Study proving public schools outperforms private schools is ignored by news media

Marc Jampole

It doesn’t surprise me that somebody figured out how to prove that public schools outperform private schools.

And it doesn’t surprise me that this seminal study is being ignored by the mainstream news media. As of one day after Atlantic released its article reviewing The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, a Google search yielded but one article covering the important findings of authors Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher A Lubienski.  

The Lubienskis took into account the effects of affluence, disabilities and other background factors and found that then public schools outperformed private schools over the past twenty years. According to Atlantic, the Lubienskis report that the Educational Testing Service, Stanford and Notre Dame all took a look at the same statistics—datasets they call it—and came to the same conclusions.

The Lubienskis aren’t saying that public school students score higher, because test comparisons show that the average private school student scores higher. But the private school student is likely to be wealthier, come from a stable family, not have a disability and not have suffered early life trauma. Correct for these factors—in a sense only compare apples that fell from the private school tree with those that fell from the public school tree—and the public school wins hands down. Not only that, but far from the crisis in public education that many see, the Lubienskis make a strong case that public schools are doing a fine job educating the youth of America.

The results of the study don’t surprise me because I live in the real world and in the real world the best get paid the most. Now I’m not saying that Alex Rodriguez deserves to make more money than Miguel Cabrera, but that they and every other professional ball player make a lot more money than minor leaguers, those in foreign leagues, semi-pros and beer league softballers.

The best lawyers tend to make the most money. The best accountants tend to make the most money. The best writers—business and entertainment—tend to make the most money. The best musicians tend to make the most money. Forget the obscene fact that Beyonce makes about 200 times what the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic does, they both do quite well when compared to the average piano teacher who gives lessons through the Jewish Community Center or the YMCA.

Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers. Doesn’t it make sense that they would therefore do a better job and that public schools would therefore do better in quantitative comparisons?  I know that there are some very competent and dedicated private school teachers, but in general, how could they outperform public school teachers, who make so much more money?

Thus my lack of surprise to learn that public school students outperform private school students on a level playing field and that public schools and their teachers are more open to innovations and trying new learning techniques.

Nor was I surprised that the news media has ignored the Lubienski book. One of the ideological tenets of the mass media is that the private sector always outperforms the public sector. In the case of education, it's just not so, but the news media filters out this important news for ideological reasons.

The news media, owned as they are by large companies, have come to share big business’ disdain for unions, especially over the past 30 years. The news media will certainly give fair coverage to both sides of most labor disputes, but in feature coverage they give far greater voice to anti-union pundits, writers, politicians, theories and events than to those in support of unions. Weakening unions is one key strategy in the 30 year class war in which wealth has been transferred from the middle class and poor up the economic ladder to the wealthy.

Charter schools, vouchers for private schools, school and school district takeovers—virtually all of right-wing school reform attacks public school teachers because they are unionized and therefore make a decent wage. As supporters of this campaign against public teachers unions, it only makes sense that the news media ignores important books such as The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

We’ve been ruled by incompetent minority since Supreme Court gave 2000 election to the candidate with fewer votes

By Marc Jampole

 

Perhaps the best characterization of the U.S. political scene since the turn of the 21st century is to say that we have been ruled primarily by an incompetent minority.

Let’s face it. The victory this week over the economic know-nothing Tea Party came with very few spoils for the American people: All the majority got was the right to keep a functioning economy through the rest of the year and a continuation of the sequestration spending cuts that have hurt so many people and serve as a drag on the economy. So in a real sense the minority ruled.

And it is an incompetent minority who don’t understand fully the dire ramifications of not extending the debt ceiling and who fought a battle that they could not win. That battle cost the economy billions of dollars, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and ground to a halt much of the workings of government, but not the processes related to the law whose implementation the minority said they wanted to impede.

It’s taken political trickery and the selection of partisanship over what’s good for the country to keep a minority—and often a minority of the minority—in power.  It started with what may have been election tampering in Florida in the 2000 presidential election that was affirmed by the Supreme Court voting along party lines. This combination of state shenanigans and Supreme Court recklessness led to a man who admitted basing decisions on gut and faith rather than facts and analysis being declared president even though he had fewer votes.

So the minority took charge in 2000, and what an incompetent minority it was: The pursuit of the Iraqi war without a plan to govern Iraq displayed incompetence. Going to war with Iraq instead of chasing Osama bin Laden displayed incompetence. Establishing a gulag of torture sites displayed incompetence because most military experts agree that torture doesn’t work (and whatever any movie portrays, the facts show that torture did not help capture bin Laden). 

Then there’s Hurricane Katrina, which displayed Bush Administration incompetence at its low point.

When Barack Obama swept into office in 2008 he brought with him an army of competent people, but after a brilliantly planned 2008 election strategy, the president and Democrats forgot that you need both houses to govern. They incompetently let the Tea Party dominate the 2010 Congressional and statewide elections. Of course, the Tea Party had a lot of help from the mainstream news media which lionized them while ignoring the many progressive candidates and rallies that took place before the 2010 election.  Analysis of polls show that Tea Party candidates won because many Democratic voters stayed home. The 2010 surge for right-wingers came about because the Democrats stupidly forgot to rally their own troops.

Once having won a majority of 2010 state legislatures, the Republicans were in a position to gerrymander new Congressional districts that gave them a large number of secure House seats.  Thus in 2012, the Republicans kept the House, even though they won millions of fewer votes for their Congressional candidates than the Democrats did.

The current Congress majority was thus elected by a minority of voters.  A minority of the minority—the Tea Party—took control of the legislative process because of the incompetence of Speaker Boehner and the fear of moderate Republicans that the Tea Party would spend lots of money to defeat them in primaries. 

And now the Tea Party has revealed how incompetent it is by driving the country to the brink of financial ruin—and for a goal that could not be attained. 

Let’s hope that Democrats have learned from the 2010 experience and treat the 2014 midterm election as if it were as important as a presidential election. That means raising a lot of money and reminding the voters constantly of how the Republican Party almost let a right-wing know-nothing faction destroy the world economy. It means sending the president, VP Biden, Bill and Hillary and new progressive heroes Elizabeth Warren and  Bill DeBlasio all over the country to campaign for Democratic Congressional representatives, state legislators, county commissioners, even dog catcher!!  It means loading vans with minorities, senior citizens and students and bringing them to the polls to vote on Election Day.  

