Weaknesses in the fabric of our republic: Infrastructure investment vs finance-wizard parasites

Nothing typifies the American right's nosedive more than the War on Infrastructure. Lawrence Summers, past president of Harvard and former treasury secretary, writes here about this growing consensus, even among more sober conservative thinkers. “The case for infrastructure investment has been strong for a long time, but it gets stronger with each passing year, as government borrowing costs decline and ongoing neglect (of decaying roads and bridges) raises the return on incremental spending increases.”

Read the Summers article, about what should be the simplest matter for consensus, if our Congress contained pragmatic patriots instead of raving dogmatists. Summers lays our various tradeoffs in paying for such a program, which would also inject high velocity cash into our sluggish economic bloodstream. 

It turns out that every approach pays for itself! Making this a no-brainer. Which confirms the Congressfolk who have been blocking an infrastructure bill for 20 years to be brainless.

But this is not about just our roads and bridges. Especially savaged in recent decades have been the glory of an advanced civilization - our universities. Those red states that actually invested in their universities - Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas - thereby succeeded in reducing the brain drain of their brightest kids departing after high school. Only now, those in-state graduates create blue islands like Austin and Raleigh, that then have to be tortuously gerrymandered lest  those smart and knowledgable citizens then elect (shudder) democrats.

Hence the GOP's solution – torch universities nationwide. Saddle students with the costs and debt. And as a side benefit this helps also to wage war on science. See: The right's war on college: destroying America's great public universities. 

Those states – both blue and red - which have resisted the trend and kept investing are reaping fantastically better actual outcomes.  

 == Why the skyrocketing wealth disparities? ==

The Evonomics site is on a roll, aiming at one “emperor” after another, pointing out the lack of clothes. Moreover, these brave iconoclasts are mostly economists who really want capitalism to work well! But they are smart enough to know a rationalization for parasitism when they see it. 

In this article by Lynn Stout - Distinguished Professor of Corporate and Business Law at Cornell Law School – demonstrates that the emperor’s been naked for a very long time: 

“Bank executives frequently proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to investors, and ensuring that securities are priced accurately so that money flows to where it will be most productive. There’s just one problem: no part of this Wall Street mantra is true.” These three “services” are false – or mostly false – because the capital-raising, liquidity and money flow services are mere add-ons to a gambling casino where the house takes a huge cut out of every bet.  

For example: “In 2010, corporations issued only $131 billion in new stock. That same year,  more than $15 trillion in stocks were traded – more than the nation’s GDP. So, what benefit does society get from all this secondary market trading, besides very rich and self-satisfied bankers like (Goldman-Sachs chair Lloyd) Blankfein?”

So much for raising capital. As for the liquidity argument: Dr. Stout points out that the average human investor “could get by with much less trading—and in fact, they did get by, quite happily. In 1976, when the transactions costs associated with buying and selling securities were much higher, fewer than 20 percent of equity shares changed hands every year. Yet no one was complaining in 1976 about any supposed lack of liquidity. Today we have nearly 10 times more trading, without any apparent benefit for anyone (other than Wall Street bankers and traders) from all that “liquidity.”

I might add that she leaves out HFT or High Frequency Trading by computers, which offer up a vast array of problems and dangers that I list here.  

But the craziest incantation used to justify finance-parasitism is price discovery, the weirdly passionate and utterly evidence-free catechism that Wall Street trading helps allocate society’s resources more efficiently by ensuring securities are ‘priced accurately.’ Stout demolishes this in economist’s terms…

…but I have an even better argument, based on both biology and thermodynamics, the branch of physics that is more reliably true than quantum mechanics or even relativity. In that same essay about HFT, I go on to show that living creatures thrive by finding a steep gradient of usable energy, in much the same way that energy converting machines do. The argument is a little involved. But when these slopes or gradients get too shallow, plants and herbivores and carnivores all get sickly and die! 

And the thing that usually makes this shallowness?

Parasites. 

Make the parallel. It will astonish and appall you, and ultimately enrage you. This is not a simile or a metaphor but an exact diagnosis of how the financial industry has ruined growth rates and sucked life out of the economy.  It’s not mystical or even economics.  It’s physics. It is thermodynamics and the basis of all living ecosystems. 

To be clear... leftists are wrong to blame ‘capitalism’ or competitive enterprise for this mess!

Capitalism… truly competitive and productive market enterprise… is a principal victim of these parasites.

== Technology doubters ==

Uber-techno-grouch Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains) is at it again, railing that: “Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency.” 

Oh, my, get ready for a choice rant.  From his new book, Uptopia is Creepy and Other Provocations, here’s a good one: 

“The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology.” And: By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests.” (excerpted from Aeon).

As years pass, I am increasingly impatient with the smug superiority of grouches, whose disdain for their neighbors and fellow citizens drips from every missive… while they fail utterly to put our problems and progress into comparison against 6000 years of failed experiments in the only known alternative – hierarchies of feudal-inheritance and privilege. 

Sure there are new addictions to deal with.  But the fraction of the population that breaks away to think deep thoughts – as you the reader are doing right now – has never been higher.

Grouches are very useful for pointing out things to discuss.  But when you start believing them… that is the road to hell.

== The Big Kneel ==

Oh all right.  I give in.... What do I think about second string  49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refusing to stand for the US national anthem? (And the subsequent wave of players kneeling as it’s played?) 

First… I don’t… think about him, that is. For one thing, I'm a baseball guy - a better sport for dozens of reasons. For another, we got bigger issues. But heck. If forced to express an opinion, I’ll defer to my FB friend, Jim Wright, who writes to veterans, as a veteran, a very moving missive suggesting that: Real respect can not be compelled, bought, inherited. Read that instead of my screeds. 

Have I an opinion, though? No. I have five at least. First, that we only move forward by applying moral pressure on our faults as a nation, as my father did, when he marched with ML King and as the Black Lives Matter activists are doing now, in the streets.

Second: that the pressure-appliers don’t always have to be personally admirable! 

Many are! Others are – as individuals – sanctimonious bullies, whose preening may be much more about grandstanding than true, moral leadership. And to a large degree that does not matter! What counts is the *direction* in which we are moving. And that we move with purposeful determination. And it is (mostly) irrelevant whether Colin Kaepernick is a showboating prima donna-ingrate who ignores how very far we’ve come. (And he may be none of those things! I truly do not know.)

No, what matters is that America - and the Great Experiment that America leads - have always benefited from critics and criticism. No matter how good we are, we can get *even better*. Always. Lots better. Hence, our reflex should be to give benefit of the doubt to critics. 

And not to those who reflexively shout for them to shut up.

Sci Tech News -- much good! Some privacy may survive... but Siberia is burning

Please oh pease let me take a break from our insane politics! Starting with... 

...Me & Morgan! Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman - one of the most successful popularized science series ever, featured me in an episode "Is Privacy Dead?" It recently aired in the U.S. on the Science Channel. The questions I was asked were solid… as were my answers… but I do tend to speak in whole paragraphs so expect me to be “clipped.”

In this case, my concepts were simplified a bit... but basically faithfully conveyed, with an excellent final thought.  I'm pretty pleased. (Though my feelings about Edward Snowden are more mixed than they implied.)

Anyway, it’s an important topic. And no I will not officially provide any bypass (illicit) links to the show! Commenters may provide some... but I encourage using the show's prescribed approach. Enjoy!

Oh... and more media. At 9:00 a.m. Sunday September 25 I'll be skyping in to a panel discussion of "SciFi and CliFi" or climate fiction, for the Society of Environmental Journalists' conference in Sacramento CA.  

October will be busy for me. I'll be speaking at Oregon State in Corvallis (the center of human civilization, in The Postman). Then for GE's Whitney Symposium near Albany NY. Then at the great big World of Watson convention for IBM, in Las Vegas. And a Skype-in for MIT's Media Lab on December 3. And one for India's Tata Industries. Phew!

== Science blips! ==

Curious about those Siberia fires and other calamities? Well, just hold on. I have some good - (or at least interesting) - news for you, first.

Posed to leading scientists: Scientific American offers Twenty big questions about the future of humanity, including Can we avoid a "sixth extinction"? to "Will brain science change criminal law?"

Good news.  Another source of helium has been found in Tanzania’s Rift Valley. Till now, the world's dangerously dwindling supply was nearly all sourced in Texas… till the Republican majority in the US Congress commanded that much of the U.S. Helium Reserve be sold - cheap - to their own cronies. An act of corrupt betrayal that, alas, is both typical and tangentially related to the War on Science.

Now bad news… science is revealing how many substances in a modern, urban environment might alter life for infants.  Add to that… apparently (and verify!) … Tylenol.

Petra was already an archaeological wonder. Now drone surveyors have found a newly discovered platform, which measures about 56 x 49 meters, appears to be a unique feature that has "no parallels at Petra or in its hinterlands at present.” 

== Tech Marvels ==

Scientists have created a system a system that (it's claimed) uses solar energy plus hydrogen-eating bacteria to produce liquid fuels with 10 percent efficiency, compared to the 1 percent seen in the fastest-growing plants. 

Outdoing nature... new 'Bionic" leaf is approximately ten times more efficient than natural photosynthesis. 

Current breath-analysis devices are bulky and costly. A new radio frequency “nose” may be compact and affordable, allowing many gas-based diagnoses to come via a cheap add-on for a smart phone… or the new (XPrize) Tricorder when it comes out.

One of our 21^st Century Edisons is Dean Kamen, most famous for the Segway but creator of a vast array of medical devices and founder of the FIRST Robotics League that has made nerdliness a macho sport on 10,000 high school campuses.  His new water purification systems are being sent to villages all over the globe by CocaCola. Now Kamen is ready to produce and deliver the LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution). This prosthetic arm has been in development for ten years, starting when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) looked for innovative approaches for a whole new generation of replacement limbs for future amputees. 

The U.S. Army’s new exo-armor and amplification suit system is not quite at Iron Man levels, yet. But it is pretty impressive.

The first new nuclear reactor in decades in the US just went on line, reinforcing the fact that  “techno-liberals” have willingly shifted on this issue, a flexibility supported by growing science, technical skill, and the imperative to fight climate change. And the Obama Administration has been putting real money into new kinds of safer reactor design. And if this does not fit your stereotypes? Get used to it. Reality probably doesn’t either. 

And no, nuclear is not the long term solution.  Sustainables are coming online faster than anyone (especially cynics) ever imagined! (Indeed, traitors tried hard to delay it.) But this is going to take a mix.. especially citizens willing to dump dogmas and relearn the skills of ethically-grounded pragmatism.

A hedge fund that bets there is no global warming. Hey cultists! Put your money into it and (maybe) win bigtime! Every sane person who sees this has visions of shorting it, of course. Just go for long horizons. Stupidity has short term advantages

This veggie-burger looks, tastes and smells like beef — except it's made entirely from plants. It sizzles on the grill and even browns and oozes fat when it cooks.  This is of more than minor interest. If hundreds of millions can be weaned to much-lower meat use, it could save so much land and especially water, and provide so much nutrition that the balance may tip in our favor. Oh, you'll live longer.

We’re used to thinking of California as quake-endangered. But geologists see an upper limit to CA’s “big one."  Less frequent but potentially far more powerful is the long delayed “very big one” that might hit the Pacific Northwest. You folks in the beautifully moist Oregonian and Washingtonian and Columbian paradise… read up.  Get foundation and water heater bolts and go bags. Live life… but be prepared.

== Environmental impacts ==

Yes, I'll get to the Siberia Calamity in a moment, but first...

Thirty years scientists warned Congress on global warming: In June of 1986, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works held two days of hearings, convened by Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), on the subject of “Ozone Depletion, the Greenhouse Effect, and Climate Change."

“This is not a matter of Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling,” Senator Chafee said at the hearing. “The scientific evidence … is telling us we have a problem, a serious problem.”

A sane, grownup Republican senator. So what has changed? Everything the testifying scientists predicted has come true - though in fits and starts, as our planets oceans adapted. Ocean acidification skyrocketed, as expected.  
    
No. What has changed is something simple. The kind of human being and the kind of American you see being called a "Republican Senator."

Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

Continued impacts of the monster El Nino of 2015-16: "Carbon concentrations at Mauna Loa rose 3.76 ppm between February 2015 and February 2016; the single largest jump in recorded history. The previous record rise, of 2.82 ppm, occurred during the 1997-1998 El Niño. In both cases, scientists believe that emissions spiked due to a combination of warming and drying in the tropics, which can accelerate soil carbon decomposition, and large, drought-fueled fires," writes Maddie Stone in Gizmodo.

== Denialists are hiding under the bed ==

2013 then 2014 broke all records for heat and drought on the planet, but 2015 is now officially the smashing record-holder… except for the first half of 2016, which seems on pace to top all of them.  So what has this done to the cult’s narrative?

Actually, all of this is viewed as GOOD news by the denialist religion! Let me explain. 

Until 2013, their standard cheat was to peg the “before” on 1998  - the previous record holder (a huge El Nino) - and shrug off the fact that every year after 1999 was hotter than the one before. An uneven but steadily rising secular trend! Too complex a concept… I know.

Ted Cruz used this trick as recently as the 2016 primaries. But that cheat collapsed since the 1998 record disintegrated, three years running. All of our 'normal' years are now hotter than the previous, record-breaking El Nino.  (In other words, "Lyin' Ted" was lying, even in the context of his obsolete cheat!)

So now what?  “The 2015 State of the Climate report examined 50 different aspects of climate , including dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice and glaciers worldwide. A dozen different nations set hottest year records, including Russia and China. South Africa had the hottest temperature ever recorded in the month of October: 119.1 degrees Fahrenheit (48.4 degrees Celsius).”  

And there is ocean acidification. Repeat it to your crazy uncle because even his crazy web sites have no answer. They just change the subject.  Ocean acidification. Ocean acidification. Ocean acidification.

Oh and once-in-a-century and even per-millennium storms are now happening every…single… year.  Many times per year!  As in the recent humidity crisis in the US northeast and record-breaking flooding along the Gulf Coast.

But do not despair, denialist cultists!  2015-2016 was an El Nino and probably there will be slight dips in 2017 and 2018… along a general, secular climbing trend.  In other words, you’ll get your cheat back!  Just peg your “before” on 2015-2016, and you’ll be able to rant “there’s been no warming!”  

Don’t get it? No? Don’t worry. Fox will massage the talking points for you into nice, spoon sized chunks.   Open wide.

== Siberia is burning... and you never even heard ==

Wildfires have been roaring out of control there since spring, and won’t stop until covered by snow. A disaster about which media are completely silent, and absolutely a result of climate change. This link shows the region in question, “covered by enough smoke to obscure the entire US east of the Mississippi.” Moreover, this creates a positive feedback loop. And one more reason never to let denialist cultists near even a burnt match, ever again. 

Yes, alas.  Try to talk science and things wind up circling back to politics.  It is not the fault of science.  It's our fault, for letting politics be steered by the mentally ill.

Stolen elections and gerrymandering

I am beyond angry at Hillary Clinton for not displaying focused fury over charges by Donald Trump that the election will be 'rigged.' 

This is a poison pill aimed at de-legitimizing her presidency, from the start. And our entire republic. It must be answered, right away, with a challenge. With a dare. 

With a wager.

This is so important that I will say it in several postings:

Hillary Clinton needs to declare this as a crisis! She should demand that Donald Trump put up or shut up, on electoral fraud. 

Insist that he appoint 6 friends who are “sages beyond reproach” to join six she would appoint, plus six chose by retired US Supreme Court Justice and GOP appointee Sandra Day O’Conner. And have that commission investigate electoral rigging charges right now!  

No delays. No excuses. And they should look at everything from voting machines to voter suppression to gerrymandering. And no time for sage perfection. Report back in two weeks!

It would be an aggressive, assertive action and she’d look decisive, presidential. And it is utterly necessary, lest her presidency begin less valuable than a bucket of tepid spit.

== Might voting machines be rigged? ==

We'll get back to that. But it is part of a bigger context. Because Donald Trump is already concocting face-saving excuses. 

Betrayal by his own party’s establishment? Check. Debates scheduled opposite football? His falling poll numbers are a plot and the election is rigged? Check. So how might he rationalize at the very last moment dropping out of the race, in order to evade being the Biggest Loser?

I know someone who suggested one plausible scenario…

“I have been threatened with something so terrible – it really is huge – so huge, so amazing that I can’t tell you about it! Believe me, I'm a fighter, but I’ll take this one in the gut, for the sake of my country!”

Sound plausible? Sure, but let’s get back to the old standby. The real fallback position that’s already being prepared. Which is “the other side cheated!”

Asserting that there is already “widespread voter fraud,” Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone said Trump should declare that “if there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate . . . we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government…. and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath.”  And yes, that is a Trump confidant.

(In contrast look at a case where the election was genuinely stolen, much to our subsequent, injury, pain and loss. Sixteen years ago, after the contentious 2000 recount, Al Gore gave a gracious concession speech that invoked Stephen Douglas’s words to Abraham Lincoln: “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”)

Let’s put aside the blatant calls to treason, that will be heard and obeyed by parts of the revived confederacy, just as such calls were heeded when the slave states went volcanically crazy in wrath over losing the White House for the first time in 30 years, in 1860.  Oh, Trump’s defeat could unleash a wave of Timothy McVeighs. But no… let’s put off (for now) such dark nightmares. Instead take the question at face value and ask:

Can that happen? Can the vote be warped or manipulated? 

Of course it can! Though the biggest cheats – like gerrymandering and voter suppression -- are all perfected and done-most by Red States, where Donald Trump has most of his strength. Likewise, most of the companies making voting machines used to be owned (I have not checked lately) by Republican Party factotums and major donors.

But zero in on the machines. After the year 2000 punch card fiascos, those systems were largely replaced with electronic voting systems. “The intentions were pure. The consequences were a technological train wreck.”

This article from Wired relates some scary stories. “Verified Voting also has a handy map of who votes using what equipment, which lets you drill down both to specific counties and machine brands, so you can see what’s in use at your polling station.” 

Good news: More than half of the states conduct post-election auditing, by checking vote totals against paper records, to ensure that the votes are accurate.  Citizen volunteers can take part in these hand audits.

Even better news, Florida and Ohio – two of the three main decider battleground states – have auditing. Pennsylvania, not so much.

But this article ignores a crucial point. That cheating via voting machines would not be aimed at the closely monitored presidential race. Rather, the most effective and vital cheating will happen where the real political power and money are at stake… down ticket races for state offices and Assembly. Because if statehouses change hands, then the voting systems (and cheats) may be reformed. 

If you can cheat, then that is where you decidedly will. 

Presidents come and go.  But any state that ends gerrymandering never goes back.  And when enough do, well, then a day will come when the courts will have the guts to stop it, at long last. 

No, the cheaters are frantic.

And that is why it should be put right on the front burner.

== Why your party-affiliation should be pragmatic, geographic, and tactical ==

Reiterating that last point; In many ways, the down-ticket elections are more important, this year, than ever.  That is because we’ve had an executive and judicial branch for 8 years, trying to do their jobs, but the laziest, most worthless Congress in the history of the republic. 

I have long urged, for example, that Bernie-or-Bust characters should prove they aren’t useless-dreamy purists by doing the grittiest and most practically urgent kind of political activism… choosing some down ticket race for Congress or Assembly where a bit of extra effort by just one person might make a real difference!

Like in North San Diego County, where that piece-of-work Darrell Issa finally faces a real challenger – a retired Marine Colonel -- who might plausibly eject one of the worst representatives in U.S. history. And we are helping as we can.

Oh?  You say that local and down ticket elections are futile, where you live?  A lonely democrat in a gerrymandered Republican district?  Or vice versa?

Well, a district like yours is the ideal place to try the tactic that I recommend here.

Democrats who live in a hopelessly (and likely gerrymandered) Republican district... and yes Republicans in a hopelessly Democratic one should re-register with the whatever party "owns" the district. For example, in a heavily conservative district, your rep will be republican. Live with that fact. 

But local liberals can help protect a local moderate gopper rep from being savaged by tea partiers if he or she dares to actually negotiate with democrats. In other words, re-register in order to vote in the only election that matters, in your gerried district: the Primary.

It's been tested in California, where all voters can now vote in a shared, open primary. Often  the fall general election winds up between two demmies or two goppers, with an amazing side effect! 

The republican voters in a 2-demo race have gained influence, because they can no longer be ignored. They are listened-to, more than before.  The two dems running against each other seek out the local Republican clubs, and listen to moderate conservatives!  And vice versa. The chief casualty has been rabid partisanship, which has been largely killed, dead.

The California method required a citizen uprising. But YOU can emulate it, wherever you live, by convincing your pals to re-register tactically. Strategically.

I wish I had some way to make this a national movement. It is so simple and logical.  And it could rob cynical gerrymandering of HALF its power to harm practical and civil politics in America.  

== Fact-checking ==

Both sides in our current, fervid and fevered political frenzy accuse each other of being liars.  One party denounces all fact-checking services as “biased.” The other has all the scientists but still can be pretty fast and loose with too-easy generalizations.

Here are some “corrections” or comments on the acceptance speeches by Donald Trump…

and Hillary Clinton.

Oh, and Trump jokes he'll blame Pence if he loses the election. 

== The 4^th Branch of Government ==

Finally, one more factor for you to consider. Perhaps the most important one.

Every party has a shadow cabinet -- hundreds of factotums who line up for jobs in a new administration.  Despite frenetic GOP efforts to find vaunted "corruption" among Clinton and Obama appointees, those two are the only 8 year administrations in U.S. history never to see even a single high official - or even intermediate - convicted or even indicted for malfeasance of office. And not for lack of trumped-up, lame-o hearing after hearing and 24 years of relentless "investigations." 

Please read that paragraph again.  Not one allegation of malfeasance in office proved or even indictable against even one clintonite or obamite official, across 16 years, despite  upwards of $500million in witch hunts. The first time it’s ever happened. Facts are a bitch.

In contrast, the GOP brain trust consists - to a frightening degree - of Koch shills, child molesters and a conga line of orange prison jumpsuits.

You are actually gonna tell me that Trump will enter office and not go to to Washington GOP pols for advice on appointments? Or that those pols won't have thick folios of 'the usual suspects"? Factotums tanned and rested and ready from both Bush Administrations.

Dig it, this is why Ryan and McConnell et. al. are playing nice with DT!

Admit it, you never even thought about this fourth branch of government.  It matters.