Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes

14 November 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/14/pers-n14.html

Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.

The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.

The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.

Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.

But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.

They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.

The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:

It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.

And yet, there are 607 people in the United States with a net worth of over a billion dollars.

Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.

Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”

Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.

Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.

The New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.

But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”

Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”

This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.

In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.

The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.

The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.

There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.

The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.

This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership. Those who see the need for socialism should join the Socialist Equality Party and build that leadership.

Barry Grey

HM2 – The economics of modern imperialism

by michael roberts

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/hm2-the-economics-of-modern-imperialism/

At the Historical Materialism conference, the Saturday discussion between Professor David Harvey and myself on Marx’s double-edge law attracted more than 250 people.  Sunday’s session on the economics of modern imperialism that I had organised also attracted a good turnout of around 60 people, many of which were clearly experts on the subject.  Unfortunately for them, the four speakers (including myself) went over their allotted times and used up the available discussion time – apologies all round!

Anyway, at least the speakers presented some important arguments.  I spoke last.  But I think in this post, I shall outline my presentation first because I think it sets the scene for the others.  G Carchedi and I have been working on some new empirical work, trying to gauge which countries are the imperialist ones and how much value they are able to extract from the dominated or periphery (we prefer those names rather than ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, which is too geographical).  We emphasise that we are looking at the economic foundations of imperialism, not the political aspects or the superstructure if you like, ie the political control by imperialist countries over the periphery, or military might or interventions etc.  Direct political control through colonies has mostly disappeared (although not completely); so imperialism operates mainly through economic control now (while throwing in the occasional coup or proxy war).  After all, that is the aim of the imperialist powers: to appropriate as much value and resources from the dominated as possible. In that sense, the economic determines the political.

If we focus on the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist economies, there are several ways that this is achieved. There is value transfer through unequal exchange in international trade; through global value chain flows (transfer pricing) within multi-nationals; through factor income flows (debt interest, equity profits and property rents); through seignorage (ie control of the money supply: dollar is king) and through capital flows (foreign direct investment inflows and portfolio flows. ie buying and selling financial assets).

So which are the imperialist countries?  Carchedi and I define them as those countries which get a long-term appropriation of value from subaltern countries.  And this is achieved by the appropriation of surplus value by high technology companies (and countries) from low technology companies (countries).  So imperialist countries can be defined as those with a persistently large number of companies as measured by their high national average organic composition of capital (OCC) and whose average technological development is higher than the national average of other countries.

In our work, we used the IMF data on net primary income flows between countries. These are cross-border flows of profit, interest and rent.  We found that when these flows are netted out, there are about 10 countries at the most that fit the bill as imperialist.  Indeed, nothing much has changed in the 100 years since Lenin wrote his analysis of imperialism: it’s still the same countries.  No others have made it from dominated to imperialist status.  Net primary income per head is concentrated in the G7 plus a few other small states and the tiny tax haven states).  Every other country is an ‘also-ran’.

The G8-plus countries own the vast bulk of all the foreign-owned assets.  Even the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) own little abroad compared to the imperialist countries.  The G8 has six times as much FDI stock as the BRICS.

The main way that value is transferred from the periphery to the imperialist nations is still through international trade. There has been a large increase in intra-firm trade by affiliates to the parent company using price mark-ups (transfer pricing).  For example, UNCTAD reckons that trans-national companies (TNCs) are involved in 80% of global trade. And of TNC trade, about 40% is intra-firm; 15% through fixed contracts with suppliers and 40% with so-called arms-length firms (ie not owned affiliates but 'captive' domestic firms). Actual intra-firm trade (affiliates to parent company) is about 33% of all annual trade.  So the main way is still export trade on world markets with internationally set prices.(UNCTAD GVC)

In Capital, Marx shows that, through competition, there is a tendency for the profit rates measured in value (labour time) to equalise into prices of production. There is a transfer of value from some capitals to others to bring about this equalisation of profit rates.  This transfer process in competition also applies to international trade. The transfer of value from the dominated to the imperialist economies is achieved by the tendency to equalise rates of profit between nations in the international market for goods and capital.

The periphery has less technology and more labour and so produces more value (in labour time) to make the same product.  The imperialist countries have more technology and less labour and so produce less value (in labour time).  When profit rates are equalised through competition in world markets, then a portion of the extra surplus value that has been extracted from the workers by the capitalists in the South gets transferred to the capitalists of the North.  So, although international trade in goods and services appears to work through equality of exchange (money for goods, goods for money at set prices), beneath the surface, there is an unequal exchange of value (UE).  The imperialist capitals gain extra value while the peripheral capitalists lose value. Figure 13 of my PP presentation shows how this transfer of value works. (The economics foundations of imperialism)

Carchedi and I have made calculations of the magnitude of this transfer of value.  We used some aggregate databases and applied a formula for the transfer. Details of this are in Figure 14 of the PP presentation and excel files are available for anybody who wants to replicate and check our methods and workings.  We found that the transfer of value from the dependent bloc (defined as below) to the G7 rose from $20bn a year in the 1960s; to $90bn in the 1970s, dropping off to $50bn in the 1980s. Then with China becoming the great trading force, there was a take-off from the late 1990s to reach over $120bn by the time of the Great Recession.

So there is annual value transfer from these countries to the G7 through their international trade of $120bn or more a year. This annual transfer of value to the imperialist countries (G7) is equivalent to about 2-3% of their combined GDP.  But the transfer from the dominated countries is much more, around 10% of their combined GDP.  So there is a substantial transfer out of the South through unequal exchange.

Recently, other authors have tried to compute the magnitude of the transfer of value to imperialist countries. Using the World Input-Output database, Italian economist Andrea Ricci of Urbino University, Italy found that for the developed countries "the global amount of value transfers corresponded to 1.8 percent of global value added… while for developing economies, the relative size of outflow transfers ranged from 10 to 20 percent of the domestic value added." Ricci unequal exchange And Greek Marxist economists, Lefteris Tsoulfidis and Persefoni Tsaliki, looked at the transfer of value in trade between the US and China.  They find a similar magnitude of bilateral transfer of value between the US and China as we do. URPE_CHN_2019

In our view, based on the Marxian theory of unequal exchange, the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist countries through international trade and competition takes place because the imperialist countries have a much higher organic composition of capital.  That expresses their technological superiority and delivers much higher labour productivity.  The G7 economies on average are five times more technologically superior than the BRICS and so four times more productive per worker.

This is where the other speakers at the session come in.  John Smith is author of the highly commended, award-winning book, Imperialism in the 21st century.  The book’s main argument is that imperialism rests and thrives on the ‘super-exploitation’ of workers in the ‘Global South’.

What do we mean by 'super-exploitation'? Well, Marx referred briefly to the idea that some workers may end up receiving wages that are below the value of their labour power (the amount needed to live and reproduce). But he did not base his theory of surplus value on ‘super-exploitation’. For Marx, even without super-exploitation, workers were still exploited for surplus value and profit under capitalism.

However, John Smith reckons that super-exploitation is now the main generator of imperialist value gains in the 21st century and technological superiority and ‘normal’ exploitation are no longer in the driving seat, so to speak. For John, this is almost self-evident, given the incredibly low wages in the sweatshops of many Global South countries and the huge mark-ups in the global value chain for imperialist multi-nationals.  Anybody who denied this and argued that workers in the North were just as or even more exploited would be denying the very existence of imperialism.

At the HM session, Andy Higginbottom from Kingston University provided some of the theoretical support for  the thesis of ‘super-exploitation’ as the economic driver of imperialism (HM 2019 Labour super-exploitation plus transformation makes for international value (1).  He pointed out that Marx’s transfer of value model as shown in our PP Figure 13 assumed equal rates of surplus value. That clearly could not be reality. If you relaxed that restriction, then different rates of surplus value between imperialist and peripheral economies come into play in the transfer of value, and not just differing rates of organic composition and labour productivity.  And then it can be argued that the rate of exploitation is not just affected by labour intensity, productivity etc, but also by differences in wages (i.e. super-exploitation).

But I don’t think Marx’s theory of unequal exchange must assume equal rates of surplus value in all countries.  In Figure 20 of our presentation, we show that value is transferred from South to North through trade in the same way even with differing rates of exploitation; indeed if the rates of surplus value are higher in the South, then the North gains even more value in the transfer. But the Southern capitalists also gain more, because they are exploiting their workers even more, either by longer hours and intensity and/or by poverty wages.

The point is that the transfer to the North takes place because of the imperialist countries’ superior technology and labour productivity.  That enables them to sell their goods in world markets at costs below the international average.  The Southern capitalists try to compensate for their lower technical level and productivity by driving the wages of their workers down. So the higher rate of exploitation in the South, whether by super-exploitation or not, is a reaction to the failure to compete against the North.

In our empirical analysis, we found that the contributions to the transfer of value from South to North came from both higher organic composition in the North and higher rates of exploitation in the South – it is both, not just technical superiority, nor just exploitation. But there is also a transfer of value between imperialist countries through trade.  And indeed, competition there remains fierce.  The annual flows of FDI show that, until very recently, flows between advanced capitalist economies were higher than between the imperialist and the less developed South.  In the decade from 2007, inflows to developed economies exceeded inflows to developing economies.  Last year was the first reversal of that.

In his paper for the HM session, Smith developed an analysis of the rate of exploitation (s/v).  Exploitation and super-exploitation in the theory of imperialism.  He reminds us that Marx recognised a so-called ‘moral and historical’ component in the value of labour-power, i.e. "the extent to which the class struggle and general social evolution (different ways of saying the same thing) has resulted in the incorporation of new needs into those necessary for the reproduction of labour-power.”

That means that the value of labour power is partly set by the class struggle. But super exploitation is not part of Marx's theory of value, or s/v.  In the process of production, capitalists might force a lower wage. If the necessities of life and their production prices remain the same, the lower wage purchases less wage goods (consumption falls) as the price of labour power (wages) falls below its value (the production price of those socially determined necessities). That is super exploitation.  But if this low wage is maintained permanently, workers must eventually accept a lower value of labour power in the goods and services that they can buy with it.  In that sense, super exploitation becomes simply a higher level or rate of (“normal”) exploitation because the value of labour power has been lowered by the class struggle. Yes, there is more exploitation, but not ‘super-exploitation’ as a new category of capital.

So I don’t think that super-exploitation is proven either theoretically or empirically as “the single-most important means of increasing the rate of surplus value and countering the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” (Smith).  Or that imperialism has an “insatiable lust for super-exploitable labour”.  Imperialism has a lust for profit and is the result of the drive for more profit beyond national borders as the rate of profit at 'home' fell.  Denying the dominance of super-exploitation as the main form of exploitation under imperialism is not “imperialism denial”, like global warming or climate change denial, as Smith suggests.

Moreover, it just might be that the days of ‘super-exploitation’, as Smith categorises it, are ending.  At the launch of a new book at HM, Ashok Kumar, a lecturer in International Political Economy at Birkbeck University, argued that there are signs that the ‘monopsony’ power of the imperialist buyers of the products of suppliers in the global South is weakening because the number of producers is also shrinking.  This increases the countervailing power of the Southern capitalists (producers) against the Northern capitalists (retailers).  And that gives a window of opportunity for the workers of the Southern sweat shops to push up wages through successful struggles - of which Kumar gives examples.

While it is possible to argue any super exploitation of the workers in the low technology countries (the so-called "South) is caused by the technological backwardness of the South’s capitalists, it is impossible to argue the opposite; that this technological backwardness is caused by super exploitation. And if super exploitation is determined, it cannot be the main determinant element. In sum, the productivity of labour is key to the transfer of value in trade between imperialist countries and the periphery. The major cause of UE is technological superiority. Differences in the rates of surplus value are significant but play a lesser role. Exclusive emphasis on only one of these two factors is misleading.

Moreover, even it were the case that super-exploitation is the main cause of higher rates of surplus value in the peripheral economies, a transfer of value has to take place.  And that can only go to countries with vastly superior technology and labour productivity and can maintain that superiority through monopolising that technology.  Indeed, that was one of the arguments made by Sam King, from Victoria University Australia, at the HM session, based on his upcoming book on imperialism.

Sam reckoned that Lenin’s Imperialism was still valid.  There were still only a few countries reaping these value transfers.  Although Lenin refers to ‘monopoly capital, he did not mean that there was no competition between capitals. Competition still took place voraciously between various imperialist economies but also with ‘Southern’ capitalists. The monopoly was in the technical superiority of the imperialist companies, which they jealously guarded.  The labour productivity gap between these countries and the periphery had not altered since Lenin’s time.  Now in the 21st century, the US is worried that its technology ‘monopoly’ may be threatened by China’s move up the value-added ladder. This is the real reason for the current trade war.

The empirical evidence shows that imperialism is an inherent feature of modern capitalism. Capitalism’s international system mirrors its national system (a system of exploitation): exploitation of less developed economies by the more developed ones. The imperialist countries of the 20th century are unchanged – it’s still the G7/10. There are no intermediate, ‘sub-imperialist’ economies. And China is not imperialist on these measures. And the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist core is continually rising.

Finally, Marx’s model of unequal exchange shows that the economics of imperialism works through the transfer of value by the exploitation of the workers of the South by the capitalists of the South and then through the transfer of some of that surplus value appropriated to the capitalists of the North in international markets and internal global value chains. The workers of the North do not benefit in any way from this imperialist transfer.

To suggest, as some do, that the welfare state, pensions and national health services in the North were only possible because of the imperialist exploitation of the South is economic nonsense. After all, the great period of imperialist exploitation was in the neo-liberal period of globalization since the 1980s, when the welfare and wage gains of workers in the North were taken back.  Globalisation of the late 20th century was a response to falling rates of profit in the North (as it was in the late 19th century).  It is also a political insult against the class struggles made by Northern workers to achieve those gains in the first place.  Both the workers of the South and the North are exploited by capital.  It is capital that is the enemy of both.

Environmental cost of cryptocurrency mines

Monetary price of health and air quality impacts

November 13, 2019

University of New Mexico

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero -- the names of digital-based 'cryptocurrencies' are being heard more and more frequently. But despite having no physical representation, could these new methods of exchange actually be negatively impacting our planet? It's a question being asked by researchers who are investigating the environmental impacts of mining cryptocurrencies.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191113092600.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero -- the names of digital-based 'cryptocurrencies' are being heard more and more frequently. But despite having no physical representation, could these new methods of exchange actually be negatively impacting our planet? It's a question being asked by researchers at The University of New Mexico, who are investigating the environmental impacts of mining cryptocurrencies.

"What is most striking about this research is that it shows that the health and environmental costs of cryptocurrency mining are substantial; larger perhaps than most people realized," said Benjamin Jones, UNM Researcher and asst. professor of economics.

Cryptocurrency is an internet-based form of exchange that exists solely in the digital world. Its allure comes from using a decentralized peer-to-peer network of exchange, produced and recorded by the entire cryptocurrency community. Independent "miners" compete to solve complex computing algorithms that then provides secure cryptographic validation of an exchange. Miners are rewarded in units of the currency. Digital public ledgers are kept for "blocks" of these transactions, which are combined to create what is called the blockchain. According to proponents, cryptocurrencies do not need a third party, or traditional bank, or centralized government control to provide secure validation for transactions. In addition, cryptocurrencies are typically designed to limit production after a point, meaning the total amount in circulation eventually hits a cap. These caps and ledgers are maintained through the systems of users.

But the mechanisms that make these currencies so appealing are also using exorbitant amounts of energy.

In a new paper titled 'Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining' published in the journal, Energy Research & Social Science, University of New Mexico researchers Andrew Goodkind (asst. professor, Economics), Benjamin Jones (asst. professor, Economics) and Robert Berrens (professor, Economics) estimate the environmental impact of these cryptocurrency mining techniques. Using existing data that assessed energy use on cryptocurrency, and a battery of economic valuation techniques, the three were able to put a monetary figure on the mining practices.

"Our expertise is in estimating the monetary damages, due to health and environmental impacts, of different economics activities and sectors," Berrens explained. "For example, it is common for economists to study the impacts from energy use connected to production and consumption patterns in agriculture, or with automobile production and use. In a world confronting climate change, economists can help us understand the impacts connected to different activities and technologies."

The independent production, or 'mining', practices of cryptocurrencies are done using energy-consuming specialized computer hardware and can take place in any geographic location. Large-scale operations, called mining camps, are now congregating around the fastest internet connections and cheapest energy sources -- regardless of whether the energy is green or not.

"With each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefit," the paper states.

The UNM researchers argue that although mining practices create financial value, the electricity consumption is generating "cryptodamages" -- a term coined to describe the human health and climate impacts of the digital exchange.

"We looked at climate change from greenhouse gas emissions of electricity production and also the impacts local air pollutants have when they are carried downwind and across local communities," Goodkind said.

The researchers estimate that in 2018, every $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $.49 in health and climate damages in the United States.

Their data shows that at one point during 2018, the cost in damages that it took to create Bitcoin matched the value of the exchange itself. Those damages arise from increased pollutants generated from the burning of fossil fuels used to produce energy, such as carbon dioxide, fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. Exposure to some of these pollutants has been linked to increased risk of premature death.

"By using large amounts of electricity generated from burning fossil fuels," Jones said. "Cryptocurrency mining is associated with worse air quality and increased CO2 emissions, which impacts communities and families all across the country, including here in New Mexico."

In addition to the human health impacts from increased pollutants, the trio looked at the climate change implications and how the current system of mining encourages high energy use.

"An important issue is the production process employed in the blockchain for securing new blocks of encrypted transactions," Berrens explained. "Along with supply rules for new units of a currency, some production processes, like the predominate Proof-of Work (POW) scheme used in Bitcoin, require ever increasing computing power and energy use in the winner-take-all competition to solve complex algorithms, and secure new blocks in the chain."

Although relatively limited in overall use currently, there are cryptocurrencies with alternative production schemes which require significantly less energy use. The researchers hope by publicizing the health and climate impacts of such schemes, they will encourage alternative methods of mining.

"The ability to locate cryptomining almost anywhere (i.e. following the cheapest, under-regulated electricity source) ...creates significant challenges to implementing regulation," the paper says.

Goodkind says the specialized machines used for mining also have to kept cool, so they won't overheat while computing such complex algorithms. That additional energy-use was not part of this study, which means even more energy is being consumed than is currently being accounted for when looking solely at the usage of running the machines.

Moving forward, the challenging public policy question is: "How can you make the people who are creating the damage pay for the cost, so that it is considered in the decision in how to mine cryptocurrencies," Goodkind concluded.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of New Mexico. Original written by Rachel Whitt. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

Andrew L. Goodkind, Benjamin A. Jones, Robert P. Berrens. Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining. Energy Research & Social Science, 2020; 59: 101281 DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2019.101281

Dreamers Tell Trump and SCOTUS They Are Here to Stay

Sonali Kolhatkar

NOV 13, 2019

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/dreamers-tell-trump-and-scotus-that-they-are-here-to-stay/

The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in a legal challenge being brought against President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA, enacted by President Barack Obama in 2012, enabled roughly 800,000 young, undocumented people to defer their deportations and live and work in the U.S.

Dozens of DACA recipients watched Tuesday’s proceedings in the nation’s highest court. They traveled to the Supreme Court on foot, marching 230 miles over 18 days from New York to Washington, D.C., to call attention to the case and show their faces to the justices who will decide their fates. When the young “Dreamers,” as they have been dubbed, emerged from the court to meet hundreds of pro-immigrant supporters gathered outside, the crowd erupted into chants and cheers.

Among the DACA recipients at court was Esther, a young community organizer of Korean background who prefers to use her first name only. Esther works with the National Korean American Services and Education Consortium and was one of the lead organizers of the #HomeIsHere march from New York to D.C. About a week into the march, she spoke with me from the basement of a church in Pittsburgh, where marchers had stopped to rest. Esther explained that the Dreamers marching with her hailed from all over the country and are concerned not just with DACA but with TPS, the program that confers temporary protection status to those fleeing disasters. (As with DACA, Trump has attempted to decimate the TPS program.)

As an undocumented immigrant, Esther might be expected to remain in the shadows, keep her head down, and not risk her vulnerable position in the country. But, as she put it, “We always believed in the power of story.” Esther and her fellow marchers have been telling their stories for years now and have refused to await their fate silently. Their organizing has worked.

“We know that more than 80% of the American public supports DACA right now, and that’s because of the remarkable courage and bravery that’s been shown by the undocumented community to risk their security and share with neighbors, friends and loved ones their stories and what it’s been like to be undocumented in this country,” she said.

In 2012, when DACA was unveiled, it was not a gift from the Obama administration so much as the culmination of Dreamers marching and organizing for years for the DREAM Act. Young people who had lived in the U.S. for most of their lives had begun “outing” themselves as undocumented and telling their life stories in an effort to put human faces to what might otherwise have been viewed by American citizens as an abstract issue.

It was just about nine years ago that the House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act. The Republican-controlled Senate promised to filibuster the popular bill, and in December 2010, as undocumented youths watched with bated breath, five Democratic senators voted with Republicans to deny the 60 votes needed for a filibuster-proof approval of the bill. The final vote tally of 55 to 41 crushed the dreams of the young undocumented people for whom the U.S. was the only country they had called home. It was only after the DREAM Act failed in the Senate that Obama took executive action to create the DACA program in 2012, enabling a fraction of the millions of undocumented people in the U.S. to live and work without fear of deportation.

Along came Trump in 2017, and about six months into his tenure, a president who had campaigned on the criminalization and demonization of immigrants ended DACA. The action was immediately challenged legally, and one after another, lower courts have affirmed the program. Now, it is before the Supreme Court, where justices will determine whether its termination was lawful. Hours before the court heard arguments, Trump repeated a claim on Twitter that he has often made, without evidence: “Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from ‘angels.’ Some are very tough, hardened criminals.” He then inexplicably added, “If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!” (Which begs the question: If they are truly hardened criminals, as he maintains, why would he make a deal for them to stay?)

Esther is counting on justices recognizing the humanity of the people whose lives are at stake. “I really believe that despite the Supreme Court being seen as an apolitical institution, the justices are people who can see, hear and feel the widespread support that exists for this program,” she said. Reports suggest that the court is split along predictably partisan lines, and that Chief Justice John Roberts will be the closely watched swing vote in a ruling that is expected next spring.

The same week the Supreme Court heard arguments in the DACA case, a trove of emails by Trump’s leading immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was leaked online. Miller, considered the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, communicated with the far-right news site Breitbart in the months before the 2016 election, and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch program, “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.” Hatewatch, which reviewed about 900 emails from Miller, found that he focused on a “strikingly narrow” set of issues around race and immigration. Reviewers were “unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.”

Among the members of Congress calling for Miller’s resignation because of the leaked emails are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, two young women of color, one of them a refugee, who embody exactly the demographics by which Miller appears to feel threatened. Ocasio-Cortez called Miller “Trump’s architect of mass human rights abuses at the border (including child separation & detention camps w/ child fatalities).” Meanwhile, Omar, who came under fire this year for calling Miller a “white nationalist,” repeated her claim, feeling vindicated by the leaked emails that her label was justified.

In the lead-up to Trump’s cancellation of the DACA program, Democratic lawmakers struck a tentative deal with the White House to preserve the program in exchange for tougher immigration enforcement. But Miller pushed Trump to abandon the deal and use the Dreamers as leverage to demand that immigration rates be cut by half. Miller has had his hand in nearly every anti-immigrant policy Trump has promoted, and the leaked emails show that his motivation is based on racist ideas.

Esther explained to me how important the case before the Supreme Court is for hundreds of thousands of people like her. If the court decides that Trump’s cancellation of the program was justified, she says, “It means that DACA recipients will lose their protection from deportation. It means that we will return to being undocumented. The stakes are extremely high.” But she insists that no one—not Trump, Miller or the Supreme Court—can take away her dignity. “I was undocumented once before,” she says. “I would prefer not to be undocumented again, but our community has a lot of power. We found a way to live before, we will continue to find a way to live now. We are still here to stay.”

Can America Ever Cure Its Obsession With Wealth?

Robert Scheer

AUG 03, 2018

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/can-america-ever-cure-our-obsession-with-wealth/

Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield is an expert in Americans’ yearning for material wealth. Since the early ’90s, her work has documented our hunger for it in photography books, multiple traveling exhibitions, short films and four documentary features, notably 2012’s “The Queen of Versailles,” the story of one Florida woman’s quest to build a replica of King Louis XIV’s home.

Greenfield’s latest feature, “Generation Wealth,” involves multiple stories, giving viewers a wide view of the cultural and social forces that drive Americans to covet becoming rich above all other goals. As Greenfield explains in an interview with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, our wealth addiction has intensified in the last few decades, influencing everything from our spending habits to whom we elect president.

“America has undergone a monumental shift in the last 25 years,” Greenfield explains in the latest edition of “Scheer Intelligence.” “The American Dream,” she says, “had really become corrupted, going from values of hard work and frugality and discipline—that being a means of social mobility that was accessible to anyone—to a culture that elevated bling, and celebrity and narcissism.”

Unfortunately, as Greenfield has discovered, the desire continues to grow. She starts the film with the stories of wealthy individuals in Los Angeles, including scenes from a bar mitzvah in a giant L.A. club with strippers, then moves across the country, then the world. She includes interviews with hedge fund managers, bankers, heirs to family fortunes and entrepreneurs, providing context for how we got here, and whether we can change.

Scheer and Greenfield discuss the decline of America’s meritocracy, the impact of venerating wealth as a positive value and how our wealth obsession led to the election of Donald Trump. Greenfield also explains what she calls “the influence of affluence, the aspiration, and, in a way, the kind of aspirational hunger, kind of disease, kind of perpetual dissatisfaction, that we really see among so many people.”