Climate activists love the wrong thing

Here are a couple of emails written in response to some climate activists who reject the Green New Deal (GND) and embrace an incrementalist approach proposed by the "moderates" (AKA "realists" AKA "reasonable people") ... like the Washington Post's editorial board. They say we can fund all kinds of environmental policies that would lead us to treat the planet better, but the idea of including social safety net programs that would let us treat each other better...apparently that's a bridge too far (and the climate activists agree!) Holy shmackerel! With friends like these, the planet doesn't need enemies!

Here are the mails...
I would respectfully disagree that the Washington Post's proposal is "efficient, effective, ...and achievable." It's focused, OK, but on whatever favors the 1%. The tax and dividend policy it suggests aligns with [Citizens' Climate Lobby, an organization promoting carbon tax whose proceeds are refunded to the population], but there are plenty of other side trips it takes.

For one thing the editorial immediately discards any mitigation for job shifting that the 99% might enjoy, saying proponents of the GND "should not muddle this aspiration with other social policy, such as creating a federal jobs guarantee, no matter how desirable that policy might be."

Really? So what's the plan to tell our coal miners and oil drillers? Let's all move to California and learn to write software? The GND is a *DEAL* above all else. Without compensation for those displaced--and there would be lots of displaced workers--it's a non-starter.

Then there's the plea for "Fiscal Responsibility™": "the country cannot afford to waste dollars in its pursuit. If the market can redirect spending most efficiently, money should not be misallocated on vast new government spending or mandates."

How about the government-funded research that discovered the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, the touch screen, roughly 75% of pharmaceutical innovation, GPS, etc? Why is government always a wasteful "misallocator"? Answer: the 1% can't control it as effectively as a privatized program.

Note that the Kochs funded the work of James Buchanan, who authored "Public Choice" economics (vouchers for everything!) which said the public sector *always* gets it wrong. As if to make Buchanan's work a foregone conclusion, Newt Gingrich's congress laid off the experts advising congress (See Why is congress so dumb?).

Of course government misallocates, while the private sector does not. That's why PG&E is cheaper than SMUD… Oh wait! [Sacramento Municipal Utility District power is cheaper]

So the Post is promoting theological economics. God has an "invisible hand" and all will turn out OK if we minimize any meddling from government and let wise Mr. Market handle our thinking automagically! Only the private sector can save us!

Incidentally, this insistence on discrediting government as a religious exercise is the point of all the recent attacks on it. Discredit it, under-fund it, and sure enough people will clamor to privatize even more of the public realm. The UK is doing that with its National Health Service now. In the U.S. Trump could have had his wall when he had both houses of congress...but by waiting he got to shut the government down, which was the real point.

The Post continues: "economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work." See the fruits of the above government-funded research in everything from transistors to pharmaceuticals. Has the iPhone paid royalties for all the government-sourced research it uses? How about for the infrastructure that's not toll roads, or for the education of its engineers? Or how about paying for a good (for now) postal service? Meg Whitman couldn't make ebay work in Russia. Why? Answer: Bad postal service.

The private sector is not interested in funding infrastructure, education or basic research. It's too expensive and risky. That means the GND *must* be public policy, or we will have to submit to an economy that's a series of toll booths! Government has plenty of critical attention since its operation is publicized, out in the open, but it has no monopoly on cluelessness. We didn't read about Enron's board meetings until the bankruptcy trial made that public. Let's not draw too many conclusions from that particular distortion, shall we?

More Washington Post: "[the GND] would cost $27 trillion to get there by 2035 — a yearly price tag of about 9 percent of 2017 gross domestic product. (Total federal spending is currently a bit more than 20 percent of GDP.)"

Wow, now we *really* can't afford it (and have you seen the size of national debt? Holy Mackerel!). Why we're completely out of money!

Truth is that the U.S. is a sovereign, fiat money creator with floating exchange rates and debts payable in the currency it can issue at will. It can no more run out of money than the scorekeeper at the ball game can run out of points.

One recent example: according to its own audit, the Federal Reserve issued $16 - $29 trillion to bail out the financial sector in 2008 (Note: no tax rise; no inflation). For only $9 trillion, they could have paid everyone's mortgage off. Apparently banks are the most important thing...not climate, not the public, not the economy. What's important is the tiny slice of the population that owns most of America's assets.

