Consider Boeing, once regarded as the crown jewel not only of aviation but even of the entire manufacturing sector. Technological excellence, innovation, and quality control were its watchwords. More recently it is a different, dispiriting story.

Marie Christine Duggan, writing in Dollars and Sense, reports:

“the company management has repeatedly failed to invest in innovation and employees, instead siphoning cash from manufacturing in order to make the company’s stock price rise. Two decades of executives taking money out of manufacturing has had the predictable and tragic consequence of undermining the quality of Boeing planes, despite the long hours put in by its workforce. Hundreds of passengers died in crashes in 2018 and 2019. Then, on February 22, 2021, the engine of a Boeing 777 flying from Denver to Honolulu disintegrated in midair. While there weren’t any fatalities, the FAA and Japan’s civil aviation bureau grounded over a hundred 777s worldwide.”

Years of deferred maintenance, short- term thinking, and obsessive focus on stock prices and dividends have come to exact their toll. She writes that in 2017, Boeing put 66% of its total spending into dividends and stock buybacks, whereas in 1990 that proportion of spending went instead to new equipment to manufacture things.

In a market economy how did Boeing get away with production of a product becoming ever more inadequate.? Part of the reason is that Boeing is a monopoly with only one international competitor, AirBus. When competitors are so severely limited they tend to collaborate. Furthermore the company, like most major corporations today, is listed on public stock exchanges in an era when markets as perfect information processing machines and maximizing shareholder value are the guiding norms. These institutional and cultural features helped sustain and were sustained by an inflated sense of self worth among the elites who ran these corporations. Cory Doctorow puts this well: Monopolies are brittle. The ideology that underpins them is fundamentally eugenic: that there exist among us superbeings, genetic sports who were born with the extraordinary insights and genius that entitle them to rule over the rest of us. If we let nature run its course, according to this ideology, these benevolent dictators will usher in an era of global prosperity. This is catastrophically, idiotically, manifestly wrong. First, even people who are very smart about some things are very stupid about other things.”

These priorities were resisted both by unions and by midlevel technical and engineering staff. Boeing sought to move its operations to South Carolina, an anti=union state.

Duggan writes:

“One reason the South Carolina flight-line workers wanted a union was because it would have given them the ability to say “no” to the forced overtime. It turns out that relentless overtime not only put families in South Carolina at risk, but also caused the kind of employee fatigue in Renton, Wash. that made errors inevitable. In the fall of 2018, the Renton, Wash. Boeing factory produced the two 737 Max planes that crashed months later even though they were brand new.”

This experience leads me to question the wisdom of President Biden’s first specific supply chain policy, opening LA port 24/7. My first reaction was who will do the graveyard shift and with what costs in terms of accidents and mistakes? Overtime will surely be necessary and will it be forced? What role did unions—both leaders and rank and file– have in this decision.?

If the highly concentrated and regulated market of plane manufacture led to the ultimate supply chain failure, a fatal crash, it does not follow that a market with many buyers and many sellers will produce a just and stable alternative. Josh Wingrove, Jill R Shah, and Brendan Case write at Bloomsberg:

“Port truckers are typically independent contractors, without the benefits and protections of unionized transport sectors or even major companies with shipping divisions, like Amazon.com Inc. Their jobs require them to line up for hours to pick up cargo, and they’re paid only when they move it. ‘The port truck driver, for decades now, has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist with the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor markets and supply chains.”

More broadly both should emphatically reject neoliberal notions of just in time delivery systems and other transport, advertising, and investment decisions driven solely by the stock market.

But the president has instead focused on trying to produce new drivers by streamlining licensing. The White House says “an average of 50,000 commercial drivers licenses and learners permits have been issued each month this year, 14% above 2019 and far above 2020 levels, when the pandemic shuttered training programs.” And then the newly licensed drivers discover they have to work long hours for nothing, and move on, right? “

The metaphor of supply CHAINS is misleading. Institutional and individual biases and decisions constitute these. Many of today’s supply chain crises are rooted in part in the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. Monoculture agriculture, international trade, and pharmaceuticals come immediately to mind. This capitalism professes a faith in markets but manipulates the market to express and concentrate power, then uses that power to extort further gains. At a minimum anti-trust and labor’s right to organize are necessary conditions both for social justice and safer supply chains.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

NBC: “Inside The Nation’s Supply Chain Crisis”

But if austerity is a disaster that does not mean that continual rounds of stimulus spending can address either traditional concerns about jobs and social justice or the current and equally pressing dangers concerning climate and biodiversity. Federal dollars are better than austerity but leave gaping holes even as they increase expectations. And as Biden’s election was premised in part on the promise to get things done, the sluggish recovery is charged to him, further reducing his political leverage. And the problem with solely blaming austerity is that its defenders can and will always say you leftists did not cut enough.

