Peter Cooper is spinning in his grave

Felix Salmon has a depressing but important article on Reuters about Cooper Union, the privately funded free college of architecture and engineering that has been a landmark in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan for a century and a half. Basically, the college was doing fine, surviving on its original bequest even though it did not charge tuition, until the past decade, when the Board of Directors became imbued with the pecuniary culture of nearby Wall Street.

Salmon's article itself is a great example of the impact of the hegemonic pecuniary culture, because he fails to capture the great irony of exactly who the Union's founder, Peter Cooper, was. He designed and built the first steam locomotive in the U.S. in 1830, the Tom Thumb for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He held patents on what became known as Jell-O, and was one of the five founders of the companies that laid the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. His son-in-law and often business partner was Abram Hewitt, historically recognized as "Father of the New York City Subway System".

As impressive as this record of industrial nation building is, there's more: Peter Cooper, in his eighties, was the 1876 presidential candidate for the Greenback Party. Perhaps Salmon knows this and deliberately withholds this information from his readers. More likely, Salmon does not know about the Greenback Party, and its history as the one real, legitimate alternative to control by oligarchs of the country's financial and monetary affairs.

The Greenback Party, in other words, is the historical political alternative to the  pecuniary culture of Wall Street.

Salmon at least provides a decent summary of Cooper's dream of a free college in New York City: 

....[Cooper] owned a lot of land in Manhattan — including the land underneath what is now the Chrysler Building — and he knew that land would, literally, produce healthy rents in perpetuity. A philanthropist, Cooper knew exactly what he wanted those rents to be spent on: he created the Cooper Union, a college with the defining characteristic that it would charge its students nothing. It was — and is — a noble cause. And in the early days, its trustees quite literally bought into that cause: they helped out with its endowment, and covered its deficits in years where it lost money. 

The past few years, the Board of Cooper Union has been selling off the massive land holdings in Manhattan Peter Cooper had bequeathed to the college. And the Board spent $175 million it really did not have, to build, as Salmon describes it, a "gratuitously glamorous and expensive New Academic Building."

Now that the Board has frittered away the college's patrimony, it has decided the time has come for Cooper Union to turn its back on the vision of its founder, and begin charging $20,000 a year in tuition.   

As Atrios, who pointed me to the Salmon article wrote, "Clueless and/or malevolent rich people are going to destroy everything nice in this country."

May Day!

It would be difficult to imagine a worse May Day for the world's Producing Classes.  Minimum wages world-wide are inadequate to sustain any sort of reasonable life.  Working conditions are becoming increasingly lethal.  With a very few exceptions, the economies are at near depression conditions.  Unemployment levels are reaching 1930s levels.  Worst of all, most governments have been pursuing economic policies that are known to be contractionary—which means that no matter how bad things are today, they will almost certainly be worse tomorrow.

The great Veblenian insight was not that the Leisure Classes make their living through force and fraud.  That observation has been with us since the beginning of recorded time.  What Veblen added was the observation that the coin of the Leisure Classes realm was the desire (and skills) to be utterly useless.  And because social status was accorded to the useless and status emulation was a most powerful human motivation, the ethic of uselessness would spread into the ranks of even people who could not afford such a lifestyle.  Veblen would note that professors spent a major part of their incomes on trinkets and activities that would enhance their Leisure Class status.

What this means in 2013 is that even "left" political parties and the overwhelming majority of central bankers have no way of even thinking about the global unemployment emergency.  There are no major jobs programs.  The Leisure Classes cannot understand that work needs doing because in their world, useful work is damn near unthinkable.  For them, useful work is assigned to classes of people so low, they are barely considered human (even if that useful work is being done by the most educated people in society.)  Hell, in the Leisure Class world, even mechanical servants are considered beneath consideration—a sure sign of committed members of the Leisure Class is if they brag they have never read an instruction manual.

So the bright spot on the horizon this May Day is that at least the contractionary austerian economic policies are coming under fire.  This isn't the same as a huge financial commitment to building the solar society, but at least it smells like a start.  But you watch, if we suddenly find ourselves handing out cash in an effort to restart the economy, much of it will go to the Leisure Class buddies of the government and bankster types who run things now.  You can just imagine the torrents of Powerpoint presentations (now that the professionally useless are aware of the hazards of using Excel.)

We have transitioned from a market economy to a market society

One of the most agonizing aspects of our current situation is how so many people who consider themselves religious have unconsciously surrendered their religious moral convictions in the arena of political economy. A number of critics have been warning for decades that the unfettered capitalism unleashed by deregulation's dismantling of the New Deal would cause a deep and dangerous moral and spiritual decline. A few years ago I found an interesting debate, from the late 1970s if I recall correctly, between a conservative Protestant theologian, and an acolyte of Milton Friedman. In no way could the theologian be considered a Marxist or a socialist, but he was fervent and unrelenting in his attacks on Friedman's ideas, which he derisively called anarcho-capitalism. Yale political science professor Jim Sleeper has written some powerful articles exploring the tensions between unfettered capitalism and morality, such as his short but brilliant Conservative Contradictions.

Hopefully, it is a sign that even business elites are getting uneasy about the cultural destruction being wrought by their unfettered capitalism, that Paul B. Farrell, writes in, of all places, MarketWatch, Capitalism is killing our morals, our future. The article is about Harvard political philosophy professor Michael Sandel, who argues that our market economy has become so all encompassing in its power and influence that almost literally everything is for sale, including goods that just a few decades ago were seen as belonging firmly in the public sector, such as health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, and recreation. We have unconsciously, and without our considered approval, Sandel writes, transitioned from a market economy to a market society.

James Hansen retires from NASA

Whenever I dispair at the utter insanity of the public debate, I think of what it must be like to be James Hansen.  He has had the unfortunate timing of doing perhaps the most important scientific work on the planet (and doing an absolutely terrific job of it) in an era when some big bucks are funding an open attack on science and rational thought.

Even though I came through the public schools in a time when science education was almost infinitely funded, I also knew people who often prayed that "God would give them strength to keep their faith when surrounded by a sea of Godless secularism."  I admit I have never quite understood such people.  I have experienced so much pure joy over the years in discovering new things that I simply cannot imagine anyone foregoing "the pleasure of finding things out" for religious reasons.  But for many, there is a much greater comfort in finding a belief set that explains "everything".  As the saying goes, "Ignorance is bliss."  Lot of blissed-out people out there trying to avoid life's pop quizzes.  So when some charlatan comes along preaching that someone like James Hansen is an evil person who wants to make their lives more difficult, there are PLENTY of people who chose to believe this slander than someone who might harsh their buzz.

So anyway, Hansen is retiring from NASA—mostly so he can raise his intensity in his fight against the forces of ignorance without having to represent an institutionally cautious space agency.  I wish him luck.  Hansen is a BIG favorite of mine—courageous, disciplined, hard-working, thoughtful, and smarter than even the description "rocket scientist" would suggest.  Type his name in the blog search box and you will discover I have mentioned him favorably before.


The man has his work cut out for him.  As the Scripps Institute just pointed out, we are approaching 400 ppm CO2 for the first time in 3 million years.

Iceland votes

The vote this weekend in Iceland may seems confusing but it really is not.  The Social Democrats who managed the recovery from the financial disasters of 2008 did a pretty good job—at least by the standards of Irish politicians.  But the "prosperity" they engineered was pretty weak tea and lots of Icelanders are still hurting.  But the SDP wouldn't have lost the election if they hadn't decided that it would be a good idea to join the Euro.  Frankly, I have NO idea what they were thinking.  The Icelandic solution to their financial catastrophe would have been nearly impossible if they had been using the Euro.  This little factoid was so obvious, the voters turned to the parties that had allowed the banking crises to occur in the first place simply because they promised to stay away from the Euro.

This isn't really a left-right matter.  When it comes to cultural issues, most Icelanders are on the same page (a page that puts them on the far left in places like USA.)  NO, this vote was about the Euro and the Euro lost.  If the SDP had been anti-Euro, they probably could have stayed in power for a long time.  So the political parties that had been in power in 2008 were forgiven simply because they claimed they had learned their lessons and were absolutely committed to monetary independence.  The only question is: Now that the old parties are back in power, will they revert to their old neoliberal swinishness, or will they chart a better path?

The 787 flies again

There are many good reasons why flying wasn't done successfully by humans until 1903.  It's really, really hard to do.  And flying didn't become "routine" until the late 1960s.  Folks who talk about how flying used to be so "glamorous" are talking about an era when it was very expensive and quite honestly, hazardous to your health.

When I was in the sixth grade, we had a family friend who worked for Northwest Airlines.  He came to visit and I got instructions from my mother that I wasn't supposed to ask him about airplanes because times were difficult for him.  It seems he was on a team that was investigating why one of their aircraft types was mysteriously crashing.  The problem airplane was the Lockheed L-188 Electra and two of them had broken apart in mid-air.  I ignored my mother's instructions because I was so damn curious—I mean, how often did I get ask a real airplane question to a real airplane expert?  Turns out, the folks at Northwest had NO idea why their Electras were falling apart and were about to ground the whole fleet until they found out.  This experience left quite an impression on me—not only because my folks found out about my curiosity, but because it was the first time I had encountered a really smart adult who didn't have an answer to a serious question.  Eventually, the airlines would just give up on the Electra—this was the era when new and better aircraft were still showing up on a regular basis.

The Electra did not destroy Lockheed as an airplane company.  They are still with us.  But there is an example of a flawed aircraft design bringing down not only a company, but the aircraft industry of a nation.  In 1953, the Brits showed up with the first jet-powered airliner called the de Havilland DH 106 Comet.  It was stunningly good-looking and seemingly gave British aircraft an insurmountable lead.  And it would have except for one small problem—they had a nasty tendency to break apart in midair too.  Eventually they would discover what was causing this problem, but by then the industry had moved past the Comet.  Because even though the fix had been implemented for the catastrophic failures, there were still the maintenance headaches that came from the stunningly bad design decision to locate the engines at the wing root.  British aircraft manufacture would never really recover.  Yes, it had a hand in Concorde—but that was a joint venture with the French who largely made it work.  And there are still British parts in some Airbuses.

Which leads us to Boeing.  This is a company that was the primary beneficiary of the problems at Lockheed and the Brits.  They didn't have these sorts of catastrophes.  Until the Dreamliner.  Turns out neoliberal business practices and aircraft manufacture are not a good mix.  So for the first time in my memory, a new aircraft type from Boeing was grounded.  Yes, the problem was not an airframe failure.  This was a battery problem.  Even so, there are probably red faces in some of the engineering teams.  This is NOT supposed to happen to Boeing.  And I am sure there are folks in the aircraft business who are wondering—if they can get something as simple as a battery pack wrong, should we be worrying about something bigger?

Cultural power

There was a lot of loose talk about cultural power back when I was in college.  And why not?  After all, we were up against a government armed with nukes—the only response we could muster was changing the culture.  Much of this was just silly—when I consider how much hot air was exchanged over subjects like long hair, I cringe to this day.  Some cultural victories like casual dress were immediately co-opted—dressing like a hippie did not stop the war in Vietnam but it certainly made Levi Strauss and Co. VERY rich.

I tend to look on my infatuation with cultural change as one example of my foolish youth.  After all, we won all the important cultural battles but that did not prevent those hippies from electing some of the more reactionary governments in USA history.  But while culture may be no match for militarism or the naked greed and corruption of finance capitalism, it isn't nothing.  And the established power structure understood this.  This is why they made such a big deal over long hair.  But where they chose to make their cultural stand was their old reliable—religion.  They have been using religion to enhance and legitimize their power for so long, bishops are on the back row of a chess board—right next to the king and queen.

This time, the choice of religion was especially inspired.  Political progressives had abandoned the field.  Sure, the civil rights movement was initially led by the preacher's kids like Martin Luther King.  Malcolm X, who taught that Christianity was the religion of the slavers became a Muslim divine.  Even the traditionally reactionary Roman Catholic Church had the (short-lived) cultural outbreak of Vatican II.  But the overwhelming majority of educated white liberals were aggressively irreligious.

Not only did the various forms of religious fundamentalism receive quite lavish funding during the cultural push-back, other more secular intellectual pursuits became fundamentalist too.  The most obvious example was economics.  Just as the economic profession was declaring itself a science, it became almost as purely religious as it had ever been.  Why just yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote:

Yet austerity maintained and even strengthened its grip on elite opinion. Why?

Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent. more

I can think of no better sign that "elite" opinion is seriously questioning the cultural assumptions of finance capitalism than to see some high muckity-muck of the Church of England questioning banking practices.  This is the same institution that once defended the Opium Wars, after all.

Saturday toons 27APR13

Economic austerity as a crime against humanity

One of the more annoying characteristics of the Leisure Class is their insistence that everyone is like them in that everyone wants to be as perfectly useless as possible.  That simply is not true.  There are many of us who want to accomplish as much as is possible with the abilities one has—to die leaving behind a long and interesting obituary.  Veblen called this desire "The Instinct of Workmanship."  So when the Predators shut down the real economy for fun and profit, their biggest crime is the destruction of human potential.  You could run an interesting continent with Europe's (and the rest of the world's) unemployed and the unemployed are NOT happy about this current state of affairs.  It goes against their nature.

Long-term unemployment not only harms the immediate victim, it causes destruction for several generations.  My parents had miserable childhoods because of the Great Depression.  That trauma affected the way they acted their whole lives.  And their fearfulness was passed on to their children in countless ways.  People don't instantly recover when an economic calamity ends just like people carry the scars of war to their graves.

Here is a Portugese parliamentarian bemoaning the fact that everything their country had built since the Carnation Revolution—most especially a generation of highly educated young—was being sacrificed to accommodate the crackpot ideas of the most reactionary economic thinkers to have ever walked the earth. 37 years of building followed by two years of extreme destruction.  Since any Predator jackass can kick down the barn, that roughly 19:1 ratio of building to destruction seems about right.

Laugh when the self-important fail in public

Folks, you simply cannot imagine how much pleasure I am taking from seeing Rogoff and Reinhart's Growth in the Time of Debt getting trashed on such a primal level.  This study smelled to high heaven when it was released in 2010.  The problem was, you could make fun of their errors in logic but to a third-party low-information bystander, whatever you said was just your opinion against a couple of big-league Harvard economics profs.  And so the Predator Class conventional wisdom just rolls over everything.  Rogoff and Reinhart not only convinced the usual suspects like Paul Ryan, but heavy hitters in the EU like Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission.

But this time, Rogoff and Reinhart really screwed up.  They stand exposed for cooking the books but even worse, making simple mistakes in an Excel spreadsheet.  Good grief, there are folks who use Excel to organize their grocery shopping.  This is a commonly used program.  Folks may not understand the nuances of macroeconomics but they know how to categorize folks who make high school level Excel errors.

So last night, Stephen Colbert held up Rogoff and Reinhart to some world-class ridicule.  They may be able to hold their own in an economics debate with Paul Krugman, but they will never recover from being turned into a national joke.  Colbert is very good at what he does and he was on his game last night—he was extremely funny!  See for yourself!

The Boston Marathon Bombing meets Institutional Analysis

Even though this blog is about real economics, the temptation to apply Institutional Analysis to the explosions at the Boston Marathon is just overwhelming.  So forgive this diversion.

That fact that the perpetrators are Chechens from Dagestan explains a lot.  Put simply, the Chechens are a people that many Russians want to eliminate from the face of the earth.  Stalin hated them.  Putin basically leveled the Chechen capital of Grozny.  Chechens in Moscow can be subject to physical attacks.  Whether the Chechens are "freedom fighters" (USA State Department) or "terrorists" (Putin's government), growing up Chechen is NOT for the weak or faint of heart.  The fact the Tsarnaev brothers grew up in Dagestan means they started life as economically precarious refugees.

The older brother was named for one of history's more brutal conquerers who has been estimated to have butchered almost 5% of the world's then known population.  So we do not have a child named for a poet.  Folks like that were cast out of the Chechen culture AND gene pool LONG ago.  What's left is pretty ferocious.

