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December 11, 2018

Bulletin 251: Converging resource, climate, and social crises compel broad, deep transformation -- far more than usually envisioned

Dear friends, colleagues --

In 2006 it became blindingly obvious that an oncoming tsunami of converging environmental, social, and financial crises would overwhelm our society, to the extent we did not prepare.

Without such preparation our democracy (in the very limited sense in which that word still applied) would certainly not survive repeated, multiple emergencies. 

We conducted weekly breakfast seminar-discussions in two cities every week to discuss the coming crises and held a smattering of related public meetings in those years and since, with blog posts, bulletins, letters, and so on.

What was prediction then is reality now. We are in the initial stages of those emergencies.

In hindsight, climate change is coming on even faster than we then thought it would, as the reliable David Spratt explained again yesterday ("Big oil and gas nations sideline the science at Katowice, even as emissions rise and warming accelerates," 10 Dec 2018, Climate Code Red).

Another timing error we made was that we didn't foresee how low-interest debt could be substituted for real economic productivity, or how gushers of low-interest money could unlock heretofore uneconomical oil and gas from shale (in "sweet spots" only, and only until ever-rising industry debts can't be rolled over any more). (For those interested, Matt Mushalik provides an overview of global crude production in "What happened to crude oil production after the first peak in 2005?", 18 Sep 2018).

This Bulletin is occasioned by today's must-read analysis of these issues by Nafeez Ahmed ("Brexit: stage one in Europe’s slow-burn energy collapse," 11 Dec 2018, Insurge Intelligence). We hope you read it.

Dr. Ahmed is one of the few journalists who can "connect the dots" of the converging crises we face. (Tim Morgan, an economist whose work somewhat parallels that of Ahmed, is conceptually similar and also recommended: "Are yellow jackets the new fashion? Popular unrest in an age of falling prosperity," 7 Dec 2018).

We bring up the matter of our converging crises and declining prosperity because it is the context in which we all live and work. This is the context in which all of our political issues will be decided.

Yes, cheap debt has been an important instrument with which political awareness, and political struggle, have been pushed into the future, until about now. We are coming to the end of that string.

The message of this Bulletin is simply this: the era when competing claims on limited or declining resources could be somewhat papered over with new debt, federal and otherwise, is coming to an end. Now we have to wake up to what is already a life-and-death struggle over priorities at every level but especially federally.

Military (including nuclear weapons) interests already understand this. Progressives, and the Democratic Party, in general do not. Climate hawks, for example, are losing a struggle to the military they don't even acknowledge they (and we) are in.

Infrastructure renewal, expensive "progressive" programs of social uplift, and huge programs of climate mitigation and adaptation -- necessary for survival but not happening and not much mentioned in campaigns this fall -- are economically and politically incompatible with a US global empire. These programs are unaffordable, as well as unattainable politically, without deep cutbacks in defense spending.

How many candidates this fall ran on changing national priorities in this way? How many progressive, arms control, and environmental 501(c)(4) organizations and PACs made cutting the defense budget a requirement for the candidates they supported? Can you help us foment some conversations about this?

Yet, for a 6-week period, even Donald Trump tried to cut military spending.

Back in mid-October, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Mike Mulvaney sat down with President Trump regarding the rapidly-rising, $21 trillion (T) federal debt. Interest on the federal debt is expected to eclipse the even military budget by 2023 (if not by 2022 or 2021, depending on assumptions).

In response, and no doubt thinking of the 2020 election, Trump, via OMB, ordered most federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to cut their proposed FY2020 budgets by 5%. (The National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA], which owns, funds, and oversees the US nuclear warhead complex, was not going to be cut. "Too important!", as Trump might tweet.)

Trump's proposed cut was met with a storm of protest from military-industrial interests, of course. So Trump reversed course and now wants to boost the Pentagon budget from its current (FY19) $717 billion (B) to $750 B next year, much more than the previously-planned $733 B. The proposed amount is about $5,950 per US household.

(For clarity, these figures include the DoD base budget of $617 B , $69 B for "overseas contingency operations," $15 B for NNSA, $7 B for DOE environmental management programs, and another $9 B, probably FBI and DOJ cybersecurity, judging by the amount. See CNN, militarytimes.com, and reason.com. The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] has a useful constant-dollar historical comparison here. The true, all-inclusive defense budget is much more: $892 B -- or even more if the portion of the annual interest paid that is attributable to past defense spending is included. We did that exercise once. All in all, total annual US national security expenditures easily exceed $1 trillion, as Bill Hartung noted in 2017. Post 9/11 wars alone will have cost $6 trillion through FY2019, with more to come.)

Meanwhile CBO has estimated the 30-year cost of nuclear weapons (prior to Trump Administration additions) at $1.2 trillion, including $400 B for modernization. That is $3,715 for every US man, woman, and child alive today. This does not include hazardous cleanup, which would raise costs to $1.7 trillion or more (with the understanding that this "cleanup," while important, would still not make sites "clean").

How can the budget be balanced? This year, spending will exceed revenues by an estimated $985 B (or by more if there is an economic downturn this coming year, as seems likely). Mandatory spending for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid comprises 62% of total federal spending this year, and these programs will come under attack.

The long and short of it is that federal priorities are in profound competition, even without highly desirable programs like a World-War-II-level "Green New Deal," which is the magnitude of effort required. Nothing being discussed in Congress so far -- including by newly-elected progressives -- comes remotely close to the transformation required.

Providing climate leadership, and a green jobs program that would put America to work doing so, and thereby providing the national purpose we very much lack at this point, are incompatible with US empire and militarism (as well as with the total nuclear weapons modernization program now underway).

We all need to talk about this, urgently, in our own networks.

Next time: more on plutonium pits, and the extra madness of current nuclear weapons "boom and bust" production plans.

Sincerely,

Greg