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(Richard, Politics@Leeds, Climate science, the politics of climate change and futures of IR, International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946365)

In the wake of the Special Report, the young activist Greta Thunberg and social movements like Extinction Rebellion emphasize that the temporal horizon of disaster is imminent (they use the language of ‘existential risk’), and that, accordingly, large-scale coordinated action is required now.13 As Thunberg memorably put it in March 2019 in front of the Davos elite, ‘We don’t want your hope. We don’t want you to be hopeful. We want you to panic and take action’.14 The second implication lies here (whether one agrees with some of the strategies of present-day environmental activism, or not). The long-term future of the planet exists already in our human and non-human present. Or, inversely and better, because of the stock of CO2eq in the atmosphere, our present is already the future. The point is well made by us returning to the above decrease this year in carbon emissions (8% on average). This decrease only reduces the average global carbon budget by 0.4 parts per million because of the stock of CO2eq already in the atmosphere.15 Now, it is precisely because this stock has a life-expectancy of 1000 years that a sustained strategy of carbon reduction and of negative carbon emissions is required. Climate change is, as a result, an immediate intergenerational phenomenon. This temporal complication of our present means two things in turn. The past responsibility of the largest emitters is about the present and the future. Past, present and future are brought together not through a human narrative offered by religion or national myth, myths that we know can motivate collective action on vast scales.16 Past, present and future are brought together through the scientific fact of climate change: through, that is, the material effect of human action on the environment. This bringing together of past, present and future is unprecedented because it is empirical, not normative. Human endeavour (simultaneously creative and destructive) has been marked in the last 1000 years by political teleology. According to this teleology, the future exists in the present in the specific normative sense that the present constitutes a means to a delimited future goal. The politico-religious narrative of Christianity has provided perhaps the strongest example of this temporal logic, just as the secularization of this narrative in Marxism and Liberalism provide the strongest examples in the temporal logic of modernity.17 Indeed, it is not wrong to say that the embedding of the future in the present constitutes one of the strongest characteristics of political ideology and is the reason why such ideologies can motivate people to effect change: structuring the present through the future makes this present emotionally resonant and directed. What is clearly particular about the climate embedding of the future in the present is that this embedding is empirical and non-human, not normative and human-focused. In terms of the overall concerns of this SI – where the aim is to think through varied types of human interconnections which include connections between the human and the non-human – the future present of climate change unmakes the modern (human) organization of the present, a present pregnant with a future that defines modern notions of progress, development and growth. This temporal dimension of climate change constitutes, accordingly, a radical material departure from human normative organizations of time, and this departure has important political consequences that I address in the next section.18

(Lida, PoliSci@Boston, http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-democratic-future-of-green-new-deal.html)

What does it mean to have a future? The monarch’s eternal body used to represent the continuity and futurity of the kingdom (over and against the mortality of both him and his subjects). In modern social contract stories, by contrast, ordinary men gain a future by moving out of a state of nature beset by uncertainty, violence, and hierarchy; mastering a state of nature that otherwise would master them. Yet nature in these stories is not a factual reality, but a metaphor for forces that feel uncontrollable or unpredictable. As Carole Pateman has argued, patriarchal mastery is necessary in social contract stories for liberal democratic futurity. So too the mastery of other races and peoples (as thinkers such as Uday Mehta, James Tully, and Adam Dahl have argued). These social contract stories, which continue to haunt our political imagination, position the future of white European bourgeois men as dependent on the subjugation of others. This mastery-centered idea of what it means to have a future may help to explain why it has been so hard for many commentators, presidential candidates, and ordinary citizens to see the Green New Deal as a real possible future. Even people who say they support the Green New Deal feel like they can only talk about it in old terms, in terms of legislators balancing a series of trade-offs between individuals and the collective – as Cory Booker is doing right now (“I’ve endorsed the framework and the resolution, but I don’t endorse doing things that are going to hurt…a strong economy”). But this whole way of thinking is rooted in the idea that mastery by some is a condition of futurity for everyone – that the future of the collective depends on elites mastering “nature” (women, poor people, marginalized individuals, etc.) through (for Booker) technocratic policy making. The Green New Deal is moving us toward a different conception of what it means to have a future – a democratic conception of futurity that has been prefigured in environmental politics and thinking. Here, futurity depends neither on mastery over some people, forces, and nonhuman nature; nor on separating politics from nature, the public realm from the private realm. Rather, futurity opens up through an ecological (holistic, interconnected) attention to how the attempt at mastery has left almost everyone in a situation of precarity, and the attempt not to master unpredictable forces, but instead to democratically understand, adapt, and respond to those forces so that everyone, and not just a few, might flourish. This is the central idea in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. After detailing the ecological devastation (actual and potential) caused by insecticides and pesticides, Carson argues in her last chapter, entitled, “The Other Road”: “We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one "less traveled by" — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth” (277-278). On the one hand, Carson seems to be suggesting here that the choice is between two futures: 1) the “deceptively easy” “superhighway” that seems to be leading quickly toward greater prosperity and comfort, but actually ends in the “disaster” of destroying the earth that actually allows our lives and pleasures to exist; and 2) a future where we push back against that tendency and preserve the earth. Yet implicit in Carson’s formulation, and in the remainder of the chapter, is a deeper distinction: not just a choice between two futures, but between what a future is. The “deceptively easy” superhighway constitutes what we usually think of as a “future”: a space of inevitable progress brought about by capitalist industry and technology, and by what Carson calls the “control of nature,” or what Val Plumwood calls the “mastery of nature.” The other “fork of the road” is, in contrast, an open-ended path, made possible by our rejection of the attempt at mastery. In the closing pages of Silent Spring, Carson does not describe in detail what that path looks like. She notes that there is “a truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects” (278), and lauds ecologically grounded approaches to insect control, “biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong” (278). Yet she does not proscribe a particular course, a particular way of proceeding. Rather, what distinguishes this fork in the road is its democratic character. Directly after describing the fork in the road, Carson says: “The choice, after all, is ours to make,” she says. “If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.” (my emphasis, 278). Looking about enables a possible future because we are no longer deferring to technocratic, corporate elites. Instead, we become agents in creating a world where everyone can flourish. Just because the “smooth superhighway” is easy does not mean we should stay on it. We may “see what other course is open to us.” The Green New Deal resolution offers us this democratic “other course,” this “other fork in the road.” If Carson called for the public to use the knowledge she gives it to demand the regulation of insecticides and pesticides, the Green New Deal calls for the public to engage in political and governmental action that will address climate change: a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal” (4). Also like Carson, the GND’s vision of the future on behalf of which they call us to mobilize is ecologically grounded: the aim is not only to ensure jobs, “prosperity, “economic security,” but also “clean air and water,” “climate and community resiliency,” “healthy food,” “access to nature,” “a sustainable environment,” and “justice and equity.” Like Carson – and perhaps more than Carson – the GND recognizes that justice and equity are connected with a sustainable climate, that prosperity and economic security are unimaginable without healthy food and clean air and water. Yet also like Silent Spring, the GND resolution does not use expert knowledge to offer a precise map for how to “solve” the problem of climate change, and foreclose democratic decision-making (nor does it make false claims of ease, as in Cory Booker’s statement: “we did it when I was mayor of Newark; we just retro-fitted our buildings. We drove down our carbon footprint; we drove down our city’s energy costs. We created jobs for our residents, and we dealt with the issues of climate change. We created a win, win, win, win…”). Rather, the GND uses knowledge to empower communities. The resolution begins with a clear depiction of the hard truth of the devastation that climate change has brought and will bring (the consequence of staying on the “smooth superhighway,” despite the many warnings of Carson and others). This knowledge, rather than inducing powerlessness, instead serves as a framework that enables communities to become agents of their own future. The resolution continually portrays “community-defined projects and strategies” (6, cf. 9) as an integral part of addressing climate change, and places democracy at its center: the resolution calls for ensuring “the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level” (12). Refusing the assumption of many that democracy is incapable of addressing an urgent problem like climate change, the GND shows that democracy is the only way that Americans can claim and create the future they desire. While this future is mostly illegible in terms of contemporary political “common sense,” we should take the Green New Deal as an opportunity to show why this “common sense” actually makes no sense. Thea Riofrancos, Alyssa Battistoni, and others are already doing that in Jacobin, to great effect. The Green New Deal invites a new way of thinking and feeling the future: not as requiring the “smooth superhighway” that exists only through eradicating that which appears unsettling, uncertain, or unpredictable (including democratic claims for equality and freedom), but instead as the possibility of things being otherwise that emerges from the democratic practice of refusing deference and opening ourselves to the pleasures, difficulty, and meaning of democratically governing ourselves.

(Keith Brower Brown is co-chair of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a PhD student in geography at UC Berkeley. Jeremy Gong is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in California’s East Bay. Matt Huber is assistant professor of geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. , 3-21)

Strike Where Class Struggle Is Hot The last four decades saw a huge decline in the power, organization, and political unity of working people in this country. Starting with increasingly aggressive austerity measures in the 1970s and an assault on unions in the 1980s, workers in 2017 were less organized than they had been in nearly a century, with only 10 percent in unions. Most major existing unions are still hopelessly tied to a self-defeating survival strategy that chains them to the corporate-funded Democratic Party elite, without giving unions or their members much say in the party’s direction. The sharp drop of worker militancy since the 1950s tells a grim story of labor’s receding and now historically low level of power. Without the power to mobilize millions of workers to disrupt business as usual, and without their own political organization independent of the Democratic Party, workers are unable to force the collective interests of the working class into the political consciousness of mainstream culture and the political elite alike. While many labor-oriented environmentalists have rightly decried the rifts between the environmental movement and organized labor, the official labor movement has become so weakened that its participation would likely not be enough to win something as ambitious as a GND. Even with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress in 2009, and after President Obama had campaigned on the AFL-CIO’s chief federal demand, the Employee Free Choice Act, organized labor was too weak to push Democrats they’d helped to elect to pass this relatively modest labor reform. Luckily, 2018 saw the beginnings of a renewed working-class movement at mass scale. Led by the teachers’ strike wave, the numbers of workers who went on strike soared to 487,000 last year. This was the highest level of strike activity in thirty-two years. If we are going to win a GND, we need this working-class movement to grow to at least the dimensions of the insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1934, 1.5 million workers went on strike; today, with 200 million more people in the US, a comparable level would mean over 4 million workers on strike. The GND won’t be won as a single issue, but must be one among many popular working-class demands like Medicare for All, living wages, and taxing the rich. The key strategy is to situate the GND within the expansion of a broader working-class movement. Today, there are three major sites where socialists can intervene to push forward this growth. The most pressing and profound of these opportunities is the teacher strike wave, which has already involved millions of people in conscious struggle against corporations and political elites. Teachers and other school-workers, often without the support of union officials, have used their links with students and their families to unite their surrounding working-class communities in “bargaining for the common good.” Los Angeles teachers went on strike in January, and united fifty thousand working-class Angelenos in the streets and on picket lines — despite the worst rain of the winter. They won their greatest victory in recent memory: major increases in teacher pay and student services, along with commitments to halve standardized testing, improve green space for students, and advance a charter school moratorium. In many of these battles, education workers have openly confronted fossil fuel interests, and proved how their ability to stop work means leverage to combat these powerful corporations and actually win. Oklahoma teachers won a higher tax on fossil fuel extraction. West Virginia teachers, through their mass strike and community organizing, made a gas severance tax the most popular proposal in the state for how to cover rising health costs for education workers. With the mere threat of a strike, Baton Rouge, Louisiana teachers were able to force local politicians to abandon their plans to give a huge new tax exemption to ExxonMobil. While teachers are only a part of the awakening worker movement, their strikes are central to rebuilding a more militant labor movement in general. Health care workers, especially nurses, have also emerged as a powerful front for labor and political struggle across many states in the last two decades. Health and education, and other forms of care work, should be central to the politics of the GND; they are not only centers of rising labor militancy, but they are also inherently low-carbon “green jobs” that should be expanded in a worker-centered GND. Second, we must bring the fight for a GND to the newly Democratic House majority. Confronting political elites with this demand helps popularize it further, and also helps raise consciousness about what it will take to win. Forcing the Democratic Party establishment to reveal its opposition to popular demands shows working people they can’t expect this establishment to deliver. It is to the great credit of Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement that they have opened this confrontational strategy for a GND. Now socialists and a broader working-class movement must be brought together to bring the disruption of politics as usual to new heights. Like the old New Deal, mass disruption is what can force the state to cave to popular working-class demands. While the old New Deal relied on support from capital-intensive sectors of capital that could withstand higher wages and more powerful unions, the GND movement will need to fracture the capitalist class between the carbon-intensive (fossil fuel, steel, chemicals, etc.), and less carbon-intensive sectors (e.g., technology, health care, services). Mass disruption is what will convince some capitalists that compromise is necessary. Finally, we have the brightest opportunity in many decades to build independent socialist political organization that makes a lasting electoral threat to elites. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign is a crucial opportunity to rally millions for a GND and an end to corporate control of our government. If Bernie wins, his record and platform makes it clear he would push for a working-class GND more than any other candidate. No matter the resistance from Congress, a President Sanders would have enormous executive powers to put federal agencies and regulations to work towards essential GND goals. His long-standing support of striking workers and independent, working-class movement building shows how his presidency would be far better at stoking the fires of class struggle from below than any other contender. Beyond Bernie, the mass popularity of Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib shows a widespread hunger for working-class champions to challenge far-right Republicans and the Democratic establishment alike. Even where they do not win, credible working-class electoral challenges can build the unity of working people for militant action and systemic political change. Across the country, socialists should work to build working-class coalitions and independent electoral organizing infrastructure that can promise an end to the careers of federal legislators who oppose a GND. Even as these challenges often use the Democratic primary and ballot line to begin with, we should be clear from the beginning that this activity is leading towards a working-class party that is independent of neoliberal Democrats and their billionaire donors. Socialists have a key role to play in pushing progressives towards this perspective and away from the notion that workers can accomplish their goals through a Democratic Party under irredeemable corporate control. By helping facilitate the deepening of working-class revolt led by militant teachers, using popular class-struggle demands to politicize a mass audience, and supporting class-struggle electoral challenges and building workers’ independent political infrastructure, socialists can help build the confidence and capacity of the working class to organize and fight back. While these sites of class struggle aren’t climate solutions in themselves, this confidence and capacity will be the essential leverage to win a GND. Without this leverage, climate activists have little social power that doesn’t rely on the goodwill of Democratic legislators and the largesse of benevolent billionaires — two groups we know will not support a working-class climate solution. The potentially transformative political capacity of the working class is the only force capable of saving us from climate catastrophe.

