Volkswagen the best?

When Volkswagen was caught cheating on its emissions tests in USA, the vilification was widespread, not to mention expensive.  At the time, I was sure that VW was not the only one cheating.  What I didn't predict was that VW was building the cleanest diesels being sold.  Well, according to the Europeans, that is exactly the case.  Which doesn't surprise me at all.  Nor does it surprise me that Fiat and Suzuki are the worst.

The invisible poverty of America’s working class

Is the political backlash of poor whites this election the outcome of the decades-long war on the USA Producer classes?

Well, that's one way putting it.  Since the Carter administration, there has been a war on the productive middle of the country.  Some pirate would show up with some hot money, loot a local factory of any loose assets, ship the jobs to China or Vietnam, and escape with his ill-gotten gains.  This often took less than a year.  The folks who worked in that factory faced a slow-motion death sentence.  It doesn't take long before they have lost homes, transportation, spouses and families.  Then they start to lose their health.  In the meantime, they have tried everything they could think of to arrest their falls.  They may have retrained to become a computer repair person or an energy rater.  They drew food stamps or unemployment for as long as that lasted.  Of course nothing that lame can possibly replace the job they recently did so well.

The descent into non-personhood is quite obvious.  When the unemployment benefits run out, they are no longer counted as unemployed.  If they lose their banking services, they are not counted by the world of credit and finance.   Society is sending a VERY strong message—your life is worthless.  So these worthless nobodies are rendered so invisible, not even academics are interested in counting them.

The white males who have been victimized by the deindustrialization of USA face one more sinister attack on their personhood—the accepted party line which claims that white males are privileged and the root cause of the most serious social problems.  That critique may apply to the latest member of Skull and Bones, but it most certainly does NOT apply to someone whose means of existence has been snuffed out by Predators.  It does serve to silence any possible valid complaints in the minds of our august defenders of political correctness, however.  "Your town was destroyed and your life destroyed," argue the lefties who would have once championed the cause of these dispossessed people, "but it was so obviously your fault.  Critical theory says so"

It happens that the invisible people have not just died as planned, but their miserable lives have now shown up in the health and mortality statistics.  This hardly means that our academics and state statisticians are suddenly going to see these people again.  My bet it that this health study will be swept under the institutional rugs.  Can't have anyone questioning why it was OK to destroy the lives of innocent people who only wanted to do a good job, now can we?  The Predator Classes have been hiding the damage their atrocities have caused for a millennia—why would they stop now?

Climate change and Big Oil

The stories about what the oil industry knew about climate change just get juicer.  Probably the main reason I am so hooked on these tales is because Institutional Analysis could have predicted (and probably did somewhere) exactly the behavior of the oil companies.

Start with Institutional assumption #1: The oil companies always know.  They have to know everything possible about the crude they will turn into gasoline and jet fuel—including which oil fields it comes from.  These people build and maintain infrastructure so complex, massive, and expensive that most folks find it incomprehensible.  Their work is not only difficult, it is very dangerous so getting the answer right is often a matter of life and death.

Because this basic assumption is true beyond rational debate, it follows that the oil industry employs the best scientists on earth.  They have the most money to pay for top talent and plenty of good reasons to employ them.  The science of climate change has been pretty much settled since the early 20th century and is simple enough to explain to a reasonably alert 7th-grader.  OF COURSE the oil scientists understood climate change.  And now we see that they relied on their calculations to makes design changes in their infrastructure.  That's called putting your money where your mouth is.

What Big Oil chose to do with all this leading-edge understanding of climate change was not so predictable but in retrospect, quite understandable.  Because it is quite obvious that they looked at the climate change problem and concluded that even with all their massive scientific expertise, they didn't know what to do about it.  And so they chose to make the environmental pests go away.  They concluded that the environmentalists didn't know how to fix things either but they did know how to write regulations off-loading the fix on someone else—such as the oil companies.  So the environmental scientists had to be neutralized, and for an astonishingly small amount of money, they were.  Turns out it isn't hard to confuse the general public about matters they already find confusing.

The real lesson here is not about the power of Big Oil, but their self-defined powerlessness.  It's easy to sit on the sidelines and wonder why the oil companies didn't just turn their immense scientific and technological skills towards the problem of building the new green energy infrastructure.  But having stared into that abyss, they chose to muddy the academic debate while corrupting the processes of democracy.  Turns out that was a whole lot easier.

Greider on Clinton and Wall Street

Probably nothing demonstrates so vividly the dramatic shift to the right in USA politics as the story of Hillary Clinton and her role in the Democratic Party.  I sort of understand her bellicose hawkishness because I got to know some amazingly militaristic "liberals" during my experience with the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.  I was living in Minnesota which had an anti-war candidate in Eugene McCarthy and a serious Cold Warrior in Hubert Humphrey.  The Humphrey people could not believe we could part company with him over Vietnam.  I was once asked, "Are you really going to turn your back on the man who almost single-handedly gave us Medicare?  Over Vietnam?"  So while I do not like it, I understand the Democratic Party selecting as its standard-bearer someone who at least half of the world's population considers a war criminal for her actions as Obama's Secretary of State.

But when it comes to economics, I am still shocked at how reactionary a Democrat can be.  Not long ago, I heard Ms. Clinton defend the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 banking reform act that drew a sharp legal divide between commercial and investment banking.  This repeal happened on Bill Clinton's watch and many of us blame that misbegotten legislation for the banking meltdown of 2007-8.  Here's something to keep in mind.  Carter Glass (VA) and Henry Steagall (AL) were very conservative southern Democrats who were vitally important in creating the Federal Reserve System.  These were not a couple of radical bomb-throwers.  In fact, such conservatives from the South are usually Republicans these days.  By defending the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Hillary Clinton was placing herself to the reactionary right of those two.  In fact, it's hard to believe there is any space to the right of those two but our Hillary has found it.

Personally, I believe that the election of Ms. Clinton would be an unmitigated disaster.  Climate change is on track to destroy the biosphere for human habitation.  The ONLY way we can get off that track is to invest a lot of money in a new greener society.  And the only way we can ever get the necessary money is to radically reform the global financial system.  We don't need someone who can be convinced that something like Glass-Steagall needs to be repealed—we need visionaries to pass a couple dozen pieces of Glass-Steagall-like legislation that will take the financial system out of the hands of criminal greedheads and put it into the control of people who want to nurture the real economy.

DW on climate change and the possibilities for Paris

The best part about getting environmental news from the German press is that for the most part, Germans are environmentalists no matter what party they belong to.  CDU Angela Merkel leads a very right-wing government yet her environmental record easily shames Al Gore's.  The result is that environmental reporting is not beholden to, or afraid of, anyone's political agenda.  The other interesting consideration is that because environmental matters are beyond political controversy, the environmental actions they have taken include massive investments in new hardware.

Deutsche Welle's take on the possibility for meaningful action at the COP 21 conference in Paris is somewhat pessimistic.  Their complaint mirrors mine—when are people going to figure out just how big this problem is? (those are my bold italics below)

The USA press is worse than pathetic.  It has no courage in the face of political controversy.  It cannot explain how to read scientific data.  But mostly, it doesn't give a shit.  Cover a meeting in Paris dealing with a complicated subject?  Are you kidding?—there's a Kardashian posing nude somewhere.

NOx and pollution control

The fuss over the failure of the auto manufacturers to comply with the diesel standards for nitrous oxides is remarkably telling.  First of all, it should be made completely clear that building automobiles remains arguably the most difficult undertaking the Producer classes ever make.  Car manufacture is more difficult than aerospace because of the sheer volume of units produced.  Building an airliner is much more akin to building a skyscraper because very few are made so many operations are allowed to be relatively inefficient.  Cars are much more difficult to make than medical devices because of the incredible cost constraints.  And of course, cars are more difficult to make than computers because cars also have computers plus everything else.

The reason the complexity of automobile manufacture is so important to remember is that these facts make a mockery of what the technologically illiterate believe about cars.  For example, there are those who think that some day, a lone inventor in a garage will make some stunning breakthrough in emissions control or fuel efficiency.  Obviously, that will never happen but the true believers will explain that is because the big boys hate honest competition and will crush the lone genius.  And now we see the environmental extremists thinking that the only reason companies are failing to comply with emissions standards is because they are greedy or are unwilling to put forth the necessary efforts.

However, when everyone seems to be failing to meet the new diesel standards, the question must be asked, "Are the standards reasonable?"  My guess is that they are not.  But the environmental bureaucrats will never admit they are wrong.  Because they refuse to admit that there are physical realities that are responsible for this outbreak of environmental lawlessness, the possibilities for real progress are likely to degenerate into expensive and pointless lawsuits.  Environmentalists are fond of pointing out that the laws of nature will ultimately trump all other considerations, yet they will not realize that they cannot regulate emissions problems out of existence by issuing mandates that are physically impossible to accomplish.

