continues to go down.

...Sale of automobile parts soared year after year... because "manufacturers are building them so they'll get to the junk pile faster [according to a V.P. of a Long Island ignition parts manufacturing firm... There was a] reluctance of many of the manufacturers to make a car that would hold the affection of its owner for more than a very few years."

...Automobile mufflers in 1958 had only one half the life expectancy of mufflers bought a decade earlier. Design Sense, published by Lippincott & Marguiles, the industrial-design firm, took note of the shorted life span of mufflers in calling on industry to take advantage of new technologies to give longer life to products. "To take just one example," it said, "a major steel company has had available for some time-- with no takers-- a lead-coated steel which, for just eight cents more per auto muffler, would give a product that would last the life of the car. Instead automakers are still installing mufflers that must be replaced on an average of once every two years at a cost to the customer of $18 to $27 per muffler."

You can do the math. The behavior is clearly sociopathic-- but protected by Republican judicial rulings that favor corporations (including, of course, the big one, Citizens United) and now Boehner and his caucus are making a big push to "cripple the regulatory system"-- in Sherwood Boehlert's words. I don't know if any of them read Packard or not, but he went on to explain that "there was specific indication that evidence of quality obsolescence was not unconnected with the drive to increase replacement sales and to point out a column in Home Furnishings Daily that "noted uneasily in the late fifties that many appliance manufacturers were rushing to get into the field of servicing their equipment. He asked: 'Why all the rush to get into the servicing angle? Is it because the appliance won't stay in A-1 working order too many days after it is installed in the home?'." Louis Cheskin of the Color Research Institute went on the blame the public for this kind of behavior-- as did industry spokesmen in every field. Cheskin:

"Why make the handles on cups so that they won't break off? Who wants to pay ten percent more for dishes so that the dishes will last a lifetime? Most housewives want or welcome an excuse to buy a new set of dishes every year or so. Who wants furniture to last forever? The large American middle classes do not. They want furniture to be in style, not outdated... Furniture, clothes, dishes can all be made to last longer at very little additional cost but neither the maker nor the consumer is interested in this."

Mr Cheskin could have changed his name and reinvented himself, ever so slightly, as any number of anti-consumer fanatics from Don Young (R-AK), Bill Young (R-FL), Jerry Lewis (R-CA) or Buck McKeon (R-CA) to Cliff Stearns (R-FL) or Ralph Hall (R-TX), each of whom was in college when Packard's book was a widely discussed best-seller. And if you're wondering how strong Republicans oppose protecting consumers and to what lengths they're willing to go to give corporations the leeway to cheat and abuse customers (i.e., their own cosntituents) let's look back at the last major Federal Trade Commission bill, Federal Price Gouging Prevention Act. It passed the House on May 23, 2007 284-141. Only one slimy corporate whore of a Blue Dog crossed the aisle to vote with the GOP that day, Collin Peterson (MN) but 56 Republicans crossed in the other direction and voted with the Democrats. Who voted against consumer protection? 140 of them and I bet DWT readers will recognize these names:

Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
Oily Joe Barton (R-TX)
John Boehner (R-OH)
Eric Cantor (R-VA)
Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
Darrell Issa (R-CA)
Patrick McHenry (R-NC)
Buck McKeon (R-CA)
Mike Pence (R-IN)
Denny Rehberg (R-MT)
Paul Ryan (R-WI)
Fred Upton (R-MI)

You get the picture... the whole freaking GOP Clown Car-- all their then up-and-comers who diligently serve the interests of the one percent.

More On The GOP Jihad Against Consumer Protection

On Wednesday we took a look at how Republicans and other conservatives serve their corporate masters with an unending jihad against regulations that protect consumers, small businesses, the environment, workers and the common good. We saw a clear example from Vance Packard's 1960 best seller, The Waste Makers of what unscrupulous businesses-- with an Ayn Rand/GOP perspective do when there is no one looking out for the public interest. We concluded it was very Lord of the Flies, which was published 6 years before Packard's book.

But I didn't want to leave anyone with the impression that it was just a bunch of scoundrels tricking homeowners into replacing their furnaces. Packard was very clear that it went way beyond that. And in our society, where the king of planned obsolescence, Steve Jobs, has practically been deified, it's worth looking at this a little more deeply-- especially with Boehner's and Cantor's demented House passing bill after bill after bill tearing down the regulatory system, bills that the Senate and the president ignore-- but bills that they will pass again in 2013-- in the hopes of having a friendly, more demented, Senate and White House. Thursday they passed a bill, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, that has been dubbed a Koch Bros Christmas present. The goal is to lessen regulations for the benefit of the 1% and much to the detriment of the 99%. But isn't that what Republican governance is all about-- despite the deluded and naive saps on the left who find no difference between the GOP and the Democrats (just as Stalin found no difference in the early '30s between the Nazis and the Social Democrats).

So Lamar Smith's H.R. 527 passed 263-159, every single Republican plus 28 dedicated servants of the 1% who have infiltrated the Democratic Party voting AYE. The bad Democrats (by the way):

Jason Atmire (Blue Dog-PA)
John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA)
John Carney (corporate whore-DE)
Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY)
Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
Mark Critz (corporate whore-PA)
Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
Pete DeFazio (someone who has recently flipped his lid-OR)
Kathy Hochul (ConservaDem-NY)
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)
Ron Kind (corporate whore-WI)
Larry Kissell (stealth Blue Dog-NC)
Dave Loebsack (IA)
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
Mike McIntrye (Blue Dog-NC)
Bill Owens (ConservaDem-NY)
Ed Perlmutter (ConservaDem-CO)
Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
Nick Rahall (ConservaDem-WV)
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)
Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)
Betty Sutton (OH)
Tim Walz (MN)

Sherwood Boehlert, a very respected former Republican congressman from New York, once chairman of the Science Committee, wrote an OpEd about the GOP anti-regulatory jihad for The Hill Wednesday, in which he accused right-wing Republicans of going too far.

The House is moving forward with three bills that would cripple the regulatory system.  The bills are not going to become law this Congress, but they show how far a party in thrall to its right-most wing is willing to veer from what has long been the mainstream. The critical question is whether and when more moderate voices-- centrist Republicans in Congress, sensible business leaders and the largely centrist American public-- will recognize the damage being done and raise their voices to call it to a halt. Clearly, that’s not going to happen in the House itself.
           
No one would argue that the regulatory system is perfect or that it’s some holy apparatus from which mere lawmakers should keep their distance.  But overall, it accomplishes what Congress set it up to do-- it protects the public, produces benefits that outweigh costs, and has, according to most studies, a neutral to slightly positive effect on employment. And as we continue to suffer through a bank-induced recession, it shouldn’t take leaps of imagination to understand the harm inflicted when the system fails to do its job.
          
Yet the bills before the House would prevent the system from working: they are a recipe for failure. The bills are sometimes described with the mild term “regulatory reform” but these measures have as much to do with reform as Communist re-education camps had to do with education.  

In the case of the REINS Act, in particular, the analogy is all too apt: “reform” is simply a euphemism for an effort to break the system and remake it according to ideological prescription that will leave it permanently hobbled.                 
           
Anyone who wants to understand what the right wing’s project is truly about need look no further than the REINS Act, sponsored in the Senate, tellingly, by Rand Paul. The bill would require Congress to approve all major rules. This would mean, among other things, that Congress would be the arbiter of each and every significant regulatory matter, no matter how technical, and that a single chamber of Congress could kill any rule. 

It is not hard to predict the result-- a virtual shutdown of the system that will leave the public exposed. Decision-making would be less rational and more random than anything that happens now because the formalities imposed by agency procedures and judicial review would no longer govern.
           
One doesn’t need to guess at the results because we’ve already tried a system like this. The regulatory system developed, starting in the late 1800s, precisely because a system that vested this much daily decision-making in Congress simply didn’t work. 

If you think that the very notion of having, say, a Food and Drug Administration is a mistake, then REINS makes perfect sense.  Otherwise, it’s hard to credit. And it’s hard to see how even business would be better off without expert agencies like the FDA, which provide a degree of predictability and consumer confidence for business.
           
And Congress doesn’t need REINS to control the regulatory system; it can already intervene to block any rule (and is not reluctant to do so), and it writes the laws that determine what gets regulated. And it’s ironic that people who say they got elected to change the regulatory system can at the same time claim that no one holds Congress accountable. Their real complaint is that not everyone agrees with them about how the system should work.
           
