Make Trump 2.0 Irrelevant Again!

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“The United States now has the highest percentage of low-wage workers – that is workers who make less than two-thirds of the median wage- of any developed nation. Fully 25 percent of all American workers make no more than $17, 576 a year.” Harold Myerson The American Prospect,

We know how to counter the Trump administrations attempts to wreck the U.S. economy and our constitution from his past history. Blue states in particular have the power to keep their citizens healthy and safe. They did it in his first term, as I said in a 2017 Huffington Post article, when it was becoming obvious Trump wanted to act like an anti-democratic oligarch.

Climate change has been the target of Trump’s “drill baby drill” fossil fuel supporters since his first term, yet climate change poses the greatest danger to Americans’ health and safety, particularly to our west coast inhabitants (wildfires and floods) and east coasters (hurricanes and tornadoes), not to speak of the record low winter temperatures tormenting Midwesterners.

Huffington Post

“The U.S. just released its latest congressionally mandated Climate Science Special Report that says 2017 wreaked the most catastrophic destruction in 90 years with an estimated $175 billion in property damage. Only the San Francisco Earthquake (1906), Chicago Fire (1871), and Great Flood (1927) caused more destruction,” I said then.

Trump’s other first term attempts at relevance included, “his fiasco of an Asian trip, where he fawned over foreign leaders who gave him massive pageants, but no trade concessions, while abandoning the Trans- Pacific Partnership.

“The remaining 11 countries, including Japan, Australia, Mexico and Malaysia, said they had revived the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, a multilateral agreement championed under the Obama administration.

And also, “American leaders from state capitals, city halls and businesses across the country have shown up in force” in Bonn, Germany, to discuss carrying out the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” said California Governor Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg in today’s New York Times.”

This is when President Trump announced at the beginning of his Presidency that he was abandoning the Paris Accord in favor of supporting a return to coal and oil energy. But that wasn’t what the rest of America wanted, as some 50 percent of U.S. states and cities were represented in Bonn.

And now it is his indiscriminate use of import tariffs that threaten to wreck international trade.

President Trump’s attempts to return to the predominately white middle class of the 1950s have become irrelevant to most of the problems facing Americans and the world today. Trump is ignoring the damage revenge policies will do to the U.S. economy, and his own red state supporters by also attempting to destroy American’s social safety net, including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that most harm red state citizens, protections against climate change, and wanting to downgrade the military alliances that have kept us safe.

Trump’s first term policies have been irrelevant in so many ways. He has done nothing for his red state supporters. As Thom Hartman highlighted in my last blog, red states continue to suffer most from:

— Spousal abuse
— Obesity
— Smoking
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape
— Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty
— Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Unemployment
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths

Climate change is a good start, since the worldwide droughts have been a major cause of the worldwide migrations escaping from poverty that have upset the existing geopolitical order.

Let’s continue to make Trump and Republicans’ actions irrelevant that are attempting to destroy our federal government by supporting cities, states and even international organizations (UN, WHO?) that pursue the policies that have kept America great and the world at peace—policies that build rather than destroy, that breed trust and community, rather than hatred and division.

This strategy doesn’t minimize the suffering Trump has already inflicted on so many Americans but could mitigate some of the cruelty to come.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

We Need A Green Infrastructure Plan

 Popular Economics Weekly

Washington Post

The Biden administration’s $3 trillion infrastructure plan is next on their agenda to boost economic growth. And it will need a tax raise to pay for it.

“I think a package that consists of investments in people, investments in infrastructure, will help to create good jobs in the American economy,” testified Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in congressional hearings this week, “and changes in the tax structure will help to pay for those programs.”

Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell said there was no problem with any inflationary bulges that might occur with so much spending because it was spending that would boost productivity as well as employment, generating even more growth.

“Our best view is that the effect on inflations will be neither particularly large nor persistent,” said Powell during the same hearings.

The circa $3 trillion infrastructure bill President Biden is proposing should really be treated as if we are fighting another world war, as we treated spending during world War Two. This war to overcome the coronavirus pandemic has killed more people than all prior world wars.

So why even worry about inflation or budget deficits? In fact, rising inflation during WWII created negative real interest rates at the time because the Fed kept rates low to finance the war, just as it is doing now, which really means it is interest-free money (That is, real interest rates less than zero as it was during WWII).

And the infrastructure bill must be a green, environmentally friendly bill because much of it has to mitigate the damage to infrastructure from global warming. Need we be reminded of the recent breakdowns in power grids that can leave millions without water and electricity for days, as demonstrated by the Texas power crisis this year?

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in a 2008 report said, “New research shows that if present trends continue, the total cost of global warming will be as high as 3.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Four global warming impacts alone—hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs—will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.”

This means an 80 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gases alone to meet Paris Accord goals, phasing out most uses of fossil fuels and replacing them with electric energy sources such as wind and solar power.

“Mr. Biden’s infrastructure plan will deal with the meat-and-potato issues that Republicans and Democrats agree are an urgent need,” say NYTimes reporters Jim Tankersley and Anni Karney. “It seeks to rebuild roads, bridges, transit, rail and ports, while also improving power grids and increasing the number of electric vehicle charging stations.”

The plan also requires the development of universal broadband, such as 5G networks that China is already building on a grand scale, a major issue in rural communities. Documents suggest it will include nearly $1 trillion in spending on the construction of roads, bridges, rail lines, ports, electric vehicle charging stations, and improvements to the electric grid and other parts of the power sector, according to Tankersley

There is much more to Biden’s infrastructure plan that will be detailed as we get more particulars. Any delays in passing it will only increase the costs from damage caused by the increasing frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, power failures; so much so that even the U.S. Pentagon says climate change has become a national security threat.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has consistently, repeatedly cited climate change as a serious threat to America’s national security in official public documents.

“Climate change is a threat in their eyes because it’s going to degrade their ability to deal with conventional military problems, said Michael Klare in an Vox interview about his new book about the Pentagon’s role in combatting global warming, titled All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. “It’s going to create chaos, violence, mass migrations, pandemics, and state collapse around the world, particularly in vulnerable areas like Africa and the Middle East.”

“It is difficult to put a price tag on many of the costs of climate change: loss of human lives and health, species extinction, loss of unique ecosystems, increased social conflict, and other impacts extend far beyond any monetary measure, says the NRDC report. “But by measuring the economic damage of global warming in the United States, we can begin to understand the magnitude of the challenges we will face if we continue to do nothing to push back against climate change.”

If we can protect ourselves from COVID-19, then we surely can protect ourselves from a warming planet.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Do We Want to Save the Planet?

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

SF Chronicle

President Trump just announced the U.S. will withdraw in one year from the Paris Accord of almost 200 countries that have agreed to significantly limit Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions.

This happened within a day of a report from the Alliance of World Scientists endorsed by more than 11,000 scientists that says the world is facing a climate emergency.

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”

Is it a coincidence Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris Accord on the same day satellite data shows that last month was the warmest October on record ?

I think not. Trump’s announcement took the headlines, thereby preempting the far more important climate news to back pages. The withdrawal is to take effect one day after the 2020 Presidential election.

His administration is full of lobbyists and former executives of the fossil fuel industry in what will ultimately prove to be a vain attempt to further enrich themselves in the face of looming environmental disasters.

The total of 11,253 scientists from 153 countries affirm that” if we do not act or respond to the impacts of climate change by reducing our carbon emissions, reducing our livestock production, reducing our land clearing and fossil fuel consumption, the impacts will likely be more severe than we've experienced to date," said lead author Dr Thomas Newsome, from the University of Sydney.

In fact, "That could mean there are areas on Earth that are not inhabitable by people," said the report.

How so? Because it is already happening. We know great swaths of North Africa and the Middle East have experienced mass population exoduses from an increasing frequency of droughts that are causing outright civil wars (Syria), and anti-immigrant xenophobia in many countries.

BBC News summarized the report’s recommendations:

• · Energy: Politicians should impose carbon fees high enough to discourage the use of fossil fuels, they should end subsidies to fossil fuel companies and implement massive conservation practices while also replacing oil and gas with renewables.
• · Short-lived pollutants: These include methane, hydrofluorocarbons and soot - the researchers say that limiting these has the potential to cut the short-term warming trend by 50% over the next few decades.
• · Nature: Stop land clearing, restore forests, grasslands and mangroves which would all help to sequester CO2.
• · Food: A big dietary shift is needed say researchers so that people eat mostly plants and consumer fewer animal products. Reducing food waste is also seen as critical.
• · Economy: Convert the economy's reliance on carbon fuels - and change away from growing the world's gross domestic product and pursuing affluence.
• · Population: The world needs to stabilise the global population which is growing by around 200,000 a day.

But there’s more. It can cause irreparable economic damage that results in geopolitical unrest; even wars, as countries compete for limited resources. The U.S. Pentagon has been warning of this outcome for years, because it has labeled climate change a direct threat to our national security.

A summary of its latest January, 2018 report to congress showed that it was also harming military preparedness in future conflicts, so much so, that a US News & World Report in a 2017 report said,

 “During his confirmation process for the post as secretary of defense this spring, Gen. James Mattis wrote in the question/response period: "Climate change can be a driver of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon."

From shifting temperatures to desertification, environmental changes have the potential to significantly affect the movement of populations, the availability of resources and the stability of governments. The results can be famine, drought, disease and a rise in global conflict.

Then the question must be asked: Why on earth is the Trump administration denying climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Accord when we now know it is causing  the suffering of millions, and is a threat to our national security?

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Modern Infrastructure A Must for Climate Change

Answering the Kennedys Call

World Economic Forum

There is something we can do as a country to mitigate the catastrophic changes that global warming is already wreaking on whole populations. Accelerate development of a modern for-the-22^nd Century infrastructure. It will create badly needed jobs, energy efficiencies that mitigate greenhouse gases, and better manage the international conflicts already arising from massive droughts and rising oceans.

That infrastructure must include new digital pathways, such as 5G networks, modern energy grids, modern transportation systems, and better planning for uncertain outcomes to changing climates. This is turn will assist in resolving conflicts that are sure to pop up when populations are pressured to move, as they have in just the last decade.

There is actually no alternative. We are already seeing the rise of populist, anti-democratic governments in Europe, Africa, and the United States. Scared native populations are building walls and fences to protect themselves from the influx of darker-skinned strangers ousted by unlivable climates from the poorest regions.

The World Economic Forum has said, “A global focus on sustainable infrastructure can boost growth, reduce poverty, improve air quality and create jobs, while building low-carbon, climate-resilient economies. This transition could entail economic gains worth $26 trillion over the next 12 years compared to business-as-usual, according to a report by the New Climate Economy.”

The New Climate Economy was commissioned in 2013 by the governments of seven countries: Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Norway, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom. “The Commission has operated as an independent body and has been given full freedom to reach its own conclusions. Lead by its global commission, it has disseminated its messages by engaging with heads of governments, finance ministers, business leaders and other key economic decision-makers in over 30 countries around the world,” said its website.

And what has been proposed by other countries is now reaching our shores. The Green New Deal resolution by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is already being denounced by so-called ‘moderate’ politicians and pundits as too draconian. Columnist David Brooks has characterized it as a massive government takeover of the private sector; socialism in its most extreme form that has been a failure in competition with modern capitalist-based economies.

Yet, why must it be an either/or proposition? The various reports on climate change mitigation maintain it will take centralized planning to create a necessary private/public partnership—yes, central planning in some form—to coordinate the incredible complexities that must be navigated in modeling multi-factor planning that takes into account many different outcomes. It’s playing three-dimensional chess with the survival of our planet at stake.

Then what kind of Central Planning? It has to resemble Roosevelt’s New Deal that brought us out of the Great Depression and enabled the U.S. to turn the tide in WWII. Global warming as a result of climate change is just such an emergency. And the longer governments wait to mitigate its affects, the more expensive it becomes—both in financial and geopolitical terms. The U.S. Pentagon has said it now poses a danger to our national security.