One reminder: taxes do not provision federal government programs. They can’t. Where would people get the money to pay taxes if government didn’t spend the dollars out into the economy first? Saying otherwise is like believing you can give the ticket taker at the movies your ticket before you obtain one from the theater. Taxes make the money valuable, they do not provision government programs.

Taxes create markets, too. Say the King wants to employ 10,000 soldiers. This is a logistical nightmare to feed, house, train, arm, etc. so many men. What does the King do? He pays his soldiers in the official currency (call them “crowns”). Then he taxes the entire population, payable in “crowns.” The population then scrambles to get crowns from the soldiers by providing them...and themselves...with a market. While there are plenty of nomadic, tribal and other forms of society, there are no historical examples of stateless societies that have markets and economic money. No state; no market.

So...good tax policy is essential to a productive economy, especially one that will have to produce climate mitigation.

Honestly, I've tried to be respectful here, but the distortions of real "solutions" are awful. It goes without saying that without some serious, all-hands-on-deck action about climate, the costs will be far greater than any GND.

That does not stop frequent Washington Post contributor George Will's recent National Review editorial from distorting the GND and Modern Money Theory (MMT) beyond all recognition as he sneers at it. MMT is the source of a lot of what's constructive about the above...So this editorial is not the only clueless thing the Post has published. If you're interested, here's Bill Black's answer to distortions like Will's. The Bee does print Will, but won't print something like Black's response. Back in the UK, though, the Financial Times has been publishing MMT's Stephanie Kelton as she responds to Paul Krugman. In any case, I'll go for a carbon tax (and dividend), but the rest of what the Post says to dismiss the GND is truly reprehensible.

What does Gandhi say? "First they they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” ... One step at a time, I guess.

…

Mail #2 (after some responses)

I’ve got to confess my disappointment that neither of you gets how essential MMT is to success in addressing climate solutions. IMHO, it ain’t optional. And your response to something like me declaring “two plus two equals four”... is “I disagree.”

This is beyond puzzling. You “disagree”…?! I’d suggest, as gently as possible, that we don’t get to vote about this.

For you, somehow government can produce trillions (without raising taxes, or triggering inflation) for bank bailouts or Middle East wars, but even [another correspondent] says "I'd rather see some of the revenue used for green stuff"....as though government needs tax revenue to provision its programs.

Please ask yourself: Where do people ultimately get the dollars? The 2+2=4 answer: The central bank (the "Fed") is the monopoly issuer of dollars. Yet you believe that when government wants to provision a program, must it collect some dollars in taxes? Really? Do dollars really grow on billionaires? Where would taxpayers get their dollars if the government didn't spend them out into the economy first?

Marshall McLuhan says “Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.” True dat.

So it's not "tax and spend"...it can't be. It's "spend dollars first, then ask for some dollars back in taxes." Why have taxes at all? Answer: To make the money valuable. Dollars give us relief from an inevitable liability: taxes. They do not and cannot provision (federal) government programs.

But what about that National 'Debt'? Answer: It's different from household debt, if only because no household can issue dollars to repay its debts, as the Fed can.

National ‘Debt’ is actually more like bank debt. Your bank account is your asset, but to the bank, it's their liability (i.e. debt). When you write a check, you're assigning a portion of that bank debt to the payee. Those dollars in your wallet are simply checks made out to "cash" in fixed amounts. They appear on the books of the Fed as a liability, too. The Republicans understand this completely, hence the bigger deficits in Trump’s budgets...and the economic improvements weighted heavily toward Trump’s real constituents, the plutocrats.

So...Imagine a mob of depositors going down to their bank to demand that the bank diminish its debt (i.e. make their bank accounts smaller). Not a very sensible picture, is it? Yet my congressperson, Ami Bera, sponsored a Pete Peterson ["Concord Coalition"] workshop on how to reduce National 'Debt' (and I made a fuss). So...you're certainly not alone!

What is another name for the dollar financial assets out in the economy? Besides "citizens' savings"... it's "National 'Debt'"... We pass around government IOUs for money. It says so on the dollars (“Federal Reserve Note”). The word “note” is a legal term for an IOU.

The way we allocate the economy's resources is with money. The machinations of that magical capitalist "Mr. Market" got us to climate catastrophe, too. I don't think it's a stretch to say it's going to take something other than the market to get us out of our current hole--as you correctly point out.

The problem with the Nancy Pelosi / Democratic approach (“PayGo”) is that it preemptively sabotages new programs by harnessing their adoption to the same billionaires whose activities got us to climate catastrophe. “We must tax the billionaires!” saps the energy of climate remedies by taking on a needless battle. It also declares National ‘Debt’ is somehow a problem. History debunks that, too.

Anyway, I pray you will come to your senses and recognize how accurate and essential is MMT (the link is to a nice explanation). As for whether the Democrats will save us...I wouldn’t count on that (not to say that R's are better). Nancy Pelosi has already preemptively resigned herself to no new programs without cuts or new taxes, and colluded with much of the Democratic misbehavior of the past. See Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? for the whole story there. For his trouble, Frank can’t get published in the U.S. today. McCluhan would understand.

Best wishes for "getting" the above, no requirement that you agree with it. Two plus two can take care of itself.

Links

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous 
...and it's not just AA. American rehab is bizarre. Excerpt: "There is no mandatory national certification exam for addiction counselors. The 2012 Columbia University report on addiction medicine found that only six states required alcohol- and substance-abuse counselors to have at least a bachelor’s degree and that only one state, Vermont, required a master’s degree. Fourteen states had no license requirements whatsoever—not even a GED or an introductory training course was necessary—and yet counselors are often called on by the judicial system and medical boards to give expert opinions on their clients’ prospects for recovery."

They Had It Coming: what the college cheating scandal reveals.

...Masterful writing from a former high school counselor.

The college admissions scandal, long form

A literary tour de force.

Sacramento News & Review...the new editorial stance

Sacramento News & Review got a new editor, Foon Rhee, who apparently must have the last word about everything that appears in the paper, including the letters from readers. Here's an example:

Original Letter:

Eric Wiesenthal, a "centrist" Democrat, writes that he is concerned that "America is not yet ready for...'socialists'" Really? Would he rather have his electricity provided by (publicly owned) SMUD, or (privately owned) PG&E? Hint: SMUD is cheaper.

He's a "strong supporter of the Affordable Care Act" which he never calls "Obamacare." Hint: single payer is cheaper and covers *everyone*!

Sure, the ACA is really "Romneycare," and was authored by the (Koch-supported) Heritage Foundation. It's a Republican plan passed during the administration of a Rockefeller Republican, Barack Obama. So it must be defended!

Wiesenthal is also a fan of the 1986 tax reform ("a bipartisan effort") that retroactively removed the last vestige of subsidies for affordable housing after Reagan cut the HUD affordable housing budget 75%. All the limited partnerships that built apartments went bankrupt after that.

With guys like this nudging the Democrats toward the right, who needs Republicans?

 

Foon Rhee's edit, and comment:

Here's the edited version we're willing to publish. Don't have the time to go through another long exchange of emails. So let me know if this is acceptable. If not, I'll move on.

A “centrist” Democrat writes that he is concerned that America is not ready for “socialists.” Really? Would he rather have his electricity provided by publicly-owned SMUD or privately-owned PG&E? Hint: SMUD is cheaper.

He’s a strong supporter of the Affordable Care Act. Hint: single payer is cheaper and covers everyone. The ACA is really a Republican plan passed during the administration of a Rockefeller Republican, Barack Obama.

The letter writer is also a fan of the 1986 tax reform that removed the last vestige of subsidies for affordable housing. All the limited partnerships that built apartments went bankrupt after that.

With guys like this nudging the Democrats toward the right, who needs Republicans?

My Response:

Sorry, I don't get it. Really and truly. The letter respects the 150 word limit. The reduction of HUD's budget that you omit is validated (and then some) by a Google search, as is the Koch-Funded Heritage Foundation's contribution to the ACA.

You seem to be a stickler for accuracy, but the writer is not a "letter writer" as you call him, he's an essayist appearing in your opinions > essay section. And why omit Wiesenthal's name? What does that accomplish?

So...as I say, a series of puzzling changes that make work for both of us.

