Green Humanist

Analyzing Societal Divisions: Double and Triple Movements

4 August 2019 –

Democrat-Republican. Left-right. Liberal-conservative. If you listen to the mainstream media, these are the lines which divide our society and are reinforced every day on many news channels. You are also probably sick to death of hearing about the polarizing arguments that dominate the major media stations. Turn on any particular news network and you would think that half of the US is at war with the other half. However, these arbitrary divisions often examine only superficial differences and heedlessly (or purposefully) ignore the true source of many of our societal struggles. Although this essay is written with a focus on American politics, the lessons can be applied universally.

One way to view the source of societal divisions was expounded by social scientist Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book The Great Transformation. In this seminal work in the field of political economy, Polanyi talks about the idea of the “Double movement,” where the interests of ordinary workers are pitted against the wishes of the captains of industry.

This idea provided a broad way to examine societal dynamics as a dialectical struggle between forces that champion laissez-faire economics and marketization and those who demand increased social protections from these processes. On one hand, business leaders will seek to expand the commodification of many aspects of life. Workers of society seek to protect themselves from this process in any way possible, such as lobbying for tariffs and labor protection laws. In Polanyi’s theory, the state acts as the stage in which this struggle takes place; government sets up the rules under which the struggles between proponents and opponents of a laissez-faire market occur.

The theories within The Great Transformation were developed in wake of The Great Depression, at a time when a unified labor movement was able to push the government towards the creation of federal jobs programs and populist policies, instead of the more austere principles enacted during the Great Recession in the beginning of 2008. In the 1930s, we saw major legislation protecting labor rights and putting people to work building infrastructure or ecosystems. After the market crashed in 2008, however, the federal response to aid ordinary people was incredibly weak by comparison. In the 75 years in between the two economic downturns, there had been major changes in societal dynamics.

Critical theorist Nancy Fraser has developed a framework through which to view the fracturing of the American left in the latter half of the 20^th century. Fraser has modified the concept of the Double Movement in order for it to reflect the realties of the 21^st century. In her essay “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis After Polanyi,” Fraser argues that the dichotomy between business and labor interests is no longer sufficient to explain the major conflict in modern society. Instead, multiple groups who felt disenfranchised by the original New Deal legislation emerged in the 1960s. These factions included feminists, Civil Rights groups, LGBT movements, and environmentalists. The advent of these groups created what Fraser has coined a “Triple Movement,” where emancipatory movements fluctuate from serving business and labor interests in turn. These groups often switch allegiances unknowingly, instead of as the result of a conscious effort or an overarching organizational strategy.

That’s a lot of jargon-laden sentences in a row. Here’s a way to visualize the Triple Movement. Suppose you have two teams engaged in tug-of-war on a rope. On one end you have Team Business Leaders, and on the other you have Team Ordinary Workers. The two teams are each trying to win the game. This is a particularly nasty game of tug-of-war. On the sidelines, you have more people waiting to join in the game, and they are free to choose which side they like to join. These people are part of various social movements that form the third arm of the Triple Movement. Sometimes these people will join Team Business Leader’s side and cause a loss for the Ordinary People. At other times, the Ordinary Workers get a bunch of reinforcements and drag Team Business Leaders down into the mud in a decisive victory. If that analogy was not helpful, feel free to discard it from your mind.

The reason that feminists, Civil Rights groups, LGBT movements, and environmentalists switch from aligning with business and labor interests in turn is that in the post-WWII era, these groups have often been more concerned with recognition and emancipation than redistribution. They criticized New Deal programs and protective laws as being callous towards or purposefully exclusionary of their interests, and they had a strong basis for these claims. Nevertheless, as a result, the forces championing increased social protection were diminished. Thus, social groups sometimes are supportive of policies that increase the commodification of individual life, and at other times will back ideas that protect the individual from market forces. Too often, they support neoliberal ideals as they criticize social protections deemed exclusionary or oppressive.

