William Greider: Is Hillary Ready for Us?

By Tony Wikrent
12MAR2015

William Greider is an old populist warrior, whom I greatly admire and respect. He used to be a national political columnist at the Rolling Stone in the 1980s and 1990s, which of course was the position of the legendary Hunter Thompson in the 1970s, and the wonderfully acerbic Matt Taibbi in our times. In 1987, Greider published Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, an exhaustive history of the Federal Reserve, with a strong forewarning of the twin problems of deindustrialization and financialization that were already well underway at that point.

Unfortunately, not many people seem to have read the book, because if they had, I very much doubt if Paul Volcker and TPTB would be able to continue their charade that Volcker is one of the "good guys."

In December 1989, Greider was one of two speakers at a special event in St. Louis on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the populist People's Party "Sub-Treasury Plan" for financial reform. The other speaker, Dr. Lawrence Goodwyn, was the author of what is far and away the best history of the populist movement. What makes it the best? Goodwyn fully understood the Greenbacker critique of the U.S. financial and monetary systems that powered the extraordinary political success of the populists. The two speeches, by Greider and Goodwyn, at the event are available online, and if you have not read them, you are missing important interpretation on a key issue of economic reform we still face today: Democratic Money: A Populist Perspective. You especially need to read these speeches if you are wondering what the Greenbacker critique is.

The other night, Meteor Blades at DailyKos highlighted a recent article by Greider at The Nation, But Is Hillary Ready for Us?. I think the article is important enough that it merits bringing your attention to it again. Greider expresses skepticism about the recent conversion of Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton to economic populism.

...the message is: Hillary gets it. She’s ready to confront the inequality thing. She will bring fresh ideas to the campaign on how to reverse the deterioration of middle-class American life. Her list includes everything from parental leave to care for newborn infants to equal pay for women and paid vacations for all working people. The CAP agenda, among many sound ideas, opts for stronger labor unions, worker ownership of corporations, faster growth and full employment, a reformed global trading system that for American working people will become a “race to the top” instead of the bottom. What’s not to like?

But Greider points out that what Summers and Clinton are now talking about, is nothing more than the focus-group tested populist rhetoric of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Pointing to Summers' recent remarks about avoiding "a politics of envy," Greider argues that it is going to be nearly impossible for Clinton to actually follow through on her new-found populist rhetoric because of "the practical problem of which political constituencies Democrats must be prepared to abandon this time—working people or financial contributors."

Greider then offers an observation that I do not remember seeing anyone make before. I think it explains in no small part the shocking electoral weakness of Democrats in running against Republicans whose policies the majority of Americans actually revile.

The trouble is, the [Clintonite] New Dems are now the Old Guard. Their center-right program—financial deregulation and “free market” globalization—has not only run out of gas but is rightly blamed for laying the groundwork for financial catastrophe. Yet the New Dem wing still holds the high ground, with big money and loyal supporters as well as Clinton clones populating the key governing positions. The labor-liberal insurgency has a weak bench because for a generation its promising young people were excluded from governing ranks—systematically screened out by both Clinton and Obama administrations—if they showed telltale signs of leaning leftward or embracing non-conformist ideas that resonate with the party’s New Deal values. By contrast, Republican regimes since Ronald Reagan have always made a point of appointing thousands of young right-wingers to second-level government posts as the training ground for long-term governance. Dems still invoke sentimental rhetoric from the New Deal era, but the practical reality is that the party’s economic policy makers went to school on Wall Street, either before or after their public service (sometimes both).

And you really need to read Greider's summary of the crucial meeting between Summers and Senator Elizabeth Warren. There is little doubt in my mind that Summers and the elite circles he moves in are scheming to destroy Sen. Warren when they get the chance.

 I want to direct your attention back to the paragraph on Clinton's proposals for

how to reverse the deterioration of middle-class American life. Her list includes everything from parental leave to care for newborn infants to equal pay for women and paid vacations for all working people. The CAP agenda, among many sound ideas, opts for stronger labor unions, worker ownership of corporations, faster growth and full employment, a reformed global trading system that for American working people will become a “race to the top” instead of the bottom.

Look, these policies, if Clinton follows through on them, if she is elected, are completely inadequate. Climate scientists have recently begun renewing their warnings that we now have less than two years before reaching a tipping point. That's the bad news. The good news is that we HAVE the technology, in hand, needed to stop climate change. The build-out of solar and wind power has already begun, but it has just barely begun. Here, for example, is the situation in Germany, which is much more progressive on this issue than USA - largely, I believe, because they don't have a bunch of petroleum billionaires and companies pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an obstructionist conservative movement.  
Annual electricity power generation in Germany as percentage of total consumption.  
Source: Can there be a renewables juggernaut?, by DoDo, March 12th, 2015, European Tribune.

In the United States, the amount of wind energy capacity is expected to double in the next five years, but that still leaves wind power at only about ten percent of total USA electrical generating capacity.

Building enough solar power, wind power, and other renewables to stop climate change in time is going to be a $100 trillion investment. That's not my number, that's the number from the November 2009 article in Scientific American by Mark Z. Jacobson, at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, at the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis. In 2011, they posted two pdf files providing heavily footnoted details of their 2009 Scientific American article; the pdfs provide all the details you could want, including discussion of critical material shortages, such as rare earth elements, for a mass, crash program.

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies.

A few days ago, Ian Welsh discussed another aspect of the climate change solution, in The Quick and Clean Guide to Fixing the Economy (Keynesian Stimulus #2)

1) Every federal building in America to go to energy neutral at least, or energy surplus ideally. That’s a massive stimulus.
2) In order for a house to be “conforming” and thus qualify for federal loan guarantees it must be energy neutral at least, as well.
3) A subsidized waiver system for retrofitting civilian buildings to be energy neutral—the cost of which is paid back by savings, so homeowners pay nothing, and commercial guys pay little. You can create a securities market for the certificates to bring private money online.
4) No mortgage can be conforming if any laws or homeowner agreements forbid the homeowner from growing their own food or selling it.
5) All new condominiums and apartment complexes must provide for growing food, through hydroponics or other means. Without it, they are, again, not conforming or the income from them gets taxed higher.
6) Substantial tax breaks for telecommuting. (See section below for how to make corporations do this.)
7) Move to a high speed rail system, subsidize electric cars with certificates (buy one while turning in a non-electric car and the government pays half), and so on.
These actions give you a massive renewable buildout, fast. Most of the jobs are domestic (even if panels are bought from China). They reduce energy use significantly, including peak turbine oil use and they enable people to grow food when needed, reducing pressures on various carbon sinks and renewable resources.

Does the $100 trillion price tag scare you? It doesn't scare me. It gets me all fired up! First, put it in perspective: the entire world economy produces $71 trillion in goods and services each year (of which the U.S. economy produces around $16 trillion). $100 trillion over 15 years is just under $7 trillion a year. That’s just a ten percent increase in world output, right now.

And, wow!, you want to talk about a jobs program? Right now, the unemployment rate in construction is 10.7 percent, significantly higher than the national average. Nearly one million construction workers are still looking for work, but there are only 117,000 openings, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And as Ian lays out above, we need a complete rebuilding / refurbishing of almost every building and house on the planet to be carbon neutral. Do you have any idea how many carpenters and construction workers that is going to require? There will not be enough people to fill all the jobs.

And what do you think is going to happen to wage rates under a 15 year program to spend $100 trillion building all this stuff? Imagine the political campaigns Democrats can run. We will solve climate change, make sure your kids and grandkids have a future without being burnt to a crisp or drowned by encroaching oceans, and we are going to create massive shortages of labor in your field that are going to drive your wages up at least 50 percent in the next five to ten years. The Republicans will be mincemeat if Democrats can run a campaign based on the $100 trillion climate solution and its implications.

Isn't that the kind of economic problems you want to hand to your kids and grand kids to solve? "Uh, sorry, we're creating way too many jobs right now. We've kind of tipped the balance of power away from capital and back to labor. Yeah, we're real sorry about that. Hope you can figure out what to do with those rapidly expanding paychecks." 

