Poverty American Style

Kenneth Surin

“The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.”

In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the US’s poorest neighbourhoods.   Alston, author of the quoted phrase in the subtitle above, is an Australian who is professor of law at New York University.  During his mission he visited Alabama, California, West Virginia, Texas, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico.

Alston’s statement on American poverty and inequality has been overlooked by most of the mainstream media.

Alston has a record of consistent impartiality, which makes his statement on American poverty all the more credible.

He was critical of China in his report on that country (the Chinese government later accused him of “meddling” in its judicial system).  He wants Sri Lanka to be investigated for war crimes against its Tamil minority population.  According to The Guardian, Alston also “tore a strip off the Saudi Arabian regime for its treatment of women months before the kingdom legalized their right to drive, denounced the Brazilian government for attacking the poor through austerity, and even excoriated the UN itself for importing cholera to Haiti”.  Alston also reprimanded the World Bank for “playing a double-game” that is “leading a ‘race to the bottom’ on human rights”.

Alston began his statement on the US by saying that “in practice, the United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation. . . at the end of the day, particularly in a rich country like the USA, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated”.

He then said of his visit:

“I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability and death”.

Asked to compare the US with other countries, Alston provided a cross-section of statistical comparisons worth noting.  (In several cases, I have supplemented Alston’s comparisons with data from other sources.)

Numerous indicators confirm that the US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries.  It spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined.

US health care expenditures per capita are double the OECD average and much higher than in all other countries. But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average.

US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.

On average, Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other wealthy democracies, and the “health gap” between the US and its peer countries continues to grow.

U.S. inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries.

Neglected tropical diseases, including Zika, are increasingly common in the USA.  It has been estimated that 12 million Americans live with a neglected parasitic infection. A 2017 report documents the prevalence of hookworm in Lowndes County, Alabama.

The US has the highest prevalence of obesity in the developed world.

In terms of access to water and sanitation the US ranks 36^th in the world.

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, ahead of Turkmenistan, El Salvador, Cuba, Thailand and the Russian Federation. Its rate is nearly 5 times the OECD average.

The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.

The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks the most well-off countries in terms of labour markets, poverty, safety net, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The US comes in last of the top 10 most well-off countries.

In the OECD, the US ranks 35^th out of 37 in terms of poverty and inequality.  According to Alston, 19 million people lived in deep poverty (a total family income that is below one-half of the poverty threshold) in the US as of 2017.

According to the World Income Inequality Database, the US has the highest Gini coefficient (measuring inequality) of all Western countries.

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality characterizes the US as “a clear and constant outlier in the child poverty league”.  According to UNICEF (see above chart), the US has higher child poverty rates than 15 other high-income countries. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that more than half of American babies are at risk for malnourishment.

The US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service says that in 2016, 38.3% of households with incomes below the Federal poverty line were food insecure.

Around 55.7% of the U.S. voting-age population voted in the 2016 presidential election. In the OECD, the U.S. placed 28th in voter turnout, compared with an OECD average of 75%.  Registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S. voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was registered in 2016, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in Japan (2014).

In a nutshell: most developed countries do much better than the US on internationally recognized human well-being indicators, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, pregnant mother mortality, obesity rates, rates of incarceration, homicide rates, standards of educational attainment, income disparities, levels of childhood poverty, nutrition standards, homelessness, etc.

In fact, on some of these indicators show the US is going backwards (in contrast to other wealthy countries).  According to The Washington Post:

“American life expectancy at birth declined for the second consecutive year in 2016, fueled by a staggering 21 percent rise in the death rate from drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

The United States has not seen two years of declining life expectancy since 1962 and 1963, when influenza caused an inordinate number of deaths”.

Alston attributed much of the above to US policy choices, more specifically, the US’s “illusory emphasis on employment”.

Proposals to slash the already precarious social safety net are touted primarily on the premise that the poor need to get off welfare and back to work (the motivation behind “welfare to workfare”, a process started by Bill Clinton).

The almost laughable premise here is that there are many jobs waiting to be filled by individuals with substandard educations, those with disabilities (many already failed by an inadequate healthcare system), sometimes burdened with a criminal record (perhaps for the crime of homelessness or being unable to pay a traffic ticket), and, moreover, with little or no training or adequate assistance to succeed in a job search.

Attempts to raise the minimum wage, already low by the standards of other developed countries, are regularly forestalled by Republican legislatures.

Alston noted another fallacy underlying this premise, namely, that it assumes that the jobs the poor could get will make them independent of the welfare system.  He says: “I spoke to workers from Walmart and other large stores who could not survive on a full-time wage without also relying on food stamps. It has been estimated that as much as $6 billion dollars go from the SNAP program to support such workers, thus providing a huge virtual subsidy to the relevant corporations”.

The abolition of food stamps is on the Republican agenda.  It is noteworthy that the location with residents most reliant on food stamps is Owsley County, Kentucky, which is 99.22% white, according to the US Census, and 95% Republican, and where at least at least 52% of its residents received food stamps in 2011.

Anyone would think that Americans accept, somewhat stoically, the above situation because as a trade-off it somehow boosts the US economy by delivering sound economic “fundamentals”.

Alas most of these “fundamentals” — trade balance, government debt (soon to be deepened by Trump’s reckless tax cuts for the rich), household debt, budget deficit, a negative savings rate, a relatively weak dollar, poor investment and productivity since 2008, etc.– are hardly reassuring where the US is concerned.

It doesn’t take an economic genius to know that what rescues the US is the dollar’s role as the primary global reserve currency, and the vast size of its economy.  A huge and rampant stock market helps, but since that contributes significantly to cycles of boom and bust (87, 97, 2007, ??), its contribution to the overall economy should not be overestimated.  In objective economic terms, therefore, with a smaller overall economy and without a global reserve currency, the US would in all probability be more like Brazil.

After making his statement on the US, Alston gave an interview on the Amy Goodman radio show, at the time when the Republicans published their tax-cut bill which is now law.  To quote him:

“[T]he issue with elimination of poverty always is around resources: ‘We don’t have the money.’ The United States, again, uniquely, has the money. It could eliminate poverty overnight, if it wanted to. What we’re seeing now is the classic — it’s a political choice. Where do you want to put your money? Into the very rich or into creating a decent society, which will actually be economically more productive than just giving the money to those who already have a lot?”.

It is impossible to disagree with Philip Alston when he says that this state of affairs has resulted from political choice and not economic necessity.

Apart from his plutocratic supporters (the Kochs, Papa John the pizza man, Sheldon Adelson, Art Pope, Robert Mercer, Robert Kraft, the DeVos wife and husband, and of course the army of their hangers-on and wannabes in Republican country clubs), Trump’s base consists of moderately or less well-off whites who’ve had the show all to themselves for many decades–  this making their own systemic exploitation somewhat bearable– but who now have to share this show with blacks and Latinos, Muslim Americans, “the gays” (as the near-senile televangelist Pat Robertson refers to this community), as well as a small quota of refugees from America’s unceasing wars and bombing campaigns, and so forth.

As other CounterPunchers have noted, “Make America Great Again” is code aimed at this group of white self-professed “victims”— thanks to Trump’s declamations the latter somehow believe they are more likely to have the show to themselves once again.

Supporting the very affluent wearer of a baseball cap (made in the US but from imported fabrics) sporting this slogan, is always a political choice, as is the preference of the plutocracy to line its already ample pockets by donating massively to the cap-wearing con artist:  “con artist” being the appellation used by his fellow Republican plutocrats Michael Bloomberg and Mitt Romney, who have political ambitions of their own not entirely congruent with Trump’s white-nationalist agenda, however incoherent the latter may be.

Trump, Romney, or Bloomberg?  Whichever one gets ahead politically; the plutocracy will prevail.  As it did with Bill Clinton and Obama.

Also a political choice in this context is the preference of mainstream Schumer and Pelosi Democrats to make congressional shadow-boxing a pitiful facsimile of real opposition.

And so, a great many Americans have before them an option expressed by a well-known philosopher, if only they opened their eyes: “You have nothing to lose but your chains”.

Illusions aside, the liberation of poorer Americans, ostensibly an immense distance away, is therefore still close enough to touch.

Obasanjo: Fire, Fury and Foolishness

Taju Tijani

Ex-President of Nigeria, Matthew Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo is at it again. His epistolary disorder has returned and Nigeria is catching the fever. The Owu prince has been waging a battle of self-rescue from his vanishing, social and political irrelevance. The 18-page letter released unto the public realm to distil President Mohammadu Buhari’s failures or otherwise is a wasted effort.  To bail out Nigeria from the raw sewage of political, economic and social cul-de-sacs, Obasanjo takes a flight of fancy into a controversial Ciceronian epistolary highway to express a volatile radical concept of Coalition for Nigeria Movement. His aim is to set in motion new imperatives that will mobilise his tribe of parochial community into another rat race for power at the centre. I will call this approach Obasanjo’s “Epistles on Good Governance”.

Obasanjo, in calibrating his desire for a new dawn has this to say: “Coalition for Nigeria Movement is proposed as the new direction to mobilise our population for unity, cooperation, development, rule of law, employment, law and order, justice, integration, peace, security, stability, welfare and well-being. In these regards, special attention and space must be given to youths and women, who in most cases, have been victims and underlings. Let me emphasise important areas, programme, priorities, or processes for improved attention. To start with, we seem to have taken nation-building for granted. Nation-building must be given continued attention to give every citizen a feeling of belonging and a stake in his or her country. For instance, the federal character principle, as espoused in our constitution, was to guide the leadership to search for competent holders of major offices to be distributed within the entire nation and avoid the concentration in a few ethnic hands or geographical places as we currently have in the leadership of our security apparatus. To avoid such non-integrative situation, we have the National Assembly and the Federal Character Commission, both institutions which must raise alarm or call for correction of actions by the executive that violates the spirit of our constitution. In like manner, the spate of violence, criminality, organised crime, insurgency and terrorism have not received sufficient proactive ameliorative responses through transformational leadership – a determined leadership that brings cohesion and wholesomeness to the polity. Nobody and no group should feel excluded in his or her own country. Inclusion and popular participation must be visibly pursued in terms of politics, the economy and our overall social life. I am happy to be a member of the Coalition for Nigeria Movement. The movement is a pressure point towards good governance. This is the commencement for our popular and grassroots association. Of course, the membership will be free to collectively decide on whether CNM becomes a political party. If the Movement decides to transform itself and go into partisan politics, I will cease to be a member. And as a member for now, I accept all the conditions attached to membership of the Coalition. We must promote the CNM and mobilise membership all over the country including membership from the Diaspora. This is an opportunity for women and men, especially youths who have hitherto been feeling marginalised and helpless to go all out and bring friends and families into the CNM fold. The CNM will remain a popular socio-economic Movement open to all Nigerians who believe in the greatness of Nigeria and are ready to contribute to it.”

I will analyse Obasanjo’s burden through three factors to see if his nationalistic narrative of the state of things in Nigeria is merely a publicity stunt or a distracting tool. Is Obasanjo morally competent to criticise President Mohammadu Buhari. The pointed answer is no. Our collective memory is too short in this country. Obasanjo’s morality pales when compared with Buhari’s. Buhari is a man of high moral stature than Obasanjo. Obasanjo encouraged corruption during his presidency and ruled Nigeria like his fiefdom. There was question about his sexual shenanigan with his daughter in law.

