Putting 'Health of All Species' in Danger, Trump EPA Proposal Guts Restrictions on Toxic Herbicide Linked to Birth Defects

"The pro-industry zealots now running the EPA's pesticide office are making a mockery of science and eliminating key safety measures, all for company profits."

Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Friday, November 15, 2019

Common Dreams

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/15/putting-health-all-species-danger-trump-epa-proposal-guts-restrictions-toxic

Environmental and public health advocacy groups expressed alarm Friday after the Trump administration moved to increase the allowable level in U.S. waterways of a common herbicide linked to hermaphroditic amphibians and birth defects, cancer, and other harmful health effects in humans.

At issue in the proposal posted yesterday by the EPA is the threshold level of atrazine, the second most widely used herbicide in the U.S. Manufactured by Syngenta, atrazine is primarily used in agriculture as a weedkiller on crops. It is not authorized for use in the European Union, as the body said there wasn't enough data to prove it wouldn't have a harmful effect on groundwater.

"Human exposure to atrazine is linked to a number of serious health effects," according to a factsheet from Pesticide Action Network. "A potent endocrine disrupter, atrazine interferes with hormonal activity of animals and humans at extremely low doses."

The proposed change, said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, "will likely lead to an increase in atrazine in drinking water, particularly in the Midwest."

As Donley's group and Environmental Working Group (EWG) explain in a press statement, the proposal regards what the EPA calls the Concentration Equivalent Level of Concern (CELOC).

"Atrazine levels above this threshold require mitigations to bring the water body back into compliance. Below, this level, no action is required," as Donley said in tweet.

Trump's EPA is proposing bumping up the level to a 60-day average concentration of 15 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine, 50% higher than the current level of 10 ppb. In 2016 the agency proposed a level of just 3.4 ppb, but that Obama-era assessment, according to Trump's EPA, was "fundamentally flawed" and failed to take into consideration "the relevance of the individual studies."

Driving the push towards higher acceptable levels of atrazine, according to EWG and the Center, is the administration's goal of appeasing Big Ag and the pesticide industry.

"To please Syngenta, the Trump EPA has rejected decades of independent research showing atrazine can't be safely used at any level," said Donley. "The pro-industry zealots now running the EPA's pesticide office are making a mockery of science and eliminating key safety measures, all for company profits."

Olga Naidenko, EWG's vice president for science investigations, warned of the possible impacts to children.

"Atrazine sprayed on the fields ends up in our drinking water and affects the development of the fetus," said Naidenko. Thus, she said, the proposal should provoke "outrage" as it "will lead to more children being exposed to this toxic chemical."

“With Trump's EPA reversing even the most commonsense protections," added Donley, "our health, and the health of all species, is in serious danger.”

While Warning of Nazi-Like Fascism and Corporate Crimes, Pope Francis Proposes Adding 'Ecological Sin' to Church Teachings

In remarks at the Vatican, the leader of the Catholic Church condemned "the large-scale delinquency of corporations."

Jon Queally, staff writer

Saturday, November 16, 2019

Common Dreams

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/16/while-warning-nazi-fascism-and-corporate-crimes-pope-francis-proposes-adding

Pope Francis on Friday issued a warning against the rise of fascist forces worldwide that remind him of the Nazis of the 20th Century as he also railed against corporate crimes and announced consideration of adding "sins against ecology" to the church's official teachings.

During a speech at the Vatican before the 20th World Congress of the International Association of Penal Law, a network of justice system and criminology experts from around the world, the leader of the Catholic Church said worrying developments both in the political arena and from the world of business remind him of dark episodes from humanity's past, including Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

"It is not coincidental that at times there is a resurgence of symbols typical of Nazism," Francis said as he decried the "culture of waste and hate" represented by contemporary politicians who spew derogatory and racists attacks against homosexuals, gypsies, Jewish people, and others. "I must confess to you," he continued, "that when I hear a speech (by) someone responsible for order or for a government, I think of speeches by Hitler in 1934, 1936."

The Pope also highlighted environmental degradation and said the church was considering adding crimes against nature and the environment to the catechism—the official text of church doctrine and teachings.

"We have to introduce, we are thinking about it, in the catechism of the Catholic Church, the sin against ecology, the sin against our common home, because it's a duty," he said. Francis has been championed by climate activists for using his position to preach about the urgent need for humanity to recognize the dangers of human-caused global warming and calling on other world leaders—and the estimated 1.2 billion Catholics in the world—to act boldly to address the crisis.

Crimes against the environment, said the Pope, should be seen as "crimes against peace, which should be recognized by the international community."

Francis also spoke of the crimes of big business, many of which receive too little attention and often go unpunished.

"One frequent omission of penal law," Francis told the criminal experts at the conference, "is the insufficient attention the crimes of the powerful receive, especially the large-scale delinquency of corporations."

As the Religious News Service reports:

In his speech, Francis condemned global corporations that are responsible for "countries' over-indebtedness and the plunder of our planet’s natural resources." He said that their activities have the "gravity of crimes against humanity," especially when they lead to hunger, poverty and the eradication of indigenous peoples.

Such acts of "ecocide" must not go unpunished, said the pope, who in October concluded a synod of bishops to discuss the Amazon region and the safeguarding of the environment.

"The principle of profit maximization, isolated from any other consideration, leads to a model of exclusion which violently attacks those who now suffer its social and economic costs, while future generations are condemned to pay the environmental costs," Francis said. 

"The first thing lawyers should ask themselves today is what they can do with their knowledge to counter this phenomenon," he said, "which puts democratic institutions and the development of humanity itself at risk."

Milex and the rate of profit, by Michael Roberts

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/milex-and-the-rate-of-profit/


A review of The Economics of Military Spending: A Marxist perspective – by Adem Yaviz Elveren, Routledge, 2019.

Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published its annual "Costs of War" report last week. This refers only to the costs of war for the US. It takes into consideration the Pentagon's spending and its Overseas Contingency Operations account, as well as "war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans' care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security." The final count revealed, "The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans."



The report found that the "US military is conducting counterterror activities in 76 countries, or about 39 percent of the world's nations, vastly expanding [its mission] across the globe." In addition, these operations "have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad." Overall, researchers estimated that "between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the United States' post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." This toll "does not include the more than 500,000 deaths from the war in Syria, raging since 2011" when a West-backed rebel and jihadi uprising challenged the government, an ally of Russia and Iran. That same year, the U.S.-led NATO Western military alliance intervened in Libya and helped insurgents overthrow long time leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, leaving the nation in an ongoing state of civil war.

Ever since the end of the second world war, there has been some sort of war, between regional powers, or as proxy wars backed by imperialist powers. The monetary costs of war are huge, as the Watson Brown Institute shows, while the human costs of war are incalculable – not just the deaths and injuries, but also the destruction of homes, livelihoods, deprivation and disease and the horrors of migration. Wars are a scourge on humanity.

But are they beneficial to the capitalist economy? That’s another question. Wars are often seen necessary by governments and politicians to preserve a capitalist power’s control over resources, land, profit etc. And they are always portrayed by war-mongering governments to their peoples as necessary to ‘save the nation’ or ‘defend our way of life’. But are wars and military spending that goes with war a necessary cost to deducted from the profits of capital or alternatively an additional boost to making money? That question has been discussed and analysed over the last 150 years by capitalist strategists and Marxist theorists from Engels to Lenin and Luxemburg and on into the 20th century.

However, the costs of military spending have been in decline for most capitalist governments since the end of so-called ‘cold war’ with the Soviet Union. So interest in whether arms expenditure and wars are beneficial or detrimental to capitalism has also fallen away. A Marxist perspective on the economic of military spending has been badly neglected – until now.

Adem Yavuz Elveren, Associate Professor at Fitchburg State University in the US, has now rectified that with his new book, simply entitled, The Economics of Military Spending. As an earlier pioneer in such analysis, Ron Smith of Birkbeck University says in his foreword, Elveren “examines the interaction of military expenditures and the rate of profit and their contribution to capitalist crises. It not only redirects attention to an increasingly relevant old literature but also makes an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis.” The book combines theoretical analysis with detailed econometric investigations for 30 countries over last 60 years.

In my opinion, Elveren’s approach is the right way to do political economy or Marxist social science. Mainstream economic analysis is either boxed into micro-foundation models or generates purely econometric studies based on unrealistic assumptions – or both. And unfortunately, most Marxist economic analysis is locked into dissecting the meaning of Marx’s writings as dug up and translated from the MEGA or into esoteric academic arguments over the ‘logic of capital’. While theory is important, it must be tested by empirical evidence or it useless. And too little of Marxist analysis of capitalism does that. For example, I am not convinced by the argument that, as there are regular and recurring crises in capitalist production, this proves that capitalism is a failed system. And that’s all we need to know. We don’t need to produce empirical data to show that. But surely, empirical evidence is essential, otherwise we cannot show the causes of these regular crises, and moreover, whether Marx’s own explanation (as there are others) is the most compelling.

No such charge can be laid against Elveren’s book of failing to provide both a theoretical and empirical explanation of the role of military spending in capitalism. Elveren correctly starts from the basic assertion of Marx that “the driving force of capitalism is profit.” And so the book “stands at the junction of defence economics and Marxist economics, examining the effect of military expenditure (milex) on the rate of profit, an indicator of the health of a capitalist economy.”

From this perspective, Elveren takes the reader through a brief history of military expenditure and its apparent economic effects. Then he considers various models of economic growth that connect military spending. He deals with the theory of ‘military Keynesianism’, popularly presented as an explanation for the fast growth and full employment in the post-war period, the so-called golden age of 20th century capitalism. And then he gets into the meat of argument by analysing the various versions of the theory of capitalist crises presented under the Marxist banner.

Chapters 4 and 5 are excellent surveys of various Marxist theories of crises from underconsumption, profit squeeze and the Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He expertly handles Luxemburg’s view on imperialism and military spending, as well as the Baran-Sweezy thesis of military spending compensating for a stagnating monopoly capitalism - and the so-called ‘permanent arms’ economy idea promoted by Michael Kidron in the post-war period, that capitalism can avoid crises by milex. If the reader wants to gain knowledge of all these theories of milex and crises without verbiage and confusion, he or she can do no better than read Elveren here.

I have some caveats. Elveren seems to accept the revisionist view of Michael Heinrich that Marx dropped his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall from the 1870s onwards. Heinrich argues that the law is wrong and irrelevant to understanding the cause of crises. I disagree and you can read more about that debate here. But Elveren’s view is that “Heinrich’s argument seems plausible”; that Marx dropped the idea that the rate of profit must fall over time (namely that the law is a tendency that will eventually overcome countertendencies). Instead the fall in the rate of profit becomes purely contingent and so whether it falls is just “an empirical question”.

While I disagree with that conclusion, because Elveren does see the law as an empirical question, he can pitch into providing empirical analysis (unlike Heinrich and others). Elveren is fully cognisant of all the empirical work done previously on measuring the rate of profit in the US and elsewhere and it is on this basis that he looks at whether milex will tend to increase or lower the rate of profit and how that affects the capitalist economy in both the short and long term.

The theoretical question at debate in Marxist political economy is whether the production of weapons is productive of value? The answer is that it must be for the arms producers. The arms contractors deliver goods (weapons) which are paid for by the government by appropriating value (either present or future). These goods are new use values which have been made under capitalist conditions of production. The labour producing them, therefore, is productive of value and surplus value.

But at the level of the whole economy, arms production is unproductive of future value, in the same way that ‘luxury goods’ for just capitalist consumption are. Arms production and luxury goods do not re-enter the next production process either as means of production or as means of subsistence for the working class. While being productive of surplus value for the arms capitalists, the production of weapons is not reproductive and thus threatens the reproduction of capital. Arms production restricts the volume of use values that can be employed for reproductive purposes. So if the increase in the overall production of surplus value in an economy slows and the profitability of productive capital begins to fall, then reducing available surplus value for future investment through milex can damage the health of the capitalist accumulation process.

But the outcome depends on the effect on the profitability of capital. The military sector generally has a higher organic composition of capital than the average in an economy as it incorporates leading edge technologies. So the sector would tend to push down the average rate of profit. On the other hand, if taxes collected by the state to pay for arms manufacture are high, then wealth that might otherwise go to labour is distributed to capital and thus can add to available surplus value. Which way does it go?

To help answer that question, Elveren offers the reader a circuit of capital model to include the military sector based on the model developed by Duncan Foley. But the question can only be answered empirically. And this is what Elveren does in the latter part of his book. He carries out a detailed empirical study to measure the impact of milex against the movement in the rate of profit on capital for most capitalist economies. This is a far more extensive study than any before. Elveren uses the Extended Penn World Tables and the Penn World Tables for his cross-country data, as I have done to measure a world rate of profit and rates of profit in individual countries. As he points out, and as I know only too well, there are many technical problems with these databases and the definitions and assumptions used. But it is the best we have.

Using his econometric skills, Elveren shows that, overall (from 1963-2008), milex had a positive effect on profit rates in capitalist countries, but that it had a negative effect in the shorter time period - the so-called neo-liberal period from 1980 onwards. It seems that milex helped to sustain profitability during the great profitability crisis that started in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, but after that, milex acted against overall profitability in a period when profit rates were rising.

Elveren offers a tentative explanation, “This might be due to the changing structure of major economies in the neo-liberal era. With the rise of the financial sector and the rentier class, the rising share of profits earned by firms has begun to be used for interest payments, dividends and other unproductive expenditure, causing a smaller faction of profit to be invested in capital stock.” This explanation may be too simple, bearing in mind work by Campbell and Bakir and myself – see my recent post.

But anyway, it seems that the productive sectors of capitalist economies had insufficient surplus value to invest at the previous pace as capitalists switched to financial speculation where profitability was higher. Military spending then became just another negative. Milex may have had a mildly positive effect on profit rates in arms exporting countries but not for arms importing ones. In the latter, milex was a deduction from available profits for productive investment.

Over the period 1963-08, Elveren finds that milex, as a stimulant to capital accumulation (with its high-level technology) was mildly positive in the US, but in other major countries it has a negative effect, particularly in those countries that imported their arms. In all countries milex was damaging for employment as a whole, as the arms sector used less labour on average. Thus milex may sometimes help the rate of profit for capital but the flipside is that milex will increase the ‘reserve army of labour’. And as Elveren adds “the effect of milex may change at different levels of the rate of profit”.

So Elveren’s empirical work appears to back up the Marxist view of the role of military spending in a capitalist economy. It can act to lower the rate of profit on capital and thus on economic growth as it did in the neo-liberal period, when investment and economic growth slowed. But it can also help bolster the rate of profit through state’s redistribution of value from labour to capital, when labour is forced to pay more in taxation, or the state borrows more, in order to boost investment and production in the military sector.



In the greater scheme of things, milex is not decisive for the health of the capitalist economy. At its height, its share in GDP reached an average of 13%. But that was due to the Korean war. Even during the cold war period, that share fell by half to around 6% of GDP. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, military spending in the major imperialist powers halved again to 3%. Milex is not going to decide the future of capital, one way or the other. But thanks to Elveren’s work, we have a much clearer picture of the economics of war and military spending beneath the horrors of its outcomes.

Zed books, China

https://www.zedbooks.net/


The Great Firewall of China
How we Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet
James Griffiths (On sale now)


China’s ‘Great Firewall’ has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself.

Through years of investigation and unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it, James Griffiths shows how far the Great Firewall has spread... Read more

Hardback: £15.00 / $29.95
















Paper Dragons
China and the Next Crash
Walden Bello (On sale now)


One of the leading figures of the anti-globalisation movement reveals how an impending financial crash in China may well bring down entire world's economy – and offers ways to prevent it.

Tracing recent history of financial crises and their ramifications, Bello argues that a fundamental change in the way we organise is required to stop the cycle of the financial crises... Read more

Hardback: £14.24 / $28.95






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