And here's something even better - at least I think it's better. We simply cannot do a $100 trillion investment under our existing financial and monetary system, which is now so screwed up that there are negative interest rates. Investors are paying some national treasuries to hold their money. To keep the principal safe, investors are willing to forgo interest. Under these circumstances, it doesn't cost governments anything to borrow money! It's crazy not to launch a massive spending program under these circumstances!

And if investors don't want to use their money to help build the $100 trillion program, the inevitable question arises: what damn good are these investors? The very existence of the present financial and monetary system will be shaken to the core once people begin to seriously consider how the world finances the $100 trillion program.

So, hell yeah, the $100 trillion price tag gets me excited - real excited! A lot more excited than Clinton's warmed over hash from 1992.

Would'ya like a serving of hope for Thanksgiving?

By Tony Wikrent
First Published 11/28/13

Hope is a powerful force. So what I want to bring you for Thanksgiving is hope. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant energy. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant food – for everyone. We CAN have cheap, abundant clean water – for everyone. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant medical care – for everyone. Hope that we CAN provide every living soul on our unique blue planet a decent standard of living worthy of the dignity of being human. And hope that we CAN do all these things while addressing and reversing the widespread environmental damage that the past two centuries of industrialization and mechanization have caused. Hope that we CAN solve global warming.

We are at a history-shattering point of transition, where resources and energy will not be scarce, and will never again be scarce. In the past half century, humanity has developed technological capabilities which are now growing exponentially. The best known example is Moore’s Law: that the number of transistors we can put on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. In a cell phone, one person has at his or her fingertips more computing power than NASA used to put astronauts on the moon forty-four years ago. The only things holding us back are old thinking in the Malthusian mold that denies the possibility of technological solutions; and old ideologies of political economy that prevent us from reforming the financial and monetary systems for the common good and to pay for what we need to do.

Economics today is hopelessly confused by a myriad of definitions for “capital”, “wealth” and even “money”. An economy is simply how a society organizes itself to procure, produce, and distribute the material, non-material, cultural, and spiritual goods and services required to sustain and reproduce human life at ever higher levels of happiness, security, and well-being. All else are really superfluities. Therefore, the major concern of economics should be the nurturing and deployment of the human mentation required to find and transform the natural resources required, and managing the scientific and industrial structures required.

In other words, the development of science and technology.

The progress of human technology can roughly be summarized as moving ever further down 1) a spectrum of energy density and 2) molecular and atomic scale. From the rapidly diffused light and heat of burning wood twigs, we have progressed to concentrate fire in boilers, then in internal combustion engines, and are now mastering the techniques of directing and manipulating single molecules, atoms, and even photons. We can now perform surgery on genes, and arrange individual atoms. These technologies are all breathtakingly recent in the context of known human history.

The implications are enormous. Almost every economics textbook I have seen – and I have acquired quite a few and looked at many, many others for just this reason – begins with some definition or other involving the allocation of scarce resources. People who have suffered through an Econ 101 course know that scarcity is central to mainstream economic thinking. In the best selling textbook on macroeconomics, economist H. Gregory Mankiw writes near the bottom of the first page:

The management of society’s resources is important because resources are scarce. Scarcity means that society has limited resources and therefore cannot produce all the goods and services wish to have. Just as each member of a household cannot get everything he or she wants, each individual in a society cannot attain the highest standard of living to which he or she might aspire.

I will put this as simply as possible: Mankiw’s and all other’s arguments that resources are scarce is a smokescreen that prevents us from seeing how rich oligarchs manipulated national economies. (Mankiw was George W. Bush’s chief economist, and earlier this year wrote a piece entitled “Defending the One Percent” – honest, not joking, that’s Mankiw’s title).

The typical environmentalist belief that the planet’s resources are finite falls right into this trap. What we consider as resources is defined by our ability to access and process them – in other words, our technology. As Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue in their book, February 2012 book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity dominates our worldview.

