Why Trump Must be Made to Pay for His Crimes

 Many of us have experienced in our lifetimes two instances of presidents who were so corrupt that they deserved removal from office.  Richard Nixon was forced to resign rather than being impeached as eventually a bipartisan conclusion was reached that his secret machinations were intolerable.  Donald Trump, whose dastardly machinations were mostly public—and proudly proclaimed—was ultimately the more dangerous to our nation, yet he received approval from one of our two political parties and almost half the population.  What has happened to us in the intervening period?  Fintan O’Toole considers that question in Democracy’s Afterlife: Trump,the GOP, and the rise of zombie politics, an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books.

When Nixon left office there was a general feeling that the nation had survived a difficult and dangerous time and could now look forward to a return to a normalcy.

“In 1974 upon his inauguration as president, just half an hour after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford declared, ‘My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.’ He implied that the lawlessness and derangement of Nixon’s presidency, laid bare in the Watergate scandal, had been more traumatic for the United States even than the violence of the Vietnam War, its wounds ‘more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.’ Yet he also suggested that Nixon’s departure had left the country in a good place: ‘Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.’ With its institutions intact, the US could quickly return to its natural condition of mutual benevolence: ‘Let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate’.”

But Nixon went away.  Trump will never go away.  He was terrible as a businessman.  He found his calling as an entertainer: he could play a businessman on television.  He loved it and made a lot of money doing it.  The same emotions make him love being president: empowerment of role and the adulation of his fans.  He’s addicted.  He can turn this lost election into a victory by convincing his fans that he only lost because of a deep conspiracy against him.  He couldn’t quite defeat the conspirators in his first term, but give him another chance and surely he will.  Trump will continue to poison our national life as long as he can draw a breath.

“In this frame of mind, there can never be a result of the 2020 election. One thing we can be sure of is that for Trump and his followers there are not five stages of grief, leading from denial to acceptance. The furthest their sense of it can go is to the second stage, anger. Just as there is ‘long Covid,’ there is long Trump. The staying power of his destructiveness lies in the way that disputed defeat suits him almost as much as victory. It vindicates the self-pity that he has encouraged among his supporters, the belief that everything is rigged against them, that the world is a plot to steal from them their natural due as Americans.

“If Trump is eventually removed from the Oval Office, the study of revenge and immortal hate, not sober self-criticism, will be the response in Trumpworld. There will be no chastening, just a further injection of resentment and conspiracy-mongering.”

What Trump has accomplished is to capture a Republican Party that was morphing into something disgusting and accelerate its transformation into something which is an existential threat to the nation we have assumed ourselves to be. 

“This is zombie politics—the life-after-death of a former conservative party. And as Gothic stories tell us, it is very hard to kill the undead. One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. This reality has to be recognized, and a crucial aspect of that recognition is to accept that the claim Ford could make in 1974—'Our Constitution works’—no longer applies. After the long national nightmare of Watergate, America could rub its eyes and awaken to a renewed confidence in its system of checks and balances.” 

“But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump’s admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen.”

“There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.”

Biden has a problem on his hands.  It is his duty to protect our country from any invaders or others who would do us harm.  Trump, as the effective head of the Republican Party, has every intent to do us harm.  What should Biden do about it?  What can Biden do about it?  He is said to have claimed that he did not want to spend his term in office running after Trump.  He does not have a choice. 

“The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy.”

“As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump.” 

It seems Biden must somehow induce the Republican Party to return to obeying democratic principles and stop aiding and assisting in fomenting the political hatred that exists today between the two parties; or, he must so discredit Trump that Republican legislators will be too embarrassed  to associate with him.  With Trump’s long history of ethical, moral, and legal transgressions, the latter path seems the most promising.  Consider his hourly complaints about fraud in our election systems.  It is a crime to provide false information about a supposed crime.  That might be a fruitful place to start.

 

Democracy’s Demise: The End of Majority Rule

The term democracy is used broadly.  Given that this is being written in the weeks after the presidential election of 2020 and Donald Trump still clings to power attempting to disenfranchise sections of voters in order to overturn the will of the people and remain in office, a relevant definition of democracy can be a system in which elections are held in which essentially universal suffrage exists.  An essay by Rana Dasgupta titled The Silenced Majority appeared in Harper’s Magazine making the case that such democracies are currently in a perilous state. 

Dasgupta tells us we must reexamine our history in order to understand our current status, and when we do that, we will discover that democracy is a fairly recent development that originated from a specific set of conditions.  Further, the era in which democracy thrived is unraveling and reverting to a more oligarchic era when input from the masses of citizens was neither wanted nor needed.  There were very few instances of what we have called democracy until the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.  For most of recorded history, political power was derived from wealth, which usually meant property in the form of land.  In the latter centuries, financial instruments and physical capital would be added to the property of the wealthy.  Given this history, a society’s practices were dominated by the wishes of the property owners: protect our private property no matter what.  Such an attitude would favor restriction of suffrage to only property owners. 

