Dear Reader, In March I made the first of, what I then realized would be many changes to The Ten

Magazine. Obviously if you read The Ten over the last few months youve seen those changes have become more noticeable and more numerous. Next week Ill make the most noticeable change possible, I will retire the name The Ten Magazine replacing it with The Revolutionarys Voice. Why am I making this change? Well for starters I never much cared for the name The Ten Magazine; it didnt capture the power of persuasion and motivation that I know information possesses I doubt I have to tell you how important an informed electorate is to a healthy democracy nor how the first instrument a tyrannical institution or person coops is the media due to its propagandizing power which just to point out quickly, in this time of increasingly concentrated media power information restriction has become an acidic force enabling economically manipulative people (I refuse to use the term powerful when speaking about these people since their power comes from our eyes and minds seeing them as such); to coax repressive legislation from our government officials that gnaw away at our ability to hold elected officials accountable and at our ability to feel secure within out constitutionally guaranteed liberties. But thats off the topic my second reason for changing the name is the most important; currently there is already a well established Ten Magazine; its a military magazine published by the Pentagon, so to avoid exposure to litigation Im not going to use it in the future. The name The Revolutionarys Voice comes from a comment I made to a friend five years ago. While talking about government malfeasance I made the following statement, blindness is not an excuse for not recognizing your house is on fire, you still have hands, legs, ears and a brain. When I didnt know any of this {information} I was happy but in order to stay there I had to ignore what I saw; once I stopped ignoring that stuff, I became activated. I couldnt stand to see things continue as they were. My friend asked me where I found my information, I gave him a list of websites and then quipped; while I like Truth-out{.org} I wish there was a {hardcopy} newspaper I could buy with a name like. . .I dont know the Revolutionarys Voice or something. And since that day I kept the title in the back of my mind hoping to get the change to use it. Well that time is now. If you have any comments dont hesitate to send them to thetenmagazine@gmail.com, Subject Line: RV. Thank you for your continued support! Chief Creative Editor Ephraim J Davis

Naked Capitalism More Proof of DoJ Lack of Interest in Enforcing the Law: The Case of the Kickback-Demanding Banks (Page 17)

The Regime at Home Truth-Out.org

The Military Assault on Global Climate (Page 19)

Real Money Energy & Capital

Strategic Petroleum, Indeed (Page 23)

A Break with History New Deal 2.0 Introduction Consortium News

Last Call for Lagging Fund Drive (Page 4) And Heres The Good News Vancouver Announces Massive Plan to build housing, end homelessness (Page 5) Nine Government Investments that made us an Industrial Economic Leader (Page 25)

The Exchange Counter Currents

A Time Frame for Systemic Collapse (Page 28) National Humanities Center The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny (Page 29)

Podcasters Way LSE

A World Economic Order Based on Cultural Comparative Advantage (Page 7) Moyers on America The Net at Risk (2006) (Page 7) Librivox General Smedley Butler War is a Racket (Page 7)

Curious Proposals Open Left

Entrepreneurial Populism (Page 33)

The Activists Desk Roll Call

The 50 Richest Members of Congress (2011) (Page 8)

Institutional Minds Migration Information

Migration Fundamentals Filling Labor Shortages through Immigration: An Overview of Shortage Lists and their Implications (Page 36)

News Briefs International Business Times

Bernanke Speech: Dont Cut Government Spending To quick (Page 13) TPM Muckracker In wake of Fraud Arrest, Biggest County Party in U.S.A Doesnt Know how much money it has (Page 14) Legistorm U.S Lawmakers among Worlds Best Compensated (Page 14)

Hot Off the Presses Deep Journal

Secret Report: Megrahi is not the Lockerbie Bomber (Page 16)

Last Call for Lagging Fund Drive

By Robert Parry (Editor of Consortium News http://consortiumnews.com/2011/09/06/last-call-for-lagging-fund-drive/
September 6, 2011 From Editor Robert Parry, For nearly 16 years, we have tried to give readers in the United States and around the world truly independent journalism, doing what the mainstream U.S. news media often doesnt do: take on the hard stories with seriousness and professionalism. We have done this on a shoe string, but we cant continue without at least a modest budget. Our current mid-year fund drive seeking just $25,000 remains about $10,000 short. And we are down to our last few days. If you can, please help. There are four easy ways to support our independent investigative journalism: First option: You can make a taxdeductible donation by credit card at the Web site or by check to Consortium for Independent Journalism (CIJ); 2200 Wilson Blvd.; Suite 102-231; Arlington VA 22201. Or you can use PayPal (our account is named after our e-mail address consortnew@aol.com). With any donation of $50 or more, you can request as a premium gift a copy of one of two documentaries about the historic 1980 election: A DVD of the PBS Frontline documentary The Election Held Hostage, co-written by Robert Parry. It explores whether Republican skullduggery with Iran was a factor in electing Ronald Reagan. Or, filmmaker William Brandon Shanleys documentary, The Made for TV Election, which examines the role of media manipulation. It is narrated by actor Martin Sheen. For $100, you can get both. And for $125, we will add the two-DVD set of the closed-door congressional debriefing of Israeli intelligence officer Ari BenMenashe, describing his role in these historic events. Once you make your donation, simply email us your selection at consortnew@aol.com. If youd prefer, a book instead of a DVD, you can ask for an autographed copy of one of Robert Parrys last three books Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege or Neck Deep as a substitute. Just follow up your donation with an e-mail expressing your choice. Second: if youd rather spread out your support in smaller amounts, you can sign up for a monthly donation. With contributions of $10 or more a month, you can qualify for war correspondent Don Norths DVD, Yesterdays Enemies about the lives of former Salvadoran guerrillas. For details, click here. (If you sign up for a monthly donation and want to get Dons DVD, remember to contact us at consortnew@aol.com. If you prefer, we can substitute The Election Held Hostage or The Made for TV Election. Just ask.) Third option: if you cant afford a donation right now, you can also help us reach our fundraising goal by taking advantage of our deep discount for the two-book set of Robert Parrys Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep (co-authored with Sam and Nat Parry). The sale price for the set is only $19, postage included. For details, click here. Fourth: you can help us close out our warehouse space by buying full boxes of Secrecy & Privilege or Neck Deep for only $59. Each carton contains 28 paperbacks, or you can ask that we give you a mix of half and half, 14 of each. You can give the books away as gifts or resell them for your own fundraiser. (One reader placed an order for her book club, a great idea since each book costs only about $2.) For details about this bulk book order, click here and scroll down to the $59 offer. As always, thanks for your support.

And Here-s The Good News

Vancouver announces massive plan to build housing, end homelessness

Philip Langdon http://newurbannetwork.com/article/vancouver-announces-massive-plan-build-housing-end-homelessness15065
When he was elected mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2008, Gregor Robertson pledged to do away with homelessness in the 643,000-population city by 2015. Now the municipal government is planning a building initiative that aims to eliminate homelessness by that date and produce 38,000 affordable housing units over the course of a decade. The Vancouver Sun reports: The comprehensive plan calls for an additional 7,900 supportive and social housing units, 11,000 rental units, and 20,000 new condos and ownership units to be built in Vancouver, resulting in more affordable housing for everyone by 2021. If approved on Tuesday, the Housing and Homelessness Strategy will unfold in two phases, beginning with a three-year strategy to stamp out homelessness by 2015. The last six years of the plan will focus on bringing down the cost of every type of housing, ranging from Single Room Occupancy hotels to privately owned homes. Vancouver, though renowned for livability it has been ranked one of the world's most livable cities for more than a decade bears the disadvantage of being one of Canada's most expensive metropolitan areas. The level of pay in Greater Vancouver isn't enough to offset the steep housing costs. In April 2010, the Canadian weekly Maclean's said this about life in metropolitan Vancouver: Family incomes are static but housing costs arent. By one measure, the Demographic International Housing Affordability Survey, Vancouver is the most unaffordable city in Canada, and the 15th worst among 100 cities worldwide. Survey co-author, Hugh Pavletich of New Zealand, says ideally housing costs should not exceed three-times the familys income, meaning an affordability index of three. Anything above 5.1 is ranked in the survey as severely unaffordable. Vancouver has an index of 6.6, which Pavletich called bloody absurd.... Already 68 per cent of [Greater Vancouver residents'] average disposable income is spent on housing costs. That compares to 44 per cent in Toronto, 35 per cent in Calgary and 36 per cent in Montreal." Of the number of people lacking housing in Greater Vancouver, The Sun said: "A region-wide homeless count on March 16 found 2,632 people living on the streets throughout the region, 1,605 of those were in Vancouver." To help reach its housing goals, the city would offer $42 million in land and capital grants to developers. The Sun noted: The plan also calls for the citys land resources and capital projects to be used to lever opportunities with the provincial and federal governments to build more housing options in new neighbourhoods. The city would approve more laneway housing and secondary suites, according to the plan. New Urban Network reported in November 2010 that nearly 200 applications had been submitted to build laneway dwellings small houses behind single-family houses. That is one part of a multifaceted approach to allow more people to find housing in the city. In 2006, a previous mayor, Sam Sullivan, announced the EcoDensity Initiative, which called for higher density in every part of the city. He presented the initiative as a way of accommodating substantial population growth and helping to relieve the high cost of housing. Council concern Homelessness is a prominent issue for some of Vancouver's Council members. "This is why I got into the job," Councillor Kerry Jang said, referring to the initiative against homelessness. "I felt I wasn't doing my part."

Weve got a long way to go, Councillor Geoff Meggs said about eliminating homelessness. Anybody who is sleeping

on the street is suffering. he said, and homelessness means society is suffering too.

URLs Librivox - http://librivox.org/short-nonfiction-collection-vol-018-by-various/ LSE http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=2246010&song=A+World+Economic+Order+Based+on+Cultural+Com parative+Advantage PBS - http://video.pbs.org/video/1475883951/

The 50 Richest Members of Congress (2011)

To determine the richest lawmakers, Roll Call adds up the minimum value of total assets reported by each Member on their annual financial disclosures and subtracts the minimum liabilities. Percent change refers to the change since last year's disclosure forms. An asset valued at $5 million to $25 million is counted at the lesser amount, as is a liability valued at $1 million to $5 million. You can visit previous editions of 50 Richest lists here. http://www.rollcall.com/50richest/the-50-richest-members-of-congress-112th.html 1. Rep. Michael McCaul (R6. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) Texas) $294.21 Million $65.91 Million

4. 1. 2. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) $220.40 Million

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) $81.63 Million 7. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) $55.07 Million

5. 3. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) $193.07 Million

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) $76.30 Million 8. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (DConn.) $52.93* Million

9.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) $45.39 Million

14. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) $21.18 Million

19. Rep. Kenny Marchant (RTexas) $16.45 Million

10. Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) $44.21 Million

15. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (RN.J.) $20.35 Million

20. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) $15.46 Million

11. Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio) $35.87* Million

16. Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) $19.78 Million

21. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) $11.90* Million

12. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) $35.20 Million

17. Rep. Gary Miller (R-Calif.) $17.45 Million

22. Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) $11.60 Million

13. Rep. Rick Berg (R-N.D.) $21.60* Million

18. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) $17.00 Million

23. Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) $10.89** Million

24. Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) $10.69* Million

29. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) $10.28 Million

34. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) $9.43 Million

25. Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) $10.63* Million

30. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) $10.14 Million

35. Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-N.Y.) $9.35* Million

26. Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.) $10.60 Million

31. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (RWis.) $10.14 ***Million

36. Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) $9.29 Million

27. Sen. Lamar Alexander (RTenn.) $10.38 Million

32. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) $9.88 Million

37. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) $9.23 Million

28. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) $10.35 Million

33. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) $9.84 Million

38. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) $8.53 Million

10

39. Rep. Blake Farenthold (RTexas) $8.51* Million

44. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) $7.93 Million

49. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) $6.47 Million

40. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) $8.44 Million

45. Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) $7.71* Million

50. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (RTexas) $6.21 Million

41. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) $8.18* Million

46. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) $7.41 Million * Indicates a freshman Member of Congress. Roll Call did not calculate percent change from forms filed as candidates. ** Member has not yet filed a disclosure form this year. The number here is based on the last available data, a disclosure form filed last year when he was a candidate for Congress. This information will be updated. *** Roll Call added Sensenbrenner to this list after initial publication based on more detailed information about his wealth provided by his office. Sensenbrenner used to file a personal wealth statement detailing not only his stock investments and bank accounts, but his travelers checks and stamp collection along with the standard disclosure form. He did not attach a similar accounting with his 2010 financial report filed this spring, which showed a net worth of at least $5.19 million. But during Roll Calls review of the details of Sensenbrenners nearly 700page report, his office pointed to a

42. Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) $8.03* Million

47. Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) $7.06 Million

43. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) $7.94* Million

48. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) $6.56 Million

11

separate financial statement he submitted to the Congressional Record in May, which indicates the Wisconsin lawmaker has a net worth of $10.14 million dollars, including several items that he does not have to report on the disclosure form. With Sensenbrenners addition, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) drops from our list.

12

Bernanke Speech: Don't Cut Government Spending Too Quickly

By Mike Obel September 8, 2011 2:12 PM EDT http://www.ibtimes.com/news/210774/20110908/forex/bernanke-speech-housing-consumer-spendingrecession-recovery.htm
Ben Bernanke, the head of the U.S. central bank, warned Thursday against cutting government spending too sharply or quickly, lest one of the most fragile recoveries in the nation's economic history suffer further damage. The Federal Reserve chairman's speech, coming just hours before President Obama was set to address a joint session of Congress to propose a jobs plan, left stocks cold: While equities started the day's session, rising they tapered off as the time for Bernanke's speech neared and were down on all three major indexes by the time he finished. The Fed chairman, who sought to assuage fears of inflation from past Fed actions that increased the money supply, forecast inflation moving to 2 percent or less. He also said the central bank would do all it could to "promote a stronger economic recovery in the context of price stability." In what appeared to be comments aimed at federal lawmakers, Bernanke affirmed the need to put a lid on the exploding national debt -- but warned that measures to that end must be judicious. "While prompt and decisive action to put the federal government's finances on a sustainable trajectory is urgently needed, fiscal policymakers should not, as a consequence, disregard the fragility of the economic recovery," Bernanke said. "There is ample room for debate about the appropriate size and role for the government in the longer term, but--in the absence of adequate demand from the private sector -- a substantial fiscal consolidation in the shorter term could add to the headwinds facing economic growth and hiring." Besides warning against rash cuts in government spending, the Fed chairman said one of the most striking features of the current anemic recovery is unusual weakness in household spending. After contracting very sharply during the recession, consumer spending expanded moderately through 2010, only to decelerate in the first half of 2011," he said, in prepared remarks. Bernanke cited as causes of the unusually weak household spending a "persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high for many, notwithstanding that households, in the aggregate, have been saving more and borrowing less. Even taking into account the many financial pressures they face, households seem exceptionally cautious." In conjunction with unusually weak household spending is unusually weak housing prices, he said. "Unfortunately, the recession, besides being extraordinarily severe as well as global in scope, was also unusual in being associated with both a very deep slump in the housing market and a historic financial crisis," Bernanke said. "These two features of the downturn, individually and in combination, have acted to slow the natural recovery process."

13

In Wake Of Fraud Arrest, Biggest County Party In U.S. Doesn't Know How Much Money It Has
Ryan J. Reilly September 6, 2011, 7:50PM http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/kinde_durkee_in_wake_of_fraud_arrest_biggest_county _party_in_us_doesnt_know_how_much_money_it_has.php
The Los Angeles Country Democratic Party -- the biggest county party in the United States -- doesn't have a clue how much money it has in the bank and is hoping it will be able to make its payroll. The county party treasurer, Kinde Durkee, was arrested over the weekend and charged with moving substantial sums of money to her personal business account and between the accounts of her clients to cover shortfalls. "I have been chair for 12 years and she predates me," Chairman Eric Bauman told TPM in a phone interview Tuesday. "We never had any issues until this last year or so." Bauman said that several state audits uncovered irregularities, but that Durkee paid the fines herself. "We've always kept a pretty tight rein on what our bank balances were," Bauman said. "But as anyone that receives financial documents from a treasurer knows, we only see the documents they prepared for us." Bauman, who joked that he'd had better days, said the party was in touch with lawyers and the bank and trying to "figure out what the hell we had." The party's bank wouldn't -- or couldn't -tell him how much money was in party accounts, Bauman said. He also said that Durkee had her own proprietary software instead of a standardized software, which would have made it difficult for clients to transfer accountants. Bauman said the software "reportedly made logging transactions and reporting them appropriately much easier, so that's a positive not a negative when you're talking with a treasurer." Bauman said the county party has five employees and raised $200,000 last month. "I just don't know if it's in the bank," Bauman said.

U.S. lawmakers among world's best compensated

Posted by LegiStorm Wednesday, July 27, 2011 http://www.legistorm.com/blog/u-s-lawmakers-among-world-s-best-compensated.html
The $174,000 base salary for members of Congress is one of the highest legislator pays in the world when compared against the average wage earner, a new report shows. When benefits are added in, lawmakers earn around $285,000, according to the report released by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and Our Generation.

14

The largest benefit is contributions toward retirement, which the study's authors estimated at $82,000 annually. The base salary for a member of Congress is 3.4 times greater than the average $50,875 wage of a full-time employee in the United States. That disparity is second only to Japan (3.7 times) among the 13

countries highlighted in the study. Before adjusting for benefits, the base salary places members among the top 5 percent of all American workers., The study's authors conclude that pay for members of Congress is excessive in light of the current economic climate.

"Immediate steps need to be taken to cut Congressional salaries and benefits and reassure Americans that sacrifices made during this economic downturn are being widely shared."

15

Secret report: Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber

By Daan de WitTranslated By Ben Kearney
The verdict in the Lockerbie case is based on lies and deception, and the man convicted of the crime, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, cannot be the perpetrator. This appears from revelations contained in a secret section of an official report. 'Lockerbie' was investigated down to the last detail by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, SCCRC. After four years, the Commission produced the findings of an investigation which cost millions to carry out and that is partly still secret, but which was seen by journalist Marcello Mega: 'The report shows Scots detectives on the original investigation, together with Crown prosecutors and their US colleagues, deliberately covered up evidence and witness statements that did not fit the case.' This quote is taken from an article by Mega published in The Scottish Sun. His article can no longer be found on The Scottish Sun website. It was erroneously edited by one of the newspaper's editors, after which - even though it was related to a technicality - the article was removed from the website in its entirety. Upon request, Mega emailed the quote and the remainder of the article to DeepJournal. 'Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber' Before Mega's article was removed, it had already been quoted online: '[...] Robert Black QC, retired Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and the architect of the Lockerbie trial, told how he believes Megrahi is innocent. Mr Black said: "Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber and these revelations further underline that. [] "That the judges did convict him on the flimsiest of evidence, which required several leaps of faith on a number of crucial matters that had not been proven by the Crown, remains a matter of profound concern for all of us." Mr Black said it was now vital that a top-level public inquiry is held to get to the truth.' Back in July, Mega wrote: 'Youll just have to take my word for it that this case represents the worst injustice perpetrated by the courts that Ive encoutered in 22 years as a journalist. In a letter dating roughly to 2008 that was recently discovered in the headquarters of the Libyan intelligence services and directed at a Gaddafi advisor, al-Megrahi writes that he is innocent. 'Failure of the justice system' Robert Black quotes from Mega's article: [The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission] has grave concerns over the evidence against the 59-year-old [Megrahi] following a multi-millionpound, four-year investigation. In the dossier - seen by The Scottish Sun Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who helped finger Megrahi as the bomber, is described as an "unreliable" witness. [] One undisclosed memo reveals the FBI discussed with Scots cops an offer of unlimited cash to Gauci - with "$10,000 available immediately".' Mega from his email: 'He and his brother Paul were rewarded for their testimony, receiving more than $2m and $1m respectively.' An 800-page summary of the report was published in 2007. A quote from the summary: The applicant [Megrahi] may have suffered a miscarriage of justice. A 2007 headline from The Scotsman reads: 'Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with, destroyed and overlooked'. 'Police are also accused of lying in court while prosecutors - including then Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC - are suspected of suppressing bombshell evidence that would likely have seen Megrahi walk free.' Petition for a new investigation On Black's website is a petition from Justice for Megrahi, an organization that Black is affiliated with: We would argue that for nearly 23 years Scottish Courts and the Scottish Government have failed to deliver the truth about Lockerbie despite these claims of supremacy in human rights matters. We are at a loss to equate the current governments refusal to hold a judicial inquiry into Lockerbie with this principle that Scotland and Scotland alone is capable of delivering justice to all of its people. Mega writes: 'Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora on the doomed flight, said: This underlines again the need for a full public inquiry. Its too easy for everyone

16

to maintain Megrahi was convicted so he must be guilty, when clearly he is not.' Megrahi was recently tracked down in Tripoli. Palestinian terrorists acting on orders from Iran This four part series of articles on Lockerbie offers more background

information on the case. It starts with the search for the real perpetrator. For the time being all signs point in the direction of Iran and the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP-GC. In 1988 the U.S. Navy's U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 civilian passengers on board. In retaliation, the PFLP-GC, under the command of Ahmed

Jibril and acting on orders from Iran, is suspected of bringing down Pan Am flight 103 that same year.

More Proof of DoJ Lack of Interest in Enforcing the Law: The Case of the Kickback-Demanding Banks
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/more-proof-of-doj-lack-of-interest-in-enforcing-the-law-the-case-ofthe-kickback-demanding-banks.html
In this world of rampant banking miscreance, it may seem hard to get worked up about $6 billion in impermissible kickbacks. But this is a case of a clear-cut legal violation, with the particulars sent to the Department of Justice by the HUD Inspector Generals office on a silver platter. And one of the alleged big bad actors was the eversanctimonious Wells Fargo. American Banker has a detailed write-up of a kickback scheme between major banks who were mortgage originators, in particular Wells, Citigroup, Countrywide, and SunTrust and mortgage insurers. The mortgage insurance was to insure the riskier portion of a highly geared mortgage. The borrower would pay a higher rate to compensate for the lack of a large (or much of any) down payment. The kickback was dressed up as reinsurance, meaning the mortgage insurer was laying off some of the risk to the originator and paying a fee to do so. But what instead happened was that fees were paid but the deals were structured so that no risk was shifted over to the banks. The violations were uncovered by HUDs Inspector General office. IGs are tasked to prevent and uncover fraud, waste, and abuse. Its budget is separate from the rest of HUD. It has substantial law enforcement powers and can subpoena documents but not witnesses. Not surprisingly, this isnt the first time that significant HUD IG finding has been ignored. The IGs office found substantial evidence that the biggest servicers had defrauded taxpayers (with Wells again a particularly bad actor) But since that report contradicted the see no evil Foreclosure Task Force findings, nothing has been done. The overview from the American Banker story: In exchange for the their business, companies such as Citigroup Inc, Wells Fargo & Co, SunTrust Banks Inc. and Countrywide allegedly required reinsurance partnerships on generous terms that violated the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, a 1974 law prohibiting abusive home sales practices. During a two-day presentation in the summer of 2009, HUDs team presented DOJ attorneys with a thick binder of evidence that major banks had engineered a decade-long kickback scheme, people familiar with the investigation say. Documents from the investigation show that the inspector generals staff concluded that banks and insurance companies had created elaborate financial structures that had the appearance of reinsurance but failed to transfer significant amounts of risk to their bank underwriters. Some of the deals were designed to return a 400% profit on a banks investment during good years and remain profitable even in the event of a real estate collapse. Making matters worse, banks allegedly forced unknowing consumers to buy more insurance than they needed and failed to properly disclose the reinsurance agreements, another RESPA violation Wells Fargo and Bank of America Corp. have settled class action cases alleging the same sort of misconduct flagged by HUD, and internal documents show that banks and insurers viewed the arrangements as a thinly veiled pay-to-play scheme. Even as insurers complained they couldnt afford the escalating cost of the reinsurance payments, banks threatened or punished companies that balked at providing them, documents obtained by American Banker show. Wells Fargo & Co told one insurer that it should consider giving Wells such deals if it wanted business referrals. After insurer