The emergence of the Triple Movement was accelerated by the divisive strategies created by public interest law firms (PILFs). These industry-backed organizations proliferated during the 1970s in response to the progressive environmental legislation passed during this decade. Certain industries realized that opposition to the unifying force of the day’s environmental movement would require the creation of an entity that had the semblance of a grassroots movement. By no means are PILF-type entities limited to the environmental movement. Industry-backed organizations that pretend to champion the causes of a social movement while infringing upon and violating the rights of workers are quite common.

Corporations (business interests, a wing of the Triple movement) do what they can to attract the support of the Social Movement wing. They may expound their support of diversity and multiculturalism to hide their anti-labor and pro-marketization agenda. They may greenwash their images or sneakily pretend to be progressive and forward-thinking. These campaigns contribute to the fracturing of the Left and draw much-needed Social Movement support from the side of Labor.

The Triple Movement is not a perfect way to view all dynamics of modern societal struggles, but it is an interesting place to start. It shows us how we craft policies that are not exclusionary to any group in society but also don’t fall prey to championing neoliberalism. Once you understand the interactions between the three facets of this movement, you may start to recognize them in the news. You may come to recognize issues were the divide is not Republican-Democrat at all, as many mainstream news outlets would like you to believe. Overall, understanding the dynamics of special interests and social movements is the first step in figuring out where we go from here, and how we form alliances to change society for the better.

The Technological Promise

28 July 2019 –

In 1833, the German-born inventor John Adolphus Etzler looked upon a world being rapidly transformed by the steam engine and mass production related to the industrial revolution. He saw a world that was extremely close to being transformed into a Utopia, and believed that with the available technology of the time, we would be able to create a world where work would become obsolete, and endless leisure time is available to all people. He wrote the book “The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men,” which was a comprehensive plan to harness the power of water, wind, and sun in order to automate every function of society, including agriculture.

10 years later, naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau looked upon a country being transformed by the telegraph and the Transcontinental Railway, and after reading Etzler’s work, strongly disagreed with the inventor. Thoreau observed that technological changes had never produced a life of leisure for the average person. Instead, he saw how they just trap people in an ever-quickening pace of life. Of fast rail travel he said, “we do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us.” He was also suspicious of companies producing new materials. Of the fashion industry Thoreau remarked, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes…the principal object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but unquestionably, that corporations be enriched.” His famous work “Walden” contains themes of how the pace of society is becoming more and more rapid because of the railroad. He believed that we were no longer running the machines of our own making, which had gained undue influence on our lives.

Obviously, J.A. Etzler’s vision did not come to pass. But this did not stop others from making similar predictions throughout the first half of the 20^th century. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes looked upon a world ravaged by the Great Depression and saw a mere temporary technological failure. In his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he explained how within a few decades a 15-hour workweek would become standard in developed countries because of technological advancement. He believed that we were close to achieving a society where a love of money would be seen as distasteful and we would discard the greedy customs of our ancestors.

Almost 90 years after Keynes made this prediction, it is evident that we are still far away from achieving his vision. Views of technology as held by Etzler and Keynes can best be described as Techno-Utopiast. Techno-Utopians believe that technology will inevitably bring about a paradise, that we are very close to achieving such a world, and that all society ills (war, poverty, disease) can be eliminated if only we had better technology.

But history has always defied all of these Techno-Utopian visions. Why has technology always failed to bring about paradise? First, not all technologies are positive. Some have negative effects on society or the environment, and we need to find new solutions to deal with the detrimental effects of these technologies. Second, new technologies are often produced with profit maximization in mind, not the improvement of all people’s lives. Finally, technologies are not deployed in a democratic fashion. I think that if we want to create a Utopia (or at least get close to one), the solutions are far more political than technological. The path towards a better society is not dependent on the latest gadget from a multi-billion dollar company, but on how much we can participate in choosing how technology is used in society, and how wisely we choose to implement it.

That Time When Humanity Came Together and Agreed to Save Itself

21 July 2019 –

Many international treaties either fail abysmally or do not even come close to achieving what they were supposed to do. But we’re not here to discuss those treaties today. This post is about the Montreal Protocol of 1987, a shining example of human cooperation on the international scale.

In 1985, a group of scientists published a disturbing paper detailing the annual decrease in the ozone present over Antarctica – i.e., the ozone hole. Within a very short timespan the link between the hole in the ozone layer and a class of compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was also discovered. CFCs were used as refrigerants and in aerosol spray. They are extremely effective at destroying the life-preserving stratospheric ozone layer. One CFC molecule can destroy about 100,000 ozone (O₃) molecules!

Side note: why did the ozone hole form over Antarctica when there aren’t any CFC-emitting civilizations there? One of the reasons is the extremely low temperatures present over the continent, even lower than those in the Arctic. These low temperatures allow the formation of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), which accelerate the activity of ozone-depleting chlorine gases. PSCs form in the Antarctic for 5 months at a time, but appear in the Arctic for only 10-60 days each year. The polar vortices also lock in weather patterns for extended periods of time, so there’s nothing to disrupt the destructive action of CFCs over Antarctica.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Did the CFC industry fight back against these scientific findings? You bet it did! Dupont, a major manufacturer of CFCs, backed a group called (in Orwellian fashion) the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, which claimed that the science on CFCs and ozone depletion was too uncertain to justify any policy action.

Yet unlike what happened with the fossil fuel industries and climate change, CFC producers were not able to delay action on phasing out CFCs. In 1987, 197 parties ratified the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty meant to save this life-protecting layer of the atmosphere. Only 14 years passed between the discovery of the link between CFCs and ozone depletion and the signing of this treaty. Compare that to the rapidity of international climate change treaties. The Montreal Protocol was also the first universally ratified treaty in the history of the United Nations. The world came together on 26 August 1987 and decided that a world without ozone was a very good place not to be.

Why was the Montreal Protocol so successful when other international environmental treaties have failed? Well, unlike climate change, ozone depletion affects everyone pretty much equally. Whether you’re rich or poor, if you go outside and are not protected from deadly ultraviolet radiation, you get skin cancer and die. The same cannot be said for the effects of climate change. In addition, only a few companies manufacture CFCs, so they did not have as much political clout as fossil fuel companies. Furthermore, they had an alternative to CFCs readily available, so it was not difficult for the companies to adapt after the treaty’s ramification. In contrast, the number of fossil fuel companies is many, and switching away from fossil fuels requires mass changes in infrastructure.

But let’s not end this post on a negative note. The Montreal Protocol shows that international environmental cooperation is possible. We can come together and agree on things as a species. The earth’s recovering ozone layer is evidence of that.

Green Energy Advocates vs. An Unfortunate Misconception

14 July 2019 –

Yesterday I was collecting some petitions for an environmental group, and heard many erroneous and disheartening opinions about clean energy from people I talked to. This blog is dedicated to all those misguided folks.

The fact that we need to move to a system of 100% renewable energy is obvious. This post is not going to debate that. However, whenever one suggests that we need to have an energy system powered by all renewables, people come out of the woodwork to say, “But there’s no way to store renewable energy. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, so we’ll always need fossil fuels. Checkmate, environmentalist!” But is it, though?

That we have no way to store renewable energy is no longer true. In fact, we have many different strategies that we can use to store wind and solar power. In this post I would like to share some of them with you.

The first is a strategy that has been used for decades in nuclear power plants. When excess energy is generated, it is used to pump water uphill into a reservoir. When more energy is needed, the water is allowed to flow back downhill, turning turbines and generating energy in the process. The same principle can be applied to renewable energy. During the time when the solar panels or windmills are generating more electricity than people are using, they can work to pump water uphill. When it is night, or when the winds are calm, that water can then flow back downhill. This process is scalable and can be used for smaller residential areas as well as big cities. Germany has scalable hydro pumps, known as gravitationswasserwirbelkraftwerk. You have to love those compound words.

