TimB

This summer, while traveling in Vienna, Dutch photographer Dick van Duijn captured an indelible moment of natural connection between a ground squirrel and a yellow flower. The photographer was in Vienna specifically to document ground squirrels. In an interview with PetaPixel van Duijn explained, “On the first day we observed them and their behavior. On the second day, we photographed them the whole day. In the evening just before sunset, when the light became soft and nice, one of the many ground squirrels walked towards the yellow flower and began to hold it and sniff it.” You can purchase prints of this and other flower-enamored squirrel’s in van Duijn’s online store, and see more of his work and travels on Instagram. (via PetaPixel)

Lisa Ericson (previously) deftly paints animals in scenes that reach outside of their natural environments, creating unique relationships that defy the natural order of the animal kingdom. In her newest series a deer, flamingo, and multiple turtles form miniature ecosystems in glassy blue water. Coral sprouts from the hooves and legs of the two larger creatures, while brilliant flowers and butterflies surround the smaller turtles. These paintings are featured in Ericson’s current exhibition Islands, which runs through August 25, 2019 at Antler Gallery in Portland, Oregon. You can see more of her beautifully rendered plants and animals on Instagram.

Mike Olbinski (previously) not only chases storms, he also brings his camera equipment with him. The Phoenix, Arizona-based photographer—who shoots weddings between storms—compiled two seasons of wild weather footage from around the U.S. The result isVorticity 2, a time-lapse of Olbinski’s top finds from spring 2018 and 2019. For seven and a half minutes massive clouds tear through open skies across plains and mountain ranges, rainbows brighten the calm after the storms, and sheets of rain obliterate horizon lines.

Olbinski incorporated music by Luke Atencio for Vorticity 2’s soundtrack. Enjoy the wild ride of Olbinski’s chases from the safe vantage point of your laptop on YouTube, and peruse fine art prints on his website.  (via Twisted Sifter)

 

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An Aussie mate tells us what happened in his neighborhood by singing this song.

It's fat times for credit card companies.

Visa made $10.3 billion in profits in 2018 on just $20.6 billion in revenue, up from $6.7 billion and $18.3 billion respectively in 2017. Profits were up again to $3.0 billion in the first quarter of 2019, a 14 percent increase from the same period in 2018. Mastercard, meanwhile, took in $5.9 billion in profits in 2018, up almost 50 percent from 2017, and saw a similar 25 percent jump in the first quarter of 2019. Beyond that, individual banks who issue such cards rake in billions more, especially with credit cards. A 2018 Federal Reserve report shows that between 2011 and 2017, large credit card banks have collected returns on assets between 3.37 percent and 5.37 percent — as compared to 1.32 percent for all commercial banks in 2017.

These companies are part of the American payments system — the ways we move money from one place to another. And it's never been easier for consumers to move their money around, to pay for everything — from groceries to movie tickets to hotel rooms — either online or in person with little to no thought about what makes that possible. But these massive profit figures raise some questions: Why on earth are credit cards making so much money? Are the services they provide worth tens of billions? And why aren't debit cards, which function almost identically to credit cards, equally profitable?

In brief, payment card companies are piggybacking on public systems and guarantees to gouge the American public, especially with credit cards. They act as middlemen, skimming fees off transactions and using their size to bully businesses into accepting their terms — who then raise prices on all consumers. The associated profits, both for Visa and company and the issuing banks, are effectively a tax on everything Americans pay for.

And it doesn't have to be this way.

To understand what exactly the credit card companies do, it's first helpful to think about payment systems more generally. These are simply a way for entities (individuals, businesses, or even governments) to exchange money. That sounds easy, but as economist Perry Mehrling explains, the details are tricky. One has to consider the direction of payment (do you "push" payments from buyers, or "pull" them on behalf of sellers, or both?), the solvency of the participants, the net balance between them, and so on.

Imagining a simplified version of this situation leads directly to a foundational payment technology — the clearing house, which settles payments across all its members at the same time. Instead of every party having to negotiate with all other parties individually, they settle with the clearing house, which calculates net obligations across the whole group. So where bank A might have owed $50 to bank B, been owed $40 by bank C, and owed $5 to bank D, instead it just owes $15 to the clearing house, which in turn calculates the net payments or obligations for all the other banks as well. Most payment systems are at bottom some type of clearing house.

The American payments system specifically has six fundamental pillars: cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, and the Automated Clearing House (ACH). They all developed separately, but they also overlap and support each other in fundamental ways. To understand how Visa and Mastercard are raking in so much cash, it's helpful to get a sense of the underlying infrastructure on which they rely.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Cash is perhaps the most intuitive of these, but it's also quite peculiar relative to the other systems. Unlike the others, there is no "owner" of the cash system, and no central coordination mechanism where payments are cleared. Instead, payments are negotiated directly between individuals, based on trust. The U.S. dollar bill is one of the most familiar objects in the world, but the very idea of a national paper currency took many centuries to develop. Indeed, paper money was originally developed by private banks, which typically used them as a promissory note — thus the term "banknote." First in China, governments gradually cottoned on to the idea of using paper notes as a general medium of exchange (especially for payment of taxes), usually backed by precious metal reserves. In times of extreme stress (above all war), the metal backing was often abandoned, effectively paying for state needs through an inflationary tax. The resulting low value of paper usually pushed governments back onto gold afterwards. But as gold- or silver-backed money became ever more unworkable, gradually states converged on fiat currency backed by nothing but trust.

The history of American cash follows this pattern precisely. Initially, metal-backed currency was considered ideal, but the state was routinely forced to print to finance wars, with "Continentals" in the Revolutionary War and "Greenbacks" in the Civil War. After the world gold standard collapsed during the Great Depression, fiat currency became the de facto (and eventually legal) reality.

There is a similar history with checks. In the first half of the 19th century, checks from one bank deposited at another had to be cleared between each individual institution, at considerable expense and labor. But in 1853, New York bankers got together to establish the first check clearing house — a group of banks which agreed to accept each other's checks. Then each bank could simply calculate a net settlement each day with respect to the clearing house, dramatically simplifying the process. Other cities and regions quickly followed suit. Finally, the Federal Reserve (established in 1913), pressured banks to hook all the clearing houses together, and accept all checks at face value. Only then did checks become a national payment system.

After the Second World War, banks developed optical scanning systems, which simplified matters, and then the Fed pushed them to develop image-based processing, which allowed clearing with a simple picture. Today, with smartphones and apps, virtually all checks are cleared without the banks ever touching a piece of paper, and any check can be cleared at any bank.

Which brings us to the bigger financial pipelines, whose technology in turn undergirds the card payments system (as well as all businesses of any kind). First, there is the Automated Clearing House, originally developed by banks trying to get around the check-clearing headache. This was the birth of the direct deposit, allowing workers to get their paycheck placed directly into a bank account. Thus ACH is wired into every bank account in the country. What's more, unlike any other system, it can go in both directions — both pushing payments into accounts or pulling them out, allowing for easy automatic bill payment. And it's cheap, with very low transaction fees. Over the years, ACH evolved to become an important system for businesses as well.

Then there are the real heavy hitters — the wire transfer systems. There are two big ones in the U.S.: Fedwire, which is owned and operated by the Federal Reserve, and the Clearing House Interbank Payment System (CHIPS), which is privately owned. These are mostly used for very large transactions between businesses, mostly banks or other financial institutions. Fedwire conducts only individual transactions, and is available to any bank with an account at a Federal Reserve bank (which is most of them), while CHIPS is mainly used by the big Wall Street players and functions as a clearing house. Either are quite cheap to use. But at bottom they work like any online banking service, only with enormously greater security precautions, because the amounts involved are gigantic — routinely over $3 trillion per day at Fedwire, and about $1.5 trillion at CHIPS (which is also a customer of Fedwire).