(Jordan, )

Amid a brutal year for military recruiting, conservative war hawks are openly fretting that President Joe Biden’s announcement last week of a onetime means-tested student debt cancellation will undercut the military’s ability to prey on desperate young Americans. “Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments,” Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) tweeted shortly after the announcement. Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments. — Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) August 25, 2022 In the six years since Banks first ran for Congress, he has taken more than $400,000 from defense contractors, weapons manufacturers, and other major players in the military-industrial complex. Corporate political action committees for Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, L3Harris Technologies, and Ultra Electronics have each donated tens of thousands of dollars to Banks, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data analyzed by OpenSecrets. He now sits on the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Department of Defense and United States military. Members of the committee have already collectively received more than $3.4 million from defense contractors and weapons manufacturers this election cycle. Banks’s admission highlights the way the student debt crisis has been exploited by the military-industrial complex. By saying the quiet part out loud, Banks is finally speaking the truth about how military recruiters use the GI Bill — the 1944 law that awards a robust benefits package to veterans — as a remedy for the cost of higher education to convince young people to enlist. “To have members of Congress openly imply that the answer to this is to actually exacerbate hardship for poor and working-class youth is, actually, the best thing for young Americans to see,” Mike Prysner, an antiwar veteran and activist, told the Lever. “It proves their reasons for not joining are totally valid. Why allow yourself to be chewed up and spit out in service of a system that cares so little for you and your well being?” Biden’s initiative will cancel up to $10,000 of federal student loan debt for people who make under $125,000 annually, plus an additional $10,000 for these borrowers who received a Pell Grant in college. The program is estimated to eliminate roughly $300 billion in total debt, reducing the outstanding student debt nationwide from $1.7 trillion to $1.4 trillion. According to the College Board’s 2021 Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid report, the average cost for annual tuition and fees at public four-year colleges has risen from $4,160 to $10,740 since the early 1990s — a 158 percent increase. At private institutions, average costs have increased 96.6 percent during that same period, from $19,360 to $38,070. Biden’s student debt cancellation plan was for the most part celebrated in liberal circles as a step in the right direction, although many pointed out that debt forgiveness needed to go much further to address the nationwide crisis. “If Young Americans Can Access Free College… Will They Volunteer for the Armed Forces?” Banks’s communications director, Buckley Carlson (son of conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson), did not respond to a request for comment — but the congressman’s comments reflect a popular mindset among Army brass and conservative hawks. In 2019, Frank Muth, the general in charge of Army recruitment, boasted that the student debt emergency played a primary role in his branch exceeding its recruiting goal that year. “One of the national crises right now is student loans, so $31,000 is [about] the average,” said Muth. “You can get out [of the Army] after four years, 100 percent paid for state college anywhere in the United States.” Cole Lyle, former adviser to Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and executive director of Mission Roll Call, a veterans advocacy group, penned an op-ed for Fox News in May calling student debt forgiveness a “slap in the face” to veterans because service members and veterans were purportedly more deserving of debt relief than the average civilian. Lyle’s piece was shared by the late Representative Jackie Walorski (R-IN), who also argued forgiveness would “undermine military recruiting.” Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of conservative outlet the Federalist, and the big-oil front group Citizens Against Government Waste, shared the piece as well. In April, Eric Leis, a former department manager at the Navy’s Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, bemoaned in the Wall Street Journal that debt forgiveness — and especially lowering the cost of higher education — poses a threat to the military’s ability to recruit. “When I worked at Navy boot camp, an overwhelming majority of recruits listed paying for college as their primary motivator for joining the Navy. If young Americans can access free college without having to earn the GI Bill or sign up for follow-on military service, will they volunteer for the armed forces in adequate numbers?” wrote Leis. Banks’s recent statement on the matter elicited strong reactions from antiwar activists on Twitter — largely because it laid bare the military’s predatory recruiting practices and exploitation of vulnerable people who desperately need economic aid. “According to Rep. Banks, any relief regarding jobs, health care, childcare, housing, food, should be opposed on the basis it would hurt enlistment!” said Prysner. “While mocked, it does reveal the core of the Pentagon’s recruitment strategy: focus primarily on young people who feel pushed into the ranks by the difficulties of American life.” “It Feels Like a Bait and Switch” Banks’s criticism comes during a tough year for military recruiting. The military is seeing its lowest number of recruits in the current fiscal year since the end of the draft in 1973, the military news outlet Stars and Stripes reported last week. Earlier in August, the Army admitted it had only successfully recruited half its goal and is poised to miss its target by around 48 percent. Other military branches have also struggled to hit their annual goals, but according to Stars and Stripes, these forces are expected to just reach their target numbers by the end of the fiscal year next month. But as Prysner points out, such recruitment struggles have nothing to do with college becoming easier to afford. “According to the most recent [Department of Defense] youth poll, their top reasons are fear of physical and psychological wounds, fear of sexual assault, and a growing dislike of the military,” said Prysner. The Department of Defense’s program for Joint Advertising, Market Research & Studies (JAMRS) conducts polls to gauge young Americans’ opinions of the United States military. The most recent poll, released earlier in August, found a majority of respondents — 65 percent — would not join the military because of the possibility of injury or death, while 63 percent cited post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other emotional or psychological issues. According to the same poll, the top reason why young Americans considered enlisting was to increase potential future pay, while educational benefits, such as those offered by the GI Bill, were the second most common reason for enlisting. The public has become increasingly critical of the military, thanks in part to a lack of a national cause to rally behind, no looming presence of a serious external threat, and growing discontent with the American system. Some of that negativity has come from within the Armed Forces’ own ranks. In 2020, a video of active duty Army soldiers expressing frustration over their recruiters lying to them racked up millions of views. The clip illustrated how many young Americans are lied to in hopes that they’ll become pawns for the military industrial complex. This is actually some of the saddest shit I’ve seen pic.twitter.com/Djw2lhZ8sF — Lolo (@LolOverruled) October 8, 2020 To boost its numbers, the military has a long and well-documented history of targeting the economically disadvantaged and enticing potential recruits with its robust benefits package. Earlier this year, the Army released new ads specifically touting how service can fill holes in the country’s tattered safety net. Antiwar veteran groups and other peace advocates warn young people to be wary of the military’s recruitment tactics, especially its education benefits. While the GI Bill could potentially cover a majority of a recruit’s education, its benefits are not guaranteed. “Even with the G.I. bill and tuition assistance, a lot of veterans end up with student debt anyway, and that’s what they really don’t tell you,” said political commentator and Air Force veteran Ben Carollo. “I think it speaks to how predatory military recruiting is. Because really it takes layers of lies.” Beyond education, veterans still have to fight for many necessary benefits. Recently, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would allow for military veterans to receive treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical issues — including cancer — caused by burn pits overseas, before begrudgingly supporting it after immense public pressure. Carollo said she bought into the lies when she enlisted. She, like many other Americans, saw the US military as “the good guys” who brought “freedom” around the world. She eventually came to see through the American exceptionalist fantasy and the false promise of benefits waiting for veterans. “Sadly I had to learn these lessons the hard way and came out with a disability and trauma that now limits my ability to really use the degree I did get,” said Carollo. “Ultimately it feels like a bait and switch. The idea that we should keep people poor just to maintain that scam speaks to how evil our system is.”

(Rose, https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2023-06-15/army-soldiers-recruiting-women-10451347.html)

Fewer women are choosing to join the Army as the largest military branch struggles through another difficult recruiting year, according to data from the service. Army recruitment overall has dropped more than 29% since the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, with female enlistments down by 31% during the same time, according to data that the Army provided to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services at its most recent meeting. “Female prospects view the Army as an inferior employer — neither aligned with their aspirations nor providing desired outcomes,” according to the Army’s slide presentation to the committee, which has provided the Pentagon with recommendations for more than 70 years on how to address the challenges women face when serving in the military. Only about 8% of women ages 16 to 24 have a propensity to serve in the military, according to a Defense Department document provided to the advisory committee, which will hold its next meeting June 27. Though the crisis of sexual assault and harassment in the military attracts a lot of attention, Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and board co-chairperson of the nonprofit Service Women’s Action Network, said it’s not the only factor that affects a woman’s decision to join the service. “The Army has the biggest need for both men and women. It's [by] far the biggest service, so their recruiting job is harder, particularly in times when there's good employment opportunities in the civilian community,” she said. Manning also said the Army could be falling behind in recruiting women because women might be choosing other service branches. “In some ways, at least in some people's minds, it's kind of glamorous to be in the Marines or the Navy, or the Air Force or Space Force. The Army is something that I don’t think is ever viewed as glamorous,” she said. The Army is struggling overall to attract enough recruits. Last year, the service fell about 15,000 recruits short of its goal of 60,000. This year, the service set a goal of 65,000 recruits and projects it will fall short again.

The year is 2040 and the planet is hot, more than warmer on average than before the start of the Industrial Revolution. Residents of are retreating to higher ground as rising tides encroach on their neighbourhoods. Summer has become synonymous with in Eastern China and violent along the Yangtze River. To mitigate further catastrophe, China and other world powers decide to dim the sun. Once limited to the realm of science fiction, scientists are now considering how to engineer the climate to avert the worst impacts of global warming. has entered mainstream scientific debate in recent years as the window to reduce greenhouse gas emissions narrows. A by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that by 2040 the global average temperature is projected to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is the threshold established by the Paris Agreement after which the risk of catastrophic climate impacts increases. If it proves feasible, geoengineering could buy nations some time to decarbonise by temporarily turning down the global thermostat and slowing the impacts of climate change. However, that even researching it creates a moral hazard because it sends a false signal to the public that a hitherto unproven technological fix can be relied on. China is than most countries to extreme weather events linked to a changing climate. The government is focusing on reducing emissions by decarbonising the economy, but it has also launched a to study geoengineering’s potential to mitigate climate change. Although it is still in its infancy, the three-year-old programme raises the question of whether China would deploy solar geoengineering. Uncharted territory Geoengineering involves the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change. It works in two main ways: blocking sunlight and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Scientists in China have largely focused on techniques to block the sun because they offer the potential to rapidly cool the planet. But they pose risks that require careful study. Solar geoengineering is untested but volcanic eruptions are a natural analogue for one approach. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines released sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that formed sulfate aerosols. These scattered sunlight to the extent that the Earth cooled by around from 1992-1993. Scientists have proposed replicating the volcano effect by spraying aerosols out of specially equipped planes at 70,000 feet. This could quickly cool the planet, but it would not target the greenhouse gases that are the source of the problem. The atmosphere would not return to a pre-industrial state because carbon dioxide would continue to acidify the ocean and have other effects on ecosystems. While technologies could, in theory, be employed simultaneously to draw the accumulated gases out of the atmosphere, these technologies are also only just being piloted and .

(, 2-22)

The urgency and scope of the climate crisis are being needlessly exploited to drive fringe ideas like carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) from the margins to the mainstream, according to a hard-hitting report issued last week by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law and Berlin’s Heinrich Böell Foundation. “Almost all geoengineering proposals serve to entrench and benefit fossil fuel interests rather than solve the climate crisis,” the report concludes. “By promoting the development of new fossil fuels and costly fossil infrastructure, by diverting resources away from proven mitigation strategies to costly boondoggles, and by sustaining the myth that meaningful climate action can be safely delayed or narrowly constrained, geoengineering threatens to undermine real solutions at the time when they are most urgently needed.” In a joint release, the two organizations contend that: Enhanced oil recovery would be the ultimate beneficiary of 85% of U.S. subsidies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies. CCS proponents believe the technology could increase coal consumption by 40% and lead to the extraction of 923 million additional barrels of oil, in the U.S. alone, by 2040. Direct Air Capture, notwithstanding the glowing media it’s received in recent months, is a highly energy-intensive technology that “will be used primarily to produce hydrocarbon fuels that will themselves be burned, resulting in either net carbon emissions or massive diversions of renewable energy for uncertain benefits while simultaneously slowing the transition from internal combustion engines.” Fossil industry advocates “openly believe CCS and CDR are essential to save coal, ensure the future of oil and gas, and ‘unlock’ unburnable carbon.” Oil companies, in turn, are relying on carbon dioxide removal to justify continued heavy reliance on oil and gas at least until 2100, despite the IPCC’s 2030 deadline to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 45%. Proponents of one of the most controversial geoengineering methods, Solar Radiation Management, have for decades “cited the potential to delay or minimize climate mitigation measures as a primary justification for its use.” They assume countries “will inject sulphate or other aerosols into the skies for decades to centuries to come—and deploy CDR to bring emissions back down.” The report suggests geoengineering is becoming the new climate denial as earlier forms are discredited, and affirms that humanity “must and can keep warming below 1.5°C”, without relying on geoengineering. “Confronting the challenge of climate change is not a matter of future technology, but present political will and economic investment,” the report states. “While most proposed approaches to CDR and SRM remain speculative, the technologies we need to reduce emissions, transform our economy, and confront the climate crisis are available, proven, and scalable.” The report suggests powerful industry influences are keeping the advocacy for CCS and CDR afloat, and cites a scenario in the IPCC’s 1.5°C pathways report that avoids “speculative” CDR technologies while “making more limited use of nature-based carbon reductions achieved through afforestation, reforestation, forest conservation, and land use.” CIEL and Böell stress that “these pathways place an early, heavy priority on reducing energy demand and rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. “

(Julia, Daniel Manzi and Ginger Zee, https://abcnews.go.com/US/geoengineering-technologies-combat-climate-crisis-scientists/story?id=98476205)

While using engineering technologies to combat the climate crisis is a welcome solution, more needs to be done, experts say. Conservation of natural resources on Earth, such as water and fossil fuels, is one way. The "real solution," Field says, is bringing greenhouse gas emissions to a net zero. "The idea with these techniques would be to not necessarily deal with greenhouse gases but to change the energy balance," Field said. Implementing these techniques could eventually lead to a "slippery slope" of more problems, Field said. Geoengineering does not combat the root of the problem, Wennberg said. "If we use these techniques, the greenhouse gases are still in the atmosphere, the oceans are still becoming more acid," Field said. "And if we were ever stopped doing the solar geoengineering interventions, the temperatures would very rapidly warm."

The strategy of growing the economy first and then wait for people who have developed green preferences to build government capacity for stricter environmental regulations is not effective: the process is too slow, it happens at the expenses of other countries (Moran, Lenzen, Kanemoto, & Geschke, 2013), and, presently, it cannot be squared with the continuous pursuit of economic growth (Jackson, 2009; Ward et al., 2016). For these reasons, the kind of policy strategy compatible with continuous economic growth has to rely on technological solutions to expand humanity’s ecological boundaries. From today’s vantage point, geoengineering is poised to quickly become the preferred technological solution for market actors with a stake in pollution and technocratic elites profiting from the status quo. This alliance around geoengineering has started to become visible during COP21 and is reflected in the Paris Agreement, which formally left the door open to the deployment of geoengineering technologies to achieve the goal of staying below 2 C of global warming compared to pre-industrial level (Anderson, 2015). Before problems. One of the major problems of the geoengineering strategy is the difficulty of reaching an international agreement on geoengineering research and deployment before ecological circumstances make geoengineering necessary. According to a standard categorization (Royal Society (Great Britain), 2009), there are two types of geoengineering: Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) alter the reflectivity of the Earth to cool the planet. Both options, to be effective, require a planetary-scale implementation and involve huge risks. If this is the road humanity thinks it should pursue, then an adequate global agreement which settles issues of ethics and governance must be reached. Without an agreed blueprint for action at the international level, early unilateral action by states, corporations, or, even, wealthy individuals, will likely lead to conflict and social tensions to the point of compromising future collective efforts and plunging humanity further into chaos. Speaking specifically of SRM, Szerszynski, Kearnes, Macnaghten, Owen, and Stilgoe (2013) find that it is an “inherently political technology” (Winner, 1980), which is incompatible with liberal democracy. After problems. The unlikelihood of a global agreement on geoengineering is also underscored by the different perceptions of the states – informed, in turn, by different values, beliefs, and rationally formed priorities – of the consequences which might occur once geoengineering has been implemented on a planetary scale. In particular, the large deployment of BECCS, quite popular because it appears in 184 out of the 204 scenarios assessed by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) which meet the 2 C target, is not fully understood in theory, much less tested in practice (only a handful of small facilities around the world currently exist). According to Williamson (2016) and Burns and Nicholson (2017), BECCS is likely to negatively impact food security, freshwater availability, biodiversity, and disrupt the nitrogen cycle. Social stress, competition for scarce resources, and migrations could then all plausibly ensue. As per SRM, the consequences of misuse of this technology are even more dire than NET’s as, without an ambitious planetary commitment to mitigate and capture carbon, SRM would lock humanity into this sort of geoengineering for centuries to come and would also expose us to rapid and calamitous temperature increases if it were to be suddenly stopped (Burns & Nicholson, 2017; Niemeier & Tilmes, 2017). Temperatures would skyrocket well above the 2 C goal somewhat arbitrarily established by the scientific and policy community (Titley, 2017). And temperature increases of 4 C – argues Anderson – are “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable, and civilized global community” (Anderson, 2012, p. 29).

(Paul, HS teacher/Member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/case-for-job-guarantee-review-pavlina-tcherneva)

The book offers a revealing history on the concept of the natural rate of unemployment. Mainstream economists warn that if unemployment is too low, employers will need to raise wages and prices. They’ve deemed this all-elusive “natural” sweet spot as the Non-Accelerating Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell unintentionally revealed the absurdity of this notion when he said, “We need the concept of a natural rate of unemployment. We need to have some sense of whether unemployment is high, low, or just right.” Since the postwar years the Congressional Budget Office has asserted the “just right” level of unemployment to be between 4.5 percent and 6.5 percent. In other words, if over 13 million workers are unemployed today we should be satisfied with this as “just right.” While traditional economists fret over the costs of inflation, this book paints a vivid picture of the social costs caused by unemployment. People who are out of a job have a more difficult time finding work, especially if they’ve been unemployed long term. It creates a dangerous cycle in the broader economy where people cut back spending and fuel further layoffs from businesses. The loss of stable, blue-collar work is the primary cause of the “deaths of despair” often mentioned when discussing working-class white Americans. Our country is plagued by phenomena like suicide, alcoholism, and depression. Unemployment cuts people off from social networks and a sense of usefulness, creating and fueling all these ills. Creating quality employment for all who want it should be the chief concern of the federal government, not the bogeyman of inflation.

(Paul, HS teacher/Member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/case-for-job-guarantee-review-pavlina-tcherneva)

The book adroitly addresses the question of how to pay for such an ambitious proposal. Recent events have already started to answer this question for many Americans. To deal with the economic fallout from the pandemic Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package, much of it going into corporate slush funds and stock buybacks. Somehow, money is always there for capital when it needs it. Ruling class calls for fiscal restraint are never applied to bank bailouts, tax cuts for the rich, and endless wars. Though the book is not a treatise on Money Monetary Theory (MMT), some of its guiding features are highlighted in order to explain the mechanisms of financing the federal job guarantee. Tcherneva asserts, as other adherents of MMT do, that a monetarily sovereign government like the US cannot really run out of money. But regardless of one’s views on MMT, the book makes a strong argument for the broad-based economic benefits a federal job guarantee could ensure. For one, it would end the pressure for states to fall over themselves offering subsidies to corporations in exchange for jobs. As states compete for investment they lose important tax revenue, and usually jobs bounce from one state to another anyway. A simulation from the Levy Institute found that the budgetary impact of a federal job guarantee would only be 1.5 percent of GDP. Findings also showed it would boost real GDP by half a trillion dollars and increase private sector employment by 3 to 4 million jobs, all without significantly increasing inflation. While a minimum wage increase could cause a one-time hike in prices, that does not constitute inflation because it isn’t continuous. There are historical precedents one can look at to support these conclusions. Tcherneva points out that in 1949 the minimum wage doubled without accelerating inflation. This was also a year when we were as close to full employment as we’ve ever been. Examples like these, along with the recent massive government stimulus, should do away with the idea that there is no money to provide quality employment to everyone.

(Saijel, )

As protests against racial injustice erupted across the U.S. in late May, an economist on Wall Street set aside her usual work of analyzing monetary policy and all things macro to try her hand at something few in her field have attempted: quantifying the cost of racism to the world’s largest economy. From her home in northern New Jersey, Dana Peterson, who at the time was a global economist at Citigroup Inc., got to work parsing data stretching over two decades, a period that included the longest economic expansion in American history. Several months later, she revealed how that economic boom belied a glaring number: Closing racial gaps would have generated an additional $16 trillion in economic output since 2000, her research showed. For Peterson, doing the work of putting a dollar figure on the effects of racism endured by Black Americans was a way to convey the centuries-old issue in a way that the world of finance and economics would understand and relate to, she says. “Some people don’t really contemplate there being a problem,” she says. “So that was the value of adding numbers, because numbers take some of the emotion out of it. If you can relate to someone in their language, then it means something.” The project, which culminated in the publication of a 104-page report in September, was also a way for the 44-year-old Peterson, who left Citi last month to become chief economist at the Conference Board, to exorcise some of her own experiences of racism. During an interview, she recalled being on the subway in New York as a school girl when she and her teen friends were stopped and frisked by police. While attending Wesleyan University, she encountered classmates who questioned whether her admission to the elite Connecticut college was a result of affirmative action policies, rather than on her own merit. Then there was the time, early in her career, when—on showing up to meet a prospective employer—she saw the look of disappointment on his face when he said he had been expecting someone whose features conformed to her Scandinavian-sounding name. econ_peterson2 Dana Peterson speaking at a conference in Washington on Nov. 19, 2019.PHOTOGRAPHER: YURI GRIPAS “I felt like I was telling part of my own story,” says Peterson of the report, “helping people to understand things from my perspective as a Black person, but also marrying the fact that I’m an economist. It gave me a chance to talk about everything.” Working in consultation with her manager, Citigroup Chief Global Economist Catherine Mann, and aided by two analysts, Peterson showed how disparities along racial fault lines in housing, education, policing, and voting all feed into one another to restrict the access of Black Americans and other minorities to employment, higher incomes, and the ability to build wealth. Housing segregation, for example, leads to unequal access to quality education. Growing up poor, meanwhile, boosts the likelihood that incarceration will diminish job opportunities. Sifting through granular data such as student loan debt and occupation breakdowns by race—information that is usually the preserve of think tanks and academics, rather than Wall Street economists—Peterson said that inequities exist at every juncture, be it when Black Ivy League graduates are paid less than White counterparts or the struggles Black business owners face when trying to secure investment from venture capitalists. By her calculations, an additional 6.1 million jobs a year and $13 trillion in business revenue could have been generated over the last two decades if Black entrepreneurs had fair and equitable access to credit. “At all these different levels of society and achievement, there are these roadblocks,” Peterson says. “It’s pyramidal.” Over the course of her research, Peterson said she was most struck by an analysis conducted by the Urban Institute on the gap in home ownership rates. The nonprofit said that after accounting for differences in income, education, credit score, and marital status, 17% of the difference between Black and White households remained unaccounted for. “That was shocking—that potentially one in five rejections alone might be attributable to bias or racism,” Peterson says. Equitable access to home loans could have resulted in 770,000 additional Black homeowners since 2000, with combined sales and expenditures adding $218 billion to gross domestic product, she concluded in her report. Peterson calculated that by closing the various gaps between Blacks and Whites, the U.S. could stand to gain an additional $5 trillion in economic activity over the next five years—not an insignificant number as the U.S. struggles to recover from the downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Citigroup’s report comes at a time when the Federal Reserve is paying increasing attention to the plight of Black Americans and other minorities who have disproportionately been negatively affected during the pandemic. The presidents of the Atlanta, Boston, and Minneapolis reserve banks have pledged to add minority voices to compilation of the central bank’s Beige Book report, which highlights the views of businesses and corporate chiefs in each district. Additional groups have also tallied the economic costs of racism. Altarum, a nonprofit in Ann Arbor, Mich., said two years ago that the U.S. could realize an $8 trillion gain in gross domestic product by 2050 by closing racial equity gaps. A McKinsey & Co. report that was published last year projected that the racial wealth gap will cost the U.S. economy as much as $1.5 trillion from 2019 to 2028, because of its dampening effect on consumption and investment. “Showing the impact of inequities is important because disparate audiences have different motivations, and we think it’s important to show the impact on the economy,” says Shelley Stewart III, a McKinsey partner who was one of the report’s authors.

(Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at New College of Florida and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. William Darity Jr is the Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African-American Studies, and economics; and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darrick Hamilton is associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research.https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/federal-job-guarantee-universal-basic-income-investment-jobs-unemployment/)

A FJG would bring us much closer to actual full employment, not the neoclassical full employment that subjectively allows for some optimal frictional unemployment. Most contemporary economists rely on the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) to calculate this less-than-full full employment artificial statistic which functions as a disciplinary tool of the bourgeoisie, but this, according to Roger Farmer is “an idea past its sell-by date.” By full employment, we mean simply that everyone seeking a job gets one. We’d wager that if you asked the average American what full employment means to them, they’d give you a similar answer — a job for all. Indeed, a plurality of Americans will also tell you they support a FJG. The UBI would likely still leave a substantial segment of the population in poverty. As Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs, one of the most prominent UBI advocates, acknowledged, even a large payment through the UBI won’t necessarily secure a comfortable living for all citizens. How about those without jobs, or those who earn below subsistence wages? Of course, a UBI coupled with a non-poverty wage option and strong unionization could seriously combat poverty. The UBI would eliminate the effective minimum wage of $0 currently offered in the United States, though it would fail to provide adequate employment for all that demanded it — a crucial shortfall of such a program. A FJG is a sounder mechanism to combat structural inequalities, for instance through closing the persistent unemployment gap experienced by stigmatized groups who face continued discrimination. (Note, since 1972 unemployment has average double digits for black workers and has never fallen below 7 percent — a level that is only reached during times of economic crisis — for white workers). Further, the FJG will have a strong macroeconomic stabilization effect. During economic downturns, it would expand and hire more people; it would then shrink during economic boom periods as people move from public to better-paying private employment. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, a leading voice on the FJG’s macroeconomic effects, argues that policies like the UBI have no counter-cyclical features. Thus, when the economy takes a downturn — say as it did in 2007 — basic incomes provide no automatic stabilizers to right the sinking ship. This is good for the economy as a whole. Rather than expanding the unemployment insurance rolls during economic busts, the FJG would put folks to work and moderate the business cycle. Federal workers’ paychecks will increase demand, which will increase economic growth. Many economists agree that today’s secular stagnation — insufficient demand — is contributing to continued “lackluster” growth after the Great Recession. Only modest upticks in growth for the foreseeable future will come if we continue the status quo.

(Josh, Research Manager The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University https://www.ourenergypolicy.org/the-ineffectiveness-of-renewable-portfolio-standards/ , 7-9)

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) require a certain percentage of the electricity sold by utilities to be from qualifying sources as determined by state statute. RPS are one of the most common state-level environmental policies; 29 states and Washington DC have mandatory standards. Despite their popularity, however, renewable portfolio standards may not achieve their environmental ends in a cost-effective manner. Basic analysis of the effects of implementing RPS shows only a nominal impact on carbon emissions, but a large impact on electricity prices. Professors at Louisiana State University compared states that had enacted RPS to states that had not, and showed that RPS states have seen neither a decrease in carbon emissions or an increase in renewable energy development relative to non-RPS states. The authors conclude, however, that RPS enactment is associated with a 10.9% to 11.4% increase in electricity prices. In addition to evidence that RPS enactment is associated with higher electricity prices, there’s also evidence that they are much more expensive than other environmental policies. Academic research estimates that in order to achieve the same emissions reduction, current RPS policies “cost a mind-numbing 18.6 times more than a broader portfolio that includes those low-carbon sources.” Ultimately, most academic research shows RPS to be expensive and ineffective environmental policies. Considering that one in five households struggled to pay its utility bills without having to give up or reduce its consumption of basic necessities like food or medicine, these findings are a serious challenge to RPS as an effective environmental policy.

(Carson, 12-3, http://sites.utexas.edu/mecc/2013/12/03/why-the-dream-of-clean-cheap-and-distributed-electricity-is-so-difficult-to-achieve/)

Perhaps Austin’s most innovative program to encourage renewable generation closer to home is the “Value of Solar” pricing approach, which differs considerably from existing solar incentives. In Germany, the utility will pay a flat fee, known as a Feed-in-Tariff, to producers of solar electricity intended to lower the total cost of owning a system and thereby increase the number of systems within the country. The problem with Feed-in-Tariffs is that they artificially manipulate the price of solar electricity and can become top-heavy and expensive if too many people opt-in to the system. A federal Feed-in-Tariff is also a political non-starter in the United States. A more popular model in the US is known as net-metering. In a net-metering system, the energy produced by the solar PV array on the rate payer’s roof will be used before the energy from the electric grid. If the rate payer is not using much electricity but the sun is shining on a hot day, then any excess electricity produced will be sent back to the grid and the electric meter will literally run backwards. Instead of ever receiving a check from the utility for their power, consumers in a net-metering agreement will reduce their electric bills, sometimes to zero, and the PV system will pay for itself over time in reduced electric bills.

(David Yaffe, adjunct professor of energy law at The George Washington University Law School, litigator in front of the FERC. “Are State Renewable Feed-In-Tariff Initiatives Truly Throttled by Federal Statutes After the FERC California Decision?” The Electricity Journal, Vol. 3 Issue 8 pp.9-16 October 2010)

There appear to be two aspects of the current federal regulatory structure that interfere with complete state formulation and implementation of FITs. The first is rate regulation under either FPA Sections 205 and 206 or PURPA 210. This is the framework confirmed by the FERC’s FIT Order. The second is that since generators qualifying for FIT treatment are public utilities under the FPA, they must file their rates, terms and conditions of service with the FERC under FPA Part II unless they fit within the QF exemptions under PURPA 210 and the FERC’s implementing regulations. This is not an issue for FIT QFs with a net power production capability of 1 MW or less. Those FIT generators that qualify as QFs under PURPA 210 with a net power production capability exceeding 1 MW must make a filing with FERC to confirm that they meet the QF standards in the FERC’s regulations[14] and either self certify or file an application with the FERC to confirm such status.[15] QFs using renewable sources with a net power production capacity of less than 20 MW (or higher in the case of geothermal sources) are exempt from various provisions of the FPA[16] and the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 2005.[17] These requirements were not addressed by the FERC’s FIT decision, however, if the FERC actively enforces them, they may present potentially larger obstacles to FIT implementation than the rate issues because the home and small business owners that are expected to deploy FIT generators are not likely to be in a position to understand or bear the transaction costs of compliance. Another factor common to both issues is the treatment of FIT generators that do not qualify as QFs. If each state were to define eligible FIT generators in a way that would also qualify them as QFs, the scope of concerns to be worked through with respect to both rate setting and utility filing would be simplified. States might consider requesting the FERC to clarify how and whether CHPs may qualify as qualifying cogeneration facilities.

(Max B. Sawicky is an economist and writer in the wilds of Virginia. He has worked at the Government Accountability Office and the Economic Policy Institute. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/bernie-gets-socialistic)

To my way of thinking, the biggest gap in current job guarantee proposals pertains to their proposed delivery mechanism — namely, federal project grants to state and local governments. There are both technical and political difficulties in this approach which have yet to be addressed in job guarantee proposals, except in passing. Most federal grants to states and localities are provided by formula: easily quantified characteristics of state or local jurisdictions are entered into a formula that spits out the recipient government’s grant allocation. The use of such formulas reduces the cost of administering the program for the grantor. But construction of the formula itself will be subject to all sorts of devious political machinations. Project grants, by contrast, are bureaucracy-intensive. Criteria for awards must be specified. Aspiring grantees must devise proposals to apply for funds. Proposals must be reviewed by the grantor. The reviews themselves (say, by a Department of Transportation) are subject to oversight by the Congress. Rejected applications will be disputed by the applicant, and those disputes will be subject to review, and so on. The more the rules are modified to address assorted criticisms, the more opaque the entire process becomes. Incidentally, governments with higher-income constituents will be able to play this game with more skill than those representing poorer communities. Meanwhile, state and local governments — and their taxpaying constituents — will prefer to direct job guarantee resources to services they already provide. This is an objection that public-sector unions have raised in the past. It’s not enough to say we won’t let them do it: the armies of the state-local sector vastly outnumber those of the federal government. The states can practice the political equivalent of asymmetric warfare. Thus far I’ve presumed good intentions all around. But of course, state and local governments in all regions of the United States are full of deplorables. And including local community participation is not much compensation, since the construction of such community entities will be subject to the same flaws as the local governments themselves — if, indeed, they’re not under the de facto control of those governments. All things considered, I’d say the delivery mechanism in current proposals requires elaboration. The alternative to decentralized delivery is to bypass state and local governments altogether. The federal government can erect state enterprises across the country to perform useful tasks routinely neglected by the states as well as by the private sector. A common feature of such tasks is that their benefits tend to be spread over multiple jurisdictions, thereby reducing the incentive for any individual state or local government to undertake them. Nostrums of fiscal austerity have been blocking them for decades, so there is no lack of such tasks. They include: Large-scale infrastructure projects. Such projects are too large to be financed by existing federal grants, which tend to spread money around thinly. Big-ticket items are usually financed by earmarks, or not at all. A national infrastructure bank could devise and assign such projects to regional public enterprises. Climate change. Rebuilding coastlines, reclaiming land damaged by industry and mining A national electric grid Public broadband School repair Everybody can think of things to add. The key criterion should be work that is not normally undertaken by state and local governments — work which they don’t particularly want to do. A network of federal, public enterprises would not be immune to the pressures faced by a more decentralized program, but it might be less vulnerable. A precedent can be found in the original War on Poverty, which created parallel institutions of local government, called Community Action Programs, that constituted independent bases of political power. Within a few short years, established local governments succeeded in destroying this replay of Reconstruction; it was a threat to local political elites. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth proposing, quite the contrary. The struggle continues. The resources of these enterprises would be made to expand or contract with the business cycle, just as private-sector firms grow and shrink with even greater volatility. The enterprises would provide real jobs, subject to the same labor standards of large private sector firms, and for that reason enjoy equal social status. Perhaps it’s my ego talking here, but an understanding of fiscal federalism — my own field of expertise — seems to be absent on the left. People seem to think the state-local sector is a genie that can be summoned at will and will always say “Your wish is my command.” The reality is that it is very difficult to prevent the states from doing what they want with federal money, and it won’t be what you want them to do.

(Kali, Leader@CooperationJackson, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/kali-akuno-interview-climate-change-cooperation-jackson. 2-15)

Cooperation Jackson is a local project, and a lot of the most exciting left projects now are local or municipal. The Green New Deal is likely to involve a lot of money that will ultimately be spent by local bodies. Yet the history of the US, including the New Deal, includes a lot of examples of local institutions actually defending inequalities and privileges from federal intervention, whereas something like what W. E. B. Dubois called “abolition democracy” required federal back-up. How do you think about the role of decentralization and the federal government in terms of a Green New Deal, especially in the early years? KA Cooperation Jackson is a locally situated project, as you noted, but we see ourselves as part of an international, or more appropriately, several international movements. I say this because we don’t think the answers to the questions posed are local or national; they are of necessity global. We have to build an international movement to stop runaway climate change and the sixth great extinction event that we are living through right now. There is no way around that. One of the reasons why we have to build a powerful international movement is to fortify our national, regional, and local movements against the reactionary threats and counter-movements that exist throughout the US, but that are extremely concentrated in places like Mississippi. For instance, on a practical level, being connected to an array of international forces helps give cover to our work in Jackson. We can bring various types of pressure to bear on local reactionary forces whose constant threats against us can be mitigated (to varying degrees) by acts of economic and political reprisal by our international (and national) allies. To the extent that the Green New Deal becomes policy, and is rooted in a radical just transition framework, it will make a significant contribution toward addressing the climate crisis as it transforms energy and consumption practices in the US, particularly those of the government, which is one of the leading carbon emitters on the planet. However, in order for the Green New Deal to be effective in its implementation, it is going to have to be extremely nuanced to address the situated racial and class inequalities that are at the heart of your question. So for instance, barring a major radical transformation of the Mississippi government (and society), we in Jackson would need a direct relationship with the federal government to ensure access to the federal resources provided by the Green New Deal. Under present conditions, if those resources were allocated to the state government alone, you best believe that Jackson would only receive a fraction of those resources — if that. The primary reason being the ongoing structural intersections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy that continue to define the US as a project. Therefore, in order to be effective, the Green New Deal must not be one-dimensional in its orientation — i.e., only concern itself with reducing carbon emissions, without taking into account how to address and overcome the racial, class, gender, and regional-based inequities in this society.

(Warren, Fellow of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at The Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, , Fall)

Government spending increases the money supply, and the payment of taxes reduces it. Much of a central bank’s monetary activities are undertaken to neutralize the liquidity shocks of the mismatch of the timing of government spending and receipt of revenue — so‐​called defensive operations. MMT wants to use taxation to manage the money supply rather than for government financing purposes. MMT wants to shift the management of monetary policy from the central bank to the treasury. In doing so it ignores the accumulated wisdom on the difficulty and undesirability of doing so. Some critics of MMT fault it for its explanatory simplification of consolidating the central bank and treasury on the grounds that it doesn’t reflect existing legislation giving central banks operational independence (it certainly doesn’t fit the eurozone with the ECB and 19 separate governments in the system). But this criticism misses the real point. If it were desirable to remove the existing barriers to central bank monetary financing of the government, it could be done. The relevant question is whether this way of thinking about and characterizing monetary and fiscal policy produces a more insightful and useful approach to formulating fiscal/​monetary policy. Does it justify shifting the responsibly for monetary policy from the central bank to the treasury? Should taxes be levied so as to regulate the money supply rather than finance the government (though it would do that as well)? I have only reviewed the articles cited here and they do not address the traditional arguments that have favored the use of central bank monetary policy over fiscal policy (beyond automatic stabilizers) for stabilization purposes. Would MMT replace setting an interest rate target with something else — such as a money supply target — as the basis for its monetary policy–driven choice of taxation? I assume that MMT would continue to support the basic principles of good taxation when making monetary policy adjustments to tax revenue (Coats 2013). If tax revenue is a tool for managing the money supply and inflation (rather than financing government), what principles or models would guide tax policy? How would the government manipulate the sluggish adjustments in tax revenue to smooth over the monetary shocks of government spending and revenue mismatches? None of the challenges of the use of fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool (flexible timing, what the money is spent for, and so on) established with traditional analysis have been neutralized by the MMT vision and claim of extra fiscal space. In fact, as we will see below, despite their advocacy of fiscal over monetary policy for maintaining price stability, MMT supporters have little real interest in and no clear approach to doing so as they prefer to centrally manage wages and prices in conjunction with a guaranteed employment program. The existing arrangements around the globe (central banks that independently execute price stability mandates and governments that determine the nature and level of government spending and its financing) are designed to protect monetary stability from the inflation bias of politicians with shorter policy horizons — the time inconsistency problem (Kydland and Prescott 1977). The universal assignments of responsibilities for monetary policy and for fiscal policy to a central bank and a treasury or finance ministry are meant to align decisionmaking with the authority responsible for the results of its decisions (price stability for monetary policy and welfare‐​enhancing levels and distribution of government spending and its financing for fiscal policy). It is the sad historical experience of excessive reliance on monetary finance and the costly undermining of the value of currencies that have led to the worldwide movement to central bank independence. MMT ignores that history and its lessons. The establishment of central bank operational independence in recent decades is rightly considered a major accomplishment. MMT advocates bring great enthusiasm for more government spending especially on their guaranteed employment and Green New Deal projects, which will need to be justified on their own merits. MMT’s way of viewing money and monetary policy adds nothing to the arguments for or against these policies. Its enthusiasm for printing money and borrowing increase already present dangers to the monetary stability so important for economic growth. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently denounced MMT for ignoring this inflation risk (Summers 2019).

(Doug, , 2-21)

If the job guarantee is MMT’s most attractive feature, the style of argument habitually employed by its proponents is among the ugliest. A classic example is a response by Wray and occasional collaborator Éric Tymoigne to a fairly friendly critique of the school by the left-Keynesian economist Thomas Palley, in which they accuse him of wanting to combat inflation with unemployment and poverty, a dishonest insult that they compound with this footnote: “Palley has been caught on video complaining that if a JG provides jobs to everyone, the poor will be able to eat . . .” (The video is from an exchange between Palley and Mosler, in which Palley says that providing the unemployed with jobs in South Africa would promote demand for electricity, food, TVs, and other goods that the country doesn’t have the capacity to produce.) Tymoigne and Wray’s response to Palley barely addressed any of his substantive points — among other things, its vagueness about the causes and consequences of inflation, its naïve belief in the curative powers of fiscal policy, its irrelevance to the problems of poorer countries, its lack of interest in how the JG might tempt anti-worker governments to replace public sector workers with underpaid transients — and just reasserted the catechism, spiced up with some rude caricatures. They also guard their turf jealously. When asked by the liberal economist Dani Rodrik to react to a polite and friendly effort by two left economists to reconcile MMT with more mainstream schools of economics, Kelton pronounced herself “not remotely” comfortable. Rodrik had called the economists’ paper an MMT “explainer”; she urged him to be “careful about labeling any post with MMT in its title an ‘MMT explainer.’” The brand must be protected. And they can be extremely slippery. If you ask, “Do you really believe the government doesn’t need to tax or borrow to spend,” which is something they frequently do argue, they’ll deny it. When questioned by a sympathetic Ryan Grim of the Intercept about what happens when the government spends without taxing or borrowing (something the United States never does, but bracket that for now), Kelton says it depends on who gets the money. If rich people get it, they’d probably save it. If poor people get it, “they’d spend it into the economy.” She had nothing to say about whether the economy could accommodate that demand. She professed “tremendous respect [for] the real constraints in the economy,” but in fact MMTers have almost nothing to say about those — and Mosler, Tymoigne, and Wray responded to Palley’s comments on the topic with insults. Nor do they ever remind their social media fans, intoxicated by the power of keystrokes, about those constraints.