Thus, the most important economic activity human beings undertake is scientific research. But I am here to tell you that no economics textbook I have seen has ever discussed the overriding importance of scientific and technological development and deployment. They all, therefore, lack a sound foundation for actually assisting the human species in our task of surviving and thriving. Aluminum, for example, is ridiculously abundant. It is, after oxygen and silicon, the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, accounting for 8.3 percent of the world’s weight. Yet, until relatively recently in human history, the use of aluminum by humans was far more scarce than the use of gold or silver. It was not until 1886 that the Hall-Heroult process was developed, using electricity to extract aluminum from its ore, bauxite, and aluminum became cheap and plentiful. Diamandis and Kotler argue that

technology is a resource liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

But many progressives and liberals object that our world is overpopulated, and the planet simply cannot support a high standard of living for nine billion people. We are already using thirty percent more natural resources than the planet can sustain. Diamandis and Kotler explain example after example of new technologies that will solve this problem. Such as nano-engineered filters for making drinking water from the most heavily polluted sources, to new materials that will allow us to build photovoltaics without semiconductors, reducing the cost of solar energy by not one, but several orders of magnitude.

Just as important – and as hopeful – as these new technologies, is the fact, demonstrated over and over and over again, that as a society becomes more prosperous, more economically secure, and healthier, the birth rate drops dramatically. In fact, the birth rate collapses. We have seen this happen in Britain and the USA in the mid-1800s, in Japan in the late 1800s, in South Korea in the 1960s, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and India more recently. In a number of advanced industrial countries, such as Italy and Japan, the birth rate is now actually insufficient, and the populations of those countries are shrinking. Diamandis and Kotler write:

John Oldfield, managing director of the WASH Advocacy Initiative, which is dedicated to solving global water challenges, explains it this way: "The best way to control population is through increasing child survival, educating girls, and making knowledge about and availability of birth control ubiquitous. By far the most important of these is increasing child survival. In communities where childhood death rates hover near one-third, most parents opt to significantly overshoot their desired family size. They will have replacement births, insurance births, lottery births — and the population soars. It’s counterintuitive, but eradicating smallpox and vaccine-preventable disease and stopping diarrheal diseases and malaria are the best family planning programs yet devised. More disease, especially affecting the poor, will raise infant and child mortality which, in turn, will raise the birth rate. With fewer childhood deaths, you get lower fertility rates — it’s really that straightforward."

What about water shortages? Only 2.7 percent of the water on the planet is non-salty and usable for human consumption. Right now, one billion people have no clean drinking water, and 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. Dean Kamen has developed a water distiller that recovers 98 percent of the energy it uses and can produce 250 gallons of sterile water per day. The power source is a Stirling engine that really can burn almost anything, such as rice husks. Others have invented machines that process human wastes and turn them into electric power.

Energy? In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of people live with no access to electricity – yet one square kilometer of land soaks up from the sun the energy equivalent of 1.5 million barrels of oil. Deploy enough photovoltaics, and Africa has a huge surplus of energy it can export to Europe. University of Michigan physicist Stephen Rand discovered a way of creating magnetic fields one hundred million times stronger than what the known, accepted “laws” of physics had previously predicted was possible. The result of this research will hopefully be a way of making photovoltaics without semiconductors, reducing the cost of solar energy by not one, but several orders of magnitude.

Global climate change? Diamandis and Kotler describe the SunShot Initiative by the U.S. Department of Energy

….now funded the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a $122 million multi-institution project being led by Caltech, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. JCAP's goal is to develop light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers, and separation membranes-all the necessary components for faux photosynthesis. "We're designing an artificial photo-synthetic process," says Dr. Harry Atwater, director of the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research and one of the project's lead scientists. "By 'artificial,' I mean there’s no living or organic component in the whole system. We're basically turning sunlight, water, and CO, into storable, transportable fuels — we call 'solar fuels — to address the other two-thirds of our energy consumption needs that normal photovoltaics miss." Not only will these solar fuels be able to power our cars and heat our buildings, Atwater believes that he can increase the efficiency of photo-synthesis tenfold, perhaps a hundredfold-meaning solar fuels could completely replace fossil fuels. "We're approaching a critical tipping point," he says. "It is very likely that, in thirty years, people will be saying to each other, 'Goodness gracious, why did we ever set fire to hydrocarbons to create heat and energy?’ “

And what about the carbon we have already dumped into the atmosphere? Dr. David Keith at the University of Calgary has developed technology that actually removes CO2 from the air. Can the technology be scaled up to actually make a difference and undo the damage already done? With enough cheap energy, it probably can.