Buhari has a shining integrity that endeared him to ordinary Nigerians. He is a disciplined man who abhors corruption and any form of national pillage by politicians. Obasanjo has no moral right to ask for Buhari to step down. This is a huge arrogance on his side. Who made him the kingmaker of Nigeria’s presidency? Constitutionally, Buhari has every right to go for a second term. Obasanjo is vile and disingenuous here. This is a man who, pandering to devilish ambition, desired to change our constitution and elongate his presidency for a third term.  To now call on President Mohammadu Buhari to step aside when he has a constitutional right for a second term is the height of shameful hypocrisy.

On performance, Buhari has so far performed creditably well.  He met a wobbly and tottering economy and he is working hard to fix it. Another problem with our memory. We have to remember that Buhari was elected to fix the damage of 16 years of massive and brutal looting of the nation’s wealth by the cabal of PDP of which Obasanjo was a leading light. Of course, we are still not out of the wood yet in terms of ameliorating the painful social and economic woes buffeting Nigerians, but the danger of our amnesia is worse. Nigerians should grapple with their impatience here. Impatience is a killer. God even hates it. We have to hate it in Nigeria. Who can fix Nigeria in four years? As a matter of fact, who can fix Nigeria in eight years? Fixing Nigeria is a lifelong project that has no end date. Buhari may have fallen short of our expectation in terms of naked tribalism and passive response to the murderous activities of the Fulani cattle herdsmen, but beyond the emotion of the bloodshed, he is a leader we need. We have to remember that the devil is a tempter. If Nigeria, through crazy impatience, fall into the temptation of returning, especial PDP, back to power then Nigerians will bear the burden of reliving in a nation of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Obasanjo’s has a divine desire to remotely micro manage any elected Nigerian president. In 2013, he wrote a letter to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan called “Before It is too late”. Now in January 2018, there is another ignominious epistolary exchanges via the public realm. Obasanjo recurrent letter writing craftiness becomes instantly gratuitous, hypocritical, morally empty, arrogant, insulting, demeaning, vengeful and inciting. Except we are all poor student at reading body language, Obasanjo has never hidden his weakness for self-exaltation. Iyabo Obasanjo, his own daughter, polemicises her dad’s mortal weakness for egoism so succinctly. “You are one of those petty people who think the progress and success of another must derive from you. You try to overshadow everyone around you, before you and after you. You are the prototypical “Mr. Know it all”.  You’ve never said “I don’t know” on any topic, ever. Of course this means you surround yourself with idiots who will agree with you on anything and need you for financial gain and you need them for your insatiable ego. In this your attitude is a reflection of the country. It is not certain which came first, your attitude seeping into the country’s psyche or the country accepting your irresponsible behaviour for so long.”  Obasanjo’s letter has neither fire nor any fury to mobilise Nigerians, but plenty, plenty of foolishness. The letter is a document of populism and should be shipped to the dump where it belongs.

Outing the US Empire: Trump’s Military Parade

Binoy Kampmark

You only had to see him goggle eyed and enthusiastic beside France’s President Emmanuel Macron last Bastille Day. The tricolours were fluttering, the jets booming above in the manner usual for a lapsed empire, and the President of the United States was thrilled to bits, delighted at the spectacle. “It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen. We’re going to have to try and top it.”

Donald Trump wetting himself over a military parade in another country was one thing. That he is now attempting to bring that experience back to the United States has local policy figures in a fix. According to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, the president “has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.”

The good citizens of the United States have tended to associate such military affairs with the goosestepping types, eyes glazed and bayonets erect with purpose before authoritarian clowns. Only foreign types, unmoved by the impulse of American liberty, engage in that sort of thing.

In some ways, having such a parade would be a natural order for a power that remains in denial about its imperial pedigree, bastard or otherwise. There is a near pathological preference to live in the bright delusional light of free world defender of peace. “As distinct from other peoples,” wrote the late Chalmers Johnson, that keen student of US empire and its consequences, “most Americans do not recognize – or do not want to recognize – that the United States dominates the world through its military power.”

An orgiastic display of US military symbolism would be a direct, if discomforting change from the usual pattern. States often tend to have military shows that are inversely proportionate to their economic and social success. More guns do not necessarily imply more butter in the home. The Soviet Union, and the current Russian incarnation, insisted on military parades as matters of pride, though such shows are as revealing as they are concealing. As Moscow terrified with its military prowess and gritty warriors parading before the greys and browns of the politburo, the state was unravelling in sickness, awaiting ultimate implosion.

North Korea similarly insists on the star studded show, the pantomime of military hardware and vocal troops captivated by supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. To take such an aggressive stance serves to also conceal weakness and internal fragility. Besides, such displays provide epic distractions for troubled populaces, a sort of cinematic release packaged in military grandeur.

To that end, a US military parade would reverse the order of things. To have such a parade could be likened to a coming out ceremony, a grand confession to the globe. The United States, through dozens of military bases webbing the entire globe like Arachne’s thread, prefers the rhetoric of restraint and order while waging a series of conflicts that result in an order of permanent war for permanent peace.

It was the coming of the Cold War, and the emergence of the United States as the pre-eminent power after the Second World War, that prompted the remark by the sharp Charles Beard that the foreign policy of both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman could be classed as the waging of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. That assessment duly stuck, though the US public, for the most part, went into a state of permanent amnesia.

