MONEY, INDEPENDENCE
AND CORPORATE WELFARE
Next to being a totally self-sufficient farmer, capable of making enough profit to purchase some of the less than necessary amenities of life, the best way for an individual to be independent is to have a good job or other means of receiving sufficient income to enjoy a reasonably comfortable life. Of course, when we speak of income, we are speaking of money—or some facsimile thereof. Federal Reserve Notes, as our "legal tender," serve rather nicely. So do food stamps in a more limited way. (Both, of course, have hidden costs that truly honest monetary units would not.)
In our "War On Poverty," the brain trust in Washington deduced that the way to make a poor person independent was to give him sufficient money to be "free from want." Somebody decided, and declared, that everybody has that right, and that somehow it is a constitutional right. (Though I don't believe the Constitution has been amended to that effect as yet.) Freedom from want is an individual's ticket to the independence that every American is entitled to by birth. Thus our welfare state was born, out of "good intentions" combined with the most convoluted, paradoxical, perverted, reasoning imaginable. During this same time-frame, (say from John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" era through the present) our language has undergone an Orwellian change, whereby the terms independent and dependent are readily interchangeable.
Millions of able-bodied Americans were made independent by being made totally dependent on hand-outs from the federal government. For many of them it has become an inescapable way of life, this peculiar kind of independence. Many were effectively weaned away from productive labor or any necessity or desire to seek it. By christening various government hand-outs entitlements, welfare recipients were made to feel comfortable with their dependence. They could hold their head up with the official knowledge that they were only receiving their just due—one of their inalienable rights bestowed by the Creator via Washington.
The nearest the average working man can hope to come to the feeling of true independence lasts but a week or two out of every year when he is on paid vacation. This is something he has earned, like the retirement (and/or Social Security) he hopes to receive in his old age. For decades, however, the welfare class has been on an endless "paid vacation" without the least necessity of having to earn it. In spite of their independence, however, they dutifully don the much coveted "victim class" mantle, for they never quite receive quite enough money to live in the manner they have been led to believe is actually their true birthright.
Had they [chronic welfare recipients] been taught from the onset to fish, rather than to put their hand out for a fish, their dilemma, at least in the large majority of cases, would never have developed. Responsibility would have been nurtured, families would have developed, or preserved, and they would have struggled together to make a go of things one way or another.
A family living in poverty, but at least earning its own way, whether living in a share-cropper's shack or ghetto tenement, is far superior to the single welfare mother trying to raise a brood of unmanageable, fatherless, children in a government subsidized crime-factory complex. The poor family, with the benefit of "community," even if it is a poor community, retains a spark of hope and the key to happiness, where many welfare recipients have tended to be locked into an existence of hopelessness and despair.
The share-cropper's son or daughter is more likely to become a productive citizen than the average welfare child. Even if he or she remains but a share-cropper, that is at least a productive and honorable occupation. Upward mobility is a function of both hope and effort, and the share-cropper's children are more likely to have both than fatherless welfare children. Education is the primary key to every type of self-improvement, and certainly no less available to the poor intact family with roots and community than the rootless poor class which has developed in our cities as the result of the welfare state.
Of course, one might argue that my share-cropper analogy is somewhat anachronistic. Share-cropping, in the context I've used it, like domestic service, is pretty much a thing of the past. This is true, however, only because the share-croppers were weaned out of the countryside by false hopes. They moved to the city, (first to find employment, then to find "relief") and became the fodder for the welfare state, and grist for our burgeoning prison system. Those who failed to "move on up" were placed on perpetual paid vacation and warehoused in government low-income housing, (albeit still at poverty wages) by the altruistic liberal policy-making arm of government—replaced on the farm, as it were, by a combination of machinery and armies of indigent migrant immigrant labor, (making the results of this transition to modernity triply damaging to the well-being of the nation).
All good things eventually come to an end. So do bad things. Now enter the recently enacted Welfare Reform Act, whereby the perpetual vacation force is allegedly about to be shoved out into a job market bent on sending production overseas and making knowledge and service industry workers out of the rest of us.
This will mean longer unemployment lines without the benefit of any earned unemployment benefit funds in the system. As I predicted in a previous commentary, welfare reform will undoubtedly prove more costly than welfare has been. It's cheaper to pay people not to work, or even look for work, than to train them for jobs that don't yet exist. Millions of mostly non-productive jobs will have to be manufactured for their employment, if civil unrest is to be avoided.
Daycare will have to be provided for millions of former welfare children. (What is an unwed welfare mother but a federally paid daycare worker anyway? So why not use this reality to positive effect?)
Naturally, there will be a large spill-over of unemployables even them. Another entitlement will be invented for some of them. I think I hear the drum-roll of one right now. Volunteerism? (As if the spirit of true volunteerism could be nurtured from the federal level!) Legions of paid, (at least room and board and a small stipend) federal and state "volunteers" may find "meaningful and gratifying employment" just helping out here and there. (Organized similarly, perhaps, to the citizen labor armies heretofore usually only known in communist states.) Of course, the prison system is also being vastly expanded into a virtual gulag to accommodate those that don't exactly fit in elsewhere, also at great public cost.
CORPORATE WELFARE
In their much belated mad scrabble to head off financial chaos, and keep chickens from coming home to roost in unmanageable droves, our legislators now almost uniformly advocate a balanced budget. Imagine that! As laughable as it may seem, some of them are even serious! A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, which has been on the table for several years, is again getting serious attention, as if that would get our chestnuts out of the fire. (Each of our representatives should have been taught, and should have learned, the importance of balanced budgets, and the desirability of living within means in elementary school. They shouldn't need a constitutional amendment in order to act on such elementary knowledge.)
More than thirty years into a disastrous national "accident" our mis-representatives in Washington are beginning to stomp at the brakes. Trouble is, we've already hit the abutment. The impact of the crash just hasn't hit home yet. The shock-waves must first penetrate the combined thickness of a lot of rather thick sculls. This has the effect of buying us some time, but it is unlikely that recent history can be reversed in order to avoid what seems to be the inevitable consequences of decade of fiscal bungling. Besides, it appears that in their collective confusion, the Washington crowd has mistaken the accelerator for the brake.
Millions of people are already feeling the effects of the "accident" by being down-sized out of their jobs, their security, and their dreams. With the Welfare Reform Act, millions more will soon begin to feel the impact. Of course, while the people have begun to suffer, Congress hasn't missed a pay raise. Not a single Supreme Court justice has had to suffer anxiety attack one for his or her job security. Not the president, nor any legislator, nor justice, has ever been compelled, through lack of means, to send their kids to District of Columbia public schools.
But Congress is getting tough. Having gone through the noble motions of getting tough on poor welfare mothers, some of our senators and congressmen are now zeroing in on cutting corporate welfare as a means of saving the granite, (or whatever) walls of the federal treasury. The extent of corporate welfare doled out to the largest, most profitable, mega-corporations currently infecting the world with such things as junk food, sody-pop, tennis shoes, chain saws, and bulldozers, not to mention every nature of deadly sophisticated weaponry and arms systems, is absolutely unbelievable. This welfare takes a multitude of forms, from direct subsidies and tax breaks to taxpayer guaranteed loans, to actually negotiating lucrative foreign trade deals for mega-corps, not to mention international advertising and actual bullying on behalf of American multi-national corporations, in the name of globalized free trade. Entire Washington bureaucracies, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, (OPIC) have been formed to help American industry move plants and jobs offshore!
In a few cases, corporate welfare makes some sense, (as in key industries that provide for national defense and provide many American jobs) but in most cases they are absolute outrages. It would be difficult to calculate the costs the taxpayer has incurred trying to force other nations to "buy American" when countries such as Japan are perfectly satisfied with their own products. Why would the Japanese want to buy Fords and Chevy's? And why should our government spend even a nickel, on Ford and GM's behalf, trying to get them to do so? If our government wished to give Ford and General Motors a boost, and help American autoworkers, (as it should) it could do so simply, and profitably, by raising the tariff on imported Japanese automobiles, to curtail Japan's competitive advantage in the American marketplace. This, of course, applies in every important major industry. It's known as "minding the national store." Naturally, the most perverse and counter-productive kinds of corporate welfare won't be cut, since it would be counter to the goal of a border-less global marketplace. The goal is to destroy national economic independence in favor of global interdependence. Dependence, rather than independence, has become our national goal! This strange turn of affairs is justified by the "wonderful new world" vision that is being foisted upon us by internationalist thinkers. For the better part of a century, they have proven wonderfully adept at manipulating our alleged representatives in Washington.