It’s time that the American people rose up and overthrew the tyranny of the incompetent minority that has been running this country into the ground since the election of Bush II.

New study shows why we have to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour

By Marc Jampole

Your Big Mac and Baconator aren’t as cheap as you think they are. In fact, every time you bite into a burger or other fast food concoction, the federal government subsidizes your meal—and the profit made by the fast food company.

That’s because more than one half of low-wage workers employed by the largest U.S. fast food restaurants earn so little that they get public assistance.  An analysis of Census Bureau figures by researchers at the Universities of California-Berkeley and Illinois released this week found that 52% of fast food workers used Medicaid, food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit program, between 2007 and 2011.  In fact, more than twice as many fast food workers sign up for public aid programs than does the overall workforce.

Another study—this one by the National Employment Law project (NELP)—found that public assistance for fast food workers costs U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion a year. That’s a $3.8 billion subsidy to the fast food industry and denizens of fast food. It’s almost 2% of the total sales of the U.S. fast food industry, but a much larger portion of the profit. So if senior management of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and Sonic are enjoying their country club memberships and private pools, they have the U.S. government and taxpayers to thank.

The NELP study estimates that the average in-store fast food employee makes $8.94 an hour.  That works out to less than $20,000 per year for someone working 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year.

I can understand why taxpayers subsidize the development of alternative energies, oil and gas drilling and university attendance. But why are we subsidizing an industry that contributes so much to our national health epidemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease?

I’m thinking that if we ended this subsidy by raising the minimum wage to a decent level—say $15 an hour—your burger and fries would likely cost a little more and that the big fast food purveyors would make a little less profit. Of course, if fast food cost what it is supposed to cost without government subsidies, maybe some part of the market for fast food would opt for healthier and tastier food.  While that might lead to healthier Americans, it would definitely lead to fast food companies making even less money. And we couldn’t have that, could we?

Could and should.

The argument that raising the minimum wage would lead to job losses is complete garbage.  Employers tend to only hire when they need someone and when they can demonstrate to themselves that the additional employee will help to make a lot more money than the new employee’s salary, benefits and cost to train and equip. Many companies get fat over time and have to do occasional trimming or purging—but that’s not related to the minimum wage. These companies didn’t hire additional workers because they were cheap, but because company management thought they needed them at the time.

It makes sense that employers like to pay as little as possible for everything, including labor. But the minimum wage sets a floor on how low employers can go for public policy reasons: most everyone would agree that it’s in the best interest of the country to make sure that people who work will be able to eat and have shelter. With the current minimum wage, far too many don’t have the basics.  It’s time to raise it.

The call for $15 an hour minimum for all workers is realistic because over the past 30 years we have allowed the minimum wage to lose ground against the cost of living and corporate profits. Keeping the minimum wage low was an integral part of the game plan in the class war against the middle class and poor that the wealthy began in this country under Reagan.

The first step in returning to a more equitable distribution of wealth is raising the minimum wage.

You might have to pay more for your hamburger, but fewer of your tax dollars will go to the public aid programs for the poor that so many Americans love to hate.

New book documents how jellyfish are inheriting the oceans, with a lot of help from humans

By Marc Jampole

If even just half of what Lisa-ann Gershwin reports in Stung! is true, then many younger readers may be telling their grandchildren stories about the long ago days when humans caught ocean fish and ate them. Stung! gives the depressing news about how we’ve managed to pollute the oceans probably beyond saving. By beyond saving, Gershwin means a return to Earth’s oceans some 500 million years ago when disgustingly slimy and stingy jellyfish ruled.

Gershwin catalogues overfished areas, red tides, jellyfish blooms, heated and oxygen deprived waters, waters polluted by fertilizer and other human wastes and man-made catastrophes that collectively are killing many fish species and destroying the ocean’s delicate cycle of life.  She gives copious examples of all the problems we have created:

• Over-fishing, which means taking so many fish out of the water that a species is doomed to extinction.  Included in overfishing is the problem of bycatch, which occurs when fishing for one species leads to the capture and destruction of other species.  There is also bottom trawling, which essentially runs a large rake across the water’s floor, picking up delicacies like shrimp but destroying plant and other animal life.
• Eutrophication, which is a type of pollution caused by excessive fertilizer and sewage runoff causing an accelerated growth of algae and other plant life, leading to a disturbance in the balance of underwater life.
• Other kinds of pollution which causes deformities or contaminates fish and other sea creatures.
• The decline in oxygen levels in the oceans, which leads to the death of virtually all higher forms of life.
• The increasing acidification of the ocean, which dissolves shells. Particularly alarming is the fact that ocean acidification destroys diatoms, tiny creatures at the base of the food chain of higher order animals like fish, whales and penguins. Acidification also makes it more conducive for the type of tiny creatures upon which jellyfish love to graze.
• Climate change, which is warming the waters, again upsetting nature’s balance and leading to the imminent extinction of many sea dwellers.

As it turns out, each of these conditions makes the waters more conducive to jellyfish, since jellyfish can live in many environments and adapt well to a lack of oxygen.  Moreover, once jellyfish get a hold on a body of water, they multiply to the point of crowding out other life forms.

Stung! holds out absolutely no hope that we can fix the oceans. Gershwin’s last words in the book are “If you are waiting for me to offer some great insight, some morsel of wisdom, some words of advice…okay then…Adapt.”

But what does adaptation mean? I’m guessing that it means giving up on eating any creature from the ocean and figuring out how to eliminate the pollution from industrial fisheries, which right now contribute to the problem by dumping waste matter from production into the water. We’ll have to limit water sports to pools and other manmade structures, which we can keep clean of pollutants and jellyfish.  We’ll have to figure out how to keep jellyfish from destroying the filters of a variety of operations sited on bodies of water. It might mean developing technologies that actively clean carbon-dioxide out of the ocean water. It certainly will mean ending our dependence on burning fossil fuels, which is both warming the waters and injecting carbon into them.

Another recent book, Countdown by Alan Weisman, tells us what else we have to do: reduce the human population. We currently have about 7 billion people in the world and counting.

Some biologists think we can sustain 1.5 billion people living the kind of life we live in industrialized countries. My own back-of-the-envelope, seat-of-my-pants, pulled-out-of-thin-air estimate of the earth’s carrying capacity for humans is 1.0 billion. I pick that number because it’s the number of people on the earth in 1800.

My own belief—and it is only a belief—is that humans are so smart that we will survive, even if that means a return to living lives that, as Thomas Hobbes once put it, are “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  I assume that survival of humans will only come at the cost of a great decline in our population. My only question is whether war, epidemics, famine and chemical poisoning—the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—will cause the decline in our numbers or if we will take matters into our own hands and do it through birth control and family planning

 

Editorial: GOP: Saboteurs or Morons?

It would be amusing if it weren’t so maddening that Republicans blame President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the federal government shutdown and House Republicans’ refusal to go along with raising the debt ceiling, which threatens to cripple the government’s ability to finance its debt and would disrupt the world economy, unless the President agrees to stop implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans have talked themselves into risking financial calamity if Democrats won’t reverse the health care reform, which is designed to provide health insurance for the 48 million Americans, many of them working poor, who are not covered by health care plans — and it was a Republican idea to begin with.

Tea Party Republicans are the ground forces opposing all things Obama in Congress, intimidating House Speaker John Boehner and more moderate Republicans who would go ahead with the “clean” continuing resolution to put the government back to work. But the New York Times reported that conservative activists, led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and financed by right-wing billionaires, have been working since President Obama’s reinauguration in January to derail the President’s health care law. More than three dozen conservative groups have pushed their fellow Republicans into shutting down most federal agencies, and the shutdown is enforced by radical groups such as Heritage Action for America and the billionaire Koch brothers whose many affiliated political action committees have threatened to run attack ads and primary challengers against Republican officeholders who refuse to toe the Tea Party line.

This is the latest manifestation of conservative Republican ideology that has been promoting anti-worker economics for more than 80 years, ever since the GOP resisted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to end the Depression. Then, after the Depression was ended, Republicans spent the rest of the 20th century trying to dismantle the New Deal, with its pesky regulation of businesses to protect workers and consumers. They went after Roosevelt’s signature program, Social Security, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s signature domestic health programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted in 1965. Now they don’t want President Obama’s Affordable Care Act to get a running start at showing that government can improve the lives of working people, even though “Obamacare” is patterned after a program that was originally suggested by the conservative Heritage Foundation and patterned after Mitt Romney’s bipartisan health-care reform in Massachusetts.

[See Thomas Frank’s cover story for more on the conservative long march to reverse the New Deal and Edward McClelland’s story on page 12 on how conservative economic policies under Republicans and Democrats hollowed out the middle class.]

It took a long time for the generation that owed their families’ survival in the Great Depression to the New Deal, and then thrived on the post-war economic expansion that created the Great Middle Class, to turn their backs on the economic system that made the United States the richest nation on Earth. The economy boomed in the 1950s and ’60s with strong industrial labor unions and income tax rates that topped out at 92% for the wealthiest classes, but as Big Money took over the newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets in the 1960s and ’70s, the word went out with numbing regularity that labor unions, high taxes and regulations were bad for the “job creators.”

In the 1960s, President John Kennedy decided to give the capitalists a break. He proposed that the top marginal tax rate be dropped to 77% in 1964. The top tax rate fluctuated between 70 and 77 percent through the ’70s, until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Reagan cut the top tax rate to 70% in 1980, then to 50% in 1982, 38.5% in 1987 and finally 28% in 1988. And you know what? Not only did capitalists take their profits out of their American factories and find cheaper places to manufacture their goods overseas; the Reagan administration also ran up record deficits as the national debt rose from $900 billion when Reagan took office to $2.8 trillion when he left. His successor, George H.W. Bush, reluctantly increased the top tax rates to 31%, but it wasn’t enough to turn the tide of red ink.

When Bill Clinton reached the White House in 1993, he convinced the Democratic Congress to increase taxes to 39.6% on incomes over $250,000. The budget and tax increase was adopted without a single Republican vote, as GOP economic leaders predicted — nay, they guaranteed — that the tax increase would plunge the US into economic collapse. Instead, of course, the late 1990s saw an economic boom and the increased tax revenues balanced the federal budget in 1998 for the first time since Lyndon Johnson left a balanced budget in 1969. Clinton balanced the budgets from 1998 through 2001, with surpluses for those four years totaling $559 billion.

What did Republicans learn from this experience? When George W. Bush was awarded the White House by the Republican Supreme Court in 2001, his administration expressed alarm that the federal government, with its budget surplus, was paying off the national debt too quickly, leaving capitalists no safe harbor for their excess profits, so Bush cut the top tax rate, first to 38.6% in 2002 and then 35% for the rest of his tenure, despite the costs of his War on Terror. He also cut the top tax on unearned income — interest, dividends and capital gains — to 15%. So millionaires and billionaires parked that undertaxed unearned income in banks overseas and the US national debt piled up once again.

After the 2008 election, when Barack Obama took office with the economy in free-fall, largely due to Wall Street financiers abusing the deregulation of the banking system, Republicans rediscovered the danger of a rising national debt. The GOP resisted Obama’s efforts to stimulate the economy with $800 billion in federal spending and tax cuts as well as his efforts to save General Motors and Chrysler with $85 billion in loans. Of course, they also resisted the drafting of the Affordable Care Act, which is expected to save the federal budget $210 billion through 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Still, after 43 straight months of private sector job growth, the slowly improving economy has halved the $1.4 trillion annual deficit Obama was handed in 2009, to a $642 billion deficit projected for 2013, but Republicans are demanding that Obama return to GOP economic nostrums.

Supply-side “voodoo” economics got its shot in the Reagan and Bush administrations and it has proven to be quackery that hollowed out the American economy and ballooned the national debt. If Republicans really were concerned with restoring the economy and eliminating the deficit, they would:

• Join progressive Dems in rolling back the top tax rates to the pre-Reagan levels and do away with the low rates for capital gains, which would give capitalists an incentive to reinvest their profits in their businesses, but make room for tax breaks for the middle class, which actually would stimulate the economy;

• Resume enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prevents cartels and large corporations from dominating the markets;

• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks from speculating with federally insured deposits;

• Replace free trade with fair trade laws that protect US jobs;

• Reverse economic policies that encourage corporate executives to maximize shareholder value at the expense of what is best for their employees and the communities in which they do business (as Thom Hartmann frequently argues on his radio show).

Instead, Republicans are demanding that they get something in return for letting the government open back up and pay the bills that Congress already has appropriated. One GOP proposal is that Democrats agree to “entitlement cuts” to Social Security and Medicare as a “compromise” from their previous demand that the Affordable Care Act be defunded. Some bad ideas just won’t go away. Whether Republican House leaders are saboteurs or simply morons, Democrats should stand firm against their hostage taking and leave Social Security and health care alone. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2013

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Selections from the November 1, 2013 issue

COVER/Thomas Frank
The conservative plan is sabotage

EDITORIAL
GOP: Saboteurs or morons?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen 

Benefits of a conversation

DISPATCHES
Federal budget crisis was carefully planned;
Millions of poor left uncovered by state health plans;
Idahoan with 10 kids on Medicaid denounces government health plan;
Disability advocates denounce ‘60 Minutes’ report;
Banks mistakenly break into homes;
Farm bill still going nowhere;
Japanese nuke continues to leak radioactive water;
What liberal media (cont'd) ...

JIM GOODMAN
Trans Pacific Partnership is win for corporations

DON ROLLINS
Religion and the poverty breach

EDWARD McCLELLAND
RIP, Middle Class: 1946-2013

MIKE LUX
Populism vs. Nihilism

WENONAH HAUTER
Taking stock of factory farm pollution

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
COBRA: Adios

SAM URETSKY
Putting a value on an education

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
This magic moment

WAYNE O’LEARY
Maine’s bad-boy governor

JOHN BUELL
Changing the political climate

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Farm labor struggles

ROB PATTERSON
You have to get past an artist’s personality

POPULIST PICKS
Johnny Carson; Marshall Chapman; Tim O’Brien

and more ...

Karl Rove chides House Republicans for not having an endgame. He should know

By Marc Jampole

Congratulations to Karl Rove for joining the “reality based community,” which comprises you and me and other lesser mortals who look to empirical reality when analyzing and acting in the world. 

Remember it was Rove who, when referring to the war in Iraq, supposedly said that some people were “in what we call the reality based community” and “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…That's not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”

It was Rove, too, who exploded in rage when Fox News declared Obama the winner in Ohio and therefore of the 2012 presidential election. An Obama win went so much against the alternative reality that Rove and other Republicans had constructed that he went into a hissy fit of denial.

Now Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal that it was probably unwise of Congressional Republicans to start this current fight over the debt ceiling and federal budget. In the Great Karl’s words, “In general, it's not wise to engage in a battle without having an endgame.”

Entering a battle without an endgame is something about which Karl Rove should know quite a lot. Rove was part of the neo-con faith-based if-wishing-made-it-so brain trust that planned and implemented the Iraq War without considering what would happen after the invasion. They went to war without an end game. We all know how that worked out.

I’m sure all my readers’ hearts are as warmed as mine to learn that Rove has dropped his objection to reality and has decided that maybe it is better to think first and shoot later.

Rove does remain part of the conservative propaganda machine that is trying to sell us on the nonsense that the country blames the President and Democrats as much as they do the Republicans for the government shutdown and imminent default. The latest polls of course contradict that colored view, with 22% more of Americans blaming Republicans than blaming Obama and the Democrats.

The Republican media apparatchiks, including Rove, are also trying to convince us that the Democrats are more to blame for the mess, because they have refused to enter serious discussions about deficit reductions.  Also not a part of reality: As President Obama recently pointed out, House Republicans turned down 19 requests to enter into joint discussions with the Senate. I am not the first to speculate that the House Republicans were probably too busy to meet on the budget because they were taking more than 40 votes to turn back the Affordable Care Act.

What the Tea-Party Republicans really object to is that President Obama, Democrats, many of their fellow Republicans and most of the country see the world as it is and not the world that these right wingers want to bring into existence by denying reality, the Democratic process, and, most tragically, the needs of millions of innocent middle class and poor people across the country.

Republicans who say defaulting is okay are lying; reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture

By Marc Jampole

If the topic is the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling, how do you know whether Senators Richard Burr and Rand Paul and Representatives Justin Amash and Paul Broun are lying? Their lips are moving.

All four of these distinguished legislators are saying that the impact of not raising the debt ceiling will be minimal. And all are engaged in straight-faced lying.

Representative Broun, Georgia Republican, says that Obamacare is the greatest threat to our economy, despite the many studies that show that the new healthcare law will save money because millions of newly insured people will go to doctors with symptoms instead of emergency rooms when very ill.  Obamacare thus adds money to the economy, something that is supposed to be good. By comparison, not paying all our bills will lead to hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, interest rates going up and foreign investors losing confidence in the dollar as the central financial pillar of the global economy. That’s all bad.   

Both Representative Amash, Michigan Republican, and Senator Burr, North Carolina Republican, point out that with tax revenues still coming in, we will still be able to pay the interest on all the various instruments by which the federal government borrows money. But what they don’t say is that other bills won’t get paid—and no one likes that. When you’ve lent a buddy money and he’s paying you back, but you hear he isn’t paying back his sister, don’t you get a little uneasy?  

Their claims are so outrageous that even the U. S. Chamber of  Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, as free-market and anti-government as organizations can get, are telling Congress to raise the debt ceiling.

Broun, Burr, Amash, Paul and other Republicans suggesting that default ain’t so bad all reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture that no one likes to talk about in the big slick business publications like Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Forbes. It’s the culture of living right at the edge of financial ruin, one step ahead of your creditors, but still in the game. Multiple bankruptcies, dragging out payments, trying to keep afloat with another loan, selling suspect goods, using slightly suspicious selling practices, maybe puffing up inventory a little or pledging the same equipment on two personal loans—these actions characterize this entrepreneurial culture, and it’s surprising how large it is.  The good old boy underbelly business culture serves as the real underlying cause of the real estate bubble that wrecked our economy: liar loans, sub-primes, bundling bad loans with good—all qualify as underbelly business behavior.

In popular entertainment—“Cadillac Man,” “The Goods,” “Fargo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Tin Men”—this business culture is associated with selling automobiles, real estate and siding, but in fact it’s not the business but the way the owner runs it that defines the good old boy underbelly culture.
Again, I ask you to personalize: Do you like doing business with these sharks? Why should banks, large multinational corporations and foreign companies be any different? They aren’t. They’ll do what any reasonable business person does when the risk of nonpayment is great—charge more.

