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The Army Gets It (At Least Somebody Gets It)

3/182006

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers publication, Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations, has become available on the web. It is a deep analysis of the effect of peak oil on the Army and what must be done to ameliorate the potentially disastrous results of a worldwide energy shortage. A sample:

In these times of tightening classical energy options, the Army needs to take steps comparable to those in the national agenda mentioned above by modernizing infrastructure, optimizing end-use, minimizing environmental impact, pulling technology markets, cooperating in regional purchases, and leveraging alternate financing. Special attention to the diversification of sources is appropriate. This incorporates a massive expansion in renewable energy purchases, a vast increase in renewable distributed generation including photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind, microturbines and biomass, and the large-scale networking of on-site generation. (Emphasis added)

Now ask yourself—honestly—do you think that a single one of these suggestions has the slightest chance of being implemented by the Bush administration? Is the Pope a Cajun? Should I even bother to ask?

You can download the document from the military website here.

If you cannot get it from the military website you can download it here (1.3 Mb).

The Dollar and Sanity

12/04/2004

Bubbling up into the American consciousness, the fateful nexus of dollar, oil, and military conquest finally made it to the front page of the New York Times. Well, not exactly. The article was about the precariousness of the dollar and how Japan and China hold over a trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury debts which they could sell to send the dollar plummeting. We think the position of the U.S. is far more precarious than the editors of the Times want us to know. This situation has been developing a long time. The JP warned you about it almost five years ago. The chickens are coming home to roost. Read the article.

Colin Campbell on Oil

12/15/2002

Dr. Colin Campbell, whose predictions of the end of cheap oil have appeared in Scientific American, gives an interview to Michael Ruppert's From the Wilderness. This interview is reproduced here by the kind permission of the publisher. Read the interview.

Spending Cuts vs. Tax Increases at the State Level:
Is One More Counter-Productive than the Other During a Recession?

10/31/2001
Peter Orszag, Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow in Tax and Fiscal Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Joseph Stiglitz, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and one of the recipients of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, explore the impact of state budget cuts versus tax increases during the current recession. Their findings are highly significant for our state as well as other states faced with shortfalls in tax collection. Read the article.

Nader, Groups Expose Privacy Notice Deception as July 1 Deadline for Banks Looms

6/23/2001
As a July 1 privacy notice deadline looms, the nation's leading consumer and privacy advocates today exposed the strategy of the nation's banks and other financial institutions to send consumers billions of "deceptive" privacy notices required by a "defective" new financial privacy law, while the banks' lobbyists oppose stronger privacy laws in state capitols and Congress. Read the article.

What You Need to Know About Punitive Damages

6/18/21
The Center for Justice & Democracy released today a new White Paper entitled, "What You Need to Know About Punitive Damages." Read the news release..

Closer to Recession: The Numbers are all There

1/27/01
Now that the word "recession" is in current use, we revisit our previous prognostications and discuss the economy in the same light.Read the article..

Estate Tax Repeal: A Windfall For The Wealthiest Americans

6/05/2000
On May 25 the House Ways and Means Committee passed legislation introduced by Chairman Bill Archer that would repeal the federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax by 2010.

Repealing the estate tax would provide a massive windfall for some of the country's wealthiest families. Read the article. From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Victor Hartung and Tom Lowe: A Political Exchange

3/27/2000
In which left and right positions are debated and readers are invited to respond.

The Face of the Economy

3/19/2000
Both yesterday's and today's business sections of the Clarion-Ledger cautiously observed that some of the economic indicators were not all rosy, but concluded that we should have a strong economy for a while. We think that the caution was well-taken and, for reasons we have already published in the Jackson Progressive, the United States has not yet discovered the solution to the business cycle. Read our analysis.

We are flattered

2/19/99
We are gratified to note that Robert Kuttner, in the February 28, 2000, edition of The American Prospect, has also noticed those "two small clouds on the economic horizon." In essence, those two clouds are the same clouds we warned about back on January 21: the increase in the price of crude oil and the boom in the economy, even though he doesn't quite link the latter to the extreme runup of debt in the private sector, as we did. The result, however, is the same; if prices, in the opinion of Mr. Greenspan, are increasing too quickly then the Fed will crunch the money supply, thus limiting the amount of further debt, and therefore money, that the private sector can create. Debt, of course, cannot indefinitely rise faster than income, so a tightening of credit (or a drastic increase in the price of crude oil) will only accelerate the day of reckoning. The long boom at this stage is beginning to look more and more like a Ponzi scheme.

Thomas Sowell and the Third Kidney

2/8/2000
Every now and then, a right-wing columnist shows his hand so transparently, so openly, that one wonders if he is not making a religious confession, rather than a policy argument. So it is with Thomas Sowell today, February 8, 2000, in the Clarion-Ledger. He bares in no uncertain terms the basic tenet of his neoclassical, Chicago school, ideology: your value as a human being is measured by what you are paid--nothing else. Read our observations on this sanctimonious propagandist and his most recent screed.

Perennial Sowell Fallacies

1/21/2000
In which we deconstruct one of Sowell's recent columns on the widening income gap by going to his sources. Read the article.

Debt and Oil: Two Ominous Clouds on the Economic Horizon

1/21/2000
Two papers, one on the current economy from the Jerome Levy Economic Institute and one by a well-known petroleum consultant, Dr. C. J. Campbell, when taken together, point to some rocky economic times in the not-too-far-off future. An analysis by the Jackson Progressive. Your response is invited.

1/30/2000
Note: An article in the New York Times today announced that the "recent run-up in energy prices is rippling across the American economy and affecting practically every family and business as it becomes more expensive to heat a home, refuel and automobile or buy an airline ticket." Nestled in the middle of the article is the fact that we now import approximately 50% of our oil, up from 37% in 1980. This was the prediction of Campbell in his article above. Quoting "economists," the NYT writes that the recent climb in oil prices, due to a decision by OPEC to cut production by 8%, is unlikely to cause a recession because the economy is booming and because oil makes up a much smaller share of the economy than it did then.

Our opinion: the "economists" might be right for the time being. We'll see.

Dollars Left on the Table by Mississippi - And Children Go Without Medical Care

When Congress changed the welfare laws in 1996 from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), it also broke the linkage between welfare eligibility and medicaid. Persons, particularly children, who lose welfare assistance under the new laws do not necessarily lose their eligibility for medicaid. Because of this delinking of the two programs, Congress allocated funds to help states pay for the costs associated with ensuring that children and parents do not lose their Medicaid coverage as a result of the new laws. Of the $500 million in matching funds appropriated for this purpose most states have not availed themselves of these funds, even though the Federal portion is 17-90% of the cost of educating and identifying eligible families. Several studies have shown that the percentage of uninsured families among the poor has climbed since the enactment of welfare "reform."

Mississippi has availed itself of very little from these funds. Of the $6,617,604 allocated, our state government has used only $582,416. Considering the degree of poverty in our state and the consequent high level of eligibility here, the refusal to utilize these funds is highly questionable. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research organization and policy institute that conducts research and analysis on a range of government policies and programs has prepared a report on the underutilization of these funds. Read the report on our website.

Congress About to Radically Change Banking, Insurance and Security Businesses: Virtual Repeal of the Depression-Era Glass-Steagall Act. We Dissent.

10/23/99
The New York Times reported this morning that one of the major restrictions on financial institutions enacted in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression is about to fall. The White House and our corporate-dominated Congress had reached a compromise to allow the banking, insurance and securities firms to engage in each other's business. The bill allows them to combine.

We think that the bill is not only a bad idea; we think it is one more hard shove in the direction of economic disaster. Here are our reasons:

1. Conflict of Interest: The banking, insurance and securities business have different interests and different methodologies. Banks, for instance, are required to invest their depositors' funds in low risk ventures or securities. The opportunity of a bank as stockbroker to influence the market for securities in which the bank has taken a substantial position constitutes a conflict of interest with which no banker or stockbroker should be faced. The same goes for insurance companies. In addition, the temptation to shore up the price of securities or the financial position of companies in which a bank had invested is own assets by means of an unsound loan would be impossible to resist in many cases. Glass-Steagall prevented that from happening.