17

MGIC Investment Corp. announced plans to cut back on banks share of premiums in 2003, Countrywide executives complained to an MGIC executive and told him that they were shifting Countrywides business to MGICs competitors. The article provides far more in the way of supporting detail Former members of the mortgage industry have also confirmed that the banks were aggressively demanding kickbacks. Yet look what then transpired: HUD Inspector General Ken Donohue and his deputy, Mike Stephens, who succeeded him last year were confident that they had a case

The DOJ said it wanted take the matter on, according to Inspector General Stephens and others. Six months later, HUDs attorneys formally referred its case to prosecutors, effectively ending the housing agencys involvement. Investigators believed a speedy settlement in the hundreds of millions of dollars was likely, and HUDs investigators even suggested that the proceeds should be used to pay for mortgage counseling for borrowers who were allegedly victims of kickback schemes. Major banks deny that their reinsurance agreements were illegal, but they have not been eager to defend them in court.

More than a year and a half after the Department of Justice took over the case, no settlement has been reached and there is serious doubt as to whether the case even remains active. So why is the Department of Justices excuse for sitting on its hands? The excuse made is that it lacks the needed accounting skills. If you believe that, I have a bridge Id like to sell you. Actions speak louder than words, and the evidence is overwhelming that the DoJ has no interest in inconveniencing anyone influential, particularly banks.

18

The Military Assault on Global Climate

War and the Tragedy of the Commons, Part 7
by: H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout | News Analysis Thursday 8 September 2011 http://www.truth-out.org/war-and-tragedy-commons-part-7-military-assault-global-climate/1315418406
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy ... Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements ... Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders. It's a loophole [in the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change] big enough to drive a tank through, according to the report " A Climate of War." In 1940, the US military consumed one percent of the country's total energy usage; by the end of World War II, the military's share rose to 29 percent.(1) Oil is indispensable for war. Correspondingly, militarism is the most oil-exhaustive activity on the planet, growing more so with faster, bigger, more fuel-guzzling planes, tanks and naval vessels employed in more intensive air and ground wars. At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army's armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.(2) The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. Fathom, if you can, the astronomical fuel usage of USAF fighter planes: the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 500 gallons per minute; ten minutes of flight uses as much fuel as the average driver does in one year of driving! A quarter of the world's jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines; in 2006, they consumed as much fuel as US planes did during the Second World War (1941-1945) - an astounding 2.6 billion gallons.(3) Barry Sanders observes with a load of tragic irony that, while many of us assiduously reduce our carbon footprint through simpler living, eating locally, recycling and reusing, energy conservation, taking public transportation, installing solar panels, and so on, the single largest institutional polluter and contributor to global warming - the US military - is immune to climate change concerns. The military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body, thanks to US armtwisting during the 1997 negotiations of the first international accord to limit global warming emissions, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. To protect the military from any curbs on their activities, the United States demanded and won exemption from emission limits on "bunker" fuels (dense, heavy fuel oil for naval vessels) and all greenhouse gas emissions from military operations worldwide, including wars. Adding insult to injury, George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol as one of the first acts of his presidency, alleging it would straitjacket the US economy with too costly greenhouse emissions controls. Next, the White House began a neo-Luddite campaign against the science of climate change. In researching "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," Sanders found that getting war casualty statistics out of the Department of Defense (DoD) is easier than getting fuel usage data. Only recently has the momentous issue of military fuel use and its massive, yet concealed role in global climate change come to the foreground, thanks to a handful of perspicacious researchers. Liska and Perrin contend that, in addition to tailpipe emissions, immense "hidden" greenhouse gas pollution stems from our use of gasoline. This impact on climate change should be calculated into the full lifecycle analysis of gasoline. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compares gasoline and biofuels for their respective atmospheric pollution, the greenhouse gas emissions calculated for gasoline should include the military activities related to securing foreign crude oil, from which gasoline is derived. (But they do not, thanks to the Kyoto Accords military exemption.) Oil security comprises both military protection against sabotage to pipelines and tankers and also US-led wars in oil-rich regions to assure long-term access. Nearly 1,000 US military bases trace an arc from the Andes

19

to North Africa across the Middle East to Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea, sweeping over all major oil resources - all related, in part, to projecting force for the sake of energy security. Further, the "upstream emissions" of greenhouse gases from the manufacture of military equipment, infrastructure, vehicles and munitions used in oil supply protection and oil-driven wars should also be included in the overall environmental impact of using gasoline. Adding these factors into their calculations, the authors conclude that about "20 percent of the conventional DoD budget ... is attributable to the objective of oil security." A corresponding analysis by researchers at Oil Change International quantifies the greenhouse gas emissions of the Iraq war and the opportunity costs involved in fighting the war, rather than investing in clean technology, during the years 20032007. Their key findings are unambiguous about the vast climate pollution of war and the lockstep bipartisan policy of forfeiting future global health for present day militarism. 1. The projected full costs of the Iraq war (estimated $3 trillion) would cover "all of the global investments in renewable power generation" needed between now and 2030 to reverse global warming trends. 2. Between 2003-2007, the war generated at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)(4), more each year of the war than 139 of the world's countries release annually.(5) Rebuilding Iraqi schools, homes, businesses, bridges, roads and hospitals pulverized by the war, and new security walls and barriers will require millions of tons of cement, one of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions. 3. In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the entire world spent on renewable energy investment. 4. By 2008, the Bush administration had spent 97 times more on military than on climate change. As a presidential candidate, President Obama pledged to spend $150 billion over ten years on green energy technology and infrastructure - less than the United States was spending in one year of the Iraq war.

Just how much petroleum the Pentagon consumes is one of the best-kept secrets in government. More likely, observes Barry Sanders, no one in DoD knows precisely. His unremitting effort to ferret out the numbers is one of the most thorough to date. Sanders begins with figures given by the Defense Energy Support Center for annual oil procurement for all branches of the military. He then combines three other non-reported military oil consumption factors: an estimate of "free oil" supplied overseas (of which Kuwait was the largest supplier for the 2003 Iraq war), an estimate of oil used by private military contractors and military-leased vehicles and an estimate of the amount of bunker fuel used by naval vessels. By his calculation, the US military consumes as much as one million barrels of oil per day and contributes 5 percent of current global warming emissions. Keep in mind that the military has 1.4 million active duty people, or .0002 percent of the world's population, generating 5 percent of climate pollution. Yet, even this comparison understates the extreme military impact on climate change. Military fuel is more polluting because of the fuel type used for aviation. CO2 emissions from jet fuel are larger possibly triple - per gallon than those from diesel and oil. Further, aircraft exhaust has unique polluting effects that result in greater warming effect by per unit of fuel used. Radiative effects from jet exhaust, including nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, soot and water vapor exacerbate the warming effect of the CO2 exhaust emissions.(6) Perversely, then, the US military consumes fossil fuel beyond compare to any other institutional and per capita consumption in order to preserve strategic access to oil - a lunacy instigated by a series of executive decisions. Short History of Militarizing Energy Ten of 11 US recessions since World War 11 have been preceded by oil price spikes ... Maintaining low and stable oil prices is a political imperative associated with modern petroleum-based economies. In 1945 the US military built an air base at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the start of securing permanent American access to newly discovered Middle East oil. President Roosevelt had negotiated a quid pro quo with the Saudi family: military protection in exchange for cheap oil for

US markets and military. Eisenhower possessed great prescience about the postWorld War II rise of a permanent warbased industry dictating national policy and the need for citizen vigilance and engagement to curb the "militaryindustrial" complex. Yet, he made a fateful decision on energy policy, which set our country and the world on a course from which we must find our way back. The 1952 blue-ribbon Paley Commission Report proposed that the US build the economy on solar energy sources. The report also offered a strong negative assessment of nuclear energy and called for "aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy" as well as research and development on wind and biomass. In 1953, the new President Eisenhower ignored the report recommendation and inaugurated "Atoms for Peace," touting nuclear power as the world's new energy miracle that would be "too cheap to meter." This decision not only embarked the country (and world) on a fateful course of nuclear power, but it also affixed the centrality of oil, gas and coal within the US economy. By the late 1970s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution threatened US access to oil in the Middle East, leading to President Carter's 1980 State of the Union warmongering doctrine. The Carter Doctrine holds that any threat to US access to Middle East oil would be resisted "by any means necessary, including military force." Carter put teeth into his doctrine by creating the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, whose purpose was combat operations in the Persian Gulf area when necessary. Ronald Reagan ramped up the militarization of oil with the formation of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), whose raison d'etre was to ensure access to oil, diminish Soviet Union influence in the region and control political regimes in the region for our national security interests. With growing reliance on oil from Africa and the Caspian Sea region, the US has since augmented its military capabilities in those regions. In 2003, Carter's doctrine of force when necessary was carried out with "shock and awe," in what was the most intensive and profligate use of fossil fuel the world has ever witnessed. Recall, too, that as

20

Baghdad fell, invading US troops ignored the looting of schools, hospitals and a nuclear power facility as well as the ransacking of national museums and burning of the National Library and Archives holding peerless, irreplaceable documentation of the "cradle of civilization." The US military did, however, immediately seize and guard the Iraqi Oil Ministry Headquarters and positioned 2,000 soldier to safeguard oilfields.(7) First things first. Many factors have converged and clarified over time to support the proposition that, at its core, the Iraq war was a war over oil. Eliminating weapons of mass destruction, deposing a tyrannical dictator, rooting out terrorism linked to 9/11, employing gunboat diplomacy to instill democracy and human rights - all were largely foils for oil. Alan Greenspan put it squarely: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everybody knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."(8) As we near peak oil production, that is, the point of diminishing returns for oil exploration and production and higher oil prices, OPEC countries' share of global production "will rise from 46 percent in 2007 to 56 percent in 2030." Iraq has the third-largest reserves of oil; Iraq and Kazakhstan are "two of the top four countries with the largest [petroleum] production increases forecast from 2000 to 2030. The Middle East and Central Asia are, predictably, epicenters of US military operations and wars. A 2006 report on national security and US oil dependency released by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that the US should maintain "a strong military posture that permits suitably rapid deployment to the [Persian Gulf] region" for at least 20 years. US military professionals concur and are preparing for the prospect of "large-scale armed struggle" over access to energy resources. Where We Stand Our national security has been reduced in large part to energy security, which has led us to militarizing our access to oil through establishing a military presence across the oil-bearing regions of the world and instigating armed conflict in Iraq, sustaining it in Afghanistan and provoking

it in Libya. The air war in Libya has given the new US Africa Command (AFRICOM) - itself another extension of the Carter Doctrine - some spotlight and muscle. A few commentators have concluded that the NATO war in Libya is a justifiable humanitarian military intervention. The more trenchant judgment, in my view, is that the air war violated the UN Security Council Resolution 1973, the US Constitution and the War Powers Act; and that it sets a precedent and "model for how the United States wields force in other countries where its interests are threatened," to quote administration officials. The air war in Libya is another setback to non-militarized diplomacy; it marginalized the African Union and it sets a course for more military intervention in Africa when US interests are at stake. Air war a model for future wars? If so, a death knell for the planet. This insatiable militarism is the single greatest institutional contributor to the growing natural disasters intensified by global climate change. Postscript In August 2010, as I was conceiving this series "War and the True Tragedy of the Commons," wildfires caused by drought and heat wave were consuming huge swaths of Russia and choking Moscow with air pollution. A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences warned that fire-induced winds could carry radioactive particles hundreds of miles from the burning forest around Chernobyl, reaching cities in Russia and even in Eastern Europe. The same risk exists for regions elsewhere contaminated with radioactive waste and jeopardized by uncontrollable wildfires. At the same time as the Russian fires, more than one in ten Pakistanis were uprooted, rendered food dependent and endangered by disease from the worst floods in recorded history, floods which engulfed one-fifth of the country from the northwest region to the south. Pakistan - a highly militarized nuclear power with tense relations with its nuclear neighbor India, whose border area with Afghanistan is a war zone, and within whose boundaries the CIA is conducting a drone war - prioritizes militarism over development. It ranks 15 in global military strength and 141 out of 182 countries in the Human Development Index.

In summer 2011, as I was completing this series, forest fires burned almost 50,000 acres in and around the nuclear weapons production and waste storage facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Among the endangered radioactive materials and waste were as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutoniumcontaminated waste stored in fabric tents above ground, awaiting transport to a lowlevel radiation dumpsite in southern New Mexico. Two months later, Vermont suffered its worst ever floods and flood damage, with no part of the state untouched, from Tropical Storm Irene considered to be one of the ten costliest disasters in US history. Coincident with these environmental tragedies intensified by global warming, is the ongoing tradeoff in the US federal budget between militarized defense and genuine human and environmental security. The United States contributes more than 30 percent of global warming gases to the atmosphere, generated by five percent of the world's population and US militarism. The pieces of the US federal budget pie that fund education, energy, environment, social services, housing and new job creation, taken together, receive less funding than the military/defense budget. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has called the military budget a taxpayer-supported jobs program and argues for reprioritizing federal spending on jobs in green energy, education and infrastructure - the real national security. The United States has the wealth (currently larding the defense budget) and the technical capacity to revolutionize our energy economy and turn it within a few decades into an economy based on efficiency and renewable energy sources, thus removing a critical demand factor of our Goliath military. How costly would it be to eliminate underlying causes of war and injustice, such as poverty and gender inequality, and to restore the natural environment? In his most recent book "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," Lester Brown estimates that eradicating poverty, educating women, providing reproductive resources and restoring forests worldwide would cost one-third of the US 2008 defense budget. The issue is not public monies. Another ferocious demand factor is the octopus of defense industry companies that have

21

spread their tentacles to nearly all of the states and control the majority of Congressionals. Thus, another vital scarce resource - some mineral in a contested seabed, for example - could replace petroleum and become the next flashpoint for more military build-up and response, unless that military-industrial complex is neutered. Perhaps the most elusive driving factor of war is the values that underpin the tradition and habit of militarized solutions. War mirrors the culture of a country. US militarism - from its training, tactics and logistics to its reasons for going to war and its weapons of war - is distinctly shaped by core elements of American identity. These determining cultural forces are, according to military historian Victor Davis Hanson: manifest destiny; frontier mentality; rugged individualism and what he calls a "muscular independence"; unfettered market capitalism; the ideal of meritocracy (no matter what one's class, one can rise to the top in the US military); and a fascination with machines, modernity and mobility. All converge to generate bigger, better and more destructive war technology. He adds that the integration of military into society is smoothed through the Second Amendment right to bear arms. This cultural competence for high-tech war, with its origins in our past annihilation of Native Americans, may be our society's nemesis unless we do critical soul searching about our cultural and personal values and actively engage in transforming them. There are a plentitude of cross currents in our society that have profoundly challenged the dominant cultural profile limned by militarist Hanson: the women's and civil rights movements, the anti-war and peace movements, public intellectuals and progressive media, peace and justice studies, progressive labor and health workers, the coop and Transition Town movements and the handful of progressive politicians, among others. The challenge is how to build voice, social cohesion and public influence for our shared values of a sense of community, connection to nature,

concern for the exploited and thirst for equity and justice against the dominant market messages of wealth, social prestige, image, power through dominance and meeting conflict with force. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Martin Luther King Resources for Education and Action Bring the War Dollars Home, a growing movement at the state and city/town level, uses the National Priorities Project data to make the case for ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and redirecting defense spending to genuine domestic security. See here and here. National Priorities Project is a think tank and advocacy group that provides research designed to influence US federal spending priorities. Includes data on costs of wars, local taxes for war and tradeoffs. Progressive Caucus Budget for 2012, also known as The People's Budget, is an alternative budget offered by the 81member Congressional Progressive Caucus that takes steps toward a saner role for government while reducing the deficit more and faster than either Ryan's "Plan for Prosperity" or Obama's plan. Peace and Conflict Studies Programs: Two hundred and fifteen accredited peace and conflict studies graduate programs and grad schools on the leading graduate school web site. Peace and Justice Studies Association War Tax Resistance: See the web site of War Tax Resistance/War Resisters League Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was founded in 1915 during World War I. WILPF works to achieve, through peaceful means, world disarmament, full rights for women, racial

and economic justice, an end to all forms of violence. Footnotes: 1. Barry Sanders (2009), "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," Oakland, California: AK Press, p.39. 2. Barry Sanders (2009), "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," Oakland, California: AK Press, p.51. 3. Barry Sanders (2009), "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," Oakland, California: AK Press, pps.50,61 for data in this section. 4. Units of carbon dioxide equivalent to combined greenhouse gas emissions. 5. This figure is conservative because there were no reliable numbers on the military consumption of naval bunker fuels for the transport of fuel and troops. Nor was there data on the use or release of intensive greenhouse gas chemicals in war, including halon, an ozone-depleting fire extinguishing chemical banned in the US since 1992 for civilian production and use, but allowed for DoD "critical mission" use. 6. George Monbiot (2006), "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning," cited in Sanders, p.72. 7. Chalmers Johnson (2010), "Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope," New York: Metropolitan Books. pp.40-51. 8. Quoted in Liska and Perrin, p.9.

22

Strategic Petroleum, Indeed

Majors Buy SPR Crude as Supply Continues to Slide By Nick Hodge Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
Late last month, the International Energy Agency announced it was releasing 60 million barrels of crude oil into world markets. Obama graciously pledged 30 million of it from our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). You should find our wanton oil disbursement a bit peculiar, especially since your own government defines the SPR as the nation's first line of defense against an interruption in petroleum supplies. So tapping it inherently implies we're facing an interruption in petroleum supply. From its creation after the 1973 OPEC oil embargo up until this summer, the reserve had only been tapped twice: We released 17 million barrels in conjunction with our invasion of Iraq in 1991. We released another 11 million barrels after Hurricane Katrina knocked out 95% of crude production and 88% of natural gas output in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005. This time only the third time ever we released more oil than in the two previous events combined. What could be so dire that we need to invoke the nation's first line of defense against an interruption in petroleum supplies? All Tapped Out Bloomberg ran this headline this morning: Middle East Oil Rises on Signs Saudis Won't Offer Extra Supply But ask anyone who's not a Big Oil employee or a politician, like Goldman Sachs, and they'll say the Saudis can't offer extra supply. As I told you this weekend, Goldman is adamant about its claim that Saudi oil production peaked in 2008 at 9.5 million barrels per day and will never reach that level again. And it isn't only Goldman that thinks so. I've told you before about Sadad AlHusseini, former vice president of the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (aka Aramco), who said: Since leaving Aramco, he's become something of a Peak Oil prophet. Given some of the stuff he's said in recent interviews, I'm surprised the collective global oil industry doesn't have a price on his head. He recently offered up this gem when asked why there is so much denial about the world approaching Peak Oil production: If you look at published information for example, British Petroleums annual statistical report it very clearly shows that from 2003 forward, oil production has hardly increased. So the information is there. If you look at some of the advertising that Chevron has been putting out for years now, they clearly say were half-way through the worlds reserves. The information is there. The facts are there. Many of the so-called reserves are in fact resources. They're not delineated, they're not accessible, theyre not available for production. Sadad knows the rest of the world is in trouble, too.

23

Oil prices did not jump four-fold over a three- or four-year period for any reason other than a shortage of supply. Yes, there may have been some recent volatility in 2008, but the price trend started climbing way back in 2002-2003. So, these are realities and the push-back is a sense that somehow the market is not able to deal with these realities, that somehow people cant cope with these realities. Speaking of Chevron... After the market closed yesterday, Chevron announced it expects second quarter earnings to rise over the previous quarter, thanks to higher oil prices. So it's all good, right? Higher oil prices, higher profits, happy shareholders. Everybody can rest easy... Until you look more closely at the details. Chevron's U.S. production in the first two months of the quarter (April/May) was down 1.8% from a year ago. Internationally, output decreased 2.4%. So they produced less oil but made more money because prices are higher. If that's not a Peak Oil symptom, I don't know what is. It's the same market dynamic that takes effect when any good is scarce, like those last few tickets to the Super Bowl or an award-winning Broadway play. And that brings us circuitously back to the strategic petroleum reserve and the 30 million barrels we're releasing from it. Remember, that's the most oil we've ever released at one time. So there must be a

serious and imminent threat to global supply. A quick look at who bought that oil and how much they paid serves as further evidence. Yesterday the Department of Energy announced it had signed 28 contracts to sell the crude at prices ranging from $104.97 to $109.26 per barrel. As I write this, oil is trading for $95, begging the question: Why are the companies buying this SPR crude willing to pay a $15 premium to current prices? There is only one answer. They think oil prices are headed much higher. Here's who bought some of the oil: Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM), Shell (NYSE: RDS-A), BP (NYSE: BP), ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP), Valero (NYSE: VLO), Tesoro (NYSE: TSO), Murphy Oil (NYSE: MUR), Sunoco (NYSE: SUN), Marathon Oil (NYSE: MRO), Barclays (NYSE: BCS), Hess Energy Trading Co., Trafigura, JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM), Vitoil, Plains Marketing. As I just showed you via the Chevron example, these companies are not increasing production. Production is declining. So they're more than willing to pay a small premium for easy supply to keep their refineries and profits flowing. The banks, on the other hand, have a different motivation... Since the government doesn't ban purchasers of SPR crude from storing it

(even though that's contrary to its intent but we're talking about the government, so what's new), banks can buy the crude, sit on it, and sell it later for a higher price. And that's clearly what JPMorgan, Hess Energy Trading, Barclays, and Trafigura are going to do. Higher oil prices are coming, folks. And the only way to prevent them from having ill effects on your bottom line is to put them to use for you just like those banks are going to do. Before you go, let me offer one more kernel of wisdom that undeniably proves we're at a major crossroads for the oil industry. The last time the SPR was opened back in 2005, the government planned on selling 30 million barrels. It could only sell 11 million barrels because of lackluster demand. This time, companies were banging down the door to buy easy oil at a premium. Just as these oil majors and banks are executing their contingency plans for the end of oil (by taking maximum profits from what's left), you might consider doing the same. Call it like you see it, Nick Hodge Editor, Energy and Capital

24

Nine Government Investments That Made Us an Industrial Economic Leader

The U.S. does have an investment problem, but the blame lies with Big Business, not Big Government. By William Lazonick Thursday, 09/8/2011 - 11:14 am http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/09/08/nine-government-investments-that-made-us-an-industrial-economicleader-57814/
Remember when the United States led the world in industrial technology? The peak of U.S. supremacy was back in the 1960s, when the military-industrial complex was in full force. Then in the mid-1970s the Japanese mounted a successful economic challenge to the United States in a range of industries, including steel, machine tools, memory chips, consumer electronics, and automobiles. Since then, among Asian nations, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and India have become major global competitors in industries that the United States used to dominate. In historical retrospect, U.S. industrial power has never been quite the same. A prominent explanation for the competitive success of Japan and other Asian nations, first argued by the late Chalmers Johnson in the 1980s, was the crucial support for industrial investment provided by the developmental state. In contrast, Johnson and others characterized U.S. government involvement in the economy as merely regulatory. The United States was no longer number one, so the argument went, because its government would not invest sufficiently in the physical infrastructure and human capital that global competition now required. The history of U.S. government support of industry, however, presents a very different picture. Far from eschewing a developmental role, it is plausible to argue that from the 19th century up to the present the United States has possessed the worlds foremost developmental state. Lets look at some highlights of that history: 1. Railroads: Under the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 through 1866, the U.S. government handed railroad companies 103 million acres of public land that could be sold or used as loan collateral to finance the construction of transcontinental railroad lines. These land grants were equivalent to 5.34 percent of the size of the continental United States and greater than the size of California. Universities: Under the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the U.S. government gifted every state in the nation 30,000 acres of land as an endowment for an institution of higher education for the agricultural and mechanical arts. Besides many eponymous state universities, Cornell, MIT, Purdue, and Rutgers all originated as land-grant colleges. The Morrill Act of 1890 provided each state with annual federal financial support for the colleges. By the early 20th century, the success of mechanical arts education within this public system compelled elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale to launch engineering courses and degrees. 3. Agriculture: The Hatch Act of 1887 provided federal funding for agricultural experiment stations, most of them set up in proximity to land-grant colleges, to engage in state-of-the-art research that could increase the productivity of the nations farms. The SmithLever Act of 1914 funded cooperative extension services, including the employment of thousands of county agents, to diffuse the latest knowledge to farmers. Aircraft: In the 1920s, the U.S. government played the leading

2.

4.

25

role in not only supporting aeronautics research but also promoting air mail services. Under the Contract Air Mail Act of 1925, the U.S. Postmaster General gave subsidized air mail contracts to a select number of commercial airline companies to encourage the airlines to demand safer, quieter, and larger planes from aircraft manufacturers so that passenger travel would increase. Five years later, when little progress in the development of passenger-friendly aircraft had been made, the Air Mail Act of 1930 changed the subsidy from the amount of mail carried on a plane to the size of the plane in which mail was carried, even if the plane carried only one letter. This generous government incentive scheme worked: By 1933, plane manufacturers Boeing and Douglas had each developed the modern all-metal, two-engine monoplane for the airlines, and air travel for people took off. 5. Jet engines: The turbojet engine, invented in Britain in the mid1930s by Royal Air Force officer Frank Whittle, was given to the U.S company General Electric (GE) in 1942 to develop for use in World War II. GE was not in the aviation business, but, as the leading producer of electric power equipment, had been doing gas-turbine research since 1903. The jet engine was not put into service during World War II, but after the war GE continued to develop it for the U.S. military and also shared the technology with Pratt & Whitney, the leading producer of commercial airplane engines. In 1974, GE entered the commercial jet engine business through a joint venture, CFM International, with SNECMA, a French state-owned company, to provide engines to midsized Airbus planes. GE is now the worlds leading producer of commercial jet engines. College-educated labor force: While the land-grant college acts

created a national system of higher education in the late 19th century, it was only in the aftermath of World War II that a large proportion of the population gained ready access to it. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemans Readjustment Act, popularly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, which provided funding to U.S. veterans of World War II to obtain college educations, buy homes, and start businesses. By the time the initial program ended in 1956, almost 50 percent of the 16 million veterans of World War II had received education and training benefits under the G. I. Bill. 7. Interstate highway system: Under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the government committed to pay for 90 percent of the cost of building 41,000 miles of interstate highways. President Eisenhower justified this expenditure on the grounds that the highways were needed to defend the United States in case of a military attack on U.S. soil. Whatever the rationale for this investment, the system has provided businesses and households with a fundamental physical infrastructure for civilian purposes. Computers and the Internet: A 1999 study, Funding a Revolution: Government Support of for Computing Research, stated, Federal funding not only financed development of most of the nations early digital computers, but also has continued to enable breakthroughs in areas as wide ranging as computer time-sharing, the Internet, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality as the industry has matured. Among other things, the study details the now wellknown role of the U.S. government in developing the ARPANET and the NSFNET for over three decades before it became available commercially as the Internet.

9.

Life sciences: The 2010 budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for life sciences research was $30.9 billion, almost double in real terms the budget of 1993 and triple in real terms the budget of 1985. From the founding of the first national institute in 1938 through 2010, NIH spending totaled $738 billion in 2010 dollars. The 2011 budget is $30.9 billion, and the request for 2012 is $32 billion. In addition, federal and state governments provide many subsidies to the medical field. For example, the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 has been critical to the development of the biopharmaceutical industry.

One could go on to talk about the U.S. governments support for nanotechnology and renewable energy, among other programs. None of these government programs is a secret. Indeed, prominent corporate executives lobby for them (and you wont find the Tea Party attacking them). Yet there is a widespread belief that the U.S. government plays at most a regulatory role in the economy. Recent research has exposed this myth. In State of Innovation: The U.S. Governments Role in Technology Development, based on a project funded by the Ford Foundation, Fred Block and Matthew R. Keller have thrown the spotlight on the invisible developmental state. Also attacking the myth is a pamphlet, The Entrepreneurial State, produced by Mariana Mazzucato, my colleague in projects funded by the European Commission and the Institute for New Economic Thinking. In a similar vein, the Breakthrough Institute has documented the history of U.S. government support for technology and innovation. Based on research on the microelectronics and biotech industries, I have argued that entrepreneurial ventures such as those found in Silicon Valley and many other U.S. high-tech districts could not exist without the U.S. developmental state. So why has the role of the state in the development of the U.S. economy been hidden from view? No doubt, many leading free market ideologues are just

8.

6.

26

ignorant of U.S. history. But its more than that. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, often with the Cold War as a motivation, business interests both provided a fairer share of taxes to support developmental expenditures by the U.S. government and invested complementary corporate resources in physical equipment and human capital in the United States. Today, business interests remain happy to have the government spend this money, but they refuse to pay a fair share of the taxes to support it, while the business investments in productive capability that build on U.S.

government spending on science and technology are increasingly being made overseas. Meanwhile, the prime type of corporate investment within the United States over the past two decades has been the stock buyback. Trillions have been spent jacking up stock prices and, in the process, inflating executive pay. Yes, America has an investment problem. But the problem is big business, not big government.

William Lazonick is director of the UMass Center for Industrial Competitiveness and president of The Academic-Industry Research Network. His book, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States (Upjohn Institute 2009) was awarded the 2010 Schumpeter Prize.

27

A Time Frame For Systemic Collapse

By Peter Goodchild 30 August, 2011 http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild300811.htm
A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text (see link below). The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that curve. Then one can look at the chapter on electricity, which as Richard Duncan says will be the first really distinct, on-off type of indicator. The next parallel can be found in the chapter on economics, which mentions two "phases," divided by the point at which money as such is no longer an important means of exchange; past examples occurred with the crash of the USSR, and in Weimar Germany. In the chapter on famine, the fall of population appears as a parallel to the fall in fossil fuels. Some critics have said that the two do not necessarily go together -or, rather, fall together. But they do, for a very simple mathematical reason. Fossil fuels are the source of more than 90 percent of the energy -- in the strict "physics" sense of the word -- in modern industrial society. If we take away 90 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 90 percent of the population. (If we take away 100 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 100 percent of the population.) No, we cannot replace that 90 percent with some "alternative" form of energy, as is explained in chapter one, because there isn't enough of any alternative to make much difference. The same first chapter also illustrates why a voluntary reduction in population cannot work. (For that matter, neither would a mandatory reduction in population, and for the same reason.) Again, it's simple arithmetic. Oil production will fall, over the next few decades, by about 3 percent annually, and if instead we say 2 percent or 4 percent the final result isn't much different. But even if every woman on earth stopped having children from this day forward, there would still not be a 3 or 2 or 4 percent annual reduction in population. It can be seen, therefore, that the curve of estimated past and future global oil production is not merely one of a myriad of problems with which mankind will have to deal. It is the time scale with which most other problems can be measured, and it is the cause of most other problems. But if anyone really needs a magic number, a good choice would be 2030. That's the date at which, with a 3 percent annual decline in oil production, the year's production will be half of that in the peak year. And half of peak oil means half of everything else in human society. A very important half will be population, because the other half will have died of famine. And that's the one item that very few people can mentally assimilate. Reference: Goodchild, Peter. The Coming Chaos (abridged). http://bravenewworld.in/wpcontent/uploads/2011/07/CHAOSABRIDGED.pdf

28

The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny

Donald M. Scott, Professor of History Donald Scott was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1985-86. He has taught at the University of Chicago, North Carolina State University, Brown University, the New School, and is currently Dean of Social Science and Professor of History at Queens College / City University of New York. He is the author of From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850 (1978); America's Families: A Documentary History (1982, with Bernard Wishy); The Pursuit of Liberty (1996, with R. J. Wilson, et al.); and he is the coeditor of The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture (1993). He is currently at work on a book entitled Theatres of the Mind: Knowledge and Democracy in 19th-Century America. Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm
In 1845, an unsigned article in a popular American journal, a long standing Jacksonian publication, the Democratic Review, issued an unmistakable call for American expansionism. Focusing mainly on bringing the Republic of Texas into the union, it declared that expansion represented the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. Thus a powerful American slogan was born. Manifest Destiny became first and foremost a call and justification for an American form of imperialism, and neatly summarized the goals of the Mexican War. It claimed that America had a destiny, manifest, i.e., selfevident, from God to occupy the North American continent south of Canada (it also claimed the right to the Oregon territory including the Canadian portion). Manifest Destiny was also clearly a racial doctrine of white supremacy that granted no native American or nonwhite claims to any permanent possession of the lands on the North American continent and justified white American expropriation of Indian lands. (Manifest Destiny was also a key slogan deployed in the United States imperial ventures in the 1990s and early years of the twentieth century that led to U.S. possession or control of Hawaii and the Philippine Islands.) But Manifest Destiny was not simply a cloak for American imperialism and a justification for Americas territorial ambitions. It also was firmly anchored in a long standing and deep sense of a special and unique American Destiny, the belief that in the words of historian Conrad Cherry, America is a nation called to a special destiny by God. The notion that there was some providential purpose to the European discovery and eventual conquest of the land masses discovered by Christopher Columbus was present from the beginning. Both the Spanish and the French monarchs authorized and financed exploration of the New World because, among other things, they considered it their divinely appointed mission to spread Christianity to the New World by converting the natives to Christianity. Coming later to the venture, the British and especially the New England Puritans carried with them a demanding sense of Providential purpose. John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and unique Providential mission. On Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630, Winthrop delivered the blueprint for what Perry Miller has dubbed an errand into the wilderness which set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny. Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place, Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to emulate. Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission, he declared, adding if the Lord shall please to hear us and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission and will expect a strict performance of the Articles contained in it. He went on to specify more full what fidelity to this commission entailed: the people of New England must follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities. But it is near the close of the speech that he coined the phrase that has been invoked again and again (most recently by President Ronald Reagan) to express the idea of Americas providential uniqueness and destiny. If we are faithful to our mission, we shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when tens of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us. In the decades following Winthrops speech most New England divines preached less about New Englands divine mission, than issue deep, laments Jeremiads, subsequent historians have called themabout how far New Englanders had fallen from fulfilling the requirements of their Covenant with God and how all the woes and turmoil that had befallen themPrince Phillips war, the loss of New Englands charter, the witchcraft phenomenon, droughts and dreadful winters, etc.were the signs and result of Gods wrath over their failings.

29

However, in the midst of what subsequently came to be referred to as the Great Awakening (but at the time was considered an extra-ordinary outpouring of Gods saving grace) that spread across New England and the other British colonies in the 1740s, the idea that God had chosen America for a special destiny was resurrected in a new form. In the midst of the Awakening, the great New England theologian and revivalist, Jonathan Edwards wrote that the latter day glory in short, the Millennium, the end times that would bring the second coming of Christ to earth and spread of the King of God across the world, would begin in America. It is not likely that this work of Gods spirit [the revivals] so extraordinary and wonderful, Edwards asserted, is the dawning, or at least a prelude of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in scripture, which in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind. Leading preachers of the Second Great Awakening that swept across the United States over much of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher) and Charles Grandison Finney, reasserted the claim that America would be the site of the millennium and that the Awakening was its sure sign. They, however, gave their idea of the millennium a particular American twist. Just as Winthrop tied the idea of New Englands providential mission to the character of the Christian commonwealth they were charged to establish, so too did millennialists like Beecher describe the society that would bring forth the millennium as the American republic, thus conjoining the coming of the millennium with the spread and triumph of American liberty and democracy. In his 1832 tract, The Plea for the West, Beecher stated that at first he had thought Edwards prediction chimerical, but now thought that all providential developments since, and all the existing signs of the times, lend corroboration to it. But if it is by the march of revolution and civil liberty, that the way of the Lord is to be prepared, where shall the central energy be found, and from what nation shall the renovating power go forth? Beechers

answer was clear: this nation is, in the providence of God, destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world. The relation between God and nation, in this millennialist formulation, is both subtle and somewhat ambiguous. The fusion between Gods will and the nations democratic character gives divine sanction to the United States secular arrangements of liberty and democracy. At the same time, it makes the nation, itself, an instrument in the coming of the millennium. Moreover, especially in situations of conflict, the claim that God was on ones side often involved demonizing the enemy. For Beecher, the demonic enemy or other was a Roman Catholic conspiracy to spread Romanism across the American west. It was the Mormons, however, who gave the fullest expression to the idea of America as the site of the millennium. The prophesies and Book of Mormon delivered to Joseph Smith and his subsequent organization of the Mormon Church marked the beginning of the end times as the formal name of the new religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes unmistakably clear. After violent persecution in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, Brigham Young led the Mormons into the wilderness of Utah and there established a new city upon a hill, a new Zion which as Conrad Cherry put it was the Holy City in the wilderness [that] was for Young the gathering place for the Saints from which they would radiate influences that would turn the entire American continent, and eventually the world into Gods Zion. The idea that God had chosen the British colonies for a special destiny received a major reformulation with the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States as a new and unique, independent nation, a Novo Ordo Seclaruma new secular order. The clergy, especially the Calvinistic New England clergy, was very much a Patriot clergy that probably played a greater role in mobilizing support for the revolution than the innumerable anti-British pamphlets produced between 1765 and 1776. For the most part, their advocacy of

the patriot cause was cast in familiar form of the Jeremiad: sermons insisted that God had visited the injustices and tyrannies Parliament and Crown employed to reduce the colonists to slavery, because of the awful sinfulness into which they had fallen. God required repentance and a new fidelity to the Sacred Cause of Liberty. By 1789, with the adoption of the Constitution and the inauguration of George Washington as president, the new nation itself was invested with a special meaning and mission. Americans did not consider their new nation to be simply another nation among nations, but a providentially blessed entity charged to develop and maintain itself as the beacon of liberty and democracy to the world. As is well known, not only was the United States remarkably diverse religiously, its new Constitution, with the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, also established a clear separation of church and state, expressly forbidding the institution of an established Church. It was formally a secular nationthough at the same time a deeply religious society sustained by Divine will, whose citizens were expected to subscribe to its founding principals with religious like devotion. In effect, what emerged was a sacralized notion of the new nation and the development of what various scholars have termed a powerful Civil Religion, a particular form of cultural nationalism to which all true Americans, whether native or immigrant born and whatever their personal religious beliefs and affiliations, were expected to adhere. In this sense the United States can be considered a creedal society, unified less by geographical boundaries which continually shifted, and more by a set of specified doctrines inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, to which all citizens of the nation gave their allegiance. The new democratic republic, proclaimed as unique, had been ordained by God and endowed with a special mission to be the new city upon a hill to shine the beacon of liberty upon the worldand, at times if deemed necessary, to spread its form of democracy by force of arms to other parts of the world. Quickly were the revolutionary leaders, especially George Washington

30

and Thomas Jefferson, elevated into Founding Fathers, and the Declaration and Constitution turned into almost sacred relics. Essential to the story, of course, was the apotheosis of the god-like Washington into an American Moses who led his people out of bondage into a land of liberty. Thus was the new nation and, to some extent, its people, chosen. While such familiar language as promised land and city upon a hill are only biblical allusions, as religious historian John Wilson has put it, the master image or figure which frames and sets their true content, is the type of Israel as Gods chosen people. Thus the apparently secularized expressions [of these phrases] have a deeper resonance which locates the origins of the American mission very precisely even when they are not explicitly elaborated. Such are the basic outlines of the idea of Americas chosenness and providential destiny and mission that not only underlay the invocation of the nations Manifest Destiny as the rationale for the United States to extend its boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. It is also the constellation of ideas that has informed American nationalism and its actions at home and abroad to this day. As noted, it was explicitly used it to justify the Spanish American War and its accompanying imperialist goals. President Woodrow Wilson invoked it to call Americans to fight to make the world safe for democracy, as did President Franklin Roosevelt, when in World War II he rallied the American public behind the war against Fascist and Nazi Europeans and imperial Japan. It was also a mainstay of the Cold War: in fact, the phrase under God was only added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 at the height of the Cold War. The sense of American uniqueness and mission also underlay John F. Kennedys inaugural address. And President George W. Bush, considering himself to be an agent of divine will, has defended his policies in Iraq by invoking the idea that it is Americas duty and destiny to conquer terrorism and to secure democracy for Iraq and help spread it to other nations of the Middle East.

Not surprisingly, however, it remained for Abraham Lincoln to provide the most complex but nonetheless clear statement of the idea that America has a sacred duty to itself and to the world to preserve and protect liberty and democracy. In 1837, as a young man of 28, Lincoln gave an address to the Springfield, Illinois Lyceum. It was a time of great social and political turmoil. Illinois was riven with violence over the question of the abolition of slavery. In Alton, Illinois an antiabolitionist mob recently had murdered the abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, destroyed his printing press and burned his office and house. In this atmosphere of intense political strife, Lincoln used his Lyceum address to call his fellow Illinoisans (and Americans) to turn to the basic democratic and liberal tenets the American national creedthe American Civil Religionand embrace them and hold them as deeply as they held their private religious beliefs. Only such a common national faith, he argued, could provide the real and lasting foundation that would hold the sprawling, diverse, and conflict-ridden nation together. During the Civil War Lincoln found these beliefs sharply challenged and at the same time gave them their most eloquent and powerful expression. Lincoln had always kept his questing and often skeptical spirituality closely guarded, but as the war ground relentlessly on, his beliefs and speeches took on not a sectarian but a deeply Old Testament tone. The cadence and words of his Gettysburg Address accentuate his message: the Union, the last best hope of earth, was fighting for the sacred cause of liberty. It is for the living, he declared, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before usthat from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last true measure of devotion . . . that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom . . . and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. In his brief second inaugural address, delivered only six weeks before his assassination, Lincoln explored the relationship between American freedom and Divine Will. He knew that nations

often, if not always, claimed God or the Gods for their side. So, acknowledging that neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained, Lincoln addressed the fact that both North and South invoked God as their partisan: Both read the same Bible and Pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. But he made it unmistakably clear that though he did not and could not really know Gods Will, he did know that God intended to end slavery, no matter what it took. Lincoln powerfully invoked a Jeremiad like vision of an all powerful and deeply offended God that would reign woe down upon those by peoples through whom the offense cometh. If we suppose that American slavery is one of those offences, he declared, which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, Lincoln continued, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsmans two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said, . . . so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. Here it all is: the idea that the United States represents the last best hope thatthe belief that an all powerful, not fully comprehendible God, governs the affairs of humankind, and that this God held the whole nation, not just the South, accountable for the existence of slavery in its midst, for the violation of its appointed mission. Finally, unlike most proponents of the idea that America is a nation called to a special destiny by God, he refrains from claiming God as the agent of Northern victory, even though as the second inaugural makes clear he had come to believe the Almighty was the ultimate agent of the mighty scourge of war that

31

He had visited upon the nation for the sin of slavery. Guiding Student Discussion At first glance, it may seem rather difficult to engage students in a discussion of religion and Manifest Destiny. I usually do not like to start with contemporary issues and perspectives or with the students beliefs, but on this topic I have found it to be effective. Teaching strategies will obviously depend on the particular composition of your classes. In a classroom in Queens, New York (the most diverse political jurisdiction in the country) well over half its students or their parents are likely to be born outside of the United States and at least half will adhere to faiths other than Christianity. Clearly a very different student population than a teacher in Troy, Ohio, for example, might face. Perhaps the best initial strategy is to open up the issues the topic raises: questions of nationalism and cultural unity; questions of the relationship between belief in an all powerful, superintending God and the actions of nations; questions of what happens when nations claim an expansive mission and justify this with a claim to Divine favor? You might begin by asking your students if they think that the various peoples of the United States with all their ethnic, religious, and racial diversity subscribe to anything that might be called a common faith and what beliefs it consists of and how it operates as a faith, does it seem to require some kind of belief in God. You

could ask how many of them participate in various rituals of Americas supposed Civil Religion, e.g. Fourth of July, Memorial Day, the Pledge of Allegiance. At this point a particularly astute student might point out that the stars and stripes of the flag only refer to the original 13 and the present 50 states of the union and that the flag doesnt seem to have any religious references at all. Do they consider the United States to be unique in its basic values of liberty and democracy and to have a mission to preserve and promote them? Do many or any of them believe that God does play a role in the action and fate of nations? What have been various consequences when the United States (and other nations) claims a special providence and mission from God? This discussion should lead into a more historically oriented discussion that can best be conducted through the use of key primary documents. Winthrops speech on the Arbella, the Declaration of Independence, and Lincolns Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address work especially well. Conrad Cherry, Gods New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, is a superb anthology with three centuries of primary documents on religious interpretations of American destiny. The introductions to the various sections and documents are also especially helpful. Scholars Debate The vast scholarly literature that bears on this subject is less a debate than a range of

works on different periods and from different disciplines and perspectives. An indispensable source and the best place to begin is Conrad Cherry, Gods New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (1998). On Manifest Destiny itself, two older books, Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (1958) and Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in America (1963) remain useful. But see also Sam Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds. Manifest Destiny and Empire (1977). Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956) remains an essential source for the Puritan sense of mission. The concept of Civil Religion was introduced into American scholarship by Robert N. Bellah, Civil Religion in America, Daedalus, Winter 1967. Sidney E. Mead, The Nation With the Soul of a Church, Church History, Sept. 1967, is a beautifully written and illuminating article. See also John Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (1979) and Martin Marty, ed. Civil Religion, Church and State (1992). See also Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (1977); Earnest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of Americas Millennial Role (1968); and H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (1959). On particular topics, Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (1985) and James H. Moorhead, Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (1979), are particularly useful.

