Tag: 1911

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.

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.