Humanity Hitting the Resource Ceiling

Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 12 (IPS) - Better living through using far fewer material resources is the only possible future, experts agree. Humanity is pressing up against the limits of a finite planet to provide resources like water, oil, metals and food, according to a new report released Thursday.
Higher resource consumption levels will be prohibitively costly or simply impossible, warns the report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

"Global resource consumption is exploding. It's not a trend that is in any way sustainable," said Ernst von Weizsäcker, co-chair of UNEP's International Resource Panel.

"We must realise that prosperity and well-being do not depend on consuming ever-greater quantities of resources," said von Weizsäcker.

The world is running out of cheap and high quality sources of some essential materials such as oil, copper and gold, the supplies of which, in turn, require ever-rising volumes of fossil fuels and freshwater to produce, the report found.

During the 20th century, the rate of resource use has increased twice as fast as the increase in global population. Now, resources are being consumed at an even greater rate and are on pace to triple by 2050, the report calculates. Except there simply aren't enough resources left on the planet to manage that.

The average person in Canada or the United States currently consumes 25 tonnes of key resources every year, while a person living in India and in most African countries uses just four tonnes, the report found.

Industrialised countries need to reduce their consumption by making significant reductions in waste and major improvements in the efficiency with which they use resources. At the same time, developing countries need to create new low-carbon, super-efficient resource use pathways for their economic development.

Developing countries have to change their idea of what development means in a resource-scarce world. They need to forge a new resource- efficient, low carbon development path, said Mark Swilling of the Sustainability Institute at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

There is a pressing need for sanitation in much of Africa, but instead of building expensive Western-style water treatment infrastructure, countries can use their wetlands and natural vegetation to provide the same service, Swilling, a co-author of the report, told IPS.

"We will miss out on these kinds of opportunities if we follow Western development patterns," he said.

Public infrastructure is the biggest determinant of future energy and resource use, said Marina Fischer-Kowalski of the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna.

North America's infrastructure, including transportation, sanitation, food production and so on, are all high-energy, high-material-use systems, said report co-author Fischer-Kowalski. They were designed with the assumption of never-ending access to cheap and plentiful energy and resources. Efficiency improvements can be made but it is more expensive and limits to what can be done.

"Our report calls for an urgent rethink of the links between resource use and economic prosperity," Fischer-Kowalski told IPS.

At a bare minimum, wealthy countries need to freeze their per capita consumption and help developing nations follow a more sustainable path, recommends the report, "Decoupling natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth". Decoupling means disconnecting economic growth from increasing use of material resources.

Economic theory has long linked rising economic development as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to increasing resource use. However, countries like Japan and Switzerland have far higher GDP per capita than Australia but they use just 25 percent of the natural resources per capita that Australians use.

Japan has an explicit goal of becoming a "sustainable society" focused on low carbon, the reduction, reuse and recycling of materials, and harmony with nature. The government has successfully focused on increasing resource productivity and minimising negative environmental impacts, the report found.

Germany aims to double energy and resource productivity by 2020. China has declared it will build an "ecological civilisation" with resource and environmental concerns as top priorities.

'Decoupling' is a way of getting away from using the GDP to measure growth and development, said Swilling. Since GDP is a measurement of economic activity, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or even a traffic accident increase GDP.

"GDP measures everything except those things that really matter to people," he said.

This shift to decoupling "will require require significant changes in government policies, corporate behaviour, and consumption patterns", the report concludes with considerable understatement.

Right now, