Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

Louis Proyect worries a lot.

There is climate change--a boogeyman that's supposed to destroy civilization within the next 12 years (I guess since the New Year it's now only 11 years). All this because of modest increases in CO2, which despite being only 0.04% of the atmosphere is nevertheless supposed to heat up the world's oceans lickety-split. Recall that the oceans represent 99.9% of global heat capacity--many orders of magnitude more than atmospheric CO2.

Rumors of our imminent demise from climate change are exaggerated way beyond any credible belief.

Then he frets over GMOs, or genetically modified plants that manufacture their own insecticide and thus don't need to be sprayed. While in principle just an improved method for breeding agricultural plants as has been done for millennia, the specific technique has been used since 1983. It saves farmers huge amounts of money in pesticides, along with greatly reducing the quantity of pesticide in the environment from any source. Despite trillions of GMO meals having been served, there is absolutely no evidence of any threat to human or ecological health as a result.

Mr. Proyect's aversion to GMOs is less rational than the fear some people have of measles vaccines. That is, completely irrational.

He worries about fracking. Here he is on more solid ground since the industry clearly has some environmental costs, though they are increasingly under control. But the benefits of fracking are huge, reducing fuel expenses across the entire society. Natural gas just fell below $2/Mbtu. The cost of gas to heat my 1800 sqft house was only $88 this past December, a nearly trivial expense. If you're against poverty and want poor people to be able to heat their homes, then this is really a good thing.

But Mr. Proyect probably agrees with President Obama: that we'd all be better off if all fuels cost three or four times more in the future. What a guy!

Mr. Proyect doesn't like nuclear power, either. He writes 

In his letter urging Bernie Sanders to embrace nuclear power, Phillips assured him that the human costs of Chernobyl were exaggerated. Even though there were likely 4,000 people who would die eventually because of exposure, it was a lot less than Greenpeace and other groups alleged.

The implication is that today's small, completely redesigned, Generation IV, nuclear power plants are just like Chernobyl. Which is like saying a modern Prius is the same as a Model T. With Gen IV, the residual radioactive waste decays in a few hundred years rather than a few billion. Unlike, say, coal ash waste, the volume of generated nuclear waste is very much smaller. It could all be stored in Yucca Mountain with plenty of room to spare. And it emits no CO2 (if that's important to you) or other atmospheric pollutants.

He worries about tourism--especially "mass tourism." He approvingly quotes Richard Smith: 

Take just one: Cruise ships are the fastest growing sector of mass tourism on the planet. But they are by far the most polluting tourist indulgence ever invented: Large ships can burn more than 150 tons of the filthiest diesel bunker fuel per day, spewing out more fumes—and far more toxic fumes—than 5 million cars, polluting entire regions, the whole of southern Europe – and all this to ferry a few thousand boozy passengers about bashing coral reefs. There is just no way this industry can be made sustainable.

This, presumably, is in addition to AOC's effort to ban airplanes--in Mr. Proyect's perfect world nobody will be allowed to travel at all. At least not unless you're exceptionally Woke. Only really Woke, pre-approved, certified people could get a passport. The rest of us will have to make do with three hots and a cot (aka free food and housing).

All for the sake of saving the planet.

Tens of millions (perhaps even hundreds of millions) of people depend on tourism, directly or indirectly, for their livelihood. Of those, some millions earn a living specifically from cruise ships. Mr. Proyect will throw all of these people into abject poverty.

Tourism is one of the most efficient ways of transferring money directly from rich people to poor people. And Mr. Proyect has, as a first order of business, a desire to stop it. What a guy!

Then, of course, he and Mr. Smith have their facts all wrong. Modern cruise ships don't run on oil at all, but instead on liquefied natural gas (cheaper, cleaner, and doesn't spill into the ocean). More, eco-cruises are growing faster than the industry as a whole--e.g., to the Galapagos and Antarctica. These ships, along with their customers, have a strong self-interest in protecting the resource they want tourists to see. If there was ever a lobby to protect the environment, the cruise industry is it.

Finally, Mr. Proyect writes off the people who live along Bangladesh's coast.

Huber certainly feels sorry for some Bangladeshi farmer or fisherman whose life will be destroyed by rising ocean levels but has to question how such struggles could ever have the social power capable of taking on a capitalist class that is responsible for the dispossession and pollution in the first place.  ... For a Yanomami or a Bangladesh farmer or fisherman, the stakes are very high. For a machinist working at Boeing or a Verizon lineman in suburban New Jersey, there are worries about climate change but it doesn’t have the same immediacy as living in a village near the Indian Ocean.

Rich people are able to take care of their environment--that's why America is much cleaner today than it was 50 or 100 years ago--and why the average New Jerseyan doesn't care. Poor people don't have that luxury. Mr. Proyect's solution is to make the rich people poor, which is truly perverse. The best solution is to make the poor people rich.

Perhaps Mr. Proyect has never heard of the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove swamp in the world, located in Bangladesh. Wouldn't part of a realistic solution be to attract more tourists to visit it? People who would buy fish from local fishermen, tours from local guides, handicrafts from local women, and food from local farmers. Plus they'd leave tips. Plus the travel company will have a strong vested interest in preserving the ecosystem.

Nah! That's much too practical. Mr. Proyect is against that. He thinks Bangladeshis should just remain poor forever so that some kooky folks on the Upper East Side can power-trip by banning air travel and cruise ships. What a guy!

I agree with Mr. Proyect that human civilization will come to an end some day--nothing lasts forever. We've been around (as a civilized species) for some 7000 years now, and perhaps we've got a few thousand more to go. I don't know how it ends, but I do know that we're not gonna run out of environment in the next eleven years. Not even in the next millennium. Mr. Proyect needs to get more sleep at night, and stop worrying about silly things.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• The Pro-Poverty Crowd
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

Note: Due to health issues, blogging may be light for the next few months.

Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers

The ridiculously named grouplet Socialist Resurgence (SR) is publishing its founding documents, among which is a political report entitled U.S. faces political, social, and economic crisis (pdf). Numbering at most 50 members, the new organization is compelled to issue mighty proclamations on the state of modern politics. The resulting document is incoherent.

Of course our comrades are not explicitly demanding steep wage cuts for healthcare workers. They'd definitely deny it if you asked them. Indeed, they write

Healthcare workers are under siege by employers. Hospitals and clinics are cutting wages and benefits while nurses and doctors are forced to see more patients, despite evidence that doing so increases errors with disastrous effects. Experienced nurses and doctors are being fired and replaced by fresh out of school nurses and doctors-they're paid less. Experienced staff not fired are leaving the profession due to ever increasing on the job stress. Suicide rates of nurses and doctors are on the rise.

The solution to this sorry state of affairs is this (emphasis mine).

Health care is a human right. This must include dental, vision care, and humane, non-punitive, and non-stigmatizing approaches to mental health care. No one should have to go bankrupt because of medical costs or decide whether one eats or gets medicine. Get the insurance companies out of the equation. Free quality universal public health care now!

Even our Trotskyist friends are smart enough to know that nothing is "free"--everything has to be paid for somehow. Their conceit is that the disempowered bourgeoisie will foot the bill from all the huge profits they've stashed in some vault somewhere, accumulated over decades from the ruthless exploitation of the working class.

And that will work for a year, or maybe two, or at most ten. But eventually the 1% will be entirely dispossessed and no longer able to pay up. Then the cash has to come from someplace else. "Free" healthcare means that patients can't be charged, so the only other possible sources of money are either taxpayers or employees.

So it is instructive that the political report cites Cuba as a positive example for how healthcare should be funded. The bourgeoisie were eliminated 60 years ago, and any residual wealth they left behind has long since been squandered. So Cuba illustrates what happens when the piggy bank runs dry.