Let’s also not forget about the millions of people whose lives will suddenly become much more challenging because they have been laid off or aren’t getting paid. It’s not just a matter of financial consequences. There are painful human consequences to refusing to raise the debt ceiling. 

In detailing the good old boy underbelly business culture I forgot to mention one thing: These business owners are all liars who lie frequently. Which brings us full circle to the Republicans who claim that defaulting on our bills won’t be so bad.

Economist Stephen D. King shows lack of imagination in telling economic horror story

By Marc Jampole

Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC and author of the recent When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence, painted a horror story as gruesome as any of his namesake in his New York Times Op/Ed article titled “When Wealth Disappears.”

King reviews the no-growth economy that Europe and Japan already have and is about to reign in the United States. King takes it as a fact that no-growth has to lead to a decline in the economy—that an economy that is not growing is weak and bad. He takes it for granted that because growth will no longer bring extra wealth each year, college costs will keep going up and we will continue to fray our safety net.

Common sense should tell you that this idea is nonsense. If we have already achieved great wealth, why should no more increases prevent us from performing the functions of an economy—to provide a reasonable living standard for everyone? We have so much wealth right now that we could feed, educate and care for everyone in our country—if we only redistributed it.  All a growing economy does is enable people to live a higher standard of living without having to seriously consider wealth redistribution.

The standard of living in the mature industrialized countries is already quite high.  Who says it ever has to get any higher?  Certainly we have to improve the lives of our poorest and most disadvantaged residents, plus there are billions of people living at or below subsistence in the developing world. But in general the middle and upper classes of the industrialized nations are living on easy street.

Of course if there is no economic growth, the improved position of the poor has to be funded from existing pots of money—and that means redistribution of the wealth. And that’s just not part of the agenda for the people who created the field of economics, most practicing economists, those who fund economic research and those who look to economic theory to guide their business operations—otherwise known as rich folk.  

The idea that a healthy economy requires growth is nothing more than a first premise, similar to the premise that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, upon which all of traditional geometry is based. The difference is that the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line (except to a few brilliant scientists and mathematicians), whereas an economy can thrive without growth. No ruling elite ever wants to try it though, because it takes planning and a commitment to the community that our wealthiest citizens don’t seem to have.

King’s own plan, outlined in broad brushes after his plea that we be honest about the end of abundance, will certainly benefit his employer without inconveniencing much, if at all.  Here it is:

“That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn’t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction.”

A higher retirement age and more immigration will keep the number of workers high and thereby lower wage rates, which is good for any employer. The “new social compact” assumes that taxes on corporate profits and wealthy shareholders will not go up; unspoken here is the obvious—that we could keep the current social compact if we taxed the wealthy at the rates we taxed them in 1950, or even 1980.  King does mention a tougher stance towards banks and less government manipulation of money, but what does he really mean? He has very concrete ideas when it comes to increasing the pain of working stiffs, but only vague strategic thoughts about modifying banking.    

It’s not just what King says, but what he doesn’t say. Immigration is a great way to funnel people from poor countries to rich countries with shrinking populations, but only if we have immigration across the board, not just for the wealthy and educated. There is nothing wrong with further opening world trade, but only if trading partners meet the high environmental, wage and work safety standards of the West. Otherwise free trade exploits both the poorly paid workers in developing countries and the middle class workers in wealthy countries who lose their jobs.

King’s horror story also doesn’t tell us how we got into this mess: by straining the world’s resources. We can’t grow anymore, because we don’t have the raw materials of growth.  Instead of bemoaning the shrinking population, King should embrace it and advocate efforts to bring down the population even faster.

And make no mistake about it. If we as a species don’t voluntarily bring down our population and learn to live well while using less energy and resources than Americans currently do, then we will see a true horror story—one in which the world descends into a hell of major wars, famines, epidemics and human-induced weather and chemical disasters.

Instead of fearing the end of growth, King should understand that it is a good thing and then set his mind of an economist to making sure that the end of growth does not also mean the end of wealth.

Of course, that’s not King’s job. His job is to help his company make more money.

Tea Party’s government shutdown has many parallels with Germany in late 1920s-early 1930s

By Marc Jampole

A group of rich industrialists are not happy with the direction in which the country is going, so they give money to support and develop a radical party to push their agenda for smaller government and lower taxes and regulation. But the fringe party they support gets into a position to subvert the democratic process and the economy. At the end, even the industrialists who funded them are worried about the actions taken by the suddenly powerful if still small party.

Sounds familiar?

What am I describing? Is it the United States in 2010-2013? Or could it be Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s?

The structural parallels between what has happened in the United States and what happened almost a century ago in Germany are uncanny. Now I’m not comparing the current state of our country to Nazi Germany, nor am I predicting that we are moving in Germany’s genocidal direction. Nor am I comparing the Tea Party Congressional representatives and Senators to Hitler, although there are many similarities between the philosophies behind the two movements:

• Stress on traditional values.
• Hate of the current government.
• Nativism and distrust of foreigners.
• An underlying racism, which the Tea Party denies, but which can be detected in code language, occasional slip-ups and irrational abhorrence of our mixed-race President.
• Willingness to subvert democratic processes.

The big difference, of course, is that the Tea Party wants to shrink government to almost nothing, whereas Hitler wanted to increase government and have government aggressively direct the economy.

Make no mistake about it. The Tea Party would be a minor force in American politics if not for two things: 1) the money that big business threw into their campaigns in the wake of the Supreme Court’s weird but unfortunate Citizens United decision; and 2) the main news media—owned by large corporations—which lavished Tea Party candidates with coverage while ignoring the many progressive and liberal candidates across the country.

But the Tea Partiers could not by themselves have been able to close down much of the government and put us on the precipice of a debt crisis that could plunge the world into economic free-fall. It has taken the craven and self-serving actions of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who has refused to release Republicans to vote their consciences on the budget and debt issues.  Does that sound like a decrepit and ineffectual Paul von Hindenberg turning over the German government to a former house painter named Adolf?

When I learned that the Republicans want to cut some $40 billion from food stamps I was befuddled and sickened at how little empathy this relatively small group of mostly privileged people had for the challenges facing the poor and near poor. I had the same feeling when I learned that 26 Republican-led states decided not to extend Medicaid coverage to millions of people who are without health insurance. Don’t they understand how much sicker people get when they don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it or take half their dosage of medicine to make it last longer?