All this arcane history points to an important lesson: American payments systems only function as well as they do because of state institutions and extensive state regulation. Cash is straight-up produced by the government. The U.S. dollar in general (as the vast majority of dollar transactions do not happen with cash) is a state creation. The Fed controls the national money supply, in addition to running the biggest wire transfer system and the biggest check clearing house in the country.

Government action has also been key in pushing improvements in payment efficiency. Universal check clearing only came about because of state pressure. Banks technically own the ACH, but it is extensively regulated to ensure stability and consistency, and prevent fraud — what's more, the Fed operates one of two ACH "switches" (which coordinate payments between ACH member banks). Moreover, the banks themselves are backstopped by state power at every level. Federal deposit insurance prevents bank runs, and protects savings when banks go under. And as we saw in 2008, when the financial system blows itself up with irresponsible lending and fraud, the state has been there to save it.

So, how do card networks fit in, and why are credit cards so ludicrously profitable?

The card networks are private companies — mostly Visa and Mastercard, which together account for about 72 percent of the market — that banks and merchants can join (American Express accounts for another 22 percent, but it is operated in-house, with no external bank involvement save a couple exceptions). Banks issue cards to their customers, which allows for payments at any merchant who is also part of the network, either directly out of a customer's bank account with a debit card, or with a short-term loan (usually unsecured) with a credit card. In the latter case, if the monthly balance is not paid in full, the bank charges a punishing interest rate on the remaining balance.

pixinoo/iStock

But the big money in credit cards today isn't in loans and interest, it's fees. First, there is the "interchange fee" — a percentage charge between the merchant's bank and the customer's bank, set by the network operator, for every transaction. Then the card companies themselves collect additional "swipe fees" (usually a percentage of every transaction), plus a smaller data processing fee and additional charges for international transactions. So when a customer buys something with a card, the money for the purchase price comes from their card-issuing bank and goes to the merchant, but then the merchant's bank pays the customer's bank an interchange fee. Finally, the merchant pays a swipe fee to the card company separately.

In other words, the card companies do not directly collect the interchange fees, but effectively collect a cut of it after the fact with their own fees, as the overall fee volume is mostly determined by the interchange rates, which they set. It's a complicated setup, but it allows the card companies to pose as if they are are not financial institutions (thus avoiding a lot of regulation), and to leave headaches like unpaid card balances to the banks.

It's key to realize that simple network effects account for a huge proportion of the value of these systems. The card companies (originally set up by banks, but later spun off into their own companies) did do a lot of work to get them off the ground with advertising, network-building, ensuring interoperability in multiple countries, and so on, but today their sheer size and universality are why credit cards are so ubiquitous. Once they got up to a big enough scale, everyone else had to join up or lose out on tons of business. As the 2018 Federal Reserve Payments Study notes, in 2000 there were 15.6 billion and 8.3 billion credit and non-prepaid debit card transactions respectively, while in 2017 the figures were 40.8 billion and 69.6 billion. That's why Visa and Mastercard are accepted at virtually every major business today.

Moreover, the card companies and card-issuing banks rely on the other major payment systems to move money around in their own right. The merchants from whom they extract money also require a stable payment system to conduct their business, as do their consumers to go about their daily lives. Without the underlying infrastructure of ACH, Fedwire, and so on, plus all the regulations to protect those systems, card networks would not be nearly as stable or reliable as they are. They might well not even exist at all.

So why aren't debit cards as profitable? Simple: They aren't allowed to be. As mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform, the Fed capped interchange fees on debit cards at 0.05 percent of the transaction, plus 22 cents (though not all types of debit cards are included). This slashed average debit interchange costs when it took effect in 2012.

But credit cards were not included in this section of Dodd-Frank at all, and naturally charge much higher amounts. For consumer credit cards, interchange fees typically run between 1.55-1.95 percent (that is, 31-39 times the regulated debit percentage fee) plus 10 cents, but can get as high as 2.95 percent for certain corporate cards. Indeed, all the big players have been steadily jacking up their fees over time — so high that some major businesses (like the supermarket chain Kroger) have begun to withdraw from Visa in protest.

There is no possible moral or economic justification for these fees. Credit card companies and their bank allies are just abusing their market power to soak the rest of society for easy fat profits. Merchants paid $64 billion in interchange fees just to Visa and Mastercard in 2018, an increase of 17 percent from the previous year and 77 percent from 2012. And while merchants pay these fees directly, and credit card holders do get a partial kickback in the form of various rewards programs, ultimately consumers pay in the form of higher prices — including those who don't even use credit cards. Indeed, the prices of all American goods and services are an estimated 1-2.5 percent higher to cover just interchange fees — effectively a moderate national sales tax that goes directly into the pockets of a few big corporations. (Last year Visa and Mastercard paid $6.2 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from 12 million merchants, who accused them of illegal price-fixing.)

Illustration|13ree_design/iStock, nitiwa/iStock

There is no reason whatsoever why credit cards should not be regulated like debit cards — their obscene profit margins are evidence enough of that. Perhaps the Fed might grant them a slightly higher rate on account of larger and more complicated networks. Whatever the case, simply studying their books and mandating fee schedules that would cut card company profits by 95 percent, and bring card-issuing bank returns in line with regular banks, could be done easily, with an enormous net benefit. Some big spenders would lose out on cheap vacation flights, but the entire population (aside from a few investors and executives) would enjoy a substantial bump in their real income.

Or, the networks could simply be nationalized. The Fed already has its hands deep in every aspect of American payments systems, or is running them outright. It would be a trivial matter for it to take on credit card operations, setting the fees at whatever it takes to cover the system's operational costs and no more.

A third option would be for the government to set up its own card system, perhaps as part of a postal banking program. No-frills debit and credit cards, run as cheaply as possible, could provide an alternative for merchants and unbanked Americans alike, while good old-fashioned market competition would force Visa and Mastercard to cut prices. (Indeed, pushed in part by retailers like Walmart and Target, the Fed recently announced it is developing a real-time settlement system. This would primarily eliminate the lag between purchase and payment for debit cards, but could also eventually bypass the card networks altogether.)

Despite the tangle of institutions, most of the American payment system is quite cheap, efficient, and reliable — the result of well over a century of sustained government pressure and institution-building. Conversely, the immense profits of Visa, Mastercard, and the card-issuing banks are sheer parasitism. In an age of worldwide computer networks and near-instantaneous communication, it ought to cost virtually nothing to buy something. With just a little more public effort, that could become a reality.

In the midst of climate breakdown, governments around the world are funding and protecting the fossil fuel industry

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 7^th August 2019

The tragedy of our times is that the gathering collapse of our life support systems coincides with the age of public disservice. Just as we need to rise above self-interest and short termism, governments around the world now represent the meanest and dirtiest of special interests. In the United Kingdom, the US, Brazil, Australia and many other nations, pollutocrats rule.

The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wild fires roar across Siberia and Alaska, biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn. Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15°C temperature anomaly. Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast by the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.

While record temperatures in Europe last month caused discomfort and disruption, in Southwest Asia they are already starting to reach the point at which the human body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the world will come to rely on air-conditioning not only for basic comfort but also for human survival: another feedback spiral, as air-conditioning requires massive energy use. Those who cannot afford it will either move or die. Already, climate breakdown is driving more people from their homes than either poverty or conflict, while contributing to both these other factors.

A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5° of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires.

The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9 trillion over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5 trillion: many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burnt more fossil fuels than ever before.

An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burnt since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.

But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s government proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.

In several nations, led by the Philippines, Global Witness reports, governments have incited the murder of environmental protesters. The process begins with rhetoric, demonising civil protest as extremism and terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. The first stage has now begun in Britain, with the publication by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange, of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. Like all such publications, it was given a series of major platforms by the BBC, which preserved its customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.

Secretly-funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs – have supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an enthusiastic fracking advocate, to run the department responsible for climate policy, and Grant Schapps, who chaired the British infrastructure Group until last month – promoting the expansion of roads and airports – as Secretary of State for Transport. Last week the Guardian revealed documents suggesting that the firm run by Johnson’s funder and adviser Sir Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.

What we see here looks like the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and think tanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.

We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.

www.monbiot.com

Nature, Published online: 13 August 2019; doi:10.1038/d41586-019-02415-9

The World Bank’s funding scheme for disease outbreaks drained potential resources from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, says Olga Jonas.

U.K.-based artist Jason Anderson creates abstract urban landscapes using pixelated patches of pastel-toned oil paint. Each work on linen has a single focal point of bright yellow usually representing the rising or setting sun, though in the painting above the illumination comes from an approach train. Anderson balances the natural and manmade by primarily featuring infrastructure—ships, marinas, trains, buildings—that appears small and distant within each pastel haze.

Anderson’s career began with stained glass restoration projects at cathedrals and he shares in a statement that his training in the jigsaw-like aspects of stained glass design and repair continue to inform his style as a painter. See more of his paintings on Instagram and Twitter. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Psychopaths have a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness. But they are more like you and me than we care to admit

By Heidi Maibom

Read at Aeon

Here are three versions of the same story:

1. In the fall of 1996, Sally Clark, an English solicitor in Manchester, gave birth to an apparently healthy baby boy who died suddenly when he was 11 weeks old. She was still recovering from the traumatic incident when she had another baby boy the following year. Tragically, he also died, eight weeks after being born. The causes of the two children’s deaths were not readily apparent, but the police suspected they were no coincidence. Clark was arrested and charged with two counts of murder. The pediatrician Roy Meadow, inventor of the term “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” testified at the trial that it was extremely unlikely that two children from an affluent family like the Clarks would die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or “cot death.” He estimated the odds were 1 in 73 million, which he colorfully compared to an 80:1 longshot winning the Grand National horse race four years in a row. Clark was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The press reviled her as a child murderer.

2. Suppose an otherwise healthy woman in her forties notices a suspicious lump in her breast and goes in for a mammogram.…
Read More…

By Ralph Nader
August 2, 2019

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) – the United States’ version of a Central Bank – is a strange duck. It is the U.S. government’s most powerful regulatory agency. It, after all, regulates money and interest rates. Yet, its budget comes entirely from the banking industry and relationships with the financial industry. So Congress, which appropriates money for all other federal agencies, has little leverage over the Fed’s operations.

This independence – except from the big banks – is by design, when the Fed was devised by President Woodrow Wilson over one hundred years ago. The Fed, a secretive, private government inside a public government presents problems for a democratic society. The alternative was deemed worse by its boosters, allowing “politics” to determine the Fed’s Board of Governors decisions.

It is as if the Federal Reserve/banking complex does not deal with political power by its own definition. The Fed entrenches the power of the banks without accountability inside Washington. Ask Republicans in Congress whether they generally oppose government regulation of a business and most will say “yes.” Ask whether they want to deregulate the Federal Reserve and they will say “Of course not.” Somebody has to assure monetary stability.

But the Fed’s announced quarter of a percent cut in interest rates, which were already low by historical standards at 2.25 to 2.50 levels, will affect people, beyond abstract monetary theories. Tens of millions of Americans who rely on income from their savings accounts and money market accounts will receive less money. Some will jump into the high flying stock market, presumably to get more income and introduce real risk to their principal.

The $2.9 trillion Social Security trust fund will receive less income from lower yielding Treasury Bonds. That’s not good for seniors. It is also really bad for pension funds, not to mention the returns on certain life insurance policies.

The Fed mumbled something about the trade war and a recent small decline in manufacturing indices as reasons to head off trouble.

But companies are piling up idle capital without knowing what to do with it other than to spend trillions of dollars on unproductive stock buybacks. There is no shortage of capital. Lowering the interest rate will just encourage more unnecessary corporate debt, with its deductible interest payments, instead of corporations using their available equity.

Venerable business columnist Allan Sloan does not think that a quarter-point cut by the Fed “will generate job-creating investments in the United States by companies that are uncertain about the future because of trade wars, threatened trade wars, interrupted supply chains and other actual and potential instabilities”(See Allan Sloan’s article here).

Sloan gave other cogent reasons against a Fed interest rate cut, while conceding that it might help borrowers. That assumes gouging lenders (pay day loans, auto loans, credit card charges) pass the savings along.

Conventional critics of the Fed’s cut this week point to already low interest rates and what they call a hefty economy, modest inflation, and a low unemployment rate.

Some former Fed governors called out the Fed for not clearly and specifically explaining its decision to cut rates. As former Fed Governor and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Sarah Bloom Raskin, said: “The Fed has really had a bit of a communications blunder… If Americans don’t understand exactly what is happening and why, they may think that Chairman Jerome Powell is caving into presidential bullying.”

No kidding. Trump has been pounding the Fed and threatening to take away Chairman Powell’s Chair for months. He is demanding sharp reductions in interest rates. He renewed his denunciation after the Fed’s quarter of a percent cut this week, tweeting that it was nowhere near enough!

Presidents almost never do this publicly to the Fed. But Trump, the failed gambling czar knows better. Intimidation through the mass media again and again works for Trump.

Although the Fed wanted to resist his pressure, hey, why take greater chances with crazy Donald? Instead, they threw him a bone.

Why are so many nations now led by extravagant buffoons? Because the nature of capitalism has changed.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26^th July 2019

Seven years ago the brilliant impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring that few of them were worth mimicking: “They’re quite homogenous and dull these days … It’s as if character is seen as a liability.” Today, his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists.

This trend is not confined to the UK – everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weakmen as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the deathly technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?

Social media, which is an incubator of absurdity, is certainly part of the story. But while there has been plenty of good work investigating the means, there has been surprisingly little thinking about the ends. Why are the ultra-rich, who until recently used their money and newspapers to promote charisma-free politicians, now funding this circus? Why would capital wish to be represented by middle managers one moment and jesters the next?

The reason, I believe, is that the nature of capitalism has changed. The dominant force of the 1990s and early 2000s – corporate power – demanded technocratic government. It wanted people who could simultaneously run a competent, secure state and protect profits from democratic change. In 2012, when Rory Bremner made his complaint, power was already shifting to a different place, but politics had not caught up.

The policies that were supposed to promote enterprise – slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions – instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. The largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets, such as land and buildings, privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is not a Russian phenomenon, it is a global one. Corporate power still exists, but today it is overlain by – and is mutating into – oligarchic power.

What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words of their favoured theorist Stephen Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons, who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.

The oligarch’s interests always lie offshore: in tax havens and secrecy regimes. Paradoxically, these interests are best promoted by nationalists and nativists. The politicians who most loudly proclaim their patriotism and defence of sovereignty are always the first to sell their nations down the river. It is no coincidence that most of the newspapers promoting the nativist agenda, whipping up hatred against immigrants and thundering about sovereignty, are owned by billionaire tax exiles, living offshore.

