Corporate Media & the Economy

With the economy in free-fall since last September, most Americans’ focus has been on this issue to the exclusion of everything else.  As such, wouldn’t it be prudent for the media outlets in America to provide analysis of the problem and different solutions by … economists?  Note that I don’t have a a lot of respect for economists these days in general.  For one, their forecasts aren’t held to the same standards as weather forecasts when validating them.  When was the last time someone else at the water cooler took their local economist to task for missing their unemployment forecast by hundreds of thousands of people or retail sales by hundreds of millions of dollars?  You haven’t because economists aren’t held accountable to the public.  But beyond that rant, the American people might benefit from having different economic views presented to them.

Why then have economists been on the weekend political talk shows and cable shows only 5% of the time the economy was being discussed in recent weeks?  Because the corporate media played a hand in wrecking the economy, along with the Cons they serve so well.  They have no interest in presenting qualified information to their viewers.  The corporate media distributes entertainment, not news.

My ire at this situation is non-partisan.  I hold Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow in much higher regard than I do Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly.  Yet even KO and Maddow only had a single economist on their shows in two weeks’ time.  That is unacceptable.  Talking heads and pundits are shown to the public.  Just as in the physical sciences, economists need to engage the public more often.  Our public discourse would benefit from it.  Our pressure to develop intelligent policies would also then benefit from it.

Climate Change Effects Come Further Into Focus

As the science over the cause of climate change has become increasingly solidified, many researchers are expanding their examination of the effects of climate change.  Among other examples, some recent items of note include:

North American bird species are wintering further north. An Audubon Society study conclusively shows that hundreds of species of birds are spending winters further north in recent winters than they did 40 years ago.  Climate change has affected northern latitudes more than the mid-latitudes and tropics: they’ve grown warmer faster than any other region.  Migratory birds’ wintering patterns have been shifted.

Sea-Level Fingerprint of West Antarctic Collapse.  An important study that came out in last Friday’s issue of Science looks more closely at how sea levels around the world would be impacted if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) collapsed.  Contrary to the incomplete assessment that was part of the 2007 IPCC Report, sea level rise won’t be equitable across the globe.  Due to gravitational effects and uplift as ice mass disappears from land surfaces, oceans bordering North America and in the Indian Ocean could rise ~30% higher than previously assumed.  For instance, the IPCC forecasted a 5m sea level rise for areas near Washington, D.C.  The new assessment indicates a sea level rise of  6.3m (1.3m more) due to additional effects.

Okay, I’m going to bring up a couple of short-comings of this study, one of which the authors identified.  This assessment did not take into account the Greenland, East Antarctic or mountain ice sheets.  Anything that causes the collapse of the WAIS will undoubtedly also cause collapses elsewhere across the globe.  Thus, that 6.3m sea level rise for Washington, D.C. could easily go much, much higher.  The authors acknowledge that serious concerns about the impact on coastal communities is increased as a result of this study, not decreased.  Second, the authors compare their assessment to the IPCC’s.  As I’ve written before, recent observations from across the planet indicate that every model used in the 2007 IPCC Report underestimated recent climate change.  The poles are warming faster than any model used indicated.  Climate zones are shifting faster.  Drought areas are expanding further.  Birds’ wintering areas are shifting north sooner.  CO2 concentrations are higher and positive feedback mechanisms have been initiated.  This doesn’t mean the results of this Science paper are invalid, only that the specific sea level rise number used for contrast is already out of date.  Policy makers must be made aware of the most recent valid research, like this paper.  The challenge facing researchers is being able to provide robust, comprehensive assessments so that strong policies can be created.

Weeds will appear in new areas and disappear in others.  Land managers could have a short period of time to reintroduce native plants in areas that have been taken over by invasive species.  The biggest question is where will precipitation fall most often.

Hurricanes’ roles in influencing Northern Hemispheric winters are being explored.  The view that hurricanes are important in maintaining the balances the atmosphere works toward in much the same fashion as mid-latitude cyclones (think of the low pressure systems that typically move west to east) has gained traction in recent years.  This article describes another effort at working to determine how that mechanism compares to mechanisms like El Nino.