Technology is developing so fast, it is hard to keep up. I receive a newsletter on developments in photonics, and here’s a very small sample of recent news: November 23, 2013: Superconducting Detector Measures Single Photons

A new superconducting detector array that can measure the energy of individual photons is seen as a likely successor to CCDs [charge-coupled devices] and other semiconductor-based detectors for the visible and near-infrared regions, which are starting to hit performance limits.
"What we have made is essentially a hyperspectral video camera with no intrinsic noise," said Ben Mazin, assistant professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara, of the array that he and his team developed. "On a pixel-per-pixel basis, it's a quantum leap from semiconductor detectors; it's as big a leap going from film to semiconductors as it is going from semiconductors to these superconductors.

November 14, 2013: Seeing A Photon Without Absorbing It

All current methods of detecting light share a common property: absorption and thus destruction of a photon. It has been a long-standing dream to be able to watch individual photons fly by without absorbing them. A team of scientists in the Quantum Dynamics Division of Prof. Gerhard Rempe at the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics has now for the first time realized a device which leaves the photon untouched upon detection.

In the experiment, the incoming photon is reflected off an optical resonator containing a single atom prepared in a superposition state. The reflection changes the superposition phase which is then measured to trace the photon. The new method opens up the perspective to dramatically increase the detection efficiency of single light quanta and has important implications for all experiments where photons are used to encode and communicate quantum information. The key elements in the experiment are a single rubidium atom and an optical cavity.

November 13, 2013: Researchers rewrite entire genome, add healthy twist

Scientists from Yale and Harvard have recoded the entire genome of an organism and improved a bacterium's ability to resist viruses, a dramatic demonstration of the potential of rewriting an organism's genetic code.

October 23, 2013: Study Finds Natural Compound Can Be Used For 3-D Printing Of Medical Implants

Researchers from North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Laser Zentrum Hannover have discovered that a naturally-occurring compound can be incorporated into three-dimensional (3-D) printing processes to create medical implants out of non-toxic polymers. The compound is riboflavin, which is better known as vitamin B2....

The researchers in this study focused on a 3-D printing technique called two-photon polymerization, because this technique can be used to create small objects with detailed features – such as scaffolds for tissue engineering, microneedles or other implantable drug-delivery devices.

Two-photon polymerization is a 3-D printing technique for making small-scale solid structures from many types of photoreactive liquid precursors. The liquid precursors contain chemicals that react to light, turning the liquid into a solid polymer. By exposing the liquid precursor to targeted amounts of light, the technique allows users to “print” 3-D objects.

This last reminds me of one of the most exciting developments Kotler and Diamandis discuss: the work of tissue-engineer Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University Medical Center, who led a team that modified a desktop laser printer to print with each pass one layer of stem-cell based specific tissue cells and were able to “print” a mini-kidney in a few hours. They don’t write how long the mini-kidney survived in the lab, but did mention that the organ was secreting a urine-like substance.

We are at a history-shattering point of transition, where resources and energy will not be scarce, and will never again be scarce. A truly golden age of economic prosperity and bounty is closer than most of us realize, but we are quite literally killing ourselves by clinging to ideologies that were hammered out when famine was the norm, cholera swept away millions, and the average human being could expect to live only somewhere between 30 and 40 years. . We will soon be at a point that we can give every person on the planet a decent standard of living. Not the wasteful sol of the contemporary USA, but enough that no person, anywhere, for any reason, need experience hunger or cold or deprivation But, we have rich pricks who have poured billions of dollars into promoting and propagating the idea that poor people deserve the hardships and indignities they suffer.

It already is seen as a “structural problem” that our industrial systems are now so productive and efficient, that they cannot be a source of good, steady, well-paid jobs for tens or millions of people. So we’re supposed to now accept that because of this marvelous advance in human know-how and capability, tens of millions of people who can no longer find a well-paying factory job have to settle for the marginal wages of Wal-Mart or McDonalds? I refer people to thereisnospoon on DailyKos a week ago, The glorious, dystopian future envisioned by our libertarian masters, attacking Tyler Cowen who wrote to welcome a possible future in which 15% of the population “succeeds” and the rest must learn to get by on what they are provided by whatever welfare system society devises.

We are at the point where everything we need can be produced by only 20 to 50% of the population, depending on what country and its stage of industrial / technological development. So, we need to develop an ideology in which “structural unemployment” is not accepted as an excuse for hundreds of millions — billions, really — of people being left in poverty. We need, in fact, an ideology which does not accept poverty under any excuse. We have the means at hand to eliminate poverty and privation. Will we allow some the “freedom to believe” in ideologies that prevent us from doing so? I ask in retort: what right has anyone to “trade” hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars when we have such a bright future to build, if only we summon the will to finance it? There have been a few already who have warned about a future in which the rich are able to use new technologies to genetically perfect themselves and their offspring, while the vast majority of the human race is subjugated by new ideologies that will consequently be developed to justify the rule by a small class of the wealthy bio-engineered to be “genetically superior.”

Which brings me to my criticisms of Diamandis and Kotler. I see three problems with their book. First, they are completely wedded to neo-liberal market solutions, and appear to have no desire to challenge, let alone change, the status quo in the industrialized west which is increasingly under the boot of, as Pope Francis recently said, the new tyranny of capitalism. Any economic system must be run to benefit the general welfare. This was well understood at the time of the American Revolution, but it is now lost knowledge. Did you know that the words “capitalism”, “capitalist” and “capitalistic” do not appear anywhere in The Federalist Papers, let alone the U.S. Constitution? (There is a website where you can search the text of these documents, and I’ve done the searches).

Rather than challenging the rise of the global corporatist state and its inverted totalitarianism of manufactured consent, Diamandis and Kotler promote the charity work done by what they call the technophilanthropists, the info-tech billionaires like Bill Gates, who are funding much of the work of deploying these new technologies in underdeveloped countries, and who are also approaching the charity work they do from a largely neo-liberal market perspective.

Second, Diamandis and Kotler simply do not comprehend how large and ugly are the problems of greed, economic rent, regulatory capture, and the grasping rich. For every technophilanthropist trying to do good, there is probably more than one Jamie Dimon or David / Charles Koch doing no good (i.e., evil, according to the definition by St. Augustine). Diamandis and Kotler simply are not attuned to the fact that a new oligarchy has arisen that is destroying democracy and representative government. As the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, William Dudley, recently shocked Wall Street in a speech, there is an

important problem evident within some large financial institutions—the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust. There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions.

Finally, Diamandis and Kotler do not understand or simply did not discuss the problem, of who controls the creation and allocation of money and credit. The control of money and credit by a small clique of oligarchs, centered in Wall Street and the City of London, but including other centers such as the futures markets in Chicago, is the major obstacle to making forward progress against these existential problem. Simply put, our financial and monetary systems must be reorganized and reformed to serve the general welfare, instead of private gain.

An article in Scientific American two years ago projected a total cost of moving the world’s economies entirely off of fossil fuels at $100 trillion. There is enough solar energy hitting one square kilometer of desert in Africa to supply all the electricity needed - in all of Europe as well as Africa.

All we need to do is build the new industrial economies to harvest and harness this energy. The only things holding are back are old thinking in the Malthusian mold that denies the possibility of technological solutions; and the problem of paying for what we need to do. And to pay for what we need to do, we simply need to stop the speculators and usurers of Wall Street, the City of London, and the futures pits of Chicago, from misusing some $5 trillion in financing each and every day.

So, what future do you want to build? One in which we spend $100 trillion over the next decade or two to give everybody on the planet freedom from starvation, poverty, and illness? Or one in which financial elites are allowed to play games with $5 trillion every day? Do you want to build a future for which our children, and their children, will thank us, or curse us?

Dear Dems: Give me $100 trillion and I'll save your sorry ass

By Tony Wikrent
First posted 12/3/2014

So, after the disaster of election 2014, yet more Democrats have come to realize that elections are not won by giving only lip service to middle- and working-class desires for a real economic recovery. If I had a fiver for every time the past three weeks I've read or heard something like, "The Democrats don't stand for anything".....