As could be expected, congress has moved first to cut so-called corporate welfare in industries that actually need them the most—the cases where American jobs are most negatively impacted—while making sacrosanct the welfare of those hugely profitable industries that are profiting by selling American labor out. The rational for this perversity can readily be seen in the stock-market and the gross domestic product, (GDP) both of which are up. Corporations which contribute significantly to both are considered worthy of corporate welfare. The numbers are in dollar figures, of course, and that is sufficient to give them much more weight than if they were, say, numbers of contented, prosperous, American workers.
Unfortunately, the welfare of Wall Street, and the state of the GDP, while all-important to Washington policy makers, are no longer directly tied to the welfare of the nation's productive labor pool. Foreign labor now contributes increasingly to American corporate profitability and thus the apparent, but very deceptive, well-being of the nation and its GDP. But the nation's well-being is really not being served at all if labor, the overwhelming majority of the people, are being disenfranchised.
Of course the interdependence formula includes the encouragement of foreign businesses to set up shop in the United States to provide jobs for Americans. This further confounds already befuddled public opinion. It provides hard evidence that interdependence is really good, and beneficial to Americans. The ploy works. The employees of Japanese automobile plants in the heartland are certainly grateful to have jobs, though they don't make the wages UAW Ford and GM autoworkers used to make. A foreign-owned factory is probably worth about one-half to a third as much to the American economy as a comparable one that is domestically owned and union manned. Not only are wages lower, but they tend to help depress wages at Ford and GM and, of course, most of the profits are exported by one means or another.
As for American companies setting up on foreign soil, Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, or Mexican labor may or may not benefit, (working in American owned plants, producing "American Products Produced Abroad") but the notion that it improves the lot of American consumers, in anything but the shortest of terms, is preposterous. It's nice to have inexpensive imported products in all the stores, but there is a serious catch to this in the final cost-benefit analysis. We are still merely in the opening moves of a game where the end is all-important. The potential disaster lurking in the end game would be rather obvious if it were not for the incredibly fine snow-job being perpetrated against an entire nation. Smoke and mirrors can work apparent miracles for a time.
None of the really big corporate welfare recipients are on the table for welfare cuts because they contribute significantly to the GDP. But GDP has become a very slippery measure of national well-being. For one thing, it is, in great part, a smoke-enhanced mirror-image of un-sustainable combined national and corporate debt. For another, the huge profits are flowing increasingly to the owners of capital and foreign capital investments rather than domestic plants and the pockets of productive domestic labor. The distribution of wealth is going lop-sided again, as it historically tended to do before our great economic national success of the mid-twentieth century.
The ultimate alleged goal of the new internationalism is international Nirvana—that state of affairs when universal equality in economic terms is attained, along with global peace and harmony. In other words, the end of international wage, price, and cultural, differentials. Yet all profit in international trade is contingent on those very differentials. When everybody makes the same things, at the same costs, at the same wages, shipping those products back and forth across borders and oceans will make even less sense than it does now. There will be no profit in it, only the added cost of transportation. If nirvana ever did arrive, local self-reliance would once again assert itself as a matter of good business practice. Trade would necessarily limit itself to what it was when we merely traded for those raw materials, or exotic spices which we did not possess, or could not grow or produce for ourselves. But the world will never see international economic or political nirvana. The quest will be interrupted by chaos, for it is a fraudulent quest unworthy of the term. According to my guru, nirvana cannot be attained through profit-taking.
THE MERCHANT MARINE TAKES A HIT
One important industry that has taken a corporate welfare cut is the merchant marine, an industry that is vital to national defense. The merchant marine has long been subsidized because of its military importance, and the fact that, by the nature of its business, it has always had to compete head to head on the world's oceans with the merchant marines of cheap labor countries, as it still does. The primary American shipping companies had been enjoying what was termed the Operating Differential Subsidy. That subsidy allowed American companies to maintain American regulatory, safety, and wage standards and still be competitive in world markets. Essentially, it paid the difference between the higher cost of maintaining and operating an American ship, as opposed to say a Panamanian ship. Most foreign merchant marines are also heavily subsidized by their respective governments—quite often with aid assistance from American taxpayers. (Yes, while cutting subsidies to our own vital and productive industries in the name of economy, we continue to blithely subsidize our competitors in the name of progress and international development!)
The recent Maritime Revitalization Act, passed by Congress in 1995, of course, did nothing to revitalize the merchant marine. It fact, it cut the previous subsidy in half, and merely set a temporary floor below which Congress determined the merchant marine should not be allowed to fall. It caused immediate pay and job cuts for American maritime labor. Maritime unions hailed the act as a victory for maritime labor only because the alternative seemed to be the complete death of the industry. If you can't have steak, you accept a bone. For the time being, the greatest maritime power on earth is assured of a fleet of 47 privately owned and operated, militarily useful, ships. At about 13th in the world, this hardly puts us in the running as a true maritime nation.
Americans and American companies actually own and operate hundreds of ships, but they are flagged out, [Panama, Liberia, Cayman Islands, Marshall Islands, etc.] and foreign manned—and the profits are carefully sheltered from exposure to the American economy and tax system. Few are available for national defense. Those that are, are receiving some sort of corporate welfare entitling them to the status of being considered under "effective American operational control."
Of course one can hardly feel sorry for shipping companies that lose of their supposed "corporate welfare." It's the multitude of maritime workers for whom one ought to be concerned. And our national economy and security. Shipping companies, deprived of their subsidies, merely switch flags and carry on perhaps more profitably than before. American seamen, however, lose their jobs, and the nation loses it's maritime military support capabilities. It doesn't need them in peacetime, of course. (Nor does it really need its army and navy.)
The average American, of course, would ask, "So what? What is the merchant marine anyhow?" The more knowledgeable might ask, "So why should the merchant marine be subsidized?" I would answer, "Essentially for the same reason the U.S. Navy is subsidized. Only Americans, employed on American flagged ships, can be depended upon to support our armed forces abroad during times of war. The same rational that says we don't need a large, viable, American flagged merchant fleet can also be used to argue that we ought to contract foreigners to man our armed forces." The Navy defends the nation and the world's sea-lanes so that international trade can be conducted in safety, yet we are abandoning those sea-lanes to foreign military and commercial powers.
With the percentage of imported goods in our stores pushing the fifty percent mark, the volume of our maritime commerce is beyond practical comprehension. The freight, or shipping cost, of getting all of those consumer goods to this country is a factor in the cost of every import sold. The overwhelming majority is carried in foreign ships, and none of their cash flow benefits this nation's economy. On the contrary, it adds significantly to our balance of trade deficit.
Any nation that does not carry a significant portion of its international commerce in its own ships is getting the raw end of every international trade deal it negotiates. The maritime subsidies paid, rather than cost the nation. The merchant marine has always more than repaid its ODS subsidy, while at the same time providing thousands of sea-going jobs, ship-yard jobs, and jobs in dozens of support industries. It can be demonstrated that some subsidies, including maritime subsidies, while looking like expensive waste and corporate welfare, not only do not cost the nation anything in the long run, but provide substantial returns—not only to Wall Street and the GDP, but, more importantly, to real economic and physical well-being of the nation and its real people.
Merchant marine subsidies are capital investments in the nation. As such, they constituted one of the few forms of "good" corporate welfare. Yes, during peacetime, Panamanian, Chinese, and Liberian flagged ships may adequately provide for our nation's ocean-borne commerce, and supply our troops abroad, perhaps at cheaper rates, but at a huge net loss to both the national economy and national security.
What most people seem to overlook about subsidies and protectionism is that subsidies are nothing less than necessary "bribes" to certain key industries to keep them loyal to the nation, i.e., domestic national interests and, by happenstance, to domestic labor. Cut those bribes, and capital, (nation-less mercantilism, predatory by nature) will flee to cheap labor markets and foreign flags to maximize profits. Capital, in its cold, raw form cares not for the interests of any nation, or any people, save its own stockholders. This is the immutable law of capitalism and the marketplace.
Protecting American markets, American labor, and vital American industries from the vagaries of international wage differentials is one of the few legitimate functions of a national government. It is more than ironic, that this vital function is the first our government actively seeks to abandon. Protectionism can be effectively and accurately defined simply as: minding the national store. Yet a veritable war has been waged against the idea of protectionism by our own alleged constitutional protectors! It's as simple as this: If we don't protect our own interests, nobody else will. But everybody will, of course, eagerly exploit our every weakness.
Camden
INDEPENDENCE THROUGH DEPENDENCE
Only a couple of years ago, I got my first real close-up look at a "Food Stamp." I was dismayed to notice that depicted thereon was an engraving of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The implication is that one who receives food stamps is a step closer to independence than before he received his first USDA food coupon. As in welfare, we again find the notion of independence through dependence on the government. This conveys a bad educational message to the children of food stamp recipients, if not the recipients themselves. It's like printing a red coupon and stating on it that it is green. Some people might get the idea that red is green and green is red. Just a little confusing, to say the least.
Liberals hated President Reagan's "trickle-down" economics. There was really only one thing wrong with the trickle-down theory. By the early 1980's community ethics had been widely replaced by the ethics of greed, and most corporations were fast shedding their sense of civic duty. The people at the top of the trickle-down chain had developed extraordinarily deep pockets. In addition to that, many had learned to use off-shore banking facilities as auxiliary pockets. Not much trickled down. Had capitalism been made to develop a community spirit through sensible regulation, I'm sure the trickle-down theory would have paid off handsomely to labor as well as CEO's and stockholders.
In order for trickle-down economics to work, perimeter flood-gates must be closed. Instead, they were propped wide open by the ideas of free trade and open flood-gates. What we call the corporate community ethic or spirit was undermined by the new internationalism, which focused corporate eyes on profits to be made abroad in opening global markets made attractive and accessible through deregulation and corporate welfare to promote international interdependence.
President Reagan made the mistake of deregulating big capital, apparently thinking he was going to get the government off of "our" backs. His intentions might have been good, but while he got the government off the backs of greed capital, us poor working stiffs got the shaft. The trickle, which actually became rather flood-like, was diverted almost exclusively to corporate management types, slick entrepreneurs, and the Wall Street crowd. Labor was by-passed.
The Air Traffic Controllers' strike didn't help labor any. As tragic as it was for organized labor, Reagan handled the situation in the only way a strong president could have handled it. A disastrous mistake was made on the part of the union leadership that called the illegal strike, and I place the blame squarely in their court. They must have listened to the advice and counsel of the wrong people. In fact, I strongly suspect that there was a mole at the top of the organized labor pyramid who encouraged the controllers to go on strike in order to start the union-busting chain. (This is because a strong organized labor movement is incompatible with the goals of the new international economic order and global mercantilism. The Air Traffic Controller strike was the perfect opening for what was almost undoubtedly a planned across the board, union-busting national campaign.) Whether or not the president was privy to this larger goal, I don't know.
The welfare and food stamp programs, of course, are merely another breed of trickle-down economics of a liberal variety. They don't work either, at least not in the long-term—but at least some of the cash makes it to people at the very bottom of the economic scale. On the down-side, a lot of poor, but otherwise able, people became independent through dependence on trickle-down from Washington, and now are faced with Welfare Reform. Many may now be forced to seek independence through work.
Everything that trickles down from Washington, of course, first has to be sucked up from working people, many of them themselves relatively poor, who pay the lion's share of the taxes. What gets to the truly needy is still but a trickle of the amount that gets stuck in the several layers of bureaucracy. Another word for this kind of trickle-down is socialism.
The dollar denominated food stamp prompts me to side-track a little and comment on money. The USDA issued food stamp is money just like the Treasury issued Federal Reserve Note. Both are coupons redeemable in goods. The only difference in the two is that the FRN is redeemable in all nature of goods and services, and is deemed "legal tender for all debts, public or private," while the food stamp is redeemable for food only, and is not supposed to be transferable. In actual fact, food stamps are traded and redeemed in all nature of goods and services, and undoubtedly accepted in payment of some debts besides those to corner grocery stores. When used illegally, food stamp dollars trade at a discount much as government bonds do. But they do function in every essential respect as money. Money is nothing more than a government issued "ticket" redeemable for goods and services, and acceptable for debt payment. That's it in a nutshell. Simple.
