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Mean Ol’ Government

Why do you hate money America? Watch Goldman squirm.

In conversations with private equity executives and others, Mr Blankfein left clients with the impression that he was eager to fight the charges in court. The SEC has requested a jury trial.

“He was very aggressive,” said one person called by Mr Blankfein on Wednesday. “He feels that the government is out to kill them, that they are under attack and the whole thing is totally political.”

Mr Blankfein said the SEC action “hurts America”, this person said.

More at Naked Capitalism.

Why would we hurt America The Earth so close to Earth Day?

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Might As Well

Buffalo Buick Lesabres… Is anything not loaded these days?

If you haven’t noticed, the New York Times increasingly occupies some weird space. While still not the Kaplan test prep daily, what was at one time a very insular ‘paper of record’ has become a kind of de facto stamp of conventionality whatever the subject, whether congestion pricing, missile defense or Teabaggerism. I mean, think back to the role it played in the run up to the Iraq war. Stunning. The paper with a record.

But this article, what is it? It’s Earth Day as a concept, supply your own detachment! (Included at some subscription levels). As though it’s really not a place you live, a contradictory sphere where progress has led to peril, yet where these issues are just a bunch of ironic curios we find in a box in the garage that get more delicious with the passage of time. Former protestors against nuclear power are now supporters of nuclear as green energy! You don’t say! What does any of it mean? Why would you even ask that? How gauche! Only those who don’t already know.

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences reported that genetically engineered foods had helped consumers, farmers and the environment by lowering costs, reducing the use of pesticide and herbicide, and encouraging tillage techniques that reduce soil erosion and water pollution.

“I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about,” Mr. Brand writes in “Whole Earth Discipline.” “We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”

Can you even get more counterintuitive than that? Watch as we become our own nemesis. USA! NYT! It’s meta ambivalence for the generation too busy to hate care, one week per year where we care enough to care again. For a day. About something.

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Bike People

See… that sounded like an admonition, but you add a ‘for’ in there and it’s just a website.

Maybe in the same way that Republicans do things like pay $200 for a ticket to hear Sarah Palin speak not because they like her (yeah sure, even they aren’t that stupid), but because they know it pisses off liberals, maybe people will buy and ride bikes just because they know it will piss of conservatives.

Okay, I guess because we don’t derive joy in that way – or is it that we just get our kicks in other ways? – that won’t work. But you have to admit it is a kind of icing on a kind of cake.

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Not Knowing Anything

Born yesterday… Just fell off the cabbage truck… wet behind the ears.

We cannot must not forget this very compelling meaning of green. Henry Giroux reminds us what public schools are for.


There has been a long, though declining, tradition in the United States in which public school teaching was embraced as an important public service. It was assumed that teachers provided a crucial foundation for educating young people in the values, skills and knowledge that enabled them to be critical citizens capable of shaping and expanding democratic institutions. Since the 1980s, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right. Seldom accorded the status of intellectuals that they deserved, they remain the most important component in the learning process for students, while serving as a moral compass to gauge how seriously a society invests in its youth and in the future. Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.

Indications of the poisonous transformation of both the role of the public school and the nature of teacher work abound. The passage of laws promoting high-stakes testing for students and the use of test scores to measure teacher quality have both limited the autonomy of teacher authority and devalued the possibility of critical teaching and visionary goals for student learning. Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom. On the contrary, they are now forced to simply implement predetermined instructional procedures and standardized content, at best; and, at worst, put their imaginative powers on hold while using precious classroom time to teach students how to master the skill of test taking. Subject to what might be labeled as a form of bare or stripped-down pedagogy, teachers are removed from the processes of deliberation and reflection, reduced to implementing lock-step, time-on-task pedagogies that do great violence to students, while promoting a division of labor between conception and execution hatched by bureaucrats and “experts” from mainly conservative foundations. Questions regarding how teachers motivate students, make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative, work with parents and the larger community or exercise the authority needed to become a constructive pedagogical force in the classroom and community are now sacrificed to the dictates of an instrumental rationality largely defined through the optic of measurable utility.

Read the whole thing.  Pay forward the Baldwin quote.

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Gluttire

There is a good story by Salman Rushdie on Sloth in a recent edition of Granta magazine (Thanks, whoever sends that).

A recent report from researchers at Georgia Tech and Duke turns its attention to gluttony, particularly the energy gluttons also known as the Southern United States. Evidently, no other region uses more and tries less to save energy and stave off the need to build more power plants. For example take Arkansas (no Please… ):

With a population of about 2.8 million people,2 Arkansas represents about 0.9% of U.S. population, 0.7% of the nation’s GDP, and 1.1 % of U.S. energy consumption (Figure 1). Thus, compared to the rest of the nation, Arkansas has a higher-than-average level of energy intensity (i.e., it consumes more energy per dollar of economic activity).

Arkansas’ industrial energy consumption as a percentage of its overall energy consumption exceeds that of the nation and the rest of the South (Figure 2). This is one reason that Arkansas ranks 15th nationally in per capita energy consumption, well above the national average.

But not to pick on them – the story is the same all over the former former confederacy.

Relative to the rest of the country, the South consumes a particularly large share of industrial energy, accounting for 51% of the nation?s total industrial energy use. In addition, the region has a higher-than-average per capita energy consumption for each of the end-use sectors covered in viii

this report: the South consumes 43% of the nation?s electric power, 40% of the energy consumed in residences, and 38% of the energy used in commercial buildings. This energy-intensive lifestyle may be influenced by a range of factors including:

  • the South’s historically low electricity rates
  • the significant heating and cooling loads that characterize many southern states,
  • its relatively weak energy conservation ethic (based on public opinion polls),
  • its low market penetration of energy-efficient products (based on purchase behavior) and
  • its lower than average expenditures on energy-efficiency programs.
So excuse the pun but, by what lights do we ignore the growing pile of evidence that this wasteful nature is more expensive and more unpleasant than it clearly needs to be? Heritage? As the report reports, southern states are ignoring measures that have proven effective in other regions and other countries, basically in favor of nothing at all. And while there’s a certain heedless beauty about having your head in the sand, it’s not something you can put on a license plate or in a mason jar. So what good is it?
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Disarmament, Revolution-style

But whose?

It seems we are going force Iran to go nukuler, or insure they do, by instituting a sanctions regime. All this while effectively defanging whatever is left of that nation’s Green Revolution from last spring. Nice going.

In a 90-minute conversation here before the opening of a summit meeting on nuclear security, Mr. Obama sought to win more cooperation from China by directly addressing one of the main issues behind Beijing’s reluctance to confront Iran: its concern that Iran could retaliate by cutting off oil shipments to China. The Chinese import nearly 12 percent of their oil from Iran.

This oil dependency thing is just not going away on its own. Are we going to be where we were a couple of years ago again this summer, only a little worse, with the cyclical oil shocks rocking the fragile ‘recovering’ economy? That should be one of the real fears of the energy wall as we hit it, that instead of some sudden catastrophe it unwinds slowly at a pace that should give us plenty of time to make a shift, but we still don’t.

It’s amazing that people wonder why the leaders of Iran, or Venezuela for that matter, think they need the bomb. Do we ever send them any other signal?

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Leading from the Rear

Is that even possible? Can we make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Luckily we have a Nobel-Laureate economist on duty.

If there’s a single central insight in economics, it’s this: There are mutual gains from transactions between consenting adults. If the going price of widgets is $10 and I buy a widget, it must be because that widget is worth more than $10 to me. If you sell a widget at that price, it must be because it costs you less than $10 to make it. So buying and selling in the widget market works to the benefit of both buyers and sellers. More than that, some careful analysis shows that if there is effective competition in the widget market, so that the price ends up matching the number of widgets people want to buy to the number of widgets other people want to sell, the outcome is to maximize the total gains to producers and consumers. Free markets are “efficient” — which, in economics-speak as opposed to plain English, means that nobody can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Now, efficiency isn’t everything. In particular, there is no reason to assume that free markets will deliver an outcome that we consider fair or just. So the case for market efficiency says nothing about whether we should have, say, some form of guaranteed health insurance, aid to the poor and so forth. But the logic of basic economics says that we should try to achieve social goals through “aftermarket” interventions. That is, we should let markets do their job, making efficient use of the nation’s resources, then utilize taxes and transfers to help those whom the market passes by.

But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions — any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window. So what should we do? Environmental economics is all about answering that question.

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The Worst Circus

What does Glenn Greenwald mean?

But the Report also cites the “fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan” and worries that — particularly if the “bloody summer in Afghanistan” that many predict takes place — what happened to the Dutch will spread as a result of the “fragility of European support” for the war.  As the truly creepy Report title puts it, the CIA’s concern is:  “Why Counting on Apathy May Not Be Enough”

It’s both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious — though, of course, completely unsurprising — that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars.  Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this.  But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available:  because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets.

If you haven’t seen the video released through Wikileaks earlier this week, good for you – it’s wrenching. But you are going to see it. GG‘s point about how information is controlled in a democracy is one everyone should step back and consider, even and especially as we get caught up in periodic convulsions about the biases of this or that news network. The whole thing is corrupted and as undeserving of your attentions as the idea that you need to calibrate your opinions to the whims of some mythical American center, politically speaking. And you cannot convince me that our extraordinary fascination with video slaughter games had nothing to do with the tone and attitude of the pilots speaking in the video. You really can’t get that callous and unfeeling about where bullets go and what they do without hundreds of hours of practice.

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Unexpectedly Green

It could be less than the ideal about what is green, or greater than the commonly held assumptions about slums. But why not both?

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.

This is a prime example of why, in case you were wondering, green is not about feeling better about yourself or what you’re doing but seeing the world as it is. The biggest problem many people have with the transition, as such, is that is just doesn’t comport with the way they see or want to see the world. Of course, you say.

Well, you know, unless you are able to just not care about the injustice of suffering as it’s spread throughout the world, too bad. Slums might seem like an extreme example – except that they are home to millions – but all the pieces are there – low/no energy transit, recycling, conservation, low per capita energy consumption.

Soon enough, the corporate world will discover and begin to hail them as Centers of Innovation. Then a movement to stop the gentrification of the slums will follow, as less-poor people begin moving back to the slums, displacing the near-poor.

What is to become of our bourgeois culture, especially when ‘slumming’ comes back around, this time for real?