Ted Auch

That is what California should do in putting forth their latest effort to curb their CO2 footprint (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/science/earth/13emissions.html?ref=todayspaper).

I commend California for taking an important and bold step to curb their CO2 footprint. However, it is worth noting their proposal is a duplicate of Washington Senator Maria Cantwell’s CLEAR Act (The Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s renewal). CLEAR would bill would cut national GHG emissions 20% and 83% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 2050, respectively. Seventy-five percent of refunds would be returned to the taxpayer and 25% to green energy technologies and infrastructure. The refunds would amount to $1,100 annually for a family of four according to Senator Cantwell’s calculations. We could make more money off emissions if we assumed a higher range, which Senator Cantwell’s office set at $7-21 per ton of C02 in 2012, with annual floor and ceiling increases of 5.5 an 6.5%, respectively. This seems like an idea that even those that don’t believe in climate change could support given the non-trivial contribution to their bottomline and those of us on the left will accept is an acceptable, albeit not ideal, first iteration.

So I have not entered the cellphoneisphere at this point and I don’t have a Facebook or Myspace or Twitter account. This blog is as close as I have gotten to such exhibitionism. However, it is our right to engage in all these activities even if the 30-35minutes on average US citizens spend on their Facebook or is it MySpace? Whatever same difference. Anyway even if this 30-35 minutes a day or 7.6 days annually is a complete waste of time, energy, and cloud space (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/weekinreview/12helft.html?scp=3&sq=cloud%20computer&st=cse) we have the right to waste this time as we see fit right? Right.

Well the other component of this continuous digital footprint is the idea that some in law enforcement would like to use this data to find, construct, and prosecute criminal behavior across the board. Okay well that is a complete and utter violation of our privacy as citizens of this country BUT lets say it isn’t and lets for the sake of argument Hallelujah to this ancillary benefit of the web, smartphone technology, and GPS. Well wouldn’t the logical extension be that if a citizen witnesses a crime and happens to have a cellphone/smartphone with a camera or video recorder that individual would be obligated to capture said crime with said device? NOPE!! Not according to the Boston police and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in a 4-2 ruling (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/).

The court stated in it’s majority opinion “”Secret tape recording by private individuals has been unequivocally banned, and, unless and until the Legislature changes the statute, what was done here cannot be done lawfully”

However, in a dissenting and what appears to be more rational take on the case Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote “Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals when they seek to hold government officials responsible by recording, secretly recording on occasion, an interaction between a citizen and a police officer.’”

I have always been very concerned about the personal and more recently digital privacy we have bequeathed to large and remote multinational corporations as well as law enforcement. Now I am even more worried because it appears that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander! Do as I say not as I do! And this from a supposedly progressive and erudite state like Massachusetts…I can’t wait to see what happens when folks like Rick Perry or Bobby Jindal here about this. Maybe we aren’t all Socialist America haters up here after all.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and……..1+1 = 3!

This is architecture on viagra.

I can’t help but wonder if something more long-lasting or as the U.K.’s Adair Turner (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKeO6gsaeQ_M#) would most likely say “socially useful” could have been done with the materials used to build these phallic symbols of excess and upper 1-2% decoupling from the rest of society? I am sure the folks in Malaysia could think of a couple of things and those that have been displaced from the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans would most assuredly have some ideas for what could be done with the $3.2 billion being spent on NYC’s rising symbol of patriotism 1 Word Trade Center.

Given the recent announcement by President Obama that he will be upping the ante by 30,000 troops in Afghanistan I was left to ponder for what seemed to me a logical question: Mr. President what in your portfolio of beliefs and objectives is worth losing an election for? Do you not have any ideologies that you feel so passionate about that you are willing to sacrifice all or most of your political capital to steward such beliefs across the finish line? I voted for you sir and I am not sure at this point whether you have any convictions you feel so strongly about that you would put your political neck on the line for. That is quite disheartening to me because when I saw you speak on the steps of the Ira Allen Chapel here in Burlington, Vermont in March of 2006 I was convinced that you were a man with a spine, conscience, and an intellect unsurpassed in modern day politics. I still believe that the latter is true but as for your spine and to a lesser degree your conscience I am left wondering what you stand for and what you will fight for to the very end, whether it means political suicide or not.

Show us some fight sir! Show us that the issues you campaigned on are part of your very fiber and not simply the populist rhetoric you knew would get the vote of people like myself. It is beginning to feel like you are ashamed that the left supported you and your “progressive” agenda. That is not the man I saw speak in 2006. That is not the man I promptly told my friend Dennis Ailor would win the presidency in 2008. And that is most assuredly not the man I thought was capable of thinking through some of the most complex issues ever to face an incoming president. Sure you were handed a mess but are you going to continue to compare your administration to the one that preceded you? I would caution against such comparisons given that the bar could not have been set any lower.