But what if there are no hills and very little water available for gravitationswasserwirbelkraftwerk (you only get so many times to use that word in life)? Fear not, o ye of little faith. We have storage technologies that don’t require those topographical conditions.

We also have compressed liquid air facilities for storing energy. In this device, excess energy is used to cool air until it liquefies. Then, when more energy is needed, the air is allowed to warm. It expands and evaporates, turning a turbine to generate electricity. These types of plants are currently deployed in Australia, China, Japan, and the UK.

But that’s not all! Another strategy we can use to store energy is molten sodium. For this mechanism, a column of molten sodium is placed in the middle of a solar panel field. The molten sodium can store energy during times of peak generation. Then, the molten sodium slowly releases the energy during the night. In the US, there is a molten sodium storage facility in Crescent Dunes Energy Project 310 km Northwest of Las Vegas. The molten sodium can store 110 MW of energy. 45 MW can power a city of 80,000, if that comparison helps at all.

And what about off-the-grid homes? Tesla is on the case. This company sells Powerwall batteries that charge from the energy generated by a home’s solar panels during the day. The battery can be installed in an interior wall of the home, and lasts for 15 years. They are an upfront investment, running into the $5000-7000 range, but a tax credit could help owners defray the costs of purchase and installation.

In order to manage all of these power sources we can use artificial intelligence as a strategy to make sure that there are not blackouts. Having a decentralized smart grid is also a good strategy to ensuring a constant source of power for all. We have the technology to bring about the renewable energy grid. Now all we need is the political willpower.

Hybrid Aquatic Mammal Confirmed: Narluga

7 July 2019 –

The ocean is a fascinating place full of creatures that look like they came straight from a science fiction novel. We know less about the ocean floor than we know about the surface of the moon. Recently, however, one small mystery of the ocean was solved when scientists were able to confirm the identity of the skull of a mysterious creature. And they call it a narluga.

In 1990, a scientist from the Greeland Institute for Natural Resources collected an unusual skull from an Inuit man in Greenland. This man had killed the animal in the late 1980s and had held onto the skull because of its odd appearance. The skull possessed strange features that were found in both beluga whales and narwhals.

Both of these large aquatic mammals live in the Arctic seas, and travel in groups called pods. Narwhals are related to belugas (as well as to porpoises and orcas) and the males of this species grow a long tusk of up to 2.6 meters (8.6 feet) in length. Beluga whales’ large, flexible forehead allows them to make different facial expressions, and also to produce different sounds to communicate with each other. These chirps and squeaks have earned belugas the nickname “canaries of the sea.” To me the heads of some whales and dolphins have some similarity to birds. The beady black eyes are the same and the snout is kind of like a beak. But anyway, both of these sea mammals are also carnivorous, eating fish and squid. Their predators are polar bears, killer whales, and humans.

Now that you have a little background on both of the species, back to the hybrid skull. Scientists speculated for a few decades over whether this intermediate bone truly represented a hybrid between narwhals and belugas. Then, in late June of this year, scientists at Trent University published the results obtained from DNA and chemical analyses on the skull.

The study confirmed that the skull, the only one of its kind ever found, is truly a hybrid of the two sea mammals! An isotopic analysis of the teeth revealed that it had a different diet than either of its parents. Instead of looking for prey at the pelagic ocean level, it foraged at the benthic (bottom) level. It had teeth that were a combination of its parents – some long and spiraling like a narwhal’s tusk (though certainly not as long), some shorter and corkscrewed like the beluga’s. The scientists believe that this off set of teeth may have caused it to develop different foraging behaviors that its parents. The skull was also larger than either of the parents’ skulls typically are.