You want a program? How about this: to stop global climate change and switch the world economy from its dependence on burning fossil fuels, to totally sustainable renewable energies, we need a crash program of $100 trillion in new construction of:

• 3.8 million 5-Mega-Watt wind turbines;
• 49,000 300-Mega-Watt concentrated solar plants;
• 40,000 300-Mega-Watt solar power plants;
• 1.7 billion 3-kilo-Watt rooftop photvoltaic (PV) systems;
• 5,350 100-Mega-Watt geothermal power plants;
• 270 new 1,300-Mega-Watt  hydroelectric power plants;
• 720,000 0.75-Mega-Watt  wave devices; and
• 490,000 1-Mega-Watt tidal turbines.

$100 trillion may sound like a lot of money. It really isn't. It's about how much is traded in three weeks in US financial markets: stocks, bonds, futures, options, and other derivatives.

In November 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, at the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis, had an article in Scientific American that surveyed what was required to end the era of burning fossil fuels. In 2011, they posted two pdf files providing heavily footnoted details of their 2009 Scientific American article; the pdfs provide all the details you could want, including discussion of critical material shortages, such as rare earth elements, for a mass, crash program.

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies.

Here are some excerpts from the Scientific American article:

Today the maximum power consumed worldwide at any given moment is about 12.5 trillion watts (terawatts, or TW), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency projects that in 2030 the world will require 16.9 TW of power as global population and living standards rise, with about 2.8 TW in the U.S. The mix of sources is similar to today’s, heavily dependent on fossil fuels. If, however, the planet were powered entirely by WWS [wind, water, solar], with no fossil-fuel or biomass combustion, an intriguing savings would occur. Global power demand would be only 11.5 TW, and U.S. demand would be 1.8 TW. That decline occurs because, in most cases, electrification is a more efficient way to use energy. For example, only 17 to 20 percent of the energy in gasoline is used to move a vehicle (the rest is wasted as heat), whereas 75 to 86 percent of the electricity delivered to an electric vehicle goes into motion.

Even if demand did rise to 16.9 TW, WWS sources could provide far more power. Detailed studies by us and others indicate that energy from the wind, worldwide, is about 1,700 TW. Solar, alone, offers 6,500 TW. Of course, wind and sun out in the open seas, over high mountains and across protected regions would not be available. If we subtract these and low-wind areas not likely to be developed, we are still left with 40 to 85 TW for wind and 580 TW for solar, each far beyond future human demand. Yet currently we generate only 0.02 TW of wind power and 0.008 TW of solar. These sources hold an incredible amount of untapped potential.

SNIP

Overall construction cost for a WWS system might be on the order of $100 trillion worldwide, over 20 years, not including transmission. But this is not money handed out by governments or consumers. It is investment that is paid back through the sale of electricity and energy. And again, relying on traditional sources would raise output from 12.5 to 16.9 TW, requiring thousands more of those plants, costing roughly $10 trillion, not to mention tens of trillions of dollars more in health, environmental and security costs. The WWS plan gives the world a new, clean, efficient energy system rather than an old, dirty, inefficient one.

This may be hard to wrap your mind around, but this program actually isn't that big. It most definitely is not overwhelming. For example: 3.8 million large wind turbines sounds like a lot, right? But Jacobson and Delucchi counter by noting that the world produces over 70 million cars and trucks each year. Did you even know that's how many cars and trucks are produced each year?

What about the $100 trillion price tag? Sure seems staggering at first. But only because we have internalized the decades of propaganda promoting neo-liberalism by the one percent and the banksters. It is actually well within our capability: the entire world economy produces $71 trillion in goods and services each year (of which the U.S. economy produces around $16 trillion). $100 trillion over 15 years is just under $7 trillion a year. That’s just a ten percent increase in world output, right now! Less than ten percent with a 20 or 35 year program. That would make for the longest sustained world economic boom since the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after World War Two.

But where do we get $100 trillion? Well, the financial markets in the USA alone trade over $5 trillion each and every day in stocks. bonds, options, futures, swaps, and other derivatives. And, there is over $50 trillion sitting around in the world’s offshore hot money centers, which the one percent are hiding from tax authorities. To fund $100 trillion in new infrastructure we can either take that money away from the one percent, or take away their control over the creation and allocation of new money and credit, which they are misusing for speculation and usury. We can just create the money needed out of thin air. That is, in fact, the way money has always been created.