For most of history the laboring class was diffuse and spread out in small agricultural or craft activities.  That would change with the advent of industrialization.  The laboring class was now collected into significant groups and placed in a position of complete dependence on their wages for income.  This naturally led to confrontations between laborers and business owners.   The property owners had control of the state and used its police powers to eliminate collective action by the workers.  However, the workers would persist and gradually, over decades, begin to share some of the power of the property owners.  Dasgupta considers first the British experience. 

“The supremacy of property was disrupted, from the 1780s onward, by the rise of a competing world principle of labor. The most stupendous product of the Industrial Revolution was the working class itself. Working people were organized into futuristic battalions, and their unprecedented productive power became the central driver of the global economy. They were also forced, from the outset, into political activism—for while agriculturalists, in difficult times, might wheedle some extra bounty from nature, factory workers relied solely on their wages, and every additional penny had to be wrested from owners’ profits. The Combination Act of 1799 attempted to prevent collective bargaining, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Labor became politically formidable, and property lost its stranglehold. The first significant electoral expansion was enacted in 1832: ‘to prevent,’ in the words of the prime minister, ‘the necessity of revolution’.” 

“But conflict was endemic. Ordinary people had known the state’s most savage cruelty, and its self-preserving entreaties rang hollow. Well into the twentieth century, many believed the only lasting cure for the state’s partiality to property owners was proletarian revolution: workers must take over the state apparatus and divert its purpose from that of property protection. In fear of such a prospect, governments made further concessions—it was just after the Bolshevik Revolution that Britain lifted most of its last restrictions on adult suffrage—but this only moved class war into the democratic arena. Over the course of the twentieth century, left-wing politicians and labor unions sought revolution by electoral means. And their activism on issues of employment and wages caused domestic contradictions to spill out across the world.” 

It would only be after World War II that a relative peace would descend upon the land. 

“Only after the Second World War would Britain’s two economies finally merge. With global property holdings and the international trading system in ruins, all Western European states constructed comprehensive national economies: national capital combined with national labor steered by national social democracy. Even the former ‘leisured classes’ now needed jobs, and with Western labor at its peak value, and growth touching 6 percent, industriousness became the basis for social participation. There was broad, cross-class consent for a historically anomalous formula—full employment, inflated salaries, high taxes, endless consumption, and generous public subsidies.” 

Workers were needed and thus had political power, and this sharing of power worked for a while.  However, the US would exert its postwar influence and encourage a “capitalism friendly” attitude.

“…European states continued their protection of private property, markets remained open, and socialist demands for fundamental changes to the structure of ownership were edged out.”

The US inherited British customs and produced an antidemocratic Constitution with the twist that the property to be protected included slaves.  Expansion of voting rights often required the awkward and difficult act of amending the Constitution.  Labor would gradually gain power withstanding the violence involved as in Britain, but the labor movement would never acquire the political status it attained there because of the racism baked into US society.  A labor movement required all workers to participate.  But the white workers were loath to consider black workers as equals.  The issue would doom unionization in many of the former slave states and create home grown nonunion competition in large parts of the nation.  Voter exclusion was common for blacks and other minorities—and still is.

“But white inclusion was the priority: it was crucial for administrators that white working-class activists, who had brought business to its knees in the 1930s, should not join forces with their black counterparts. Even Lyndon Johnson made clear how much the American democratic balance depended on such manipulation: ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.’ Though disenfranchisement of African Americans was officially outlawed in 1965, the Supreme Court soon endorsed felony disenfranchisement, which by the time of the 2016 election barred more than six million mostly non-white Americans from voting. If there was ever a heyday of American democracy, it was recent and short-lived.”

The postwar years of prosperity and relative equality could not last.  There were too many who yearned to return to the good old nineteenth century days where real money could be made without the worry of labor issues and state regulation.  Democracy must be contained if not ended.  The eternal threat that the masses could choose to distribute wealth and property must be eliminated.  The possibility of a worker class that might organize and vote coherently must be rendered impossible.  This could be accomplished by reinstituting the nineteenth century model for a globalized economy.  Middle class jobs would be sent to low-wage lands, particularly manufacturing plants where union organizing was easiest.  Moving production to distant lands allowed companies also to escape the health and safety regulations that protected the masses but ate into the profits of the owners of capital.

“The cross-class accord of the national economy, fragile and partial though it was, is often held up as the authentic manifestation of American civilization. But neoliberal ideologues—such as Friedrich von Hayek and his Chicago disciples—still dreamed of liberating capital from the clutches of national politics, restoring nineteenth-century internationalism, and undoing the labor-friendly aberrations that had been institutionalized by the New Deal. America’s golden age was for them a dark age—so they drew up plans for revolution. In the 1970s, those plans came out of the drawer. Today, after five decades of political, financial, and technological transformation, the American empire no longer tolerates national economic containers. The structure of the economy has resumed what we might call its more normal (i.e., transnational) guise. As a result, the principle of property is once again supreme and the principle of labor is in retreat.”