It’ll be interesting to see if scientists can find any living examples of these hybrids. There are other known whale hybrids, such as the bowhead whale-right whale dolphin hybrid. The first ever known hybrid shark was discovered off the cost of Australia a few years back with both common and Australian black-tip shark DNA. The conclusion of this post is that the ocean is a vast and amazing place, and there are still countless amazing things there that are waiting to be discovered.

Charting the Charters Chart II: The Chartering

30 June 2019 –

This week is a continuation of last week’s post on the history of corporate charters, the contracts common in the early United States that outlined what corporations could and could not do. Now, here is the rest of this fascinating page-turner. (Screen scroller? Is that a term anyone uses? If no one claims it within 30 days, it’s mine.)

Of course, you can guess that corporations weren’t fans of corporate charters. Being dissolved for unscrupulous behavior can really put a damper on your efforts to make a huge profit at the expense of human wellbeing. It was important for corporations to both diminish the will of the government to enforce charters and to take away people’s faith in charters as an enforcer of the public good.

One of the early foundations of the arguments against charters came in the court case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819. Dartmouth College was founded prior to the existence of the United States and thus was a private entity that had not been given a charter by the American government. New Hampshire’s legislature was trying to make Dartmouth into a public institution, but the Courts ruled that Dartmouth’s charter was a contract between two private entities (King George and the college trustees), so the state could not interfere with it. This ruling provided precedent for future cases against charters.

By the mid-1800s there were more and more legal battles over charters. The United States was edging towards a Civil War, and as tensions mounted between the North and the South, corporations were often able to get away with abusing their charters, and merging to form trusts. Changes in the economy brought about by the industrial revolution forced more farmers into the wage market, and fear of employment often won out over enforcing the rules laid out in a corporate charter.

The wealthy owners of corporations found new ways of getting their agenda implemented. They bought off politicians and newspapers, and by owning the press they could control the narrative on corporate actions. They pushed the idea that legislators examining corporate charters was a waste of time and money, and that a generic administrative procedure for creating corporations would be in the public’s best interest. They used words such as “competition” and “entrepreneurship” to create the idea that abolishing charter laws would give everyone an equal opportunity to make money in the American market.

By the dawn of the Civil War, corporations had grown larger and were utilizing new techniques of mass production. They used their new wealth to buy representatives in government and erode the laws found in charters that required corporate accountability. During the Civil War, corporations also gained power because of the contracts they received related to warfare, which increased their power. (Hmm. In the 1860s it was the corporations who benefited from war. Today it’s the corporations who benefit from war. It’s almost like there’s a pattern here!). The Reconstruction also saw an increase in power for corporations, as many construction contracts were up for grabs during this time.

There were still some victories to be had from the voters. In 1894 New York’s attorney general revoked Standard Oil’s (a predecessor of ExxonMobil) charter. Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting also helped to reign in some of the power that large companies had obtained during the latter half of the 19^th century. More and more often, however, the courts were ruling in favor of the corporations in charter cases, interpreting the Constitution in novel ways. The power citizens held over corporate behavior was further eroded in the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, where the Court ruled that corporations had equal protection under the 14^th amendment of the Constitution. Gradually the possibility of using charters to govern companies faded from people’s minds.

Often modern measures to limit corporate harm to citizens (if any are taken at all) are tweaks around the edges. I would like to call on invoking charters (which are still part of state constitutions) once again, except this time doing so in a way that promotes true economic democracy. Would such a plan be more difficult because of the existence of large multinational corporations? Yes. But impossible, no. Once again legislators should examine the possibility of dissolving an unscrupulous company. Also, I imagine a type of charter that has a time limit of 10-20 years. After this time, the company is required to take a vote from all employees as to whether or not in would like to begin the transition to being a worker-owned cooperative. Some sort of agency in government could oversee this process.

There are some interesting lessons from past policies that can give us guidance on future legislation. The economy doesn’t exist somewhere out of reach of democratic governance, and this is just one idea on how to create an economy that works for the people.

