This Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That’s sad, because we could really use him now.
Many of us thought hoped that Barack Obama would be the answer to our quest for a new New Deal, but we quickly learned that he wasn’t the right person for that job… The big question is whether there’s anyone who can fulfill our quest for a president as courageous and ballsy as FDR.
To talk about the man who I believe was our greatest president ever, Harvey J. Kaye returned to the program today. The author of The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great joined me in the first hour today.
As for the worst president in history, I’d say Bush-Cheney (they go together like bull and shit)…. Cheney actually said Obama is the worst president ever! (Do we have to remind him who invaded Iraq??)
Of course, I addressed the latest revelations in the execution-style shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, by a North Charleston, SC cop, courtesy of the heroic young man who shot the video that brought us the truth about what happened. I played some clips from his lengthy interview by NBC’s Craig Melvin. Click below to watch the whole thing. It’s absolutely stunning…
In hour two, GottaLaff joined me to talk about the rest of the news, and have some fun at Rand Paul’s expense, an exercise that will likely continue for the next year or so.
Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the week with Flashback Friday! John Melendez will join in (I’ll get some dirt on Howard Stern from him), and for our musical blast from the past, an amazing radio performance from the Brian Setzer Orchestra that you won’t want to miss… radio or not!
Most people hear these reports in the news individually, and few media…even those focused on environmental issues put them all together in one presentation. When taken together, the combined environmental impacts of the human race in recent decades, show the insanity of expecting further growth in our finite world.
So here’s some bullet points on what has happened during the 20th century (many of these stats from UN agency reports take up to 10 years to get update, but up till 2000:
Human population went up 4-fold.
Industrial pollution was up 40-fold.
CO2 emissions increased 17-fold.
Fish catches up 35-fold.
Mining of ores and minerals increased 27-fold….some sources like USGS believe at least two thirds of essential metals and minerals used in industrial production are already past peak production.
One quarter of coral reefs, a third of mangroves and half of all wetlands were destroyed.
Today we find:
60% of ecosystem services are degrading.
We have exceeded 3 ‘planetary limits’ – extinction, climate change and nitrate pollution
The Earth’s ecological footprint is more than 1.5 Earths and the Living Planet Index has dropped by 52%.
Extinction is at least 1000-fold above the normal levels in the fossil record and Peter Raven (2011) estimates that without changes by the end of this century, two thirds of life may be extinct due to our actions.
According to a UN FAO report in 2002, almost 40% of the planet’s arable land surface is used for some form of human activity….cities, roads and highways, farms and grazing lands….much of the growing mass extinction is directly caused by how much space and how much of the earth’s resources we are already using for our own pursuits.
So where is this ‘growth’ going to be found again? I said before, that part of my misgivings about New Deal politics was that it changed the emphasis on the left from redistribution of wealth, to mostly growing the pie bigger. The modern day liberals may see their growth as targeted specifically at the majority who have been bypassed by the economic growth of the past century, but they…including Elizabeth Warren in fact…say nothing about redistribution of wealth…it’s just more of that message on allowing growth through the rest of the economy.
Whether it’s seen as for good or nefarious purposes, Nature’s economy says we’re not going to be allowed any more room for growth, as we are already way past the point of overshoot into drawing down resources unsustainably. Going forward, the situation is either sharing resources sustainably…with the rest of the world…this is not just about America, which has already used up more than its share of planetary resources for fun and profit, or the alternative is what happens when so many empires collapse and disintegrate – a vicious fight for what’s left. Those are the choices, like it or not!
Where can it be found?
Here’s an idea.
Decoupling environment from economic growth
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/archivestory.php/aid/453/Decoupling_environment_from_economic_growth_.html
We could also talk about some of Bucky Fuller’s ideas, most notably Smart Grids and Dymaxion engineering.
If you’re still open to such things, of course.
Decoupling the environment from our economic growth is about as big an oxymoron as military intelligence….as George Carlin would have put it. YOur link..from 2001…a little on the stale side, is from an OECD-sponsored report which notes in the opener that: “over the past 20 years, total pollution in industrialized countries, including Japan, Germany and the U.S., has increased by 28%” , so even at the turn of the new millenia, before a lot of the really bad environmental news and forecasts started coming in, the trendlines were already matching the worst business-as-usual projections of the early 70’s.
This report only addresses the issue of carbon inputs from energy use. So it points to Denmark as a hopeful example of a future of economic growth with lower carbon emissions….I wouldn’t mind seeing the data of the last 15 years to verify that, but be that as it may, no discussion of the effects of economic growth on land usage, agricultural production, or the environmental costs of increased product consumption is mentioned. And since manufacturing is globalized in this age, how does a short term decline in carbon emissions in Denmark compare with the increased ecological footprints of imports, made possible by that increase in economic growth? Further down on the subject of have’s and have not’s, I find this bizarre statement:”and open markets can’t provide all the answers!” What answers have globalization provided for anyone’s benefit…aside from the investors?
The percentage of the world’s population today living with food scarcity is the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago. The increased transportation required by globalization has increased carbon footprints. And worse: the so called “developing” nations like China and India are experiencing the same stratifications of wealth and income as the western nations. Inequality drives extravagant, wasteful materialism among the rich classes, and motivates the masses further down the economic ladder to try to imitate their avarice. THis is how poverty spurs environmental degradation! In conditions where people can meet their basic needs for food, shelter and clothing, they do not feel the incentives to destroy whole tracks of forests and kill off wildlife. And, as has been noted in the data provided by the Equality Trust analysts – Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book – The Spirit Level, stats that attempt to measure aspects of happiness and wellbeing, show that people living in more modest but equitable societies (Costa Rica) are happier and more satisfied than people who live in richer, but more unequal societies (the United States). Growth for the sake of growth will only benefit a small segment of the population, and harm the vast majority of people.
If capitalism is to be self-sustainable it has to exist without the need for growth. The degrowth economists like Herman Daily, Haydn Washington, and Tim Jackson provide useful common features they will have to have:
Return to full reserve banking….where banks actually loan out money they really have as assets….not virtual money they can collect interest on provided the growth bandwagon continues.
Taxing marketing and advertising/ rather than the present tactic of allowing tax subsidies for practices that all too often attack the subject’s psychological wellbeing, in the hopes on turning them into impulsive, unthinking consumers.
A dramatic reversal of flat taxation to an increased progressive taxation to level out income disparities, and ramping up investment taxation…regardless of the claptrap about the benefits of investment!
The decoupling claims are doing what they did 20 years ago – retreading the same old claims that new technologies and substituting raw materials will allow growth to continue on in our finite world. And they don’t consider all the environmental impacts….even I forgot to add one of the big ones in the previous post – ocean acidification…which in itself may be the key driver towards extinction today.
But, it’s also hard to factor in techno-optimism, which though it goes unchallenged, is about as unsubstantiated as any faith-based belief system. Some day some new technology will be invented to solve all of our problems….except that every new technology has unexpected wider impacts on the environment, which often require the development of counter-technologies to fix or reduce. But the other claim “substitution” is flat out fraudulent, because first of all, there are non-renewable resources which are truly essential…in that no other substitutes are known which contain their needed properties.
Copper, for instance, spikes in price when demand increases too high, because it is a common metal with essential properties today. It is the most conductive of all non-precious or rare metals. is corrosion-resistant, has as high tensile strength as aluminum, it’s ductile, can be soldered…so it’s easy to install…..so copper is considered essential for wiring as much today as it was over a hundred years ago in the time of Edison and Tesla. The problem is that…since resource extraction invariable progresses from the most profitable low-hanging fruit to the more costly to extract, the most productive copper mines in the world have already been virtually depleted, and copper extraction today depends on going to more remote locations, extracting and refining more earth, to get the ore out of the ground and to market. Certainly recycling plays an increasing part of the picture….it’s actually why thieves are stealing copper wiring to sell to unscrupulous scrap dealers. It’s hard to fathom today that copper was so abundant and easy to access early on in American history, that explorers paddling down rivers like the Colorado saw large shiny nuggets of almost pure copper under a few feet of water. Needless to say that the business of gathering pure copper nuggets didn’t last long. But the path since then of developing copper for market keeps getting increasingly costly, so that at some point it may be among a number of essential resources that are so costly, the wheels of industry seize up entirely.
But just this one non-renewable resource is a template for so many others: open, unbridled extraction from easy to difficult sources, with no thought given to the increasing financial, political and environmental costs, nor especially to the most obvious fact: ALL NNR’s are finite! Our whole modern civilization is built upon the extraction of finite resources, and yet no thought is given to how the kind of world we have built will exist in 100, 1000 or more years!
I have to pick one bone with Harvey Kaye regarding FDR…and it’s the same problem I have with Paul Krugman: when it comes to economic issues, these guys seem to think it’s 1933 again. Or at least, that’s what Krugman was telling us in 2008…I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to what he has to say anymore.
The problem is 2015 is a much different world than 1933. That was a time when the U.S. and the rest of the world had a much lower population with a much, much lower ecological and resource footprint. So FDR’s primary economics advisor – John Maynard Keynes, could propose policies designed to stimulate economic growth. Keynes was not a socialist, and neither was FDR. These men came along with the stated intention of saving capitalism/not moving towards socialism, as the right of that time had claimed. The liberal alternative to the socialist threat that was still growing in America during the Depression, was to advise economic policies of “growing the pie” bigger, instead of “dividing the pie” more equally, which has always been the traditional standard of left wing movements.
Yesterday, when Jill Stein was on, I tried to insert a comment in chat to ask her about the Green Party US platform policy to phase out “fractional reserve banking.” Under subheading ” I. Banking and Insurance Reform” it says under item 16 “……. ending what’s known as the fractional reserve system in an elegant, non
disruptive manner. Banks will be encouraged to continue as profit making
companies, extending loans of real money at interest; acting as
intermediaries between those clients seeking a return on their savings
and those clients ready and able to pay for borrowing the money; but
banks will no longer be creators of what we are using for money.”
What this would mean in plain english is…if capitalism continues, the main pillar of modern capitalism that drives exponential economic growth would be ended! It’s because banks are allowed to only have on average – 3% in assets to cover all of the loans they create (literally money creation), that the new money and new debt obligations can be absorbed by growing economies. This cannot happen in static or especially declining economies. Considering that the bulk of the wealth is owned by a fraction of the population of every country in the world, if it wasn’t for fractional reserve, economies could actually shrink, and greatly reduce their resource and environmental impacts without negatively affecting the quality of life for most people!
I was actually surprised that the U.S. Green Party has this plank in their platform, because it is unfortunately only a clique of libertarians…specifically the acolytes of radical libertarian economist – Murray Rothbard, who advance the case for moving towards full reserve banking. Obviously libertarians aren’t on side for social justice or ecological reasons, but if this world is in a state where nature’s limits can no longer allow for continued growth in size of human economies, then this should be seen as an issue that cuts across political ideological lines! This is just an observation of reality, and it’s a shame that the few voices on the left…like the Green Party U.S. who recognize it, don’t say it louder, or make a much, much greater effort to educate the public about the need to end continued economic growth today. This is a time when the pie definitely has to be shared more equally/ not grown larger!
“without negatively affecting the quality of life for most people” …
That must be your version of voodoo economics.
You really have no idea what impact your “vision” would have on the third world, which needs economic development?
I do agree with the Greens that we need a sustainable rate of economic growth, but that rate can be nonzero.
I also think we can set reserve requirements for banks, without mandating full reserve banking. You do realize that under full reserve, depositors will now have to pay huge fees for banks to hold unto their money? People with savings accounts will now have to pay more for the banks to hold their money.
I don’t think banks need to lend less money, but like credit unions, they should focus more on micro and community/development lending.
This guy points out that that plank you love so much in the US Green platform, in the UK platform, is essentially endorsement of austerity.
https://notesbrokensociety.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/backing-the-positive-money-delusion-how-the-green-party-just-voted-to-become-a-party-of-austerity/
Yes, Keynes was not a socialist. Maybe more of a social democrat. On the other hand, he did point out — correctly — that government spending and increased lending is what gets countries out of depressions and recessions. Full reserve banking will simply impose austerity, which is already killing European economies.
BTW, if your pie is not growing, but population is, you can keep sharing equally, but the slices are going to get smaller and smaller. And that’s not left wing, that’s just being stupid. I don’t think you’ve thought through a lot of your bumper strip ideas very well.
If I wanted to put up with your Dembot b.s., I would still be on the forum! You have the gall to throw out charges like “voodoo economics” while you advocate the liberal version of unsustainable growth on a finite planet!
My “vision” is the vision of steady state economics as presented by ecological economists like Herman Daly – http://steadystate.org/top-10-policies-for-a-steady-state-economy/ – and I’ll assume that’s where the U.S. Green Party is getting their inspiration from….so cut your b.s. about “sustainable growth,” that’s one of the contradictory buzzwords in your Democratic Party b.s. on ecology! In the U.S. Green Party platform subheading on economic justice, it states: “Our current economic system is gravely flawed. It is unjust and
unsustainable because it is premised on endless economic growth and
destruction of nature.” Further down it says:” here is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection.” And this is what they have to say about growth vs. steady state economics:
“This policy of securing economic growth is having negative effects on
the long-term ecological and economic welfare of the United States and
the world. There is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and
ecological health (for example, biodiversity conservation, clean air and
water, atmospheric stability).
We cannot rely on technological progress to solve ecological and
long-term economic problems. Rather, we should endeavor to make
lifestyle choices that reinforce a general equilibrium of humans with
nature. This requires consciously choosing to foster environmentally
sound technologies, whether they are newer or older technologies, rather
than technologies conducive to conspicuous consumption and waste.
1. Economic growth, as gauged by increasing Gross Domestic Product
(GDP), is a dangerous and anachronistic goal. The most viable and
sustainable alternative is a steady-state economy. A steady-state
economy has a stable or mildly fluctuating product of population and per
capita consumption, and is generally indicated by stable or mildly
fluctuating GDP. The steady-state economy has become a more appropriate
goal than economic growth in the United States and other large, wealthy
economies. A steady-state economy precludes ever-expanding production
and consumption of goods and services. However, a steady-state economy
does not preclude economic development — a qualitative process not
gauged by GDP growth and other measures that overlook ecological
effects………………….
Economic growth has been a primary goal of U.S. policy. Corporations,
politicians beholden to corporations, and economists funded by
corporations advocate a theory of unlimited economic growth stemming
from technological progress. Based upon established principles of the
physical and biological sciences, however, there is a limit to economic
growth.
This policy of securing economic growth is having negative effects on
the long-term ecological and economic welfare of the United States and
the world. There is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and
ecological health (for example, biodiversity conservation, clean air and
water, atmospheric stability).
We cannot rely on technological progress to solve ecological and
long-term economic problems. Rather, we should endeavor to make
lifestyle choices that reinforce a general equilibrium of humans with
nature. This requires consciously choosing to foster environmentally
sound technologies, whether they are newer or older technologies, rather
than technologies conducive to conspicuous consumption and waste.”
Man! I’m reading all this and wishing that the Green Party of Canada had this platform…instead of the watered down drivel about “green growth” and “smart growth” and similar buzzwords in their economic platform!
Now, since there are many critics of Herman Daly and other steady state economists, who come from the right and liberal Keynsian side of the aisle, and claim that any market system of economics cannot work without continuous growth….assuming they’re right, then we have to transition to a true socialist economy that provides the basic necessities for all, and relegates the luxuries for what is ecologically affordable. Because, ultimately, human economies work inside of a larger natural economy. That’s the economy that really counts….not the one based on our wants and desires!
Needless to say, population growth has to stop also and bring global population back down to a permanently sustainable level also! But, that can easily be accomplished with unrestricted access to birth control, including abortion if necessary. The present economic system of allowing unrestrained growth in the rich countries, acts as a driver for the rest of the world to try to copy. And we don’t have the resources, the ecological sinks, or the biodiversity to support 7.5 billion people driving cars or building roads to accommodate everyone trying to copy the suburban living model in the west. If anything, our consumer-driven deman economy needs to downscale substantially…especially those at the top; then there is capacity for the poorer nations of the world with average incomes under $3.00 per day to have the kind of economic development they need.
This “Demobot” actually agrees with sustainable development, which was first endorsed as a goal of the UN (that’s the whole planet, not just one party here in the U.S.) at the UN Earth Summit in 1992.
http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.html
It is not a zero-growth/steady-state policy. Why? Because it’s something rejected by most of the third world. Not just affluent societies that can sit back in bask in their existing development and infrastructure.
Oh, and BTW, so do most environmental organizations.
P.S. I do agree we can and do need to slow overpopulation, but you clearly don’t know about the demographic transition. Google it. The key to reducing population growth is helping nations achieve it.
And they can’t do it without economic development. (I do agree a lot of the way the World Bank does it is foolish, but there are better-thought, sustainable ways that involve more stakeholders.)
You know, for somebody who says they hate ideologues, you sure act like most I know. Particularly in your unwillingness to discuss critiques of your ideas.
P.S. Jill Stein says she wants a Green New Deal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Stein#Positions
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but while I think that is a great idea, you can’t get Keynesian multiplier effects in a shrinking economy. Her position is in contradiction to the Herman Daly plank in the platform.
It’s too bad, her public position is better than what the platform says.
Economists don’t even all agree that the Keynsian Multiplier is a valid description of what actually occurs in the real economy. But that’s beside the point anyway. The point is it doesn’t matter what Jill Stein wants, Hillary Clinton wants, “most environmental organizations” or the b.s. that Maurice Strong cobbled together at those UN summits back in the early 90’s……it’s about what the Earth is able to allow one species to extract and consume from the total biosphere of planet Earth. And there are many, many ecologists who are already very pessimistic on the future for human prospects on this planet now; and because there are so many unknowns in how ecosystems function, the policymakers take the bare minimum of positive assessments and….and don’t even follow them…as we witnessed with the carbon limits set at the first Earth Summit!
As for “hating to discuss critiques of my ideas,” I have already pointed out that I haven’t decided or tried to determine what the clear path for human survival is in the first place. If Herman Daly’s or the French academics who first advanced a policy of ‘Degrowth’ http://www.decroissance.org/ are wrong, then a way has to be found to make socialism work on an international level; because the liberal slightly watered down capitalism advanced by mainstream corporate sponsored green capitalists eventually leads to collapse of civilization….and that obviously doesn’t guarantee human survival either!
If you haven’t figured it out, you ought to stop bullshitting about knowing things you don’t know.
BTW, for those who are actually interested in the theme of the show (FDR) and not RTL’s tangent: FDR proposed an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944, which Nicole’s guest mentioned, along with the famous Four Freedoms. This is mentioned in a segment at the end of Capitalism: A Love Story.
I personally think this is something we need to campaign for again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
All of your bullshit in these two replies are pointless, because I pointed out right in the first sentence of my first post that my issue with Harvey Kaye was not his interpretation of FDR’s economic policies or FDR’s Four Freedoms. Harvey Kaye is doing what historians do all too often: look backwards and assume that present day conditions are similar enough to allow past solutions to problems….like the New Deal, to be superimposed on modern day America’s economic situation.
And the difference is that 1930’s America was a largely undeveloped, underpopulated, and rapidly growing economic power with aspirations of replacing England as the imperial power in the world. There were still many isolationists during that time, but FDR was not one of them! And today, America is an overpopulated, resource-depleted, and decaying empire that is doing what so many other past empires do just before they collapse: try to use brute force and military intimidation to control foreign nations and their economic policies. It is a feature that crosses party lines in U.S. politics, if your Dembot sources haven’t informed you – Obama has spent more on military expenditures in little over five years in office, as George Bush did in two terms as president! And as long as America is an empire that keeps trying to grow its way to prosperity, it will continue using military force and the threat of force to do the job!
The only thing that will stop this spiral into chaos that seems determined to end with WWIII before we have a chance to observe a Permian level extinction event, is a radical….and I mean radical reappraisal of economies based on endless growth. That is an important feature of Jill Stein’s Green Party U.S. platform, and I hope she also accepts it and does a little more to educate the public on the perils of unrestrained energy/resource consumption and waste production that go hand in hand with that growth….since I don’t recall her mentioning the problem of trying to grow after limits to growth are being applied from the outside. It’s not something that Harvey Kaye touches on in anything that I have happened to gloss over of what he has written, so I assume it is not a subject on his radar….but it should be on everyone’s radar, because all solutions from whatever direction are pointless without ending the growth spiral that doesn’t recognize the natural limits to growth!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150409143033.htm
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/04/26/can-we-expect-the-economy-to-keep-growing/
Harvey Kaye has better things to do than deal with your BS.
The U.S. was underdeveloped and underpopulated in the 1930s? A third world country?
Most of the U.S. industrialization occurred in the 19th century.
There was 122 million people in the U.S. in the 1930 census.
Growing economies are based on being an empire? The fastest growing economy in 2013 was South Sudan. The 2nd fastest was Sierra Leone.
Of course the resources in the world are finite: the question is how close they are to exhaustion. You are just the latest version of Thomas Malthus, who was WRONG. See, I would have no problem if you said we should focus on conservation and efficiency, switch to renewables, pursue more sustainable rates of growth, do more recycling, and work on population control. But no, anybody who doesn’t agree with your view that we need zero-growth economies, reducing the pop growth rate to zero worldwide (you’ve yet to explain how you’ll do that, commissar), and a modicum of post-industrial comfort/civilization, is obviously just a corporate stooge.
That would include a number of left-wing figures in the U.S. who are not Greens, including Bernie Sanders.
You are so full of shit.