And I have the same feeling now. Why don’t these people feel the pain of the many federal workers who have already been ordered to stay home or the businesses that serve them? Why don’t they feel the fear of the many federal workers whose jobs have been declared essential, which means they’ll have to keep working even when the government won’t be able to pay them, starting in about two weeks? What about the people waiting for Social Security disability forms to be processed? Or people who work for government vendors and will be laid off? Don’t the Republicans care one little bit about the collective pain and economic loss already inflicted on American individuals and families?

The sheer lack of empathy for their fellow women and men, their willingness to plunge so many into suffering—their hard hearts—frightens me as much as the Tea Partiers attack on democracy and our democratic system.

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

House Republicans want to destroy the town to save it

By Marc Jampole

The logic of House Republicans should ring familiar to those old-timers who lived through the Viet Nam War. What they want to do is “Destroy the town to save it.”

The original quote was attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by reporter Peter Arnett about the U.S. bombing of the city of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The Republicans are using this logic in refusing to fund the federal government unless Congress votes to postpone the implementation of the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.  The Republicans believe the new law is a disaster for the country, so they are willing to shut down the government in their continued efforts to dismantle it.

But a government shutdown will be more of a disaster than letting go into effect a law passed by Congress, signed by the President and endorsed by the American people in the last presidential election.  Most of the government will grind to a halt. About 800,000 federal workers will lose their jobs for the duration. About 1.4 million active-duty military personnel must remain on duty unpaid. We’ll see delays in processing passport and visa applications, issuing gun permits, continuing U.S. bankruptcy court. All national parks and federal wildlife refuges would be closed for the duration of the shutdown. Think of the loss of status we will suffer in world markets and in other countries.

That sure sounds like destroying the town to save it to me.

Except for one thing: Just as U.S. carpet bombing was unable to stop the rise of the Viet Cong nationalists, defunding our federal government won’t affect the timetable for starting exchanges or other major elements of the new healthcare law. The Internal Revenue Service will still collect the new taxes mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

The “destroy the town to save it” logic is merely stupid. But the other piece of Republican House strategy reeks of venality and cynicism.  I’m referring to the idea—supported by recent polls—that the American people will blame both Democrats and Republicans equally for a government shutdown.  In other words, instead of treating the funding of the government and the lifting of the debt ceiling as a matter of public interest, the Republicans (and perhaps Democrats, too) see it as a political football to be tossed around. 

This strategy is likely to backfire. No matter what the polls show, history suggests that once the government is shut down, the American people will blame Republicans.  It’s similar to war situations. After we declare or invade a country, the American public always rallies around the President, no matter how many people opposed the war ahead of time. 

I think government shutdowns are similar. Moreover, based on the views expressed on the opinion pages so far, it’s likely that virtually the entire mainstream media and significant parts of the right-wing media will blame Republicans.  Of course, Americans might blame President Obama if the current House bill passes and the President vetoes it, but rest assured, Senate Democrats won’t let that happen.  

If we want to blame one person for this mess, it’s John Boehner, who is all too willing to resort to the most irresponsible of actions to placate radical Tea-partiers and keep his job as Speaker of the House. All Boehner has to do to serve his country is release Congressional Republicans to vote their conscious (or the will of their constituents) and thereby let enough Republicans in blue states vote with Democrats to keep the government running.

Mr. Boehner, sir, it’s time to stand up and show a profile in courage.

Editorial: Death Panel’s Last Stand?

In his professed crusade to derail Obamacare, Sen. Ted Cruz, the Canadian-American charlatan who is seeking to broaden his base from Texas to the nationwide Tea Party, played to the rubes Sept. 24-25 with his fake filibuster that, ironically, was supposed to block Senate consideration of the House bill that would defund Obamacare.

Cruz stayed on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours, delivering a rambling spiel that at one point included a reading from Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. He apparently was oblivious to the irony that the children’s story is about someone who says he does not like a food he has never tried, until he tries it and finds that he likes it. In the end, after declaring that “a vote for cloture is a vote to fund Obamacare,” Cruz ended up voting with the rest of the Senate, 100-0 for cloture.

Cruz and other Republicans went through this charade in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in May 2010 over unanimous GOP opposition and, among other things, required insurance companies to actually make good on their promised coverage while helping lower- and middle-income Americans get affordable health coverage when their skinflint employers refuse to provide it.

Of course, some of us were unhappy in 2010 that the Democrats didn’t go ahead and expand Medicare to cover everybody, or at least provide a public option for Americans who don’t want to be forced to buy private insurance. But Vice President Joe Biden congratulated President Obama at the May 23, 2010, signing ceremony, telling him in what he thought was a private aside that the health care reform “is a big f***ing deal.” The ferocity of Republican opposition to the law, and the lies they have told about the reforms over the past three years in order to scare the working people the law was designed to help ought to validate Obamacare for progressives.

The reforms already have required insurance companies to provide free preventive care and annual health exams, allowed parents to include their children in their insurance plans until the kids are 26 and required insurance companies to provide rebates when their administrative costs and profits amount to more than 20% of premiums. Insurers also no longer can cancel policies if you get sick or made an honest mistake on your application; consumers can appeal insurance company decisions to an independent reviewer; and insurance companies no longer can limit an individual’s medical benefits. In 2014, insurers also no longer will be able to deny coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions.

When Republicans were unable to come up with a Senate majority to repeal the reforms, they resorted to sabotage and now hostage-taking. As Tara Culp-Ressler noted at ThinkProgress, Republican governors at the state level have refused to extend health coverage to the working poor by rejecting the law’s optional Medicaid expansion, which is supposed to cover people below the poverty level (including those working at minimum wage), with the federal government paying more than 90% of the costs.

Republicans have undermined national public outreach efforts to teach Americans about their options under the law, and they have slashed the state-level budgets dedicated to marketing the new insurance plans. They’ve attempted to slow down enrollment by placing unnecessary restrictions on the people who are supposed to help Americans sign up for new Obamacare coverage. For example, in Texas, where 25% of workers are uninsured — the highest uninsured rate in the country — and health insurance is practically unregulated by the state, Gov. Rick Perry has chosen to impose draconian regulations on the health marketplace “navigators.”