Unfortunately, there are many people who seem to believe that the problems of climate change can be solved if only we elect politicians who will enact tougher legislation to outlaw greenhouse gasses.  Such people are worse than wrong, they have delayed the possibilities for progress for at least three decades now.

Wendell Potter on free-market "medicine"

Over the years, I have found that Wendell Potter's views on the state of USA medicine most closely resemble my own.  And in the article I have reproduced below, he hits a home run because he tackles THE fundamental issue facing our thoroughly dysfunctional system—whether for-profit medicine is even medicine.  Obviously most countries do not believe a free-market system delivers good medicine.  And of course, they have a wealth of evidence to back them up.  While USA has easily the most expensive medical care on earth, the health outcomes rarely crack the top 30.

There are many reasons why for-profit medicine doesn't work very well in any other measurement than the pay scales of health-care executives or the costs of prescription drugs.  Book have been written on the subject.  My favorite reason is that when money becomes the primary outcome, it destroys the trust between a doctor and patient that lead to all sorts of bad decisions.  It doesn't take long for a patient to wonder, "Are all these expensive tests necessary to diagnose my illness or does the doctor own shares in the MRI lab?"  This is especially true if the patient is paying these crazy bills out of pocket.  The question is especially corrosive if the doctor actually does have a financial stake in a diagnostic lab.

It wasn't always this way.  Between 1971 and 73, I was sentenced to work as a surgical orderly for my "crimes" of opposing the Vietnam War.  The hospital was a big sprawling affair attached to Minnesota's primary medical school.  This teaching hospital pretty much invented open heart surgery during the 1950s so while almost all the giants had moved on or retired, the reputations still dominated the surgical suites.  Heart trays were filled with instruments named for doctors who once walked the halls.

Most of the Twin Cities hospitals in those day were either state or county institutions or were large affairs owned and run by religious organizations.  There was still a tradition that medicine was to be a benevolent affair run for the benefit of the sick.  But the big greed had already begun to set in.  The head nurse of the OR, my boss, had bought stock in Medtronic when it was still being run out of a garage.  She obviously only came to work out of love for medicine because when Medtronic had gone public, she had become a wealthy woman.  The transplant doctors were already anticipating the world they would inhabit when Medicare started paying for dialysis and transplants.  So while there were still surgeons whose big goal was to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association for describing some breakthrough treatment, there were also the greedheads who were paying for their offshore horse ranches.

So Mr. Potter, contrary to your claim that Arnold Relman coined the term "medical-industrial complex" 35 years ago, I can assure all us conscientious objector orderlies at the UM Medical School were calling it that in 1971.  But yes, what we found disgusting and offensive was nothing compared to standard medical practice these days.

Stop TiSA or we are all doomed

It is no secret that I most vociferously oppose the trade agreements that the Obama administration is trying to "fast-track."  There was a small victory the other day when the House stopped TPP fast-track on a procedural vote.  I am willing to bet that this minor set-back for the Predatory ghouls who have been using such agreements to loot the USA will be temporary at best.  Maybe I am still licking my wounds from our failure to stop NAFTA, but the question that was often asked in that fight, "How do you stop people who will stop at nothing?" still applies.

Ellen Brown notes below that of all the monstrous "trade" agreement being proposed, TiSA is the most harmful because it will effectively outlaw any sort of meaningful monetary reform.  This is a HUGE deal.  If humanity is going to seriously address the climate problem, it simply MUST come up with at LEAST $100 trillion.  Anything much less will mean that we will be trying to put out a raging house fire with a squirt gun.  And without monetary reform, getting our hands on a pile of money that size will be impossible.

So I am not kidding when I state that if a dangerous lunacy like TiSA is passed, we can kiss our collective asses goodbye.  And I can say this with a mathematical certainty.

Fracking go broke

Because of its cost structure, the fracking industry is extremely vulnerable to an organized attack.  Now there is no way for me to know who, if anyone, is coordinating an attack on fracking but the collapse in oil prices has already claimed its first victim.  Keep in mind here that fracking has been funded by some high-rollers who expected hedge-fund sorts of returns.  Many actually believed the fracking hype—that it was a game-changer that would usher in a new era of oil plenty and USA energy independence.  How hyper-expensive wells that lose half their output in less than five years would accomplish that is a mystery that no one has ever explained to me.

What OPEC can accomplish with their low-price strategy is significant.  Not only can they drive those pesky frackers out of business, they can cause them to inflict such major losses on the investment community that the high-rollers will never return.  Of course, it isn't just the frackers that will lose out when oil heads below $60 / barrel.  Lots of producing nations will be losing money at that level.  So my guess is that these low prices won't last very long.

Yesterday, I was filling up at the local Costco.  The exit checker who stands near the gasoline price sign in the main store told me that prices had gone down twice just yesterday.  It was $2.29 for a gallon of unleaded at 5 pm.  After a nasty cold start to winter around here, temps had climbed well over freezing and there were patches of ground fog developing.  Between the low gas prices and the unseasonable warmth, it felt like I had fallen into an old movie.  Because low oil prices could also trigger another financial meltdown, I have seen this old movie before and am not crazy to see the rerun.  I did notice that the banksters were in Washington last week covering their butts in case of another 2008-style meltdown.  So enjoy the low gas prices because you probably will get nicked by the bailout.

Wall Street whistleblowers

There is something almost painfully sweet in the actions of whistleblowers.  It is the belief that if only the public or political leaders knew the truth and realized how blatantly the public interests were being subverted, things would change and a new and better day would dawn.  And yet, whistle blowing almost never actually changes anything.  The most important leak in USA history, the Pentagon Papers, was published on the front pages of the New York Times, was the subject of an important Supreme Court decision, and was debated in thousands of dorm rooms, and yet the real effects of this leak were negligible.  USA foreign policy barely changed and the military responded by tightening up procedures so that it would become harder to question their version of events in the future.

Even so, there is always some good when light is shined into the dark corners of evil.  Because of Carmen Segarra's latest allegations against Goldman Sachs, we will know more details as to how the vampire squid manages to jerk around the elected governments of the world.  That Goldman is little more than a gang of thieves who will stoop to anything to increase their ill-gotten gains has been pretty generally known since at least the 1930s.  But it is always good to read accounts of how they actually pull off their robberies.

Quite honestly, I have no idea how one actually stops something as obviously evil as Goldman Sachs and its like-minded competitors.  But something MUST be done because the damage the Predators can do to the real economy is simply staggering.  And now we are talking about the destruction of the biosphere.  But if finance capitalism is really just an extra-nasty vice like opium dens, the solution is to wall off those activities so the Predators can have their fun so long as they cannot touch the real economy.  And when the real economy actually needs financial services, it must open its own banks, credit unions, and clearing houses.

I would nominate Ms. Segarra to run a major financial institution in the real economy.  Smart and principled are obviously major Producer Class virtues and she seems to have plenty of both.

Committed carbon—the REAL threat to climate stability

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the climate change debate is how easily most activists on the subject home in on the fuel suppliers as the bad guys.  And while the oil and coal companies have more than their fair share of bad guys, concentrating on them is to wildly miss the point.

So what is the point?  The point is that the real engines of carbon emission growth are the folks who purchase technology that needs carbon-based fuel to operate.  When someone make the decision to purchase a car, they are also deciding to buy large amounts of 87-octane fuel for as long as they intend to operate that car.  Their decision to pollute is literally baked into the decision to operate a motor vehicle.

There are those who claim that we as a society are "addicted" to fossil fuels.  Anyone who has ever studied the medical aspects of addiction must cringe at the misuse of the word.  Because we are not at all "addicted" to fossil fuels.  Rather we made serious purchases that require us to buy very specific forms of fuels.

The best current example of this misunderstanding of a technological imperative is the celebrity cause of stopping the Keystone XL pipeline being built to transport Alberta Tar Sands.  And while no reasonable being can be anything but horrified by the environmental implications of mining the tar sands, fighting over how it is transported trivializes the problem.  Face it, if they cannot move the tar sands in a pipeline, they will ship it by rail because there has been nothing done to diminish the DEMAND for the fuels those sands contain.

In this essay, Tim Radford explains how this concept works when the subject is a new coal-fired power plant.  Build one of those, and you have increased the demand for coal for at least the next 50 years.  At that point, the coal mine operators are are merely good businessmen supplying a social need.  If you REALLY want to make a dent in the carbon-emission problems, you must somehow get access to the room where the decision is made to build a coal-burner in the first place.  This action will probably not be nearly as sexy as watching Daryl Hannah get handcuffed at a pipeline protest, but it would accomplish a whole lot more.

Coal still smashing consumption records

For all the good news on solar cells, energy efficiency improvements in lighting, advances in electric cars, etc., most of the world's real economies are still overwhelmingly powered by burning carbon.  And the dirtiest, ugliest, most environmentally damaging carbon fuel of all—coal—is still a growing player.

typical coal molecule

The problem with burning coal is not so much that it is mostly carbon, but that we are burning so much, so fast.  If all the coal burned last year were burned in say, 1000 years, the planet could probably adjust.  Now the folks who own coal stocks think growing consumption is a good idea.  But it is not—even for the folks who own coal stocks.  And most certainly not for the rest of us.

Our dilemma is that we need electricity and will buy it no matter how it is generated.  And the utilities have HUGE investments in the machinery that burns coal combined with management and staff that knows how to run this equipment.  Since electrical equipment is something that only governments or corporations can afford to buy, an individual consumer has almost no say on how this power is generated.  It's not even worth writing a concerned letter on the subject (I have tried).

Even political activism is frustrating as hell because a debate over methods of power generation will only attract the attention of a tiny minority compared to the sexier subjects.  Unfortunately, there is no substitute for democratic control.  The countries that have made significant progress on reducing carbon emissions have effective green political movements.  That is why the corruption of democratic institutions and environmental organizations is so tragic.

The secret world of hedge funds

...and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. John 3:19

It is easy to ignore the utter uselessness of hedge funds.  After all, the whole point of being a member of the Leisure Class is to put one's uselessness on display.  And what can be more useless than to get one's living by gambling?  Hedge funds are just modern and very large-scale bucket shops.  As defined by the U.S. Supreme Court, a bucket shop is "[a]n establishment, nominally for the transaction of a stock exchange business, or business of similar character, but really for the registration of bets, or wagers, usually for small amounts, on the rise or fall of the prices of stocks, grain, oil, etc., there being no transfer or delivery of the stock or commodities nominally dealt in."

These sorts of transactions are zero-sum games.  Since money put into play in bucket shops are not investments, they do not grow the real economy.  So for every winner, there must be losers.  Unfortunately, removing money from the real economy for the purposes of gambling does real damage.  So in truth, the rest of us SHOULD pay attention to the hedge funds.  Turns out, however, that hedge funds operate in secrecy so even if the rest of us wanted to know what they are up to will find it very difficult.  It seems that hedge funds are not merely economically useless, they are downright nefarious.

One of the key provisions of the New Deal was the outlawing of bucket shops.  It seems pretty obvious that any economic renewal these days will outlaw the hedge funds—at least the 99.999% of their activity that has no hedging function whatsoever.  And the rest of us should NEVER be put on the hook for any losses incurred by the folks who participate in this uselessness.

Limiting speech by the rich

In classical republican theory, two major threats to self-government were recognized.

The first was a standing military. The second was concentrations of wealth.

Free speech is not absolute. The speech rights of military officers in USA are to a rather large degree limited by both custom and tradition, as well as law.

No such restrictions have been developed to limit free speech by the rich. With the rulings by the Roberts Court, it is time we start thinking along these lines. (The most notorious ruling was Citizens United v. FEC, which held that corporations have the same speech rights as human beings. This morning, the Court struck down any limits on the total amount of money any single individual corporation can give to any number of political campaigns.)

I don't know what the exact percentage is, but I think a good guess is that at least two thirds of political campaign spending goes for TV ads.

How informative are political ads on TV? And how truthful?

The United States was designed to be a democratic republic - a system of government that is designed to be responsive to the people of the United States as a whole, and not to the wealthiest 1 percent. The key to a functioning democratic republic is an informed citizenry. Yet, the key feature of modern political ads are thirty or sixty second TV ads that more often than not are deliberately designed to misinform, misrepresent, mislead, and inflame.

The founding fathers and mothers concluded, from their intense historical study of previous republics, most especially Rome, that the most important safeguard of a republic was a sense of public virtue, which is cultivated by general education of the population. John Adams was most proud of his writing of the Massachusetts Constitution, which includes this remarkable admonishment:

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

Only an educated public could spot those political leaders who had been corrupted and lost their sense of public virtue, and subject them to the censure and punishment requisite for preserving the republic. As Jefferson states, "An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy."

Backsliding on climate change

The climate change "debate" is essentially absurd.  On one hand, you have the real climate which is obviously changing and for well-documented reasons.  On the other hand, you have C- hacks who have figured out how to make a living pretending that none of this is so.  This should be the greatest intellectual rim-rocking, slam-dunk of all time.

Yet it is not.  While it is damn difficult to deny that the Australian Open is currently being played in dangerous 108°F (42°C) heat (and a million other fine examples), it is much easier for everyone to deny that they are the problem.  Some of the biggest carbon footprints belong to people like Al Gore who professes a deep and abiding concern for the climate.  And so the deniers win—not because they have any good science on their sides but because everyone is willing to believe any remotely plausible explanation for why they don't need to change how they live.

Of course, the vast majority of humans don't have a lot of options for change because the only way we will ever have better options for reducing carbon emissions is through collective action.  Unfortunately, that well has been thoroughly poisoned by the ninnies who believe collective action is best defined by using police power to enforce drug and sex laws.  Start talking collective action and most folks need only a few nanoseconds to come up with a good example for why such talk usually leads to very bad outcomes.  Denial wins because after a couple of centuries of crackpot collectivism, denial is institutionally embedded in most societies.  I mean, how can mere science and obvious reality combat THAT.

And so the beat goes on.  The USA cranks out more CO2.  The EU makes it extra difficult for even countries with programs to reduce CO2 to make a difference.  The investment community has little interest in long-term projects and CO2 reduction is the ultimate long-term project.  International trade agreements are crafted with strong enforcement mechanisms for everything BUT the environment.  And we aren't even talking about the economic forces that have huge vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Unfortunately, all this institutional denial doesn't change reality and the Antarctic glaciers really ARE melting right now.  But those events are a long ways away.  And so denial grows in the breasts of most humans until it is their house that is destroyed.  Because in the end, most people find science deeply annoying—as annoying as Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory."

Shoddy Solar Panels From China

Sorry folks, but this story sucks so bad it could replace gravity.  It's bad enough when honest producers are driven out of business by dumping tactics, it's even worse if those crooked "low-cost" producers are cheating in their methods of production.  Dumping is a Predator sin—cutting too many corners is a Producer sin (which is much worse.)  Just remember, Predators steal because they have no other options but when Producers cheat (in this case by knowingly making shoddy goods) they are sinning against their class advantage.  When Producers cheat by cutting corners, they create an atmosphere where others must now also cheat just to stay in the game.

Of course, dumping should never be confused with public support for infant industry.  Difficult tasks have long learning curves.  The micro-second financial dealings on Wall Street simply will not support long learning-curve projects.  So if a society wants something like solar panels, they must subsidize the development costs.  There is a huge gap between inventing and perfecting solar panels and simply setting up a factory to produce them.  Cultures that invest in development understandably resent competition that skips these development costs—and cannot even be bothered with turning out a first-rate product.

To make things worse, we have economist / bureaucrats who actually think that government subsidies provided to companies engaged in long learning-curve projects should be treated the same as government-supported dumping.  Understanding this absurd confusion is critically important because if cultures are not permitted to subsidize the development of the difficult (in order to appease the neoliberal gods), then there are NO problems we can solve.  This isn't simply a matter of industrial stagnation—we already have that here in USA—this is actually about the survival of a planet that supports human life.

Building on the cheap—Moore, Oklahoma

Oklahoma was a strange place to visit when I was kid.  My dad's brother lived in Bartlesville which was a company town for Phillips 66 in those days.  This was a town where some of the oil business's intelligentsia lived.  Folks who are not especially familiar with oil tend to be surprised when I tell them just how many highly educated specialists (geologists, refinery designers, chemists, engineers, etc.) it takes to get that dino juice to your neighborhood gas station.  When my uncle retired from Phillips, they presented him with a leather-bound collection of the patents that had been granted to Phillips with his name on them.  There were 12 and some were quite significant.

I once mentioned to my cousin how impressed I had been by that collection.  He laughed and said, "One of our neighbors invented styrene which pretty much reduced the rest of the neighborhood to peasant status."  And there was a significant difference between the technological wizards that made Phillips the go-to company for innovation, and the folks at the top who ran things—as was made painfully clear when T. Boone Pickens blackmailed Phillips in a hostile takeover attempt that essentially destroyed lovely little Bartlesville.  As I discovered from Pickens' raid, the oil business is like that—some of the most talented members of the Producer Classes are working for some of the most ruthless Predators (think Dick Cheney) on earth.

Producers—even those with the most skills—are often (usually?) painfully naive politically.  And when you work for companies that are run by the utterly ruthless, your politics will often mimic the company line.  My uncle's politics were so extremely right-wing, my father would mumble about them for hours on the drive back to Minnesota.  And as I discovered over the years, the political agenda set by the Predatory oil company executives has come to absolutely dominate the whole state.  As proof, Oklahoma is currently represented by two of the most extreme Senators in the land.  James Inhofe seems absolutely convinced that Climate Change is a hoax—much to the approval of the top executives of big oil.

