Feedback Loop

You may have noticed an article in the Washington Post comparing the popularity of various institutions to that of Congress. The approval rating of the U.S. Congress, at 9%, beats Fidel Castro (5%) and ties Hugo Chavez, but is below the approval for the concept of the U.S. going Communist, at 11%. The fact that at least one in ten Americans is willing to reverse the Cold War is interesting in itself. However, my focus is on Congress, and why even BP during the Macondo oil spill (16%) beats their approval rating.

I have written in earlier posts about the concept of hyperscopic life. (You may wish to review here, here, here, and here.) The short version is that a corporation fulfills all the qualities that scientists use to identify a living organism. My conclusion – if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, etc. The problem with corporations is that a duck is a lot smarter than a corporation but a corporation has political power.

Human beings serve corporations, and so naturally corporations have many of the characteristics of human beings. To be more specific, psychopathic human beings, as defined by their behaviors and psychiatric literature. One thing that humanity does very effectively is to modify our environment. We cut down forests, drain swamps, build roads, dam rivers, and blast the tops off of mountains. We build houses and breakwaters and other barriers against the forces of nature. Corporations modify their environment as well, but we must consider that their environment is both physical and legal. We might say that the legal environment is as physical to them as air, water, and land are to us. Law is also DNA and connective tissue to a corporation, meaning that it can modify both its internal and external environment.

As with the physical world, there is resistance to this modification. It is institutional, active, and consequential. By institutional I mean that human beings put into place legal strictures that limit corporate agency. These could be campaign finance laws, lobbying restrictions, conflict of interest laws, and transparency laws. By active I mean groups of citizens actively opposing corporate reach into legislation. By consequential I mean that corporations are too short sighted and narrow of vision to properly calculate the consequences of their actions. If either law or enforcement is inadequate they end up like Enron or Lehman Brothers, collapsing from the excess they pursued.

The tide turned for corporations back in 1976, with the Buckley vs. Valeo decision by the Supreme Court. The Court decided that donating money was the constitutional equivalent of political speech, thus making plutocracy official and ending our progress towards democracy. Corporations have gained ground continuously since then. It is a positive feedback loop. As they gain more political power they are able to reduce the resistance to their modification of their environment. This includes all three of the modes of resistance I outlined above.

The millionaires and billionaires who engage in symbiotic parasitism on the corporate herd have veto power over entry into politics. Candidates have to raise those two-thousand dollar donations in order to stand a chance. This restricts the boundaries of legislation to initiatives acceptable to corporate remoras, which means fewer restrictions on corporate power. Once enough presidents and senators have been elected this way, then the Supreme Court can be stacked, and the Constitution gets interpreted to benefit further corporate power. Witness the Citizens United decision.

Similarly, information (or, more likely, disinformation) is supplied to citizens by a shrinking handful of ever larger communications conglomerates. Citizens can’t oppose what they don’t know about, and they won’t oppose what they have been convinced is in their interests. The internet has provided some outlet for human voices, but the behemoths of the business are always making efforts to fence that in as well. The latest outrage is the ProtectIP/SOPA bills, which would allow the big media players to shut down competing sites without due process.

Even the consequential restrictions on corporate action have been buffered by massive government intervention. Instead of taking over bankrupt financial firms and writing down mortgages to market prices, the government just stuck a funnel in the top of the banking industry and poured in a trillion dollars.

So there is a feedback loop going on. The accelerating accumulation of power by corporations allows the increasing acceleration of their accumulation of power. The problem for corporations in this situation is that some restrictions are necessary to prevent them from destroying their own environment. The idiocy that culminated in the 2007 financial meltdown is one symptom of corporate self-direction. Another symptom is the congressional approval rating.

Corporations are so short sighted and so programmed for self interest that they habitually overreach. Eventually even the cleverest psychopath buries too many bodies in the backyard and it begins to stink. The stink of political corruption has gotten so obvious that even the propaganda efforts of corporate media can’t cover it. In good times a certain amount of corruption can make it past the public with a knowing eye roll, but when everybody knows (or is) someone who is one of the long term unemployed, and when everyone knows (or is) someone on the wrong end of an underwater mortgage, public consciousness shifts. As long as most people were on an upward economic trend, or at least there was a promise of upward mobility for the next generation, people could put up with their lot. Now we’re looking at structural unemployment and underemployment, while college has become too much of a financial burden for too many, with no reasonable guarantee of a benefit. Corporations and their elite parasites have simply sucked too much wealth out of the economy.

This has given them the power to change the economic rules so that they can suck out even more. Up to a point. Another symptom of the ever tightening feedback loop is the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as dozens of other movements focused directly on taking power away from corporations. Review any number of opinion polls from the last decade and you’ll find that a consistent 75% (or more) of respondents say that big business and their lobbyists have too much power. The question is whether these various political movements can turn this sentiment into real action and a real power shift. The corporate grip on the means of communication and legislation is firm. On the other hand, who would have thought a couple of years ago that Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya would have pitched out their dictators? I have no conclusion here, except to note that the fight is out in the open now. I guess that’s half the battle.

Miles Per Hour

This is an old concept, first proposed by a writer named Ivan Illich in his book Energy and Equity.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour.

The numbers are a bit out of date, so I thought I’d look up some contemporary figures. The results I found varied depending on the source, but generally clustered around the numbers I’ll use here.

Your average American drives about 13,500 miles annually and earns $31,250.

The average speed for a car in an urban area is between 20 and 25 miles per hour. It’s hard to find numbers for rural areas. In one sense they should be higher due to fewer stops and less congestion, as well as more time spent on highways. Then again, here in Vermont we spend a lot of time on unpaved back roads and in town centers where 35 mph is the limit. Most people are commuting less than 10 miles to work, most of which is on class 2 roads, not interstates.

The average cost of owning and operating a car these days, according to the Automobile Association of America, is $8,766. (That’s for a sedan. An SUV cost $11,239)I looked up a number of studies, and they all gave costs in the $7,500 to $9,500 range. This is, of course, the direct costs to the owner; purchase, maintenance, gasoline, taxes and fees. The fact that we drive polluting vehicles on subsidized roads with subsidized fuel and regularly smash into each other adds hidden costs spread across society. (More on that later) One problem: AAA used $2.88/gallon for fuel cost. The national average is around $3.27 (again AAA numbers) as I write, 13.5% higher. That increases the annual cost of driving for an average sedan by around $234, bringing the AAA annual cost right up to $9,000.

If our average American is driving 13,500 miles annually at, let’s be generous, 30 mph, that’s 450 hours per year in the driver’s seat. That same person is earning $15.62 hourly, so that $9000 cost is sucking up 576 hours at work. It is interesting to think that most Americans spend much more time earning money to drive than actually driving. There is other time associated with driving, including waiting around at the repair shop reading a 2002 issue of Bass Fishing Magazine, but I’ll be optimistic and add only 24 hours a year of general screwing around time. The grand total is 1050 hours, which works out to 12.86 miles per hour. That’s twice Illich’s estimate, but still not particularly impressive.

Your mileage may vary. A person with a high hourly wage and a small cheap used car driving a lot of highway miles will do better.

Then again, the hidden costs do change the picture dramatically. Various studies have pointed out that we do not directly pay the true cost of driving. Our taxes (property, state, and federal) subsidize road construction and maintenance, subsidize oil companies, and pay for the treatment of people with lung disease. We also pay for an aircraft carrier battle group cruising around in the oil shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and generally mess about with oil producing countries around the globe. I have found numbers for the hidden costs of driving, if paid as a gasoline tax, from three to thirteen dollars per gallon.

Running the numbers again using the $3/gal hidden cost figure, the annual cost of driving jumps to $10,800, or 691 hours at median income. This brings our true miles per hour down to 11.6. Driving an SUV would bring it solidly under 10. You could do that on a bicycle.

To go back to Illich and complete his thought:

In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

576 hours is 28.8% of a 2,000 hour work year. 691 hours is 34.4%. Think about that – working over a quarter of your time for your car, mostly to get to work.

It makes me think of the Librarian, who doesn’t own a car and walks or bicycles a few minutes to work. She has a really beautiful bicycle, but it cost her perhaps one tenth of what a decent used car would cost. The maintenance costs are almost nil, and she’d have to spend money on fuel anyway. She is effectively saving herself about $10,000 a year.

Well, you say, all right for her, but there is 20 miles of car-clogged highway between my home and place of work, and the weather doesn’t always cooperate. True, but back to the Librarian. She lives in an apartment building that was built to house people who worked at a small factory (now housing) just around the corner. We used to do that in this country. Our urban geography was designed for people without cars. That was a policy of necessity. Later our legislators made the decision to zone workplaces separately from residences and to subsidize the infrastructure that supported automobile-centric policy. This was a decision, not inevitability. Such decisions can be reversed.

Such decisions will be reversed. The geology of oil will require this. It is inevitable. Given the amount of our lives we presently dedicate to supporting our automotive habits, it might not be so bad.

Negative Interest

For those of you who may have been losing sleep about the U.S. government deficit, I have a glass of warm milk for you. The esteemed Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has pointed out that we are now living in a financial bizarro world.

How would you like to take out a 5-year loan and have the bank pay you interest? Read that again. Sounds like insanity, doesn’t it? Well, things in Europe and elsewhere have gotten so shaky that this is exactly the situation in which the U.S. Treasury finds itself. Investors all over the world are looking for a safe haven, and America’s credit rating is so good that they are willing to pay for the privilege of storing their money here.

Treasury Real Yield Curve Rates, which translates as actual inflation adjusted interest when our government borrows money, have gone negative. Five-year Treasury Notes are paying something around -0.75 percent as of December 9^th. Seven year T-Notes are around -0.4% and ten year T-Bonds are hovering around zero. Free money, in other words. Beyond ten years the interest rates are soaring as high as 0.92%. That’s right, stop gloating about your 4% mortgage. Uncle Sam is borrowing at less than a quarter of that on a 30-year loan and making more money than your savings account on short term loans.

Interest rates aside, our debt to GDP ratio is 90%. That’s like someone with a $100,000 annual income having a $90,000 mortgage. It’s not an emergency, and the financial world recognizes this. We can tell that from the negative interest rates.

We are like a fisherman, in debt, with a leaky boat. Do we borrow more money and fix the boat so we can earn our way back into the black? Or do we stand on principle, refuse to borrow, and let our livelihood sink? When our fisherman can make money by borrowing money the answer is obvious.

Update on Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:38PM by Minor Heretic

I received a correction from my friend The Broker, to wit: "Minutiae from the Peanut Gallery: Treasury Bills are obligations less than one year, Treasury Notes are one year to ten years, and Treasury Bonds are ten years and up (to thirty at present), although all of these are generically bonds."

Noted and corrected, with thanks.

Bernie Has Started It

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to amend the Constitution in order to reverse the Citizens United decision and end corporate personhood. I recently posted a version of such an amendment as hashed out on an online forum, but I am perfectly happy with this one. It gets most of the job done. There would be some legislative battles even with the amendment in place, but this would be a death blow to corporate control of our government.

Here’s the link to Senator Sander’s website.

Here’s the relevant text, below. Enjoy. And get behind this. If you live in Vermont, send a letter of support to Bernie and a “Get with the program” message to Senator Leahy and Representative Welch. If you live elsewhere, send the link to your elected representatives and tell them to get with the program. I declare this a litmus test for all politicians – 99% versus 1%, democracy versus plutocracy, however you want to phrase it.

Send word of this bill to your friends and family all over the country. This is the deciding issue of our times: Who will govern, corporations or people? Either we win this battle or we lose all the rest with it.

3          ‘‘ARTICLE—

4          ‘‘SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution

5          of the United States are the rights of natural persons and

6          do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability

7          companies, or other private entities established for busi

8          ness purposes or to promote business interests under the

9           laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

10        ‘‘SECTION 2. Such corporate and other private enti

11        ties established under law are subject to regulation by the

12        people through the legislative process so long as such regu

13        lations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the

14        States and do not limit the freedom of the press.

15        ‘‘SECTION 3. Such corporate and other private enti

16        ties shall be prohibited from making contributions or ex

17        penditures in any election of any candidate for public of

18        fice or the vote upon any ballot measure submitted to the

19        people.

20        ‘‘SECTION 4. Congress and the States shall have the

21        power to regulate and set limits on all election contribu

22        tions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own spend

23        ing, and to authorize the establishment of political com

24        mittees to receive, spend, and publicly disclose the sources

25        of those contributions and expenditures.’’.

Rule of Law

A couple of legal issues are on my mind right now, one at the law enforcement level, and one at the legislative level.

I have been seeing a series of photos and videos from around the country of unprovoked assaults by police against unarmed and entirely peaceful demonstrators. An 84 year old woman got maced out in Oakland and students at U.C. Davis, seated and passive, were maced in a calculating, unhurried manner by a campus police officer. Unresisting protesters have been beaten with clubs and teargassed. An officer in Oakland fired a tear gas canister into the head of a man at point blank range, fracturing his skull. When other people clustered around the fallen man to administer first aid, an officer tossed a tear gas grenade into the center of the group, scattering them.

This bothers me, of course, because of the unnecessary violence and sheer sadism of it. It also bothers me because of the damage it does to the idea of rule of law.

We should expect laws to be enforced fairly, evenly, and with techniques proportional to the seriousness of the crime. We should expect law enforcement personnel to do their jobs with the minimum force required for their own safety and the safety of those around them. But we can’t. It seems that peaceably assembling in order to petition the government for redress of grievances, while admittedly becoming a public nuisance, is grounds for violent assault.

What the police themselves fail to realize is the two types of power they wield, and the relationship between the two. Their most obvious type of power is that of the gun, the mace, and the club. This is their small power. With all that weaponry and armor, an individual police officer is no more powerful than any other person so armed and armored. A police officer’s great power is the power of respect, both for the rule of law and for the officer as a just enforcer of that law. When the general populace has that respect for law enforcement, a single officer can walk safely among a thousand people. The people will assist that officer, obey all reasonable commands, warn of danger, and offer useful information. When the police arbitrarily use violence, they lose that respect. Without that respect, the officer is merely the member of a uniformed gang.

As a positive example, consider the Vermont State Police. They are one of the best trained and most thoroughly professional police forces in the country. They patrol the highways and back roads of Vermont alone. They rely on respect. They have a solid reputation. In my few interactions with them they have been uniformly polite, helpful, and professional, even when my personal appearance was not such as inspires the affection of a police officer. They are not perfect as individuals or professionals, but I can easily see 98% of Vermonters on their side. Can the police officers of New York City or Oakland expect the same from their citizens?

The police forces that are using violence against peaceful protesters are weakening themselves. And yet, this is a common theme in history. As a government loses legitimacy in the minds of its people it resorts to force, which hastens the decline. The relative immunity of millionaire bankers to arrest and prosecution is an aggravating factor. Apparently trespassing on Wall Street is a more pressing concern to the authorities than defrauding investors of billions of dollars on Wall Street.

As if the militarization of the police wasn’t bad enough, now Congress is turning the military into the police, prosecutor, judge, jury, and jail. The Senate just passed the National Defense Authorization Act, S.1867. Stuck in there is a nightmare provision, Subtitle D – Detainee Matters. It authorizes the U.S. military to detain any terrorism suspect indefinitely, without trial. That includes U.S. citizens detained on U.S. soil, as in you, on your street. A false accusation or a case of mistaken identity is as good as a life sentence. There is a feeble and vague insertion about not affecting existing law or authorities. That means that after the military whisks you away into secret indefinite detention you can hope that the courts work it out before something even more unpleasant happens to you.

Specifically (as highlighted below):

Under Section 1031 c (1), you can be detained until the end of the “War on Terror,” whenever that might be.

Under Section 1031 c (2), you can be tried in a military tribunal, lacking basic rights or rules of evidence, and including the use of confessions obtained under torture.

Under Section 1031 c (4), you can be shipped off to a foreign country of the government’s choice.

Well, there go all the good parts of the Constitution.

President Obama says he wants to veto it, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The House of Representatives still has to work it over. Apparently even the top military brass and the various branches of the intelligence services don’t want it to pass. It’s time to write the White House and your members of Congress. And call them. And raise hell in general.

Subtitle D—Detainee Matters

SEC. 1031. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED

FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.

 (a) IN GENERAL.—Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military

Force (Public Law 107–40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition

under the law of war.

 (b) COVERED PERSONS.—A covered person under this section is any person as follows:

 (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

 (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly

supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

 (c) DISPOSITION UNDER LAW OF WAR.—The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:

 (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

 (2) Trial under chapter 47A of title 10, United States Code (as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (title XVIII of Public Law 111–25 84)).

 (3) Transfer for trial by an alternative court or competent tribunal having lawful jurisdiction.

 (4) Transfer to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.

 (d) CONSTRUCTION.—Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

 (e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities, relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.

 (f) REQUIREMENT FOR BRIEFINGS OF CONGRESS.—

The Secretary of Defense shall regularly brief Congress regarding the application of the authority described in this section, including the organizations, entities, and individuals considered to be ‘‘covered persons’’ for purposes of subsection (b)(2).