As economic life has been offshored, so has political life. The political rules that are supposed to prevent foreign money from funding domestic politics have collapsed. The main beneficiaries are the self-proclaimed defenders of sovereignty, who rise to power with the help of social media ads bought by persons unknown, and thinktanks and lobbyists that refuse to reveal their funders. A recent essay by the academics Reijer Hendrikse and Rodrigo Fernandez argues that offshore finance involves “the rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty” and the shifting of power into a secretive, extraterritorial legal space, beyond the control of any state. In this offshore world, they contend, “financialised and hypermobile global capital effectively is the state.”

Today’s billionaires are the real citizens of nowhere. They fantasise, like the plutocrats in Ayn Rand’s terrible novel Atlas Shrugged, about further escape. Look at the “seasteading” venture funded by Paypal’s founder Peter Thiel, that sought to build artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, whose citizens could enact a libertarian fantasy of escape from the state, its laws, regulations and taxes, and from organised labour. Scarcely a month goes by without a billionaire raising the prospect of leaving the Earth altogether, and colonising space pods or other planets. 

Those whose identity is offshore seek only to travel further offshore. To them, the nation state is both facilitator and encumbrance, source of wealth and imposer of tax, pool of cheap labour and seething mass of ungrateful plebs, from whom they must flee, leaving the wretched earthlings to their well-deserved fate.

Defending ourselves from these disasters means taxing oligarchy to oblivion. It’s easy to get hooked up on discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There are endless arguments about the Laffer curve, that purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation.

Breaking this spiral is a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself: only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.

Of course, the offshore world the billionaires have created makes such bold policies extremely difficult: this, after all, is one of its purposes. But at least we know what the aim should be, and can begin to see the scale of the challenge. To fight something, first we need to understand it.

www.monbiot.com

Councilmember Kshama Sawant (District 3, Central Seattle) issued the following statement today in response to the State Court of Appeals ruling on Seattle’s Tax the Rich (income tax) legislation – Ordinance 125339 – sponsored by Councilmembers Sawant and Herbold, which passed unanimously by City Council in 2017:

“Yesterday’s court ruling on our ‘Tax the Rich’ legislation is a huge step forward for Seattle’s working people! The ruling strikes down one of the two principal legal objections to taxing wealthy households, giving the State Supreme Court the first opportunity in almost a century to rule in favor of progressive taxation in Washington State.

“Seattle and Washington State have the nation’s most regressive tax system.  The result is a chronic perversity of the wealthy getting wealthier and an abysmal underfunding of public education, affordable housing, social services, and infrastructure. Unlike the regressive taxes in Seattle, which fall overwhelmingly on the shoulders of working people and the poor, our Tax the Rich ordinance would only tax incomes over $250,000. Because so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few millionaires and billionaires, a tiny 2.25% tax on Seattle’s richest residents would raise an estimated $140 million per year, enough to build almost a 1,000 quality, affordable homes each year.

“Like Seattle’s victory on the $15 minimum wage and renters rights ordinances, this ruling affirms that when our local movements act with courage, we can make change happen, contrary to those who tell us that we must wait for the politicians in Olympia to act, which they have failed to in many decades. We must now build the fight to win rent control in Seattle, and not passively wait for permission from State Legislators. Join us at the Rent Control Rally July 20th at 6:00PM at the All Pilgrims Christian Church on Capitol Hill!”

“The Tax the Rich movement cannot afford to become complacent. This legal battle will continue, and if we finally prevail in the courts, big business and the super rich will continue to use their power and wealth to undermine our victories, and working people will need to continue to organize and unite in powerful movements.”

by Charles Mudede
On Sunday morning, Trump told four congresswomen of color (known as 'The Squad') to go back to their countries, which, according to his view, are "crime infested" and run by the most corrupt governments in the world. There is, of course, nothing in this attack that's new. It is a racist position that has its root in one of the justifications for slavery—namely, that the African societies blacks came from were, at the end of the day, much worse than the country that exploited their labor with no mercy. Slavery was not a curse but a blessing for unfortunate negroes.

After the emancipation in 1863, this reasoning quickly mutated into: If you don't like America, then go back to savage Africa. Trump was saying exactly this to the four congresswomen, three of whom were born in the US, two of whom are (if generational duration be our measure) more American than the president himself, one of whom is a second-generation American (only one generation below Trump), and one is, like the First Lady, a naturalized US citizen.

Now, the first point I want to make is that people do not leave their home countries because they're seeking a new adventure. Leaving the place of one's birth is never an easy thing to do. It's rarely a matter of inspiration. It's almost always an act of desperation. Things are so bad in your beloved country that you're willing to reboot your whole life in an unknown place. One only has to look at the Irish immigrants of the 19th century to appreciate this point. These Europeans did not leave a paradise, but a "shithole" made by the British Empire. Jews, Italians, and what have you were escaping one shithole or another. That pattern is a major part of US history.

But once settled in a new country, isn't it wrong for an immigrant to "hate" it? This is Trump's present move to defend his seventh-day rant. He claims the four congresswomen of color, who came from lord knows where, hate the US. Now, isn't there some substance to this Trumpian way thinking? How ungrateful these immigrants are. How dare they come all the way over here and begin hating on everything. Let's think about this for a moment.

You made the point! Then why does the Squad Hate America?
— james hanna (@jamesha68080317) July 15, 2019

The problem with this apparently common sense reasoning is the definition of hating a (or this) country is not universal. It's implied that it is. That all feel this way. Hating the US only means this and this and that. But the this, this, and that are, in actuality, issued not from The All but a particular point (or species) of American feeling. One group is determining what it means to hate a country. And this group has, as far as I can tell, not asked one of the four congresswomen of color in question if they do really hate the US in the way expressed by Trump and his party, the GOP. These women are being told that they do, no matter what. They are also called communists, which is another way of saying: you want to destroy "the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth."

First, you have to be nuts to think that the US is a perfect country. It's just not. Instead, it's a country with lots of room for improvement. The case for the US's obvious greatness is far from settled. But, you may insist, if one is not happy with this enterprise as it is (with all of its problems), why don't you just pack your things and go back to where you came from (which, in my case, is Zimbabwe)? Here is my one answer to that position.

In terms of population, the US is the most multicultural nation in the world. No large country in Europe or Asia or Africa even comes close. In this respect, the US is still a leader in cross-cultural innovation. To give my point one of many examples, let me describe a recent stay I had in Hamtramck, a city within Detroit whose council became, in 2015, "the first majority Muslim city council in the US." The house I stayed in (Jar House), which is run by the Hamtramck art organization, Power House Productions, which collaborates with the Zimbabwe Cultural Centre of Detroit, also based in Hamtramck, was on a street, Klinger Street, dominated by Bangladeshi Americans. The city also has Yemeni Americans, and pockets of Polish Americans.

On Caniff Street, Al-Haramine International Foods is directly across from Bozek Markets. Iraqi Chaldeans also live here with Bosnians. And at the most beautiful moment of the day, dawn (the darkling blue sky, the dying stars), rising over the street, the houses, the whole neighborhood, I would hear the Muslim call to prayer. This was the morning music of a culture or religion that's mostly foreign to me. If I'm anything, I'm a black African Methodist (that is indeed the source of my first name, Charles Wesley, the church's hymn-man—a bloke who wrote over 6,500 songs to his one and only.) But here was this ancient prayer. And there was the crowing of a rooster. The love songs of small birds. The slow-rising of the sun. This intense infusion of humanity. This one of so many all-American cities.

I could never experience this in Zimbabwe. And I also could never feel the transformative possibilities that buzz all about this work-in-progress we call the US. I can not speak for the Squad, but if this intense feeling of the country's unique multi-cultural position and rich cultural potential is what you describe as hating the US, then, your application of that word can only have meaning to you. How you hate as an American is not how I hate as an American.

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As I’ve found to my cost, the billionaire press seeks to kill change before it happens.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3^rd  July 2019

All billionaires want the same thing – a world that works for them. For most, this means a world in which they are scarcely taxed and scarcely regulated, where labour is cheap and the planet can be used as a dustbin, where they can flit between tax havens and secrecy regimes, using the earth’s surface as a speculative gaming board, extracting profits and dumping costs. The world that works for them works against us.

So how, in nominal democracies, do they get it? They fund political parties and lobby groups, set up astroturf (fake grassroots) campaigns and finance social media ads. But above all, they buy newspapers and television stations. The widespread hope and expectation, a few years ago, was that news controlled by billionaires would be replaced by news controlled by the people: social media would break their grip. But social media is instead dominated by stories the billionaire press generates. As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.

They use this power not only to promote the billionaires’ favoured people and ideas, but also to shut down change before it happens. They deploy their attack dogs to take down anyone who challenges the programme.

It is one thing to know this. It is another to experience it. A month ago, seven of us published a report to the Labour Party called Land for the Many. It proposed a set of policies that would be of immense benefit to the great majority of Britain’s people: ensuring that everyone has a good, affordable home, improving public amenities, shifting tax from ordinary people towards the immensely rich, protecting the living world and enhancing public control over the decisions that affect our lives. We showed how the billionaires and other oligarchs could be put back in their boxes. The result has been four extraordinary weeks of attacks in the Mail, Express, Sun, Times and Telegraph. Our contention that oligarchic power is rooted in the ownership and control of land has been amply vindicated by the response of oligarchic power.

Some of these reports peddle flat-out falsehoods. A week ago, the Mail on Sunday claimed that our report recommends a capital gains tax on people’s main homes. This “spiteful raid that will horrify millions” ensures “we will soon be joining the likes of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam in becoming one of the world’s few Marxist-Leninist states.” This claim was picked up, and often embellished, by all the other right-wing papers. The policy proved, the Telegraph explained, that “keeping a hard-Left Labour Party out of office is not an academic ideological ambition but a deadly serious matter for millions of voters.” Boris Johnson, Phillip Hammond and several other senior Tories weighed in, attacking our “mad” proposal.

But we made no such recommendation. We considered the idea, listed its possible advantages and drawbacks, then specifically rejected it. As they say in these papers, you couldn’t make it up. But they have.

There were dozens of other falsehoods: apparently we have proposed a “garden tax”; we intend to add “an extra £374 a year on top of what the typical household pays in council tax” (no such figure is mentioned in our report); and inspectors will be sent to people’s homes to investigate their bedrooms. Dozens of reports claim that our proposals are “plans” hatched by Jeremy Corbyn: “Jeremy Corbyn’s garden tax bombshell”; “Jeremy Corbyn is planning a huge tax raid”; “Corbyn’s war on homeowners”. Though Corbyn is aware of our report, he has played no role in it. What it contains are not his plans but our independent policy suggestions, none of which has yet been adopted by Labour. The press response gives me an inkling of what it must be to walk in his shoes, as I see my name (and his) attached to lurid schemes I’ve never heard of, and linked to Mugabe, Maduro and the Soviet Union. Not one of the many journalists who wrote these articles has contacted any of the authors of the report. Yet they harvested lengthy quotes denouncing us from senior Conservatives.

The common factor in all these articles is their conflation of the interests of the ultra-rich with the interests of the middle classes. While our proposals take aim at the oligarchs, and would improve the prospects of the great majority, they are presented as an attack on ordinary people. Progressive taxation, the protection of public space and good homes for all should strike terror into your heart.

We’ve lodged a complaint to the press regulator, IPSO, about one of the worst examples, and we might make others. But to pursue them all would be a full-time job (we wrote the report unpaid, in our own time). The simple truth is that we are being outgunned by the brute power of billionaires. And the same can be said for democracy.

It is easy to see why political parties have become so cautious and why, as a result, the UK is stuck with outmoded institutions and policies, and succumbs to ever more extreme and regressive forms of taxation and control. Labour has so far held its nerve – and this makes its current leadership remarkable. It has not allowed itself to be bullied by the billionaire press.

The old threat has not abated – it has intensified. If a newspaper is owned by a billionaire, be suspicious of every word you read in it. Check its sources, question its claims. Withhold your support from any party that allows itself to be bullied or – worse – guided by their agenda. Stand in solidarity with those who resist it.

WanJin Gim (previously) continues to amaze with his detailed drawings that show the nuanced colors and textures of bare skin. Most often working on kraft paper, Gim uses cross hatching—a technique most commonly associated with ink drawings or prints—with an array of colors to capture hands, arms, feet, and the occasional cat. Though simple in subject, Gim’s drawings pulsate with the gestural energy that informs the postures of each carefully rendered limb. You can see more of the Seoul-based artist’s work on Instagram, and find prints of his drawings on Gim’s online store.

On Nias island, the heart can be ‘squeezed’, ‘hot’, even ‘hairy’. What can anthropology say about unfamiliar emotional zones?

By Andrew Beatty

Read at Aeon

New research from Science: "Civic honesty around the globe":

Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets. In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result. Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

I am surprised, too.

What’s one of the world’s most powerful cartels afraid of? A bunch of meddling kids.

Climate activists and their “unscientific” claims are “perhaps the greatest threat to our industry going forward,” said Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of OPEC (the cartel representing 14 countries with 80 percent of the world’s oil reserves) earlier this week.

He might have been talking about protesters more broadly, but the rest of his statement suggests that young people are being particularly irksome. Barkindo said some of his colleague’s children are asking them about the future because “they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry.” (I guess the birds and the bees isn’t the most uncomfortable conversation parents are having with their kids in OPEC households.)

This is, of course, heartening news for climate activists. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swede famous for starting a movement of youth strikes calling for climate action, thanked OPEC for the compliment.

Barkindo is right that climate advocates are winning over the hearts and minds of the people. Surveys show that 57 percent of Americans now think fossil fuel companies are at least partially responsible for climate change. Meanwhile, support for policies that would cut into fossil fuel companies’ bottom lines, like transitioning to renewable energy infrastructure, is increasing as approval for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and offshore drilling declines.

As for climate activists’ “unscientific claims,” it’s unclear if Barkindo had a particular statement in mind, but the science pretty unequivocally supports demands for urgent change. Global emissions need to be drastically cut by 2050 to avoid more than 1.5 degrees C of warming, and to do that we need to use way less fossil fuels.

It’s not just public opinion that’s turning against the fossil fuel industry — insurance companies and investors are increasingly opting to put their money elsewhere. But that’s not the fault of some upstart kids: It’s because science and common sense are showing fossil fuels are a bad investment, especially in the long run. Recent figures estimate that climate change could cost the world economy as much as $69 trillion by 2100.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline OPEC head: Climate activists are the ‘greatest threat’ to oil industry on Jul 5, 2019.

This past weekend, a volcanic eruption on Russia’s Kuril Islands was so massive it was quite literally visible from space. An astronaut on the International Space Station’s (ISS) Expedition 59 crew documented the plume from Raikoke Volcano, which reached eight miles into the sky. The ISS orbits 250 miles above earth. NASA explained:

On the morning of June 22, astronauts shot a photograph of the volcanic plume rising in a narrow column and then spreading out in a part of the plume known as the umbrella region. That is the area where the density of the plume and the surrounding air equalize and the plume stops rising. The ring of clouds at the base of the column appears to be water vapor.

Because of the reach of its plume, the ash and gas pose a flight risk to airplanes. Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers in Tokyo and Anchorage have been monitoring its movements. Raikoke rarely erupts; its last explosion was in 1924, and before that, 1778. You can explore more scientific documentation of the blast on NASA’s Earth Observatory blog. (via PetaPixel)

 

Sculptor Ted Lott builds wooden artworks based on one of human beings’ most fundamental requirements, exploring the different ways in which we’ve devised shelter as a product of the industrial revolution. Lott examines modern architecture at its core by building tiny scale models without the decorative designs imposed by exterior siding and paint. He then combines these bare yet elegant structures with domestic furniture, fusing the basic necessities of home with the comforts provided from within.

To build his works, Lott uses a bandsaw as a scaled sawmill to generate miniature pieces of wood and other proportioned raw materials. Found and vintage furniture provide the base of his structures which are then lit from within as if someone is home.

“Like us, these structures are regular, nevertheless they strive to be unique, transforming their everyday bones into something beyond the banalities of basic needs,” Lott explains in his artist statement. “To me, this is the reason for making objects, to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. Through this process we point to the complex interaction of necessity, artistry, economy, function and beauty present in the original objects, while highlighting the possibilities of transformation and growth that are a requirement for the continuation and evolution of life.”

Lott received his BFA from the Maine College of Art and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can see more of the artist’s hybrid wooden works on his website and Instagram.

 

 

 

Architectural photographer David Cardelús recently completed an assignment for the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Casa Vicens. In the grand tradition of ornate “cottages” commissioned by society’s upper class, the 1880’s home was designed and built by Antoni Gaudí for a wealthy broker, Manuel Vicens. Though the city of Barcelona has since been built up to surround Casa Vicens, at the time of its construction it was in a village known as Gràcia. The home is considered the first architectural work of note by Gaudí, and one of the pioneering buildings in Europe’s Modernism movement. It features many Islamic and Oriental architectural motifs and vibrant colors from cadmium red exterior trim to cerulean blue ceilings bring personality to every corner of the home.

Cardelús has captured Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, Gaudí Crypt, Palau Güell, and El Capricho in addition to this most recent series, and he shares with Colossal that he hopes to photograph all of the famous Catalan architect’s buildings some day. Cardelús, who was born and raised in Barcelona, studied photography, film, and video and now lectures on architectural photography at Universitat Pompeu Fabra ELISAVA.

You can see more of Cardelús’s photographs on his website and Behance, and learn more about Casa Vicens (which is now a museum) on their website. (via Colossal Submissions)

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both unveiled student debt forgiveness plans recently. This has prompted a good deal of think tank and media coverage trying to estimate the precise distributional impact of those plans. Being a think tank man myself, I set out to produce my own distributional analysis over the past few days but learned something very unpleasant in the process: the data source everyone uses for these estimates, the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), is not well-suited for the purpose and almost certainly systematically understates how much student debt is carried by low-income individuals.

Everyone uses the SCF for these purposes because it is the only high-quality wealth survey in the US that appears to allow for distributional analysis on student debt. The think tanks that have put out student debt figures based on it include behemoths like Brookings and the Urban Institute. Those figures have then been cited in articles at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, Slate, and virtually every other media outlet.

But a deep dive into the methods of the SCF, along with comparisons of the SCF to other student debt data sources, clearly show that these figures are off the mark, and probably dramatically so.

Primary Economic Units

The way the SCF constructs family units differs from other surveys like the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Rather than grouping all related people who live in the same household, they instead construct a Primary Economic Unit (PEU) for each household, which “consists of an economically dominant single individual or couple (married or living as partners) in a household and all other individuals in the household who are financially interdependent with that individual or couple.”

Importantly for our purposes here, the financially independent relatives of the economically dominant individual or couple, such as many young adults living with their parents, are not included in the PEU. In fact, they are excluded from the survey altogether.

This is a problem because it means that student debtors who live with their parents, which many do in part because of their student debt, are either absent from the survey sample or being counted as part of their parent’s PEU. Specifically, if the parents tell the survey taker that their co-resident student debtor kid is financially independent, then they are just dropped out of the survey universe. If they tell the survey taker that their kid is financially interdependent, then the kid (and their student debt, if their parents properly estimate it) are included in the parent’s PEU, meaning that it is the parent’s characteristics (age, income, education) that gets assigned to the kid’s student debt.

Understating Debt

Once you understand how the PEU works, it does not take a genius to realize that the SCF must be missing a lot of student debt and especially student debt carried by low and moderate income young adults who are living with their parents. And even when it does pick up that kind of debt, it is assigning it to the older, generally more affluent parents of the student debtors, which should also skew the distribution of student debt up the age and income ladders.

Digging into the SCF appears to confirm that this is exactly what is going on.

For starters, the total amount of student debt picked up in the SCF is well below the aggregate reported by the Federal Reserve’s G.19 publication and well below the aggregate reported by the NY Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel. How much lower? About 25 to 35 percent lower.

The total amount of SCF student debt is not just lower than the other sources. It is also skewed further up the age range. This is exactly what you would expect if student debtors living with parents are mostly being dropped from the survey while the ones that are being included are having their debt counted under their parent’s demographics.

Although I’d like to think I am the first one to realize this systematic bias, it turns out that the Federal Reserve itself acknowledged this problem in a 2015 piece in FEDS Notes:

A “family” in the SCF is defined as the economic core of the sampled household, roughly speaking the person whose name is on the deed or lease at the surveyed address, and all people at that address whose finances are intertwined with those of that person. The published SCF statistics refer only to the debts and assets of this economic core. Thus, student loan information is not collected for members of the household that are outside of the household economic core. It is likely that most of the student loans of these non-core household members are included in G.19 and CCP statistics.

[…]

Due to these considerations, the aggregate amount of student loan debt captured in the SCF will be lower than that captured in either the G.19 or the CCP. Thus, the differences between the SCF and CCP and G.19 aggregate levels suggests that a considerable portion of aggregate student loan debt is held by individuals outside of the economic core of a household.

In 2014, the Federal Reserve put out a paper that also flagged this general issue and specifically warned that people should interpret SCF data on young adults with caution:

Overall, our comparison between SCF and CPS data indicates that young adults captured by the SCF tend to have higher incomes and higher homeownership rates than the overall population of young adults in the CPS. Moreover, because fewer young adults lived independently in 2013 than in 2001, SCF median income declined slightly less than CPS median income over the period. If higher incomes are correlated with greater wealth, the SCF will tend to overstate young adults’ balance sheets on average. Thus, the results presented in this article should be considered with the caveat that they are representative of only young adults living independently. More broadly, our comparisons with CPS data indicate that SCF users should exercise caution when drawing inferences regarding balance sheet items that are primarily held by young people.

Put simply, the only student debt that is being picked up by the SCF and assigned to the person who carries it is the student debt held by adults living independently in a household where they are the economically dominant individual/couple. This means that a lot of the debt held by especially lower income young adults is simply not represented in the survey, which further means that these think tank estimates about the distribution of student debt almost certainly overstate the degree to which it is skewed towards the rich. Without better data, anyone purporting to know with great certainty the average debt burden of the bottom or second quintile is either mistaken or worse.

“Yes, we do have concentration camps,” began the stinging critique of the Trump administration’s immigration detention facilities. It was written earlier this week by the editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune, in the reliably conservative state of Utah.

