Month: November 2019

Disclaimer

Dear Reader, I am glad that you dropped in. I want you to know what I do here.

No source pays me, and I do not seek remuneration. In retirement, I am busy, content, but fulfill a personal commitment in this project. The mission explains my intention, declared in 2007 as my Statement of Concern, my North Star. My principle concern: I do not wish to neglect household duties and my busy social life, nor to strain my wife’s patience.

My course-driven website supplemented my lectures and course offerings. Here they are:

These pages, perhaps over a thousand, follow the map of the course syllabus and schedule. My Public Policy Cycle offered the main text.

Fortunately, my server indicates that I receive close to one-hundred visits per day, with each visitor engaged for about four minutes. This pleases me. My work does appear in a myriad of college-level courses, parts of are apparantly being translated into Spanish, and permission has been sought for many courses. I am referenced a fair amount.

However, Dear Reader, I write as well for other purposes:

  • I fulfill a commitment that I made to progeny and, well, to Creation and to Being itself. Humanity is making a cataclysmic blunder: Wasting Life on Earth, degrading Nature, and diminishing the human Soul and stripping billions of people of their dignity. I abhor such atrocities and will speak out. This blog allows me to raise my voice, clarify my thoughts, share my words, and, hopefully, offer a unique perspective, a kind of Political Economy or even Political Ecology.
  • I heartily recommend the commonsense handbook ReWork. The book admonishes the reader to pursue their work in her unique way, to cut the falderal, and even to build your own tools. Thanks to the open-source volunteers who have built WordPress, an amazing app that has weaned me from hand-writing my own webpages or using the clunky DreamWeaver, my default editor — which won’t work on the Chromebook that I typically use.
  • My Statement of Concern laid out my mission in 2007. My sense of urgency has intensified. In the curriculum I worked within, environmental scientists handled climate change, so I obliquely referenced the impacts, but had no faith in public policy but trusted civil society, itself in crisis. Needless to say, Ramapo’s business-oriented economics faculty actively rejected the topic of climate change as they engaged their chrematistics, deluding themselves with their own capitalist ideology.
  • I appreciate that the RealPolitik that confronts the collision between capitalisms and climate catastrophe suited me and directed me to my North Star. As I explain later, Aristotle’s notion of Aporia challenged me, still does. This cataclysmic double-theme well suited me. How could I say “No.” Join me in tackling this Aporia, or Aporiae.

K2L Bulletin Board, #1

Welcome to my little project, dubbed “Capitalism to Livelihood.” I am Professor Emeritus of Sustainability from Ramapo College, having retired in July, 2015.

I have continued several themes that emerged from two specific courses, World Sustainability and Ecology, Economics and Ethics. Such daunting challenges required a lot of background, mostly in political economy, perhaps political ecology.

My commitment: Work out the systematic scenario speculation of what might occur between now (early November 2019) and 2030, even 2050 — but the further the time horizon, the vaguer the scenario.

Let me get this out of the way: This effort comes from my concern that Humanity and Nature will be degraded significantly within either time horizon in the default case of business as usual (BAU).

These concerns pertain not to some way distant future, like 2100 (when your kids may wonder where were you when this was going down). I make my point by referencing this morning’s New York Times (I haven’t peeked):

President Trump formally withdraws the US from Paris Accords on climate.

Trump formally withdraws the US from the UN Paris Agreement on climate change. See Secretary of State Pompeo’s Tweet. Thus, the largest economy in the world continues to shred the international order. Uh, neither China nor Russia nor India have joined the Paris Accord. Get the Big Picture? Ain’t happening anyway. This is what Aristotle termed an Aporia: no path through it.

Trump huffed and puffed:

President Trump had long held that the accord would cripple growth and intrude on American sovereignty.

Consumption Trumps Production

For a simple reason: Consumers rule in the capitalist hegemon, the USA, where nearly 70% of the GDP provides private household consumption. No other nation comes close.

As I explored the Livelihood layer of capitalist civilization through volume one of Braudel, I advocated the bolstering of the household as an intermediary between civil society and the highest layer of capitalism, the global — now captured as Neoliberalism.

A seminal source comes from Annie Leonard, now the director of a CSO the powerhouse Greenpeace, the highly informative and entertaining Story of Stuff.

A robust theoretical review from Schnaiburg adds depth to the underlying potential. Barnes captures the neglected significance of the household that, despite its decentralized ubiquity (which can be transformed into a strength) but consumption rests with, well consumers, who can, in effect, vote with their money.

Less direct control over production exists, but indirect means are available, including the market signals emanating from demand. Investors, financial intermediaries, pension funds, sovereigns, however, can exert considerable sway, and do. The withdrawal of financing for new coal-fired electricity plants and nuclear energy (post-Fukishima) have a profound impact through the nerves of capitalism.

Existentially, the decision-makers at the quarternary level live in real-time, with families and with reputations to uphold. Their income suffices. Much potential to guide future investments can result.

I, however, appeal to the consumer to exert leverage that registers and gets results. Cases are needed here. Start with Annie Leonard.

Why Capitalisms, Plural?

Okay, I am a capitalist, probably you too if you are reading this. I have benefitted, sort of like I’m a fish swimming in the ocean of an economy into which I was born (in Jersey City in the propitious month of August 1945). Fish don’t notice water the way that we don’t notice the capitalism that flows all around us. This is changing, however.

The post World War II years were good for me, representing a benign respite from the Great Depression and World War II that intervened in my parents’ biographies (see Mills). “Mutatis mutandis,” say economists: “All things change.”

But I am concerned that capitalisms will collide with climate catastrophe, and maybe I will be around in 2030 — at 85 — so that I can herein speculate as to the outcomes.

I have had the privilege to offer courses around the broad theme of global sustainability, such as Economy, Ecology, and Ethics. I no longer restrict myself to a broad and innovative curriculum, but can transcend into speculation. This is the purpose of this site. So let’s dive into this ocean.

BTW, I am emphatically not a Marxist, so let’s get that out of the way as well. I find Marxism and Marxists stubbornly and rigidly dogmatic. However, I also recognize that capitalism drives for profit, thus requires economic growth, and will not give up its business model or its privilege. Period.

Further, capitalism in the hegemonic US will utilize its citizenship privileges granted by the Roberts Court in its Citizens United holding but will not embrace its civic obligations. The large corporation will likely seek to corrupt the public realm to capture the overall political economy with its prodigious financial resources, while it shamelessly greenwashes with its supportive ideology and propaganda (Korten). My daring to even write these words will inflame many of capitalism’s adherents, who will continue to troll me.

Plural Capitalisms?

So why the plural? For these reasons:

  • Approach capitalisms as cases exist in practice (Gray) in its manifold forms: Scandanavia, US, Brexit, China, Venezuela, Germany, Hong Kong, etc. These targets will not stand still, so pay close attention, now. Tomorrow. Do not give in to determinisms of any kind: You surrender your freedom to see beyond the dilemma.
  • This invites comparative analysis and learning its flexibility and adaptability: Capitalisms’ adaptability must be discovered to find its limits and to . . .
  • Accommodate capitalisms to bend to sustainability (a useful shorthand, explained later). A disclaimer: Although I offered classes in public policy, I do not advocate grand plans such as the Green New Deal: Such futile schemes will be staunchly and effectively repulsed, will be unwieldy in practice, and will ultimately generate a sharp pushback. The private sector can nimbly adapt. Maybe: Got a better idea? Let me know.
  • Spot advantages, innovations, and strategic opportunities when they appear, or anticipate these. Leonard Cohen said it well in his Anthem: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Notice my ambivalence to capitalisms, which forces me to resolve my cognitive dissonance. I work this through as I write.
  • Aristotle stated in his magisterial Metaphysics, Volume 7, that the only problem worthy of philosophy was an Aporia (Owen): No known path through the conundrum. This obsessed Martin Heidegger, a situation which do not go well as he descended into Nazism. The coming catastrophe of capitalism and climate is my Aporia, thus I am compelled to discover my journey in this blog. Pity my beloved wife, Kathleen, as she puts up with my obsessive folly.
  • As you set out on this journey, adhere to the more humble road toward decentralization, devolution, community, autonomy, federalism. Below, I will argue from Braudel, Keynes, and Adam Smith that localism trumps globalization. Build on the household, the community, the civic engagement rather than rely on Neoliberalism and unfettered corporate capitalism. Turn toward the tactile, accessible, caring and away from the dominance of the distant, the remote control, the glitz, the unattainable and anti-life of globalization, the ultimate impersonal and dehumanizing. As Hesse said in his Siddhartha, “Do not seek, find.” Go Zen. Think globally, act locally — but strategically, as my old friend and colleague Murray Bookchin said to me a long time ago.
  • Better, nurture Life and reject, defy, struggle against all that defiles, disrupts, diminishes, or degrades Life, Creation, the dignity and potential of the human Soul, and more broadly Nature. Do not tolerate abusive anything, anywhere, anytime (see Jensen). Start now: never stop.
  • But can capitalisms support, rather than plunder, exploit, objectify, commodify all life, matter, and humanity? This reverts back to the Aporia itself.
  • Finally, due to the looming catastrophe of climate collapse on the horizon, I suggest that the answers had prudently be discovered and actually implemented in the coming decade, 2020-2030. I remain quite pessimistic but move forward: Onward! Join me, on your unique path. We will meet along the journey.