Republicans have disseminated misinformation about the law and confused people about what it actually does. Some states have even simply refused to implement Obamacare’s provisions altogether. And as the state health insurance exchanges prepare for their debut on Oct. 1, Republicans are even advising young people to break the law by refusing to get insurance.

If you already have insurance through your employer, are enrolled in a government program like Medicare or if you purchase insurance on your own, the “individual mandate” won’t affect you — though if you buy your own insurance you might find a better deal on the exchange. If your employer cuts your insurance benefits or increases your share of the cost, it probably is because your company is run by a skinflint using Obamacare as an excuse to cut costs, but mom-and-pop businesses with 25 or fewer employees qualify for tax credits to help them offer health insurance to their employees. Small businesses with up to 100 employees can shop for health plans in the exchange. And if health care costs continue to rise, as some Obamacare critics predict, well, they were rising for a decade before the health reform was enacted, but at least the rate of increase has been reduced.

Democrats should work with labor unions to allow tax credits for union-sponsored multi-employer plans, also known as Taft-Hartley plans, that are bargained by unions and jointly administered with employers, usually for low-income, part-time and seasonal workers who might work for several employers during a year.

The mandate will affect 48 million Americans who are uninsured — 15.4% of the general population, according to the Census Bureau, but 25% of people in households with an annual income of less than $25,000. Many of those households will now qualify for Medicaid coverage — unless their Republican state officials have left them adrift by refusing Medicaid expansion. Families living in poverty won’t be required to pay for insurance, but they won’t get health care either, because of the Republican obstinance. Families above the poverty level are required to be insured but they will qualify for subsidies to help them buy insurance if they make less than $94,200 for a family of four (or $45,960 for a single person).

You can find out the truth about the Affordable Care Act and how to find your state’s health insurance marketplace online at healthcare.gov or by calling toll-free 1-800-318-2596, where help is available 24/7. Signup starts Oct. 1 for coverage starting Jan. 1.

And if the program is implemented without the disruptions that Republicans are predicting, Ted Cruz likely will claim the credit.

Republicans might not get Obama and the Senate Democrats to agree with dismantling the Affordable Care Act, but Senate Democrats did agree to keep the job-killing austerity budget going into the new fiscal year with previously scheduled sequesters. The Congressional Budget Office in July reported that keeping sequester cuts in place through 2014 would cost the economy as many as 1.6 million jobs.

In case the “deficit hawks” try to take another run at “entitlement reforms” — that is, cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits so the richest 1% of Americans don’t have to pay the taxes they deferred during the Bush II administration — Dems need to remind their representatives in Congress that they paid for Social Security and Medicare and they are entitled to those promised benefits.

Richard Eskow noted at OurFuture.org that leaders of “Fix the Debt,” a group of corporate executives who are trying to push the costs of budget cuts onto the working class, recently met to discuss the possibility of ramping up their campaign for a Grand Bargain to cut entitlements.

If expansion of the tax base is required to stabilize Social Security, that can be accomplished by lifting the cap on taxable income for the payroll tax from the current $113,700. Imposing a relatively small tax of 3 cents per $100 traded on Wall Street would be unnoticed by most investors but would curb market speculators and raise an estimated $352 billion over the next decade.

Anybody who professes concern about the federal deficit, then turns the discussion to “fixing” Social Security and/or Medicare without the option of lifting the cap on the payroll tax and/or the financial transaction tax is a fraud. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2013

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Selections from the October 15, 2013 issue

COVER/Deena Shanker
Chicken is killing the planet

EDITORIAL
Death Panel’s last stand?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Lawmakers outlaw UN, welcome agribusiness

DISPATCHES
GOP chairman eyes Medicare cuts;
New report sees lower costs under Obamacare;
Why are 47M Americans on food stamps?;
Safety net programs kept 40M out of poverty;
Immigration reform looks dead;
Pope attacks global capitalism;
Pig farms, manure fertilizers tied to MRSA infections;
Plummeting sales force Walmart to increase workforce;
Labor Dept. extends wage protection to home care;
World Food Prize to be occupied;
Sometimes a pox on just one house will do;
Still recovering from the bungling of George W. Bush & Co.;
Senate race splits Wyoming GOP;
Appeals court overturns DeLay conviction;
Gun study finds: More guns, more murder ...

GENE NICHOL
Continuing the judicial assault on democracy
NORMAN SOLOMON
Next step for peace in Syria — Stop ‘lethal aid’

BOB BURNETT
The Obama doctrine

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
News deserts

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Ignoring the pumphandles

SAM URETSKY
Government helping people take care of people
WAYNE O’LEARY
The tax Wall Street fears

JOHN BUELL
Double or nothing

MARTY KAPLAN
Most depressing brain finding ever

DON ROLLINS
Seamus Heaney, wartime poet

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Women prisoners resist

ROB PATTERSON
A new look at old friends

POPULIST PICKS
Origins of Oz; Mt. Rushmore; Delbert & Glen

and more ...

Turning healthy vegetables into unhealthy chips symbolic of cultural homogenization

By Marc Jampole

 

What could be healthier than starting dinner with a seaweed salad, then moving on to brown rice and black beans with a side of kale? What a rich balance of delicious tastes and colorful foods, and how healthy. Lots of cancer fighters, cholesterol reducers, plus no salt, sugar or chemical additives. Perfect for a vegan, and even good for a meat-eater who might add a small piece of chicken, fish, beef or lamb and still have a healthy meal.

But what a lot of work. It might take as much as a half hour to dress the seaweed, boil the rice, heat the chickpeas, sauté the kale and broil the meat.

How much easier to open a few bags and munch brown rice crackers, dried kale leaves, black bean chips and roasted seaweed snacks.  All meat-eaters have to do is add some beef jerky.

Yes, there are now chip versions of all these foods and others, too—cabbage, chickpeas, peas. In fact, American food processors have created snack chip versions of virtually every hot “super food” fad of the last few decades. For example, manufacturers have introduced 16 new versions of seaweed chips this year alone.

As readers may have already suspected, all of these chips are loaded with salt and many have sugar and chemical additives. All involve processing the life out of the original fruit or vegetable. An ounce of all these snacks delivers many more calories than an adult serving of the unprocessed food.