“The most visible consequence of this change is financial inequality. The incomes of the bottom 50 percent of workers have shown little increase over the past forty years; most men in this group earn less now than in 1980. Incomes at the ninetieth percentile, meanwhile, have increased by nearly 40 percent in the same time (and by more for white people), while for the top 1 percent the figure is 157 percent.”

The net result is that jobs for the working class have not disappeared.  Rather, as each job classification has been diminished in number it has been replaced by a lower wage service position.  But that is only the beginning.  One began worrying that jobs would be lost to robots—and some are—but the real threat to the dignity and stability of work is coming from the tech industry.  Real jobs will be eliminated by algorithmic advances or replaced by “gig work” where workers get to participate in the act of eliminating job security and benefits, and compete with each other to drive wages ever lower. 

“Silicon Valley will not simply destroy the jobs on which the industrious society was built. It will corrode and negate the principle of labor. It will do this in part by establishing unpaid, uncontracted labor as a social norm.”

“This social norm is spreading: the U.S. Department of Labor recently relaxed restrictions on unpaid work, while the frequent talk of a universal basic income concedes that work can no longer provide the basis for social participation. The principle of labor is ebbing fast.”

A platform such as Facebook has the tools available to suppress or enhance political participation, bully people its owners don’t like, destroy competition, and promote themes as they wish.  The fact that some restraint has been exhibited does not mean it will always be there.  And how long will it be before someone with ignoble intentions takes control of such a tool?

“’I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ Peter Thiel, Trump’s principal advocate in Silicon Valley, once wrote in a techno-libertarian manifesto. ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism’.” 

“Such thinking required things to break, and Trump came into power as a wrecking ball, a role for which his celebrity and vulgarity qualified him well. He created a ‘populist’ alliance of financial elites with anxious masses, and he sought to uproot the latter from their last remaining expectations of material advancement—converting them instead to a parallel system of immaterial consolations and rewards. Traditional solutions for disenfranchisement and postindustrial grief were closed off; the only currency the president now dispensed was violent sensation. Trump vowed to protect ‘good’ Americans from an ever-expanding range of scapegoats: rich people, poor people, gay people, black people, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, women, scientists, intellectuals, Democrats, politicians, CNN, the New York Times, hackers, vandals, hoodlums, agitators, terrorists, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Europe, Canada, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and many more. Race was particularly important, of course. The major economic process of the moment, after all, transferred mass prosperity from the West to Asia—the first significant interruption to white-supremacist world organization in centuries, which disrupted the carefully managed racial hierarchies on which American democracy was built. Trump’s apoplectic assaults on China and his colonial attitudes toward Africa offered many white people the hope that he might preserve the old symbolic order, and so supply a most traditional consolation for the heartlessness of twenty-first-century neoliberal depredation.”

Trump seems to have been successful at attacking and disabling the federal government and other democratic norms that we have assumed for generations.

“If less than half the U.S. population is now satisfied with democracy as a system, down from 75 percent in 1995, this is partly the result of Trump’s determined effort to present it as a liability to the MAGA endeavor: it was subject to fraud, it was infiltrated by foreigners, it gave a voice to unpatriotic Americans.”

Workers gained the vote and political influence at times when they threatened the ruling oligarchy, or when the oligarchy recognized that it needed them.  Dasgupta tells us we must recognize that there no longer is anything remotely like a working class capable of formulating an agenda and defending it.

“Industrial employment has largely been replaced with what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” and the bottom 50 percent are drifting back to their preindustrial condition: dispersed, politically and spiritually weak, on the periphery. Millions of Americans dull the pain with prescription opioids. Seventy thousand die every year from drug overdoses, most of them in states where endless propaganda advises them to solve their problems with guns and credit cards.”

“But the shift won’t be reversed: the system can no longer afford Western production, and even America’s poor are dependent on the subsidy of cheap Asian labor to maintain their precarious consumer status. Along with debt, of course. U.S. consumers have incurred nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt, $1.5 trillion in student loans, another $1.3 trillion in auto debt, and almost $10 trillion in mortgages.”

If the nation’s workers are not in a position to represent themselves effectively, they become, at best, pawns in the electoral games; at worst, they become irrelevant and the business elite will find it convenient to nullify any role for them.  It is democracy itself and majority rule that are at stake.  Republicans, representing the oligarchy, have spent decades trying to suppress voting and have admitted that democracy is “inconvenient.”  The Constitution has provided them the tools with which to form a permanent minority ruling party.  What we have in our future is nothing less than a war between those who favor democracy and majority rule and those who do not.

“Eighteenth-century Britain could not afford democracy. Today, as the economy reverts to a similar structure, America is encountering the same problem. It is difficult to carry out a mass economic expulsion, after all, while everyone has a vote. And it will not be possible indefinitely to suppress those left-wing voices demanding that the state abandon its raison d’être and serve, not property and empire, but American citizens themselves. The stakes, in other words, could not be higher: if the present order is to continue, an almighty war must take place in U.S. politics.”

The Democratic Party is ruled by a professional and educational elite.  The Republican Party is ruled by a business elite.  The Democrats preach democracy and appeal to the best instincts of the masses.  The Republicans preach oligarchy and appeal to the worst instincts of the masses.  Thus far, the Republicans appear to have the better strategy.  The Democrats must do better.

Dasgupta finishes with this grim realization.

“The neoliberal revolution aimed to restore the supremacy of capital after its twentieth-century subjugation by nation-states, and it has succeeded to an astonishing degree. As states compete and collude with gargantuan new private powers, a new political world arises. The principle of labor, which dominated the twentieth century—producing the industrious, democratic society we have come to regard, erroneously, as the norm—is once again being supplanted by a principle of property, the implications and consequences of which we know only too well from our history books.”

“The real political battle in America today is not between a ‘liberal’ left and a ‘fascist’ right. It is between the people and a grandiose private system of social, economic, and political management that has the power to bring to an end the democratic certainties on which Americans have come to rely. If we wish to preserve those certainties, we will have to do a lot more than remove Donald Trump”

 

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Eliminating the National Debt with a Keystroke: Modern Monetary Theory

Stephanie Kelton has become a spokesperson for an insurgent group of economists who are propagating the notion that most current economists do not understand the nature of money and have been causing the United States and other countries unnecessary grief.  These people refer to their viewpoint as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  If MMT is correct, the United States and other countries become free to direct the necessary funds to battle poverty, unemployment, the coronavirus pandemic and global warming.  A new economic era is created.  What could be more important than resolving the applicability of MMT.  Kelton defends this theory and its consequences in her recent book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy.

The United States and a few other countries have complete monetary sovereignty.  That is, they spend, tax, and borrow in a currency that does not need to be converted into some other quantity such as gold or some other currency.  Such money is referred to as a fiat currency. 

“The main arguments that I present apply to any monetary sovereign—countries like the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, and others—where the government is the monopoly issuer of a fiat currency.  MMT changes how we view our politics and economics by showing that in almost all instances federal deficits are good for the economy.  They are necessary.  And the way we have thought about them and treated them is often incomplete and inaccurate.” 

“The taxpayer, according to the conventional view, is at the center of the monetary universe because of the belief that the government has no money of its own.  Therefore, the only money available to fund the government must ultimately come from people like us.  MMT radically changes our understanding by recognizing that it is the currency issuer—the federal government itself—not the taxpayer, that finances all federal expenditures.  Taxes are important for other reasons that I will explain in this book.  But the idea that taxes pay for what the government spends is pure fantasy.” 

The underpinnings for MMT are very old.  Perhaps so old that they have long faded from modern economic textbooks, but they have not been forgotten by historians and anthropologists.  When Kelton was still a graduate student, she encountered a book titled Soft Currency Economics by Warren Mosler, who was not an economist by training, but an investor.  His main point was that economists misunderstood the relationship between governmental taxing and spending.  Governments don’t tax in order to be able to spend, they spend in order to tax.  That notion requires a bit of explaining and Kelton initially was not buying it, but she would eventually see the light. 

“Warren [Mosler] saw things that most economists were missing.  To many of us his ideas sounded completely original, but most weren’t.  They were only new to us.  It turns out they could be found (and we found them) in canonical texts, like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or in John Maynard Keynes’s two-volume classic, A Treatise on Money.  Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others had long ago arrived at similar conclusions about the nature of money and the role of taxes, but the economics profession largely lagged behind.”

“Taxes are there to create a demand for government currency.  The government can define the currency in terms of its own unique unit of account—a dollar, a yen, a pound, a peso—and then give value to its otherwise worthless paper by requiring it in payment of taxes or other obligations.  As Mosler jokes, ‘Taxes turn litter into currency.’  At the end of the day, a currency-issuing government wants something real, not something monetary.  It’s not our tax money the government wants.  It’s our time.  To get us to produce things for the state, the government invents taxes or other kinds of payment obligations.  This isn’t the explanation you will find in most economics textbooks, where a superficial story about money being invented to overcome the inefficiencies associated with bartering—trading goods without the use of money—is preferred.” 

Kelton provided an example of how this relationship between money and taxes works, but we will consider another example, one provided by David Graeber (an anthropologist) in his book Debt:The First 5,000 Years.  One of Graeber’s concerns was understanding how money and money-driven markets came to originate.  He points out that there is no evidence of a classical barter economy ever existing.  Consider a small kingdom or a domain ruled by a lord.  There would be an economy based on exchange by gifting.  If someone needed something possessed by another, the other, if possible, would provide the goods as a gift with the understanding that the person in need would return the favor with a roughly equivalent gift.  Peer pressure would help keep such exchanges satisfactory to both participants.  Barter was viewed as a path to perdition because the temptation to try to get the better of the deal would be too great.  The peasants of this entity would conduct their business in this manner and give some portion of what was produced to the ruler as tribute.

Now suppose this leader decided he wanted to maintain a squad of soldiers to protect his lands or to attack a neighbor.  These soldiers would have nothing to contribute to the local peasants yet must be supported with food and supplies.  A clever way to promote this trade would be to issue to the soldiers a supply of objects with no intrinsic value.  They would attain value when the lord issued a tax on the peasants requiring them to provide the lord with some number of these valueless objects.  With the imposition of the tax, the objects acquired a value and forced the peasants to exchange goods with the soldiers in order to acquire the number of objects needed to pay their tax.  Instantly a form of money, a fiat currency, was created along with a market in which goods could be valued and exchanged.  The tax was a way to guide the behavior of the lord’s subjects. If the lord decided he needed a larger number of soldiers, he would acquire them and produce more objects to give them for exchange.  Note that for the system to work, the peasants must have the capability to produce enough to satisfy the needs of the soldiers.  If the number of soldiers became too great for the economy to support, the extra objects possessed by the soldiers could not buy more produce.  Rather, these excess objects would produce what we moderns call inflation: too much money seeking too few products. 

This example illustrates essentially how a currency-issuing country like the United States actually operates.  It issues fiat money backed by nothing but the requirement that it must be used to pay taxes.  The amount of money that the country can create and place in the economy is only limited by the desire to avoid inflation, because inflation is itself the indication that the government is driving the economy, by spending or injecting more money, to produce more goods than it is capable of producing.

As currency issuer, the lord can increase the money supply simply by producing more of the objects and distributing them.  In a modern country like the US the Fed would merely make an entry in a bank account in order to create money.  Money is created all the time.  Every time a loan is issued by a bank, there is no money transferred from a reserve account to that of a user.  An account is merely created and the bank records that there is a certain amount of funds in that account.  More money has come into existence.

Getting back to the ancient lord, things would become more complicated if he wished to exchange goods with another lord using his objects as currency.  In order to use them in this manner he would have to replace his object by something recognized be his partner as having value.  Hence, we get coins with precious metals included in order to provide something of universal value.  This notion of tying the value of money to precious metals would persist until Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. 

We, and nations such as Britain and Japan are issuers of fiat money and have what Kelton refers to as currency sovereignty.  All have currencies that are accepted around the world at a stable value.  All are producing what we misguidedly refer to as a “deficit” and are doing well.  But they could be doing even better if they created more money and ran larger deficits.  We seem to have learned the wrong lessons from all those years on the gold standard. 

The proponents of MMT are trying to reeducate people about the true nature of money.  The consequences of their viewpoint are enormous.  National debt is just an accounting item.  Balancing the federal budget is a very harmful waste of time.  Spending should be at the level required to provide what society needs.  The implications are enormous.  Consider Kelton’s chapter on the national debt.  She begins with this statement. 

“The national debt poses no financial burden whatsoever.” 

To pay any interest on the national debt, the Federal Reserve merely produces a credit to whatever account it is due.  These transfers are tallied by tradition, but they have no economic impact.  The issuing of bonds in a value equal to the deficit spending of government is also a tradition.  Its main economic impact is that it provides a means of controlling interest rates.  Kelton suggests that the Fed could buy back all the bonds issued as easily as it pays the interest on them, with little if any adverse effects. If the Fed were to credit the value of the bond to the account of each bond holder it would merely be exchanging non-interest-earning dollars for interest-earning dollars.  The net wealth of the bondholders would be unchanged, but the interest earned would disappear.  There would be no new surge of excess dollars into the economy.  The loss of income would be slightly deflationary. 

How can two such different economic viewpoints exist within a discipline which likes to refer to itself as a science?  If MMT is correct, and I have begun to think it is, then we must begin to act accordingly.  Otherwise, there is no way we will ever be able to deal with the situations in which we find ourselves.

 

Nature vs Nurture, Biology vs Culture: Refighting Old Battles

 The manner in which we humans comport ourselves can be influenced both by biological factors (nature) and by cultural factors (nurture).  At various times it has been argued that one or the other is decidedly dominant.  More usually, it is recognized that we are influenced by both factors, but the argument over which is dominant, and by how much, seems to go on.  A recent book by Charles King provides an interesting history of the various contentions as they existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.  The subtitle promises a lot—and King does not disappoint. 

The central characters in this tale are Franz Boas, one of the prime movers in the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline, and four women he mentored as students and researchers: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.  It was unusual at that time to encounter one woman performing cutting edge research, let alone accumulating four.  And Hurston was an African-American woman, while Deloria was of Native-American descent.

Mead was probably the best known, partially because of her publications and partly because she outlived the others.  She was also the most intriguing because of her complex sex life.  She would make a name for herself living among Samoans, ultimately resulting in “Coming of Age in Samoa.”  Boas had sent her out there with this goal:

“…the first serious attempt to enter into the mental attitude of a group in a primitive society.” 

Mead would make her voyage on a ship called the “Sonoma.”  To make sure the reader realized that she was not a typical female of the time, he included this aside.

“On board Sonoma was a twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, slight but square built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis, with a broken ankle and a chronic ailment that sometimes rendered her right arm useless.  She had left behind a husband in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman.” 

Ruth Benedict would be the Boas student who would go on to be his right-hand woman in co-mentoring students, organizing research initiatives, and performing research of her own.  She was a sometimes lover of Margaret Mead and always a dear friend.  She would be best known for her very popular books “Patterns of Culture” and “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”

Zora Hurston never became a full-time student, but she did participate in research suggested by Boas and also pursued her own initiatives.  Given her heritage, she was mostly involved in work among the blacks of the American South, and Caribbean peoples.  Her most interesting accomplishment was to be the first person to photograph a real, live, undead zombie.  Her efforts would produce the book “Mules and Men,” but she would ultimately become best known as a writer with her most famous work being the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Deloria was fluent in English and in several major Native-American dialects.  One of the major anthropological thrusts was to capture what could be learned of Indian cultures.  The difficulty was that those cultures had long been corrupted by interactions with the whites.  Deloria played the important role of trying to verify cultural descriptions that had already been published and trying to capture evolving Indian cultures as they existed at the current time.

When Boas concluded that he would become an anthropologist, the meaning of that word was still being defined.  The major activity in the field was called anthropometry.  It was believed that by measuring physical characteristics, mainly cranial shape and size, one could determine characteristics that could be associated with race, intelligence, criminality, stages of evolution and so forth.  Boas soon concluded that this was nonsense. 

“The idea of a natural ranking of human types shaped everything: school and university curricula, court decisions and policing strategies, health policy and popular culture, the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. colonial administrators in the Philippines, as well as their equivalents in Britain, France, Germany, and many other empires, countries, and territories.  The poor were poor because of their own inadequacies.  Nature favored the robust colonizer over the benighted native.  Differences in physical appearance, customs, and language were reflections of a deeper innate otherness.  Progressives, too, accepted these ideas, adding only that it was possible, with enough missionaries, teachers, and physicians on hand, to eradicate primitive and unnatural practices and replace them with enlightened ways.  That was why America’s foremost periodical on world politics and international relations, published since 1922 and now the influential Foreign Affairs, was originally called The Journal of Race Development. 

People were coming up with hypotheses and then looking for data that would prove the hypotheses correct.  This was a dangerous perversion of the scientific method that allows biases to render research valueless.  Boas would insist, and drill into his students, that the data be accumulated first—and then you attempt to form a hypothesis.  Their research would provide a basis for greater equality among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and economic classes.  If only nations would have accepted what their science had told them.

“Real, evidence-driven analysis, they believed, would overturn one of modernity’s most deeply held principles: that science will tell us which individuals and groups are naturally smarter, abler, more upstanding, and fitter to rule.  Their response was that science pointed in precisely the opposite direction, toward a theory of humanity that embraces all the many ways we humans have devised for living.  The social categories into which we typically divide ourselves, including labels such as race and gender, are at base artificial—the products of human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society.  We are cultural animals, they claimed, bound by rules of our own making, even if those rules are often invisible or taken for granted by the societies that craft them.”

“The belief that our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones has a powerful allure, especially when expressed in the language of science, rationality, religion, or tradition.  All societies are predisposed to see their own traits as achievements and others’ as shortcomings.  But the core message of the Boas circle was that, in order to live intelligently in the world, we should view the lives of others through an empathetic lens.  We ought to suspend our judgement about other ways of seeing social reality until we really understand them, and in turn we should look at our own society with the same dispassion and skepticism with which we study far-flung peoples.”

Boas and his group called the type of research they performed cultural anthropology and their basic theory cultural relativity or cultural relativism.

“For nearly a century their critics have accused them of everything from justifying immorality to chipping away at the foundations of civilization itself.  Today, cultural relativism is usually listed among the enemies of tradition and good behavior, along with such terms as postmodernism and multiculturalism.  The work of the Boas circle makes appearances as bugbears and objects of derision in conservative media and on alt-right websites, among campaigners against diversity programs and political correctness, and on such lists as ‘Ten Books that Screwed Up the World.’  How can we make any judgements about right and wrong, critics ask, if everything is relative to the time, place, and context in which our judgements occur?” 

The Boas group helped to eliminate some of the worst abuses of science, but it is difficult to assess the extent of their influence on the course of events.  World War II was quite an event.  The scientific dispute continues over the roles of biology and culture.  Louis Menand wrote on this issue in a review of King’s book that appeared in The New Yorker: How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity.  The title of the paper version in the magazine was The Looking Glass and began with this lede: “Are we at the end of the nature-nurture debate?” 

“The new biologists are not like the scientists Boas did battle with in the early twentieth century. They agree with Boas that ‘man is one.’ But they think this means that there exists a single ‘human nature,’ and that the success or failure of different forms of social organization depends on how faithful they are to this species essence.”

“This has become almost the default mode of analysis among social and political commentators, who like to cite work by cognitive scientists, endocrinologists, and evolutionary psychologists. In the most reductive version of the new biologism, life is programmed, and culture is simply the interface. Even the social science that is most popular, like behavioral economics, is human-nature-based. Nurture is out.”

“And yet the issues on which Boas and Mead made their interventions, issues around race and gender, are now at the center of public life, and they bring all the nature-nurture confusion back with them. The focus of the conversation today is identity, and identity seems to be a concept that lies beyond both culture and biology. Is identity innate, or is it socially constructed? Is it fated, or can it be chosen or performed? Are our identities defined by the existing state of social relations, or do we carry them with us wherever we go?”

Menand then makes this comment. 

“Other species are programmed to ‘know’ how to cope with the world, but our biological endowment evolved to allow us to choose how to respond to our environment. We can’t rely on our instincts; we need an instruction manual. And culture is the manual.” 

Menand comes down on the side of culture, as do I, but he seems to have a serious misunderstanding of the biology of animals of which humans are only one example.  The reason we have the opportunity to select so many different ways to socialize is because the need to socialize has been so deeply ingrained in our biology—and the biology of many of the animals.  Evolution, long ago, provided the tools that allow us to get along almost no matter what situations we create for ourselves. 

Frans de Waal provided an enlightening examination of the similarities between us and some of our animal kin in his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.  A lower class of animal might survive with the instinct to bite anything it encounters.  Of course, some things will bite back or respond in other lethal ways.  What more advanced animals developed were emotions.  An emotion differs from an instinct because it causes no direct action.  What it does is prepare the body to take action and provides this higher order animal with the time to decide what is the best course of action.  Fear can be responded to with flight, fight, hide, or do nothing at all.  Four options are better than one. 

Emotions were designed to produce physical responses.  It was as though evolution decided that animals would get along better if they could understand the emotions of their neighbors.  Facial expressions tend to make our emotions apparent to an observer.  This knowledge is usually used for prosocial purposes, but antisocial behavior can follow should one specimen try to take advantage of the emotional state of another. 

Perhaps the most socially important emotion is empathy.  Empathy can be defined as the ability to interpret and share the feelings of another.  What de Vaal wishes to make perfectly clear is that the emotion of empathy is not restricted to humans, and that empathy is a physical phenomenon—our bodies are designed to participate in the process, and its activities often take place subconsciously.  One thing that research has established is that emotions are conveyed by facial expressions and animals are excellent at interpreting these signals, particularly within their own species.  Part of the mechanism of empathizing is the unconscious mimicking of observed expressions of another. 

Humans have a large number of facial muscles allowing it to produce an incredible number of very nuanced expressions.  Are humans unique in possessing such complex responses?  Perhaps, but not by much. 

“When a team of behavioral scientists and anthropologists finally tested the idea by carefully dissecting the faces of two dead chimpanzees, they found the exact same number of mimetic muscles as in the human face—and surprising few differences.” 

Scientists tell us that the human line evolved off the chimpanzee line 4-6 million years ago.  It is difficult to believe that both species evolved by developing the exact same facial musculature.  That capability to emote and presumably recognize emotion, must have developed long before the two species diverged. 

Nature really worked hard to provide us the tools for successful socializing.  But nowhere was there a rule describing how the tools should be used.  I agree with Menand’s final comment.

“Only we can tell us how to live. There is nothing that prevents us from deciding that the goal of life should be to be as unnatural as possible. ‘Human nature’ is just another looking glass.”

King anticipated that the nature-nurture arguments would continue by including a quote from the famous physicist Max Planck. 

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

 

Global Warming: The Scariest Warning Yet

 Much has been written about the hazards of continuing to burn fossil fuels and drive up the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, but few have dared to identify the end game should humans continue on their merry way.  Ultimately, global warming will trigger processes that release huge amounts of CO2 and methane from natural sources that are potentially larger than human emissions and a point of no return is reached.  What would that mean for mankind? 

Mark Lynas dares venture into such end-of-times scenarios in his book Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.  Lynas is a British journalist and activist who in 2007 produced a volume titled “Six Degrees.”  The current book was motivated by the need to update future projections with the results of the research that has been provided in recent years.  The dire title was generated by the recognition that just about all projections in the past have been superseded by ones indicating more rapid effects of global warming.  To make that point, Lynas provides this possible timeline. 

“If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so.  If we’re unlucky with positive feedbacks,,,from thawing permafrost in the artic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by the century’s end.”

A change of 1.0 degrees C is equal to 1.8 degrees F.  A temperature increase of 6 degrees C is then 10.8 F.  It might seem that a few degrees change in average temperature is too small to produce the effects predicted, but it is the change in the extent of the temperature extremes that is critical.  We are already experiencing deadly heat waves producing many thousands of deaths.  Some areas of Earth experience temperature and humidity combinations that are near the point where the human body can no longer maintain itself at a viable temperature.  A few more degrees at the extremes could render habitation impossible without air conditioning for all.  Climate scientists insist that higher temperatures will lead to more intense weather effects: more severe floods in areas threatened by floods and more severe droughts where they are now threats.  We, at only a bit over one degree C in change, are beginning to suspect that climate change is already upon us.  Some of our most important food crops are already at risk during heat waves in our current environment.  Adding a few degrees to the temperature extremes will make crop failures much more likely.  Increasing temperatures will decrease crop yields at a time when the planet’s population is still growing—not a promising trend.

George Keeling is the scientist who began measuring the CO2 concentration and demonstrating its seemingly inexorable growth.  Its time-dependence is referred to as the Keeling Curve.  For Lynas this data proves the ineffectiveness of humanity’s paltry efforts and sets the stage for what is to come.

“…the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, from roughly 1 ppm [parts per million] in the early years to about 2 ppm annually today.  There is no visible slowdown, no sudden downwards blip, to mark the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, still less 2009’s Copenhagen ‘two degrees’ commitment or the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015.  All those smiling heads of state shaking hands, the diplomats hugging on the podium after marathon sessions of all-night negotiating—none of that actually made any identifiable difference to the Keeling Curve, which is the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature.  All our solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries, LED lightbulbs, nuclear plants, biogas digesters, press conferences, declarations, pieces of paper; all our shouting and arguing, weeping and marching, reporting and ignoring, decrying and denying; all our speeches, movies, websites, lectures and books; our announcements, carbon-neutral targets, moments of joy and despair; none of these to date have so much as made the slightest dent in the steepening upward slope of the Keeling Curve.”

Combining the results of recent observational data and improved modeling with the lack of any effective human response, Lynas has no choice but to expect an accelerated progression to ever higher temperatures—and the consequences thereof.

“When I started writing this book I thought that we could probably survive climate change.  Now I am not so sure…we are already living in a world one degree warmer than that inhabited by our parents and grandparents.  Two degrees Celsius, which will stress human societies and destroy many natural ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs, looms on the near horizon.  At three degrees I now believe that the stability of human civilization will be seriously imperiled, while at four degrees a full-scale global collapse of human societies is probable, accompanied by a mass extinction of the biosphere that will be the worst on Earth for tens or even hundreds of million years.  By five degrees we will see massive positive feedbacks coming into play, driving further warming and climate impacts so extreme that they will leave most of the globe biologically uninhabitable, with humans reduced to a precarious existence in small refuges.  At six degrees we risk triggering a runaway warming process that could render the biosphere completely extinct and for ever destroy the capacity of this planet to support life.” 

That may seem to some to be an outrageously over-the-top assessment.  However, we need to consider the fact that the planet, despite our recent stable century or two, has always been in an unstable equilibrium at best.  There have already been at least five occasions in the past when the planet got so far out of equilibrium that it caused mass extinctions.  In one instance about 90% of species disappeared.  These were accomplishments realized without our human assistance.  We should not doubt that we are capable of generating another mass extinction.  As best as scientists can tell, all these events were characterized by some combination of high temperature, high atmospheric concentrations of CO2, and oxygen-starved ocean surfaces—all of which we are putting in play.

Critical to the scenario Lynas has laid out are the feedback mechanisms that will inject additional CO2 into the atmosphere from natural sources.  A little survey of the planet’s carbon cycle is helpful in providing credibility.

The CO2 human activity contributes to the overall tally is dwarfed by larger natural sources and sinks.  The major sinks are absorption by the oceans and by terrestrial plants.  The major source comes from the decomposition of plant life.  Human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels, contribute a source of about 40 billion tons of CO2 annually, of which a little less than half remains in the atmosphere.  Decomposition of organic materials in the soil contributes about 100 billion tons annually that are almost balanced by the plant sink.  We contribute to the CO2 content of the atmosphere directly, but we can also contribute by altering the balance of the natural sources and sinks. 

About 50% of live plant mass ends up contributing to soil mass.  This soil mass increases over time.  Scientists believe there is nearly twice as much carbon stored in the dead biomass as in the living biomass.  Microbes break down the organic compounds in the soil and produce CO2 if oxygen is present and methane if oxygen is not.  The rate of decomposition will increase with rising temperatures.  Over geologic times this buildup can become quite large, and in some situations the organic materials are sheltered from decomposition.  This has occurred in the frozen permafrost regions in the northern hemisphere and in the bogs that form and grow in wetlands where plant growth far exceeds the rate of decomposition.  A warming climate will gradually melt the permafrost and provide a significant new source of greenhouse gases.  A similar process will occur with the bogs.  

Climate change can also alter the efficiency of the CO2 sinks.  Currently, scientific projections suggest that the Amazon rainforest, a major sink, could “collapse” under a drier climate as the temperature rises and become a significant source.  The wildfires that are spanning the globe are eliminating sinks and creating sources at the significant rate of about 7 billion tons of CO2 per year.  One can argue that this CO2 will be recaptured with plant regrowth, but there is evidence that the incidence of fires is growing as higher temperatures cause more rapid drying of vegetation, and the time lag associated with regrowth may be too large given the rate at which the climate is changing. 

Raising the temperature with our emissions will eventually throw the system out of balance and the sources could overwhelm the sinks leading to a runaway condition where our contributions are no longer needed.

No one can predict the exact temperature trajectory the planet will follow, and no one can predict the exact sequence of events that will ensue.  Nevertheless, we should keep in mind those five previous instances of mass extinction.  Messing with the climate is extremely dangerous.