The myth of GOP fiscal responsibility

Rendered funny (which, of course, it is not):

Trudeau’s sort-of-blog the Sandox is also worth your periodic time:

The Sandbox’s focus is not on policy and partisanship, but on the unclassified details of deployment — the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox is a clean, lightly-edited debriefing environment where all correspondence is read, and as much as possible is posted. And contributors may rest assured that all content, no matter how robust, is currently secured by the First Amendment.

Lives unmeasured

How does one measure out their life in coffee spoons that do not exist at all? This sort of thing comes along every few years but, at the moment, this corresponds well with my recent post about New York’s poor and, further back, about the globally-increasing trend in refugees.

Many of these stateless people are among the world’s poorest; all are the most disenfranchised. Without citizenship, they often have no right to schooling, health care or property ownership. Nor may they vote, or travel outside their countries – even, in some cases, the towns – where they live.

They are stateless for many reasons – migration, refugee flight, racial or ethnic exclusion, the quirks of history – but taken together, these noncitizens, according to one report, “are among the most vulnerable segments of humanity.”

Without the rights conferred by citizenship, they have few avenues for redressing abuses, and little access to resources that could help them build better lives. They have few advocates, because human rights groups tend to focus on the types of abuses they suffer – trafficking, exploitation, discrimination – rather than the root of their problems, their statelessness.

…

“The very fact that democracy makes people count makes citizenship a more important social and political fact, and that has given an incentive to some political leaders to use citizenship as a tool to disenfranchise opponents,” said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

By the most common count, there are 15 million stateless people in the world, but by its nature, this is a number nobody can know for certain.

…

The stateless include some 200,000 Urdu-speaking Bihari in scores of refugee settlements in Bangladesh, where they are barred from many government services and subject to harassment and discrimination.

Formerly a prosperous, land-owning community, they were stranded in Bangladesh when it separated from Urdu-speaking Pakistan in 1971. Although Pakistan at first offered refuge to fleeing Bihari, neither nation offers citizenship today to those who stayed behind.

It is not uncommon for Bihari men in Bangladesh to leave their wives to marry local Bengali women in order to obtain Bangladeshi citizenship. This 20-year-old woman, abandoned by her husband, makes paper bags to support herself and her baby. She is paid less than 25 cents for the 500 bags she makes each day. She is losing her sight in both eyes and has no health care.

Bihar has its own terrible legacy of British rule.

This is a lesson, to some extent, on perspective. If you live in an urban environment (and even if you don’t) I recommend to you a book called The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City, by Jennifer Toth. The lesson is a depressing one. We already feel helpless in the face of what we think we know to the be the problem (who can even think for long about 10 million refugees? We’re busy being miserable in our cubicles, surrounded in more wealth than 99% of the world will ever know). How much worse to know that there are literally countless numbers of human beings out there, whose place and worth is so low that they are not counted at all?

Have I a solution? No. The countries holding these people, like New York City itself, have every incentive not to recognise them. Moreso than New York, the state of Bihar cannot afford more mouths to feed. The solution is for us, the wealthy, to respond in a truly global fashion. We will not. Even if we were moved to try, our attempts would be hijacked by Agribusinesses trying to complete the wreck of a place like Bihar with patented grains and seeds, or something. Maybe one day. My parents and grandparents never managed it, but perhaps the students I teach will.

This, by the by, is just one of the reasons why you should vote. It won’t help these people, but imagine how such people would feel to know you have citizenship in the greatest societies ever known, and give it not enough value to wield it in your own democracy.

There is an element of Satrean existentialism, here (sorry). One of the amazing things about humans is that our existence carries a level most things do not: our ability to re-purpose our own lives. Everything exists within itself, and with the meaning(s) with which it is imbued; you, though, have the ability to imbue your life with your own meaning – there is no meaning of life, after all, only the meaning in your life, which is for you to decide. This is why it is such a shame when Fox News, MTV and the electoral college convince so many of us that the meaning in our lives is for them to decide. Or when the vagaries of government and the political economy mean that some people’s lives have an entire identity, which the rest of us enjoy (citizenship), stripped away. My recommendation is for you to engage with anything besides a television, as you go along.

This is also selfish. Informed and engaged individuals, acting in their self-interest, also make Economics work better. So, do me a favour?

Can you buy a greener conscience?

The commodification of ethics comes in for more scrutiny. The LA Times is on the issue, too:

The race to save the planet from global warming has spawned a budding industry of middlemen selling environmental salvation at bargain prices.

The companies take millions of dollars collected from their customers and funnel them into carbon-cutting projects, such as tree farms in Ecuador, windmills in Minnesota and no-till fields in Iowa.

In return, customers get to claim the reductions, known as voluntary carbon offsets, as their own. For less than $100 a year, even a Hummer can be pollution-free — at least on paper.

…

Tom Boucher, chief executive of Native Energy, said people should first reduce their energy consumption and waste, and then buy offsets — “the only way to really get to zero unless you stop driving, stop traveling.”

But the industry is clouded by an approach to carbon accounting that makes it easy to claim reductions that didn’t occur. Many projects that have received money from offset companies would have reduced emissions by the same amount anyway.

This is the point I was making back with the Wired article (none of my students seem to have found this site, so my reticence was entirely wasted).

Cap-and-trade, for example, works because the trade is pushed along by the cap. We trade a steadily declining commodity: the right to pollute. Voluntary carbon-neutral schemes do not. One’s right to pump shit out their exhaust pipes is not declining, and paying for trees that already exist are not going to help that. There is a chance, certainly, that your donation may secure a tree that otherwise would fall – but that, too, is not saving the planet. Planting trees, sure (say, via Future Forests), as long as the carbon neutralised is measured accurately and sold honestly.

As with the Wired article, which touted companies buying the right to pave over a wetland – there is a net reduction in wetlands as a result. The purchase of some environmental credibility was only that: the wetlands, and the service they provide to the planet, were not replaced.

This is the key problem with voluntary carbon conscience ameliorating: the markets are fundamentally different. Cap-and-trade works because the market for pollution is tied directly to the credits being traded. A lot of the trading schemes (and the LA Times article has plenty) do not meet this key criterion. Purchasing something that already exists (moreso if it’s an acre of trees in Asia, somewhere) is one market. Cutting down trees, burning up petrol, etc. (moreso if it is not in Asia) is another market, and neither economics nor biology will say the two can cancel each other out.

More importantly, without the ‘cap’ aspect, the price in the ‘trade’ part isn’t representing what relatively sound economic theory dictates. There is meant to be a price attached to the reduction of pollution. With not a single limit placed upon one’s household carbon emissions, and a price on offsets that do not reflect the scarcity invoked by those limits, we are probably buying little more than the Feeling of Good. You may as well go by some weed and smoke it until you feel better. You even get the benefit of irony of burning plant matter.

The LA Times article mentions the potential for Federal Trade Commission involvement in the industry (that is, here in the US). I won’t say it’s about time, because the industry (or rather, this aspect of it) has only been around for a few years, and it’s still only worth about USD55m per year – compare that with the hundreds of billions, collectively, that the polluting industries are worth. It will be nice to see some standards, some proper accounting, and some honesty in advertising. Proper engagement by carbon-offset purchasers would be nice, too.

I have a better idea, if one is truly into off-sets. When one buys something expensive, or anything that is not a luxury, they should give five bucks to the first panhandler that they see. What’s the relationship between that new dress, or that big meal, and this man living on the streets? None. That dress didn’t put him there, that five bucks will not get him out, and that five bucks will not help the person who sewed the dress for a pittance. But if one is principally after the assuagement of guilt, I think there at least exists a moral obligation to face the ugly side of the issue. Half our problem isn’t what we buy or do, but what we are permitted to ignore.