Will Portugal leave the Euro?

While the Portuguese government is probably horrified that someone is out getting famous trashing their Euro membership, the subject is probably gaining traction by the day.  The reason is simple—the Euro is destroying their economy.  Portugal really cannot afford to stay.

But man, this must piss off the Portuguese elites.  Membership in the Euro means much more than some petty economic advantage that they may be a part of.  No, this is about being in a a very nice club—the kind of club folks from small nations rarely get to join.  This dynamic is at work in other little countries—some of whom are still trying to join the Euro even with all its problems.

They owe us

In all the history of truly vile ideas, the idea that the banksters—who have destroyed much of the real economy, corrupted our governments, turned serious subjects like economics into a sick joke, reduced our communication systems below well-written soap operas, attacked honest science, and all those other corruptions of the human potential in the name of naked greed—are not only NOT going to jail or facing execution, they are to be rewarded in perpetuity every scrap of wealth a society can generate.  Presumably for their good work in managing an economy that can no longer even maintain its systems.

Takes some serious gullibility for that reality to sound like a good idea.

When I was a kid, I was shown many examples of extreme human credulity.  Got to believe a lot of bullshit to be religious—especially if you are a fundamentalist who thinks the Bible is true down to "the last jot and tittle."  My absolute favorite example came at a Bible camp.  One featured speaker was an old China hand.  With their successful revolution in 1949, the Chinese made it a priority to get rid of western missionaries.  The missionaries, who thought themselves the good guys, were NOT happy to be expelled.  Post 1949, China policy in USA would be largely created by pissed-off missionaries and their representatives who were give a permanent platform at Time Magazine by Henry Luce (who was born in China to Presbyterian missionaries.)  Our Bible camp speaker was a long way from being Luce, but he had carved out a minor traveling salvation show that warned folks of the nature of the evil we faced in Chinese Communism.  Not content to explain how the Communists had turned their good Chinese friends against them, Bible-camp guy had to make some extra claims about the evil forces he encountered in China.  It seems that he had a sideline in casting out demons which he recounted in Exorcist-like detail.  The whole idea of his message was that if the power of God could cast out the devil himself, why golly-gee we should be able to cast out those godless communists in China.

How many people actually believed his rap, I have no idea, but there were enough of them to keep his "ministry" afloat.  The last time I heard him, he had diversified and was peddling the Hoover / FBI smears against Martin Luther King.  As this was a pet project of the John Birch Society, Bible-camp guy probably had open ties to them.  After all, John Birch himself was a Protestant missionary in China who was shot by the Communists in 1945.  They accused him of being a USA intelligence agent.  (He was.  Just remember, missionaries may have had some whacky views of China, but they were the only folks who knew anything at all about the middle kingdom.  Most missionaries were debriefed about their knowledge of China by USA intelligence coming and going.  Most of them cooperated enthusiastically.)

I am reminded of this because the bug-eyed craziness of a man who believes we should resort as a nation to whatever means (including a nuclear standoff and the Vietnam War) it required so he could go back to performing exorcisms on poor Chinese peasants, is really quite similar to whatever bullshit it requires to make us believe that after all they have cost us, we still owe the banksters more of our wealth.

So here's to the They Owe Us movement.  Make this idea stick and you will have accomplished much.

Losing our dirt

Anyone who has tried to get an apathetic friend concerned about Peak Oil or Climate Change has but a TINY appreciation for the problems of getting public policy to address the loss of topsoil.  Because even though the loss of arable land is easily as serious a problem as the destruction of the oceans, the dwindling supplies of fresh water, or the end of the age of petroleum, it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath because, after all, we are talking about dirt—you know, the stuff that made your mother scream at you when you got some on your clothes or hands.

Of course, because farmers (peasants) are the folks who must work with dirt and are the quintessential examples of Producers, this is a subject that also suffers from class animus.  For many, many Predators, farming is just another impediment to their favorite activity—real estate speculation.  So the folks in these articles are not only doing difficult work, they are doing work that gains them Leisure Class scorn.  This in no way alters the fact that care for the planet's dirt is literally a matter of life and death.

Euro economic crises rolls on

I have been spending a lot of time lately wondering why the USA left is so freaking hopeless when it comes to economic and environmental matters.  It is not a topic that makes me happy.  To have a President from the Democratic Party who will not defend Social Security is really quite devastating.  Now it can be argued that the Democrats were never all THAT left, but compared to the unabashedly bourgeois Republicans, they were sort of left.  And even though they are but a handful, there are even some Democrats who are reminders that theirs was once the party of FDR, Francis Perkins, and Ken Galbraith (etc.)

But compared to the collapse of the European Left, ours has held up amazingly well.  So I wonder what killed the Euro left.  After all, they were are lot "lefter" than we would ever be, were theoretically much better grounded, and more importantly, held power in important governments for significant periods of time.  But, watching someone like Gerhard Schroeder sell out German workers was enough to make folks forget that Hitler once considered the Social Democrats so dangerous, he had many of them murdered and many more sent to concentration camps.  Seeing an überwienie like Hollande in action, it's hard to remember that the Socialists once preached armed struggle.

Even worse, it seems that former leftists become the most enthusiastic neoliberals.  The intellectual journey from Marx and Gramsci to neoliberalism seems especially short.  I have theories for why this is so, but they are not so important as the fact that it IS so.  Then there is the problem that Marxism was such a notorious failure so flogging that horse back to life looks especially impossible.  Once you have lost your economic playbook, the only thing a Marxist has to offer is an annoying authoritarianism. The obvious solution would be to turn to other progressive strategies such as was invented by the left Populists in North America.  After all, the USA Pops were confronting corrupt banksters so the application is ideal.  But the Euro establishment has turned populism into a swear word and Euro scholarship doesn't even begin to understand the historical underpinnings of left Populism.

Debunking the economics "profession"

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes

Of all the scams, none is so pernicious as the one that claims economics is a science.  The discipline has some scientific moments, to be sure, but the way it is practiced has MUCH more in common with theology.  The recent saga of Rogoff and Reinhart should serve as a permanent warning that even the most highly credentialed economists are at best, sloppy theologians, who have at most, only a vague and passing interest in the rigors of scientific research. (See the April 25 coverage of this story here at real economics.)

Of course, the scandal here is not that a couple of arrogant academics mailed in a study that should have embarrassed a freshman, the scandal is that anyone treated it seriously because it was obvious from the outset that this paper was nothing more than a hack job turned out to please some stupendously stupid rich client(s).  So now that the work of Rogoff and Reinhart has been discredited, the attack on them has turned into an attack on the folks who have been paying their bills.  Krugman even seems to believe this is the beginning of the end for the whole austerity movement R & R were such a part of.

We can only hope he is right.

Protests are back (Turkey)

Here in Minnesota, winter lasted for-freaking-ever so it seems like it just turned spring.  And as history teaches, spring is a good time for protests.  Because the global economy is still being mostly run by stupid sociopaths, the protests could happen almost anywhere—even in places where they are relatively rare.  Nothing tops economics as a reason to get people into the streets.  This time it's Turkey and the supposed reason is about a re-development of a popular park—the destruction of a public place for the gain of a handful of well-connected real estate speculators.  So the connection of this protest to economics is pretty direct.

Saturday toons 1 JUN 13

Protesters target ECB

With some notorious exceptions like the Bank of Japan, central banks are the very essence of today's economic mismanagement.  They tend to be staffed almost exclusively by austerians—folks who believe the crises spawned by the banksters should be the perfect opportunity to make life more miserable for the rest of us.  And of the world's central banks, the ECB headquartered in Frankfurt Germany is arguably the most reactionary.

Today, members of "Blockupy" have effectively blockaded the ECB.  This won't last long before the storm troopers are called out but it is a hopeful sign that folks in Europe are at least targeting the most evil of the bad guys.

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.

Euro energy update

North America and Europe have both seen declines in their output of greenhouse gasses.  Normally, we would think this is great news around here.  We are going to restrain our glee for the simple reason that virtually all of these declines can be attributed to slower economies and a warm winter in 2011 while only a little (if any) can be chalked up to introduction of new technologies.

Solar dumping update

The Chinese are about to discover what the Japanese automakers learned before them—Europe is not the USA when it comes to giving up industrial turf.  It actually looks like EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht is willing to trigger a trade war over solar panels.  You can hardly blame him.  After all, the Europeans have put a lot of public money into the development of their Green industry—why should they give that up for a cheap trade-war trick like dumping?

I find this dispute fascinating and have covered it in the past.  See also:

• July 20, 2012 The solar industry is now officially "mature"
• November 8, 2012 Solar panel trade war heats up
• August 21, 2012 Solar-panel "oversupply"

Zombie theories

The evidence the climate is changing is literally overwhelming.  And yet there is doubt.  This seems especially acute in English-speaking world.  So the following from Australia is probably relevant in USA too.  It is really quite depressing to realize just how shallow the roots of scientific understanding actually are.  This is especially unfortunate when the subject is climate change because our understanding must be based on scientific reasoning.  Don't understand how science works and you can literally believe anything.

Now it is highly unlikely we can convince everyone who slept through science class to upgrade their understanding, but we should be able to insist as a society on some minimal scientific literacy in journalism and other forms of public communication.  I would be hugely entertained watching the local TV newsreaders take some basic science tests on-air.

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.)

Skipping economic development steps

When I was at the University of Minnesota, I had a roommate from Bangladesh for a year.  He used to say something I thought preposterous, "We will advance from pre-indistrialization to post-industrialization and just skip the problems that come from industrialization."  The reason I thought this so preposterous is that I was one of those creatures who thought if you wanted to do industrialization right, you simply had to take all the necessary steps—especially those like making machine tools that came with the lessons of precision.  "Not possible!" I would sputter.

I still advise against taking shortcuts.  Learning all the steps produces an economy with a near infinity of possibilities.  Contrast South Korea—a country that carefully learned all the steps of industrialization and China which skipped a bunch and still relies heavily on runaway "screwdriver" industrialization.  The result is that Korea has companies that can build things no one else on the planet can build—China seems like it is decades from that stage.

But my friend from Bangladesh was right in one respect—there ARE perfectly sterling example of skipping stages that have worked very well, thank you very much.  The story is told of how Frank Zappa met with Vaclav Havel not long after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.  Czechoslovakia was left with an utterly pathetic telephone system.  Zappa's advice was not to even try to fix those land lines and go straight to cellular.  (Remember, in the early 1990s, this was still pretty radical advice.)  And so it happened.  Czechoslovakia went from having one of the worst phone systems to one of the best in less than a decade.  And one of the things that facilitated that process was the fact that there was nothing about the old system worth saving.

Now that solar cells have reached the semi-commodity stage, the economic benefits of solar are now so easy to prove, and installation nearly routine, we should see big-time "stage-skipping" in those lesser developed nations that don't have a bunch of installed energy infrastructure to displace.  Many of these countries have spectacular solar collection sites.  Here we see a piece by France's 24 about Morocco's commitment to solar.  They have a lot of solar energy to collect.  If they do this right, they will significantly change their lives—I believe for the better.

Saturday toons 25 MAY 13

The economic absurdity of fracking

James Kunstler over at Clusterfuck nation may be excessively cranky about the current social-political order and sometimes given to speculations on motives that might seem a little wild, but when it comes to his main subject—the end of the age of petroleum and the need to ponder what this will mean—the man is brilliant.  This week he provided an excellent example.

If you want to live with old infrastructure...

you better be a bunch of compulsive maintenance freaks.

Jus' sayin'!

The Interstate 5 Bridge over the Skagit River in Washington state collapsed around 7 p.m. on Thursday, dumping cars and people into the water.



This, folks, is embarrassing.

Why cap-and-trade is failing in the E.U.

As regular readers know, I think cap and trade is a stupendously bad idea.  I have brought this up before.  Here are two recent examples.

• April 4, 2013  Cap-and-trade is still a bad idea
• April 19, 2013 Selling indulgences for carbon emissions does not work

So I take some pleasure in finding someone else who has reached similar conclusion even though coming from a different place.  In this case, we are talking about a man who has been studying how the E.U. sets its agenda.  According to Cronin, cap-and-trade is a favored scheme in the governments and bureaucracies of Europe because Big Oil and the moneychangers want it.  Big oil likes it because it lets them operate their businesses unchanged while guys like Goldman Sachs and their traders see it as merely something else to profit from.  The fact that it does not reduce CO2 one little bit seems to be a problem about which they care little.

Wagner—on his 200th birthday

When I was singing with the Minnesota Bach Society, we were asked to provide the chorus for a symphonic performance of Wagner's Tannhäuser with the Minnesota Orchestra.  To be perfectly honest, I was not exactly thrilled about this.  I had signed up to sing the delicate polyphonic melodies of Bach—not the heavy and oh-so-serious operas of Wagner.  Not surprisingly, I discovered that singing Wagner was a real hoot and Tannhäuser was not the endurance contest of the Ring Cycle.  I also discovered that there are SERIOUS Wagner fans. I am still mainly a Bach fan, but I have read some of the scholarship, seen the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, and visited the Herrenchiemsee—one of the more lavish palaces of Ludwig II, Wagner's main patron—in an attempt to understand what all the fuss is about.

Wagner's politics have been discussed in minutest detail over the years—mostly because one of his biggest fans was Hitler.  This is probably a mistake because as I have discovered in life, outside of music it's probably a bad idea to discuss any other subject with a musician.  The reason is simple—music is such a complex subject and requires so much practice in order to do well, anyone who gets good at music hasn't had a lot of time to master much else.  When the musician is Wagner, the music itself is so complicated, discussions of his politics is usually just a distraction for those who cannot or will not deal with the complexities of his music.

Me?  I intend to celebrate the occasion by listening to Tannhäuser one more time and wonder again if the mere act of asserting that the essence of love is lust is such a serious crime, it requires acts of redemption.  Really?

This time I won't wag my finger

"How do you stop people who will stop at nothing?"

For me, this was the most interesting question from the 2008 film Battle in Seattle about the 1999 anti-WTO protest that successfully halted (for a few minutes) the forces of globalization.  Now Chris Hedges addresses the same problem.  This is a man who once had a platform at the New York Times.  He was someone who actually had a little influence in a world where almost no one has any.  He looks at the plans the bad guys have for the rest of us and comes to the conclusion that we must either "rise up or die."

As a practical matter, the interesting question must be, "Rise up to do what?"  I have been trying to answer this question for almost 30 years and trust me on this, there are NO easy answers and all the useful ones absolutely require conditions of peace to implement.  So I am not one to beat the drum of revolution.  I am in agreement with John Lennon who wrote in Revolution that  he wanted "to see the plan" from those advocating toppling the system.  So I have spent my adult life looking for a plan that would have at least a minimal chance of actually improving the human condition.

Even though I believe I have found most of the elements for a good post-revolutionary plan based on a combination of historical research and an enduring belief in the powers of human innovation, I am a LONG way from signing on to any change scheme that involves explosions (no matter how pleasant it may be to contemplate the head of Lloyd Blankfein on a pike.)  Even so, I am also a long way from condemning Hedges for his call for a revolution.  There have been a bunch of bad guys in history but the crowd destroying the planet these days makes even guys like Genghis Khan look pretty harmless.  If Hedges can slow down these evildoers, more power to him.

Electrical storage alternatives

Outside of discovering new and more efficient ways to move green power around, the holy grail of renewables is storage.  And in some ways, I am not convinced the storage problem will ever be solved.  In fact, I am more or less convinced that with renewables, we must "make hay while the sun shines."  In other words, we use the energy when it is available and get along without when it is not.  Of course, this unreliability is pretty much what doomed sailing except for fun.  It is obvious that given a choice between an intermittent power source and a reliable one, folks will chose reliability in a heartbeat.

So no matter how unpromising, folks will pursue electrical storage because it will most certainly have a ready market if anyone actually makes some scheme work.  So with another hat tip to K. Fathi, here is a damn good look at the various storage technologies and a guess at how likely any of them are to succeed.