But denying the reality of Climate Change in Oklahoma can be hazardous to your health—as residents, including children, discovered when a monster F5 tornado flattened a suburb of Oklahoma City and killed them.  What is especially interesting about this tale of madness is that the 2013 tornado followed almost exactly the same track of an F5 tornado that destroyed a lot of the same town in 1999.  So even though people knew they were living in a tornado alley, they could not be bothered to build safe rooms in elementary schools—or even follow the state's building codes.  Such anti-regulatory extremism likely came from on high—from the oil executives who buy anti-regulatory politicians.  And so schools in a known tornado alley were built without enough rebar in the concrete.  Starving public infrastructure is so politically acceptable in Oklahoma they will cut corners on something as cheap as freaking rebar!  (You cannot make this stuff up.)

Penny Pritzker as an example of the criminality of our elites

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime
oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait." - Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed," more dramatically rendered in English as "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

President Obama is nominating his top fund raiser, Penny Pritzker, to be Secretary of Commerce. Incredibly - perhaps I should write, sadly - the announcement is causing hardly a stir among the liberal and progressive blogosphere. At the very least, Greg Palast's May 4, 2013 post at Smirking Chimp, Billionaire Bankster Breaks into Obama’s Cabinet,  should be going viral. Palast wrote:

Pritzker’s net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust – at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior’s depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama’s South Side district lost their homes.

There were also a couple diaries on DailyKos, including by front pager Laura Clawson, who called attention to Pritzker's and her family's role in Hyatt Hotels, which has compiled what may be the worst records of labor abuses in the hotel industry. Incredibly, just to prove, I suppose, how hopelessly uninformed, ignorant, and unaware liberals and progressives can be, someone posted in one of the first comments, "She's not the monster you think she is."

Even President Obama rushed to show that he was likewise uninformed, ignorant, and unaware, though at this point I'm not about to attach the labels "liberal" or "progressive" to him. 

"She's built companies from the ground up," Obama said. "She knows from experience that no government program alone can take the place of a great entrepreneur."

There once were, in most every city, old labor and socialist organizers, veterans of the labor strife of the 1920s and 1930s, you could sit down with in a neighborhood tavern, and during the course of an evening, well lubricated by a few pitchers of beer, tell you more than you really wanted to know about who was actually running your town. How the police chief's kids got really good paying jobs because the chief would not make too many inquiries about (in other words, would remain deliberately uninformed, ignorant, and unaware) the prostitution on the West Side; or the numbers racket along the riverfront; or the freight pilferage at the airport. How the mayor's wife was able to drive around in a brand new Cadillac because a certain tract of land had been quietly rezoned, to the advantage a mayoral crony. Such petty corruption used to be the stock in trade of good local investigative reporters at big metropolitan newspapers, back in a nearly forgotten era when FCC rules made it nearly impossible for one or two corporate behemoths to own every major newspaper, radio station, and television station in one city.

Many of you already know that I used to be an economics correspondent, and that I burned out and became depressed watching Wall Street have its way in the early 1990s in what was called, back then, "off balance sheet liabilities" (what we today call "financial derivatives" - the stuff, like credit default swaps, that blew up in 2007 through 2008, and left a dismaying amount of the world's economy in ashes). Well, that's not really the whole truth. About what got me depressed, that is. So, tonight, you're going to learn a bit more of the truth. You're going to learn some of the dark, frightful secrets hidden away in my memory; stuff I usually don't mention, because it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. 

In a word, the mob. Organized crime. The syndicate. In Chicago, it was called the Outfit. But every major city had its own crime family, or branch thereof. You see, part of what I researched and wrote about in that depressing period of nearly a quarter century ago was how the billions of dollars, nay, hundreds of billions of dollars that were fueling what was politely called mergers and acquisitions, most especially including leveraged buy outs, came from, not entirely, but in large part, organized crime. That included hundreds of billions of dollars that the Wall Street banks laundered from illegal narcotics trafficking, including heroin and cocaine.  The beginnings of financial derivatives were closely tied to the mob going legit.

So, the Reagan regime of deregulation was really a double whammy. It basically decriminalized the worst behavior of banks and corporations, at the very time that some of the most immoral, ruthless, indeed murderous, people in America were buying legitimacy for themselves and their heirs by seizing control, through brazen manipulation of debt and stock markets, of America's industrial companies.

The story of the hour is Penny Pritzker becoming Secretary of Commerce. So, tonight, you're going to learn about the Pritizker family and its fortune. I suspect that it's probably more than you want to know.

The origins of the Pritzker family fortune was her grandfather's mob connections when he was a tax attorney for a lot of people in "The Outfit," the Chicago mob, beginning under Al Capone, and continuing through the 1980s. This connection to organized crime was reportedly what financed the creation of Hyatt Hotels by Penny's father. There was no crime involved, but the financial backing came from organized crime, plain and simple.  The details are in Gus Russo's 2006 tome Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. Russo's book is crucial reading for anyone trying to understand why America's ruling elites are, well, so bad. It's not really a matter of incompetence or ineptitude. Rather, it is a case study in how the republican (small "r", not capital "R" as in the Republican Party, or GOP - greedy old pricks) ideals of public virtue, the general welfare, and economic and political equality, are forgotten and eventually undermined by allowing a criminal class to become legitimate and amass political and economic influence. The story of the Pritzker family is an all-American story, of how a family with ties to organized crime amasses a great fortune while striving relentlessly for legitimacy, and arrives at the pinnacle of economic and political power in America. Chris Hedges is not exaggerating when he states that "the criminal class in this country has seized power."

This ascent to America's summits is an oft-trod trek, pioneered by Boston and Newport maritime merchants who parlayed opium and millions of ruined lives in China into wealth, respectability, and power in the 1800s. Many of the mercantile banks established along the way are still with us, brightened and prettified by numerous changes in corporate branding. The one constant is the ruthless concentration on private gain. The extent to which that concentration on private gain is tempered and ameliorated by fleeting notions of public service provides the cracks and crevices in which the ebb and flow of history eddy and swirl. 

Now, you can point to the Kennedy family as an example of ill-begotten gains leading to some very good minded public service. But Penny Pritzker's roles at Hyatt and Superior Bank are, to say the least, highly troubling, and cast doubt on the idea that she may be anywhere near as mindful of the general welfare as John, Bobby, and Edward Kennedy were. Instead of public service, the tradition in the Pritzker family seems focused on economic exploitation of others, skirting the law as much as possible, and shady dealings. There is a strong tradition in the Pritzker family of outright money laundering and offshore tax evasion.

Selling indulgences for carbon emissions does not work

Regular readers are probably well aware that I am not exactly a big fan of cap-and-trade.  I have a whole vocabulary of slander for the idea.  But if you read the following articles, it becomes quite clear that in the world where neoliberals run the economic debate, cap-and-trade is the only game in town.  For those young enough to have grown up after the neoliberals convinced everyone that there was no alternative to their worldview and that history was over, ideas about well-regulated capitalism that were part of the normal discussion in my youth are considered impossible to smart, highly-educated folks as old as 50.  So for them, the failure of cap-and-trade eliminates their best hope for addressing climate change.

We can hope that this set-back for cap-and-trade will force the green policy planners to come up with better alternatives.  I wouldn't count on it, however, because if you actually believe something is impossible at 50, the chance your thinking will evolve is not high.  But here is a thought for those who believe that there are no alternatives to some cut-rate version of Thatcherism.  We are cooking the planet.  The ONLY solution is to stop burning so much carbon.  There. Is. No. Alternative.  The only flexibility comes from deciding on what approach will put out the greatest number of fires.  Cap-and-trade wasn't putting out many (if any) fires so it wasn't a very good idea.  So let's not even TRY to flog that dead horse back to life.

It's time to think big.  We want an all (or nearly all) electric society.  We want the equipment that powers our society to be at least 99% recyclable.  We want economic policies that put our citizens to work building that sustainable society.  And we want to put our fellow citizens to work NOW!  Jeers to the folks who think debts that exist only in a computer chip somewhere are enough reason so that we cannot address the very real debts we owe the planet.  (A longer version of this argument can be found here.)

Doha—what to expect

So long as criminals run the global financial system, it is impossible for anything meaningful to come from the Doha climate talks.  People who cannot afford to do anything rarely get anything accomplished and now the thieves have run off with all the money.  Of course, there is something very sad about people who think that a large meeting room full of harried bureaucrats arguing the minutia of the trillions of fires set every day by the earth's 7+ billion inhabitants can lead to any meaningful progress anyway.  But remove any authority to actually make large-scale changes and the resources to make those changes happen and the recipe for getting nothing done is baked into the event.