One symptom of empire common to all entities which have undertaken this venture is the illusion of some lingering order without disturbance, the civilizing effects of the Pax Romana delivered through soldiers bearing the gift of peace or the more recent Pax Americana. This supplies the nursery story, widely disseminated, that international peace is maintained in such circumstances while swords are turned to ploughshares.

Quite the opposite is true. Such states of affairs ensure a constant demand for conflict, the need for police operations and bloody corrections, the deployment of auxiliaries and allies, and the necessity for a hardened military industrial complex.

A mild acquaintance with those blood thirsty deliverers of peace, the Romans, provides the surest precedent by which subsequent empires supposedly interested in peace thrive upon. The parallels between US narratives of power, and those of Rome, are striking. True, the Roman empire incorporated local power elites and spread citizenship. “It was generosity,” notes classicist Mary Beard, “even if sprung from self-interest.” But it was Tacitus in his inimitable account of Agricola, his father-in-law’s exploits as governor of Britain in the late first century AD, that left a superb critique of empire that remains as pertinent to the US as any other.

Tacitus takes note of the Caledonian resistance figure Calgacus, whose speech does not merely attack the imperial predations of Rome, but the euphemising nature of power and its concealments. “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” There is nothing to suggest that Calcagus ever said anything of the sort in the name of liberty to rouse his troops – Tacitus was a despairing critic of empire and its consequences, being both recorder and analyst.

From matters of conspiracy to an emphasis on the fake news complex; to the suspicions of suited establish doyens who have long steered empire in the shadows while proclaiming the virtues of liberty, Trump’s opportunity for another show is here. It is time to put the US empire on display.

As he has done before, the current president overturns convention and confronts the deep seated psychic disturbances of the US state. Forget the clichés and deceptions about delivering peace. Ignore the alarm from the imperial closeted types. (We, claimed Representative Jackie Speier, “have a Napoleon in the making here.”) Put stock, instead, in matters of belligerence, of making deserts. Place that weaponry on show in lusty, persuasive fashion. And most importantly of all, make Little Rocket Man green with envy.

Is Cryptocurrency a Ponzi Scheme?

Julian Vigo

Just three weeks ago Bitconnect announced it was shutting down after being accused of running a Ponzi scheme.  Techcrunch chronicles Bitconnect’s decline noting how the term “pyramid scheme” was not an unfair assessment as to what was going on:

“Bitconnect was an anonymously-run site where users could loan their cryptocurrency to the company in exchange for outsized returns depending on how long the loan was for. For example, a $10,000 loan for 180 days would purportedly give you ~40% returns each month, with a .20% daily bonus. Bitconnect also had a thriving multi-level referral feature, which also made it somewhat akin to a pyramid scheme with thousands of social media users trying to drive signups using their referral code.”

Typically a Ponzi scheme is characterized by first by promising large, unrealistic returns such as the ~40% monthly return. The promise of these sorts of returns largely regarded as both suspicious and impossible, even under even the most aggressive market conditions.

Another point of critique aimed at Bitconnect was the fact that those who sign up for its service are encouraged to share its affiliate marketing and affiliate links. If you look online for any discussion of BitConnect you will find the comments riddled with affiliate links. The reason for this is that those who spread the affiliate links were allegedly to be rewarded with higher returns on their original deposit if the link they posted is later used to sign up a new customer.  Best Bitcoin Exchange chronicles how one user is reported to have lost over $400,000 in the demise of Bitconnect.  And many others have made a legal challenge in a class-action lawsuit about their losses in this market.

All this, however, begs the question that many of us have been asking for some time: are cryptocurrencies an elaborate Ponzi scheme?

Agustin Carstens, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has recently denounced bitcoin as “combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster,” the last point referencing the amount of energy required for mining these currencies.  Raising questions about bitcoin’s efficiency and legality and its replicability, querying if the replication of the Bitcoin model would eventually lead to the debasement of all cryptocurrencies rendering them all potentially valueless.

Carstens also points to problems of trust associated with cryptocurrencies:  “The tried, trusted and resilient modern way to provide confidence in public money is the independent central bank.” While acknowledging that this currency was intended as an “alternative payment system” he warns that without government surveillance this currency is extremely volatile, “a poor means of payment and a crazy way to store value.” Yet, while Carstens praises the protections that banks extend to consumers and investors, he does this in almost complete oblivion to many of the historical moments when these “protections” utterly failed or were resisted by both Wall Street and the banking system.

Think back to 2008, when millions were hurt by excessive risk-taking leading to financial crisis which was largely chalked up to be the result of the failure from Wall Street to Washington DC where, on the one hand, irresponsible risks were taken, and on the other, Washington didn’t have the authority to properly monitor or limit the potential damage to the nations largest firms. So when the crisis finally hit, there were no tools to address the failing financial system without putting the tax system at risk.  The creation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 subjected banks to more stringent regulation by the federal government and held Wall Street accountable for its own mismanagement. Here are the three principle reforms  in the Dodd-Frank Act that the Obama administration ushered into law:

Taxpayers will not have to bear the costs of Wall Street’s irresponsibility: If a firm fails in the future it will be Wall Street – not the taxpayers – that pays the price.

Separates “proprietary trading” from the business of banking: The “Volcker Rule” will ensure that banks are no longer allowed to own, invest, or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers. Responsible trading is a good thing for the markets and the economy, but firms should not be allowed to run hedge funds and private equity funds while running a bank.

Ending bailouts: Reform will constrain the growth of the largest financial firms, restrict the riskiest financial activities, and create a mechanism for the government to shut down failing financial companies without precipitating a financial panic that leaves taxpayers and small businesses on the hook.

So where people are reading the financial markets as creatures that are highly regulated, recent history tells quite a different story.  Many regard the Dodd-Frank Act as a feeble regulation and most who are familiar with proposed legislation since 2010 which has attempted to challenge the protections to whistleblowers, such as the “Whistleblower Improvement Act” of 2011 which would have required financial industry whistleblowers to report their concerns internally before taking them to government regulators. Thankfully, this bill died, but we cannot pretend that economic regulations in other sectors are significantly better than what is happening in the world of cryptocurrency as many countries have already banned such products and many others already imposing modest regulations and taxation.

As bitcoin price has fluctuated greatly in recent months, we must wonder if this change in appraisal is, even in part, due to how these cryptocurrencies are presented, marketed, and largely uncontrolled by most conventional forms of oversight and regulation.  Lionel Laurent has recently drawn an interesting parallel between cryptocurrencies and the S&P futures markets noting: “The past 24 hours have shown a surprising resemblance between Bitcoin’s behavior and the world’s more established financial markets. A chart of Bitcoin’s price plotted against S&P 500 E-Mini futures shows how both moved in similar formation when the selloff reached a trough and a mini-rebound began.” Having analyzed how the bitcoin and S&P 500 Index have a correlation of 0.7 (0 being the weakest and 1 the strongest). Over the past year, this correlation is 0.8.  Laurent maintains that the world market fluctuations have shown remarkable resemblance over the period of Monday’s historic losses to the Dow’s 500-plus point gain on Tuesday, noting a particular similarity “when the selloff reached a trough and a mini-rebound began.”

Independent business editor, Josie Cox, has already announced the impending demise of bitcoin and Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University, claims that bitcoin is “the mother of all bubbles.” And many are couching the cryptocurrency plunge as the beginning of its end with some claiming that it is taking down other currencies with it. Earlier this week, Lloyds Bank has banned the use of its credit cards from purchasing cryptocurrency as have more banks in the UK and the US. But Cox’s notion that “[i]f something’s too good to be true, it probably is” doesn’t really apply to the entire spectrum of financial markets, even far outside the bitcoin sector.   At least not in the way that the financial sector wants people to invest in era where everything could easily be characterized as a “bubble.”

Not so many years ago, we heard the same over the dotcom bubble and although there are some significant similarities, there are as many differences between these two paradigms.
And there are as many signs that the crypto bubble will burst as it will not.  Eastman Kodak Co. recently signed up for the blockchain which is not an illogical move given that of the 32 publicly traded firms worldwide that use “blockchain” or “crypto” to describe its business, their share prices rose 218,000 percent since January 2016.  For example, other sorts of investments like stock in a company with a solid history and leadership, might seem more stable (and often are), history is replete with moments of stock being perilously as unstable as bitcoin.

There are even those speculating that even if cryptocurrency were to fail, it has revolutionized the way investment functions, providing for more transparency and integrity, not less according to the World Economic Forum. And for all the accusations made of bitcoin being a Ponzi scheme, there is still no proof that bitcoin made promises of spectacular profits. To the contrary, many have made and lost money due to the volatility of its price.  As for the accusations of bitcoin’s lack of liquidity, the decentralized nature of bitcoins means that there are various ways to sell bitcoins, even if not always convenient.

My verdict here is that cryptocurrency is a “natural” extension of the trading ethos that has existed for decades on Wall Street with a twist: this currency has merely reflected the current human condition by taking on contemporary millennial, anthropomorphic qualities such multi-tasking, lack of attention span, and hyper-emotive personality.  Its volatility is not only the sign of the times, it is a litmus test of our economic and ethical responsibility to society.

The Environmental Holiday Hangover

Graham Peebles

Christmas may seem like a distant memory but the environmental effect of the annual consumer frenzy, over-indulgence and extravagance is lasting damage. And year on year the cost to the planet grows.

For the best part of a week in early January the street in which I live in London was littered with mountains of rubbish and discarded Christmas trees, real and fake. The use of both live and artificial trees as decorative emblems of Christmas is ecologically damaging and, like many aspects of this materialistic pantomime, needs to be consigned to a bygone era and replaced with either a naked corner, or a rented potted tree from a garden center, which can be returned to the growers afterwards.

In Europe an estimated 60 million live trees are bought, decorated and dumped; it’s around 30 million in America. The majority of real trees are grown specifically for Christmas so forests are not being depleted, but after the festivities most real trees are thrown away and as they decompose, methane (a greenhouse gas) is produced. Artificial trees leave their own carbon footprint due to their production and transportation. Most are made in China and amass a great many polluting air miles on route to their Western destination, and when discarded end also up in landfill sites. In order to make up for the amount of energy used in its production, according to The Woodland Trust, a plastic tree would need to be reused every Christmas for twenty years. Under the tree of course is to be found the Festive Icons – the presents. Worldwide, adults are said to spend on average $475 on gifts, half of which are unwanted, but in this throwaway world of ours, instead of returning them, most of these rejected trinkets are dumped in the rubbish bin and end up in a landfill site.

Christmas and rubbish are synonymous terms in more ways than one. It’s the time of year when the largest amount of consumer waste is produced and the overwhelming bulk it ends up in a hole in the ground. Over 114,000 tons of plastic waste is estimated to have been produced in Britain over Christmas and not recycled, together with “more than 88,000,000 Sq. m of wrapping paper and 300,000 tonnes of card packaging”, The Times relates. In the Capital of Consumerism, America a colossal $10 million is spent on wrapping paper, most of which is not recyclable, and the number of Christmas cards sold requires 300,000 trees to be cut down.