2. Financial fragility: The consolidation of the financial industry will create a few, very large, financial conglomerates. Because their size will give each of them a substantial share and control of the entire economy, these giants cannot be permitted to fail. Nothing is more dangerous to the public welfare than a business that cannot be allowed to fail. It cost the banking industry, and by extension, the depositors of those banks, many billions of dollars to bail out Long-Term Capital Management, an obscure hedge fund whose betting on currency exchange rate fluctuations went sour. The money was literally extorted; too many banks had huge positions in the fund. It was either bail out Long-term Capital or face a collapse of several major banks. And with the consolidation that has already taken place in the banking industry, the threat of general collapse simply could not be ignored. The New York Times, quoted Alan Greenspan testimony before the Congress thusly: "Had the failure of LTCM triggered the seizing up of markets, substantial damage could have been inflicted on many market participants, including some not directly involved in the firm, and could have potentially impaired the economies of many nations, including our own."

The history of the American banking system teaches one lesson again and again: given the slightest opportunity to speculate, American bankers will play fast and loose with their depositor's money. If the reader is sceptical of this statement, he or she is should remember the all-too-recent Savings and Loan scandal, which will ultimately cost the taxpayers in excess of $500 billion dollars. Repeal of Glass-Steagall will once again allow banks to invest in common stock, with all its hazards and risks, and thus to resume their follies, the consequences of which they barely escaped seventy years before.

3. Political Power: The consolidation of the financial industry has already increased the power of the financial sector over government policy. Still, the three sectors affected by the new bill have had differing interests and the balance of power has, up until now, made it impossible to enact legislation favored by only one or even two of these interests. Now there will be no opposition.

Persons of power in the financial sector have always tended to identify the good of the nation with the good of the financial sector, an illusion that has been productive of endless mischief throughout our history. In reality, the financial sector has promoted the welfare of a small minority of our nation's people: those with a great deal of property.

New Voices Needed In Coverage Of Budget Politics

10/02/99
Lost in the media's play-by-play are some grim facts. While leading Democrats and Republicans fire off more rhetorical salvos, neither of the warring parties wants to preserve even the current (woefully inadequate) level of social spending. Neither party even has the decency to insist that federal programs for low-income Americans be adjusted for inflation. An article by Norman Solomon on the Fairness and Accuracy in Media web site.

Why the Republican Tax Bill is a Scam: An answer to Paul Breazeale

8/16/99
On Sunday, August 8, 1999, the Clarion-Ledger featured a pro-con debate between CPA Paul Breazeale and Robert McElvaine over the Republican-sponsored tax bill. Breazeale, a local CPA, made extensive claims for the benefits of the bill. This article is an answer to Breazeale's screed. Read the article.

The Awful Truth About Welfare-to-Work and the Politicians Who Claim to be Family-Oriented

8/14/99
On the front page this morning, the Clarion-Ledger carried a story on a new aspect of the current welfare-to-work programs our Republican congressional representatives and our supposedly liberal Democratic president have served up to us. The sub-caption reads "Federal grant designed to make night, weekend work possible." The story explains that Hinds County, using a federal grant, will be able to provide extended child care for mothers to work nights and weekends. The purpose of the program is to move TANF recipients most at risk of long-term, 30 months or more, welfare dependency into unsubsidized jobs, according to Pat Neal, workforce development director for the Hinds County Board of Supervisors.

What does this mean? Simple. Now parents can work even longer hours at below subsistence wages without ever being bothered by the necessity of raising their children. The story featured an interview with one of the program beneficiaries, a 23-year old mother of two, who claims she will save $500 per month because the program will pay for a baby-sitter on the weekends.

During the last election cycle, we all heard much rhetoric about the importance of the family in the raising of healthy, well-adjusted children. I'm sitting here at my word processor trying to find some consistency between what is supposed to be a family-friendly policy and a public policy that deliberately forces parents to work at nights and on weekends in order to qualify for public assistance and further doing it with the explicit purpose of forcing them into unsubsidized employment within 30 months.

There was once a time when a person could , without frills or luxuries, support a family on the minimum wage, working an 8-hour day. At five one could leave work, return to one's home or apartment and enjoy a hot meal and the company of spouse, children, and friends. One could attend church on Sunday morning. Now, in this new, more "efficient" economy, that's no longer possible for the less educated, less well-connected, worker, even though his or her productivity has risen consistently since those more "liberal, welfare-state" days.

What gives?

What really gives is totally obscured by the fallacy of the right: the lie that  we have no choice;

• that the laws of economics require that we dismantle the social safety net;
• that long-term responsibility towards the needs of our less-fortunate citizens is contrary to the iron laws of the marketplace;
• that employers have no responsibility to their employees other then paying them the smallest wages and the least benefits possible;
• that employing persons at below-subsistence pay is not, in reality, a subsidy to the inefficient employer, who foists off a part of his real costs upon his employees;
• ultimately, it is the fallacy that morality is determined by the market place - that what is right is determined by a contract arrived at between seller and buyer without regard to the difference in economic power between the two or the effect of the transaction upon the welfare of anyone or everyone. In other words, it is the fallacy that morality is whatever the wealthy and powerful say it is.

It is a flight from responsibility.

The convoluted welfare-to-work program is in reality a disguised subsidy to employers of cheap labor. By thrusting more workers into the labor pool, the system insures that workers who demand higher wages can easily be replaced by workers who will work for any wage, no matter how low. The Republican Party has historically supported large immigration quotas for exactly the same reason: the presence of desperate workers keeps down wages.

If you don't believe that, look carefully at the words of Mr. Greenspan, our revered chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who makes no secret of the fact that as soon as unemployment diminishes to the point that wages start to go up, he will promptly raise interest rates, causing the demand for goods and services to slacken with the shrinking of the money supply, with the result that workers will be laid off. As workers lose their jobs, the pool of the unemployed will increase, and the threat of unemployment will keep the remaining workers subdued and afraid to ask for more money. The fact that they have become far more productive over the past 20 years and that the owners of capital are literally rolling in money from record profits is never a reason why mere workers should share in a portion of the bounty they have helped create.

More about this later.

Aids, South Africa and Al Gore

8/10/99
It's hard to believe. South Africa suffers with an epidemic of AIDS to the degree that caring for all the patients with medicines produced by the major pharmaceutical manufactures is prohibitively expensive. In response to this crisis, the South African government in 1977 passed an act allowing local companies to produce the drug in generic form at a reasonable price. A fixed wholesale price was to be paid to the patent holders, which would have reduced their profits in South Africa by as much as 90%, but would have saved countless lives, particularly the lives of babies in their mothers' wombs.

The pharmaceutical industry, sensing a threat to its monopoly, sued the South African government in court for infringement of intellectual property rights. They also lobbied heavily with Washington. Vice President Al Gore was the spearhead for negotiations with the South African government. Gore has been unyielding in his support of the pharmaceutical industry, to the extent that South Africa has been placed on the list of countries suspected of infringing on U. S. patentholder's rights. If the South African courts uphold the statue, severe sanctions could be brought against South Africa.

Now let me get this straight: a massive epidemic has swept South Africa and the vice president of the United States, a recipient of massive political campaign contributions from the pharmeceutical industry, is determined to insure that those infected people will die, because, although the medicines can be manufactured for a fraction of the retail price, the profits of the patent holders must be preserved at all costs. Thus spake Al.

Shall I put it a third time even more bluntly? Let me try: in the New World Order, of which Mr. Gore is a willing and feckless servant, profits come before human lives--even millions of human lives.

And this, even when the rules of the World Trade Organization, one of the primary instruments of the New World Order, allow for South Africa's action in fighting AIDS. Patent laws may be waived under those rules in the case of a national emergency, cases of extreme urgency, or where there are no profit motives. Certainly, South Africa action qualifies for this waiver.

Further Reading on South Africa and AIDS:

AIDS/South Africa page on the web site of the Consumer Project on Technology A wealth of documentary material on the controversy.

From the Guardian (UK): Gore accused of working against cheap Aids drugs (free, but registration required)

How Well Does Mississippi Treat Its Children?

8/8/99
By way of comparison, in the Republic of Cuba the infant mortality rate in children under one year of age reached its lowest rate ever with 7.1 per 1 thousand in 1998. That's a rate of .71%, folks. Cuba has not only shamed Mississippi but slightly bested the United States average, in spite of a crippling embargo. We have no excuse whatever. None.

8/4/99 (To make sense of this read the August 3 article below first)
By comparing the statistics in the 1999 Kids Count Data Book by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to the CRC figures, the author discovered two mistakes in CRC's copying of the statistics: the infant mortality for both Missouri and Mississippi were one decimal place too small; the actual figures were 10 times as much as CRC used to compute its averages. Contact the editor at editor@jacksonprogressive.com for the actual spreadsheets.

It makes sense. There is a strong positive correlation between the teen birth rate and infant mortality as well as child poverty and infant mortality. Missisippi, in particular, has extremely high child poverty and teen birth rate; a low infant mortality rate is highly improbable, and indeed, does not exist. On the contrary, it is shamefully high. When the corrections are factored into the calculations, Mississippi ranks 44th, rather than 42nd or 32nd.

A society that tolerates 30% child poverty and an infant mortality rate of 1.1% when the national averages are 18.7% and .73%, respectively, has its priorities in the wrong place. Moreover, any  nation that tolerates such conditions in the midst of the longest economic boom in its history has unquestionabley fallen into a moral stupor.

It evokes that famous passage from Dicken's A Christmas Carol:

'At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,' said the gentleman, taking up a pen, 'it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.'

'Are there no prisons?' asked Scrooge.

'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again. 'And the Union workhouses?' demanded Scrooge. 'Are they still in operation?'

'They are. Still,' returned the gentleman, 'I wish I could say they were not.'

'The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?' said Scrooge.

'Both very busy, sir.'

'Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,' said Scrooge. 'I'm very glad to hear it.'

'Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,' returned the gentleman, 'a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink. and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?'

'Nothing!' Scrooge replied.

'You wish to be anonymous?'

'I wish to be left alone,' said Scrooge. 'Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned -- they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'

'Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'

'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that.'

'But you might know it,' observed the gentleman.

'It's not my business,' Scrooge returned. 'It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!'

Have we become a nation of Scrooges? Here is the revised ranking of the states:

August 3, 1999

On July 27, the Children's Rights Council released its ranking of states by how well they treated their children. According to the CRC, the top ten states were: Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maryland, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Iowa, in that order. Mississippi ranked 42nd on the list, ahead of Arkansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and the District of Columbia. The results, the numbers from which they were computed and the sources of those numbers are at http://www.vix.com/crc/bestStates.html.

I have a confession to make: I am a numbers junkie. When I saw those tables of numbers, I couldn't wait to pop them into a spreadsheet and play with them to see just how the rankings were arrived at. CRC's procedure was simple: take the same ten relevant statistics of each state, average them, and rank the states in the order of their averages. Since all the statistics were "bad" statistics, things that you don't want for your children, the states with the lowest scores treat their children the best. It sounds like a reasonable procedure.

Then I started looking at the numbers themselves. The first thing that I noticed was that in some categories, all the numbers were higher than in other categories. For instance, the average rate of abuse/neglect for all the states was .0110, whereas the average rate of non-immunization at age 2 was .2135 and the average infant mortality rate was .0070. When you add these three figures together, the differences between states in non-immunization swamps the differences in abuse/neglect and infant mortality. It doesn't make sense that non-immunization should be twenty times more important that abuse or mortality, but the statistics with the bigger numbers clearly had more weight than the others.

So as you might guess, I manipulated the numbers to come up with another, "improved," set of rankings. To do this, I converted them all to t-scores, using a method that not only takes into account the size of the numbers but also the spread. When a statistic was marked "not available" I fudged by putting the t-score of that statistic at 50, the mean. Adding the t-scores, I arrived at a ranking of states that resembles the original list, but with some striking exceptions. And, you guessed it, Mississippi went from 42nd in the nation to 32nd. This may not qualify us for bragging status, but it sure beats 42nd.

Mississippi stands out in its extraordinarily low infant mortality rate, bested only by Massachusetts and Missouri. The two factors which pulled Mississippi towards the bottom of the list are our shamefully high rate of children in poverty (30%) and our teen birth rate (7.55%).

Below are the states with the revised rankings. CRC's news release is at http://www.vix.com/crc/bestStates.html

        --Tom Lowe