Year: 2010

Every once in a while, I feel the need to do some blog house-cleaning. 

Let’s start with the windows.

The blog has been getting a lot of comments lately, so I thought I should tell readers how we handle them:  My assistant Colette reviews each comment and then posts all except those which are pornography (rare so far) or bald-faced advertisements (often).  I don’t care if the comments are derogatory of my blog entries, nor if the language is vulgar: if someone took the time to write it, we will post it.

Sometimes I will respond to the person who posted the comment. I prefer to send a private and almost always short email rather than clog up the blogosphere by commenting on the comment in the public blog space.

Sometimes I will publish the comment and my response to it in a blog, which brings us to the stove, still a bit hot from a boiling controversy…

Yesterday, “Stacie” responded to one of my two blogs advocating negative population growth with the following comment: “so basically you’re a eugenicist? fuck you man, my husband and I are going to have all kinds of brilliant babies!!”

Stacie may not know what a eugenicist is or maybe she does and is trying to throw some mud at me with a big word.  So let’s clear the air: A eugenicist is interested in improving the hereditary characteristics of future generations through selective breeding.  I did not advocate that at all, nor mention anything that even came close to talking about it.  What I was proposing was birth control across the board, not selectively.  There’s a whiff of Nazism about applying eugenics to humans, so I want to make sure my position is clearly understood.    

Finally, some vacuuming in the basement: On February 11, I ripped Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times for beginning an article with an assertion of factual news and then never proving it; not even discussing it, just taking it for granted.  The assertion was that many (most) Germans are sorry that their country switched to the Euro.

Kulish went to the German EU well again, but not so deep, and this time his pail didn’t leak because he cited a survey.  Just a few days later, On February 15, Kulish wrote an article, which was not the lead article on the front page, reporting that opposition to the European Market bailout of Greece was growing in Germany.  In the new article he does cite a survey.  (Of course it’s a long way from being opposed to a bailout to regretting the switch to the Euro, which is unmentioned in the new article.)

I have no idea if he read my blog on his first German EU piece or not.  I’m just delighted that Nick has decided to return to the land of the reputable journalists.  Let’s hope he remains there.

The Associated Press reported yesterday afternoon that “President Barack Obama signed an order Thursday unilaterally creating a bipartisan commission to rein in unruly deficits after Congress rejected a similar body with considerably more enforcement power.

As I have said a few times and William Greider details in the January 25 issue of The Nation (posted on the Nation website on January 7), the force behind the bipartisan deficit commission is Pete Peterson and his pals, who have long clamored for gutting Social Security benefits.  Peterson, like many who dislike Social Security, pretends that it suffers from a deficit, which will get worse as baby boomers retire.  In fact, there is no Social Security deficit.  Social Security has a surplus that will last us many decades.

But under Reagan, Social Security began to loan its excess reserves to the federal government to help pay for the federal deficit. 

It is true that this year Social Security will pay out more than it takes in for the first time in 25 years, the first of many years that will occur as the baby boomers, those born 1946-1964, reach retirement age.  But as Paul Krugman has observed in several articles over the past few years, if the federal government pays back what it’s supposed to pay back, all Social Security needs is a quick fix or two, like raising the maximum salary subject to the Social Security tax.

But what if the bipartisan commission that President Obama creates follows the wishes of Peterson and other conservatives who want to use deficit cutting as an excuse for hacking Social Security into pieces?

Besides ruining the retirements of millions of working people, such a move would signal the first time the United States has ever defaulted on a debt.  We would lose all respect in the world, no one would want to lend us money for fear of another default and the dollar would soon be replaced by another currency as the basis of the world economy. 

Let’s work to make sure that never happens.  If you agree with me, do what I’m doing and send President Obama a letter or email asking him that in his charge to the commission that he asks them to recommend that the federal government pledges to pay back the Social Security system what it owes as the need to pay retirees and other recipients comes due. 

Also, tell your friends and relatives to write a letter to the President.  When the names of all commission members are announced I’m going request everyone to mail or email all the commission members telling them the same thing.

Earlier this week I proposed that by limiting everyone to one child each, in less than a century we could bring the world population down to 500 million, thereby ending both environmental and economic problems.

One reader asked quite aptly how I propose to do it. As the Burt Reynolds’ character says in “Semi-Tough,” Michael Ritchie’s 1980 send-up of the human potential movement, “I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be semi-tough.”

Conceptually, it’s easy: To change the behavior of vast numbers of people, it takes:

• Changes in attitudes and social mores
• Social pressure (the extreme form of the first point)
• Incentives or disincentives, such as taxes and tax credits
• Laws and regulations

To state the obvious, to get governments to create incentives, disincentives, laws and regulations, first there has to be a groundswell of support from somewhere, either a change of general mores or of the mores or goals of a ruling elite, e.g., a one-party government or a collection of corporations.

In the United States, a negative population growth (NPG) movement would begin with corporations and wealthy individuals using influence and grants to universities, think tanks, lobbying groups and foundations to create research, which would lead to public policy groups, government commissions and then coverage in the news media. The entire process was best described by that leftist professor G. William Domhoff in The Powers That Be, although the most frequent followers of his theories on how to achieve social change or control of public issues have been the right-wing. (And why not? The most ardent followers of the principles of capitalism as set down by Karl Marx in Capital (Das Capital) were Carnegie, Frick, Ford and other American industrialists.)

My history can get a little fuzzy at times, but I believe that prohibition, welfare reform and regulating cigarettes all came about because of this process.

A recent example of what Domhoff calls the “policy-formation” process is the way that Pete Peterson and his cohorts have been investing in research and commissions for the purpose of gutting the Social Security system. So far, his efforts have failed: Congress did not approve forming his proposed commission to investigate ways to address the federal deficit, which, as a number of columnists have pointed out, is a thinly veiled attempt to get at Social Security. But to get the Obama Administration to support the commission, he followed this policy formation process that starts with monied folks commissioning research that proves what they want to do is the right thing.

But can enough people (or enough people with clout) become convinced that we need to shrink our population? Hasn’t the economic well-being of many and the accelerating accumulation of wealth by a few depended too long on continually growing our population? Doesn’t that create a tremendous impediment to change?

I’ll answer that question in two ways:

1.  There are many examples of dramatic changes in attitude and mores of people over time.  Some examples:

• Slavery was once practiced ubiquitously.  It took millennia, but now it’s forbidden everywhere.  
• It also took centuries to end the custom of taking more than one wife.
• The cultural attitude in the United States towards women in the workplace in the U.S. changed dramatically from 1960 to 1975 (see Gail Collins, When Everything Changed).
• At the beginning of 19th century, infanticide was the preferred form of birth control in France (see Graham Robb, The Discovery of France) and abortion was a common procedure that didn’t bother most people and was often sued for birth control (see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine).

2.  We are already seeing some countries experiment with NPG.  The Chinese approach had a bad rep; the social control aspects of it don’t bother me because I also see social control in western countries, but I am profoundly disturbed by the fact that the Chinese reacted by not having female children.  The current NPG status of both Germany and Italy and the general slowdown in population throughout western Europe suggests to many observers that as people rise economically and gain personal freedom they tend to have fewer children.  Of course, the recent rise in U.S. birth rates may belie that theory or prove it in the negative, i.e., people in the U.S. are losing ground economically and reacting by having more children.

The big challenge again is that so many people think that their economic well-being depends on growth and NPG will by definition lead to a shrinking economy.  But many people were invested in horse-and-buggies, vinyl records and Florida real estate.  In the part of the world economy that’s a free market, it’s just part of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction of capitalism.”  And in the part of the economy that’s managed, it’s just a social policy objective that requires management.  The hard part will be getting people to think straight about this issue, to understand that environmental pressures and resource shortages will reduce the population by violent and unsavory means unless we do it rationally first.

But I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be semi-tough!

Today let’s go big picture and look at some pressing global problems and my conceptually simple solution to them:

As Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the U.S. and worldwide, we face an excess of productive capacity that presses wages downward everywhere.  Lower wages means that owners and investors keep more of the wealth created by the economy.  Helped along by artificially low tax rates, this excess of productive capacity redistributes wealth upwards unless there are social constraints to prevent income polarization, as exist in western Europe.  From the Roman Empire to Mughal India, Spain in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire, various Chinese dynasties to 21st century United States, history teaches us that when incomes polarize, then rapid economic decline soon follows.

Here are the ways to increase the need for labor:

• The market solution, which is preferred by most large industrial concerns and very wealthy people; that means to grow markets, open new markets, create new products for existing markets. 
• The government solution, e.g., raising minimum wages, lowering maximum work times, mandating additional workers to perform government-required work, raising the basic standard of living that society guarantees to all such as education and medical care.  All attempts in this area are routinely met with great resistance by those who like market solutions and the mainstream and rightwing media they own or control through advertising purchases.

Note that in Europe and increasingly in China and Brazil, governments are employing combinations of both these strategies.

But spreading the wealth around in either of these ways pushes against the other major problem facing the U.S. and the world: the impact of humans on the earth, especially the inexorably accelerating spew of additional carbon into the environment.  Give more people relative wealth and they will create more pollution.  In world summits, this problem plays out as rich nations versus poor ones, developed versus nondeveloped, north versus south.  

My conceptually simple solution to both these problems is to shrink the population.  We know for a fact, again from a close reading of history that after a rapid depopulation economic good times soon follow as the cost of labor goes up and more people have money to spend.  The classic example is 14th century Europe after the bubonic plague wiped out about half the population.

Depopulation usually occurs because of some disaster: war, famine, disease.  But why does it have to be that way?

Suppose, for the sake of dreaming, that every person in the world today would have just one child.  Since having a child takes two parents, in about a generation the population would begin to naturally fall and within a century, we would have somewhere between 500 million to one billion people in the entire world.  With a century of investment into recycling, solar, wind, biofuel, smart grid and other technologies, we could very easily support a billion people with a fairly comfortable western middle class lifestyle.

But what of the transition costs, some may ask.  Remember that in most places, people have it drummed into their head that the only good economy is one that is growing.  But what if we know that the economy is going to shrink because there will be fewer people to serve?  It’s such an easy problem to address.  We merely do all the stuff mentioned in the two bullets above: let the market work and let government redistribute wealth and guide social and economic policy.

Now as the population shrinks, labor shortages will grow everywhere, as there will be fewer young people always entering at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder while the upward part of the ladder will always be relatively larger.  The number of people retired and supported by the workforce will also be relatively larger but that impact will be offset by a small population of children to serve.  But we know in advance professions serving the elderly will grow and those serving children will shrink and so can plan.

Additionally, developed nations can readily fill their labor shortages with people from the undeveloped world.  Western Europe has been doing just that as its native populations start to decline, e.g. in Italy and Germany.  It’s too bad that many of the locals and some governments in western Europe are reacting to the newcomers so poorly.  After all, it is this instream of immigrants that can enable the world to make a painless transition to a shrunken human population. 

But the last point I want to make about the transition costs of peaceful negative population growth is that whatever they are, they’re better than war, famine or disease.  

Humans are pushing against the upper limits of the earth’s carrying capacity for the current incarnation of our species, and natural history tells us that this situation typically leads to decline or outright extinction.  We can “rightsize” our species in a peaceful way or we can make a lot of people suffer.  I vote for peace and therefore endorse all efforts to reduce our population.

A lot of wishful thinking goes on in articles that purport to be news.  I’m talking about the kind of article that speculates that a trend is forming that will be positive to the interests of the U.S.  But when you read the article carefully, you see that it’s built on a series of conjectures and the opinions of one or two people with a vested interest in the prediction coming true.  No real facts.   

In the past, there have been wishful “it’s so because we say it’s so” articles about many topics:  violence ending in Iraq;, various national troops becoming ready to take a larger role in the defense of their countries; proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; Chinese economic weakness; and even sighting economic green shoots sprouting and signaling the end of the deep recession.

For a classic example of these stories spun from the gossamer of wishful thinking, check out the lead story on the front page of the New York Times. 

The story is titled “Germany, Forced to Buoy Greece, Rues Euro Shift” and the first paragraph plus reads:

“As Europe edges toward emergency guarantees to stem market panic over one of the most profligate members of the euro bloc, the country that the region turns to for leadership, Germany, is suffering from growing doubts about the European experiment it long championed.”

But the rest of the article is about something else.  The reporter, Nicholas Kulish, makes no attempt to offer any facts to substantiate the supposed premise of the article—that the Germans regret having converted to the euro. 

The remainder of the article concerns the fact that German leaders know that Germany and France must take lead roles in helping Greece, but for the time being they are not talking about what they might do, a tactic that is suppose to put pressure on the Greek government.  The article does quote from someone who was opposed to the conversion to Euros and someone else whom we are supposed to assume was also opposed to it, but neither says anything about being opposed to it at the current time nor that they have heard a groundswell of people sorry that Germany made the move.

Although the article repeats many times that opposition to being on the euro is growing in Germany, the writer provides not one shred of evidence that it is so.  Everything else he writes in the article is well-substantiated, so that most readers may not even see that the basic assertion of the article is unproven.

Parade Magazine’s new chef, Bobby Flay, from the Food Channel, is thin and buff, very photogenic. 

He must not be eating the Superbowl party menu he is proposing in last Sunday’s Parade, which as a Sunday magazine supplement is delivered to more people than any other publication in the United States.

In Bobby’s first monthly article as Parade’s new food columnist, Bobby cooks up three Latin-inspired party treats:

• Cuban sandwich crostini, which is pork, ham, cheese, pickles and mayo on a baguette.  260 calories each, but it’s a baguette, so you know most people will have two.  That’s 520 calories.
• Adobo-seasoned baked chicken wings, which are wings, dipped in honey, mango nectar and various spices.  340 calories a serving (5 wings). 
• Hot cumin-scented potato chips with blue cheese sauce, which are potato chips you buy in a package tricked out with cumin and then dipped into a sauce of blue cheese, butter and milk.  An arbitrary 480 calories, since Flay does not tell us how many calories are in the average dipped chip.

It’s easy to see that Flay’s Superbowl party is a nutritional atom bomb.  If you have two crostini, we’re talking 1,340 calories before the beer.  That leaves the average person about 600 calories for the rest of the day to lose two pounds a week; from 900-1,100 calories left to eat if the average person wants to maintain her/his weight.  Add in two beers and you know you’re blowing your diet that day.

Not only does Flay’s Superbowl feast load up on the calories, but it breaks just about every consensus rule of good eating:

• Eat more vegetables:  The only vegetables are pickles and herbs.  He actually avoids the chance to add vegetables by proposing a cheese-butter dip instead of a vegetable-based salsa.
• Eat more whole grains:  There are no whole grains in Bobby’s spread, but plenty of processed ones.
• Eat less meat and cheese:  Flay goes out of his way to load us up with fat and protein.  One dish has two kinds of pork plus cheese.  The chicken wings have skins on.  And then there’s that dip!
• Use scratch ingredients and not processed foods:  Where do we start?  The potato chips.  The pickles.  The mango nectar and mayonnaise, which I assume most won’t be making from scratch.  The onion powder!!  Bobby, at least let us peal and grate an onion!

Here’s why I take such a petulantly sarcastic tone with this party spread:  Parade Magazine presents itself as the family and consumer’s best friend.  There’s a “Stay healthy” column and the publication frequently gets behind national causes, including fitness.  The “Intelligence Report” typically presents issues such as capital punishment and environmental change or gives news-you-can-use consumer advice and information.  Virtually all issues of the pub feature an uplifting story of a celebrity who has learned a lifetime lesson that would help all of us to put to use.

One would thus hope that Parade would charge its new cooking columnist with helping address the most pressing health challenge we face as a nation: the inordinately high number of people who are obese or overweight, and therefore more prone to heart diseases, diabetes and some kinds of cancer.  One would thus hope that Parade’s chef would present a Superbowl party that was delicious, nutritionally balanced with lots of veggies and fruit, and low in calories.

Flay says that because the Superbowl is in Miami, the center of Cuban cuisine in the country, he decided to “create some festive Latin finger foods.”  First let’s note that he should have said “Latin-themed” foods (and I carefully selected the phrase “Latin-theme” which its theme park implications, as opposed to “Latin-styled”).

Something I learned from being a public relations consultant to a major regional supermarket company for 19 years is that supermarkets sell more Mexican and Mexican-styled food products in January than in any other month of the year and that the growth in the sales of Mexican food has been remarkable over the past two decades.  There is therefore a lot of advertising and special sales in supermarkets of Mexican food products during the week before the Superbowl.  It seems as if for some reason, Mexican cuisine, or Latin or Hispanic if you prefer, has become associated with Superbowl parties.   It would be interesting to learn why.  Did it start from an ad campaign that worked and so was repeated?  Was it some kind of social virus spreading at the grassroots, as people sampled nachos and tortillas at one Superbowl party, liked it and then served it at their own?

Business Week’s Venessa Wong has written an article about a new study that shows that Texas leads in number of high-growth cities, those places that are seeing population increases and rising prices for houses.

Here are the leading high-growth areas across the country, according to this new piece of research:

• Braselton, Georgia (Atlanta suburb)
• Atascocita, Texas (Houston suburb)
• Spring Hill, Tennessee (Nashville suburb)
• Lincoln, California (Sacramento suburb)
• Katy, Texas (Houston suburb)
• Wake Forest, North Carolina (in the Raleigh-Durham triangle)
• Mansfield, Texas (Dallas suburb)
• Wylie, Texas (Dallas suburb)
• Buckeye, Arizona (Phoenix suburb)

Note that in all cases, these high-growth areas are all the newest furthest upscale suburbs of fairly new cities in the south and west.  Atascocita is 20 miles from Houston, Wake Forrest is 23 miles from Durham and 10 miles from Raleigh—you get the idea.

Now what is this survey supposed to prove exactly?  All it does is measure a thing that proves itself.  In good times and bad, what area should show the most household income growth and real estate price growth other than the very newest area for the wealthiest among us?  In Latin, it’s res ipso loquitor, which means “a thing that proves itself.”  Maybe some readers will prefer a translation into American slang, “Duh, no-brainer!”

But what the survey, the news release by the company that conducted it, Gadberry Group and the Business Week coverage all do is use the survey as proof of the superiority of a way of life that depends upon driving great distances on a daily basis to conduct most commercial activity in enclosed, privatized places and which the only people you encounter are all upscale like you and overwhelmingly white.  In short, the way of life that has helped us choke the environment, the way of life has led to the misallocation of resources away from mass transit and already developed areas, the way of life built firmly on the politics of selfishness.

And what is the Gadberry Group exactly.  Here is its description via mission statement on the homepage of this Little Rock, Arkansas research firm’s website: “The Gadberry Group provides location-based services and information data products, for clients who demand the most current, accurate, and precise household and population data for their site location analysis.”

Translated into English, that means Gadberry provides research to the real estate industry.  The best thing for the real estate industry, of course, is for people to want to move to new areas (thus creating high growth) where property recently purchased cheaply suddenly becomes much more expensive.  Those areas by definition are in these distant suburbs that come out on top in Gadberry’s study.

I’m not saying that Gadberry fixed the survey.  What I’m saying is that it doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know, while it helps to provide intellectual support for a debatable point about where people can achieve the highest quality of life.  The survey and others like it through the decades have created a body of knowledge that overtly, or in the ideological subtext behind the facts and figures, supports the suburban lifestyle.  Supporting this lifestyle, which helps the automobile and real estate industries, has been one of the basic tenets of the U.S. mass media for more than a century.