Andrea Pitzer, author of the definitive book on the global history of concentration camps, agrees. So do people who were once forced to live in another era’s concentration camps.

But amid the debate about what to call immigration detention facilities, few people have disputed the truly terrible conditions that exist within them. Migrants have long reported awful experiences in immigration custody, but in recent months, an increase in the number of people, especially families and children, crossing the border and being detained has led to severe overcrowding.

Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier was granted access to a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, and wrote in her report about it that “the conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities.” They “felt worse than jail.” The kids she examined were forced to endure “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”

It’s not an accident. These systems are cruel by design.

Over the past year, seven children have died in U.S. immigration custody or shortly after being released. These deaths occurred after 10 years during which not a single child died. Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, told The Atlantic that the stench in some detention facilities is so horrible that it was hard for her to even have a focused conversation with the children. Babies didn’t have diapers. Young kids were forced to care for infants who they didn’t even know. Clothes were covered in snot and excrement. Baby bottles were used without being properly cleaned and sterilized. All of these conditions have created environments where sicknesses and diseases spread like wildfire. In one facility, lice spread from child to child, and when the children were forced to share “lice combs,” and one somehow got lost, dozens of kids were punished by having their bedding removed. They had to sleep on the cold concrete floor.

This is why we say that cruelty is the point. It’s not an accident. These systems are cruel by design. The idea is to make it miserable to deter people from coming to the U.S. These detention centers are reckless and dangerous.

As many have pointed out, we need to remember exactly how and why the teenage diarist Anne Frank actually died. She was not gassed to death in a Nazi death camp. Instead, she died of neglect, malnutrition, and disease. It’s believed that she and her sister Margot contracted and died from typhus. In December 1944, a minor miracle occurred when Nanette Blitz, a lifelong childhood friend and classmate of Anne’s, was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp where the Frank sisters were being held.

“She was no more than a skeleton by then,” Blitz recalled. “She was wrapped in a blanket; she couldn’t bear to wear her clothes anymore because they were crawling with lice.” Guess what? Lice are the primary carriers of typhus. That’s how the disease spread.

And right now, today, we have prison camps across the United States where the same thing is happening. Multiple reports state that emergency conditions are repeatedly ignored until they result in death. The adults and children in these camp aren’t accused of being a danger to society. They haven’t been charged with violent crimes. Yet they are clearly being punished in the most severe ways.

Here’s where I am. If we have doctors, historians, and leading congresspeople calling these facilities “torture facilities” and “concentration camps,” and we all see the deaths piling up, and the conditions growing perilous, the question becomes: What exactly are we going to do about it?

For all the years that we’ve read and heard about concentration camps in other countries under other regimes, I don’t think many of us fully considered what we would do if such camps were built and operated in our nation, by our government, on our watch, on our dime. But that’s exactly where we are right now.

My soul is uncomfortable with where we are.

I swear, I am not trying to be inflammatory. I don’t mean this as a threat of violence or physical force, but I thought that concentration camps were supposed to be liberated. I thought that kids being held against their will in such atrocious conditions were supposed to be rescued. I don’t know what that kind of rescue would look like in present-day terms, but I know this much: My soul is uncomfortable with where we are.

It seems like our game plan is to focus on defeating Trump, and in the meantime, sue the administration until it incrementally agrees to start allowing kids to brush their teeth or wash their hands with soap. It just doesn’t seem to be enough. What if Trump wins again? Is our game plan then to wait four more years to hope we end these monstrous camps? Even if a Democrat wins, pledging to improve conditions, how can we hold them to account and demand that migrants be freed?

I always wondered how concentration camps lasted for so many years during the Holocaust, but now that we have our own, I see how. It’s a mix of fear, indifference, and lack of political will. We see the consequences of doing nothing, but it seems as though we’ve put all of our eggs into the basket of a far-off election. And I just don’t feel good about it.

The post History Has Taught Us That Concentration Camps Should Be Liberated. We Can’t Wait Until 2020. appeared first on The Intercept.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some 30 miles north of San Diego, along the Pacific Coast, sits the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest effort to turn saltwater into freshwater in North America.

Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water that is piped to municipal users. Carlsbad, which became fully operational in 2015, creates about 10 percent of the fresh water the 3.1 million people in the region use, at about twice the cost of the other main source of water.

Expensive, yes, but vital for the fact that it is local and reliable. “Drought is a recurring condition here in California,” said Jeremy Crutchfield, water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority. “We just came out of a five-year drought in 2017. The plant has reduced our reliance on imported supplies, which is challenging at times here in California. So it’s a component for reliability.”

A second plant, similar to Carlsbad, is being built in Huntington, California, with the same 50-million-gallon-a-day capability. Currently there are 11 desalination plants in California, and 10 more are proposed.

The cost of desalinated water has been coming down as the technology evolves and the cost of other sources increases.

It’s been a long time coming for desalination — de-sal for short. For decades, we have been told it would one day turn oceans of saltwater into fresh and quench the world’s thirst. But progress has been slow.

That is now changing, as desalination is coming into play in many places around the world. Several factors are converging to bring new plants on line. Population has boomed in many water-stressed places, including parts of China, India, South Africa, and the United States, especially in Arizona and California. In addition, drought — some of it driven by a changing climate — is occurring in many regions that not that long ago thought their supplies were ample.

San Diego is one of those places. With just 12 inches of rain a year in the Mediterranean climate of Southern California and no groundwater, the region gets half of its water from the distant Colorado River. The amount of snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains and keeps that mighty river flowing, however, has greatly diminished over the last two decades and according to some researchers may be part of a permanent aridification of the West. Climate change is a very real phenomenon for water managers throughout the Southwest and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the cost of desalinated water has been coming down as the technology evolves and the cost of other sources increases. In the last three decades, the cost of desalination has dropped by more than half.

A boom in de-sal, though, doesn’t mean that everywhere with access to the sea has found a new source of freshwater. Circumstances play a large role. “As populations increase and existing surface water supplies are being tapped out or groundwater is depleted or polluted, then the problems are acute and there are choices to be made” about de-sal, said Michael Kiparsky of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “There are places around the world where de-sal makes economic sense, where there is high pressure on the water resources plus a lot of available energy resources,” such as the Middle East.

De-sal proponents acknowledge the industry must confront and solve some serious environmental issues if it is to continue to grow. Desalination requires vast amounts of energy, which in some places are currently provided by fossil fuels. Kiparsky warns of a feedback loop where more de-sal is needed as the planet warms, which leads to more greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, there are serious concerns about the damage to marine life from the plant’s intake systems and extra-salty wastewater.

The first large-scale de-sal plants were built in the 1960s, and there are now some 20,000 facilities globally that turn seawater into fresh. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with very little freshwater and cheap energy costs for the fossil fuels it uses in its de-sal plants, produces the most freshwater of any nation, a fifth of the world’s total.

Australia and Israel are also major players. When the Millennium Drought gripped southeastern Australia from the late 1990s until 2009, water systems in the region dropped to small fractions of their storage capacity. Facing a crisis, Perth, Melbourne, and other cities embarked on a large desalination plant spree. The plant in Melbourne, which provided its first water in 2017, cost $3.5 billion to build and provides a third of the city’s supply. It’s critical because the region has had below-average rainfall for 18 of the last 20 years.

Israel, too, is all-in on desalination. It has five large plants in operation, and plans for five more. Chronic water shortages there are now a thing of the past, as more than half of the country’s domestic needs are met with water from the Mediterranean.

Globally, more than 300 million people now get their water from de-salination plants, according to the International Desalination Association.

But despite the need, de-sal plants will not be built on every coastline. Foremost among the barriers is the cost of constructing a plant and the cost of processing the water. The San Diego County Water Authority pays about $1,200 for an acre-foot of water sourced from the Colorado River and the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta and pumped hundreds of miles to Southern California. The same amount from the Carlsbad plant — enough to supply a family of five for a year — costs about $2,200. As Lake Mead — the reservoir of Colorado River water on the Nevada-Arizona border that supplies San Diego — drops precipitously, it may someday, perhaps in the next several years, no longer be able to supply San Diego. Certainty is paramount.

De-sal, however, is plagued by some serious environmental problems. There are two types of desalination – thermal, which heats up water and then captures the condensation, and reverse osmosis, which forces seawater through the pores of a membrane that are many times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. This traps salt molecules, but allows the smaller water molecules to go through. Both require a great deal of energy, and greenhouse gas emissions created by the power needed — especially in the Middle East, where fossil fuels generate electricity — are a significant contributor to global warming.

There are ecological impacts as well. It takes two gallons of seawater to make a gallon of freshwater, which means the gallon left behind is briny. It is disposed of by returning it to the ocean and — if not done properly by diffusing it over large areas — can deplete the ocean of oxygen and have negative impacts on sea life.

A study by the U.N. Institute for Water, Environment and Health published earlier this year contends that the problem of brine waste has been underestimated by 50 percent and that, when mixed with the chemicals meant to keep systems from fouling, the brine is toxic and causes serious pollution.

Another problem comes from the sucking in of seawater for processing. When a fish or other large organism gets stuck on the intake screen, it dies or is injured; in addition, fish larvae, eggs, and plankton get sucked into the system and are killed.

“At our intake we [draw in] tiny little organisms, that amount to about a pound and a half of adult fish per day,” said Jessica Jones, a spokesperson for Poseidon Water, which owns the Carlsbad plant. “To mitigate that we are restoring 66 acres of wetlands in San Diego Bay. And we just got a new intake permitted which will lessen the impacts.”

According to Heather Cooley, research director at the Pacific Institute, “There are a lot of unknowns around the impact on sea life. There hasn’t been a lot of monitoring at the facilities.” A strategy increasingly being used to obviate, or reduce, that problem is to bury the seawater intakes beneath the seafloor and use the sandy ocean bottom as a natural filter.

In 2016, California passed the Desalination Amendment, which tightened regulations for intake and brine disposal. Proponents of desalination contend the changes have been onerous and are slowing the march toward a de-sal future.

Because of the cost of seawater processing and the impacts on the ocean, much of the recent desalination growth has involved the use of brackish water. The solids in brackish water are one-tenth the amount in ocean water, and that makes the process much cheaper.

Arizona, perpetually short on water and facing a Colorado River supply shortage, is looking at both a seawater de-sal plant in partnership with Mexico — which has the ocean access that the state lacks — and at plants that can treat the 600 million acre-feet of brackish water deposits the state estimates it has.

Texas, meanwhile, now has 49 municipal de-sal plants that process brackish water, both surface and subsurface. San Antonio currently is building what will be the largest brackish water de-sal plant in the country. In its first phase, it produces 12 million gallons a day, enough for 40,000 families, but by 2026, the plant — known as H2Oaks — will produce 30 million gallons a day. Brackish water de-sal costs $1,000 to $2,000 per acre-foot.

The Pacific Institute’s Cooley argues that before building de-sal plants, municipalities should fully implement conservation programs, promote potable re-use — the re-use of wastewater, also known as toilet-to-tap recycling — or treat storm water runoff. “It makes sense to do the cheaper options first and leave the more expensive options down the road to be developed when you need them,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Desalination plants are here, but they’re not solving the water crisis yet on Jun 23, 2019.

What do the crimes of a Navy SEAL tell us about U.S. military culture?

Not bumpy skin.  Bumpy skull.

You learn something every day.  Via.

Illustrator Luis Coelho uses cross-hatching and stippling to form wide-eyed and bushy-tailed cats, armadillos, and flying squirrels. The seemingly surprised stylized animals are built using carefully placed short lines that build texture and volume. Coelho, who lives in his hometown of Guimarães, Portugal, shares with Colossal that he has had a lifelong affinity for art. After studying painting and illustration in college and in Barcelona, he explored other paths for several years. Coelho returned to art in seeking the meditative qualities of the practice:

One day I gave both my two nieces a blank sheet and I told them that they would have to decide what animals should appear on those white papers and that then I would have to draw those animals for them. I also told that those animals would be the guardians of their dreams and whenever they needed to get out of a nightmare they just needed to call them. What I didn’t know at that moment was that those two drawings marked the very beginning of the style that I’m working today.

Inspired by the delight he felt in collaborating with his nieces, Coelho has focused his formerly wide-ranging art practice on animal interpretations for the young and young at heart. “Maybe because it started this way, I feel like all my creatures seem to have come out of a dream world, somewhat obscure but also adorable,” Coelho explains. Through sharing his work online, the artist has been able to leave his office job and pursue illustration full-time. You can see more from Coelho on his web shop and Instagram, where he accepts commissions. If you enjoy these critters, also look into the work of Kamwei Fong and Lindsey Thomas.

 

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A post shared by Luis Coelho (@purr.in.ink) on Jul 26, 2018 at 6:00am PDT

March 14, 2019

Dear Editor:

Regarding the op-ed by the Dalai Lama and Arthur C. Brooks: “All of Us Can Break the Cycle of Hatred,” March 11, 2019.

Did the Dalai Lama, with his message of love and peace, realize that Arthur C. Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, runs the most concentrated center of lawless war advocates and opponents of government mandated life-saving health and safety standards in the United States? The list of these monetized, cold-blooded minds is a rogues gallery of people who, like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and John Yoo, held high positions in a war crimes government, including having key roles in the Iraq catastrophe. Brooks has the gall to quote Jesus “Love your enemies” and the contagion of “warm-heartedness.”

This column gives a new dimension to brazen hypocrisy.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Every quarter, the Federal Reserve puts out the Financial Accounts (aka “Z1” or “Flow of Funds”), which provide economy-wide aggregates for nearly every kind of asset and liability there is. Every three years, they put out the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which is a household survey that records many of the same kinds of assets and liabilities that are in the Financial Accounts. In a perfect world, the assets and liabilities in the SCF would sum up to the aggregates in the Financial Accounts, but for various reasons they do not.

Recently, the Federal Reserve released a new data series called the Distributive Financial Accounts, which combine the Financial Accounts and the SCF to provide quarterly estimates of the distribution of wealth in America that do sum to the aggregates in the Financial Accounts. The series goes back to 1989, the first year the modern SCF was administered and runs to the fourth quarter of 2018, the last quarter for which there is Financial Accounts data.

The insights of this new data series are many, but for this post here I want to highlight a single eye-popping statistic. Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.

To derive this, I initially take the nominal net worth aggregates for each wealth group that are provided by the Federal Reserve and subtract out consumer durables. Consumer durables are things like cars and fridges that many academics who work on wealth distributions do not consider wealth. The average person in the top 1 percent owns around 32x as many consumer durables (in dollar terms) as the average person in the bottom 50 percent owns. So the subtraction of them reduces the inequality between the top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent.

From there, I adjust the 1989 figures to 2018 dollars using the CPI-U-RS price index. This is what the Federal Reserve also does to adjust wealth figures over time in its Survey of Consumer Finances reports.

What the final product reveals is a 2018 where the top 1 percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets. This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth.