How we got into this mess


James Goldsmith on the Charlie Rose show, Nov. 15, 1994

The devastation to our economies caused by globalization and Wall Street gaming was predictable. It also was predicted. Those of us who, in the 1990s, failed to anticipate where globalization would lead now have an obligation to look back and try to understand why we got it wrong. The video I’m going to link to is a huge help in this process.

It is easy to see why so many people embrace ideology as a way of making sense of the world. The world is extremely complicated and hard to model, so ideology simplifies things and provides some comfort.

Those of us who disdain ideologies and try to understand the world as it actually is take on a huge work load. Not only must we absorb huge amounts of information, we must try to figure out who we can trust and who has disguised motives and seeks to hoodoo us.

In the 1990s, I subscribed to The Economist, which is considered to be ever so authoritative. I fell for The Economist’s predictions about globalization, which was that globalization would lead to increased prosperity for all. The Economist, like the governments of the United States and Europe, was catastrophically wrong. As I began to understand this, I dropped my subscription to The Economist, and I will never trust them again.

So who got it right? Very few people got it right. Among those few was James Goldsmith, a European tycoon and politician who prophesied all this with a book named The Trap. Goldsmith died in 1997.

On YouTube you can find the video of an hour-long interview with Goldsmith by Charlie Rose. Goldsmith predicts it all — the offshoring of jobs and devastating unemployment, the loss of our manufacturing base, the severe neglect of our infrastructure, the flight of hundreds of millions of people in China and other poor countries from farms to the cities, a crisis in agriculture, a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the rich. Goldsmith, we can see in retrospect, was able to make these predictions because he understood and modeled the real world, and he was not thrown off by an ideology. He had principles, though. And one of those principles, despite his great wealth, was that the welfare of the people is far more important than markets and their profits.

We also can learn a lot from this video about how the media and politicians lie to us and mislead us. Charlie Rose was almost combative with Goldsmith and kept interrupting Goldsmith to spout the establishment point of view. Rose also brought on Laura Tyson, then the chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also kept interrupting Goldsmith and shouting the establishment point of view.

At the time, I think that I too would have discounted Goldsmith’s ideas, largely because of his record as a tycoon. It is incredibly difficult to identify experts who we can trust. But one thing is very clear: We can’t trust the media, because they speak for the establishment. And if there is anyone in Washington who can be trusted, I’m not aware of it, because corporations own Washington.

This process of checking ourselves and understanding why we were wrong when we are wrong is extremely important. That is one of the major failures of our media and our punditry. They rarely admit their failures or revisit their mistakes. It is up to us to catch their errors when they are dangerously wrong and to simply never pay them any more attention. They have agendas, or they are blinded by an ideology.

Principles, of course, are a good thing, and Enlightenment principles have stood the test of time. But ideologies only guarantee that we will be wrong and that we will neglect or belittle the hard work of trying to understand the world as it is.

We got it wrong about globalization, and now we are paying the price for our wrongness. And those who pushed for globalization (while we were asleep at the switch) are richer and more powerful than ever. As a friend of mine who is a law professor said, “It’s over. We lost.”

Update: From DCS (the law professor), who also has commented on this post, is a link to the entire, unsegmented video, Google video, here. The YouTube link above is in six segments. The YouTube version will play on iPads; the Google video version requires Flash and will not play on iPads.

Prabhupada Village

Yesterday Ken and I made a visit to Prabhupada Village, a 360-acre village of Hare Krishna devotees about 8 miles north of Acorn Abbey. They all live simply and close to the land. Many of them farm and are excellent farmers. In many ways, they live much as the rural people of this county lived up until 50 years ago. The village has been there for 20 years.


From a ridge, looking down on Prabhupada land


Water tower and hay shed


Ken with one of the village puppies


A living roof


Daffodils and crocuses, blooming too early in the warm winter

The garden zones move north


U.S. Department of Agriculture

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has released a new version of the “Plant Hardiness Zone Map.” As you might expect, a warming climate has pushed the zones north. It’s the first time the zones map has been revised since 1990.

It’s interesting to note that the Department of Agriculture isn’t saying anything about global warming. Though the data is obvious, we can’t risk offending the oil companies and the know-nothings.

Giving away our trees to corporate chain saws


Atlanta Journal

Right-wing state legislatures all over the country are bending over backwards to sell out taxpayers and give greedy corporations anything they want.

The Raleigh News & Observer has a story this morning about new regulations rammed through the North Carolina General Assembly that allow billboard owners to cut down more state-owned trees. The same thing has been going on in Georgia. No doubt this is happening in other states as well.

Most Americans have no idea that our laws are rarely written by legislators. Rather, lobbyists and corporations write the legislation, and legislators line up at the troughs to sponsor the legislation in exchange for fat donations. The billboard legislation — like anti-union legislation and other giveaways to private interests — is part of a coordinated push by corporations to get their legislation passed by right-wing state legislatures all over the country. It’s no different, of course, in the U.S. Congress.

The billboard themselves are bad enough. But destroying public property — living trees — to make billboards more visible ought to be a crime. Instead, new laws freely give away taxpayer-owned trees to be cut down. To right-wingers eager to drag us peasants back to the dark ages and to enrich corporations at taxpayer expense, that’s not a crime. It’s progress.

Nosy neighbors

It’s surprising how much wildlife drama there is right outside the doors and windows of the abbey. This little scamp from the woods frequently plays on the deck and climbs the chimney, but today he put on quite a little show-off act while Ken and I stood by the deck door and took pictures. The squirrel went through a wide range of antics as though it was taunting us. Ken said it even rubbed its belly.

There also have been rabbits on the steps, and once after hearing strange noises I found a groundhog with his nose to the glass of the front door, looking in.

Tote tanks

I finally found a tote tank to store water for the garden’s irrigation system. The irrigation system is a work in progress, and I’ll have photos of that when the project is done.

Tote tanks are much less expensive than the water tanks sold by agricultural suppliers. When you buy one, you’re also recycling it. Otherwise, I assume, they’re industrial waste.

Tote tanks are a product of globalization. They’re how high-value fluids are shipped around the world. They’re designed to be easily moved by a fork lift, and no doubt there is some special means of stacking them on container ships. Some — probably most — of the tanks are used for toxic fluids such as industrial lubricants. But some of them are used for food. That’s the trick. It took me months to find a tote tank that I could verify was made of food-grade plastic and that had not contained anything toxic. This particular tank contained organic olive imported from Spain. The man I bought it from didn’t want to tell me the name of the company he buys them from, because he wants to protect his access to these hard-to-find items. But he did say that he gets them from a company that makes products such as salad dressings.

If you’re looking for a tote tank, check for a label. There always should be a label saying what was in the tank. Personally I would not buy a tank if the label has been removed. In the photo below, note the glass-and-fork icon put there by the Spanish manufacturer of the tank. I believe that icon indicates that the tank is made of food-grade plastics.

Around here they sell for $65 to $100, depending on the condition and whether it’s food grade. They hold about 275 gallons, or 1,000 liters.

Compost, compost, compost

I wish I had thought to keep a running total of the amount of compost that has been used at the abbey. Tons, certainly. I buy it by the dump truck load.

This is a leaf compost, made from leaves picked up as a city service in nearby cities. It’s not an ideal compost, because it’s a high-carbon compost. But if you give it plenty of time for the soil to digest it, it works fine. My understanding of the biology is that high-carbon compost requires further digestion by soil bacteria. The bacteria that do this digestion suck up available nitrogen for their cellular protein. When the bacteria have done their work, the cells die, and the nitrogen is released back into the soil. So, when used in a garden, it must be applied out of season so that it can be digested before planting time.

I think of it as food for my earthworms. They too are hungry little animals just like the rest of the wildlife. That’s something I inherited from my mother. She could never bear the sight of a hungry animal. No one at Acorn Abbey is permitted to go hungry, if I can help it, though I must admit that my population of very fat voles tests my tolerance.