Sir you know that the right would gladly fall on their sword for issues like abortion, the sanctity of marriage, gun rights, and the military industrial complex. That is a given and that for better or worse is one thing I respect about the neoclassical and neoconservative movement. When they give speeches in Portland or Corpus Christi you know what you’re gonna get and they make absolutely no apologies for their beliefs. It is time you get a little neocon in you Mr. Obama and by that I mean pick an issue any issue, whether it be health care, climate change, FISA, bank reform, or torture and go to the wall for it. Own the issue sir. Take back any one of these issues from those in your party that are self-hating Democrats. Just like Iraq and Katrina will define George W Bush (and no one else!!) one of these issues will define you and it would be a shame if you let the spineless wing of your party co-opt your presidency.

I and many like me – and I would hasten to guess those on the right – are anxiously or should I say nervously waiting and wondering if you will ever stand up and be accounted for with respect to some of the aforementioned issues. I would suggest firing Geithner, Summers, et al as a start. The left rightly sees them as an extension of the Greenspan-Rubin virus that has infected the nation’s financial services regulations for far too long now and the right won’t support them because….well who cares they just won’t because you do and that is reason enough for them.

Apologizing for our hegemonic history and bowing to Emperor Akihito shows that you are sensitive to our fragile status as a global power and more importantly the proper way in which you interact with others when on their turf. However, tacitly apologizing for being liberal or in any way concerned with the appalling trend in wealth, health, and education distribution in this country makes those of us on the left wonder if we were sold a bill of goods and those on the right question your leadership capabilities, both from a foreign and domestic perspective.

You may be wondering at this point why we don’t have your back on some of these crucial issues? Well all is not lost and believe me if we see fight emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue we will most assuredly get in the ring with you but until then you’ll have to rely on the likes of the Blue Dog Democrats. BTW how’s that working out so far?

There is alot of talk right now about Tea Party Revolution and Socialism via the Obama administration. However, the thing that these people that are not seeing is that most of what is happening is being inflicted on them via both parties in concert with the banks, health care industry, and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). I used to be very skeptical of the socialist ideologues and remain skeptical of those that invest all their emotional and intellectual capital in one school of thought or religion for that matter. Such philosophies remove the individual’s personal responsibility. They also allow themselves to be easily manipulated through advertising. The fact is that when you look at two long-term sets of data - income disparity and the MIC - you see the true problem AND to those that blame Obama as a fascist or whatever I say a trend does not 9 months or 1 adminstration make. This guy is clearly overwhelmed but based on the data I will present he is facing an inertia whose depth and scope is quite daunting.

As you can see from the figure to the right when plotting the returns on 10 of the largest military industrial contractors it is clear that they are rapidly overtaking this country’s production sector.

What we are seeing is that those firms with a long-term presence on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) have done quite well for themselves from the 94,171% increase in share price of General Dynamics since it’s initial offering in January of 1977. The MIC giants Boeing and United Technologies have since their share prices increase by 21,788 and 18,633%, respectively. Interestingly two new players in the MIC industry KBR a spin-off of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and DynCorp a leading competitor of Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) have declined by 105 and 119% since their arrival on the DJIA in 2006. In summary the MIB has on averaged gained 15,448% relative to the 823% increase on the DJIA.

So, while the economy suffers and jobs are lost at the rate of 250-750,000 per month in the last 2.5 years the MIB is operating at a profit ratio of 15:1 relative to the DJIA. This type of ratio would usually raise red flags, but since these companies are True Patriots their profligacy is viewed as an inevitable result of the War on Terror and the Spread of Democracy. I wonder if these companies are also Too Big To Fail?

The other contention is that Obama is a looking to redistribute wealth at the expense of most Americans. Hand in hand with this argument is the idea that all citizens have access to the American Dream. Well if you look at data from the Census Bureau you will see that redistribution is absolutely happening but it is occurring in the opposite direction. Two correlated trends are quite evident from the data:

1. Every year the Upper 5% of this country increases it’s average income by $2,049, while the income of the lower 2 Quartiles increases by $93-164. This seems unfair yet the common concern amongst those that are benefiting the least is accruing enough wealth to realign themselves with those that benefit the most form the Efficient Capitalist Market. However, those that benefit the most are doing their darndest to insure that they and only they benefit from this increasing disparity.

They are doing this by promoting war in the hopes of keeping this country divided and invoking patriotism as a means to encourage those with nothing to fight for those with everything.

2. The data also demonstrates that the share of this country’s income allocated to the Top 5 Percent has risen from 43% in 1965 to 50% in 2008. If this trend continues this sector of society will account for 60% of this country’s wealth by 2050.