The Treasury, under the authority and direction of Congress, could, and should, issue money into the economy to provide for the people's purchasing power, (in the form of U.S., non-interest bearing, certificates) but it doesn't. It prints and issues Federal Reserve Notes to Federal Reserve Banks in the form of interest-bearing "notes" of federal indebtedness—a legal form of larceny against the people of the republic. This compounds the national debt, enriches certain private banking interests, and provides a control mechanism to further milk and manipulate the economy. This, in turn, robs the economy of many of the benefits of a truly free marketplace.
To return to corporate welfare, farmers are on the federal subsidy-cutting chopping block. Agriculture is our single most important industry. Everybody has to eat and be clothed, including non-farmers. Yet individual farmers and the family farms have already largely been eliminated from our economy. Farmers no longer have a significant voice in politics. There are too few of them. The so-called farm lobby is really the agri-business lobby, which many remaining farmers mistakenly confuse with being advocates of their interests. When the government talks of eliminating farm subsidies, however, it is talking about eliminating as many remaining independent farmers as possible, not hurting agri-business.
The Agribusiness big boys will retain all of their major subsidies and their corporate welfare. What will be cut are the price supports that have kept many remaining family-sized farms in business. The big boys make their money in the big markets, as well as in every stage of commodity wholesaling, processing, transportation, and food processing.
The independent individual tiller of the soil barely squeaks into the agribusiness economic equation. He is useful only insofar as he can produce commodities at or below international prices the big boys set for him. If he can't, he's out. Most are already out.
Perhaps the largest agricultural subsidy is the food stamp program. Interestingly, this program is not a part of welfare reform package. Who gets the benefit of the food stamp program besides food stamp recipients? Of course, the farmer gets the rap for the cost of agricultural subsidies, but he only gets a very few cents of the food stamp dollar, or any dollar spent on food in the nation's super-markets. Over 90% goes to the big boys, (such as ADM, super-market to the world)—trading, petro-chemical, wholesaling, processing, transpiration, and retailing companies. The Saudi Royal family probably gets as much out of the American food dollar as the American farmer. Maybe more. Futures traders, such as Hillary Clinton, cash in on it too. She put $1,000.00 into cattle futures and walked a few months later with ten times that amount. Her profits came from American consumers and taxpayers. Of course, they were made possible by the sweat and labor of farmers and ranchers who raise cattle for a living. A cattle rancher, however, can put that much into his cattle and wait until hell freezes over before realizing that much profit, and never miss a day of hard work in his life. Chances are, he'll lose his shirt and have his ranch foreclosed before he reaches retirement age.
The huge Department of Agriculture itself would have to be considered an agricultural subsidy, but nobody is suggesting eliminating it. Yet it has proudly presided over the elimination of the family farm as an American industry and institution, much in the manner Churchill proudly presided over the decline and fall of the British Empire. Possibly Empire would have faired better had Churchill never existed.
Camden
CARBON BONDS
In a recent commentary I expounded upon the incongruities of the bond markets. A global bond market, trading in debt for profit, somehow seems suspiciously like anti-economics to me. Yet it's big business and getting bigger. We already have Brady bonds, and hundred year securities, designed to send currently un-payable debt into the distant future. I mentioned my own ideas for cyber-bonds, orbital bonds, and satellite bonds, designed to send debt far beyond the stratosphere—but I failed to mention Carbon Bonds, or Certifiable Tradable Offsets, (CTO's).
Carbon Bonds are already here. The government of Costa Rica became the first to sell $2 million worth of CTO's early this year. CTO's will soon be traded on the Chicago stock exchange. While I have serious doubts about their workability, they aren't such a bad idea on their face, since the New World Order is coming ready or not anyway, it's a good way for countries with rain forests to make a quick buck, and good PR for polluters.
The idea is to help conserve the world's environment and natural resources, (particularly the rain forests) by making a potentially profitable market out of selling companies the "right to pollute" (elsewhere) in return for saving specific tracts of forest. Rich countries, rich uncles, and environmental groups can band together and purchase the bonds to save the rain forests anywhere in the world without invoking the right to pollute benefit they convey. If times get tough, they can conceivably resell the bonds, hopefully at a profit, to polluting companies in need of extra "pollution credits." Polluting companies, or "offenders," could not resell their bonds nor profit from them. However, if they pollute (elsewhere) more than they are allowed to, (by yet to be established international standards) they may be forced, by some international body, to buy more bonds to make up the difference. The World Bank and Earth Council of the United Nations both support the scheme. (Naturally.)
