Economic issues – Page 4

eBay’ing from Japan

Having spent an embarrassing amount of money lately on a film camera, lenses, and other stuff necessary for film photography, I certainly had noticed on eBay that some of the best deals and best prices were from Japanese dealers. I came across a portrait lens that looked so perfect and was so reasonably priced that I bought it in spite of my concerns about doing business outside the country. I figured that delivery would take forever, but I was willing to wait for a lens like that.

Much to my surprise, six days after I ordered the lens on eBay, it was delivered to my door — special delivery — by the U.S. Postal Service. I have never received an eBay item that was so carefully and neatly packed. Best of all, there was a little bird in the package, made of folded green paper.

Now I feel ashamed for not seeing that America does not have a patent on good business. We Americans may even be slipping, since my expectations are so low, which makes me wonder if the rest of the world is wary of doing business with us.

The package was sent from the Japanese post office to the U.S. Postal Service, using a service called Express Mail Service. It’s trackable and insured, and there seemed to be no delay in customs.

I’m still in the testing and learning state with the new camera, but I should have some film photos before long.

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, by Steven Stoll. Hill and Wang, 2017. 412 pages. ★★★★★

During the past couple of years, an extraordinary series of books have brought to our attention just what a sorry state the world is in. Ramp Hollow is the latest. Some of the others (many of which I have reviewed here) are:

Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Anthony Atkinson: Inequality: What Can Be Done?

Kyle Harper: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

James C. Scott: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

Jason Stanley: How Propaganda Works.

Sebastian Junger: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Jason Brennan: Against Democracy

Volker Ullrich: Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939

Jack Rakove: Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America

This is by no means a complete list. There are others that I still urgently need to read, including books by George Monbiot and Jonathan Haidt.

Stoll is a professor of history at Fordham University.

As for Ramp Hollow, I used the word “angrifying” in an email to a friend. I subsequently came across a review that used the word “enraging.” This book is a history of how the self-sufficient subsistence farmers of Appalachia were dispossessed of their land by the timber and coal industries and forced to work in coal camps and mill towns for starvation wages. Their forests and swidden fields, which they depended upon for their living, which were a kind of commons, were enclosed and decimated to feed the industrial revolution.

Stoll has much to say about dispossession and enclosure in general, starting in England in the 17th Century when Parliament dispossessed the rural English of their common lands, gave the land to the lords, enclosed the land, and forced the people to become peasants who worked the land for others. Earlier in American history, the native Americans had been dispossessed by the colonists. After the Civil War, every possible effort was made to keep emancipated blacks dispossessed, landless, and forced to work like slaves for others. All this was seen as economic and social progress. The poverty and misery this so-called progress caused was hardly noticed.

All around us today, we see the consequences. The poor people who now spend much of their sorry wages buying health-destroying foods at Dollar Generals are descendants of people who once lived off the land with no need of wages. The old subsistence farmers liked money when they could get it, but they could live without money. They traded with each other for what they could not make or grow themselves. Their descendants are dependent on money and sorry wages. They buy their sorry food from corporations.

We have forgotten how forests provided a living. The abundance produced by forests goes far beyond hunting or gathering nuts. One burned a little piece of forest and planted one’s crops amid the stumps. Pigs could live in the woods without being fed. Chickens did fine with a little bit of woods, a little bit of clearing, and a little stream from which to drink. With some pasture, you could keep a cow. Capitalism, on the other hand, saw the forests only as a source of timber to be clear-cut and shipped out by train. Beneath the West Virginia forests lay coal. Capitalism could not tolerate people living without money. Dispossession was a win-win for capitalism. The timber could be sold, and the people who were forced off the land were now a source of cheap labor and taxes, dependent on money for a living rather than on their environment.

Stoll’s book is an unapologetic indictment of capitalism. He ends the book with a stunning proposal — he calls it a thought experiment, but it would be doable if we had the political will — for reversing the centuries-old process of dispossession and the poverty and inequality it has caused. He calls it “The Commons Communities Act.” I’m all for it.

This book is enraging because it tells the story of cruelties and injustices that history did not record:

Those who hung on in the hills had their misfortunes thrown back at them. The basis of their autonomy gutted or sold, they pecked and scrimped. The words of the engineer who condemned them in 1904 echo here: “forlorn and miserable … never having known anything better than the wretched surroundings of their everyday life.” Though they often insisted that they could make a living on remnants of the old commons, they had become poor. They had become the horrifying hillbillies that lowlanders had always thought them to be.

The story is an old one: The intentional creation of poverty by the rich, in order to exploit the labor of the poor. Today’s rich have become so sophisticated at this exploitation that their propaganda has turned its dispossessed victims into active agitators for their own greater exploitation. The very idea of taxing the rich for the relief of the poor is rejected with a religious fervor. How long can this go on?

Democracy in Chains

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. Viking, released June 13, 2017, 368 pages.

This book has been out for just over two weeks, but already there are 65 Amazon reviews. With the exception of one 2-star rating, all the ratings are either 5 stars (60 percent) or 1 star (37 percent). The 1-star reviews all cite pretty much the same talking points — that the book is intellectually dishonest, takes quotes out of context, contains inaccuracies, and that it’s a left-wing hit piece on libertarianism and one of the saints of libertarianism, James McGill Buchanan. In addition to the reviews, there many comments on many of the reviews, in which a war is raging.

The author, Nancy MacLean, is the William H. Chafe professor of history and public policy at Duke University. Libertarians can quibble over her quotes all they want, and they can say that we snowflake liberals are subject to “confirmation bias” (though libertarians never are, of course!). Nevertheless, whether I am subject to liberal confirmation bias or not, it seems clear to me that MacLean has landed what ought to be a finishing blow on the libertarian movement. It’s not that we didn’t already know what the libertarian movement is up to. It’s that MacLean’s research takes us much deeper into libertarian history and tears off the disguises of libertarian secretiveness.

MacLean begins her history with John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (1782-1850). Calhoun believed that slavery was a “positive good” that benefited both slaves and slave owners. He believed that individual human rights had to be “earned” (by becoming rich, for example) and that such rights were not bestowed by God or by mere citizenship. Calhoun clearly believed that owning other human beings was just one of his liberties, which presumably he earned by becoming rich. Calhoun was very jealous of these liberties earned by rich people, and there were pretty much no limits to his willingness to abridge the liberties of others — by force, by law, or by perversion of the Constitution) if the majority sought to constrain the power of the rich minority, even if what the rich minority wanted was to own other human beings.

MacLean picks up the Calhoun thread in the 20th Century in Virginia, with Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (1887-1966), who was a Virginia senator from 1933 until 1965. Byrd was a segregationist. He built a powerful political machine that worked for decades to try to keep Virginia segregated. Now what do you suppose Byrd’s theory of government and attitude to the Constitution might have been?

MacLean then turns to James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013). Libertarians know who Buchanan is, because they worship him. Part of the gap that MacLean is trying to close is to let the rest of us know who McGill was. Charles Koch, the second richest billionaire in America, who unfortunately has untold millions of dollars to pour into the project and the many institutions that carry water for him, helped make Buchanan’s career and helped finance the well-funded system which is using Buchanan’s strategies to make the rich richer (no regulation and no taxation), to destroy the social safety net, and to rig the rules so that rich men will have a lock on American government at every level, from now on.

Looking for economic indicators

From our pockets to theirs

Last year, we were transfixed by the horror of the 2016 election. So far this year, we can’t take our eyes off the train wreck of Trump in the White House. Most of us haven’t been paying much attention to the economy. It would be smart to take a look.

I am not an economist, nor was I ever any good at stock picking. But I did defend my retirement nest egg pretty well with thoughtful (and conservative) financial planning, by keeping an eye on economic cycles, and with a healthy respect for cash. I’m not offering any advice here. But I am suggesting that we mustn’t let the political pig circus distract us from economic cycles.

Though I said I wouldn’t offer any advice, one rule I honor is this: Pay no attention to anything on television, pay no attention to anything you come across on Facebook, and pay no attention to Republicans unless his name is Charles Schwab. Who, then, do we pay attention to? I look at the track records of economists. For example, Nouriel Roubini nailed the housing bubble and made accurate calls on the financial crisis that was the grand finale of the Bush-Cheney administration. Though Paul Krugman was slow in seeing the housing bubble, Krugman correctly predicted the long, slow schlog that is required for recovery from any banking and financial crisis, as bad debt and unwise debt gets slowly unwound. More than eight years after the banking and finance train wreck, interest rates are still low, as Krugman said they had to be. (While all that time Republicans kept predicting runaway inflation and the destruction of the dollar.)

What are Krugman and Roubini saying at present?

Krugman has had very little to say, actually, about the American economy, simply because the recovery was long, slow, and stayed on course during the Obama years. Krugman was more interested in Europe during the Obama years, actually, because it was in Europe where the proponents of austerity were proving yet again that austerity does not lead to prosperity but does lead to human misery. Krugman remains distracted by politics, but surely he will weigh in before long on current economic indicators — though Krugman has expressed concern that the Federal Reserve was keen on raising interest rates too soon.

As for Roubini, much of his research is now available to subscribers only. But in early May he did write an article expressing concern that markets are ignoring geopolitical dangers to global economic stability, including Russian aggression and North Korea. And if there is a calamity somewhere on the globe — as there almost certainly will be sooner or later — we can be certain that the current occupants of the White House will do everything wrong and make everything worse (unless you’re a billionaire or have fossil fuels to sell).

I was amused a few days ago to come across an article with the headline “Reclusive Millionaire Warns: ‘Get Out of Cash Now.'” From Googling I could see that the article showed up in lots of places that subscribe to cheap or free “news feeds.” These so-called news feeds help feed the swamp of fake news and scam bait that we all are exposed to. I’m not sure what the article was pushing — probably gold or someone’s stock picks. But it’s interesting that Charles Schwab — as honest and impartial a brokerage as I know of — is subtly suggesting that its customers consider increasing their holdings of cash. Charles Schwab himself actually is a Republican, but he’s a San Francisco Republican.

Schwab’s view would be consistent with standard Dow theory: When unemployment is low and when interest rates are rising, watch out for irrational exuberance in the stock market.

Again, a disclaimer: I’m not giving any financial advice here. I’m just saying that we musn’t let political turmoil distract us from the course of the economy.

More Buffalo China

This blog gets a lot of visits from people who are interested in the history of Buffalo China. I would collect Buffalo china if I had anywhere to put it, but as things are I’ve collected only enough Buffalo china for the table, and no more than will fit in the kitchen cabinets.

But recently, while searching on eBay for more green-stripe cereal bowls (of which I have only four and need more), I came across an item that I had never seen before — cups and saucers with a dogwood pattern.

The seller, who is in Lenoir, North Carolina, said that the cups and saucers were from an old hotel in Lenoir, the Carlheim Hotel, which was torn down in, I believe, 1971. I don’t know for a fact that this china came from the Carlheim Hotel, but it seems very likely. Partly this is because the china did indeed come from Lenoir, and partly because dogwood is the state flower of North Carolina (as well as Virginia). It seems unlikely that Buffalo China would sell much of the dogwood pattern outside of North Carolina and Virginia. So I’m guessing that the dogwood pattern may have been custom china made for the Carlheim Hotel.

The china appears to be brand new. This stuff and its quality always amazes me.

2016: Record temperature for 3rd straight year

Wikipedia Commons: Polar bear starving on Svalbard because of ice melting early

Reports are out today that 2016 set a record for global temperature for the third year in a row.

A lot of people don’t quite grasp an important part of the science of global warming. A few degrees doesn’t seem like much. But it’s all about thermodynamics.

Heat is a measure of energy. At the particle level, heat energy is the jostling of electrons, atoms, and molecules. With global warming, it’s not just that the earth is warmer. Even a tiny increase in global temperature means that there is a tremendous increase of the total energy in the atmosphere and oceans.

Because the earth heats unevenly, ocean currents and weather systems are constantly working to stabilize and equalize the temperature gradients from the hot equator to the cold polar areas. Much of what’s scary about global warming is that the winds, ocean currents, evaporation, and precipitation systems that are driven by heat energy are disrupted.

Inevitably, a severe cold snap in midwinter causes some people (not to mention the right-wing media) to doubt and deny global warming. What they don’t realize is that, if it’s abnormally cold in the United States, then it’s because normal weather systems have been disrupted. Arctic air has moved too far south, displaced by warm air over the arctic that has moved too far north. As they say in thermodynamics, nature abhors a gradient. So this abnormal reversal of hot and cold air is the earth’s weather systems working extra hard to reduce temperature gradients and stabilize the atmosphere. It’s also the additional energy in the atmosphere that drives larger and larger tropical storms, more tornadoes, wetter monsoons, drier droughts, and so on. Normal weather patterns break down.

So it’s important to think not only of earth being warmer, but also to think about the increasing heat energy making the atmosphere increasingly turbulent, wreaking havoc with ocean currents, and screwing up ecosystems that have depended on a stable climate for centuries or millenia.

“Where to Invade Next”

It’s easy to dislike Michael Moore. He’s rude, and he looks like a slob. But his documentaries fill an important need, because he tells us what we otherwise wouldn’t hear.

In this blog, I’ve often mentioned the Overton window. That’s the window of allowable discourse, the range of ideas that the mainstream media will talk about because it’s assumed to be the range of ideas that the public will accept.

For years, the Overton window has been pulled hard to the right. It was assumed that European-style socialism was something that the American people just didn’t want to talk about until Bernie Sanders proved otherwise. With “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore shows that Europe is not the decaying freedomless hell hole that the right-wing media say it is. The American people are deeply immersed in their delusion of American exceptionalism and rarely question the notion that we Americans are the best at everything, that the whole world envies us.

In “Where to Invade Next,” we are reminded that, in many ways, the civilized world feels sorry for us Americans. Even Tunisians feel sorry for us. Moore doesn’t whitewash Europe’s history or Europe’s problems. He sheds a lot of light, actually, on how Germans deal with the shame of their history and how even peaceful Norway has to grapple with right-wing terrorism and mass murder.

And you will definitely want to know what French schoolchildren have for lunch.

In search of environmental justice

Since 1974, the people of the Walnut Tree community have lived in the shadow of Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Duke’s largest coal-burning power plant in the Carolinas. Not until 2008 were scrubbers installed on the plant’s stacks. For all those years, people in Walnut Tree were at Ground Zero for the plant’s emissions — fly ash, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and all the extremely toxic heavy metals that are found at trace levels in the wastes from coal combustion.

Unsurprisingly, people began to get sick. Also unsurprisingly, the official response was that the steam plant had nothing to do with it.

It would be difficult to overestimate the political and economic power of Duke Energy in North Carolina. Working largely through the Republican Party, Duke Energy (along with other fossil fuel fortunes including the out-of-state Koch brothers) helped engineer the Tea Party takeover of North Carolina in 2010. North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, worked for Duke Energy for 28 years. McCrory and the right-wing legislature have moved with terrifying efficiency to try to protect Duke Energy’s interests, to bring fracking and offshore oil drilling to North Carolina, to slow the state’s investment in renewable energy, and to weaken environmental regulations and the state agencies that enforce them. Part of the purpose of North Carolina’s so-called bathroom law is to distract people (and the media) from the rest of the right-wing agenda in North Carolina.

In February 2014, a massive coal ash spill into the Dan River near Eden focused the nation’s attention (at last!) on what Duke Energy and the politicians they own were trying to do in North Carolina.

Back in 2012, when I and a small group of sassy (and very smart) Stokes County citizens started the organization that we call No Fracking in Stokes, we had no idea how the fracking issue would play out or how it would end up connecting with the coal ash issue. There is much local history here that needs to be written, but by 2015 a powerful coalition had formed to fight not only for the environment but also for environmental justice in our obscure little county. Among these organizations are No Fracking in Stokes, Appalachian Voices, Clean Water for North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the NAACP. I sometimes refer to these organizations as the cavalry that rode in to help us.

As readers of this blog know, Stokes County is a rare piece of largely unspoiled earth in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The beautiful Dan River winds down out of Virginia, through Stokes County, and back into Virginia again. North Carolina’s most popular state park, Hanging Rock State Park, is here. Climb to the top of the Hanging Rock promontory and look around. You’ll see what we’re protecting. But because the county is controlled by Republicans, and because many of the people are poor and are too busy just trying to get by to pay attention, outside interests would like write the county off as an environmental sacrifice zone.

Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has gotten involved. That group held a hearing in Walnut Cove last month, specifically on the question of environmental justice in the Walnut Tree neighborhood. Last year, the Rev. William Barber, who has led North Carolina’s powerful Moral Monday movement, spoke in Walnut Cove. He also brought the resources of the NAACP to the struggle.

It seems quite possible that, in the larger statewide struggle to hold Duke Energy accountable and to expose the corruption of the Republican Party’s protection of Duke Energy, Walnut Tree will be Duke Energy’s Waterloo, because in Walnut Tree the legal questions relating to environmental justice become crystal clear.

These photos are from a cookout last Saturday in the Walnut Tree community. They’ve gotten organized. They have plans to build a community center. They have a legal strategy for getting the Walnut Tree community annexed into the little town of Walnut Cove (Walnut Tree desperately needs Walnut Cove’s water, which comes from deep wells that are a safe distance from the coal ash impoundments).

As someone from Appalachian Voices said, this is what winning looks like. It has taken 40 years, though we’re still not done.

Kill your dryer

According to an article at grist.org, Americans spend about $9 billion a year on electricity to power their clothes dryers. While appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines have made great strides in energy efficiency, dryers have not. In 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a “call for action” for more-efficient clothes dryers.

It was news to me that dryers sold in Europe, Australia, and Asia use heat-pump technology, which can cut energy use by more than half. Heat-pump dryers have recently come to market in the United States. They’re not exactly cheap, but I’m sure that, over the life of the appliance, they more than pay for themselves in energy savings.

Some people, I realize — for example those who live in cities, or in apartments — pretty much have no choice but to use clothes dryers. Heat-pump dryers could yield considerable savings and avoid a lot of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere.

But when you live in the sticks, like me, and when you’re a cheapskate, like me, a $4.99 clothesline is the way to go. I don’t even have a dryer and don’t want one. Not only do clothes dryers eat your clothes, they give things that dryer smell instead of a fresh-air smell. I even like scratchy towels. Why am I thinking about this now? Because March winds are the best clothes dryer ever.

Farms and farmland: What are the trends?

This is the farm of my great uncle Barney Dalton in Laurel Fork, Virginia. Barney was born in 1876 and died in 1972, but his farm is still owned by his heirs, who work hard to keep it looking like it looked 75 years ago.

A story in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal (by my friend Meghann Evans) reports that Forsyth County, North Carolina, is working on a plan to preserve farmland. I’m all for it, though for Forsyth County it would seem that the plan is a little late. Though Winston-Salem and Forsyth County have not grown as fast as Raleigh and Charlotte, developers have been buying up farmland and turning it into suburbs for decades. It has been more than 25 years since I lived in Forsyth County, but decades of uncontrolled suburbanization is one reason why I would never be able to live in such a place anymore.

Meghann’s story about Forsyth County got me wondering about the trends in farmland.

Just a couple of weeks ago, actually, I was at a Stokes County Arts Council event and saw a friend who is co-owner of Stokes County’s largest real estate company. “How’s business?” I asked her. “Have property values gotten back up to the pre-crash peak?”

She said that farms are selling very well but that homes are still a bit of a drag.

I’m going to guess that one of the reasons that Forsyth County can even afford to talk about preserving farmland is that farmland is more valuable than it used to be. Developers can no longer buy up farmland dirt cheap and turn it into suburban gold. Driving through a place like Forsyth County, evidence of this change is easy to see. Suburban housing is still being built, but the housing is much more dense than it used to be. That is, new suburbs don’t sprawl as much as they used to because the land is not as cheap. Houses are much closer together. Much of the new housing consists of multi-story, multi-family units.

Worldwide, farmland is increasingly seen as a good longterm investment. Much of the investment in farmland is coming from corporations. In fact, here in Stokes County, one of the biggest land transactions in the past couple of years involved 1,000 acres of farmland in the Dan River bottomlands. The buyer was a corporate outfit from Greensboro. I still don’t know what they plan to do with the land.

One surprising new trend is that agricultural degrees are in great demand, and there aren’t enough graduates to fill the available jobs. Just this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 60,000 high-skilled jobs in agriculture are expected each year but that there are only about 35,000 graduates available to fill the jobs.

In a news release earlier this year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, “There is incredible opportunity for highly-skilled jobs in agriculture. Those receiving degrees can expect to have ample career opportunities. Not only will they be likely to get well-paying jobs upon graduation, they will also have the satisfaction of working in a field that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges. These jobs will only become more important as we continue to develop solutions to feed more than 9 billion people by 2050.”

Though the corporatization of farmland ownership is disturbing, I nevertheless see it as an encouraging trend that farmland is becoming too valuable to be trashed by housing developers out to make a quick buck. For a young person trying to figure out what to do in college these days, I’d suggest horticulture with a minor in English. Wouldn’t that improve the world?

Lily (the abbey cat) gets nervous if her food bowl gets low and she can see the bottom of the bowl. She nags me until I fill it, and then she feels secure again. I feel the same way when I’m in places that are too densely populated, too dry, or otherwise too dead to support an exuberant population of living things. I need trees, rain, streams, good dirt, my own water from a well, an orchard, a garden spot, and some chickens. If the deer, voles, raccoons, possums, rabbits and even snakes rush in to live off my spot of land, then I’m flattered. At least I’ve got something for them to take.

Normally I’m at odds with trends. But the trend toward valuing and wanting to be near farmland is a trend I’m glad to see.

Nearby farmland

The abbey garden in a good year