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. 

Someone in the Obama administration has leaked the main findings of a government ethics report about the Bush II attorneys who wrote and published the memos that in various places stated the legal justification behind the following views: 1) waterboarding is not torture; 2) that the legal definition of tortured permitted a number of techniques that the common person would consider to be torture; and 3) that if the president orders it, it is by definition not torture.  All these views by the way came in John Yoo and Jay Bybee’s infamous 2002 memo to Alberto Gonzales.

The original draft of the report said that Yoo and Bybee had “had violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted the memos that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics,” as yesterday’s Associated Press story puts it.

But a senior Justice Department official David Margolis reduced the charge to “using poor judgment,” which of course can’t lead to disbarment or other professional sanctions.  By the way, A.P. released its story at 2:00 a.m., Sunday morning, I guess in an effort to make sure the news got the coverage it deserves (that’s sarcasm!).

At least the Obama administration has been consistent when it comes to saying that we should let bygones be bygones and not prosecute the people who created the torture gulag that has shamed us and ruined our reputation in the world.  Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee and the dozens of henchmen who actually constructed our torture chambers—all are getting off scot free.  They won’t even receive the proper public venting provided by the Clinton impeachment for lying about an affair. 

But then there’s the matter of the shameful hypocrisy that the Obama administration has demonstrated about ending torture itself: Obama said he would end torture and close the Guantánamo facility.  Neither has happened. 

Those who voted for Obama who want to masochistically revel in betrayal should read Roger D. Hodge’s article titled “The Mendacity of Hope” in the February issue of Harper’s.  (FYI, The New York Times reported just this morning that Harper’s has fired Hodges.) The third and fourth paragraphs present a litany of disappointment and horror:

“Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date. Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the kidnapping and rendition of foreigners will continue, and the Bush Administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies. Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained; when even such mock trials provide too much justice, he will make do with indefinite detention. If, by some slim chance, a defendant were to be found not guilty, we have been assured that the president’s “post-acquittal” detention powers would then come into play.

The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as ‘the essence of who we are,’ no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue—as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance. In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that ‘the King can do no wrong,’ to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute.”

The right-wing, military contractors and the news media have conspired to strike enough fear in the hearts of many U.S. citizens that they are happy—perhaps relieved is a better choice of words—to give up their freedom  and to have immoral, illegal and obscene acts committed in their names.  So let’s review again what’s wrong with torture:

• It is against both U.S. and international law.
• It is universally perceived as barbaric and immoral, an act that reduces the actor and those sponsoring the actor to the level of unethical bestiality.
• It doesn’t work, at least according to most experts and studies.  (But as with those who don’t believe our earth is getting warmer because of human interventions and those who believe that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime, the believers will take the word of a tiny minority of experts, who usually are in the employ or pay of the some faction of the believers).
• It puts our own combatants at risk, because once we torture we give de facto approval to our enemies to do the same.

We thus have something that’s illegal and immoral, makes people hate us, puts our own people at risk and doesn’t even work, and the Obama administration can’t summon up the courage to end it.  Truly shameful and disappointing.

The New York Times continued its campaign to get the average Jane-and-Joe to adopt the questionable ethics of investment or mortgage bankers this weekend with an article by Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago wondering why more of the millions of homeowners who owe more on their homes than the places are worth don’t just walk away from their mortgages, and their homes.  Thaler assumes that people are going to finally get with the program and start abandoning underwater homes in waves, and therefore proposes a big idea to stop this theoretical rush to default.

As I said in my January 11 blog entry about another New York Times article that explicitly advocated walking away from underwater mortgage, these economic experts propose that instead of passing regulations to restrain bankers and business operators from actions that common sense tells us are unethical (such as making loans to people with no means and then selling the loans in packages to investors), people should instead adopt the faulty ethics of the business world. 

It’s shameful that in this country freedom has been reduced to meaning that everyone can behave at the lowest common ethical denominator in a dog-eat-dog winner-take-all economic struggle.  It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to figure out that if we have minimum rules restraining economic actions, the rich will get richer at the expense of everyone else, because the lack of constraints creates an environment in which the possession of money gives the possessor an enormous edge. 

The rationale behind campaign contribution limits has always been to level the playing field by creating rules that limit the naked power of money.  Of course, the Supreme Court recently used the principle of “freedom of speech” as its rationale for declaring unconstitutional this attempt to create more real freedom of speech (the narrow margin of victory provided in advance by the Democrat’s decision not to filibuster the Roberts and Alito nominations several years back).

In yesterday’s news was an announcement that exemplified the kind of unethical behavior which unfortunately is quite common in the business world:  Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty, two of the very biggest financial players, have defaulted on $4.4 billion in loans they used to buy Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two vibrant middle class apartment complexes in Manhattan.  Each will lose $112 million, not pennies by any means, but as yesterday’s New York Times detailed, Tishman Speyer manages a $33.5 billion portfolio.  They’ll be nicked, but not hurt much.

The default will cost much, much more to the investors that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty brought into the deal when it purchased the two large apartment complexes for $5.4 billion at the top of the market in 2007.  For example, the pension fund for California public employees is losing $500 million and the Singapore government is losing $575 million.  Those who rent the apartments—completely innocent victims—are also suffering; for one thing, the company that is negotiating with Tishman Speyer and BlackRock is still looking for someone to manage the apartments now that Tishman Speyer is no longer doing so.

The investment went bad so these financial behemoths just walked away.  And these economic theorists are telling us that the average person should do the same.  Trust is the basic fabric which holds together every economic system.  Without appropriate regulation, we are allowing and enabling the actions of the big players and the words of many economic right-wingers continue to rip this basic fabric to shreds.