CTO's are government issued bonds denominated in metric tons of carbon representing the supposed among of carbon dioxide, (CO2) present in so-called green-house gases. This puts a quantifiable value (presumably) on specific tracts of forest land, which will be used as a means of financializing protection of the earth's environment. In February Costa Rica sold 200,000 tons in CTO's to the Norwegian government, which supposedly binds Costa Rica to the preservation of certain areas of its rain forest for 20 years. (The area would be the area required to "sequester" that amount of carbon.) The Norwegian government, in effect, bought protection for some of Costa Rica's forest, and Costa Rica made a $2 million dollar profit without having to call in the lumber jacks and timber companies. They can do it 20 years hence, however, if they are unable to sell the same CTO's again.
Near as I can make out, if a company wants to pollute in Brazil, it should buy CTO's from Costa Rica to satisfy its global civic duty and not appear too hypocritical. If one would wish to pollute in Costa Rica, he'd be well advised to purchase Brazilian or Malaysian CTO's. At only $10.00 per carbon ton, CTO's look like a bargain. I think I might get a couple before they go through the roof. They'd look good on the wall next to my "Brotherhood of Old Bastards" membership certificate.
Camden
ART and the CIA?
Have you ever wondered how or why the plague known as modern art ever became popular in the U.S.? I have, because at one time I aspired to be an artist. To me, most, (perhaps not all) modern absract art is little more than colorful doodling carried to absurd lengths and taken seriously. The fact that abstract expressionism had become a coveted "art" form, and the ability to do realistic work downgraded to "mere" illustration, discouraged me from seriously attempting to pursue art as a career.
The following is excerpt from an article entitled Of Spies and Splatters, by Frances Stonor Saunders, that appeared in the London "Independent on Sunday," on October 22, 1995.
'For decades in art circles it was either a rumor or a joke, but now it has been confirmed. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art--including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko--as a weapon in the cold war. In the manner of a Renaissance prince--except that it acted secretly--the CIA fostered and promoted American abstract expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.'The connection is improbable. In the 1950s and 1960s, the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art. President Harry Truman summed up the popular view when he said, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists, many were leftists barely tolerable in the America of the McCarthy era and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive U.S. government backing.
'Why did the CIA support them? Because this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of America's creativity, intellectual freedom, and cultural power...
'The decision to include culture and art in the U.S. cold-war arsenal was made as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947... the agency set up the Propaganda Assets Inventory that could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines, and public-information organizations.
'Then, in 1950, the International Organizations Division was set up... This office subsidized the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm... Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, and even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, ...it promoted America's anarchic avant garde movement, abstract expressionism.
'Philistinism, exemplified by Truman's Hottentot remark, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was unorthodox, discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in. It was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites, and heavy drinkers who made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
'To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," explains Donald Jameson, a former CIA case officer. "Most of [the artists] were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use People who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."
'The centerpiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast Jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists that was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beachhead from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travelers" in the West. At the congress's height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines.
'The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in abstract expressionism. The congress would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions, and no one, the artists included, would be any wiser.
'...millionaires and museums were called upon to help. Preeminent among them was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded New York's Museum of Modern Art. His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organize most of its important art shows. The museum was linked to the CIA by other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Program. And Tom Braden of the CIA's International Organizations Division was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
'Now in his 80s, Braden... [says] I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the cold war.
'Braden confirmed that his division acted secretly because of the public's hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do...
'But look where this art ended up... ...a signature for their culture and system that they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.'
Yes, they succeeded, and art has never been the same since. It has continued to progress, with or without the help of the CIA. Now we see crucifixes in glasses of urine and American flags as foot-wipes termed art, and the so-called artists subsidized by the NEA, not to mention some really swell looking welded junk piles. Of course a lot of modern art is attractive and colorful, or both. I suppose some of it is actually art, since art has attained a rather broad definition. But for my part, I think the CIA helped put one over on the American people, and many fell for it.
I wonder if they were the ones that yelled, "God is dead!"
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