Best that we find a diagnosis that touches everyday frustrations mor than abstract fiscal balances. Sonali Kolkatar comments on the high rates of resignation plaguing US workplaces:

“If such a high rate of resignations were occurring at a time when jobs were plentiful, it might be seen as a sign of a booming economy where workers have their pick of offers. But the same labor report showed that job openings have also declined, suggesting that something else is going on. A new Harris Poll of people with employment found that more than half of workers want to leave their jobs. Many cite uncaring employers and a lack of scheduling flexibility as reasons for wanting to quit…

So serious is the labor market upheaval that Jack Kelly, senior contributor to Forbes.com, a pro-corporate news outlet, has defined the trend as, “a sort of workers’ revolution and uprising against bad bosses and tone-deaf companies that refuse to pay well and take advantage of their staff.” In what might be a reference to viral videos like those of McGrath, Ragland, and the growing trend of #QuitMyJob posts, Kelly goes on to say, “The quitters are making a powerful, positive and self-affirming statement saying that they won’t take the abusive behavior any longer.”

That workplace, such as it is, is sustained by deficits, but not the deficits so frequently lamented. Rather the debt at fault is consumer debt, especially student and mortgage debt.

James Galbraith argues at the Intercept, correctly in my view, that these are structural problems at the heart of much discontent. Workers who abandon the workplace are not lazy beneficiaries of expanded unemployment compensation. They did not rush back to the labor market when those benefits were eliminated. These workers recognize something academic economists often forget—there is a cost to holding a job just as there is to losing one. Especially in a society lacking public transit, travels to and from the job may require a second family car . Add in clothing and increased day care costs and the job becomes a problematic proposition.

Beyond these practical concerns there may be a broader cultural shift. How are these workplace escapees getting along without income or state support. Perhaps many workers have distinguished more clearly between needs and luxuries and/or extended family support, which may not face so much stigma. Or forms of collaboration outside the market may be easing some burdens. In any case it seems likely that workers are much less willing to accept the tyranny of the modern workplace.

We have not heard such talk since the late sixties blue collar blues. Those frustrations were channeled into wage concessions, but workplaces remained contested terrain with deleterious effects on the final product. White working class males made some monetary gains but often at the price of further give backs of workplace autonomy and cost of living clauses that fostered self-reinforcing inflationary spirals.

One constructive response that Galbraith advocates is modest subsidies for small scale local cooperatives, a policy already adopted in Germany. Such enterprises create incentives to identify with the business and thus require fewer supervisory personnel.

Combatting the dangers of austerity may require more than economic arguments. It will also need an ethical critique, one that awards consumption its place. Such a message may seem dangerous in an era of environmental limits. Consumption, however, need not be limited to the corporate driven consumerism of our era. We might revisit John Kenneth Galbraith’s moral critique of two generations ago, with his contrast of private affluence and public squalor. Especially necessary is public sector spending on a new green infrastructure, on preventive health care, university education. Equally important would be public and private art. The gains from technological progress can also be “spent” on more leisure, with all its possibilities, rather than more goods. Austerity is a passionate opponent and demands a multifaceted response.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Biden Delivers Remarks on his Build Back Better Agenda | NBC News

“the generally accepted understanding is that 12-25% of “Western” medicine is derived or based on plant molecules/chemical backbones…It depends who’s talking and what their agenda is. And that is JUST in Western medicine. There are other, much older and empirically-based medicinal systems out there that are incredibly effective, but most U.S. citizens are unaware or only dimly, of them. Not only is the loss of language directly linked to knowledge loss and potential medical/economic loss, but think of all of the practical and useful things that get lost, too.”

When Brazil President- Bolsanaroo encouraged more forestry development in the Amazon, global climate advocates worried about the lungs of the planet and the contribution to global warming. They might equally have been concerned with the indigenous knowledge going up in smoke..

Sibélia Zanon writing at nature site Mongabay reports:

“A study at the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that a large proportion of existing medicinal plant knowledge is linked to threatened Indigenous languages. In a regional study on the Amazon, New Guinea and North America, researchers concluded that 75% of medicinal plant uses are known in only one language.” She reports that 91% of medicinal knowledge exists in a single language, so the loss of linguistic diversity diminished the former as well.

Nor are medicines all that are lost. She adds,

“Every time a language disappears, a speaking voice also disappears, a way to make sense of reality disappears, a way to interact with nature disappears, a way to describe and name animals and plants disappears,” says Jordi Bascompte, researcher in the Department of Evolutional Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich.”