The other bills before the House don’t go as far as REINS-- nothing could, short of just eliminating every regulatory agency entirely-- but they are animated by the same attitudes, and it’s no accident that they’re being brought up as a group.

They are all different ways to gum up the works.  And in some ways they contradict each other: REINS seeks to weaken regulatory agencies and to make Congress the locus of all decisions, while the Regulatory Accountability Act (RAA) gives the agencies and the courts more responsibility. The only straight line between those two opposite points leads to regulatory breakdown.
           
The RAA does have one structural similarity with REINS, though: it would effectively amend, in one fell swoop, numerous health and safety laws without any serious analysis of what that would mean. In addition to saddling the regulatory process with enough new procedural requirements to slow it to a standstill, in one simple phrase-- “notwithstanding any other provision of law”-- the RAA changes the criteria for setting health and safety standards in many statutes.

Also like REINS, the RAA revives ideas that have already failed, such as so-called “formal rulemaking”-- trial-like procedures that were shown to slow things down without improving any results. Again, an ironic move when the REINS Act would effectively ditch all formal procedures in favor of a political sweepstakes.

The third and least extreme bill, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, also ignores history-- larding the system with additional reviews based on previous efforts that have slowed progress while helping nobody.

The Republican Party should be spending its time trying to improve what is basically an effective system, figuring out how to improve protections and reduce costs. But the House is off on a very different path, ignoring experience in favor of ideology, working to destroy a system that has protected business as well as the public.  It’s high time for those in the center to call them on that.

So... back to our friend Vance Packard and his theorizing about the future in 1960. This is what happens when corporations-- which have only one goal (profit) and no conscience-- don't have regulations to follow:

The idea of creating obsolescence of quality through material failure is not a new concept. In the late twenties, Advertising & Selling carried a statement by J. George Frederick on the problem of increasing consumption. He dismissed as a "mere minor stopgap" the proposals of political liberals that more money be put into consumers' hands. A far more powerful lever, he said, was the "principle" for which he had dreamed up the name "progressive obsolescence." That simply meant indoctrinating the people who do have spending money with the habit of "buying more goods on the basis of obsolescence in efficiency, economy, style, or taste."

Obsolescence planning was spelled out much more bluntly-- and specifically in terms of quality-- a few years later in a speculative article entitled "Outmoded Durability" in Printers' Ink (January 9, 1936). It's author was Leon Kelley, identified as an executive of Fishier, Zealand & Co. The article subtitle was "If Merchandise Does Not Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed."

Mr. Kelley explained that man traditionally has cherished the notion that durability is a prime feature of merit in products and that the longer a thing lasts the more completely you realize a return on the money you paid for it. He cited the grandfather's clock that had been in his family for two hundred years and still worked fine. Advertisers, he said, have tended to stress durability of their product as a major feature.

This harping on durability, he said, was out of date and should stop. It didn't meet the needs of the times.

...Certain practices of General Electric came to light during a United States government suit involving General Electric's international agreements in the late thirties...

In one memorandum introduced as an exhibit during the proceedings, a company engineer outlined to his superior a program for increasing sales by increasing the efficiency and shortening the life of flashlight lamps. He pointed out that progress already was being made. Originally the flashlight lamps outlasted three batteries. They were now made to last only through two batteries. And now he was proposing that the lamp life be adjusted to last through only one battery. "If this is done," he pointed out, "we estimate that it would result in increasing our flashlight business approximately 60 percent."

...A number of designing engineers entrusted with shaping United States products meanwhile began showing acute cases of guilty conscience about some of the things they were expected to do. After all, they hadn't been taught during their idealistic days back in college how to build products that would fall apart after an appropriate period of service.

In fact it sounds like the corporations, which went to a great deal of effort to hide their intentions, were downright sociopathic.

One magazine writer asked, "Is purposeful design for product failure unethical? The particular engineer in question stoutly defends his company's design philosophy in two ways: first, if portable radios characteristically lasted ten years, the market might be saturated long before repeat sales could support continued volume manufacturing...; second, the user would be denied benefits of accelerated progress if long life is a product characteristic." The editor's informant went on to explain that it takes sales to get money in order to develop "better" performance, "better" styling, and "better" prices for products.