They write:

In Cuba, the healthcare system is publicly owned with several layers. There are community clinics, with doctor-nurse teams who live in the neighborhoods that they serve, local hospitals, and larger medical institutes. All healthcare is free, with some exceptions for some medicines and procedures for higher income people, and quality of life indices are impressive. Cuba enjoys one of the highest life expectancy rates in the hemisphere, with the average life expectancy at 78.05 years old, compared to the U.S. at 78.62 years. In 2005, Cuba had 627 doctors and 94 dentists per 100,000 population. That same year, there were 225 physicians and 54 dentists per 100,000 population in the U.S. All medical and nursing education in Cuba is free. Cuba has innovated in the realm of vaccines and cancer treatment. Unlike the U.S., which sends weapons around the world, Cuba sends doctors and nurses to disaster areas and semi-colonial countries.

One can certainly dispute the virtues of Cuban healthcare. Cubans have always had a long life expectancy since way back when--a trait that's likely more genetic than the result of good healthcare. Regards vaccines, all they've done (to their credit) is manufacture them--unhindered as they are by the liability faced by American firms. I'm unaware of any pathbreaking cancer research coming from Cuba. Medical research today is overwhelmingly done in the United States (which is one reason why drugs are more expensive here).

Those issues aside--the question is Who pays for healthcare for Cubans? The answer is obvious: the employees. According to Fox News, in 2014 Cuban doctors got a 150% pay raise--all the way to $67/month! Nurses also made out like bandits, with their monthly paycheck going from $13 to $25.

A homeless woman in any civilized country earns more than that just by panhandling. Our comrades will argue that Cubans are often compensated in kind rather than in cash, e.g., with "free" housing and a food ration card. Which is just like in the US: the bag lady gets to sleep for free in a shelter and is given a free meal (along with food stamps).

Life is much harder for US doctors, who have to pay their own rent and buy their own food. But they earn on average about $17,000/month, or a bit over 250 times what the Cuban medic makes. The median US salary for registered nurses in the US is about $6,000/month.

Healthcare is a labor-intensive business. While I have not been able to find a precise statistic, if it mirrors the economy as a whole 70% of costs are paid to labor. So obviously, if you want to reduce the cost of healthcare in America to be something close to "free", you will have to dramatically lower the wages of healthcare workers. The comrades never say that, but of course that's exactly what they mean. They think doctors and nurses, and phlebotomists and radiation technicians, and orderlies and laundry workers, should all take a whopping big pay cut--just so we can believe the fiction that healthcare is "free."

So I'll stand by my headline: a 100% accurate summary of Socialist Resurgence's true position. Socialist Resurgence demands steep wage cuts for healthcare workers.

The rest of the political report is not full of facts as much as factoids. The difference is context, and in every case our comrades leave that out. A few examples:

• They mention that despite low unemployment, labor participation has not budged. True, but it's due mostly to the on-going retirement of baby boomers, who are withdrawing from the labor force.
• They predict a new recession is looming. Of course they're right--eventually there will be a recession. The business cycle has not been repealed (except in places like Cuba which are in permanent recession). But it looks increasingly unlikely to happen in 2020.
• They write "the free speech rights of students and professors has come under attack. Critics of Israeli apartheid and advocates for BDS have been attacked as anti-Semitic by pro-Israel politicians and lobbying groups." Accusing somebody of antisemitism is not the same as denying their free speech rights. The campus Left's insistence on shouting down pro-Israel speakers is a much better example.
• "Living standards for U.S. workers are falling." This is manifestly not true.

But here is the biggest howler:

The wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80% own 7%. Eight people, six from the U.S., own as much wealth as half of humanity. Only the top 20% fully recovered from the Great Recession.

Do eight people buy half the cars in the world? Do eight people eat half of the world's food? Do eight people own half of the world's houses? Do six Americans receive half of all social security payments? Of course not! It is only by the narrowest, cherry-picked definition of "wealth" that our comrades can make such ludicrous claims.

This is one of those documents I've read so that you don't have to. Not recommended.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Socialist Action Goes AWOL