News Items From The Weekend 2/6/09

A number of items caught my eye in local newspapers over the weekend.  Starting with Friday’s paper:
Pentagon expanding funding to woo world public opinion.  $4.7 billion will be spent on spreading propaganda this year alone.  That’s as much as it spent on body armor for America’s troops in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006.  Interesting to note where the priorities are.

Deal on stimulus elusive.  In this L.A. Times article, the debate is identified as becoming increasingly partisan.  Darn right it’s becoming more partisan – it’s all Republicans know how to do.  They think delaying recovery and reinvestment in America (not Iraq) will somehow lead to winning elections in 2010.  Good luck with that.

A note here.  Most Cons’ objection to the bill centers around, “There’s not enough tax cuts!”  The Cons implemented every tax cut they could during the Bush years.  Guess how many jobs it created?  The fewest since the Great Depression.  Nearly all of them have since been lost as the Cons’ failed economic policies took full effect.  What do the Cons want in this bill?  More tax cuts to the rich, which won’t create one middle-class job.

Politics collide over road tolls in transporation bill.  When do the Cons like a tax?  When it’s called anything else.  They want tolls on highways that the public have already paid for.  The Cons didn’t fund their maintainence for years as part of their Drown-Government approach.  Tolls aren’t the answer.  How about mass-transit instead?

Lennon or Lenin, it stinks.  Right-wing editorialist David Harsanyi does his part to confuse the details of loans and recovery monies.  He asks:

Why did we just allow the president to dictate the pay of private citizens working in the private sector?

After writing that beggars can’t be choosers, he then asks:

However, in Obama’s trillion-dollar “stimulus plan” rushing through Congress, nearly every sector of the economy will, at one point, have allegedly benefited from taxpayer bounty. Does this mean that all industries can be subjected to similar central control?

There is a big difference between the TARP money financial institutions received and the recovery funds currently being negotiated in Congress.  The former went directly from the federal government to individual corporations who were screaming they were about to fail.  Instead of using the money as the TARP legislation spelled out, those corporations instead used the money to buy other banks and give out $13 billion in executive bonuses – for doing a good job, they said.  President Obama rightfully called them out on the practice.  If they want money from the taxpayers, there will be conditions set on it, just like the conditions customers agree to when asking banks for money.  There is really very little difference.

The recovery money will be provided to generate programs and projects, which will create middle-class jobs.  In contrast, none of the money from the TARP program went to creating middle-class jobs.  The other big difference is individual corporations aren’t begging the federal government for corporate welfare.  The government is instituting the programs under which money will be distributed.  The difference is quite clear to those who take a moment to look for it.

And though we didn’t hear Vladimir Ilyich, we are hearing the creeping sound of centralized Western European top-down economics — a system, where even with all the glorious over-regulations, there is a deep recession.

Ah, the token swipe at other industrialized nations’ economic policies.  Of course, Harsanyi doesn’t mention that the U.S. initiated this recession.  It started here and is getting worse here than in parts of Western Europe.  That simple fact is one of the biggest reasons why Western European countries’ economies have also slid into recession.  The demand from the world’s largest economy has come to an abrupt and very significant halt.  That has to have an effect in today’s interconnected world economies.  To warn U.S. policy makers away from Western European economic policies makes no sense.  They didn’t create the problem.  American Cons did.

Rescued Firms Just Not Getting It

An interesting headline caught my eye this morning.  “Obama imposes limits on executive pay” is about President Obama and other Democrats introducing common sense limits on executive compensation if their firms receive bailout money from American taxpayers.  Why do I think they’re not understanding the environment?  Executives have been allowed for a generation now to run free at the helm.  They’ve been more than happy to take millions of dollars per year from firms, regardless of whether they succeed or fail.  They shouldn’t earn anything if their firms fail due to horrible executive decisions.  That’s more true than ever if firms accept American taxpayers’ money.

What Pres. Obama and other Democrats want to introduce in this recovery and reinvestment legislation is public accountability and transparency.  Private firms have been able to do whatever they want with consumers’ investments.  They’ve done whatever they want with the corporate welfare money they’ve taken from the public.  Now it’s time for change – that’s what the 2008 election was all about, after all.

Out of the $350 billion financial firms received from “president” Bush and Secretary Paulson, they decided to use it to buy other banks.  They decided to use it to pay for $18 billion worth of bonuses for executives!  What was the money supposed to be used for?  Balancing out the crappy financial instruments the firms decided to gamble with.  They money was supposed to increase the credit flow to Americans so that our economy could continue to function.  The same executives that decided to not use the money as it was intended by Congress are now warning Congress that

intrusion into the internal decisions of financial institutions could discourage participation in the rescue program and slow down the financial sector’s recovery.

Call me underwhelmed.  That warning is a good indication of just how alternate the reality these clowns have been living in.  If private firms want public money to bail them out from their disastrous decisions, the terms for doing so need to include public transparency and accountability, as Sen. Dorgan is recommending:

On Tuesday, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., introduced amendments to the Senate’s economic stimulus legislation that would require firms that receive bailout funds to disclose the bonuses they paid during the time they received government funds. The bonuses would be posted on the Internet and included in a report to Congress.

Why would executives not want their bonuses made public?  Because they know they’ve made unethical business decisions in the past and they think that a different set of rules should apply to them just because they’ve been financially successful.  All this while millions of Americans that actually work for a living have lost their health insurance, their jobs and their houses.  Those losses have come about as a direct result of the executives’ immoral decisions.

Sen. McConnell offers up another b.s. talking point:

“I really don’t want the government to take over these businesses and start telling them everything about what they can do,” Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said this week. “Then you truly have nationalized the business.”

Fine, Sen. McConnell, then the businesses should take care of themselves.  If the market is truly free, as you and other ideologues constantly assert, then they shouldn’t need billions of Americans money.  If they don’t want the oversight and the accountability that Pres. Obama and Congressional Democrats are proposing in return for a public bailout, they don’t have to take the money, do they?  They have the choice to do what they want.  Let’s see what happens when they refuse the money and oversight and fail.

Perhaps the scariest part to all of this is considering the “solution” the Cons would be offering if they had won the 2008 elections.  They were successful in giving away $5 Trillion of Americans’ money under 8 years of Bush rule.  This meltdown would only provide them an excuse to give away trillions more.  Democrats are coming up with solutions that will result in a healthier economy in the medium- to long-term.  Democrats want transparency and accountability, two items that were not considered under the Cons.

Climate Change: Current Goals Lacking

Scientists most closely associated with recommending climate policies to government officials are refocusing their recommendations.  Armed with new data that show the current state of the climate is worse than that predicted by any model used in the 2007 IPCC Report, scientists are trying to let government officials know that stated goals to decrease emission levels won’t go far enough in the alloted timeframe.

For instance, CO Gov. Ritter’s Climate Action Plan calls for a 20% reduction in 2005 GHG emissions by 2020.  President Obama has called for 2020 emissions to be reduced to 1990 levels.  If officials are serious about not introducing the worst climate change effects currently estimated (sea level rise, temperature, precipitation patterns, drought, etc.), their emission reduction goals must become much more bold.  By 2050, reductions from 1990 levels must be at least 80%.

Climate models used in the 2007 IPCC Report forecasted a range of temperature increases of 1-6 degrees Celsius.  Severe or abrupt climate changes weren’t expected until the upper limit of that range was reached.  The beginnings of those climate changes have already been seen, with temperature increases of only 0.7 degrees Celsius.  To wait until 6 or even 2 degrees of warming then seems like a very bad idea.  A whole set of tipping points might be reached well before the worst warming was seen.  Plenty of warming resides today “in the pipeline”.  Greenhouse gas concentrations today are enough to continue to warm the globe for at least another 100 years.  In light of the continuing data showing climate change effects, emissions standards must be more aggressively set and pursued.