The consumer had no choice in the matter and that his investment over the ten years was much higher, didn't seem to bother than corporate heads, who operated outside of the purview of any regulatory agencies designed to protect the interests of consumers, who were, clearly, being systematically ripped off by this "customer be damned attitude."

Packard concludes the chapter with three objections to what he calls "designing death dates" into products. I'll go directly to the final one:

Death-dating was cheating the customers out of hard earned money. Harold L. Chambers of Remington Rand observed "I greatly doubt that any one of us [designers] would wish to apply this "principle" of planned short-term failure to his own purchases of home, auto, piano, and other durable goods involving considerable expense. Why, then, support pressing this principle on 'someone else'? ... Several expressed the opinion that if engineers did in designing products for a given life expectancy, then ethics should compel them to insist that those death dates be printed on the product. One was not optimistic that sales departments would permit that. Managements might fear, he said, that such information would be "misunderstood" by consumers,

Or that they actually would understand. There's even a chance that voters will figure out what Republicans are up to by taking a sledge hammer to the regulatory system on behalf of the worst capitalistic predators roaming the planet today. This interview was done early in 1989, even before OccupyWallStreet took over Zuccotti Park.

Conservatives Working For Big Business Want To Dismantle Regulations For Their Predator Allies... What Else Is New?

The whole GOP clown car claiming to be running for president vows to end regulations near and far. So do Boehner, Cantor, Issa, Ryan and the rest of the Ayn Rand acolytes in the House. Tomorrow they'll even waste part of the day voting against a regulation that doesn't exist!

“Now, here comes my favorite of the crazy regulatory acts. The EPA is now proposing rules to regulate dust,” Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, said on the House floor. He said Texas was full of dusty roads: “The EPA is now saying you can be fined for driving home every night on your gravel road.”

There was just one flaw in this argument. It was not true.

The EPA’s new dust rule did not exist. It never did.

Still, the specter of this rule has spurred three bills to prevent it, one of which will be voted on Thursday in a House subcommittee. It sparked a late-night battle on the Senate floor. GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain cited it in a debate as a reason to eliminate the EPA.

The hubbub over this phantom rule, surely one of the most controversial regulations that never was, involved a slow-moving federal agency and a Republican Party with the EPA in its crosshairs.

“I do believe that the EPA does have the ability to change its mind,” said Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., sponsor of the bill to be voted on Thursday. The EPA has now confirmed that it does not intend to strengthen standards on farm dust. But Noem is still pushing a bill to go further and weaken the EPA’s power to set these rules in the future.

“This EPA has been very hard on business in this country, and this EPA has been very hard on agriculture,” Noem said. “I think it’s time we pushed back.”

...For Republicans the EPA’s new dust rule was an ideal talking point for this agenda. Even though the EPA had still not proposed any new EPA dust rule.

“We’ll stop excessive federal regulations that inhibit jobs in areas as varied as cement and farm dust,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told the Economic Club of Washington in September. Boehner’s deputy, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post decrying “EPA’s proposed regulations” on subjects including farm dust.

On the House floor, other legislators sketched out an even more detailed picture.

“Say Bessie the cow kicks up too much dust running over to your pickup truck at feeding time,” warned Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas. “The EPA is going to fine you for Bessie’s misconduct.”

We pay these people. Did you read William Golding's 1954 classic, Lord of the Flies? Here's a 10 minute cartoon version, that makes the point. Notice this line about the Republican Party:

Now we see another problem on the island. At least one of the boys is a sociopath by nature. And since there are no adults to enforce rules, it's only a matter of time, or circumstances, before Roger realizes he can kill.

Boehner weeps too. (See above) And the Republican mania to destroy regulations on behalf of their wealthy donors is as sociopathic as it gets... and can (and does) kill. I've been re-reading Vance Packard's classic from 1960, The Waste Makers and last night I came across a chapter-full of descriptions of what happens when Big Business corrupts politicians into weakened or abolishing regulations that protect consumers. There were dozens of great examples but I pulled out one to share is related to a face legal battle Cheff v Mathes, a seminal 1964 corporate law case. Four years before the case, Packard, writing about the entire concept of "planned obsolescence," set the stage:

The most flagrant attempt to promote a throwaway mood was that of the Holland Furnace Company of Holland, Michigan. This company is the largest seller of replacement furnaces in the nation, with five hundred retail branches. In 1958, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Holland to stop the strategy that had been used by some of its salesmen to frighten furnace owners into replacing existing furnaces with new Holland equipment. What follows in the next two paragraphs is taken from reports of the commission.