As indigenous peoples rely on the spoken word for intergenerational knowledge transfer, the disappearance of these languages will take with them a universe of information. The possible losses include fundamental neurological facts about the human brain. Jairus Grove, author of Savage Ecology, cites work by neurologists showing that each language contains a different cognitive map of the human brain. Sometimes the differences are very significant and open up important research potential. Grove cites work by linguist David Harrison on the Uririna people of Peru showing that some, though very few, languages place the object of the sentence at the beginning. Were it not for the continued existence of this people, neuroscientists would not even suspect or know that the human brain could be wired in such a way to make O-V-S sentences possible..

Grove points out that most Indo European languages have a active subject, verb, passive object form, but there are minority cultures that do not express that format. In a world beset by the dangerous exploitation of the natural world these minority cultures may teach us more about how to survive and thrive in this world. In this context Trip[let points out that agency is not confined to the human world The unwillingness to recognize and accept this fact could have increasingly dire consequences.

Dr. Kirsten Tripplett writes, “It’s a long leap conceptually to make, but if one accepts a premise that “language” isn’t just spoken, and that knowledge is transmitted through actions and lifeways, then loss of biological species and their exploitation to serve human interests, is a critical loss, too, for the same reasons as those cited above . . .”

Grove has similar worries: “Irreversible catastrophic changes are certain but extinction is unlikely. What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable , not because of the loss of life but because of the loss of difference. Who and what will be left on Earth to inspire and ally with us in our creative advance is uncertain. If the future is dominated by those who seek to establish the survival of the human species at all costs through technological mastery then whatever “we” manages to persist will likely live on or near a mean and lonely planet.”(Savage Ecology, p. 209)

Why this loss of cultural diversity? There is first the reductionist tendency to treat cultural diversity and biodiversity as separate issues rather than as continuously interacting. Zanon further quotes Jordi Bascompte: “We can’t ignore this network now and think only about the plants or only about the culture . . . We humans are very good at homogenizing culture and nature so that nature seems to be more or less the same everywhere.”

This homogenization process includes reduction of human labor to cogs in a corporate machine, to cookie cutter development to the planned obsolescence and corporate dominated consumer culture. Most important is a neoliberal financial system fostering increasing wealth gaps within and among nations. In this context it is especially important to preserve alternative ways of being in the world and their origins and history. Despite efforts to homogenize many indigenous cultures some retain their vitality. But their survival will depend on bottom- up activism and rules, laws, and practices negotiated across race, ethnicity, religion and class.

As Subhankar Banerjee argues, saving elephants in different states presents complex problems. More broadly biodiversity conservation is contextual. What works for one place and in a particular culture may not work for another place and in another culture. This is not, however, cultural relativism. Biodiversity advocates value most those cultures that seek space for difference and for a politics that celebrates that end.

Banerjee again: “”What makes biodiversity conservation so beautiful is that it is a pluriverse—so many ideas, so many practices, so many forms of human-nonhuman kinship that exist around the world, which in a different context, a quarter-century ago, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha and Spanish ecological-economist Juan Martinez-Alier called Varieties of Environmentalism.”

To help indigenous peoples worldwide preserve, revitalize and promote their languages, UNESCO has launched its Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages from 2022 to 203. This is a principle worthy of much more attention than it receives. For that situation to change more than proclamations of rights will be necessary, including political movements celebrating and willing to fight for economic justice and biological and cultural diversity.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Euronews: “Inside the rainforest’s medicine cabinet”

2. Newsroom
3. Press Releases

September 29, 2021

Manchin Statement On Infrastructure And Reconciliation Negotiations

Washington, DC – Today, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) released the following statement about infrastructure and reconciliation negotiations.

Manchin: “Every Member of Congress has a solemn duty to vote for what they believe is best for the country and the American people, not their party. Respectfully, as I have said for months, I can’t support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March. At some point, all of us, regardless of party must ask the simple question – how much is enough?”

The constant reference to the 3.5 trillion is misleading. That money will be spent over ten years. Annual expenditures will be less than half of military expenditures. As for how much is too much, as long as human and material resources remain idle more expenditures are appropriate. Climate and the pandemic are global emergencies and require total mobilization.

Manchin: “What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity.”

This is the old canard about Social Security and Medicare. Any shortfall in program resources, which are over a decade off, could be met by simple fixes, including lifting the cap on income subject to taxation. And as for fiscal insanity, the US has most costly and least effective healthcare system in the industrial world. At the very least extending Medicare to those 60 -65 would improve finances and population health, but Manchin and his like prevent such options even from consideration.

Manchin:: “Suggesting that spending trillions more will not have an impact on inflation ignores the everyday reality that America’s families continue pay an unavoidable inflation tax. Proposing a historic expansion of social programs while ignoring the fact we are not in a recession and that millions of jobs remain open will only feed a dysfunction that could weaken our economic recovery.”

Inflation at this time is as much a supply side as a demand side problem. That historic expansion of social programs will dramatically reduce childhood poverty and give parents more opportunities to enter the workforce. One consequence will be some relief for the supply side of the inflation equation.

Manchin: “This is the shared reality we all now face, and it is this reality that must shape the future decisions that we, as elected leaders, must make.

Since the beginning of this reconciliation debate, I have been consistent in my belief that any expansion of social programs must be targeted to those in need, not expanded beyond what is fiscally possible.”

This might be Manchin’s seductive poison pill. Political support is more likely for universal programs like Social Security. Otherwise middle class citizens find themselves taxed for programs they can’t use. And the process of qualifying for benefits is usually complicated and infuriating. Just ask many recipients of ObamaCare.

Manchin: “Our tax code should be reformed to fix the flaws of the 2017 tax bill and ensure everyone pays their fair share but it should not weaken our global competitiveness or the ability of millions of small businesses to compete with the Amazons of the world.”

The tax code is not the primary barrier to small business competitiveness Unregulated markets and government subsidies play a much larger role. And the response needs to be a reformulation of anti-trust law for a digital age.

Manchin: “Overall, the amount we spend now must be balanced with what we need and can afford – not designed to reengineer the social and economic fabric of this nation or vengefully tax for the sake of wishful spending.”

I would like to know what constitutes fair or vengeful taxation. I don’t see much of either.

Manchin: “In August, I recommended we take a strategic pause to provide time to develop the right policies and to continue to monitor how the pandemic and economic factors are affecting our nation’s fiscal situation before we spend more. Throughout September, I have made it clear to all those who would listen the need to means test any new social programs so that we are helping those who need it the most, not spend for the sake of spending.

While I am hopeful that common ground can be found that would result in another historic investment in our nation, I cannot – and will not – support trillions in spending or an all or nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces.”

Brutal fiscal reality? Every developing nation’s leader wishes he/she faced such a reality. The US can still borrow long term at historically low rates. The brutal reality is a pandemic that has killed nearly three quarters of a million fellow citizens and a climate steadily worsening. And all this with a broken health care system and an infrastructure graded D plus.

Manchin: “There is a better way and I believe we can find it if we are willing to continue to negotiate in good faith.”

One possible good faith negotiation might be to focus on the coal miners Manchin is supposed to protect. What kind of jobs do they have and how is their health. How about a generous buyout and promise of well compensated employment in WV?

Manchin: “If there is one final lesson that will continue to guide me in this difficult debate ahead it is this: America is a great nation but great nations throughout history have been weakened by careless spending and bad policies. Now, more than ever, we must work together to avoid these fatal mistakes so that we may fulfill our greatest responsibility as elected leaders and pass on a better America to the next generation.”

Absent democratic reforms and a more proactive government there is little chance of passing on a better America to the next generation.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema Contradict Constituents In Obstructing Build Back Better Bill”

Most immediately apparent is the disproportion between the modesty of the reform proposal and the intense hostility it has evoked. Changes in the top marginal income tax bracket would only bring the tax code back to pre 2017 levels, and the surtax on incomes above 5 million will hardly dent the regressivity of the tax code. Nonetheless, from the reaction one would think a Warren/Sanders coup was about to confiscate all wealth.

Sonali Kolhatkar commented: “The right-wing pushback against taxation of the rich has been relentless, eager to cast the wealthy as benevolent caretakers of the economy. Fox Business echoed a popular statistic, saying, “The richest households paid 40.1% of all federal income taxes in 2018,” adding that, “[t]he share of taxes shouldered by the nation’s richest individuals has climbed over time,” as if to suggest that wealthy Americans are becoming more generous.”

To these comments I would add that defenders of the wealthy argue that their great wealth is employed for philanthropic purposes. Those purposes often include establishment of think tanks and broader astroturfed movements. The broad contours of energy and education policy have been laid out long before democratic elections. From my vantage point I would rather see the hyper wealthy build a few more luxury yachts and golf courses. (My late senior colleague at The Progressive, Erwin Knoll, once told me he had tried to persuade Stuart Mott to make a substantial financial contribution to the magazine only to be told “I only contribute to organizations I can control.)

Sonali adds: “the rich suck up a disproportionate (and increasing) percentage of all earnings. The mistaken notion of the wealthy as generous revenue generators, as Jonathan Chait explains, “turns the fact that rich people account for a massive share of the income pool into a reason to see them as mistreated.” Chait also reminds us that the statistic that Fox Business cited focuses only on federal taxes, not all taxes. When accounting for all taxes, the rich pay a much lower percentage of revenues.

If the wealth tax is modest it does not follow that there are no reason for concerns. The largest worry is a capital strike. The wealthy, especially those with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, will pick up their marbles and go elsewhere. This remains a possibility but my take is if this were so sure a bet there would not be such angst about the issue. Despite a generation of deregulation the US remains the deepest and most secure financial marke in the world. Recent scholarship on the role of taxation in choices among states downplays the importance of taxes: Cristobal Young argues :” millionaires are more tied to where they are currently living: most millionaires are married, are more likely to have children, and are economically and socially tied to where they made their money.”

Nonetheless this possibility should be a topic of discussion. Where progressive taxation has been most successful it has been part of a bag of reforms that usually included unions willing to challenge arbitrary workplace power and social justice movements. And although financial capital can move, factories not so easily, thus making occupation or other disruptive strategies possible.

Another risk, however, is that a wealth tax becomes caught up in the politics of austerity Democrats should not promise or be forced to promise to save revenue from the wealth tax in the dangerous quest to balance the budget. (I can imagine those “moderates” justifying their vote for a wealth tax by saying they were committing the revenue it produced to deficit reduction.)The US controls its own currency and can default only if it chooses to. The US does not need revenue from the wealth tax to fund a Green New Deal any more than it needed cuts in social programs to offset the Trunp tax cuts. Democrats should cease a budget balancing rhetoric that only aids the enemies of a progressive agenda. A wealth tax may help bring about a more egalitarian society. It need not fund the ongoing responsibilities of government.

Ultimately the push to tax wealth is one further and important test of US democracy. A Reuters/ Ipsos poll Among the 4,441 respondents to the poll, 64% strongly or somewhat agreed that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs” – the essence of a wealth tax. Results were similar across gender, race and household income. While support among Democrats was stronger, at 77%, a majority of Republicans, 53%, also agreed with the idea.” These numbers are all the more significant when one considers how committed to a Horatio Alger mindset and lotteries as a form of civic religion US culture had become. Several prominent political scientists maintain that when money collides with popular progressive goals, money wins. They claim in effect that the US is no longer a functioning democracy. Though well argued, such theses risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Let’s do what we can to present a more democratic face to the world.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Yahoo News: “House Democrats seek additional tax on wealthy Americans”

In the 104-page contract, Public Citizen found a list of manufacturing specifications for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, including particular composition and strength, identity, and purity requirements followed throughout the production process.

Public Citizen’s website says, “This info can help mRNA vaccine scientists by illustrating the kinds of requirements they need to meet critical quality standards,” Such agreements have a widely recognized ability to enhance the parties’ market power, but less attention is paid to the effects on the direction of scientific research.

Public Citizen discovered is that safe and effective vaccines are more than individual accomplishments. Not only is the basic research publically financed, the process of converting it to a product safe for human consumption is dependent on a complex manufacturing infrastructure of quality control and trained personnel to operate that infrastructure.

Recognizing that vaccines are social products, both basic formula and technical specifications, argues not only for suspending or revoking patent protection but equally important sharing technological know how. Currently much scientific research is conducted behind a screen of corporate control, out of concern that sharing may weaken any patent claim.

Patent monopolies and hoarded production techniques are supposed to foster incentives to find and develop new miracle cures. This view has been widely critiqued, in part by pointing to the role of government subsidy. But there is another downside to the conventional model. That model’s emphasis on secrecy in preparation for patent claims and patent litigation impedes communication among scientists and renders their work far short of science’s transparency standard.

“Sharing information can help ramp up Covid vaccine production. Sharing information can also advance mRNA science by allowing scientists to quickly learn from each other’s work,” Public Citizen said. “Indeed, the development of safe and effective mRNA vaccines builds on decades of scientific discoveries across many different institutions. Secrecy makes us less safe against this virus—and future pandemic threats.”

Current drug research, development, and marketing priorities are based on an effort to limit competition at every step of the journey. “Big Pharma’s business model—receive billions in public investments, charge exorbitant prices for lifesaving medicines, pay little tax—is gold dust for wealthy investors and corporate executives but devastating for global public health,” said Robbie Silverman, Oxfam America’s private sector engagement manager, in a statement.

“Instead of partnering with governments and other qualified manufacturers to make sure that we have enough vaccine doses for everyone, these pharmaceutical companies prioritize their own profits by enforcing their monopolies and selling to the highest bidder,” he added. “Enough is enough—we must start putting people before profits.”

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now! “Doctors Without Borders: U.S. Should Force Pfizer to Share COVID Vaccine Technology with Africa”

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul – forced to deal with every political leader’s nightmare, a weather disaster, after just one week in office – called the rain “far more than anyone expected.” In fact, despite many residents getting caught unaware, the potential for high-end flooding was amply predicted by the National Weather Service. A flash flood watch for the New York City area for Wednesday afternoon was issued by the local National Weather Service office an amazing 48 hours in advance: at 3 p.m. Monday. The watch warned that “widespread 3 to 5 inches of rain is forecast with locally higher amounts possible.”

Both long- and short-term predictions by climate scientists have been largely spot on. Although the behavior of hurricanes is often unpredictable, scientists have done an excellent job identifying conditions leading to major hurricanes.

Hochul ‘s comments reflect not only appalling ignorance and lack of interest in the existential issue of our time. Her lack of interest is equaled by an electorate that while caring about climate always marks it low in political priorities. In addition even when Congress acknowledges the climate crisis it becomes bogged down in squabbles over the budget. The net result is often money to ease the damage of hurricanes—such as levees– but little for the basic causes of climate change.

When Ida came ashore it was arriving on a land far more prepared for terrorists—and then only left or purportedly radical insurgents. Just as authorities are reluctant to hurt white supremacists, so also is mainstream middle class culture reluctant to enact policies that would make a real difference.

Why is it that when it comes to climate even professed believers can at best engage in reactive thinking while the military or the terror warriors often receive more than they request? Meanwhile Ida demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to self-intensify, to spin off storms so potent that forecasters had to issue simultaneous flood and tornado warnings. And most impressive the hurricane reversed the flow of the mighty Mississippi. Even old man river could not roll through this one.

If scarce resources are not devoted to bold climate initiatives, where is the money going. Fred Kaplan provides an informative list. These include a new destroyer, upgraded tanks, state of the art fighter jets. Two things are clear.. Army, Navy, and Air Force are well cared for. Secondly the titans of our corporate economy need not fear the military budget. Modern capitalist economies are recession-prone, and government spending has been a countercyclical requirement. Nonetheless, F-15s are not going to take American airline’s share of cross country travel. Thirdly the items that dominate the military budget are high tech -— great for the engineers among us and a good that even without the Russian threat demands continual upgrades. Add to this the fact that the military sector of the economy is heavily concentrated, thereby allowing military contractors to extract monopoly profits.

Historically the arms race intensified as well as reflected Cold War tensions. The portrayal of an affluent democratic society able to exploit nature was forged and strengthened against the background of an evil Soviet empire. That experience left a potent residue. Spencer Ackerman puts it well: “But, ultimately, all of these things that both parties, that the leaders of the security services and intellectuals created, maintained and justified, so readily, against the threat of a foreign menace, seen as civilizational, seen as an acceptable substitute for a geopolitical enemy that had served as a rallying purpose throughout the 20th century — the war on terror is kind of a zombie anti-communism in a lot of its political caste and association.” Such narratives were especially necessary in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and public support for a peace dividend.

The case against these priorities has never been greater. Resources have more vital uses. International collaboration on climate issues is a necessity. They are so devastating that using some of these weapons in battle is unthinkable. Nonetheless support for the military and the “American Way of Life” is deeply ingrained even among many who accept climate change. It is time to bury the zombie anti-communists.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Now this News: “Joe Biden on the Climate Crisis”

“The bombing of Germany, both by the British and ourselves [America], had far less effect than was thought. The German arms industry continued to expand its output until autumn 1944, despite the heaviest air attacks. Some of the best-publicised attacks, including those on ball-bearing plants, practically grounded the 8th Air Force for months. Its losses were that heavy. At the end of the war, the Germans had ball bearings for export again. Our attacks on their airplane plant were a failure. In the months after the spring raids of 1944, their production increased.”

The commission’s explanations, though not directly relevant to the Afghanistan war, do suggest lines of inquiry that should be pursued. Galbraith wrote that the “reasons were threefold. First, the machine tools were relatively invulnerable. They’d be buried under rubble but could be dug out in a day or two. Second, it was possible to decentralise production: to move the machinery into schools and churches. It was reorganised in much less time than was imagined. The Germans discovered that it wasn’t necessary for production to be in a single factory. They also discovered that it was possible to redesign a lot of equipment to reduce the use of ball bearings. Third, it was possible to reorganise what had been sporadic and less than diligent managements.”

…There had been two broad strategies. The British bombed at night and went for the central cities, because that was all they could find….

American strategy involved daylight raids; we aimed for the plants themselves. The problem was targeting. In a large number of cases, we couldn’t hit them. There was a saying in 1945: we conducted a major onslaught on German agriculture.

We have here some possible convergences. Weapons in caves can be relatively invulnerable and training and command structures decentralized. And as with all fighting forces missing the target was an inevitable part of the enterprise.

There are more compelling reasons to oppose such massive bombardment campaigns but failures of such magnitude across frames of era and ideology leads one to ask what factors did motivate these continuing campaigns.

Galbraith concluded,

“All the wartime bombing, accidents apart, being on the far side of enemy lines, knowledge of the destruction depended on the reports of those in the bombers or later aerial reconnaissance. Neither source was given to understatement; [emphasis mine] neither air crew nor photographs minimized the admittedly ghastly consequences. Out of the several proposals in November, 1944, came the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. It was to be independent of the Air Force, although advised and supported by it, and independent and accurate in its findings. Accuracy to many of the Air Force generals had a somewhat specialized connotation; it meant establishing with some clarity that the bombers won the war.”

Now lets fast forward to the early stages of the Trump Administration. NY Times reports:

“During the years of intense fighting in Afghanistan, the United States dropped a handful of similar bombs to destroy caves believed to be used by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as well as to frighten troops dug into trenches who were not immediately killed. The military offered a similar rationale on Thursday for using the bomb — a successor to the ‘daisy cutter,’ a heavy bomb designed for the instant clearing of large sections of jungle in Vietnam.”

Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan “are using I.E.D.s, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” said Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the United States commander there, referring to improvised explosive devices. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive.”

So here we have it. The mother of all non-nuclear bombs versus the home made IED.

In a pattern to be followed throughout the war the mother of all bombs continued to evoke anguished criticism.

“While the damage from the bombing, which occurred at night in a remote area, was unclear, the strike quickly brought backlash. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s former president, was among those who condemned it.

‘This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons,” Mr. Karzai wrote on Twitter. ‘It is upon us, Afghans, to stop the USA.'”

Blowback and the IED

The US has been in a two decade war because previous efforts to dominate the Middle East not only have failed, they have been counterproductive .

The Taliban, armed by the US under President Carter to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan,

The Muslim fundamentalist fighters of Afghanistan against the Soviet Union were originally known as Mujahidin. Some later joined the new movement of the Taliban that incubated among Pushtun refugees in the seminaries of northern Pakistan. Backed initially with a small investment by the Carter administration, the Mujahidin came to receive as much as $5 billion in a year from the Reagan administration, with matching funds from Saudi Arabia. They developed the skills and the firepower to turn on their benefactors, whose presence as of 2001 in their holy land was deemed blasphemy. In Iraq itself, US imperialism also unleashed its own demonic response. Its often stated goal is to extirpate the terrorism and extremism to which it has contributed so mightily by bombing suspected ISIS sites in Iraq and Syria. Yet as Phyllis Bennis of the Institute For Policy Studies points out, you cannot bomb extremism. Bombing these selected targets inevitably kills civilians and becomes a tool to recruit further extremists. This pattern has continued throughout the 21st century wars of the U.S.

Though blowback has been written all over the rise of ISIS, less attention even in the Left press has been devoted to another factor in the United States’ long and agonizing retreat/defeat in this region. That is the role of the humble IED, improvised explosive device. Seldom is mention made of Pentagon efforts to defeat/prevent the use of these devices. University of Hawaii International Relations theorist Jairus Grove, author of Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World, points out that the Pentagon spent 26 billion dollars over a six year period to achieve its goals only to see attacks increase from about 800 to over 15,000 between 2006 and 2012. IEDs accounted for two thirds of all soldiers wounded and killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

In dollar terms, the legacy of the IED is even more pronounced. The US has spend over $16,000 to defeat the IED for every dollar the insurgency has spent.

Distant cousins to the defensive land mines of the earlier world wars, these devices are far more. They have totally disrupted the major arteries on which the modern US army depends for its imperial adventure.

IEDs have received far less academic scrutiny than other weapons of war, such as nuclear armament and chemical weapons. Nuclear’s capacity to destroy civilization and the pall it cast over an entire era obviously justify the attention it receives, but in more subtle ways IEDs have reshaped not only Iraq and Afghanistan but war as well. There are at least three reasons for this paucity of scholarship. Traditional scholarship looks at the weapons of war as following a fairly predictable course. The most powerful and technologically advanced societies develop new weapons first, with their presence and demand for them then moving outward to lesser powers and wannabees. In addition, IEDs have no famous scientific parent and no path breaking scientific theory upon which their development rests. Finally, they are hard to define. They are not reducible to any one component or even to one particular whole. Citing another scholar, Grove points out that as with a coral reef, which can be composed of coral but could instead be composed of dead tires, no single totality defines it. Yet both teem with life and we can tell the difference between a reef and a parking lot.

J. Grove argues convincingly that the IED is revelatory of modern life. It is an event, one that never stands still. IEDs “are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life.”

The larger context in which this event has emerged is war itself. Grove observes, “War has always been an assemblage of things in which any particular human being played only a linkage or fulcrum of a larger, more heterogenous orders.” Artisans and tinkerers are not the only factor keeping the constant evolution of the IED alive. “It is the stubborn perdurance of high tech and manufactured waste dumping that provide the near limitless flow of materials from place to place. The protocols of production, waste disposal, and consumption habits– that are never entirely human—generate the exteriorization waste from the centers of cutting edge commerce to the periphery.” (700 million new computers will be manufactured this year, up from 183 million just five years ago. )

Ironically the US, with overweening confidence in its technological mastery of the social and nonhuman world, for years refused to sign a land mine treaty. But as the tables turned it then endorsed such treaties, but characteristically remained blind to the ability of the mine to evolved in unpredictable ways.

Galbraith was right. This entire saga exposes the consequence of elites’ consistent overstatement of their own power and ability to control nature. They repudiate ecological perspectives on the world. Ecology appreciates, in Groves’s words, “ creativity and participation at multiple levels of complexity and organization, species, populations, individual organisms, and assemblages of living and non-living things…To this end ecological relations are characterized by shifting stability, creativity, and variable involvement from top to bottom, cosmos to microorganism.”

An account that treats the IED as itself a complex evolving species deeply intertwined with social, economic, and nonhuman forces and agents exposes the arrogant faith in technology of the military planner and of much of contemporary economic thought. It is little wonder the IED has proven to be the most painful blowback from our most recent imperial venture.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

From last year: Afghanistan: why the Taliban can’t be defeated | The Economist

In other words this is an emergency. And as with all emergencies climate crises are an occasion to to struggle over the shape of the institutions and values that combined to constitute the crisis and the appropriate response. Although much of the current discussion surrounding the Green New Deal centers around the amount to be spent, there has been less attention to the question of who will administer the funds and to what end, In this emergency it is imperative that the public reaps the most possible payback from its expenditures.

One model of crisis management likely to have strong support in DC is the so called public private partnership. In practice these have been long on federal dollars and short on the qualifications and standards imposed on the private sector. The crash of Boeing, both literally and figuratively, is a cautionary tale about the risks posed by ideology driven faith in markets,

Watchwords of the seventies Neoliberal turn in American politics were deregulation and flexibility. Deregulate financial markets and make labor more flexible, ie less protected by health and safety standards or economic safety nets, Greater capital mobility combined with worker mobility was supposed to make a more productive and profitable economy from which Boeing and other manufacturers would gain.But on the contrary the result has been a decline in the rate of productivity growth to the point where productivity growth between 2015 and… 2019 was negative.

This poor productivity performance is not solely the consequence of one man’s inept or exploitative actions. Economist Marie Christine Duggan points out that financial deregulation has since 1982 included permission for companies to buy back their own stock. This practice puts upward pressure on the stock price, thereby creating opportunities for investors in the stock to realize gains. in addition the relatively widespread practice of compensating executives with stock options, the right to buy a specified number of shares at a fixed price, strengthens the incentive to do whatever is necessary to increase the stock’s price. This practice is often more profitable than investment in new technologies., whch only pay off much later even as the costs appear now.

Not surprisingly companies have a perverse incentive to steer profits into stock buybacks rather than invest in technology improvement. Boeing’s performance with a new breed of jet engine that it hoped to install in its 737s is instructive. Unfortunately it could not place the new engine in the plane without some aerodynamic risk of stalling. Its answer -— a soft ware package that will sense and correct for the problem. The highly questionable -— but less costly use of software to solve a hardware problem — was combined with failure to tell pilots about this feature and unwillingness to give them time in flight simulators to gain familiarity with these systems.

Not surprisingly these maneuvers and others like them caught the attention of Boeing workers and their unions. Many had worked for decades with Boeing and took pride in its long history of safe air travel. Some were so appalled by management’s crusade to cut costs at any price they would not fly the planes they built. Perhaps the ultimate in cost saving strategy was to outsource production to non-union South Carolina. Besides the immediate savings on wages and benefits, eliminating unions is often seen by the stock market as enhancing profits, thereby increasing stock market price and making the buyback strategy more appealing. What the public reaped was planes with sensors installed by first time technicians who had never done one before.

Companies that under-invest in new technologies or their workers can still do well in that other market, the stock market. This is especially the case when they have a cozy relationship with legislators and regulators. Unfortunately they lose or devalue vital skills and often human life itself

At this point in our history such losses are intolerable. Senator Tammy Baldwin has proposed legislation that would outlaw stock buybacks and require placement of a worker on the board of governors. These are reasonable first steps and do give more visibility to the issue. Nonetheless Duggan’s article illustrates the role that strong bottom- up unions can play in protecting workers and the broader public. Such considerations are imperative if we are truly to “build back better.”

—

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Thom Hartmann: “Breaking Down the “Code Red” IPCC Climate Change Report (w/ Dr. Michael Mann)”