Resurrecting the Charter: A Hidden History

23 June 2019 –

You can’t go long these days without hearing about some egregious act committed by a corporation in the news, whether it be poisoning a city’s water supply or manufacturing a prescription drug with deadly side effects. The punishment for these horrendous acts, however, usually ranges from a slap on the wrist to a shrug by government officials. Like an inanimate machine, the company forges onward, seemingly unstoppable. But this wasn’t always the case in the United States. At one time, the people had incredible power over how a corporation could operate and whether or not it could continue to exist. Today we’re going to learn a little American legal history. It’ll be interesting, I promise, so stay with me.

In the years before the Revolution, American colonists saw British companies such as the East India Company granted a charter by the British monarch that allowed it exclusive rights to control trade and property in the American colonies. This form of charter (a grant allowing a corporation to exist and conduct certain types of business) was seen as tyrannical by many colonists. The journalist and lawyer Thomas Earle said that, “Chartered privileges are a burthen [olde time spelling of “burden”], under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery.” Thus, when the colonies gained independence from Great Britain, the citizenry of the new country tried to protect themselves from corporate tyranny.

They did this by setting specific rules for corporate charters. Legislators, who were answerable to the people, were responsible for issuing charters to corporations. These charters outlined the specific business practices that the company could conduct, held it responsible for the harms caused by its mode of operating, and also said that the firm could be dissolved at any time if it violated any of the rules in its charter.

Charters granted to corporations also had an expiration date, often set by state legislature. Nowadays, corporations seem like far more infinite entities, but that was not the case in the early days of the United States. Pennsylvania, for example, put a 20-year limit on manufacturing charters. Maryland set a 50-year time span for mining charters. Banks had a particularly short charter period, usually 3-10 years (banks also had to get government approval to merge and could not engage in trade). Once a charter expired, the corporation had to apply for renewal. If the state thought the company was operating unjustly, then the company would be dissolved and its assets would be divided among shareholders.

Many charters did contain such “revocation clauses” so that the states could dissolve corporations that were abusing their charter. Can you imagine that today? Dupont dumped the toxic chemical C8 into Ohio water bodies a few years ago. Imagine if in reaction to this crime lawmakers had said, “Sorry, Dupont, but you’ve just lost your right to exist.”

Charters were used to limit large shareholder power through scaled voting, Many strategies in charters and state legislatures were used by states to keep corporations accountable to the public. Massachusetts’ Turnpike Corporation Act of 1805 allowed the government to dissolve the companies building turnpikes once they made a 12% profit, and the road was then made public. Toll road companies were often required to provide toll exemptions for farmers or impoverished citizens. In the early 1800s Pennsylvania had a fund that drew from corporate profits in order to eventually make those corporations public.

Here’s a little quote from Pennsylvania’s 1834 state legislature to give you a general idea of how charters were intended to allow the public to keep an eye on corporations:

“A corporation in law is just what the incorporation act makes it. It is the creature of the law and may be moulded to any shape or for any purpose that the Legislature may deem most conducive for the common good.”

Doesn’t sound much like the US legislature we know today, does it? If any politician were to make a statement like this today, that person would be decried by the media as being an advocate for scary socialism, and for wanting to make the US like the Soviet Union.

So why is it that the idea of charters is so foreign today? What happened in between the mid-1800s and now? That is a matter for the next post!

Two American Megalomaniacs in 19th Century Central America

16 June 2019

Cornelius Vanderbilt was an extraordinarily businessman in the US in the 1800s. He primarily garnered his immense fortune through shipping and railroads, using devious and brutal tactics to undercut his opponents and establish monopolies on shipping routes. His estimated net wealth was $215 billion in today’s dollars (compared to Jeff Bezos’ $150 billion).

William Walker was an impressive child, who graduated from the University of Nashville at age 14. I think that early success went to his head, because he became an impressive megalomaniac, even by American megalomaniac standards. He studied medicine, practice law, and co-owned a newspaper for a while. Then he thought it would be a good idea to conquer Central America. An odd change of career path.

At this time in the Western United States, there were many people who believed that “Manifest Destiny” included the conquering of the entire continent, and believed that people in the US were destined to spread throughout the whole of North America. These people were called “filibusters.” In 1853 he recruited 45 men to go conquer parts of Mexico. Imagine what the recruiting conversation must have been like:

[Location: a bar]

“Hey, pal, me and a few buddies are going to go take over another country. Do you want to come along and help?”

“Sure!”

He gave himself the title of Colonel, and, amazingly enough, his 45 men did not take over Mexico. But when the defeated legion returned back to the United States, Walker was charged under the Neutrality Act, a law that (on paper) bars Americans from invading other countries. Because Walker’s trial was in San Francisco, where the population supported filibusters, he was let off with no charges.

What Walker learned from this experience is that he should choose another target besides Mexico to invade, so he selected Nicaragua. He believed that Nicaragua’s ongoing civil war would make the country easier to invade. Also at this time, Cornelius Vanderbilt had shipping lines that ran back and forth from New York to Nicaragua to San Francisco. The business magnate was also able to get an exclusive business charter to ferry passengers across a certain portion of the country.

Walker and his freshly recruited army took a steamboat down to Nicaragua in 1855 and joined the more liberal side of the Civil War. He played a part in the battle that captured Grenada, the stronghold of the opposition, and soon staged an election to make himself president of Nicaragua. That escalated quickly. There was even talk that Nicaragua would be annexed by the United States. Vanderbilt wouldn’t have cared about any of this, except that Walker made one big mistake: he revoked Vanderbilt’s license for the Nicaragua shipping line and gave it to two of the businessman’s competitors.

Now, Vanderbilt could’ve just ignored this measure, but he was not that kind of man. He liked to completely ruin his enemies, and Walker was now an enemy. Vanderbilt sent an agent down to Costa Rica who paid the country money to invade Nicaragua and overthrow Walker. Honduras and Guatemala, fearful of Walker’s plan to make an empire out of Central America, joined in the fight against his forces. Walker surrendered after a few months of fighting and was taken back to the United States by the US Navy. When he was tried again under the Neutrality Act, it was a hung jury. Walker’s delusions of grandeur had still not been dispelled, because he soon went back down to Central America to invade Honduras. He was captured by the British (who were in nearby Belize) and executed by a Honduran firing squad in 1860.

Postscript: Vanderbilt’s Revenge

Although Vanderbilt had crushed Walker’s dreams of glory, the businessman had not managed to tarnish Walker’s image in many Americans eyes. To a good number of people in the US, Walker was a hero, especially in the Southern states. Vanderbilt, in contrast, was widely hated, which made sense since he was a ruthless oligarch with few redeemable qualities.

Vanderbilt wasn’t one for philanthropy, unlike other magnates like Rockefeller. During the last few years of his life, however, he did have one major project: he gave a one million dollar endowment to establish a university named after himself. This university became Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee. But why would a man who never went to university choose this as his sole philanthropy project? And why would someone who grew up and lived in the northeast US for all his life establish a university in Nashville, Tennessee? Vanderbilt had never even visited Nashville!

Well, Nashville, Tennessee, just happened to be the birthplace of William Walker, and he was still celebrated there are his death. Vanderbilt University eventually caused Walker’s Alma Mater, the University of Nashville, to go out of business. Now Nashville is partially known for Vanderbilt. The conniving railroad magnate had hijacked Walker’s legacy in his own hometown and replaced it with his own. That is some savage revenge.

Oil Companies & Environmentalists Unite: What a Time to Be Alive!

9 June 2019 –

The current administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a new plan. Under this proposal, the year-round sale of gasoline blended with 15% ethanol (known as E15) would be permitted. Right now, this form of fuel is banned during the summer months. This ban is not just for an arbitrary reason. Ethanol has a high vapor pressure and evaporates easily at high temperatures, such as the ones that are frequently present during, you know, summer.

This evaporation of ethanol leads to the formation of nitrous oxide and ground-level ozone, which subsequently leads to the formation of smog. All of these pollutants can be extremely detrimental to respiratory health, especially at high levels. Permitting E15 to be sold during the summer months would increase the frequency of smog and worsen air quality for cities that already deal with serious pollution issues from automobile exhaust.

The EPA’s move to permit summer E15 sales has been driven by the desire to appease Iowa corn farmers. The farmers are currently suffering because of the tariffs enacted against American agricultural products in the ongoing trade war between China and the United States. Allowing E15 will create more domestic demand for ethanol, and thus increase the income of these struggling farmers.

Environmentalists are against the E15 sales permit because it will increase harmful air pollution such as ground level ozone. Oil companies are against the E15 sales permit because an increase in ethanol usage will cut into their own profits. As part of the E15 summer sales permit, the EPA has also cut smog controls initiated in 2011 as part of the Clean Air Act. Both environmental groups and oil companies are challenging this action! Environmental groups and oil companies banding together to fight the EPA! Such an event happens on the 12 of Never!

The American Petroleum Institute suggested that the EPA was acting recklessly in a recent press release. The API is planning on suing the EPA over the E15 rule and would likely be joined as plaintiff by several environmental groups.

Politics really does make strange bedfellows. Cooperation between groups that normally oppose each other is fascinating to me. Another interesting environmental cooperation story is the one about how the Army Corps of Engineers and pro-development politicians pioneered the first major water quality laws in the 1940s and early 50s. For more information on that, I’d recommend reading “Unlikely Environmentalists” by Paul Charles Milazzo.

Democracy: Coming to A Workplace Near You

2 June 2019 –

Senator Bernie Sanders has recently backed two different proposals that would dramatically shift the balance of economic power in the United States. These two proposals haven’t picked up much media coverage (perhaps because major media outlets have not yet figured out how to put a negative spin on them) so I’d like to take some time to introduce them here.

The first proposal would require large companies to shift a certain percentage of their stocks to a fund controlled by employees. Instead of the dividends all going to the wealthy stockholders, board of directors, and CEO, some of this money would now go directly to workers. The second plan involves allowing employees to control some of their board of directors. This latter proposal would mean that employees would be responsible for electing some of the individuals who run their own company. This is called codetermination and is the rue of law in some countries such as Germany. The Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1976 permits workers to elect slightly less than half of their company’s board of directors if the company has more than 2,000 employees. For companies of 500-2,000 employees, 1/3 of the board of directors must be elected.

These proposals, if they were to pass, would be a major step forward in giving employees greater control over their working conditions. We want to live in a political democracy where we elect the representatives who govern our country? Why should we not want to expand democracy, so that we have control over those who “govern” our workplace?

The American people also believe that this is not so radical of an idea. A recent poll conducted by research institute Democracy Collaborative and data company YouGov revealed that “a policy requiring companies with over 250 employees to put 10 percent of their shares into a workers fund, which would pay dividends out to the company’s employees.”

These policies are also a good step towards shifting companies towards being employee-owned. Employee-owned companies would not choose to operate in the same way that many corporations in the US presently do. Workers would not vote to send their jobs overseas, and would choose for the average worker to receive a living wage instead of most pay going to executive bonuses. An example: at that cherished company Comcast that is near and dear to many of our hearts, the CEO to average worker pay ratio is 301 to 1. In contrast, in Spain’s worker-owned Mondragón corporation, this ratio ranges from 5 to 1 to 9 to 1.

The reason that these policies have not received much traction in the media is that they scare the people in power. The wealthy class of this country does not want people to realize that a more equitable structure of economic power is feasible. Although these proposals have no chance of passing under the current administration (they would surely be opposed my many representatives from both parties) the fact that we have presidential candidates (not only Sanders but also Warren and Gillibrand) talking about increasing worker ownership of companies is significant. I am excited that this new frontier is beginning to be a part of the political debate.