The salesmen involved, according to the Federal Trade Commission, sometimes posed as government or utility inspectors in order to get into the homes. And some misrepresented themselves as "heating engineers." A householder in the St. Louis area testified that two young men came to her house and said, "We are from the government inspecting furnaces," and asked for admission to the house. She refused them permission and called the police. When the men were picked up by the police and questioned, they identified themselves as Holland salesmen. They denied telling her they were government officers but admitted they had told her they were working with the "government fuel-inspection program."

Once the Holland canvassers gained access to a house-- either by pretext or in response to invitations resulting from company advertisements offering cleaning service or free inspections-- "in many instances" they dismantled furnaces without the owners' permission. In some cases, the Federal Trade Commission asserted, "they then refuse to reassemble them when requested, misrepresenting that this would involve grave danger of fire, gas, and explosion." In other cases, it said, they declared that the existing furnaces were beyond economical repair or that companies making them were out of business. "Some of the furnaces condemned by these agents," the Federal Trade Commission order 4 asserted, "were to be either in safe condition or safely repairable."

The Federal Trade Commission order upheld its examiner's ruling that Holland's "false claims and improper business methods had caused many owners to discard competitive furnaces prematurely in fear of grave danger from continued use of this 'condemned' equipment." The company denied or minimized the various accusations and turned to the federal courts for relief. At this writing-- two years and three court decisions later-- the matter is still under litigation.

In light of the trillions pillaged by Wall Street fighting over furnaces seems almost quaint. So let's go right to a hot off the presses report from Pat Garofalo at Think Progress. And, as so often is the case, it's not just a slimy Republican undermining public safety, but an equally slimy Democrat. That there are no Republicans slimier or more corrupt that New Jersey far right fanatic Scott Garrett says something very scary-- something that must be dealt with-- about New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney.

For months, Republicans have been trying to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law-- passed in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis-- by cutting budgets for market regulators, obstructing nominees, and advancing bills that would weaken the law’s key provisions. But sometimes efforts to dismantle the law take on a more bipartisan flavor.

One of the key sections of the Dodd-Frank law has to do with swaps, the complex financial instruments that felled, among others, insurance giant American International Group. Before the 2008 financial crisis, the swaps market was totally opaque, giving neither customers nor regulators any sense of what the instruments actually cost or how much risk was building up in the financial system.

Dodd-Frank brings transparency to this market by forcing swap trades onto open exchanges-- where they can be seen by everyone-- rather than allowing backroom wheeling and dealing in the instruments to continue. But a bill authored by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), as the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgensen explained, would take these bits of the bill out at the knees:

Representative Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican, has teamed up with Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat, to introduce the Swap Execution Facility Clarification Act. It would bar the Securities and Exchange Commission and the C.F.T.C. from requiring swap execution facilities to have a minimum number of participants or mandating displays of prices. Both mechanisms promote transparency.

Mr. Garrett said the bill directed regulators “to provide market participants with the flexibility” they need to obtain price discovery. This means maintaining the old system that can keep prices in the shadows.

On Nov. 15, a House subcommittee approved the bill by a voice vote.

As Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler-- whose agency is charged with regulating swaps under Dodd-Frank-- explained, “economists for decades have shown that transparency lowers margins, leads to greater liquidity and more competition in the marketplace.” “Transparent pricing is also a critical feature of lowering the risk at the banks, and at the derivatives clearinghouses as well,” he said.

As David Min and I explained back in April, 2010, opacity in the swaps market “means that no one-- regulators, investors, or even the dealers themselves-- has a good handle on the systemic risk these instruments pose, or who is bearing the risk. This prevents regulators from being able to take steps to reduce systemic risk and creates the conditions for financial panics.” Dodd-Frank did a lot to deal with this problem, but Congress now seems to be aiming to undo that progress.

It's not just that Maloney doesn't want another scare from a Wall Street whore like hedge fund attorney Resma Saujani, she would like to knock Maxine Waters out of contention and become top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. That must never happen. And, by the way, since arriving in Congress, Maloney has taken $3,717,221 in legalistic bribes from the financial industry she's supposed to be helping to regulate. Let's find a progressive to take her on this time. Know anyone who lives here?

Newt Gingrich Actually IS Anti-Child... But Isn't That Whole Party? What Would James Speth Say?

Monday Rachel started her show with the video above, about how Newt Gingrich and other Republican reactionaries want to abolish child labor laws. (I didn't make that up; please watch the video.) At the same time, I was busy writing about how I had started re-reading Vance Packard's 1960 classic Waste Makers, about how the new American creed-- a kind of Ayn Randian religion young, impressionable, mediocre conservative minds couldn't get enough of-- was consumption and endless growth for the sake of growth.

"Whether the growth," wrote Packard, "is particularly needed to promote the well-being of the American people is rarely even considered... It is just assumed that any growth is good. Growth is fast becoming a hallowed word alongside Democracy and Motherhood."

Today Republicans have all but given up on-- nay, declared war on-- Democracy and, as far as Motherhood... they still do love women to be barefoot, pregnant and undedicated. When Packard was writing The Waste Makers, Professor David Korten was earning his degree at Stanford and getting ready to move to Ethiopia to start setting up business schools. In his latest book, Agenda For A New Economy he introduces the work of economist James Speth, former administrator of the United Nations Development Program and a dean at Yale's School of Forestry. Korten and Speth seem equally adamant that "the planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it"-- the capitalism that Packard warned us about, the capitalism still fetishized by mediocre conservative minds, like Newt Gingrich's and Paul Ryan's. Korten reminds us that "growth in GDP always increases environmental damage." He quotes a passage from Speth's book, The Bridge to the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability:

To sum up, we live in a world where economic growth is generally seen as both beneficent and necessary-- the more, the better; where past growth has brought us to a perilous state environmentally; where we are poised for unprecedented increments in growth; where this growth is preceding with wildly wrong market signals, including prices that do not incorporate environmental costs or reflect the needs of future generations; where a failed politics has not meaningfully corrected the market's obliviousness to environmental needs; where economies are routinely deploying technology that was created in an environmentally unaware era; where there is no hidden hand or inherent mechanism adequate to correct the destructive tendencies. So, right now, one can only conclude that growth is the enemy of environment. Economy and environment remain in collision.

Korten isn't just trying to scare anyone. He-- and Speth-- have some solutions. "After examining the abuses of corporate power," he writes, "Speth endorses the call to revoke the charters of corporations that grossly violate the public interest, and to exclude of expel unwanted corporations, roll back limited liability, eliminate corporate personhood, bar corporations from making political contributions, and limit corporate lobbying." People want a program and a list of demands from OccupyWallStreet? How about those? It goes right to the heart of the matter-- far more than Obama or a severely conflicted Democratic Party. Korten continues: "Speth is clear that we are unlikely as a species to implement the measures required to bring ourselves into balance with the environment so long as economic growth remains an overriding policy priority, consumerism defines our cultural values, and the excesses of corporate behavior are unconstrained by fairly enforced rules."

Korten wrote that last year-- a year before OccupyWallStreet made Zuccotti Park a household name. It was also exactly 50 years after Packard wrote about the explosion of consumerism in the U.S. He wrote of "general evidence of profusion of material wealth even though there is a substantial residue, numbering millions of families, that remains unquestionably ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed. And the television set may be substituting for adequate food in the family budget." How far have we come in those 50 years-- despite Packard's warning?

Consumption must rise, and keep rising. Some marketing experts have been announcing that the average citizen will have to step up his buying by nearly fifty per cent in the next dozen years, or the economy will sicken. In a mere decade, advertising men assert, United States citizens will have to improve their level of consumption as much as their forebears had managed to do in the two hundred years from Colonial times to 1939.

...What we needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers-- and strategies that would provide products assuring such wastefulness.

Today the Republican "solution" is more yachts and private planes for the wealthy-- subsidized by the tax payers. The GOP wasn't always that fatuous, that demented. There was a short, albeit harsh, recession in 1958, while Eisenhower, a mainstream Republican, was president. Packard explains that "the federal government acted quietly, certainly played a major role" in righting the economy. The Eisenhower Administration did, basically, exactly what the Republican Congress has prevented Obama from doing in the current, far worse, recession. "It poured several billion extra dollars into the economy for such things as pay raises [yes, pay RAISES-- the polar opposite of the GOP politically-motivated agenda for economic catastrophe], farm subsidies, missiles, and highways, thus unquestionably helping to quicken the enfeebled national economic pulse... By 11959, prosperity had returned [and] the massive clot of unemployment began to dissolve into manageable proportions."

Well, I guess that's how far we've come in 50 years. James Speth was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1942, 9 years before James DeMint was born (straight up the I-26 in Greenville, South Carolina). That's about all they have in common. Here's Speth discussing his ideas-- ideas which Senator DeMint doesn't have the capacity to grasp-- at UC, Berkeley in 2008. Enjoy:

The Oppression Of Consumerism

Sometimes It Pays To Rethink What we Know

I didn't grow up in a house where books or authors were discussed over dinner. But my friend Danny did. And his parents often invited me over. His father was a professor at CUNY and through him I was introduced to the idea that books were something worthwhile. I was also introduced to the work of contemporary authors and, in some cases, the authors themselves, like Michael Harrington, who wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States while I was in high school, and The Social-Industrial Complex while I was in college. One of Danny's dad's pals was also Vance Packard, who wrote The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers and The Waste Makers all before we were even in high school, the latter of which I'm reading again, some 4 decades after I first read it and talked with the author about it over dinner.

I was very impressed at the time-- and Packard was clearly ahead of the times. Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben was born the same year Packard wrote The Waste Makers and the just published new edition has an intro from him and his contemporary approach makes a lot more sense today than the way people looked at Packard's work back in the day. Even the concept of "planned obsolescence"-- no matter what you think of Apple's business model-- is reinterpreted by McKibben as "the much more potent idea of 'the planned obsolescence of desirability,' the continuous flow of fashion designed to get people to buy new things even when their old ones work just fine." Could anything be more early twenty-first century? McKibben:

[I]t's not primarily the details that Packard got right, but the broad strokes. He understood what kind of country we were building. He understood, fundamentally, that growth had become its own religion. Even ten years before economists had doubted that the size of the U.S. economy would grow much larger-- FDR had said we had more factories than we'd ever need. But in the wake of World War II, the boom to end all booms (at least until China's) was leaving us with a new theology: "Out of all the anxieties created by the desire to make the economy hum at ever higher levels has come a clamor for 'growth.' Economic thinkers of many stripes have joined in the call. Certainly this is the first time in history that the felt need for growth has been so self-consciously vocalized." A brief recession in the late 1950s had made it clear that we had a new master. "At a press conference, President Eisenhower was asked what the people should do to make the recession recede. Here is the dialogue that followed:

A- Buy

Q- What?

A- Anything

There's not much distance between that moment and President Bush informing all of us in the wake of 9/11 that our job was to go shopping. Packard quotes another leader-- marketing consultant Victor Lebow, writing in the Journal of Retailing: "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate."

If there's a moral to this book, fifty years later, it's that No One Can Say We Weren't Warned. If we didn't get it from Thoreau, we should have gotten it from Packard. That we didn't get it is indisputable, and now-- as the Arctic melts and the oceans acidify-- we'll pay the price in ways even he couldn't have imagined.

A McKibben contemporary, author and environmental economist David Korten has very much imagined-- and quite vividly. In his newest book, Agenda For A New Economy, Korten compares the approaches of economists Jeffrey Sachs and James Speth-- tinkering vs transformation-- in regard to the economic collapse our 1% elites have ushered us into. Describing Speth idea's for system redesign, it would be hard to imagine Korten hadn't read Packard at some point.

Economic growth is disrupting the values and living systems essential to human well-being. Beyond a minimal threshold of consumption, distributing wealth equitably and building community, rather than increasing the consumption of stuff, is the key to increasing human health and happiness.

...The operating systems of capitalism must be fundamentally redesigned to internalize costs, distribute ownership, and establish accountability for the human and natural consequences of economic decisions.

Have you been watching the Republican "presidential" debates? Can you imagine asking Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry to comment? How about Mitt Romney? Skip a few months and try imagining what kind of an answer you would get from Barack Obama.