The critics of better coordination between the private and public sectors obviously miss the point. It is what is lacking from any suggested solutions to the climate crisis, because it entails massive improvement in the social structures as well, as is envisioned in the Green New Deal—such as some form of more universal health care, better labor laws, and a much improved social safety net that would mitigate much of the red-vs-blue states’ conflicts that have stymied bringing infrastructure improvements into this century, much less planning for the next.

“Even with these caveats in mind, a global climate action scenario prepared for this (New Climate) Report using the E3ME model that combines a range of opportunities including the wide scale use of appropriate carbon prices and phasing-out fossil fuel subsidies, seizing energy and industrial energy and resource efficiency gains, halting deforestation and restoring degraded lands, accelerating the penetration of electric vehicles, and integrating intermittent renewables into the power system—was found to deliver significant benefits. Transitioning to this low-carbon, sustainable growth path could deliver a direct economic gain of US$26 trillion through to 2030 compared to business-as-usual, according to analysis for this Report,” says the Guardian.

There is no reason that such complexities might overwhelm the planning process, in other words. Even AI will contribute in some form. If IBM’s Big Blue and newer iterations can win chess matches and defeat a top S. Korean champion in the ancient game of go, then we know Artificial Intelligence will be needed to help overcome those complexities.

Shouldn’t saving our planet take precedence over going to Mars, a barren planet and prime example of what could happen on earth? North America and all countries will suffer greatly from the looming climate crises, if we aren’t able to perfect our union in some way.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What Green New Deal?

Popular Economics Weekly

The Green New Deal resolution introduced in the House by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as H. RES.____ is really the vision of what a fully-realized United States of America could look like, if its social and economic ills were remedied. But what Markey and Ocasio-Cortez propose will take at least a generation to accomplish, which a majority of Americans say they support, in the best of circumstances.

That’s because much of the current voting public is older folk suspicious of change; and doubtful the dire predictions on climate change are true. So it must be the Octavio-Cortez’s in generations coming of age that want a better future for themselves than is currently the case.

Markey and Ocasio-Cortez want to change more than environmental laws and regulations in order to eliminate greenhouse gases. They want to make democracy work for everyone in H. RES.____:

“…to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘‘frontline and vulnerable communities’’).

Much of the business community will also be alarmed by the reversals in pro-corporate policies implemented since the Reagan era that tilted the economic playing field towards Big Business by allowing monopolistic behavior in many business sectors and weakening labor laws.

The Green New Deal wants to strengthen labor laws by “(G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition.”

Let’s first understand where the phrase “Green New Deal” comes from. NYTimes’ Thomas Friedman declared in a 2017 Op-ed that a Rooseveltian, big government New Deal was needed to revive the American economy from its doldrums since the Great Recession, and save Earth from the dire effects of climate change that even the U.S. Pentagon predicts could be catastrophic for world peace.

Friedman summarized its goals as: 1. Zero-net energy buildings: buildings that can produce as much energy as they consume. 2. Zero-waste manufacturing: stimulating manufacturers to design and build products that use fewer raw materials and that are easily disassembled and recycled. 3. A zero-carbon grid: If we can combine renewable power generation at a utility scale with some consumers putting up their own solar panels and windmills that are integrated with the grid, and with large-scale storage batteries, we really could, one day, electrify everything carbon-free. 4. Zero-emissions transportation: a result of combining electric vehicles and electric public transportation with a zero-carbon grid.
The Green New Deal uses Friedman’s suggestions as a blueprint. Their resolution says:

“The October 2018 report entitled ‘‘Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 of Celsius’’ by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the November 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment report found that among other things—a changing climate is causing sea levels to rise and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life, healthy communities, and critical infrastructure”

Furthermore, “…global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause— (A) mass migration from the regions most affected by climate change; (B) more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100; (C) wildfires that, by 2050, will annually burn at least twice as much forest area in the western United States than was typically burned by wildfires in the years preceding 2019.”

The U.S. Pentagon first raised similar alarms on global warming in a 2015 report to the Senate Appropriations Committee, because of the possibility of global conflicts caused by the struggle for depleted resources.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', wrote the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of n-planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

“The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies.
The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents,” according to the Observer and Guardian newspapers that first broke the story.

We should be debating how to achieve those goals, not whether it is desirable. The first step must be to eliminate our reliance on non-renewable, carbon-based fossil fuels that is endangering national and international security, as our planet warms while becoming ever more overcrowded.

The truth is it cannot be achieved without a more perfect union, rather than the conquer and divide mentality of certain segments of our current political and economic elites.

The Green New Deal resolves to revive our democracy so that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from it.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Global Warming too Hot to Ignore

Answering the Kennedys Call to Action

www.economist.com

The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country. More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities, according to the just released U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment..

Future climate change is expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality, said the study.

“Impacts within and across regions will not be distributed equally. People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events and are expected to experience greater impacts.”

It is people that are most affected by climate change—global warming in particular that can result in massive population shifts away from rising waters, drought-affected areas with lack of water and the increased danger of wildfires—and so its effect on communities leads off the study results, especially in the western states with their prolonged droughts.

NationalClimateAssessment

“Climate change has led to an increase in the area burned by wildfire in the western United States,” said an Atlantic Monthly summary of the report. “Analyses estimate that the area burned by wildfire from 1984 to 2015 was twice what would have burned had climate change not occurred. Furthermore, the area burned from 1916 to 2003 was more closely related to climate factors than to fire suppression, local fire management, or other non-climate factors.”

California in particular has been affected by heat waves this year and the prolonged six-year drought leading to the worst wildfires in California history. The just extinguished Paradise Camp Fire destroyed 18,793 structures and 85 lives lost to date, with several hundred residents still missing.

The last prolonged U.S. dry spell was the 1930’s Dustbowl during the Great Depression. It only compounded the economic damage with the loss of farmland and mass migration of dustbowl families immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

And economic damage will be horrendous if nothing is done to mitigate the damage from a hotter planet and coastal areas subject to greater flooding.

The report says shoreline counties hold 49.4 million housing units, while homes and businesses worth at least $1.4 trillion sit within about 1/8th mile of the coast. Flooding from rising sea levels and storms is likely to destroy, or make unsuitable for use, billions of dollars of property by the middle of this century, with the Atlantic and Gulf coasts facing greater-than-average risk compared to other regions of the country …

Damage could be as much as $3.6 trillion in properties and value loss of no mitigation measures are taken, but $820 billion “where cost-effective adaptation measures are implemented.”

Climate change is becoming a topic too hot to ignore; even by the science-deniers who prefer to protect their pocketbooks rather than America’s communities and country.

Harlan Green © 2018

Government Is the Solution, Not the Problem

ANSWERING THE KENNEDYS CALL

Graph: NOAA.gov

“With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” said on Monday in its prelease.

And that can’t happen without the support of governments. Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report in response to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.

This means the U.S. should rejoin the Paris Agreement on global warming, or voters select a more climate-friendly administration as soon as possible. The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to deny and defeat any support for mitigating the effects of global warming, even recently transferring funds from FEMA that aid hurricane and tornado victims occurring with more frequency to fund its border wall and zero immigration policy.


Best-selling author Michael Lewis in his latest book, The Fifth Risk, details how the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to neuter any government functions that hinder the profitability of his mega-donor supporters at a time when government is most needed to protect Americans from any number hazards—not only the environmental hazards from global warming, but growing costs of healthcare, and record income inequality.

Lewis says the risk a society runs in thinking short term, rather than long-term solutions, “…is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge edge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it.”

“Government is the problem” was President Reagan’s call to downsize government, which he characterized as full of waste and inefficiency, then tried to convince Americans private enterprise was a paragon of efficiency and prosperity for all.

