Occupy the G-8

by Brent Blackwelder

This is the text of an address delivered by Brent Blackwelder to the Occupy Movement, in Frederick, Maryland, May 18, 2012 on the occasion of the annual meeting of the G-8 at Camp David.

Terrible economic times are facing billions of people worldwide. Where are the jobs? Roughly half of new college graduates in the U.S. cannot find work. Who’s getting all the money? The gap is widening between the one percent and the 99 percent.

At the same time, the world’s oceans are being devastated by overfishing, forests are being obliterated, mountains are being blown apart to get at the coal, and rivers around the world are being dammed, diverted, and drained of their water. A quarter of the species on the planet are headed toward extinction. Compounding these effects, the earth’s climate is being destabilized by emissions of greenhouse gases.

Driving this fiasco are casino economics, cheater economics, and futureless economics. It’s not a pretty picture. Why can’t we do better? What can we do about it? Are the powerful leaders of the G-8 nations gathered here going to provide the solutions?

If the past record of the G-8 is any guide, promises will be made, the World Bank will be assigned the role of savior, but monetary pledges won’t be fulfilled, and nothing major will happen to shift the status quo.

I propose to you today a bold paradigm shift in our economy — away from the futureless economics, away from the casino economics, and away from the cheater economics that run the global economy. We need an economics for the earth, its people, and all the life on this planet.

I suggest that the Occupy Movement could bring about an economic paradigm shift by adopting the steady state economy as its macroeconomic policy goal. That means an economy with stabilized levels of production and consumption, which means stabilizing population and per-person consumption. It means an economy that operates within the carrying capacity of the Earth and does not threaten present and future generations with its overbearing, bloating size.

Cheater Economics, Casino Economics, Futureless Economics

The global economy treats natural resources as if the Earth were a business in a liquidation sale. The global economic system of today is undermining the life-support systems of our planet.

One major shortcoming of capitalism is that it does not reveal the real ecological costs of commercial products. Furthermore, today’s capitalism allows corporations to externalize the damaging health and environmental costs of their activities. Today’s capitalism also tolerates massive taxpayer handouts to highly polluting corporations.

In the Casino Economy billions in profits are made without providing any goods or services — they are made with complex financial instruments sometimes referred to as derivatives. Complex financial instruments enable the avoidance of taxes. The financial sector in today’s U.S. economy is now about three times as large as the manufacturing sector.

In the aftermath of the big bank bailouts and the passage of the Dodd-Frank law to curtail high-risk lending, JP Morgan Chase recently announced a loss of $2 billion from its risky trading (now the bank says it’s over $3 billion). Hand-in-hand with cheater economics, many huge corporations put their profits in offshore tax havens and escape paying an estimated $100 billion to the U.S. Treasury.

In current economic practice, corporations are evaluated on their quarterly returns. There is little long-range thinking. Mainstream economists tell us 100 years from now is not worth worrying about. (One dollar a century from now is only worth pennies today.)  But such thinking runs counter to the values of most people. Parents are concerned about what kind of world their children and grandchildren will live in.

Futureless economics, casino economics, and cheater economics have no place in a steady state economy. But here are some examples of the damage they cause in the current economic sectors of energy extraction, agriculture, mining, and forestry.

1) Fossil fuels. Extractive industries are going to the most remote and riskiest places, such as the Arctic Ocean, to obtain oil. Uncleanable spills will be the inevitable result. Some of the most biologically diverse regions, such as the tropical rainforests, are being decimated by oil drilling. Oil and gas companies are extracting the dirtiest of fuels, such as tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Coal companies are using techniques like mountain-top removal to get at the coal in West Virginia. In the process they are creating a Martian landscape by obliterating the forested green mountains and destroying the entire hydrologic cycle.

Most extractive industries enjoy substantial handouts from governments. The U.S. is set to provide $110 billion over the next decade to the oil and coal industries. That’s right — some of the world’s richest companies enjoy taxpayer handouts, and some do not even pay income tax.

The health and environmental costs of oil extraction in places like Nigeria over the last 50 years are huge, but oil and gas companies like Shell have not cleaned up the more than 5,000 spills that have wrecked fisheries, polluted drinking water, and harmed the health of local people who have borne the brunt of the contamination.

2) Agricultural lands. Powerful agribusiness giants like Monsanto are trying to patent all seeds and control agriculture from top to bottom. Major meat companies like Smithfield operate gigantic animal factory slums that cause serious water pollution and load the air with noxious fumes that harm people’s health and displace local family farms.  As with fossil fuels, governments subsidize the polluters. Time Magazine showed that some of the biggest animal factory farms receive all sorts of handouts from state and local governments.

3) Forests: the world’s forests are rapidly being destroyed. The U.S. has set a horrible example going back to the 1800s when, for example, the state of Michigan was almost totally deforested. Instead of creating sustainable logging operations for the state, the timber industry abandoned Michigan and kept moving west. After seeing some of the horrendous logging along the West Coast, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “I hope the bastards who did this are roasting in Hell.”

The U.S. Forest Service is notorious for providing “below cost timber” sales in our National Forests. Corruption and bribery characterize logging operations around the world.

Friends of the Earth England and Friends of the Earth Ghana combined efforts to show that lumber in Ghana was being extracted, but taxes were not being paid on the real volume of timber being cut.

4) Minerals. Leonardo DiCaprio’s film Blood Diamond illustrates a typical problem with mining operations that seek gold, copper, diamonds, and other minerals. The use of cyanide to extract gold causes major pollution all over the world. The mining lobby in the U.S. has been so strong that the 1872 Mining Law and its subsidies have not been changed. The “pollute-and-run” practices of the past continue today on steroids.  As with oil, coal, and gas extraction, the damages to health, crops, and the air, land, and water are externalized on the public.

Elements of an Economics for the Earth: A Steady State Economy

There is no magic formula that can move the world to a sustainable, steady state economy. However, by pursuing any of the following actions, countries and localities can move in the right direction and set the stage for a paradigm shift to occur.

1) Get rid of polluter subsidies.  Give subsidies only to clean energy; no more subsidies for fossil fuels, agribusiness, and the like. About half the states exempt pesticides from their sales tax. Senator Sanders (I-VT) and Congressman Ellison (D-MN) have introduced legislation to eliminate all subsidies to the fossil fuel industry — a measure that would save $110 billion over the next decade.

2) Shift to a clean-energy basis for the global economy. It is technically feasible to run the global economy on a carbon-free and nuclear-free basis. Amory Lovins has a new eloquent description of his plan. Arjun Makhijani in Carbon Free, Nuclear Free provides another. California physicists Jacobson and Delucchi offer a slightly different plan in Scientific American (Nov, 2009) as does Lester Brown in World on the Edge.

3) Adopt the measures proposed by Senator Levin on tax dodging. Senator Levin (D-Michigan) is chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Investigation Subcommittee and has exposed a wide range of scandalous tax-dodging activities by corporations in American that deprive the Treasury of over $100 billion annually. A miniscule tax on global financial transactions and on currency transactions would yield hundreds of billions, while forcing players in the casino economy to pay at least something.

4) Change the indicators. The gross domestic product (GDP) is taken as a measure of society’s well-being, but in reality it measures how fast a nation is converting its natural resources into waste. It fails to account for the depletion of natural resources. Some states, including Maryland, have adopted the genuine progress indicator. And Bhutan has adopted Gross National Happiness as a better measure of well-being.

5) Restructure jobs. Adopting a four-day workweek can help reduce unemployment, spread the work, and provide time for people to spend with their families. The clean energy strategies described above would provide vastly more jobs per dollar than the fossil fuel industry. These jobs can materialize from dispersed renewable energy projects while our energy dollars remain in the community.

6. Support local investing. Michael Shuman’s new book Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street provides evidence that local investment does better than Wall Street stock purchases. The book presents a variety of examples of opportunities for investing in local businesses, local banks, and local exchanges. About two dozen studies have shown that such local spending and investments can provide several times as many jobs compared to investments in nationwide business. For example, for every $100 spent in a national book chain about $13 would remain in the local economy, whereas with $100 spent at a local bookstore, about $45 would remain.

Is a steady state economy just an idle utopian dream? Tim Jackson’s report, Prosperity Without Growth, prepared for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, provides a detailed discussion that makes a convincing case. Canadian economist Peter Victor has shown how the transition to a new economy can be accomplished in such a way that per capita income increases, unemployment declines, and poverty decreases.

In a world where propaganda and big money have undermined governance and the media, the Occupy Movement has a vital role to play by confronting decision makers, protesting polluting corporations, calling for an economic paradigm shift, and giving visibility to the paths for a healthier future.