Anyway, at least say he's an essayist, not a "letter writer," and publish it that way. If you're convinced by the links above, include that too.

Rhee's response:

Will fix essayist. As I said, don't have time or need to go back and forth on changes. 

 

...

The great thing about a blog is that in it, I get the last word...👍

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar

This 1973 essay on how cars have taken over our cities remains as relevant as ever (reposted from Unevenearth.com)

by André Gorz

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it’s up to the “government” to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots. The monstrousness of this demagogic nonsense is immediately apparent, and yet even the left doesn’t disdain resorting to it. Why is the car treated like a sacred cow? Why, unlike other “privative” goods, isn’t it recognized as an antisocial luxury? The answer should be sought in the following two aspects of driving:

• Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behavior, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace. (“You’ll never have socialism with that kind of people,” an East German friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic).
• The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

Let us look more closely now at these two points.

When the car was invented, it was to provide a few of the very rich with a completely unprecedented privilege: that of traveling much faster than everyone else. No one up to then had ever dreamt of it. The speed of all coaches was essentially the same, whether you were rich or poor. The carriages of the rich didn’t go any faster than the carts of the peasants, and trains carried everyone at the same speed (they didn’t begin to have different speeds until they began to compete with the automobile and the airplane). Thus, until the turn of the century, the elite did not travel at a different speed from the people. The motorcar was going to change all that. For the first time class differences were to be extended to speed and to the means of transportation.

This means of transportation at first seemed unattainable to the masses—it was so different from ordinary means. There was no comparison between the motorcar and the others: the cart, the train, the bicycle, or the horse-car. Exceptional beings went out in self-propelled vehicles that weighed at least a ton and whose extremely complicated mechanical organs were as mysterious as they were hidden from view. For one important aspect of the automobile myth is that for the first time people were riding in private vehicles whose operating mechanisms were completely unknown to them and whose maintenance and feeding they had to entrust to specialists. Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming independence has for its underside a radical dependency. Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy.

The oil magnates were the first to perceive the prize that could be extracted from the wide distribution of the motorcar. If people could be induced to travel in cars, they could be sold the fuel necessary to move them. For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy. There would be as many customers for the oil industry as there were motorists—and since there would be as many motorists as there were families, the entire population would become the oil merchants’ customers. The dream of every capitalist was about to come true. Everyone was going to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly.

All that was left was to get the population to drive cars. Little persuasion would be needed. It would be enough to get the price of a car down by using mass production and the assembly line. People would fall all over themselves to buy it. They fell over themselves all right, without noticing they were being led by the nose. What, in fact, did the automobile industry offer them? Just this: “From now on, like the nobility and the bourgeoisie, you too will have the privilege of driving faster than everybody else. In a motorcar society the privilege of the elite is made available to you.”

People rushed to buy cars until, as the working class began to buy them as well, defrauded motorists realized they had been had. They had been promised a bourgeois privilege, they had gone into debt to acquire it, and now they saw that everyone else could also get one. What good is a privilege if everyone can have it? It’s a fool’s game. Worse, it pits everyone against everyone else. General paralysis is brought on by a general clash. For when everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets—in Boston as in Paris, Rome, or London—to below that of the horsecar; at rush hours the average speed on the open road falls below the speed of a bicyclist.

When everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets

Nothing helps. All the solutions have been tried. They all end up making things worse. No matter if they increase the number of city expressways, beltways, elevated crossways, 16-lane highways, and toll roads, the result is always the same. The more roads there are in service, the more cars clog them, and city traffic becomes more paralyzingly congested. As long as there are cities, the problem will remain unsolved. No matter how wide and fast a superhighway is, the speed at which vehicles can come off it to enter the city cannot be greater than the average speed on the city streets. As long as the average speed in Paris is 10 to 20 kmh, depending on the time of day, no one will be able to get off the beltways and autoroutes around and into the capital at more than 10 to 20 kmh.

The same is true for all cities. It is impossible to drive at more than an average of 20 kmh in the tangled network of streets, avenues, and boulevards that characterise the traditional cities. The introduction of faster vehicles inevitably disrupts city traffic, causing bottlenecks-and finally complete paralysis.

If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the United States. Ivan Illich sums up the effect in these startling figures: “The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

It is true, Illich points out, that in non-industrialized countries travel uses only 3 to 8% of people’s free time (which comes to about two to six hours a week). Thus a person on foot covers as many miles in an hour devoted to travel as a person in a car, but devotes 5 to 10 times less time in travel. Moral: The more widespread fast vehicles are within a society, the more time—beyond a certain point—people will spend and lose on travel. It’s a mathematical fact.

The reason? We’ve just seen it: The cities and towns have been broken up into endless highway suburbs, for that was the only way to avoid traffic congestion in residential centers. But the underside of this solution is obvious: ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything. To make room for the cars, distances have increased. People live far from their work, far from school, far from the supermarket—which then requires a second car so the shopping can be done and the children driven to school. Outings? Out of the question. Friends? There are the neighbors… and that’s it. In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes. Of course, you can get yourself to work doing 60 mph, but that’s because you live 30 miles from your job and are willing to give half an hour to the last 6 miles. To sum it all up: “A good part of each day’s work goes to pay for the travel necessary to get to work.” (Ivan Illich).

In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes.

Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,” the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.” Everyone wants to escape from it, to live in the country. Why this reversal? For only one reason. The car has made the big city uninhabitable. It has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars. [comment: hold on sparky, horses were not exactly clean!]

Since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.

From being a luxury item and a sign of privilege, the car has thus become a vital necessity. You have to have one so as to escape from the urban hell of the cars. Capitalist industry has thus won the game: the superfluous has become necessary. There’s no longer any need to persuade people that they want a car; it’s necessity is a fact of life. It is true that one may have one’s doubts when watching the motorized escape along the exodus roads. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m., between 5:30 and 7 p.m., and on weekends for five and six hours the escape routes stretch out into bumper-to-bumper processions going (at best) the speed of a bicyclist and in a dense cloud of gasoline fumes. What remains of the car’s advantages? What is left when, inevitably, the top speed on the roads is limited to exactly the speed of the slowest car?

Fair enough. After killing the city, the car is killing the car. Having promised everyone they would be able to go faster, the automobile industry ends up with the unrelentingly predictable result that everyone has to go as slowly as the very slowest, at a speed determined by the simple laws of fluid dynamics. Worse: having been invented to allow its owner to go where he or she wishes, at the time and speed he or she wishes, the car becomes, of all vehicles, the most slavish, risky, undependable and uncomfortable. Even if you leave yourself an extravagant amount of time, you never know when the bottlenecks will let you get there. You are bound to the road as inexorably as the train to its rails. No more than the railway traveller can you stop on impulse, and like the train you must go at a speed decided by someone else. Summing up, the car has none of the advantages of the train and all of its disadvantages, plus some of its own: vibration, cramped space, the danger of accidents, the effort necessary to drive it.

And yet, you may say, people don’t take the train. Of course! How could they? Have you ever tried to go from Boston to New York by train? Or from Ivry to Treport? Or from Garches to Fountainebleau? Or Colombes to l’Isle-Adam? Have you tried on a summer Saturday or Sunday? Well, then, try it and good luck to you! You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them. The only ones that have been spared are the high-speed intercity connections that compete with the airlines for a bourgeois clientele. There’s progress for you!

The truth is, no one really has any choice. You aren’t free to have a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their cars, it won’t be enough to offer them more comfortable mass transportation. They will have to be able to do without transportation altogether because they’ll feel at home in their neighborhoods, their community, their human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in walking from work to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

“People,” writes Illich, “will break the chains of overpowering transportation when they come once again to love as their own territory their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away from it.” But in order to love “one’s territory” it must first of all be made livable, and not trafficable. The neighborhood or community must once again become a microcosm shaped by and for all human activities, where people can work, live, relax, learn, communicate, and knock about, and which they manage together as the place of their life in common. When someone asked him how people would spend their time after the revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done away with, Marcuse answered, “We will tear down the big cities and build new ones. That will keep us busy for a while.”