Then there’s the unbridled cruelty reserved for the animals that are raised for the festive table; around 10 million turkeys are eaten in Britain; its closer to 25 million in America, where the major turkey cull is Thanksgiving. The vast majority of birds stuffed and roasted are factory farmed. Their short lives are spent in appalling conditions and end when they are plunged head first into electrified stunning baths, after which they have their throats cut in the slaughterhouse. The industrial farming of turkeys is not just barbaric, like all animal agriculture it produces huge amounts of the greenhouse gases which fuel man-made climate change. Add in Christmas travel by road and air and the enormous environmental impact of Christmas begins to become clear: from 15th December to 4th January a record 52 million people in America took to the air and 97 million hit the highways. In Britain over thirteen million vehicles clogged the roads in the days leading up to the Big Day, and both Heathrow and Gatwick airports had their busiest days on record: around four million people in total, with record numbers taking long-haul flights. Aviation is a major source of greenhouse gases, and the further one flies the greater the environmental damage.

Simplicity and Sufficiency

Whilst the festive period allows much needed time for rest, and for some, warm family gatherings (tense misery for others), in its current form it is little more than an exercise in mass consumerism. The ‘Christmas Spirit’, which suggests peace, brotherhood and ‘goodwill to all men’, is widely absent, replaced by an exaggerated version of how life is conducted the rest of the year; contemporary values (which are not values at all of course) of greed and selfishness are relentlessly encouraged and to a large degree, prevail.

The ‘consumer culture’, of which Christmas is the pinnacle expression, is an essential part of the Neo-liberal economic system under which we live. It is maintained by insatiable desire and the false notion that happiness is to be found within the Christmas wrapping paper, the Black Friday Deals or Saturday shopping outings, in ‘success’ and sensory pleasure. However, far from creating the conditions in which contentment and joy can flower, discontent and conflict is maintained, and an atmosphere created for anxiety and depression to grow. As it is currently constituted, Christmas perpetuates and strengthens this materialistic and highly damaging approach to life – for humanity and the planet. Like much of contemporary living it needs to be simplified and re-defined, not necessarily in a way that corresponds to Christian doctrine, but in a manner rooted in what we might more broadly call ‘spiritual’, or simply human values: sharing, social/environmental responsibility, tolerance and kindness to one another and, crucially, the Earth itself.

A treeless, gift-free Christmas, where little or no travel is involved, and money usually spent on gifts is donated to an environmental charity, would be the ideal. If you can’t face Christmas without presents, then environmental considerations should be paramount when choosing what to ‘give’ – not necessarily what to ‘buy’. If we are to overcome the environmental catastrophe and reverse the colossal ecological damage, greed, selfishness and excess must come to an end, replaced by Simplicity and Sufficiency – and a new environmental consciousness urgently cultivated, at Christmas and throughout the year.

What is Stalling Wrongful Injury Lawyers?

Ralph Nader

Up against four decades of megacorporate erosion of wrongfully injured Americans’ access to our courts, trial lawyers are wondering what use is left of the Seventh Amendment, our constitutional right to trial by jury?

Indentured lawmakers pass laws blocking or obstructing harmed individuals who are simply seeking fair compensation for their medical expenses, wage loss and suffering as a result of actions committed by their wrongdoers. Corporations, with their fine print consumer contracts, are eluding justice for some serious crimes by employing compulsory arbitration clauses, which preemptively force victims into closed, private arbitration (in lieu of trial by jury) and block the wrongfully injured from getting their day in open court.

It’s unavoidable. Chances are you sign such clauses regularly without ever knowing it. Everywhere, lawsuits, jury trials and verdicts are diminishing in the midst of population growth and ever more invasive technologies, drugs, chemicals, and many other products—all with the very real potential to suffer from dangerous defects, and all bearing built-in immunities for the guilty parties, should these defects come to light. Indeed, the vast majority of fatalities and serious injuries from preventable causes in the health care industry, factories, mines, drillers and hurtful products never even see an attorney.

Still the corporate lobbies, led by the insurance industry, keep pressing to block the courtroom door and avoid accepting responsibility for their injurious deeds.

They built this system of justice, but collectively, they have not been up to defending and preserving it from the mounting counterattacks.

The trial lawyers cannot match their adversaries in political contributions. However, there is one simple thing they could do. Should they deign to return the calls of consumer, environmental and labor groups wishing to forge alliances at the grass roots, such a union of minds could turn the tide for the trial lawyers who have long been on the defensive. Bear in mind, the law of wrongful injury (tort law) defends all the people regardless of political persuasion, race, gender or economic background. An unbeatable coalition could be assembled.

For over fifty years, I’ve been fighting, as a volunteer, for more appropriate utilization of our civil justice system to further its goals of compensation for the wrongfully injured, public disclosure of hazards, consequences for crimes against innocent victims and the environment, and deterrence against culpable actors. This effort is part and parcel of consumer, environmental and worker safety movements. In fact, the dangers that prompted safety legislation and regulations were often first disclosed by personal injury lawsuits.

Yet, with luminous exceptions, most major plaintiff law firms are not responding to the mobilization of these constituencies. They tend to their selected clients as attorneys but do not flex their muscles and resources as proactive lawyers by addressing the overall crisis that is the slow-motion destruction of civil justice.

Their adversaries have established so-called “lawsuit abuse” groups in numerous states and activated their dealers, agents and professional societies to keep the siege on our Seventh Amendment rights proliferating with wildly inaccurate assertions and hyperbolic anecdotes.

Inexplicably, these successful law firms will not protect the dwindling forest for the few trees they are nurturing. You call them for collaborative projects and their secretaries keep saying they are “in deposition” or are “on conference calls” that seem to occur perpetually.

I suspect that they are just not interested enough, no matter their enormous wealth from contingent fees in such areas as the great tobacco, asbestos, drug, oil spill or motor vehicle class actions. They have not built collateral civic institutions to begin to match their opponents even though these civic groups would be speaking for tens of millions of families.