How to Approach Capitalisms?

Three books might help:

  • The Making of the by Dudley Dillard. I took a graduate course with the marvelous Professor Dillard at the University of Maryland in the fall of 1963. His magnus opus had just been published. Dillard navigated each turn and development, but also introduced me to . . .
  • Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, sharply distinguished formal economics, masquerading as science, an substantive economies, the actual practices, institutions, cultures that comprise the concrete, specific economies that hopefully sustain us.
  • Fernand Braudel opened a potential path as he organized his trilogy.
  • Marx, especially in his three volumes of Capital, to his great credit, identified the tensions and contradictions within capitalism — Marx never used the term capitalism. Thus, capitalisms of all sort must resolve their internal dialectic. Therein might lie a piece of the map, lighting a clearing on the journey.

“Environment” to “Creation”

This blog initiates a glossary around the theme that I am not an environmentalist but my concern is the defilement of Creation, a sublime gift from God. The latter reflects the influence of Laudato Si’ by Pope Francis.

OED

On Nov 2, 2019, I ventured into the OED to explore a word I find disagreeable: environment. But, wait, you say: “Aren’t you an environmentalist?.” Uh, no, as in: emphatically, “NO!”

Counterintuitively, at my personal introduction to my scores of classes, I would, with little fanfare, so indicate. My friend Larry Susskind once told me that he, too, was not an environmentalist. So, I figured I better address this in my blog post.

Let me confound this further: So when asked, “Then what are you?” My tantalizing response: “I am Pro-Life,” in the sense of an intense advocacy of all life, all of Creation (a gift from God), Nature writ-large. Thus, any and all degradation, rupture, debasement, denigration, reductionism of the dignity and sustenance of any and all life viscerally offends me. Are you listening, the occupant of the Oval Office?

Definitions

I would like to get my language straight, presented as a glossary to which I will refer throughout this project:

  • environment: The OED etymology refers to the French origin as nearby surroundings.
  • neighbor: My neighbor are the “near-dwellers” who surround me, for whom we should build reciprocal relations.
  • bio-region refers to the ecology that nestles and which I inhabit, dwell, and to which I am obliged to reciprocate
community: social capital, networks
Includes networks
See Putnam and Gordon
capitalism: thus capital itself, implies wealth, investment
See OED re capitalism:

Discussion

Gather the provisional glossary as blog here but switch to html5 page as support on website. Use definition lists and copious links, internal and external. Thus, this blog initiates a writing process after WordPress failed login and poor support from Aabaco web server.

See Guardian on environmental writing.

Costs of Climate Catastrophe

CDP foresees $1T in next five years, but partial survey.

This calculation requires close attention:

  • Stern sees substantial underestimation of damage and out-of-pocket costs. Further, will hit sooner and harder.
  • Infrastructure SOC investment will be immense and unfair, exacerbating inequality and exclusion.
  • However, a Kondratieff Cycle may be forming as public-private coalitions form and as plutocrats segregate themselves in armored enclaves.
  • The fiscal burden cannot be sustained, will distort interest rates (must be permanently low to forestall bankruptcy of sovereigns), and triage sacrifice zones of poor multitudes, who will be forcefully prevented from migration.
  • Productive investments will be crowded out by the emergencies such as fires, floods, droughts, vast unimaginable inundations.
  • Food supplies, perhaps adequate in the aggregate, will fall short regionally, producing mass famine.
  • Mortality and population will fall sharply starting perhaps in 2025 Die Off — population forecasts will have been overly optimistic.
  • Consumption expenditures will be precluded but despite deep bias against the Multitudes, demand will fall short: other than Kondratieff Cycle, private monetized economy will sharply decline.