These new cities might be federations of communities (or neighborhoods) surrounded by green belts whose citizens-and especially the schoolchildren-will spend several hours a week growing the fresh produce they need. To get around everyday they would be able to use all kinds of transportation adapted to a medium-sized town: municipal bicycles, trolleys or trolley-buses, electric taxis without drivers. For longer trips into the country, as well as for guests, a pool of communal automobiles would be available in neighborhood garages. The car would no longer be a necessity. Everything will have changed: the world, life, people. And this will not have come about all by itself.

Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life.

Meanwhile, what is to be done to get there? Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

From Le Sauvage September-October 1973. Translator not known.

André Gorz was a philosopher, journalist, and writer. He was known as one of the first ecosocialists and political ecologists.

The Corruption of Economics

"In the decade since the financial crisis, not one so-called top economics department has hired a single senior professor who had accurately foretold the calamity to come. It should be evident, by this point, that this is not accidental." -- Book review of Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, by Robert Skidelsky (Yale University Press, 2018) (Quoted in Ian Welsh's blog.)

Neoclassical economics, the fashion of economic thinking currently informing the public policy decisions of the ruling class, folds the classical economists' three factors of production (capital, labor, land) into two (capital and labor), so it ignores the monopoly aspects of land ownership.

Elizabeth J. Phillips (née Magie; 1866–1948) invented the precursor to today's Monopoly, The Landlord's Game to illustrate the position of land in those productive inputs, and the effects of Henry George's proposed land tax. In the Monopoly version of the game, there's only one winner; everyone else, in effect, declares bankruptcy. Ms. Phillips proposed an alternative set of rules ("Prosperity") that let everyone win. You can still get the rules for Prosperity online, but Monopoly is the game in popular distribution. Neoclassical economics gets at least a propaganda victory by the kind of willful ignorance forced on the public, particularly ignorance of the potential to make the economy more productive by paying attention to the effect of land as a productive input.

Neoclassical economics also ignores money and credit, asserting that the real economy is, in effect, a system of barter, effectively ignoring economic history. Anthropologist Caroline Humphrey concludes that "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."

So it's no surprise that neoclassical economics did not predict an event at the confluence of credit and land--the subprime mortgage meltdown--because those factors do not appear in their calculations.

Finally, American economic thinking historically includes Simon Patten’s (1852 – 1922) teaching at the Wharton Business School — which asserted government-subsidized public infrastructure was a fourth factor of production. The neoclassicals want to suppress this bit of history, and paint government as only a meddler in markets.  But historically, only societies with states, and their regulatory infrastructure have had markets. No state; no market.

How does a state create a market? Imagine the king wants to employ 10,000 troops to defend the borders. Training, housing and feeding this enormous number of soldiers would be a logistical nightmare. So the king pays his troops with the official currency (let's call it "crowns"), and demands the rest of the population pay a tax...in crowns. This means people want get their hands on the soldiers' pay, and make a market to serve them, and everyone else, in the process. It's also equally obvious that the state has to regulate that market, if only to specify what makes a legitimate "crown," and how credit arrangements can work.


So some fairly bizarre neoclassical assertions guide current public policy, reminding me of a stage hypnotist I saw once at the state fair. He put a dozen people in a trance, told them to take off their right shoe and hold it in their hand. Then he told them when they woke, they wouldn't be able to see whatever was in their right hand. He snapped his fingers to wake them, and asked them what happened to their right shoe. People were looking under their chairs, around the back of the stage, etc. while clearly holding their shoe in their hand. The crowd laughed, but I wondered how often we're holding the shoe we're looking for.

That's the state of play in economics, currently. The economists with the ear of the public policy makers are walking around with their shoe in their hand, wondering why these irritating people opposing their policy solutions are telling them to wake up.

Russiagate

Taibbi: On Russiagate and Our Refusal to Face Why Trump Won Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

The 2016 campaign season brought to the surface awesome levels of political discontent. After the election, instead of wondering where that anger came from, most of the press quickly pivoted to a new tale about a Russian plot to attack our Democracy. This conveyed the impression that the election season we’d just lived through had been an aberration, thrown off the rails by an extraordinary espionage conspiracy between Trump and a cabal of evil foreigners.

This narrative contradicted everything I’d seen traveling across America in my two years of covering the campaign. The overwhelming theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system.

The anger wasn’t just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans’ chosen $150 million contender, Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or $50 million per delegate). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” with little money and close to no institutional support became a surprise contender.