In an open letter to plaintiff attorneys circulated in 2012, I described how the great law of torts is under assault and demands a multidimensional mobilization of the public. It was overwhelmingly ignored.

On September 29, 2016, we organized the first ever national celebration of this pillar of private justice at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Some of the region’s leading trial lawyers promised to bring people out and help with the expenses. They struck out.

There was a time twenty-five to fifty years ago when trial lawyers recognized the necessity of community education. They offered seminars in property, consumer, personal injury, civil rights and contract law in a program called The People’s Law School. Others joined with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to share little known product and environmental hazards discovered in their litigation which they hoped would foster broader protections. They started, at my suggestion, a marvelous non-profit litigation group called Public Justice in 1982 that brings fundamental court cases unlikely to be brought by commercial attorneys.

Presently, personal injury lawyers, except for the few rich ones, are not making big money. They are discouraged. Their own state trial lawyer associations report dwindling membership, smaller budgets and less engagement. Whole areas of practice are nearly disappearing, as in California with its draconian statutory caps and other restrictions on litigating serious medical malpractice injuries, which limit compensation to $250,000—regardless of the severity of the injury—for a lifetime of pain and suffering. (See my letter to Governor Jerry Brown.)

But there is one smallish firm in California that shows their colleagues just what can be accomplished for the American people by combining logical vision with enabling resources for the common good.

I’ll describe what this firm has done for America in next week’s column, and ask the question, what are many larger personal injury firms waiting for?

Human Sacrifice in the Yucatán

James McEnteer

One of the world’s great civilizations, the Maya, flourished in southern Mexico and parts of Central America for more than three thousand years. From about 2000 BC until the Spanish Conquest in the 16^th century AD, various Mayan centers rose in their far-flung territories in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Maya peoples developed a hieroglyphic writing system, as well as ornate arts and sculpture designs, architectural innovations, complex mathematics and a detailed calendar based on their highly sophisticated astronomical calculations. Over the centuries the Maya withstood conquest by other indigenous peoples, sometimes for prolonged periods, and the systematic destruction of their culture by the Europeans.

The Spanish demolished Mayan temples, spreading Catholicism and disease wherever they went. The island of Cozumel, off the eastern Yucatan coast, now a destination for cruise ships and scuba divers, was once a sacred site of pilgrimage for the Maya, home of their Moon Goddess, where women came to seek fertility. At least ten thousand Maya were living on Cozumel when the Spanish arrived in 1520. But the smallpox they brought soon reduced the native population to a few hundred, who were later forcibly relocated to the mainland. As Wikipedia succinctly notes: “The Spanish conquest stripped away most of the defining features of Maya civilization.”

Despite the best efforts of the soldiers and the priests, Mayan culture and language persisted in part because some of its population centers were remote, and because some Maya peoples stubbornly and secretly persisted in their beliefs and customs away from the official gaze. When the Spaniards had taken everything they considered of value, they left the population of subsistence farmers largely to its own devices.

In the nineteenth century the Maya were “discovered” by adventurers, ethnographers and archeologists, who romanticized and plundered Mayan sites, including the “cenotes,” the underground rivers where Maya buried their dead, often laden with gold and jewelry. Mayan treasures – pottery, stone carvings, paintings, codices – ended up in museums and private collections around the world. Not until the mid-twentieth century did Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History organize against this systematic looting and demand the return of their national patrimony.

In 1964 Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology opened in Mexico City. One of the world’s great museums, it features artifacts from the many indigenous peoples of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, including a generous selection of Mayan art and architecture, a fair portion of it returned from abroad. A visit here is a must for anyone who hopes to grasp the cultural and historical diversity and significance of Mexico’s complex identity.

Though many Mayan pieces had been ripped from their original contexts – from tombs and temple walls in various sites in the Yucatán and elsewhere – at least some had now been repatriated to Mexico. But the most grievous threat to the legacy of Mayan culture was yet to come, in the form of apparent adulation  that morphed into a full-blown assault that continues today.

“One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.” – Crazy Horse

In 1967 the Central Bank of Mexico commissioned a two-million-dollar study about how to attract foreign currency through tourism. The Mexican economy was in trouble, despite the country’s huge petroleum reserves. Mexico had nationalized all foreign oil interests in the 1930s to create PEMEX, the government oil monopoly. PEMEX constantly increased oil production but was unable to meet the even greater demand, as Mexico industrialized during and after World War Two. Combined with mismanagement and corruption, that demand forced Mexico to become an oil importer instead of an exporter.

The only tourist area attracting significant foreign currency to Mexico was Acapulco, a resort that came together in the 1940s when war eliminated Europe as a holiday destination. Through private investment and government assistance, Acapulco built infrastructure and luxury hotels that turned it into a jet set “playground of the stars” by the 1950s.

Mexico’s Central Bank – Banxico – had a different touristic plan in mind. Their study identified five areas of Mexican coastline – four on the Pacific and one on the Caribbean – ripe for massive investments in infrastructure and luxury hotels. Banxico formed an investment agency to create Ixtapa, Huatulco, Loreto, Los Cabos and – as their first project – Cancún. The plan was designed not only to attract foreign tourists and their currency but to provide jobs outside Mexico’s major industrial cities, where desperate unemployed people by the millions were crowding in from rural areas seeking work.

In some ways it seemed an unlikely, even quixotic, idea. The area now known as Cancún had a population of only about five hundred people in 1970. (By 2014 the population had boomed to 722,000 people and counting.) Roads on the Yucatán were rudimentary, as were the coastal ports. The few air strips could only accommodate small planes. Where only forested limestone plains and low hills existed, inland from a mostly empty coast, Banxico proposed to devise and construct a massive mega-resort zone. A number of extraordinary Mayan temples, pyramids and cenotes were also in this area, many of them protected and preserved only because they were largely inaccessible.

For the first couple of decades, things seemed to be progressing well in Mexico’s concocted Caribbean tourist Mecca. Tens of thousands of Mexicans found work constructing and servicing the huge luxury hotels and restaurants. The tax base expanded. Public services increased. Living standards improved. Foreign currency came rolling in. “From one of the most marginalized regions in the 1960s, the Mexican Caribbean became one of the wealthiest in terms of GDP per capita in 2000.”* Cancún’s new international airport became the second-busiest in the country, after Mexico City, with the most international traffic. Forty percent of all foreign currency generated by tourism is from Cancún.

But by the late 1990s the social and environmental costs of this rapid development and apparent prosperity had become acute and undeniable. Despite liberal federal government subsidies and tourism promotion, income inequality in the region was well above the national average. Insecurity was increasing. School attendance was down. Suicides and teenage pregnancies were on the rise. The reefs were degrading, partly as a result of pollution, partly from excessive dive tourism and partly from growing cruise ship traffic, which continues to increase. “Cozumel edged out Nassau to become the world’s most popular cruise destination in 2016,” according to the Oxford Business Group.

As the once-clear air suffers from increased motor traffic on the clogged roads, the paths to Mayan ruins suffer from increased foot traffic. Unless you arrive to visit ruins as soon as they open in the morning you will have to struggle through crowds of visitors at the once-pristine settlements. The streets of Tulum, a rapidly expanding city as well as a picturesque Mayan ceremonial site, are ankle-deep and in some places, knee-deep in littered garbage. Can it be redeemed? There is no sense that anyone is making any effort.

In 1984 a Hollywood movie, Against All Odds, was filmed using locations on Cozumel and Isla Mujeres, and Mayan sites at Tulum and Chichen Itza. According to the Internet Movie Data Base, that “was the first time permission had ever been granted by the Mexican Government to use these sacred ruins for a theatrical motion picture.” Visitors to those areas who see that movie now will be shocked at the changes that have occurred there in the past thirty-five years. Movie viewers can behold a natural and architectural beauty that no longer exists in reality, if they can take their eyes off Rachel Ward, or Jeff Bridges, depending on, you know…

During the Christmas holiday, the peak of peak tourist season, many of the expensive guided tours to Mayan sites or natural wonders are abbreviated, without any advance warning or reduction in price, simply so that tour operators can entertain the highest possible volume of tourist traffic. Visitors only find out about the foreshortened experience in the middle of it, after they have paid. Human interaction has become commercialized and degraded. Tourists are dehumanized, as are the vendors and service providers. It’s all about money. Faces and identities of locals and visitors disappear in the mercenary blur.

In their rush to cash in on the tourist dollar, local merchants render once-unique and charming landscapes into tacky pizza-t-shirt-tiki-bars and generic luxury hotels. And they’re not slowing down. Of course this is a problem in many places, not only the so-called “Riviera Maya,” the bogus term boosters use to describe the ongoing metastasizing development down the Yucatán peninsula.

It represents a modern travel equation: the value of a unique destination decreases in direct proportion to the number of visitors it attracts. Machu Picchu is struggling with this problem, as are Iguazu Falls and many U.S. national parks, prisoners of their own popularity. At this point, Cancún has exceeded its acceptable limit. There is less and less to see: reefs with no fish, jammed and littered beaches, coasts with diminishing beach access, and Mayan sites too crowded to really see, let alone contemplate. And just too damn many people.

The Mayan calendar, a detailed and highly accurate record, spanning centuries, ended at 11:11 a.m. on December 21, 2012. Some excitable New Agers thought the Maya were prophesying the end of the world. But perhaps they just knew it was the end of their world. Or maybe they just ran out of rock. Centuries ago, when what is now a sprawling resort was a raw, barely inhabited wilderness, it was the Maya people who named it Kankun, meaning “nest of snakes.” In some ways – considering the hustling and price-gouging going on there now, not to mention the declining quality of life for the locals – that term seems prescient.

World travelers these days must struggle with what might be called The Galapagos Conundrum. Situated off the coast of Ecuador, the Galapagos Island group spans both sides of the Equator. The northern islands get the warm Panama current, while the southern islands get the cold Humboldt current. This variation in water temperature causes variations in habitat and among the species of animals who live in these islands. As Charles Darwin discovered, the same species of birds and reptiles differ markedly on different islands, though they live not far from one another in miles.

The Galapagos are a unique world unto themselves, with creatures that exist nowhere else, and great variety among (and within) different species. It is a protected national park, but also Ecuador’s touristic cash cow. The country is trying – as Peru is struggling at Machu Picchu – to limit the number of visitors to this sensitive environment, in order to preserve it, while making the maximum possible profit from its popularity. Peru has limited visiting hours and drastically increased entrance prices to the Incan remains at Machu Picchu, but still they come, without cease, visitors from around the world., to feel the magic firsthand.

So the Galapagos Conundrum is simply this: do you go there as soon as possible to experience this unique ecology for yourself before it disappears forever? Or do you refrain, in order not to contribute to the degradation of this sensitive place that it may continue to exist?

Sadly, that is a riddle too late to wrestle with on the Yucatán Peninsula. Those were not questions the Central Bank of Mexico ever asked. But Kankun may have more to worry about than pollution and the school drop-out rate. There are signs that the Mexican drug cartels are starting to muscle in on Cancún’s tourism industry as they did in Acapulco, demanding protection money and turning it into a ghost town, with lots of murderous violence. That would make its Mayan name a genuine prophetic curse.

Check out this shocking video: