Bob Sheak, Climate chaos, land degradation, corruption – Trump makes it worse
August 27, 2019

The purpose of this paper is to consider recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and land degradation. The title of the report is “Climate Change and Land Degradation.” The full IPPC report can be accessed at https://www.ippc.ch/report/srccl. One of the principal contributions of the report is to provide extensive and scientifically-based evidence on how agriculture and other land uses contribute significantly to global warming, along with the emissions from fossil fuels.

The land degradation that the IPCC authors have in mind is linked to how food is grown and consumed, how forests are harvested for lumber, but more, and the greenhouse gases that are emitted in the process, even as the land itself is degraded. The sources of land degradation are complex, from industrial farming, large ranches, over-fishing, meat-heavy diets, and the enormous waste of food, involving the inefficient storage, transportation, and consumption of food to and the growth of landfills. There are also important issues that go beyond the global focus of the IPCC report concerning in the US the use and leasing of public land that prioritizes profit over public interests.

The dominant type of farming in the US and much of it in the major countries of the world requires heavy equipment, hybrid and GMO seeds, lots of water, toxic chemicals to protect against pests and weeds, and other practices that are unsustainable.Large-scale ranching often destroys grass and other plants. Deforestation eliminates services provided by healthy forests to protect soil against wind, retain water, and nourish complex ecosystems necessary for a host of species.

Large agribusiness companies are at the center of the agricultural, timber, and mining aspects of unsustainable land use. There is opposition to these practices, and there are sustainable alternatives. The principles and practices of organic farming and healthy diets are well known. But the political forces are now arrayed against the alternatives, and the Trump administration is making the problem of land degradation even worse than it has been.

First, some good news

Proposals to rapidly phase out fossil fuels are having some effect. There are a wide range of international organizations, environmental groups, and a growing number in the public who think that such changes are necessary. Some Democrats in the US Congress are advocates and a number of Democratic presidential candidates are on board, seeing the need for major changes in US energy policy, from fossil fuels to renewables, energy efficiency measures, mass public transit, and more. Bernie Sanders’ plan is the most detailed (https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-16-trillion-climate-change-plan-most-expensive-yet-2019-8). Democrats in the US Congress have also put forth a proposal for a “Green New Deal,” about which has been covered widely in the media, especially online. (See https://vitalissues-bobsheak.com/2019/03/16/the-green-new-deal-its-critics-and-its-promise.)

The movement is apparently having some impact on public opinion. Despite the efforts by the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration, the Republican Party, and right-wing media to deny or dismiss climate change/global warming, a majority of American believe that climate change is happening and that it is caused largely by “human activities.” Glenn Branch reports in May on a survey by the Yale Program on Climate Communication that “offers new data on Americans’ beliefs and attitudes about climate change….documenting that 70 percent of respondents answered affirmatively that global warming is happening, while 17 percent answered no, and 14 percent answered don’t know” (https://ncse.com/news/2019/05/new-climate-change-poll-highlights-political-differences-0018916).

But, nonetheless, the problem of climate change and its increasingly harmful effects increases

The scientific evidence documenting this problem continues to come forth. Julia Conley reports that, according to research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), July 2019 “was the hottest month the planet has ever experienced since the government began recording global temperatures nearly 140 years ago,” breaking the previous record set in July 2016 and “the 43rd July in a row with above-average temperatures.” She further reports that July” was the 415th consecutive month when the world was warmer than average” [and] “Last month, NOAA reported that June 2019 was the hottest June on record.” The ice in the Arctic melted far more than average in July. Marco Teseco, a climate scientist at Columbia University put it this way for Grist: “‘We are seeing record after record after record.” And: “‘It looks like the worst case scenario put forward by the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] could be an underestimate because we are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now” (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/15/global-temps-continue-soar-upward-noaa-confirms-2019-was-hottest).

A big challenge: disconnecting the American economy from fossil fuels

The understandable focus on the sources of the climate crisis has largely been on the greenhouse gases emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels and the need to stop using them as fast as we can, though the challenge to do so is immense. There is a need for rapid transition away from oil and gas to renewables and energy efficiency that would require transformational changes across the economy, including in the energy, transportation, construction, manufacturing, and other sectors. However daunting, the present situation forces us to make a choice as to whether to suffer the consequences of additional warming of the planet with all its cataclysmic effects or support transformational changes. And the challenge is made even more difficult because, according to recent scientific estimates, humanity only has a few decades at most before calamitous weather events, a seriously degraded environment, failed states, and rising waves of desperate people can be reduced or reversed.

Greenhouse gas emissions: 63% from fossil fuels, but a striking 37% from agriculture and the related processing, packaging and distribution of food
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One of the chief findings in the IPCC report is that efforts to curtail global warming must pay serious attention to how land in a general sense is used and its effects. According to Georgina Gustin, the authors of the IPCC report are referring to “the entire food production system, with transportation and packaging included,” a system that “accounts for as much as 37 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions,” and the need to prioritize in the US and worldwide “better land use, less-meat-intensive diets and eliminating food waste.” Specifically, “Agriculture and deforestation account for 23 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But the report says that if the entire spectrum of food production were factored in—from growing crops to transportation and packaging—that percentage could be as high as 37 percent”(https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08082019/ipcc-agriculture-report-food-system-overhaul-climate-change-deforestation).

These IPCC assessments were reached through a collaborative scientific approach

As Guston describes it: “Negotiations over the final wording of the report, which was written after assessing thousands of studies, began in Geneva last week (first week in August). Attendees said the talks were bogged down at times by negotiators from countries, including the United States, with powerful biofuels and livestock industries. Still, they call for a very different kind of agricultural system that adds carbon to the soil, limits greenhouse-gas emitting fertilizers, stops deforestation while supporting reforestation and protecting forests, along with other efforts to manage land in ways that contain rather than release carbon and methane gases into the earth’s atmosphere.

Here is a list of key findings from the IPCC report’s findings on land degradation and associated problems.

• Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Dominant agricultural practices are ones that degrade the land, including the increased use of nitrogen fertilizer, high intensity water usage, and other practices that destroy the soil and the micro-organisms that nourish the soil and plants.
• “Around three-quarters of the global ice-free land, and most of the highly productive land area, are by now under some form of land use…Grazing land is the single largest land-use category, followed by used forestland and cropland.”
• “An estimated one quarter of total anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions [from land uses] arise mainly from deforestation, ruminant livestock and fertilizer application, and especially methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture….”
• More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
• The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.
• Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.
• There is a gender-dimension to the problem of land degradation. According to the report: “A gender inclusive approach offers opportunities to enhance the sustainable management of land. Women play a significant role in agriculture and rural economies globally. In many World religions, laws, cultural restrictions, patriarchy and social structures such as discriminatory customary laws and norms reduce women’s capacity in supporting the sustainable land resources. Therefore, acknowledging women’s land rights and bringing women’s land management knowledge into land-related decision-making would support the alleviation of land degradation and facilitate the take-up of integrated adaptation and mitigation measures.”
• Population growth has put increasing demands on the food-producing and -distribution systems.
• In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.
• One of the outcomes of current land-use practices is rising food insecurity, a situation in which there is too little food availability to meet basic needs or the inability to access food. “After a prolonged decline, world hunger appears to be on the rise again with the number of undernourished people having increased to an estimated 821 million in 2017, up from 804 million in 2016. Of the total undernourished in 2018, “256 million” lived in Africa, and “784 million” in Asia (excluding Japan).”
• Unequal land arrangements and access to land is “strongly affected by local land ownership.” The authors also refer to how existing “power relations often disfavor disadvantaged groups such as small scale farmers indigenous community or women.” They add that “large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) are a factor in driving food insecurity. “LSLAs are promoted by investors and host governments on economic grounds (infrastructure, employment, market development), but their social and environmental impacts can be negative and significant.”
• Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992. According to the report: “Urban and other infrastructure areas expanded by a factor of 2 since 1960, resulting in disproportionately large losses of highly-fertile cropland.”
• Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totaling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) – a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.

The authors not only assess the cause and effects of agriculture and forestry on global warming but also consider changes that would reduce such effects. Here is a list of proposals from the report.

• Farming more sustainably, i.e., using less fertilizer, lowering tillage and employing practices that increase the soil’s ability to hold carbon. In a section on “land management,” the authors says there is high agreement among the contributors to the report “on choices such as agroecology (including agroforestry), conservation agriculture and forestry practices, crop and forest species diversity, appropriate crop and forest rotations, organic farming, integrated pest management, the preservation and protection of pollination services, rain water harvesting, range and pasture management, and precision agriculture systems.” They add: “Conservation agriculture and forestry uses management practices with minimal soil disturbance, such as no tillage or minimum tillage, permanent soil cover with mulch combined with rotations to ensure a permanent soil surface, or rapid regeneration of forest following harvest.”
• Large-scale tree-planting on previously unforested land. The authors of the IPCC report write: “Reforestation is a mitigation measure with potential co-benefits for conservation and adaptation, including biodiversity habitat, air and water filtration, flood control, enhanced soil fertility and reversal of land degradation.”
• Manage fisheries to prevent over-fishing (e.g., impose quota or temporary bans on endangered fisheries).
• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Rapid reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions that restrict warming to ‘well-below’ 2 degrees C [say by phasing out fossil fuels] would generally reduce the negative impacts of climate change on land ecosystems” (e.g., less drought). And changes to a sustainable system of agriculture and land use generally would lower greenhouse gas emissions significantly.
• Changing diets – “‘Diets present major opportunities for reducing greenhouse gases as well, because diets that are rich in plant-based foods emit lower greenhouse gases than diets that are very heavy in red meat consumption,’ Rosenzweig said. The report’s authors conclude that, by 2050, dietary changes could free up hundreds of millions of acres of land, which could help avoid deforestation and reduce emissions.” — The most optimistic scenario, in which fewer resources are consumed and more people adopt “low greenhouse gas” diets, would translate to lower emissions and help keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—the aim of the Paris climate agreement.
• Reducing food waste – “The authors say reducing food waste is another key strategy for cutting emissions from the food system. Nearly a third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted.” To address this problem, the authors recommend “advancing harvesting technologies, storage capacity, and efficient transportation” as methods that “could all contribute to reducing these losses with co-benefits for food availability, the land area needed for food production and related CHG emissions.” They also point to the need for individuals to waste less food, for there to be less food waste at the retail level, and for there to be reductions in food waste along production and consumption supply chains.” Generally, “overconsumption was found to waste 9-10% of food bought” A further benefit of reducing food waste is that if it was reduced by 50%, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by “20 to 30% of total food-sourced GHGs

On the one hand, the IPCC authors have done us all a great favor by bringing further attention to the problems of land degradation and forcing us to think about big solutions. Indeed, it is important to highlight the problems of how land is degraded by current agricultural and forestry practices, how high-meat diets from prevalent livestock ranches interact with the accelerating problem of climate disruption, and how food security for hundreds of millions of people across the planet is undermined by the enormous scale of food waste that is part and parcel of the present dominant agriculture system. More than that, it provides additional factually based, verifiable evidence that helps to dispute and reveal the counterproductive policies of the Trump administration, as the administration brazenly opens more public lands, including national parks, to mining, farming, ranching, logging and fracking, while also eviscerating laws and regulations that have been designed to protect the public land and the species that inhabit them. Trump, his advisers, and the powerful corporate interests that benefit in profits and enhanced political and economic power from these unsustainable policies, ignore the extensive damage that is being wrought for their short terms economic gains and political advantage. (I’ll come back to this below.)

On the other hand, the report fails to consider how, for example in the US, the problems of land use, reflected in the current agriculture system and in related land uses, are a consequence of a capitalist system that is inherently exploitative of people and land at home and abroad. On this point, the dominance of agribusiness in the US agricultural system has been well documented. For example, Vandana Shiva, physicist and world renown environmental thinker and activist, tireless crusader for economic, food, and gender justice, has written about “the toxic cartel,” which includes the “Big 6 pesticide and GMO corporations that own the world’s seed, pesticide and biotechnology industries.” They include: “BASF, Bayer, Dupont, Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto, and Syngenta.” Dupont is said to be merging with Dow, and Bayer with Monsanto (p. 57). The principal owners of these corporations are “investment funds like Vanguard, Blackrock, Capital group, Fidelity, State Street Global Advisers, Norges, Bank Investment Management (NBIM), and others” (p. 58). The toxic cartel, Shiva writes, is expanding and “going beyond the convergence of seeds, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, to farm equipment and information technologies, and to climate data, soil data, and insurance in a bid to have total control over our daily food” (p. 62). There can be no solution to the problem of land degradation without an effective challenge politically to the influence of this complex of powerful interests.

Along these lines, the IPCC report says nothing about how the governments in the US and other “rich” countries have facilitated the commercial and extractive land-relevant interests of mega corporations, ranchers, and others private, for-profit interests in perpetrating or launching practices that degrade the land, while paying little attention to the sustainability or regenerative practices, the plight of small farmers or farm workers, or the importance small farmers in the solution. Vandana Shiva has also written extensively about the latter point (e.g., Who Really Feeds the World: The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promises of Agroecology). US government farm and farm-relevant policies have been crucial in enabling the current unsustainable and land degrading agriculture system to continue, and played a particularly important role with respect to public land and how administrations have opened this land, allowing private corporate interests cheap, easy, little regulated access to exploit the public’s land for farming, ranching, the extraction of minerals and fossil fuels, timber, and for various other commercial interests.

Going in the wrong direction with Trump – on public land

Randi Spivak reports generally on how Trump and his administration are “attacking our public lands” and plundering them at a terrifying rate, as they have “kicked the door open and let in profiteers to mine, drill, frack, log, and bulldoze. Along the way, it’s worsening the climate crisis, endangering wildlife, and divesting our natural inheritance to fatten the dividends for massive corporations” (https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/public-lands-trump-climate-change-20190816). Spivak brings to our attention to how Trump and his administration have “slashed” the budgets for two national monuments in Utah, while the “Interior Department and U.S. Forest Service have been quietly, systematically ceding control of America’s public lands to fossil fuel, mining, timber, and livestock interests since the day he took office.” And a lot of land is at stake. We are talking today about “670 million acres of forests, canyons, rivers, wetlands, mountains, and high deserts. Native American sacred sites. Ancient migratory pronghorn paths and towering temperate rainforests. Pristine streams that feed wild salmon and endangered pikeminnow. Prehistoric artifacts.”

Undermining the Endangered Species Act has general implications

Then, in early August, 2019, Spivak reports that “Trump launched a massive attack on imperiled wildlife, finalizing changes to the Endangered Species Act that could lead to extinction for hundreds of animal and plant species. The changes, which will make it harder to protect wildlife habitat from development, come in the face of urgent scientific warnings that humans have driven up to 1 million species worldwide to the brink of extinction.”
In an article for Inside Climate News, Sabrina Shankman points out that Endangered Species Act has been given credit “with keeping 99 percent of listed species from becoming extinct, including humpback whales and bald eagles” (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13082019/climate-change-endangered-species-act-arctic-trump-changes-polar-bear-wildlife). The revisions advanced by the Trump administration will “make it harder to take climate change into account when deciding whether a species needs protection,” “limit protections for critical habitat,” and allow “agencies to consider economic interests when deciding whether to list a species – something that was explicitly forbidden in the past.” That is, profits will take precedence over the environment. Also, “Under the new application of the rule, a species can only be listed as threatened if its population is going to be affected in the ‘foreseeable future,’ allowing decisionmakers in the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA to ignore long-term threats like climate change.”

Who benefits? Shankman nails it: “The oil and gas industry, which has long argued that the Endangered Species Act restricts its ability to pursue natural resources by putting some areas off limits, would benefit from the revisions, and the American Petroleum Institute said it welcomed the Interior Department’s changes. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, whose president was with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt for the announcement, also applauded the move, calling it.” And: “Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement that the revisions ‘fit squarely within the President’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.’”

Trump and his administration want to lease millions of acres of public land to oil companies and other for-profit enterprises

Zach Coleman reports for Grist on this story (https://grist.org/article/under-trump-public-lands-could-see-leases-on-millions-of-acres). He writes: “The administration’s new policies would bring sweeping changes to this Rocky Mountain landscape, facilitated by a growing bond between federal officials and the oil and gas industry. Emails and other communications between government employees obtained by E&E News reveal directives and orders by Trump officials to shelve environmental policies to speed energy development.” He continues: “In one instance, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke courted oil and gas drillers in private by assuring them that changes to federal land policy would make their companies more profitable.”

The land is being sold at bargain-basement prices. The policies of the Trump administration “will set the nation on a future course of reliance on fossil fuels that cause climate change, more air and water pollution in rural areas, and new threats to endangered species. In return, the government charges oil companies as little as $2 per acre to lease the land for drilling.” Trump administrators have already been implementing such leases and hope it turns out to be a long-term trend. According to the documents obtained by E&E News, Trump “wants to open millions of acres across the West, all owned by taxpayers, to private oil and gas companies. Last year alone, his administration put 11.9 million acres on the auction block. It was the most in nine years. In sheer size, that’s twice as big as Vermont.” It remains to be seen whether all the leases will be purchased. They justify the self-off as one that will generate revenues for federal and state governments and claim that the royalties from the leases will be used for conservation, under-estimate the volume of greenhouse gases that are expected to be emitted, and downplay how the policy has been coordinated with fossil-fuel interests.

Unsustainable land use practices existed prior to Trump; he just doubles-down on them

Such practices did not begin with Trump, as Christopher Ketchum lays out the history of how the public land have for generations been plundered for profit in his book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. He considers the history of this helter-skelter, exploitative and corrupt process. One example: “During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, much of the land was leased and sold off in a frenzy of corrupt dealings. Railroads, corporations, land speculators, mining interests, and stockmen gorged on the public domain, helped along by the fabulously pliable General Land Office, which from 1812 until its closure in 1946 privatized more than a billion acres, roughly half the landmass of the nation” (p. 23). This land acquisition, abetted by the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service, has led to the despoliation of the soil and grasslands, to damage and destruction to eco-systems and habitats, and the extinction of wildlife and plant species. Ketchum provides a rich, in-depth historical analysis of how private interests have benefited from access to public lands. Here’s a recent example.

“State and federal officials of both parties, elected and appointed, defend the panoply of subsidies as the cattlemen’s divine right, passing legislation and tweaking regulations to favor the industry and protect it from oversight. Consider this emblematic instance: when in 2010 the Department of the Interior funded $40 million for the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] to conduct a broad study of ecological trends and ‘change agents’ on public lands, the Obama administration exempted grazing – the change agent with the heaviest footprint. ‘One of the biggest scientific studies ever undertaken by BLM was fatally skewed from its inception by political pressure, reported the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). ‘When the scientific teams were assembled at an August 2010 workshop, BLM managers informed them that grazing would not be studied due to anxiety from ‘stakeholders’ – code for ranchers – and ‘fear of litigation.’ A participating scientist remarked at the time, ‘We will be laughed out of the room if we don’t [include] grazing.’ PEER’s executive director, Jeff Ruch, observed, ‘If grazing can be locked so blithely into a scientific broom closet, it speaks volumes about science-based decision-making” (p. 70).

Jim Robbins highlights the effects of the industrial-type farming practice have occurred for a long time and it is “one of the most ecologically destructive things that humans do.” He continues: “Plowing large fields every year causes a mammoth loss of topsoil; erosion removes 30 tons of soil per hectare per year, on average, according to one study.” The monoculture crops are subject to diseases that can wipe them out. The fungus Tropical race 4, for example, has decimated the global Cavendish banana crop – the kind we all eat – largely because they are a genetically identical fruit grown in vast one-crop plantations” (https://e360yale.edu/features/with-new-perennial-grain-a-step-forward-for-eco-friendly-agiculture).

Evaggelos Vallianatos observes that American farmers “have been addicted to huge petroleum-fueled machines, mountains of petroleum-based fertilizers, and rivers of petrochemical poisons.” She continues: “These ‘inputs’ undermine the fertility and life of the land. Petrochemicals [the herbicides, insecticides] fight nature, primarily by killing beneficial microorganisms in the soil and poisoning beneficial insects and other wildlife” (https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/12/farm-rot-is-eating-america-alive). This method of “farm chemical warfare has been going on for several decades.”

It was decades ago when Rachel Carson brought the world’s attention to the lethal effects of DDT and chemicals in food production in her famous book, Silent Spring, in 1962. The research then and since then show documents that “petrochemical companies, and the land grant universities have been inventing toxic weapons of the farmers [that] keep farmers hooked on every newer hazardous substances” and keep farmers on a chemical treadmill, as insects morph into ever more resistant varieties. Vallianatos points out that the spraying starves birds and other wildlife, poisons honeybees, impoverishes wildflowers and reduces the amounts of pollinated plants and crops. A recent peer-reviewed study published August 6, 2019, “revealed that American agriculture is now about 50 times more deleterious to insects than it was 25 years ago. The second terrible truth is that neonicotinoid insect-killing chemicals account for 92 percent of the growing toxic wrath of land and farming.” Additionally, Vallianatos writes, “Insects, after all, are the ‘food web’ sustaining life on Earth. They are essential for birds, amphibians, fish, reptiles, and mammals. They decompose animal wastes and dead vegetation, enriching the soil. They make farming possible. They pollinate our crops and eat those bugs harming our fruits, vegetables, and other crops.”

Carey Gilliam has spent recent decades in researching the effects of toxic chemicals in agriculture, with attention to the role that Monsanto has played in this continuing story. In her book, White Wash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science (2017), she documents how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have refused to test for the herbicide named glyphosate, known by consumers as Roundup, a weed killer patented, produced and distributed by the mega-corporation Monsanto, which recently merged with another mega-corporation, Germany’s Bayer AG. Gillam notes that glyphosate “has for many years been the most widely used herbicide in the world” (p. 9). Research has indicated that glyphosate may cause cancer in animals and humans, and that “Monsanto faces a long list of people who attribute their cancers to Roundup (p. 15). Nonetheless, the weed killer is found virtually everywhere in the environment. Gillam writes:

“By 2013, glyphosate use was so widespread that U.S. government researchers were documenting it in our air and waterways as well as in human and animal urine, including that of dairy cows. An analysis of state water agency data by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found glyphosate in tap water in at least six states, flowing through water utilities that serve more than 650,000 people” (p. 20).

Sustainable alternatives are available – some examples

The recommendations from the IPCC report on land degradation

Recall that the IPCC report on land degradation offered a set of proposals aimed at the regeneration of the land, including how to farm sustainably, large-scale tree planting, management of fisheries, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and poor agricultural and land-use practices, changes in diets away from red-meat consumption, the need to greatly diminish food waste.

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report on “sustainable agriculture”

The Union of Concerned Scientists have issued a report in which “sustainable agriculture” based on agroecological principles and practices is defined (https://www.ucsusa.org/food-agriculture/advance-sustainable-agriculture/what-is-sustainable-agriculture). The report posits that “[e]nvironmental sustainability in agriculture means good stewardship of the natural systems and resources” that is based on” building and maintaining health soil, managing water wisely, minimizing air, water, and climate pollution, and promoting biodiversity. According to the scientists, sustainable agriculture practices includes “several key sustainable farming practices, such as:

“Rotating crops and embracing diversity. Planting a variety of crops can have many benefits, including healthier soil and improved pest control. Crop diversity practices include intercropping (growing a mix of crops in the same area) and complex multi-year crop rotations.”

“Planting cover crops. Cover crops, like clover or hairy vetch, are planted during off-season times when soils might otherwise be left bare. These crops protect and build soil health by preventing erosion, replenishing soil nutrients, and keeping weeds in check, reducing the need for herbicides.”

“Reducing or eliminating tillage. Traditional plowing (tillage) prepares fields for planting and prevents weed problems, but can cause a lot of soil loss. No-till or educed till methods, which involve inserting seeds directly into soil, can reduce erosion and improve soil health.”

“Applying integrated pest management (IPM). A range of methods, including mechanical and biological controls, can be applied systematically to keep pest populations under control while minimizing use of the chemical pesticides.”

“Integrating livestock and crops. Industrial agriculture tends to keep plant and animal production separate, with animals living far from the areas where their feed is produced, and crops growing far away from abundant manure fertilizers. A growing body of evidence shows that a smart integration of crop and animal production can be a recipe for more efficient, profitable farms.”

“Adopting agroforestry practices. By mixing trees or shrubs into their operations, farmers can provide shade and shelter to protect plants, animals, and water resources, while also potentially offering additional income.”

“Managing whole systems and landscapes. Sustainable farms treat uncultivated or less intensively cultivated areas, such as riparian buffers or prairie strips, as integral to the farm – valued for their role in controlling erosion, nutrient runoff, and supporting pollinators and other biodiversity.”

There is also research that confirms the viability of agroecological principles and practices. They give this example: “an ongoing study at Iowa State University’s Marsden Farm research center has shown that complex crop rotation systems can outproduce conventional monocultural in both yield and profitability.” You can obtain further details and a wealth of information by going to the Union of Concerned Scientist site and accessing a series of reports related to sustainable agriculture.

Example of ecologically sustainable farming

In an article for Yes! Magazine, Kristin Ohlson gives us examples of ecologically sustainable farms (https://truthout.org/articles/for-a-sustainable-climate-and-food-regenerative-agriculture-us-the-key/?utm_source=sharebutton&utm_medium=mashshare&utm_campaign=mashshare). She tells of a visit to a South Dakota cornfield with “entomologist and former USDA scientist Jonathan Lundgren.” She witnesses corn “as a high as an elephant’s eye” and describes the field as follows.

“Instead of the sunbaked, bare lanes between cornstalks that are typical of conventional agriculture, these lanes sprout an assortment of cover crops. These are plants that save soil from wind and water erosion, reduce the evaporation of soil moisture, and attract beneficial insects and birds. Like all plants, these cover crops convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into a liquid carbon food, some for themselves and some to support the fungi, bacteria, and other microscopic partners underground. A portion of that carbon stays there, turning poor soil into fragrant, fertile stuff that resembles chocolate cake.”

This thriving cornfield is part of an experiment of a research institute called Ecdysis that Lundgren started back in 2016. They conduct “comparative studies between conventional agriculture and regenerative agriculture, which is generally defined as agriculture that builds soil health and overall biodiversity and yields a nutritious and profitable farm product.” Furthermore: “Regenerative farmers avoid tilling so that they protect the community of soil microorganisms, the water-storing pores they create underground, and the carbon they’ve stashed there. They encourage plant diversity and plant cover that mimics nature in their fields, avoid farm chemicals, and let farm animals polish off the crop residue.”

In 2018, Lundgren published a study that, according to Ohlson, “followed 10 cornfields per farm on 20 farms over two growing seasons, half of which were regenerative and half conventional. The study tracked soil carbon, insect pests, corn yield, and profits.” The key findings? “…while the regenerative farms used older, lower-yielding corn varieties without fertilizer and had lower yields, their overall profits were 78% higher than the conventional farmers.” This was partly “because the regenerative farmers’ costs were so much lower, with no cash outlays for costly insecticides and GMO seeds. They also ‘stacked enterprises’ and had two or more sources of income on the same acre—in this case, they grazed their cattle on corn residue after harvest and got a premium price for pastured beef. What was the primary factor correlating with farm profitability? The amount of carbon and organic matter in the farmers’ fields, not their yields.”

Finally, Ohlson refers to a 2018 interview with soil scientist Rattan Lal, “one of the first people to connect the loss of soil carbon caused by destructive farming to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” In that interview, “Lal said that he and his colleagues estimated that regenerating landscapes—farms, forests, coastlands, and so on—could restore up to 150 gigatons (a gigaton equals 1 billion tons) of carbon to the world’s soil in 80 years.” Continuing, he said: “All the extra vegetation grown to put that carbon in the soil would store 150–160 gigatons more, resulting in a terrestrial biosphere holding an additional 330 gigatons of carbon, equal to a drawdown of 150 to 160 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere,” and concluded: ‘We should encourage the policy makers that this process of restoring degraded soils and ecosystems is a win, win, win option.”

Concluding thoughts

As in other spheres of our oligarchically-structured contemporary life, here in the US we are saddled with a President and administration who want to advance private interests over the public interest generally and specifically how their policies pay no attention to how to protect the soil and conserve water, forests, fisheries, etc. and only think of how to give away public land to for-profit enterprises.

Nonetheless with all that going on, we are fortunate to have what appears to be a growing movement of people here and across the world who are concerned about ending fossil fuels, and engaging variously in support of policies that support sustainable agriculture, reforestation projects, a greening of economies, and, in these and other ways, challenge existing power structures. We are fortunate to have farmers who sustain the land. We are fortunate to have scientists who carry out illuminating research and investigative journalists who unveil the truth. We are fortunate to have authors who dig into sources to reveal what’s going on behind the scenes. We are fortunate to have some elected representatives in the US Congress and across the country who have the courage and knowledge to support bold policies. We are fortunate to have teachers at all levels who are committed to their students and strive to understand and convey the sound information. We are fortunate to have many citizens who find time to be informed about important issues. And we are fortunate that time to create sustainable alternatives has not yet run out.

Analysis of and progressive alternatives to the dead-end policies of Trump and the right-wing alliance
Bob Sheak, August 10, 2019

The evidence based on verifiable facts depicts a reality of the US that is deeply troublingly, especially when this evidence is so often missed, ignored, misconstrued, or intentionally distorted. It takes a bit of time and effort to stay informed on the array of important issues that confront us. Here is a sample of what so many people are missing from a report by Jake Johnson on the distribution of wealth that captures how badly the present political-economic system is so unequally skewed in favor of the rich and powerful among us (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/05/if-inequality-continues-grow-current-rate-richest-americans-will-own-100-us-wealth). The point is that, rather than trickling down, wealth has flowed up in torrents.

“If wealth inequality in the United States continues to soar at its current rate,” Johnson reports, “the top 10 percent of Americans could own 100 percent of the nation’s net worth by 2052.” The supporting data for this contention comes from the Federal Research, which document that “[f]rom 2013 to 2016, the top 10 percent of households increased their share of total wealth from an amazing 75.3 percent to a stunning 77.2 percent. That’s a share gain of 1.87 percent in just three years.’” If that rate of increase continues, they will take the 22.8 percent now held by the other 90 percent of the population, fueled by Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich. Johnson also refers to the published research of the University of California Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman that just 400 Americans “own more than the bottom 150 million Americans.” Between 1989 and 2018, “the top one percent increases its total net worth by $21 trillion.” At the same time, according to a report by Matt Bruenig published on Common Dreams in June, “Federal Reserve data…show that the bottom half of Americans lost $900 billion in wealth between 1989 and 2018.”

The Right-wing alliance

Presently, the chief beneficiaries of the opposition to scientific and verifiable evidence on the economic, political, and social conditions of the country are the groups that make up the right-wing alliance. It is based on an affinity of interests and ideologies, with a massive propaganda effort to sustain and consolidate the current unequal, environmentally destructive, and corporate-dominated capitalist system. The alliance includes Trump, his advisers, the Republican Party, the red state political leaders, Trump’s base of 63 million or so voters, the mega-corporations that dominate all sectors of the economy, and probably most businesses and trade associations, along with right-wing experts, think tanks, political-action groups, and right-wing media. This seemingly disparate assorted of groups find enough common ground in combining economic, militaristic, nationalistic, white supremacist, xenophobic, anything-goes gun advocates, evangelical fundamentalists, and anti-environmental ideologies and interests.

The base is regularly energized by Trump’s tweets and rallies and a broad right-wing propaganda establishment. Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters elaborates on “the world of post-truth politics” in their book, Lies, Incorporated. They document the existence of what they label “Lies, Incorporated,” which is “made of lobbyists, PR companies, media lackeys, unethical ‘experts,’ and unscrupulous think tanks. This is a “growing industry that exists to create and disseminate fictitious public policy ‘facts’ on behalf of business and ideological interests willing to pay for them,” and to identify strategies for sustaining support from the broad right-wing base (pp. 5-6).

The center of power

Not all segments of this right-wing alliance necessarily espouse or are even concerned about every aspect of the policies and practices that emanate from such a vast and variegated right-wing coalition. But there is a center of power that keeps the primary focus on economic and political issues.

This center revolves around the key activists in this coalition, including Trump and his key advisers and appointees, those who run the mega-corporations, the rich, and key Republicans in the US Congress. They are supported by major business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, The American Enterprise, and more more. They have their experts of all kinds to support their positions – trained staff, public relations advisers, lobbyists, lawyers, “conservative” economists, high-tech experts, etc. – who advance self-serving explanations and justifications to preserve and advance the advantages of the center of power, with a heavy dose of propaganda. And they use the most sophisticated computer hacking approaches from organizations like Quantum Analytica that use massive data bases on millions of people to manipulate how voters in key congressional districts vote or discourage people from voting. Then, focusing on those identified as “persuadable,” money pours in from “dark money” political contributors to barrage these citizens with misinformation and ads attacking Democratic candidates and their policies. This is supplemented by nefarious but often effective voter suppression efforts by the Republican Party establishment in the various states (e.g. gerrymandering, burdensome voter ID laws, misinformation about when and where to vote, the lack of reasonably located voting places, too few voting machines).

Those at the center of this right-wing coalition consolidate and advance their illiberal policies at home and abroad that are designed to favor the mega-corporations and the rich with selective and opportunistic support for programs of other parts of the society when politically it is expedient to do so. Domestically, neoliberal economic policies includes an emphasis on tax breaks for corporations and the rich, reducing regulations on the mega corporations and the private sector, re-directing government revenues away from public education, social-welfare programs of all kinds, as well as efforts to privatize or increase privatization of any parts of the public sector or public land from which there are potential profits to be made.

Indeed, the right-wing alliance can only win elections by using its political power by using manipulating the information received by undecided, moderate, and nonvoters in key congressional districts to support Republican candidates or by suppressing the vote of those likely to choose Democratic candidates. And they did this effectively enough in the 2016 election to elect a buffoon, malicious narcissist, and reckless President and an obstructionist and right-wing Republican candidates to the US Senate and House. It is not all bleak. The 2018 mid-term election gave Democrats, including progressive Democrats, control of the US House of Representatives. However, there is also reason to see a foreboding reality.

Central arguments of the right-wingers for “more of the same” – with some rebuttal

First, they contend that government spending, regulation and taxation should be avoided to the maximum extent – unless it benefits them.

They argue that government is mostly inefficient and wasteful, except when government reduces taxes, regulations, and opens public land, or schools, or prisons, or infrastructure to be privatized, or coastal waters to be mined for oil. They have had their eyes on privatizing Social Security and Medicare for a long time and do their best to oppose reforms that would strengthen these hallmark social programs. They make room for big exceptions. It’s okay to spend an enormous amount of taxpayer money on “national defense” for an already bloated military, far more than any other country. It’s okay for the government to do the basic research on new drugs if it then gives them long-term patents for-profit corporations to produce and sell the drugs for whatever price they chose. And it’s okay to run up the national debt without any real concern about the eventual disastrous economic consequences. There are plenty of such examples.

Steven Pearlstein writes on the anti-regulation views of the right wing as follows. “The mindless animosity toward all regulation…has now provided a rationale for handing over the keys to independent regulatory agencies to lobbyists and executives from the very industries they are supposed to regulate….Their aim is to hollow out these agencies from the inside – to maintain the fiction that the government is still protecting workers, consumers, investors and the environment while, in reality, trusting markets to restrain predatory business behavior.” And: “After gaining control of both the White House and Congress in 2016, Republicans moved aggressively to rescind dozens of Obama-era regulations that would surely strike most Americans as fair and reasonable. These include a rule setting strict environmental standards for oil and gas drilling in national parks and wildlife refuges, a rule barring federal student loans at for-profit colleges whose graduates never get jobs and a rule requiring financial advisers to act in the best interest of their customers. They include a rule preventing mines from dumping debris into nearby rivers and streams and a rule preventing cable and phone companies from collecting and selling information about the internet sites visited by customers. They even set out a to repeal a long-standing rule preventing restaurant owners from taking waiter’s tips for themselves” (Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal, Fairness won’t make up Poor (2018). p. 14).

Pearlstein also points out that they want tax cuts so bad that “[e]ven the long-cherished conservative ideals such as balancing budgets and investing in infrastructure have been tossed overboard in the relentless pursuit of tax cuts, which are now the reflexive Republican solution to any problem” (p 15). Of course, for corporations and their political supporters the chase for profits continues to take precedence over all other interests.

Second, they contend that the unbridled “market” should be the rule in the economy, with some self-serving exceptions.

The right-wingers argue that generally a competitive “free market” is the best way to allocate the society’s resources, because, they say with a straight face, it unleashes the entrepreneurial spirt of investors and leads to innovation and capital accumulation. They ignore contrary evidence. They ignore the uncompetitive reality of oligopoly and concentrated corporate power (more on this point below). They ignore how corporate executives and the bankers have hollowed out US manufacturing, investing in low-wage economies rather than in the US economy and workers. They ignore, and welcome, the lavish compensation given to corporate executives. They ignore the principal of the polluter pays. Profits are foremost in their business decisions. Many executives act as though they are above the law.

The Corporate Crime Reporter publishes a running list of corporate crimes, posting examples every week (https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/corporate-crime-morning-minute-podcast). Here are the examples for the last two weeks (as of this writing, Aug 9).

Week of August 5, 2019
Friday August 9, 2019 Is Amazon Liable for Defective Products Sold on Its Site?
Thursday August 8, 2019 Tech Millionaire Fined $3.7 Million After Destroying Wetlands for Winery
Wednesday August 7, 2019 How Trump’s Political Appointees Overruled Tougher Settlements With Big Banks
Tuesday August 6, 2019 NRA Chief Sought Help of Group’s Ad Agency in Trying to Buy $5 Million Mansion
Monday August 5, 2019 Defense Contractors Tighten Grip on Pentagon

Week of July 29, 2019
Friday August 2, 2019 Breast Implants Linked to Rare Cancer Recalled
Thursday August 1, 2019 Taco Seasonings Recalled
Wednesday July 31, 2019 FTC Fines Facebook $5 Billion
Tuesday July 30, 2019 3M China Bribery Probe
Monday July 29, 2019 Most California Lawmakers Took Money from Convicted Felon PG&E

There is another important point. The right-wing proponents of the “free market” dismiss the economic reality that a few mega-corporations control most of the assets, revenues, sales, and profits in most sectors of the economy and do their best to mislead the public about this reality. The real concern is that extraordinary economic power will distort markets and have a un-democratic impact on government. Here’s what I wrote about the concentration of corporate wealth in a post sent out on November 2, 2017, disputing the contention that the US has an economy driven by competitive markets.

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From November 2, 2017 post.

There is no doubt that we have a capitalist economy dominated by mega-corporations that measure their success by their profits and the value of their stocks compared to those of their domestic and foreign competitors. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a megacorporation as “a huge and powerful corporation.” You get some sense of the size of these corporations from the numbers generated each year by Fortune magazine in its “Fortune 500” list of the largest corporations in the economy. In the magazine’s most recent list for 2017, the magazine finds that “Fortune 500 companies represent two-thirds of the U.S. GDP [gross domestic product], $2 trillion in revenues, $890 billion in profits, and $19 trillion in market value, and employ 28.2 million people worldwide” (http://fortune.com/fortune500/list). The corporation with the most revenues in 2017 is Walmart, with $485.8 billion in revenues. The corporation with the most profits in 2017 is Apple, with $45.7 billion. The biggest corporations have more assets than most nations. According to Quora, there are 220 U.S. “firms” with revenues of $2 billion or more (https://www.quora.com/Forbes-400-How-many-companies-in-the-world-generate-over-US-1-billion-in-annual-revenue).

Here’s another way of thinking about the role played by mega-corporations. The domination of industry-specific markets by a few large corporations is defined as an oligopoly. In the U.S. economy, most industries are oligopolies. We have an economy in which virtually all industries and markets are dominated by a few mega-corporations. According to Wikipedia, “An oligopoly (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning ‘few’, and πωλεῖν (polein), meaning ‘to sell’ is a market form wherein a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). Oligopolies can result from various forms of collusion which reduce competition and lead to higher prices for consumers. Oligopoly has its own market structure.” Wikipedia continues: “With few sellers, each oligopolist is likely to be aware of the actions of the others. According to game theory, the decisions of one firm therefore influence and are influenced by decisions of other firms. Strategic planning by oligopolists needs to take into account the likely responses of the other market participants” (https://en/wikipedia/wiki/Oligopoly).

Tim Wu throws further light on this form of corporate concentration in an article for The New Yorker entitled “The Oligopoly Problem” (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-oligopoly-problem). He refers to Barry Lynn’s 2011 book Cornered “which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties.” Lynn’s chief finding is that dominance by two or three firms “is not the exception but increasingly the rule.” Wu gives this example, among others: “while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty percent of the market….” Wu argues that there should be more government regulation of such arrangements.
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The right-wing disinformation apparatus also ignores the obviously flawed medical system dominated by insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical-equipment corporations that keep prices rising for medical care, prescription drugs, hospital care, and a system in which tens of millions of American cannot afford insurance or afford medical care when they are insured. And they dismiss how the mega-banks and mega-auto corporations were among the principal causes of the Great Recession in 2007-2009, or that they were kept in business with an enormous federal government bailout, while millions of ordinary citizens lost their jobs and homes. They ignore furthermore how the Federal Reserve employed a method called “quantitative easing” to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of toxic (valueless) assets that threatened the viability and bottom lines of the mega financial institutions on Wall Street. And, astoundingly and brazenly, the banks have grown bigger since the recession, while the “too big to fail” rule is now institutionalized in practice and in place for another taxpayer bailout the next time the mega banks and their speculative investment strategies lead to another market crash. The point: forget all this hogwash about a competitive economy based on a “free market.”

Third, they contend that only the free market economy can produce strong growth and the fruits of it will trickle down.

The economic growth that the “free” market produces is said to trickle down to the middle and working classes in jobs, income, wealth, and a slew of commodities of all sorts. However, the evidence indicates that more and more of the jobs are jobs that have little security, no benefits, low wages, and no union protection. And the distribution of incomes and wealth have reached record levels of inequality since the “roaring twenties,” as much of it goes to the most affluent and richest segments of the population. Examples abound of the lack of trickle down in the growing number of people who find it difficult or impossible to find decent and safe housing, or safe water to drink, or afford medical care, who or are “food insecure,” or whose children attend under-resourced schools, or whose parents must, if they are physically able, continue working into their 70s and 80s.

Anand Giridharadas refers to examples of widespread deprivation in his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, where he writes: “the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries”; “the average twelfth grader tests more poorly in reading than in 1992”; “the share of young people who own a business has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s”; “illiteracy has remained stubbornly in place and that the fraction of Americans who read at least one work of literature a year has dropped by almost a quarter in recent decades”; “the average pretax income of the top tenth of Americans had doubled since 1980, that of the top 1 percent has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001 percent has risen more than sevenfold – even as the pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same” (p. 4).

Jake Johnson, whose article on the highly unequal distribution of wealth I cited on the first page, reports on a study that uses figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Kaiser Family Foundation that finds the costs of employer-sponsored health insurance soared from 1999 through 2017 by 127 percent, while the median -household income rose only 2 percent, reflecting the stagnation in wages (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/07/eating-away-workers-wages-employer-sponsored-health-insurance-soared-121-1999). Johnson adds: “‘By 2017, family coverage absorbed more than double that amount, to about 31 percent of take-home pay,’ according to Axios. ‘Health insurance has hovered consistently around 31 percent of household income since 2012, as companies shifted their employees to plans that had steady premiums but higher deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.’”

Additionally, Robert Reich offers a refutation of the “free market” narrative as well. He writes that in the US there is “Socialism for the rich” (https://truthdig.com/articles/robert-reich-america-is-a-socialist-country-for-the-rich). For right-wingers, Reich points out, “socialism means getting something for doing nothing.” And that “pretty much describes the $21 billion saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts” and the “$31.4 billion that “went into massive bonuses for bank executives.” At the same time, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees lost their jobs. Reich gives other examples of how Trump is “promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else, pointing to how under Trump “GM has got more than $600 million in federal contracts plus $500 million in tax breaks.” He continues: “Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22 million in total compensation in 2017 alone.” These lucrative subsidies, tax breaks, and executive compensation occurred while “GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.”

Here are some other examples identified by Reich: “Sears is doling out $25 million to the executives who stripped its remaining assets and drove it into bankruptcy, but it has no money for the thousands of workers it laid off.” And: “As Pacific Gas and Electric hurtles toward bankruptcy, the person who was in charge when the deadly infernos roared through Northern California last year (caused in part by PG&E’s faulty equipment) has departed with a cash severance package of $2.5 million. The PG&E executive in charge of gas operations when records were allegedly falsified left in 2018 with $6.9 million.” Then there was Equifax’s Richard Smith who retired in 2017 “with an $18 million pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 million consumers to hackers,” and “Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125 million exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.” And, to rub it in, Trump wants to cut the estate tax for the superrich, many of whom have never done a day’s work in their lives, to apply only to estates valued at over $22 million per couple.” Over the next three decades, “an estimated $30 trillion will go to their children.” Reich notes that “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.”

Government supported research has been critical in spurring innovation

There is yet another point worth making, that is, innovation generally and high-tech innovations specifically have often stemmed from research in government labs, or subsidized research in universities, or public-private partnerships with researchers from the private sector. Economics professor Mariana Mazucato has written a brilliant book, The Value of Everything, thoroughly documenting this fact. Here just a sample of what she has found.

“…the iPhone…depends on publicly funded smartphone technology, while both the Internet and SIRI were funded by the Defense Department of Defense; GPS by the US Navy; and touchscreen display by the CIA. In the pharmaceutical sector, research has shown than two-thirds of the most innovative new drugs (new molecular entities with priority rating) trace their research back to funding by the US National Institutes of Health. Meanwhile, some of the greatest advances in energy – from nuclear to solar to fracking – have been funded by the US Department of Energy, including recent battery storage innovations by ARPA-E, DARPA’s sister organization. Both Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet (the parent company of Google), have recently written about the immense benefits their companies gained from public investments: as well as the Internet and the html code behind the worldwide web written in CERN, a pubic lab in Europe, Google’s very algorithm was funded by a National Science Foundation grant” (p. 194).

Fourth, they contend that economic inequalities are not a problem because they reflect differential achievements and perhaps even genetic differences, not differential opportunities.

The historic and rising inequality that has been recorded since the 1970s should not be of concern to policymakers, they contend, because incomes, wealth, and other benefits are said to be based on merit, that is, hard work, IQ, the right education, and moral rectitude. From this view, the richest are the most meritorious of all, while the poor are said to deserve their desperate positions because of their own bad decisions and/or lack of a work ethic. Consistent with this Social Darwinist view, the right-wing leaders and propogandists want public assistance to be kept at a minimum or eliminated altogether to avoid giving incentives to the poor and needy a “free ride.” The same is true, they say, of minimum wages, that is, keep it low or eliminate it.

Such claims that government benefits to people with lower incomes are bad for society because there are too many people who don’t want to work for a living are challenged by historic examples. From 1939 to 1969, for example, there were opportunities related to WWII and the fact there was a labor shortage as a result of 11 million men and women in the armed forces, and then unique conditions that existed in the ensuing decades that gave great advantages to the US economy. According to estimates based on officially-based poverty standards, the poverty rate fell from 64-68 percent in 1939 to 12 percent by 1969 (from Sheak’s unpublished 2002 book draft, Poverty, Corporate Power, and the Welfare State – can send info on request; also see the extraordinary analysis of sociologist Edward Royce in his book, Poverty & Power: The Problem of Structural Inequality, 3rd ed).

The implication is that when there were opportunities, people who had previously been left and out and poor and/or because of racial or gender employment discrimination took advantage of the opportunities. These years, from the late 1930s to 1969, had high rates of economic growth (4% +), strong unions, job security for many with benefits and good wages, high taxes, the GI bill, the building of the inter-state highway system, the inclusion of the disabled under Social Security, a minimum wage that approximated labor productivity, the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, and more.

It was far from perfect, as the country was still affected by institutional racism and sexism. This was a period, moreover, when the ratio of CEO pay to workers’ pay was about 30-to-1. In recent years, according to one major study of 225 companies, it is now 339-to-1overall, and 997-to-1 in fast food and retail (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/16/ceo-worker-pay-ratio-america-first-study). Since the 1970s, the average wage of workers has stagnated, while the compensation of corporate CEOs has skyrocketed. This had little to do with meritocracy and more to do with corporate power, the primacy of keeping stocks high in value, corporate policies of deindustrialization and corporate investment abroad to low-wage countries, the right-wing assault on labor law and its enforcement, the increase in the number of right-to-work states, a falling minimum wage, the replacement of workers by automation, contracting out work to non-union firms, and similar practices, as well as trade policies that are devoid of protections for worker rights, human rights, the environment , and that prioritized corporate interests over democratic interests.

Fifth, they contend that the economic and political systems we have and US foreign interests need to be protected from foreign enemies as well as keeping markets open for US corporate exploitation through an ever-more profligate “national defense.”

The makers and shakers in this right-wing coalition benefit from or go along with pouring ever-more money into “national defense,” as the basis for a foreign policy that is increasingly based on war or the threat of wars, military interventions, 800 to 1,000 military bases located in 70 or more countries. According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the US, for example, has “the highest combined battle fleet tonnage[10][6] and the world’s largest aircraft carrier fleet, with eleven in service, and two new carriers under construction.” Continuing: “With 319,421 personnel on active duty and 99,616 in the Ready Reserve, the U.S. Navy is the third largest of the U.S. military service branches in terms of personnel. It has 282 deployable combat vessels and more than 3,700 operational aircraft as of March 2018,[2] making it the third-largest air force in the world, after the United States Air Force and the United States Army” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy).

William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger give us some in-depth understanding of the extraordinary amount of taxpayer money that goes to pay for national “defense” and defense- related expenditures in an article for The Nation magazine. (https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defense-budget-bigger-than-you-think). Taking their numbers from Trump’s FY2020 budget proposal, the base budge for national defense is $750 billion, which would be “one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars.” This money would pay for the 1.8 million military personnel, the 800,000 in military reserve units, and the 600,000 private contractors, and for the costs of maintaining facilities, housing, uniforms and equipment, feeding the troops, medical care, transportation, adding a Space Force, and a huge array of weapons from small-arms weapons to major weapons’ systems.

Also, according to Hartung and Smithberger, the base budget does not include the regular “cost overruns on major weapons programs like the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent—the Pentagon’s unwieldy name for the Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile—and routine overpayments for even minor spare parts (like $8,000 for a helicopter gear worth less than $500—a markup of 1,500 percent).” There is more like “the overpriced weapons systems the military can’t even afford to operate, like a $13 billion aircraft carrier, 200 nuclear bombers at $564 million a pop, and the F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons system in history, at a price tag of at least $1.4 trillion over the lifetime of the program, the latter a program, this F-35 that “may never perform as advertised.”

The Pentagon “also maintains its very own slush fund, formally known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, which is supposed to pay for the War on Terror—that is, the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere across the Middle East and Africa. In practice, it does that and so much more.” This includes a proposed nearly $174 billion, only $25 billion of which “is meant to directly pay for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The rest will be set aside for what’s termed enduring activities that would continue even if those wars ended or for routine Pentagon activities that couldn’t be funded within the constraints of the budget caps.” Hartung and Smithberger note that the “2020 OCO also includes $9.2 billion in ‘emergency” spending for building Trump’s beloved wall on the US-Mexico border.”

Then there are other military-related operations and costs that are not included in the basic national defense budget. Part of the Department of Energy’s budget, about $24.8 billion, is dedicated to running “a nationwide research, development, and production network for nuclear warheads and naval nuclear reactors that stretches from Livermore, California, to Albuquerque and Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Kansas City, Missouri, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Savannah River, South Carolina. Its laboratories also have a long history of program mismanagement, with some projects coming in at nearly eight times their initial estimates. $9 billion goes to “the FBI for homeland security-related activities, $216 billion for Veterans Affairs, a substantial part of which is for providing care for veterans who suffer from “the physical and mental wounds of war.” The sad fact is this: “Hundreds of thousands of returning troops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, illnesses created by exposure to toxic burn pits, or traumatic brain injuries.” The cost of caring for these vets will total “more than $1 trillion in the years to come.” The estimated budget for the Department of Homeland Security is $69.2 billion, with “nearly a quarter of a million employees, includes spending budgets for “the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Secret Service, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis.”

Hartung and Smithberger say that all the proposed activities thus far identified add up to $1.0469 trillion for 2020. But there are three more items. One, the international affairs budget of $51 billion has been cut under the Trump administration but still includes in the president’s 2020 budget the money for “the budgets of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development Diplomacy.” Two, “The proposed $80 billion budget for intelligence is $80 billion, for “the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of National Security Intelligence, the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, the Office of Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence, Coast Guard Intelligence, and Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, set up to coordinate the activities of the other 16. And, three, the defense share of the national debt is $156.3 billion.

Hartung and Smithberger arrive at a “final tally” of “$1,254,200,000,000. Thus, when all the spending they identify is considered, the Trump government wants to spend $500 billion more than the base budget of approximately $750 billion, plus the uncalculated costs of overruns and inflated prices, or of the unnecessary wars, or of a military presence all over the world. They expect that if the average taxpayer was “aware that this amount was being spent in the name of national defense—with much of it wasted, misguided, or simply counterproductive—it might be far harder for the national-security state to consume ever-growing sums with minimal public pushback. For now, however, the gravy train is running full speed ahead, and its main beneficiaries—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and their cohort—are laughing all the way to the bank.”

It might be added. Trump and his advisers, with the support of the military contractors and compliance of the military brass, are drumming the war beats for a war with Iran, withdrawing from arms control treaties with Russia, preparing for war (a nuclear war) with Russia and China, modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, while, as just outlined, increasing spending on an already bloated and over-extended national defense. Bear in mind that the US still has a policy that allows for the first (preemptive) use of nuclear weapons, allows for lunch on command, and that embodies the irrational belief that the US could “win” a nuclear war, with only a few tens of billions of American casualties. (Read Daniel Ellsberg’s in-depth analysis of this craziness in his book, The Doomsday Machine, 2017).

Summing up the critique of the right-wing assumptions

If not effectively contested politically, the agenda of the right-wing alliance will further consolidate corporate power, increase the already extraordinary wealth of the rich, make government less democratic, irrationally do little to reverse the accelerating climate disruption, do little to rebuild the manufacturing sector, do too little to prevent further deterioration in the nation’s infrastructure, drive more Americans into insecure, low wage jobs and poverty, foment divisions and racism, pour vast resources into “securing the border,” put more people into the prison system, do nothing about the regulation of guns, and pursue foreign policies that rely on the threat of military force and nuclear war, and sanctions, and trade wars. The “America First” slogan that is so dear to the hearts of Trump’s base stupidly ignores the fact that the US economy is highly dependent on other countries for vital raw materials and goods of all kind, and that, like it or not, we live in a highly interdependent and interconnected world. The path on which the right-wing activists, their enablers, and supporters are taking us will lead us to economic ruin, environmental calamity, unprecedented inequality, the loss of allies abroad, and war, if not nuclear war.

Items for an incomplete alternative progressive agenda to advance democracy, equality, fairness, and sustainability

#1 – Reduce the size and power of the mega-corporations
• anti-trust enforcement
• eliminate corporate money in political campaigns
• limit corporate lobbying
• no more bailouts, no more quantitative easing, no “too big to fail” bailouts
• support public banks
• limit copyrights and patents
• reform corporate governance by requiring the participation of workers, consumers and others to have representation on corporate boards

#2 – Strengthen democracy
• make it easier to register to vote
• take steps to end the voter suppression tactics of the Republicans
• work to repeal “corporate personhood”
• promote public funding of political campaigns
• limit “special interest” money in politics
• enfranchise ex-felons who have served their time
• takes steps to stamp out domestic terrorism
• take steps to protect the privacy of Americans from “capitalist surveillance” (see Shoshana Zuboff’s book by that title)

#3 – “green” the economy
• phase out fossil fuels as quickly as feasible
• end government subsidies for fossil-fuel companies
• put solar panels on very government and military building and facility
• support companies that manufacture solar panels and wind turbines domestically
• support organic farming, while reducing support for industrial agriculture
• protect the viability of national parks and endangered species
• plant lots of trees

#4 – implement a plan to address the national infrastructure problem
• e.g.: highways, roads, ports, sanitation and water systems, high-speed rail, low-emission public transportation

#5 – raise taxes on the rich and corporations
• raise the corporate and individual tax rates
• raise tax on short-term capital gains and dividends
• institute a transaction tax on stock trading
• increase the estate tax by lowering the amount of inherited wealth that is untaxed

#6 – reduce the “defense budget”
• directly reducing the amount spent on the military
• reconsider the policy of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal
• enter or re-enter treaties that aim to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons
• comply with obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty

#7 – strengthen the economic position of the working and middle classes
• push for a full-employment policy, which includes the creation of jobs in the public sector
• raise the minimum wage
• strengthen collective bargaining law for public as well as private sector workers
• oppose “right to work” proposals and laws
• pass legislation that would guarantee paid maternity leave, vacations, paid sick days
• expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
• Subsidize child care
• Share profits with employees

#8 – take steps to fix the public education system through college
• increase federal financial support for schools and teacher education
• support the idea that teachers and community officials and citizens should have a major say
• redraw school district boundaries to end segregation by class and put students in same school systems
• reduce, excuse, and find alternative ways to deal with the huge and rising student debt
• increase and encourage support for community colleges
• support an interim program of bussing, as the Marshall plan to end poverty is implemented

#9 – build a progressive social-welfare security system
• support universal health care legislation – e.g., “Medicare for all”
• do what it takes to maintain the solvency of all aspects of Social Security – e.g., eliminate the ceiling on the “wage tax”
• reduce the high rates of poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity, say with a Marshall Plan for poor communities or a “universal basic income”

#10 – have a foreign policy that aims to strengthen peaceful, non-military options, arms reduction, mutual trade arrangements, and non-exploitative investment rather than policies that assert “America First”
• rebuild the state department
• support the United Nations efforts to address the problems of the world’s nations, the poor, the environment, and economic development
• don’t support authoritarian governments or allow weapons to be sold to them
• better regulate and reduce the foreign sales of weapons to “developing” countries
• emphasize “development” projects in relations to “developing countries” that build their domestic economies – e.g., work to realize “the Sustainable Development Goals”
• enter into multilateral trade agreements that prioritize workers’ rights, human rights, environmental protection, green energy, and international tax avoidance
• avoid attempts to gain advantages and enhance America’s interests through sanctions, military and covert interventions, threats of conventional or nuclear war, tariff wars

Some of the challenges

The situation is clear: There’s a lot that needs to be done if Americans are going to reverse the un-democratic, corporate-dominated economy, the rising inequalities, the environmentally-devastating policies and practices, the war-mongering path that Trump and his administration are taking us. And there are additional concerns and questions about whether the process of robust change will even have a chance to begin.

One, will the Democratic Party have the vision, courage, and ability to advance a progressive agenda in the 2020 elections? It’s worrisome that many Democrats have been overly dependent on donations from corporate PACs, have been willing to support large increases in the military budget, flawed educational policies, a reckless “all-of-the-above” energy policy, a Federal Reserve board dominated by the mega-banks, etc.?

Two, will the American electorate in 2020 be able to understand what is at stake and not succumb to the fear-mongering, racist, divisive rhetoric, disinformation, and duplicitous policies of Trump and the Republican Party and/or have so many of their votes denied by Republican voter suppression tactics?

Julia Conley reports on a study by the Brennan Center for Justice that found how millions of Americans “are still suffering the consequences of the 2013 Supreme Court decision [Shelby County v. Holder] that loosened restrictions of the Voting Rights Act, giving states with long histories of voter discrimination free reign to purge voters from their rolls without federal oversight” (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/02/17-million-americans-purged-voter-rolls-between-2016-and-2018). The study found “that 17 million Americans were dropped from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018—almost four million more than the number purged between 2006 and 2008.” Furthermore: “The problem was most pronounced in counties and election precincts with a history of racial oppression and voter suppression. In such areas voters were kicked off rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than places which have protected voting rights more consistently.” Indeed: “The Brennan Center said that while there are legitimate reasons for removing names from a state’s voter database, such as a relocation to another state or a death, many voters’ names—especially those of minority voters—are purged even though they meet the state’s requirements for casting a ballot.” And: “Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it’s already too late,” according to one of the researchers. Bear in mind that this is only one method for suppressing the vote of those who would otherwise vote for Democratic candidates.

Three, if Democrats win the 2020 elections and control the White House and both chambers of the US Congress, will they be able to find ways around Republican obstructionist tactics (e.g., the filibuster) and advance elements of the progressive agenda?

Four, can a progressive agenda be advanced without further increasing or having a plan to reduce expeditiously the already unsustainable national debt, which exceeds $22 trillion and is steadily rising?

Five, should the issue of some sort of “reparations” to African-Americans in compensation for the long history of slavery and racial oppression continuing to this day is an issue be prioritized? Or is the progressive agenda already sufficient, if implemented, to address many of the unfair and pressing issues African Americans still face?

Six, amidst the plethora of issues that need serious attention, there is one that is definitive in its deleterious and destabilizing effects, that is, climate change, or, as Dahr Jamail labels it, anthropogenic climate disruption. (See his book, The End of Ice.) Everything humans do depends on a relatively stable climate. We’re told by scientists that the US government – and other governments across the globe – has only a limited time to act to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps 10-30 years before the disruptive climate change already well underway will be beyond control and reach a point that threatens life as we know it. Therefore, if nothing else, the massive fossil fuel complex must be rapidly phased out and replaced by renewables, energy efficiency measures, and whatever else will reduce greenhouse emissions (e.g., electric cars, eco-designed or revamped cities), along with efforts to extract the extraordinary level of carbon that is already in the atmosphere (e.g., protecting and enhancing public land, stopping deforestation, along with massive reforestation and regenerative farming). On the latter subject, see the article by Juliett Majo, “Landmark UN Report Emphasizes Crucial Role of Regenerative Farming Practices to Address Climate and Food Emergencies (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/landmark-un-report-emphasizes-crucial-role-regenerative-farming-practices-address).

In the meantime, the effects of climate disruption continue to be shockingly manifest all around us. Andrea Germanos reports on the July 2019 report of the World Meteorological Organization that July “may go down as the hottest month the planet has seen thus far in recorded history and “on track to be among the five warmest on the books, from 2015 to 2019” (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/02/july-has-re-written-climate-history-month-could-go-down-planets-hottest-ever). The WMO chief is quoted: “The extraordinary heat was accompanied by dramatic ice melt in Greenland, in the Arctic, and on European glaciers” while “[u]nprecedented wildfires raged in the Arctic for the second consecutive month, devastating once pristine forests which used to absorb carbon dioxide and instead turning them into fiery sources of greenhouse gases.”

The time is not for moderation but for transformative change.