So the brothers Tsarnaev come to the USA in time to watch the country invade two countries from their neighborhood on the nakedly fraudulent pretext of fighting terrorism.  In spite of the fact that his economic situation is still very precarious, Tamerlan gets married and has a kid.  As the bills mount up, his uncle determines he is a "loser."  Of course, the uncle fails to mention that in Tamerlan's age group, at least half the earth's population are "losers."  So we have someone who is a stranger in a strange land who cannot figure out any path out of "loserhood."  He is probably furious that no one he knows in USA has any idea what it means to be bombed—as they casually justify the use of drones in countries that they could not locate on a map.

The point here is that those bigots running around the land screaming that this is another example of Muslim "extremism" are barking up the wrong tree.  Tamerlan did not need to fall under the spell of a magical guru, he had overwhelming reasons to be furious by the facts he could see and feel on a daily basis.

Of course, merely being angry does not a bomber make.  He needs the means to get his hands on a bomb.  And here we encounter a major theme in Institutional Analysis—technological diffusion.  The fact that your desktop computer or iPad has far more capabilities and power than all the computers combined at my university when I still a student in the early 1970s is the most obvious example of diffusion.  But technology diffuses in many areas and the massive innovation in cheap, but very effective, Improvised Explosive Devices during the USA occupation of Iraq proves that weapons are just another area.  Turns out cell phones make excellent remote explosive triggers—who cudda known?  Tamerlan did not need a terrorist infrastructure to arm himself—he could build those simple bombs in a garage out of parts he could buy at Wal-Mart.

Welcome to the brave new world—where free-lancers can actually wage war on a primitive level.  One thing is absolutely certain—chasing Muslim "extremism" and cutting off links between terrorist organizations will not stop a Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  And though I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, might I suggest that the best way to stop the Tamerlans of this world from blowing things up is to ensure they have a clear route out of "loserhood."  We simply must give young people meaningful work opportunities.  Otherwise, they will spend their idle time and ingenuity figuring out how to make bombs out of pressure cookers.

Is the long dark night of neoliberalism nearly over?

During the long darkness of neoliberalism, there have been many times when I have been nearly overwhelmed by despair.  It was that crushing feeling I had when I realized the University of Chicago was going to provide economic direction for that sick twisted thug Pinochet.  I felt it when I realized that Jimmy Carter was making it "respectable" for Democrats to be neoliberals.  When Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers and put a Wall Street hack named Regan in charge of the treasury, little Davy Stockman in charge of OMB, and anointed George Gilder as his economic guru, I knew the darkness was going to be long and deep.  I was furious when Bill Clinton ran on a Populist platform and then mutated into Grover Cleveland between his election and inauguration.  I was damn near suicidal over the passage of NAFTA.  Etc.

The flickers in the darkness have been few and faint.  There was The Battle of Seattle when a tiny handful of activists actually managed to close down a WTO conference.  There was the rise of industrial Japan as she basically ridiculed every neoliberal tenant out there. There was the organized opposition to the IMF in Latin America.  But realistically, there were damn few cracks in the neoliberal hegemony I could find no matter how hard I looked.

Truthfully, the only thing that gave me any hope at all was the certainly that because neoliberalism was a ridiculous collection of crackpot ideas, eventually it would fail.  Unfortunately, bad ideas can hang on for a very long time even when they keep blowing up in the faces of the true believers.  So even though I love the sunny optimism of the following article, I am still worried about all the darkness left to chase away.

More global weirding

It snowed again last night.  It's over a month since the equinox.  The landscape is photogenic enough for Christmas cards. (sheesh)  The local PBS weather guy calls this "global weirding."  Sounds about right to me.

Resource availability in a finite world

To the long list of reasons for why humanity does NOT want to take the steps required to make a meaningful dent in the climate-change problems, we have another—serious investments have been made to secure fossil-fuel resources that literally cannot be burned if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe.  The forces conspiring against meaningful change seem infinite.  Of course, change is inevitable because of facts already baked into the ecosystems. The question is, do we want to control the change or let it happen to us.

Economics—the utterly shameless profession

In 1994, two men named Myron S. Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who shared the 1997 Riksbank Prize (Nobel Memorial) in Economic Sciences for a "new method to determine the value of derivatives", were made directors of a hedge fund named Long-Term Capital Management.  In 1998, these arrogant "Nobelists" had managed to blow through so much money, they nearly brought down the global financial system.  So did these clowns go to jail for fraud?  Did the Riksbank committee demand its prize back—or even decide that maybe they shouldn't be giving out awards to crackpots?  Sadly, no.  Scholes is a professor emeritus at Stanford while Merton graces the halls of MIT.

So it is obvious that economics is a "profession" that is immune from feeling shame.  Apparently, once you have made the inner circle of that club, just being wildly wrong does nothing to damage your career or reputation.  Which is probably what the latest two examples of economic fools gone wild are counting on.  This time the two über-fools, Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, concocted a pernicious piece of garbage that had the effect of ruining millions of lives.  Unfortunately, these clowns couldn't even get an Excel spreadsheet right.  They were busted for not being able to use a program that is run by millions every day.

Will this fiasco have any negative effect on their professional careers?  I would bet NO!  Just remember, their paper became famous because it gave an excuse to the austerians who wanted to crush the poor and middle classes.  In fact,  Rogoff and Reinhart were not expected to actually be right about anything so this minor blotch on their esteemed reputations will be quickly forgiven by the shameless Predators who used their artificially induced catastrophe to make a bundle.  I would not be surprised to see a chair endowed at Harvard in one or both of their names.

A lesson in soft water

We live in a corner of Minnesota where well water has a lot of dissolved limestone in it.  The upside is that it's delicious and plants love it.  The downside is that unless you remove these dissolved "impurities," you may as well not shower, wash clothes or dishes, and certainly not the car.  As a result, water "softeners" are a common piece of the house's hardware.  Cities like Minneapolis soften their municipal water and other places like Duluth gets its water from Lake Superior which is nearly as soft as rainwater.  So water softeners aren't everywhere but in plenty of places.  You can tell when you are in such a locale because salt is sold at gas stations, convenience, and grocery stores.  I live in one of those places.

Our 58-year-old house came with a water softener that dates from the 1970s.  It has mechanical controls which are pretty cool to set.  Last Tuesday, I heard it start its flush / recharge cycle.  Went to bed.  Woke up about six hours later and it was still running.  NOT good.  So I went down to see what might be wrong and discover it is out of salt.  My bad.  I didn't check it often enough—which was especially stupid considering I had no experience with this bit of hardware.  So I shut down the water supply and go shopping for salt.  I come home with 160# (73 kg.) of it.  Load the salt and restart the water flow.  Three hours later I have decided the shut-off problem had not been solved.

Time to call the folks at Culligan because they made my softener.  Not surprisingly, they have an outlet store in my little town.  They scoffed at the idea of fixing my softener  I was told that they had ceased making spare parts in the mid 1980s and stopped stocking them in early 1990s.  I had an obsolete piece of machinery.  I was assured that this was a very common way for my softener to die—and for the modest sum of $2000 they would haul it out and bolt in a new one.  Oof.

That seemed a lot for such a simple appliance.  So I stopped by my nearest big box building supply store and they had a perfectly acceptable softener for $400 + $60 for the parts to hook it into my plumbing.  I went home to take inventory of the tools I had on hand—pipe cutter, propane torch, solder, flux, teflon tape, etc.—and sort of resigned myself to a minimally tough DIY job.

Since we have a Sears appliance store in town, I decided to take a look at what they were selling before I committed to a purchase.  Went online and bless them, they had a downloadable .pdf instruction file.  It was complete and well illustrated.  It was written in good old midwestern (Hoffman Estates, Illinois) English.  And on around page 18 there were instructions for if you ran out of salt—replace the salt and push the Recharge Now button.

Oops!  I had replaced the salt in my softener but then I had simply restored the water flow.  Major facepalm!  My softener had gotten "stuck" in its cycle when the salt ran out and even after I had replaced the salt, it was still confused as to what to do next.  It needed to be rebooted.  It needed a fresh start.  And while this is the FIRST thing you would do to a computer or a softener with electronic controls, it turns out that even (or especially) mechanical controls need to know where to begin too.

I pushed the Recharge Now button and an hour and a half later, I was back in business.  I hadn't spent $2000 OR $460.  I hadn't had to figure out how to dispose of an appliance (another $50).  I hadn't had to hump an 80# (36 kg.) load up and down a flight of steps.  And I didn't need to make fussy modifications to the house's water supply with the possibility it would leak if done wrong.

All this was made possible because someone at Sears had written a good instruction manual and because I so admired its comprehensive approach, I had read it even though I wasn't at all sure I wanted to buy their softener (although after this experience, it will be my first choice whenever the day comes that my softener actually dies.)

Maybe the instruction manual for my softener is still available somewhere but I could not find it in the house.  And given the response the Culligan people gave my dilemma, who knows if the important instruction is in there anyway.  Sounds like they were replacing a bunch of perfectly good parts over the years and selling new (overpriced) softeners to folks with good appliances when the parts ran out.

There were some fine lessons to be learned here.  1) Even if something is designed to be easily serviced, it doesn't help much unless spare parts are available AND the manufacturer is committed to a maintenance culture.  2) It never hurts to read instruction manuals—who knows what gems are contained therein.  3) The landfills of the nation are probably full of perfectly good stuff because folks give up on problems way too soon.

There are probably other lessons.  But the big rewards of this experience were personal.  I saved a bunch of work and money.  I found I was ready to take on simple plumbing jobs.  But mostly, it was fun to solve a problem.

This is Spring?

After an early Spring, a blazing Summer, and a crackling dry Fall last year, we have had a nearly snowless Winter followed by this long, cold never-ending "Spring."  Seriously, it snowed again yesterday.  We only got about 4" (10 cm) but parts of the state were hammered by over a foot (30 cm) combined with nasty winds to blow it all around.

The birds that stayed the Winter barely noticed our attempts to feed them but those who came back expecting Spring have flocked to our yard.  We had so much left-over bird seed we filled a pie tin to feed the squirrels.



Perhaps the most unusual surprise is that a pair of mallards decided to make a nest in our front planter box.  We will see how this turns out.  The hen lays an egg per day until some magical timer goes off in her head and she decides to start warming / hatching them.  The goal is to have all the little ducklings hatch at the same time.  She is up to seven eggs so we shall see if our duck couple sets up house for real.  We are at least 10 blocks from the nearest water so the march to the river with the ducklings will be quite arduous. (Yes those are decorative lights and yes I know it's April but that is also snow on the ground.  sigh!)



And NO! This goofy weather does not dent my analysis of climate change.

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.)

Thatcher and the triumph of finance capitalism

Now that the Thatcher funeral / Tory PR stunt is behind us, it would be wonderful if we could just bury that nasty woman's memory and move on.   But we cannot because there was a good reason why the British robber classes wanted to have a final celebration in her honor.  Thatcher represented a major shift in the thinking of what capitalism was all about.  She not only was the sworn enemy of whatever she believed to be "socialism," she was a "post-industrialist" who was willing to destroy industrialization itself.  And because GB was home to the industrial revolution, the shift from the strategies of industrial capitalism to the sheer goofiness and criminality of finance capitalism was a very big deal indeed.

Like all successful "revolutions," Thatcher was mostly kicking in a very rotten door.  By 1979, British industry was mostly uncompetitive in damn near every field of endeavor—from bicycles to aircraft, from steel to ship-building, and from automobiles to electronics.  It couldn't compete on the low end because of labor costs and it couldn't compete on the high end because British industrial organization was nowhere nearly as sophisticated as Germany's, Japan's, or USA's.

So someone made a decision to throw industry over the side and concentrate the economy on the financial shenanigans of The City.  The question is, WHO?  In the attached article, there is a long list of deregulations, privatizations, and other measures that paved the way between industrialized Britian and the new global model for Finance Capitalism.  The idea that Thatcher dreamed all this up beggars belief.  So even though I don't know if all these crackpot ideas came from her favorite advisor who is identified here as Victor Rothschild, it makes a lot more sense than the notion that Thatcher dreamed them up herself.

The British de-industrialization of the 1980s was followed by the de-industialization of the Russia after the breakup of the USSR and the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in the 1990s.  The fact that these two nations stuck to almost identical plot-lines suggests that both de-industrialization schemes were hatched by the same minds.

So now we have a Britain whose economy is totally and absolutely reliant on financial maneuver.  This is proving to be a VERY bad choice as replicating financial centers is proving to be a great deal easier that replicating industry.  And so as every little drinkwater country opens a financial center, London can only maintain its competitive advantage by resorting to ever more brazen acts of criminal behavior.  Yet, there will be no crackdown on the crimes of The City because if Britain had to compete legally anymore, she could not.

And so today, the Church of England and the British establishment tried to pray this truly evil human being into heaven.  The money quote:

Conservative MPs have showered praise on the bishop of London, Richard Chartres, for "a terrific address" that humanised Lady Thatcher and challenged the perennial claim that she believed there was no such thing as society.

Some Conservatives said his address, focusing on her faith and personal kindness, would do more to strengthen her political legacy than many of the more divisive, political eulogies delivered in the past week by her former colleagues. more

And there are those who wonder what the clergy do to earn their pay.  Defending a woman associated with an historic shift that has turned into a never-ending series of disasters for Britain and the planet is harder than it looks.

Back in the real economy, climate change complicates matters considerably

One of the more frightening realities of food production is how little the weather patterns need to change to create serious problems.  Sometimes the catastrophe is brutally quick—a three minute hailstorm can wipe out a crop and an overnight downpour can cause millions in lost food and infrastructure.  Sometimes the devastation is more insidious—like a string of excessively warm nights when the crops are pollinating knock 40% off the yields.  In any case, the important thing to remember is that it doesn't take much to seriously impact the global food supply.  And when it comes to growing food, many of the baleful effects of climate change are already here.  Vidal talks about the situation in 2050—he should be worrying about 2013.

The rage backlog

Rall asks an interesting question—why aren't people reacting to bankster criminality with some violent response?

May I have this one Ted?

People have to be provoked a LOT to react violently.  Especially at figures of authority.  Especially figures of authority backed by state power.  I remember the response to the wave of farm foreclosures in the early 1980s here in Minnesota.  The affected farmers were NOT happy.  Not only were they losing their homes, they were losing their livelihoods, and usually a large slice of their family's histories (fourth generation on the same farm anyone?)  So even though these farmers were seething with rage and many quite heavily armed, most of them went pretty quietly.  Yes, the sheriffs showed up to throw folks off the land—in many Minnesota counties that is all the sheriff's departments did for several years.  But most went peacefully—most had been totally beaten down in the futile attempt to keep up with loans that suddenly demanded 20%.  They had to believe that something, anything, was better than that impossible struggle.  Besides, these farmers were people who thought of themselves as the good guys.  A handful of bankers actually were killed but considering the social upheaval in progress, the casualty list was VERY short.

And then there is the matter that bankers can buy "respectability."  They conduct their business in buildings designed to intimidate.  They are good friends with anyone who has some money.  They dress beautifully.  They golf.  They conduct their business in hushed tones.  If this sounds like the tricks employed by the clergy to give credibility to their little scams, its because they are.  And in rural Minnesota, the local bankers were often the financial pillars of their churches in a usually successful attempt to show that they were on the side of the angels.

So Ted, good luck trying to start a riot against the banksters.  Not only do they have state and cultural power on their side, they have the ultimate weapon—insider information.  Just as clergymen traffic in the conceit that they understand how God wants the world organized, bankers retail the notion that they have the secret to magic, painless wealth.  Anyone who opposes them is condemned to a life of shoveling shit.  And amazingly, it works.  The fact is that a bunch of charlatans selling an obvious scam can not only corner the wealth of the planet, but buy academe, governments, and religion—lock, stock, and friggen barrel.