So I just finished an amazing book by Naomi Klein called “The Shock Doctrine”, which basically chronicles the dark side of capitalism via the actions and thinking of folks like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Eugene Fama, and Jeffrey Sachs. Anyway the book is revealing and pokes lots of holes in the Efficient Market hypothesis of Fama and Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”. Ms. Klein mentions in passing the SPADE Defense Index, which according to www.amex.com

“…is a modified market capitalization weighted index, comprised of publicly traded companies that seeks to measure the performance of securities in the defense, homeland security, and space marketplace.”

For those that deny the existence of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) described by Dwight D. Eisenhower as he left the oval office I think I can prove empirically that the SPADE Index demonstrates the naivete of such a view (See Figure).

Between the end of 1997 and September 10th 2001 the SPADE rose by 107%, but between 9-11 and 9-14-2009 it more than doubled (205%). Overall the SPADE has grown by 233% since it’s origination in December of 1997. So whats so important about these data? Well looking at the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), S & P 500, and NASDAQ we see that they grew by 103%, 99%, and 90% respectively between December of 1997 and 9-11. These trends are well alligned with what I described for the SPADE during the same time period. Heres the rub these indices only grew by 111%, 103%, and 142%. It is understandable that the NASDAQ would outpace the DJIA and S & P 500 as it was operating from a lower base. We are seeing that this country is relying more on the financial services and war profiteering industry 2 nefarious and wealth concentrating sectors of our economy. I must wonder where the outrage is? We have been conditioned to believe that all of us can have a big piece of the pie when infact the folks that pull the strings of these industries would in no way allow such an event to occur. It would be called wealth redistribution and we know what the neoconservatives and evangelical right-wingers think about such a prospect. The SPADE provides concrete evidence that we are moving towards a society that embraces Frederick the Great’s belief that “Diplomacy without war, is like music without instruments.” For those that think that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, et al’s fingerprints have been removed from the dialectic I call your attention to the Supreme Court and the SPADE’s trajectory.

“Even as Islamist terrorism grabs the headlines, more familiar varieties cling stubbornly to existence. It would be a brave man willing to bet where the next attack will come from.”

This is a quote from an article titled “The Airline Bombers: Bang to Rights” in the September 12th-18th 2009 edition of The Economist (http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14424960). However, given a recent and very disturbing story emanating from from a town called Big Creek in Clay County, KY this quote could easily be superimposed on the current moral and political divide in this country (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/us/25brfs-CENSUSWORKER_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=kentucky%20census&st=cse; http://blogs.newamericamedia.org/nam-round-table/1777/locals-parse-death-of-kentucky-census-worker). Bill Sparkman a Boy Scout leader and substitute teacher was found dead, naked, and gagged in the Daniel Boone National Forest, with a rope hung around his head and looped over a tree. The coroners believe that Mr. Sparkman was dead prior to being hung as his feet were in contact with the ground. One of the more disturbing aspects of this story is that Mr. Sparkman a part-time census field worker was found with the word “FED” written across his chest with red ink. Folks at New America Media noted that a blogger named “Hill Jill” an appalachian resident was defending her region on the Daily Kos:

“This does not strike me as a “native” crime. A native might shoot you, I won’t argue there-but they would not do the whole elaborate staged crime scene.”

This is something I would whole-heartedly agree with and having worked in Northeastern Kentucky and much of Western West Virginia I know that there are plenty of folks in this region that are pissed that they are immediately conflated with the folks in Deliverance. Yet, there is a problem here and unfortunately The Times has not deemed it worthy of sending someone to the region relying instead on AP reports. Yet, apparently the Roman Polanski story is worthy of round-the-clock editorials and in-depth coverage. Why is this so scary? Well because we need to know how many people are in this country and census workers in no way reflect the Big Brother image promulgated in this country since Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. I must wonder why the coward that killed Mr. Sparkman didn’t revolt against the Bush administration’s constant probing of our phones, emails, and if they had their way our bedrooms? Why did the coward who killed Mr. Sparkman not revolt when the 2000 election was literally stolen from the people of this country by Antonin Scalia et al.? Why did the coward who killed Mr. Sparkman not revolt when his or her taxes were used to bail out a bunch of criminals on Wall Street?

I think the reason he or she didn’t revolt is because this country has transformed from the United States of America into nothing more than a bunch of “tribes with flags”, which ironically was coined by Tahsin Bashir to describe the 22 Arab states of the Middle East and Africa (http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14027698). I think if we were to lift up all the rocks surrounding the crime scene in Big Creek we would be mightily disturbed by what we find. But here in this country the truth more often than not doesn’t set you free, rather it gets you jailed, fired, or relegated to the marginal fringe. It is a shame because what happened in Clay County, KY last week is a symptom of a great sickness that appears to be spreading. It will be easier to address this issue now rather then later. This will require us to engage in thoughtful inter-state dialogue with the politicians and lobbyists locked out, because all they seem to want to stoke rather than quash divisiveness.

The lack of attention this story has received in favor of more titillating and irrelevant events is a shame but in no way surprising. Accountability is something we need to demand of our politicians and current-event purveyors alike.

It seems that we may be hitting the point the Romans and many others inevitably approached and violently surpasses. It is the point at which our cumulative GDP growth has flattened out while population growth continues to grow albeit at a mild rate.

To the right you see a graph of the ratio of Cumulative Annual US GDP to Population Growth from 1930 to 2008.

This ratio did not become positive until 1940 on the eve of WW II and spiked at the war’s conclusion in 1944-45. At this point this ratio began a steady decline to a low of 4.52 in 1963. While it experienced a bump between the 60s and late 90s it has remained relatively flat between 1950 and 2008 deviating very little from it’s ~60 yr average of 5.43.

Another way of looking at this “Economic Ceiling” is from an agricultural perspective. I have plotted the Yield to Nitrogen (N) Applied ratio for Corn here in the US from 1943-2007. On the Primary Y- and X-Axis the relationship for the raw data is shown, while the Secondary Y- and X-Axis depicts the relationship on a log scale. We see two things here: 1) the shape of the relationship is dependent on how the data is presented and 2) the raw data demonstrates quite conclusively that we have reached a similar asymptote to that described above for our economy relative to population growth. This is a disturbing trend given our over reliance on corn here in the US. GMOs and fertilizer technology will only be able to do so much in fighting this apparent biological inertia. The rest of the quagmire will require a new paradigm if it is to be fixed. That should include a gradual transition to a more diverse produce and dry goods food economy in keeping the the proselytizing of Michael Pollan. However, alot of this will involve tough medicine, which should start with decreasing national obesity from it’s current rate of 33% to 15% or what it was in 1980. This may sound quixotic but really it is a necessity and weening ourselves off our addiction to High Fructose Corn Syrup would probably put a 5-7% dent in our national obesity on it’s own.

It is high time we start to seriously discuss the idea that Eugene Fama’s “Efficient Market Hypothesis”, Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”, and Milton Friedman’s “Shock Doctrine” are a thing of the past designed solely to benefit the top 0.1-0.5% of the G20, G8, or OECD. We must turn our attention to what I will call an Asymptotic Economic Hypothesis or the Steady State Economy (http://www.steadystate.org/) acknowledging the ubiquitous influence of Keynes’s “Animal Spirits” and the fact that nothing grows forever.

It would be absolutely acceptable if we didn’t shift towards an economy with strict ceiling and floor constraints BUT if we do our children will be very mad at us!

Michael Lynch makes some compelling points in his recent piece on ‘Peak Oil’ in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?ref=todayspaper), but he calls on one very important fallacy commonly invoked by the Big Oil:  Rate-Of-Discovery Is Not A Concern!

He states that “easy oil” is gone is “vague and irrelevant”. If you replaced the word oil with coal a majority of geologists would agree with the contention that “easy coal” is indeed gone. If it isn’t than why are we resorting to horrific, both from a health and ecological perspective, techniques such as mountain-top-removal and strip mining of thousand of Appalachian and Northern Plains hectares? The answer is that the industry is desperate and the same curse will strike Exxon, Conoco, etc. Recent advocacy for hydraulic fracturing of the Marcellus Shale is a prime indicator of such desperation and presents similar concerns for human health and our fisheries here in the Northeast.

The fuzzy logic Mr. Lynch refers to is actually his estimate that their are 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. According to who? BP and the EIA estimated 1.26 and 1.32 trillion barrels, respectively. This amounts to anywhere from 30 to 43 years of oil depending on whether we do what we did in 2008 curbing consumption by 1.1 billion barrels or we reach the commonly held projection of 43.1 billion barrels by 2030. I think it is time for another Malaise Speech. Obama….Obama….!

The amazingly phony nature of the tribute to Ted Kennedy in the media and New England writ large. If you or I had been in his position we would be in jail for Chappaquiddick. I wonder how Mary Jo Kopechne’s family feels about the ‘Lion of the Senate? I can only guess their opinion of the man is diametrically opposed to that presented by the talking heads on network television and unfortunately my beloved NPR.

Also his family’s opposition to Cape Wind is indicative of the phony liberalism of the New England I love so much? We proselytize on our Green Soap Box, but as soon as we are asked to do more than talk and actually do we hide behind our NIMBY bullshit! Kennedy and his kind are the neoliberals Naomi Klein so effectively and efficiently exposed.