Yet history has shown that none of this prosperity and progress would have happened without government research and support. We wouldn’t have built our highway system, gone to the moon, invented the internet, or even constructed the energy grid without government mandates.

Such progress has always required strong national leadership, with an ethos that it should benefit all Americans, not just the wealthiest. “Government is the problem” has always meant cutting taxes that take away programs lifting the many, and benefit the few most favored by circumstances or birth.

Now we have the dangers arising from global warming that scientific research tells us is man-made, and only leadership from governments can mitigate.

A recent New York Times article highlighted the necessity of government support. “None of the major technological transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries were the product of the private sector acting alone and responding only to the market. Railroads, radio, telegraph, telephone, electricity and the internet were all the result of public-private partnerships,” said its authors, science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. “None was delivered by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace (a favorite rationale of conservative economists). “All involved significant interventions by the visible hand of government.”

In fact, “The internet was created by scientists funded by the federal government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency,” said the authors. “Al Gore didn’t build it, but he did sponsor the 1991 legislation that made it public, which laid the foundation for the World Wide Web, Silicon Valley, smartphones and our information-driven society.”

Union of Concerned Scientists

Australia, the U.S., and Canada lead the world in per capita emissions of CO2, yet the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Accord within months of his inauguration in a sop to the fossil fuel magnates that funded much of his campaign. It was pay-and-play, politics as usual, in a deeply cynical ploy that endangers not only Americans, but the rest of the world, as Americans with only 5 percent of the world’s population consume 25 percent of its resources.

“Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the agreement for environmental action signed by 195 nations is a remarkable rebuke to heads of state, climate activists, corporate executives and members of the president’s own staff, who all failed to change his mind with an intense, last-minute lobbying blitz,” said the NYTimes then. “The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major blow.”

Need we say more about the necessity to make government the solution to our problems, not the problem?

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Irrelevance of President Trump

Popular Economics Weekly

It’s sad for America that the President of the United States has become irrelevant to most of the problems facing Americans and the world. But it’s heartening as well, because in choosing to return to a 1950’s that never was—the brief emergence of a white middle class—Trump can’t do much damage to future growth by choosing to isolate himself and his constituency from the real world. Do we need a better definition of President Trump’s irrelevance?

Let’s start with his fiasco of an Asian trip, where he fawned over foreign leaders who gave him massive pageants, but no trade concessions, while abandoning the Trans- Pacific Partnership.

The remaining 11 countries, including Japan, Australia, Mexico and Malaysia, said they had revived the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, a multilateral agreement championed under the Obama administration.

The Guardian reported Ministers meeting in Danang, Vietnam agreed on the “core elements” of what was now called the comprehensive and progressive agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a joint statement read.

And “American leaders from state capitals, city halls and businesses across the country have shown up in force” in Bonn, Germany, to discuss carrying out the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” said California Governor Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg in yesterday’s New York Times.

This is when President Trump announced at the beginning of his Presidency that he was abandoning the Paris Accord in favor of supporting a return to coal and oil energy. But that isn’t happening for the rest of America, as some 50 percent of U.S. states and cities are represented in Bonn.

“California just extended its cap-and-trade emission program through 2030 and has adopted incentives that will help put 1.5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2025,’ said Jerry Brown, Governor of the sixth largest economy in the world.

Graph: Marketwatch.com

And the U.S. just released its latest congressionally mandated Climate Science Special Report that says 2017 wreaked the most catastrophic destruction in 90 years with an estimated $175 billion in property damage. Only the San Francisco Earthquake (1906), Chicago Fire (1871), and Great Flood (1927) caused more destruction.

What is Trump afraid of, that he fawns over Chinese and Russian leaders, while extracting no concessions from them? He was seen to spend more time with Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam than any other leader.

Even his support of Republicans’ so-call tax reform bills is irrelevant, as he wants Republicans once again to attempt to repeal the Obamacare mandate, when more than 50 percent of Americans now support Obamacare, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundations Health Tracking Poll.