We have the technology. We have the means. We have people desperate for good jobs. What we don't have is a financial and monetary system that will provide financing to do what we have to do. So, the real fight is to destroy the political power of Wall Street and the one percent, so we can get on with the task of financing a real economic recovery. In Britain, according to PositiveMoney.org,

...between 2000 and 2008, the amount of money and debt in the UK economy doubled as a result of money creation by bank lending. This created the debt fueled boom that ultimately led to the financial crisis. From 2011 to 2014 just 8% of new loans were made to businesses. The majority of new loans are directed to financial markets and mortgage lending.

I would be very, very surprised - shocked even - if the statistics in the USA did not also show a similar skewing of lending toward financial markets and real estate speculation.

The need for $100 trillion in investments to totally transform the world economy is why it is so important to back Senator Elizabeth Warren's opposition to Obama's nomination of Antonio Weiss, the head of investment banking for Lazard, for the senior post of Under-Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance. It is very unlikely that anyone who has been a "success" in banking and finance the past few decades has the understanding, willingness, and integrity to help lead the nation in the radical transformation of the financial and monetary system we require. I don't think even Senator Warren is as fully aware of what is at stake as you, dear reader, are, now that you have read about the $100 trillion program to build an entirely sustainable economy. Senator Warren is merely saying there are too many Wall Streeters in positions of power right now. I'm saying even one Wall Streeter is one too many.

That, of course, is a stretch. Of course we need people with experience in the banking and financial system to help achieve the dramatic shift we need. But, if you really are truly concerned about the future, this is the hard core attitude you need to take to anyone with a background in banking and finance at this point. In a post at Hullabaloo, Gaius Publius writes that there are already signs that exactly such a hard core faction is emerging in the Democratic Party. Gaius Publius calls it the "Hell No" caucus. Gaius goes directly to the central issue by posing the question that a lot of rank and file Dems are already pondering: In opposing the President's nomination,

"Has Warren joined the nominal enemy (Republicans), or has she taken the fight to the real enemy that controls both parties — the "billionaire class"?

Gaius Publius posits that what position Democrats in Congress take on the Weiss nomination will be crucial test of the "Hell No" insurgency. Another important test will be "what Harry Reid does." A third test will be the nomination of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General. She may be the first African-American women nominated for the position, but she is entirely cut from the same mold as Eric Holder, so it is extremely doubtful she will abandon "Too Big to Jail" and actually start to go after the criminals at the top of our banking and financial institutions. You really need to go read the entire post because it is the clearest statement yet of the possible paths the Democratic Party can take after the 2014 electoral defeat. There are also a large number of links to important articles and postings throughout. If you are blessed with an extended holiday this weekend, you should spend at least an hour or two reading this material. Please trust me, it's worth it.

"$100 trillion to build a new economy" will be another test, but one that we need to impose over the coming two years. It can completely transform what issues are defined, and how, for the 2016 election. We need to get general public awareness of the need for "$100 trillion to build a new economy" - and how doable it actually is. Once we do that, it will be a relatively simple matter to determine if someone is serious about solving the problems we face. The next time we meet someone who is a leader in the Democratic Party, mention the fact that we need "$100 trillion to build a new economy" and watch carefully how they react. If they are hopeless neo-liberal water carriers for our would-be corporatist overlords, they will recoil in horror, or try to argue that such a huge amount is simply preposterous. Anyone who is stuck talking about programs of a few billion, or even a few hundred billion dollars, is simply completely uninformed about the problems we face - or just not willing to face reality - because reality is that we can no longer afford to let Wall Street play funny money games. We must figure out how to impose new laws and regulations that force banking and finance serve the general welfare, not just private gain.

Remember, $100 trillion really isn't too much to wrap your mind around: it's less than ten percent of world economic activity each year over the next 15 years. And, it's less money than Wall Street and the Chicago futures market shuffle around every month. Wall Street and the Chicago futures market are not doing anything socially useful with all that money. We have much better uses for it. So give me $100 trillion.

Besides, we can create money out of thin air any time we want. That's what the real fight is about: Who controls, and who benefits, from the creation and allocation of new money and credit?