The role of farming in global warming

 From George Monbiot:

America handles defeat

The conclusion of a must-read article here:

A society represented by an entire political class that is not sobered by that prospect rightly can be judged as providing prime facie evidence of being collectively unhinged.

Second, amnesia may serve the purpose of sparing our political elites, and the American populace at large, the acute discomfort of acknowledging mistakes and defeat. However, that success is not matched by an analogous process of memory erasure in other places. We were fortunate, in the case of Vietnam, that the United States’ dominant position in the world outside of the Soviet Bloc and the PRC allowed us to maintain respect, status and influence. Things have now changed, though. Our relative strength in all domains is weaker, there are strong centrifugal forces around the global that are producing a dispersion of power, will and outlook among other states. The BRICs phenomenon is the concrete embodiment of that reality. Hence, the prerogatives of the United States are narrowing, our ability to shape the global system in conformity with our ideas and interests are under mounting challenge, and premiums are being placed on diplomacy of an order that seems beyond our present aptitudes.

We are confounded.

The Reagan Legacy

 

Also...

- Reagan and Bush 41 also experienced the Savings and Loan debacle, thanks largely to Reagan deregulating them. At the time, it was the largest political and financial scandal in US history--orders of magnitude larger than the traditionally cited instances of capitalism gone to seed like Teapot Dome and Credit Mobilier. The bailout (including interest) was roughly a half trillion dollars. Of course Clinton/Newt's deregulation created the 70-times-larger subprime/derivatives meltdown now called the "Global Financial Crisis" (GFC). The Federal Reserve's response to the GFC - $29 trillion in bailout, now down to ~$8 trillion on the Fed's books.

- The Reagan recovery prompted by those tax cuts and record-holding increase in national debt was called "Morning in America" by the Wall St. Journal. It was an average business cycle recovery with lower-than-average capital investment.

 

That graph comes from Statista, but ultimately from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Note the two much larger peaks at the beginning of the graph. The source of those are the New Deal and that big public works project we call World War II. That's when the government took over 50% of the economy. The Green New Deal would take 5% of the economy now.

- Systemic problems are disguised by the "rugged individualism" but systemic solutions, not individual solutions are all that can solve such problems. Crime is a good example of a problem with a large systemic component. The US incarcerates (per-capita) seven times more than Canada or France, yet its crime rate is not significantly lower. Meanwhile, the US suffers more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Single-payer countries (like Canada and France) don't have such bankruptcies. So...a half million plus desperate people are generated by US healthcare. Could that lead to crime? The plot of "Breaking Bad" is the story of a husband who couldn't pay his wife's hospital bills, so he starts cooking meth. The US system of cruel social policies and draconian incarceration is a recipe to increase criminality.

Economics, meet Politics

 

Meanwhile:

Comprehensive measures of poverty—specifically those based on the Supplemental Poverty Measures (SPM)—showed very sharp increases. The overall SPM poverty rate rose by 4.6 percentage points to 12.4%, while child poverty more than doubled, rising from 5.2% to 12.4%. pic.twitter.com/pO5dxLT76x

— Elise Gould (@eliselgould) September 12, 2023