“When asked whether it was good or bad that the Senate GOP had failed to repeal ObamaCare, answers were more direct. Six out of 10 Americans say that Senate Republicans' failure to repeal the law was a "good thing," said the KFF poll, “compared to just 35 percent who disapproved and wanted the law repealed.”

That is irrelevance of the highest order, and as many pundits have noted, it is also the definition of insanity: attempting to repeal Obamacare more than 50 times, and expecting a different result.

Another feature of the tax reform bill is that it requires taking away approximately $1.5 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid benefits to give the wealthiest an unnecessary tax cut. Therefore, it won’t help the shrinking middle class, or any income class, except the top one percent.

Harold Myerson voiced recently in The American Prospect, “The United States now has the highest percentage of low-wage workers – that is workers who make less than two-thirds of the median wage- of any developed nation. Fully 25 percent of all American workers make no more than $17, 576 a year.”

The irrelevance of this President is therefore a real danger to our health and standard of living in so many ways.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Repubs Anti-Science Agenda Endangers US

Financial FAQs

Last week, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, approved a bill that would slash at least three hundred million dollars from NASA’s earth-science budget, says the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Colbert. “Earth science, of course, includes climate science,” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is also on the committee, noted. (Smith said that the White House’s NASA budget request favored the earth sciences “at the expense of the other science divisions and human and robotic space exploration.”)

This is just the Republican’s latest effort to cut more funding from those government agencies that provide climate data to help us predict all kinds of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes. Have they forgotten Hurricanes Sandy, or Katrina, or the record number of tornadoes that have hit the Midwest and South? House Republicans are now passing bills that are dangerous to everyone’s health, in a word.

It is becoming more obvious why the Republican Party have been so anti-science; in fact anti-all scientific research. It enables them to deny any reality that will decrease the profits of their supporters, such as the Koch Brothers with a net worth of $100 billion, no matter the danger to the environment. They have been denying climate change of any kind in order not to have to put CO2 scrubbers on their power plants that emit so much heat.

Representative Johnson tried to get the cuts eliminated from the bill, but her proposed amendment was rejected. Defunding NASA’s earth-science program takes willed ignorance one giant leap further, says Colbert. It means that not only will climate studies be ignored; but weather data won’t be collected that helps to predict the increasing number of natural disasters.

It takes Republicans’ efforts to dumb down their electorate to a whole new level. Their intentions were first apparent when Wisconsin’s Tea Party Governor Scott Walker recently proposed turning the University of Wisconsin into a trade school, after the Republican-led legislature banned collective bargaining of school teachers, in an effort to dumb down their public educational system.

His latest salvo was directed at the University of Wisconsin. He proposed not only to cut its budget, but proposed downsizing its mission from that of higher education to supply more workers, whoever they might be. Walker’s new budget proposal would slash $300 million from the University of Wisconsin system over the next two years. That’s a 13 percent reduction in state funding.

The vote on the NASA bill came just a week after the same House committee approved major funding cuts to the National Science Foundation’s geosciences program, as well as cuts to Department of Energy programs that support research into new energy sources. As Michael Hiltzik, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted, the committee is “living down to our worst expectations.”

This willful ignorance of anything scientific endangers much more than our health and worsening environment. It endangers all scientific research—solely in order to protect the profits of their wealthiest supporters.

The practical implications of the proposed cuts are certainly disturbing. (It’s going to be hard for D.O.E. to find new energy sources if it isn’t even looking for them.) But perhaps even more distressing is the mindset that led to them. The “I’m not a scientist” line that all Republican candidates to date have espoused is basically a declaration of willed ignorance, said Colbert.

It highlights the dangers that such an agenda presents not only to scientific research, but to the health and well being of all Americans.

Harlan Green © 2015

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why Do We Need Wars for Great Recoveries?

Financial FAQs

Nobelist Paul Krugman has said history tells us it could take another world war, or similar mobilization effort to put everyone back to work and economic growth to return to historical levels from the Great Recession—even an Alien Invasion would do it, he once quipped

In fact, the Great Recession was the equivalent of the Great Depression, which took more than 10 years of massive infrastructure building, retooling of whole industries, and a World War to recover. But aren’t the wars are we are now fighting—against ISIS, Ebola, and global climate change—such equivalents?