32

Entrepreneurial Populism
by: Mike Lux Thu Feb 03, 2011 at 13:30 http://www.openleft.com/diary/21600/entrepreneurial-populism
The progressive movement is at a challenging but fascinating time in our country's history. Even when the Democrats had a newly elected President who ran on a platform of big change, 60 votes in the Senate, a big margin of control in the House and the most progressive Speaker in history, we still had trouble getting big changes passed. We accomplished some important things, but not nearly as much or as progressively as we had hoped. Now, with a Republican House, only 53 Democratic senators, and a President who has signaled he wants to move more to the center, progressives have even less power than before. There's one other factor that even this oldschool, lefty populist needs to acknowledge at this moment in our political history: While most voters remain very angry at Wall Street, health insurance companies, big businesses that keep outsourcing jobs, and other corporate special interests, they also are very angry with a government that seems pretty dysfunctional. Swing voters in particular are generally tired of traditional political arguments, and just want political leaders who are going to be very pragmatic about actually delivering jobs and other tangible economic benefits. In this environment, progressives should not shy away from making populist arguments, but need to temper that populism with a pragmatic message about helping small businesses and manufacturers create more jobs. Things can change rapidly in politics (just ask Hosni Mubarak), but in the foreseeable future, if we want to make any progress in the legislative or regulatory arena, progressives will need to frame their ideas in new ways and look for alliances that go beyond the usual suspects. I have even given a name to this strategy: entrepreneurial populism. The idea is to continue to take on Wall Street and the other big corporate interests that have sweetheart deals with the government, but to do it on behalf of middle-class homeowners and entrepreneurial small businesses. Both Democratic base voters and working and middle-class swing voters are angry at the powers that be: a government that never seems to get things done on their behalf; Wall Street mega-bankers who crashed the economy, demanded a bailout, and never showed a moment of remorse; a media establishment more concerned with trivia and sensationalism than with anything really important; and big businesses that ship jobs overseas and have their lobbyists cut sweetheart deals with the government. But a purely angry message going after bankers and tax breaks for the wealthy only brings Democrats into a 45-45 tie with an angry anti-government message from the Republicans. Americans right now are first and foremost very pragmatic, very focused on jobs and the things that will help them make it in tough times. However angry they are at the establishment, they want to be sure that politicians are focused on pragmatic policies that create more jobs and economic growth. Voters are looking for policies that help small-business entrepreneurs get investment capital and create more jobs; policies that help manufacturing companies, big or small, create jobs here in America; and policies that invest in the jobs of the future: infrastructure, R&D, green energy, and technology. The winning political formula is entrepreneurial populism: taking on the big Wall Street banks, the jobs outsourcers, and other powerful special interests on behalf of both the middle-class workers and the business innovators who want to create American jobs here and now. President Obama's investment agenda is a good start, but it needs to be bigger and bolder in terms of job creation, and it would be far more powerful if Obama were taking on wealthy special interests who are keeping things from moving forward. I think progressives should be consciously looking for the kind of issue fights that put us in alliance with small, Main Street business, up and coming entrepreneurs and innovators, and American manufacturers whenever they are fighting the big Wall Street banks and other establishment special interests. A couple of examples come readily to mind. The first is the credit/debit card swipe-fee issue, which I have been excited to be working on for several months with a combination of retail business interests and consumer groups. Check out this recent article by Larry Nannis, who is the

33

chairman of the National Small Business Association: In Broken Market, 'Swipe' Fees Must Be Regulated America's small business owners have long endured a broken credit-card and debit-card processing market and its attendant ills. Visa (V), MasterCard (MA), and issuing banks have long charged merchants interchange-or "swipe") fees every time a consumer makes a payment with a credit or debit card. The fees are excessive for merchants of all sizes, but tier pricing disproportionately affect small companies because their transaction volume is lower than that of their large competitors. Relief is finally at hand, at least in terms of debit cards. Last year, Congressional reforms required the Federal Reserve to ensure that interchange fees charged for debit-card transactions were "reasonable and proportional" to their actual processing costs. To the great relief of the small business community, the Federal Reserve issued a proposal in December to implement the new law by July 2011. If enacted, merchants' swipe fee costs will drop considerably, from the variable percentage-based cost (an average of 1.5 percent of every transaction processed) to a fixed cost of 7 to 12 per transaction. What small business owners see as relief, however, MasterCard and others have begun referring to publicly as a type of "price control" that stifles a competitive market. The claim is remarkable, given that the whole interchange system was built on industry price-fixing perpetuated by an anticompetitive market. Swipe Fees Tripled as Costs Plunged For more than 40 years, Visa and MasterCard focused their business models on their ability to centrally set the swipe fees that card-issuing banks charge merchants that accept their cards. Since merchants pay these fees to the banks, the banks sought to issue the cards with the highest fees. This led to a price war of sorts between Visa and MasterCard:

Which company could set the highest fees? For example, Visa sets its swipe fees high enough to entice banks to issue more Visa cards. In turn, MasterCard raises its swipe fees to get banks to issue more MasterCard cards. "The fact that Visa and MasterCard have market power over merchants-but compete for issuers-implies that they have strong incentives to exploit their market power over merchants to subsidize issuers," Georgetown Law professor Steven C. Salop and co-authors wrote in a 2010 report. This perverse form of "competition" resulted in a tripling of swipe fees since 2001, according to the Merchants Payments Coalition. To repeat: Fees more than tripled in less than a decade, just as technological advances slashed the processing costs for credit- and debit-card transactions to roughly a penny. In a functioning market, competition drives efficiency. To be successful, one business must either offer a better-quality product or service to a customer at an equal price or provide the equivalent quality at a lower price. Businesses succeed or fail based on their ability to compete in such a market, with consumers benefiting from the outcome. In the broken electronic-payments market, the incentives were reversed. The market failed. Why did this situation persist? Because Visa and MasterCard together represent more than 80 percent of the market. The sole meaningful competition in this "market" was to see which card network could raise its fees to the highest level. Pay Plastic Rates or Settle for Cash Merchants sign a contract when they decide to accept credit and debit cards, requiring them to agree to all current and future operating rules. This leaves merchants with the extortive choice of accepting plastic and all the fees that go with it or declining to accept plastic altogether, which in today's economy is not much of an option. For decades Visa, MasterCard, and the biggest banks have profited mightily-to the

recent tune of about $48 billion a yearfrom this anticompetitive market. (Be sure to peruse this release about the related lawsuit filed by the Justice Dept. in October.) With Congress and the Federal Reserve finally attempting to introduce some semblance of balance to the market, you can be sure that the big banking lobby and its allies on Capitol Hill will be pushing for a return to the lucrative, anticompetitive status quo. They will decry "price control," only so they can resume their own cartel-like price-fixing. Those who believe in competitive markets should ignore their cries: When you zap a cash cow, you must expect mooing. I'm guessing there would be many things I would disagree with Nannis and the NSBA on, but I sure didn't find anything to argue with there. The fact is that these huge mega-banks, the six biggest of which control assets worth 64 percent of our country's GDP, are hoarding their money, not making the loans and investments that would help fuel more jobs and a broader economic recovery, and screwing over small businesspeople on things like swipe fees just as much as they are screwing over all those homeowners they are trying to foreclose on. This is exactly the kind of issue progressives ought to be championing. Here's another one: Progressives should push hard for government contracting reform, forcing entrenched businesses that have been getting sweetheart deals at the government trough for a very long time to actually compete fairly with up and coming small-business innovators who might be able to do the work more efficiently. The Center for American Progress, U.S. PIRG, and other reform groups have estimated that the federal government could save enormous amounts of money ($100 billion annually or even more) simply by reforming the way they do government contracting. With more and more government services privatized, the amount of government contracting has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last couple of decades, and these contracts have been noted for the waste

34

and corruption entailed in them. No-bid contracts, sweetheart deals, cost overruns, a lack of accountability for getting them done on time, easy to achieve bonus clauses written into most contracts, and special-interest language in appropriations bills favoring one firm over all others have generated enormous amounts of waste. By demanding reform of this process, progressives could burnish our credentials in terms of cutting waste in government as well as opening up contracting to more innovative and efficient firms.

There are many other issues where parts of the business community would be in common cause with progressives: solar and wind companies that need help to compete with big established energy companies; small businesses that can put people to work retrofitting schools and government infrastructure to save energy dollars; companies that want to bring highspeed broadband to rural areas that don't have it; and road and bridge building. Progressives should look for these alliances wherever we can, and build unlikely bedfellow coalitions on the issues that help our cause.

This kind of political outreach can help us in the fights we have with other parts of the business community. It was this kind of progressive-retailer coalition that won us a legislative victory against the banks on swipe fees, and elements of the business community have supported other components of progressive legislation over the past few years. Wherever we can forge these kinds of alliances without compromising our principles, we have the potential to win some victories.

35

Filling Labor Shortages through Immigration: An Overview of Shortage Lists and their Implications
By Madeleine Sumption Migration Policy Institute February 2011 http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=828
Pick up any paper, report, or book about immigration and the economy, and it probably will not be long before you encounter a reference to labor shortages. Some skills and abilities are in short supply, even in times of recession, and sometimes vacancies in certain sectors are particularly hard to fill. Since immigration brings new workers to the economy who might fill these gaps, immigration policy represents a logical part of any strategy that addresses recruiting difficulties. Immigration policies designed to alleviate perceived shortages of labor have been around for decades, and the idea of targeting immigration to needy parts of the economy is not new. The United States' Bracero Program, for example was a series of bilateral labor agreements with Mexico that emerged in response to tight labor supply in agriculture during and following World War II. Regional migration policies in Australia and Canada were also designed, in large part, in response to perceived local labor shortages. And dedicated visa programs for specific occupations or sectors in which host countries wish to increase labor supply for example, in agriculture or health are common. But over the past ten years, wealthy countries have frequently attempted to fine-tune immigration flows by maintaining lists of critical occupations into which immigration should be facilitated. The points systems in New Zealand and Denmark, for example, reward prospective immigrants working in designated occupations. Canada maintains a list of occupations in high demand, and France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom all introduced a shortage list of some kind between 2006 and 2008. What are labor shortages, how do countries go about measuring them, and how effectively can policymakers use such information to increase labor supply in targeted areas of the economy? How do these policies work and what impact do they have? This article addresses some of the technical, philosophical, and policyrelated questions raised by the practice of maintaining shortage lists and translating them into immigration policy. What is a Labor Shortage? Defining labor shortages is not straightforward, but a simplified definition is that when the demand for a given type of worker exceeds the number of willing candidates at the prevailing wage and working conditions in that occupation, a shortage is thought to occur. Economists disagree as to whether "labor shortages" exist at all: if particular skills are scarce, employers will raise wages and more workers will come forward or seek training to join the occupation. In practice, however, this is not always the case.

36

Some periods of tight labor supply are transient, disappearing once the market has had time to adjust. Others persist, perhaps because demand continues to rise faster than supply can catch up, or because the work is inherently difficult or unappealing. In some occupations, international competition with producers abroad might mean that employers cannot raise wages and remain economically viable. In other cases, such as with highly renowned scientists or talented businessmen, one could argue that a shortage exists because one can never have too much of a good thing. Or a recruitment difficulty of sorts might arise in fields where workers perform a socially valuable function teachers, nurses, and caregivers, for instance but taxpayers are not willing or able to pay the high price that would be required to attract more of them into the profession. In other words, "shortages" come in different shapes and forms. It may in fact make more sense to refer to them as "recruiting difficulties", since this is how they are experienced in practice by employers. Identifying Labor Shortages Because various types of shortages exist, identifying and measuring them is quite difficult. Rapidly rising wages can be a good indicator for identifying labor shortages since employers will typically be forced by the market to pay more for skills that are scarce, but will not occur in cases where earnings are held back by international competition or taxpayers' desire to get more for less. Low unemployment can also be a useful if imperfect indicator, as it can signal tight labor supply in the short run, but could also reflect transient or seasonal variations in the number of workers needed. However, unemployment by occupation is difficult to measure accurately. The number of unfilled vacancies provides a potential measure, but occupations with short job tenure and high turnover experience higher vacancy rates even when plenty of job seekers are available to work. And more fundamentally, the fact that employers would like to find workers

with a particular skill set does not mean they can realistically expect to find them. To see why, consider a firm designing software to help farmers track the genetic characteristics of rare breeds of cows. Ideally, they would like to hire a software programmer who understands cow breeding and genetics. But how many of these people exist? This is not a case of a shortage in expert programmer-breedergeneticists, but rather an instance where an employer must lower their recruitment expectations. During the economic boom of the 1990s, which was fueled in large part by advances in the field of technology, many US employers did exactly that. Employment in the information technology (IT) industry ramped up at an impressive speed, and some firms began to hire less experienced candidates. When the dot-com crash reduced demand for their services, they once again raised their expectations and began to hire more highly qualified workers. Was there a shortage of qualified IT workers during the boom? Did that shortage cease to exist because employers "made do" with less qualified employees? The answer is not clear-cut. Additionally, shortages or hiring difficulties cannot be described as an either-or (binary) category, wherein an occupation either experiences a shortage or it doesn't. There is no objective point after which one can confidently assert that an employer faces a shortage. In general, therefore, one must measure hiring difficulties relative to other occupations, rather than in absolute terms (which would be impossible even in theory). This means that analysts must choose a somewhat arbitrary cutoff or threshold, or even choose a priori what proportion of occupations should be found to face shortages. Considerations of Accuracy and Timeliness Perhaps the greatest challenge that economists face when measuring labor shortages is accuracy or, more specifically, accurately identifying and analyzing occupations that genuinely reflect groups of people with similar skills.

Statistically representative data sources like labor force surveys categorize workers by occupation, but the formal title of the occupation to which a worker belongs is a very crude measure of the skills that his or her job requires. Occupational categories often fail to account for a huge variety of required experience, qualifications, and abilities. Moreover, even within occupations, skill needs change over time. For example, one might be able to estimate the wage increase for engineers from one quarter to the next with relative accuracy, but engineers come in numerous varieties many of which have little in common with one another. Official data are also generally not sufficiently powerful (i.e., the sample size is generally too small) to zero in on very specific occupations. For smaller and more-specialized fields, it becomes increasingly difficult to analyze shortages with precision. Unemployment might skyrocket among biologists, for example, but if a firm requires a scientist with a detailed understanding of a specific kind of fish, it may still be difficult to find a qualified employee. A second, though perhaps less troubling, challenge is timeliness. Labor market conditions are somewhat variable but data sources and shortage lists respond with a time lag. The United Kingdom and New Zealand, for instance, update their shortage lists every six months, while others (such as Ireland) adjust the list periodically without a specific timetable. By the time the data is analyzed (sometimes months after it was collected) and a profession added to the shortage list, and by the time foreign workers have applied for the jobs, obtained visas, and arrived in the destination country, the recruiting difficulties they were supposed to alleviate may have disappeared. For their part, existing workers might have responded to signs of high demand and trained to enter the profession. Alternatively, economic conditions might have changed, decimating demand in cyclical industries. In cases where hiring was difficult precisely because of a business cycle boom, a downturn could reduce employment demand quite fast.

37

These realities mean that policymakers who expect immigrants to respond in real time to skills shortages as they emerge and promptly return home as the shortages recede are likely to be disappointed. The challenges inherent in measuring labor shortages, together with the issues of accuracy and timeliness, means that the actual number of shortage occupations might not automatically adjust to the economic cycle a concern for some policymakers. Case Study: The United Kingdom To illustrate some of the philosophical and policy complexities that any practical attempt to channel immigration towards shortage occupations must grapple with, a quick overview of the United Kingdom's recently instituted and relatively comprehensive shortage analysis is useful. The UK Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) a group of five economists supported by a small secretariat uses both quantitative and qualitative data to produce a list of occupations into which the government is recommended to facilitate immigration. The quantitative component comprises statistical analysis of wages, employment, unemployment, and vacancies as measured by 12 particular "indicators". It's important to note that occupations often experience shortage according to some indicators, but not according to others. Indeed, the correlation between the indicators is not particularly strong. An occupation must meet a given threshold for at least half of the indicators in order to make the shortage list (e.g., wages must be rising by a certain rate or unemployment falling below a certain level). Qualitative analysis is also quite central to the MAC methodology, and consists of evidence gathered from employers, regional public-sector "skills councils", and other interested parties such as labor unions. It is used to confirm or reject the statistical evidence of hiring difficulties, and in some cases to identify specific subcategories within an occupation that are thought to face a shortage while the rest of the occupation does not. The March 2010 list, for example, includes pediatric dental consultants but not other dental

practitioners. The committee takes into account the extent to which they believe employers in a given occupation are making efforts to train UK workers or entice them into jobs by improving working conditions. They also consider alternatives to immigration, including how easily employers could outsource the work abroad or mechanize labor-intensive tasks. Additionally, they examine the likely contribution of immigrants to innovation, the United Kingdom's global competitiveness, and the quality of public services. In other words, measuring shortages in the United Kingdom is not simply a statistical exercise driven by quantitative data, but also requires substantial qualitative judgments. This is especially the case if the goal is to produce a fine-grained analysis. The same was true of a similar shortage-type exercise in Canada in the 1980s, which was designed to set annual targets for immigration into specific occupations. As MAC itself emphasizes, "top-down indicators do not, in themselves, provide unassailable evidence of shortage, or a lack thereof." Shortage Lists in Policy Most countries that incorporate some notion of shortage into their immigration systems create a single list of occupations deemed to experience shortages, rather than distinguishing between degrees of hiring difficulty in each occupation. Some lists are based on complex analyses of the kind described in the United Kingdom, while others are based purely on consultations and qualitative evidence. In either case, the function of the shortage list is to make immigration easier for workers in these occupations or to prevent inflows into occupations that are not on the list. Shortage-targeted immigration is commonly made easier in one of two ways: by alleviating some of the requirements employers face for the recruitment of immigrants or by rewarding or qualifying an otherwise ineligible immigrant based on their skills, experience, or occupation in a field

deemed to have a shortage. Employers hiring foreign workers in shortage occupations in the United Kingdom and France, for example, are relieved of the requirement to advertise the job to resident workers a process known as the "labor market test." The labor market test is designed to demonstrate that few resident workers are available to take the job (i.e., that there is a labor market shortage), and is a widely used requirement for employer-sponsored visas around the world. In the case of shortage lists, however, an occupation on the list is already deemed to be in shortage, thus negating the need for the labor market test. In keeping with this policy, workers are required to have a job offer in order to get a visa for a shortage occupation. Countries with points systems that admit workers on the basis of the number of "points" they score for their education, work experience, or other characteristics sometimes award additional points to shortage occupations. Migrant workers seeking admission through points systems may or may not be required to have a job offer. New Zealand, for example, awards points to potential immigrants with qualifications, work experience, or a job offer in designated "future growth areas" or areas of "absolute skills shortage." In practice, offering points on the basis of shortage occupations means that the bar is lower for workers entering those occupations they may be able to enter despite lower levels of formal education, substandard earning potential, or fewer of whatever other criteria the points system rewards. Consequently, immigrants who otherwise would not have gained entry are admitted for the sake of filling vacancies in certain industries. In the United Kingdom, for instance, foreign workers who entered under the shortage occupation route in 2008 and 2009 earned less, on average, than other employer-sponsored immigrants. This makes some policymakers uncomfortable, and may serve as recognition of the fact that salaries do not always reflect the social benefits of certain types of occupations, such as with care workers. The idea that shortage lists enable less-

38

skilled workers to immigrate has particular implications in regimes with fixed quotas or targets for economic-stream immigration, such as the United Kingdom or Australia. This is because less qualified workers take a "place" that could have been occupied by a higher-earning, more skilled immigrant. A widely publicized example of this phenomenon in Australia was that, under the prevailing shortage list system in early 2010, a hairdresser might qualify for skilled migration but an environmental scientist with a PhD from Harvard University might not. Concerns that Australia's shortage list created inflows of low-paid cooks and hairdressers contributed to the recent decision to no longer award points for specific occupations. The United Kingdom is currently addressing this concern by implementing changes that would prevent sub-degree level workers from entering as employersponsored workers, whether or not they are engaged in a shortage occupation. The most likely effect of this policy will be a reduction in the number of shortage occupation entrants, giving slightly greater priority to other routes where workers by and large already have higher earnings and qualifications. The use of shortage lists to restrict immigration to specific occupations is also quite common. The impact of doing this depends on how broad the list is (i.e., the number of occupations it covers) and whether other immigration routes are available for employers whose occupations

are not listed. Restricting immigration to a relatively narrow set of occupations a step that has, on occasion, been proposed but not implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom is problematic, especially for highly skilled and specialized occupations where the scarcity of different types of workers is measured with only limited accuracy. The inherent problems of analyzing shortages make it important to provide other routes of employment-based immigration, rather than relying on shortage lists alone. Finally, systems that channel immigration into certain occupations at the expense of others run the risk of "flooding" the labor market for some occupations while leaving others entirely dry. This was a criticism of Canada's experiment with assessing labor market shortages in the 1980s, a policy the country subsequently abandoned. Fine-tuning or Micromanaging? Governments turn to shortage lists because they want to ensure that immigrants fill jobs where the need is greatest and where competition with the resident labor force is limited. In some cases there is also political motivation the desire to show constituents that policy is targeting the most valuable types of immigration. Do shortage lists represent beneficial finetuning, or problematic micromanaging? As with so many immigration policies, the true impact depends on the details of the implementation.

Inaccuracy of the list matters less if immigrants require a job offer before they migrate, as they do in the United Kingdom. The stakes are also lower if other routes of employment-based immigration are available for employers who cannot easily recruit from the domestic labor force, but whose occupations are not included on the official list. This is especially the case if the list covers a small proportion of occupations. Timeliness, on the other hand, becomes less important when lists focus on very highly skilled professions whose practitioners are likely to fare well in the labor market in the long run, regardless of variable demand. Perhaps shortage lists serve some useful functions, but governments should not expect them to deliver too much. Some may find that, instead of distinguishing between shortage and non-shortage occupations, it makes more sense to focus on admitting workers with high levels of human capital or a proven demand for their skills, while making special allowances for more limited categories of workers who find it difficult to enter through other channels.

39