While 71% of all U.S. snack foods now make health claims, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, no one really believes that eating this stuff is healthy. It certainly is not as healthy as eating a serving of brown rice or kale.

People prefer the chips because of convenience and flexibility. It’s much easier to carry a bag of spiced dried chickpeas around than a plastic tub of chickpeas. And many people prefer the taste of salt and sugar to the bitterness of kale or the tang of cabbage. (Yes, there are also cabbage chips!).  They’re used to process food.

There is no doubt that chips bear a major part of the responsibility for the epidemic of obesity and obesity-related disease we face. But beyond health, the proliferation of faux-healthy chips represents another example of the homogenization of reality that we see everywhere. Instead of authentic Italian or Mexican food, Americans go to themed versions that use a few stylistic elements from the authentic cuisine to dress up American fare. These ethnic-themed restaurants tend to load down healthy traditional recipes with unnecessary frying and extra sauces laden with so much sugar and salt that they taste more like some standard muck than like Italian or Mexican. Check out how many chain restaurants serve the very same menu: hamburgers, fajitas, chicken strips, blackened meat.  And doesn’t it seem as if pizza dough and bagels now share the same consistency and overly sweet taste in most chain restaurants and packaged versions?

And it’s not just food. National chains for auto supplies, clothing, movie theatres, fabrics, toys, sporting goods, furniture, jewelry, hair stylists, urgent care facilities, drug stores, convenience stores, fitness clubs, massage studios and consumer electronic stores make every mall in every suburb and most smaller cities look virtually the same. Many of us prefer taking a phony riverboat at a Disney resort to a real one in New Orleans or viewing the faux Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty in a Las Vegas casino to the real deals in Paris and New York.  One theme—a landmark—associated with New York or Paris is placed in a homogenized environment, like a vegetable dehydrated and encased in salt, chemical additives and binders.

On another level, the concentration of media has led to homogenization of the information we receive, too, as more media run the same stories with the same point of view.

One could make the case that this homogenization is a good thing, because it turns the disparate cultures and nationalities of the United States into a unified whole—the melting pot that produces the cookie-cutter suburbs.  I prefer a vision of the United States as a rainbow of beliefs, practices, customs and cuisines, each retaining its own authenticity while also contributing its own richness to a glorious American mosaic. 

Let’s not be lulled by a lull in global warming

By Marc Jampole

 

A few news stories don’t make a trend, but it seems as if the mass media are misreading some short term trends to present a more optimistic view of our future on earth than we really face.

Much of the news media has covered the news that the average global temperature has failed to rise over the past 15 years, despite the soaring levels of greenhouse gases we have been pumping into the atmosphere.  While no reporter has quoted Desi Arnaz yet, the tone of the articles could clearly be captured by his stock phrase, “Lucy, you have some 'splaining to do.”

The argument that treading water for 15 years disproves or calls into question the theory of human-induced climate change is absurd for several reasons. First of all, the earth is still much hotter than it was 150 years ago, much of the icecaps have already melted and we still have dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in our oceans.  And while the average temperature on earth may have remained the same over the past 15 years, some parts of the earth have grown warmer, including the United States and most of Europe and China. 

Secondly, those who only look at the last 15 years make the mistake of trend localization: They are judging changes that take centuries on the basis of a few years. The earth goes through natural cycles of warming and cooling. Most phenomena act that way—the stock market doesn’t go up every day even during a raging bull market and children don’t grow the same amount every month or even every year, but grow by spurts. The important question is whether the average temperature on earth would be lower during the current cycle without the impact of all that additional carbon we are generating. I’m betting the answer is yes.

There is also the issue of the complexity of life on earth—our ecosystem comprises a number of cycles and smaller interlocking ecosystems. It’s possible that the earth has made a partial adjustment, but if we keep burning fossil fuels at the current rate, sooner or later, the earth will become less flexible. The increase in drought areas, the thriving of jellyfish in the oceans, the extinction or threatened extinction of so many species—so much is happening that tells us we have to change our ways or risk destroying our planet. By all means, scientists should continue to study the models that predict global warming. But we shouldn’t use a misinterpretation of short-term facts as an excuse for keeping our heads in the sand about climate change.

One environmental challenge—and I see it as the main one—is the sheer number of human beings walking the planet, about seven billion right now. It’s very convenient to ignore population control. The religious issues aside, most economists and politicians love an increasing population because it’s an easy way to grow the economy and they are addicted to growth. Any campaign to stabilize or reduce the population requires a plan to address how an economy may thrive without growth—in a solid state or even shrinking. My idea of thriving clearly doesn’t mean “growing bigger” but rather producing a high quality of life and economic opportunities for all its members.

Like the end of easy oil, reaching a population level that is unsustainable is the unspoken fear. It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Many people, then, must have breathed a sigh of relief to learn the news that the standard forecast for population growth may be too high.

But like the report of a stable temperature over 15 years, “not as bad as” still doesn’t mean “good.” Instead of predicting that the world’s population will reach 10.9 billion by 2100, the latest statistical model says our population will peak at 8.7 billion by around 2055 and then decline to 8 billion by the turn of the next century. The models are based on the theory that as nations develop their citizens have fewer children. It’s a corollary of the idea that animals follow one of two reproductive strategies—have a lot of offspring and pay them no attention, or have a few and put a lot of energy into helping them to survive. In human terms, when people get wealthier, they tend to have fewer children.  The experience of Europe, the United States (except our immigrants) and Japan seems to support this idea.

The only problem is that even our current population of seven billion is too high. Half that amount is too high. The earth cannot carry so many humans on a long-term basis. We use too many of the earth’s non-renewable resources and leave too many messes in our wake. And imagine if most of the world raised its standard of living to the levels of Japan or Western Europe—they might produce fewer offspring but each person would be using a lot more resources!

I doubt that we will be able to formulate an adequate response to global warming and resource shortages without lowering the population on earth substantially.

Historically there have been three ways that human populations have decreased: war, famine or epidemics.  Let’s hope that instead of riding these three horses of the Apocalypse, most countries will instead decide to pursue aggressive policies to reduce our population in a more peaceful way: birth control. More people must make the decision to have one child in their lifetime, be it by following a new social norm or a draconian law.

So don’t believe that there’s good news about global warming and populations trends. These recent optimistic news reports are the equivalent of learning that you won’t die in six weeks, but in eight weeks—if the trends stay lucky.