What do we mean by that? Even the New Deal wasn’t enough to get us out of the Great Depression. It took the mobilization of everyone in the effort of producing and building things to defeat a worldwide danger. Government as well as the private sector was involved, as all governments are during wartime. Governments created the jobs and paid the bills that produced the millions of tanks, planes, and war equipment needed to defeat our enemies.

Well, it looks like we already have more world wars on our hands. ISIS has declared war on infidels and apostates, the Ebola Virus could infect and maybe kill tens of not hundreds of thousands, and climate change that is scheduled to flood major coastal cities by 2050.

The Pentagon has even said that global climate warming could provoke more wars and cost $trillions in lost property and foodstuffs if not dealt with soon. "Climate change will affect the Department of Defense ability to defend the nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security," it has reported.

And for the Ebola virus? the most authoritative model, at the moment, suggests a potential economic drain of as much as $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 if “the epidemic spreads into neighboring countries” beyond Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to a recent study by the World Bank. This includes the possibility of the quarantine of whole countries, and the consequent reduction in world travel and trade.

The war against ISIS is also predicted to not only be very long, but very expensive. In a critically important article Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes wrote for the Boston Globe this week, the author of The Three Trillion Dollar War (with Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) points out that although the US has already spent approximately one billion dollars thus far on President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, the price tag is going to climb steeply — and quickly — from there. Direct costs of the president’s plan will likely be on the order of $22 billion per year, but that is only the start.

Shouldn’t this call for mobilization of a nationwide campaign to defeat these enemies that threaten not just US, but the rest of the world? The 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap anticipates that rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will collectively have a profound effect on U.S. security:

‘In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a "threat multiplier" because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today – from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts,” said the report.

A 127-page UN study on global warming “leaked” to Bloomberg News includes a 32-page summary and is filled with language highlighting the dangers from rising temperatures. Those include damage to crop production, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and more pervasive heatwaves. The report mentions the word “risk” more than 350 times; “vulnerable” or “vulnerability” are written 61 times; and “irreversible” comes up 48 times.

Possible permanent changes include the melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland. That would boost sea levels by as much as 7 meters (23 feet) and threaten coastal cities from Miami to Bangkok along with island nations such as the Maldives, Kiribati and Tuvalu.

This means putting everyone to work that wants to. It can be mass employment to rebuild the $2.2 Trillion in deferred infrastructure and climbing that the U.S. Society of Civil Engineers has been warning about, or putting the 11 million unemployed back to work building more schools, or cleaning up our environment, or replanting forests, or even rebuilding some of those homes that need to replace those lost during the housing bust.

There is currently a shortage of available homes with rental costs rising sharply. Government could subsidize the refinancing of home loans, as was done during the New Deal by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). By the HOLC’s final year in 1936, it had provided just over a million new mortgages, had lent out approximately $350 billion ($750 billion today), and by 1934 about one in five mortgages in America were owned by the corporation. This is in contrast to just $1.8 billion spent by the Obama administration to date in subsidizing today’s distressed housing market.

Why not find a way to mobilize all our resources to fight those wars? GW Bush understood that government spending was required to fight his Wars on Terror, yet left us with the massive federal deficit because he wouldn’t mobilize and unite all Americans to participate. Instead he cut taxes sharply, rather than use the Clinton budget surplus to pay for it.

President Obama could cite the urgency to combat the spread of Ebola as well as ISIS in order to spend what is necessary to boost U.S. economic strength now. We have known since the Korean War that governments had to spend to create prosperity in peacetime as well as wartime. And what happens when we have another Hurricane Sandy or more Katrinas? Does anyone believe that we can’t afford to build what is necessary to prevent more natural disasters?

It’s only when those lessons of Great Depressions and wars are forgotten that we listen to the wrong people, forget we are a United States, and have the power to defeat these enemies.

Harlan Green © 2014

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen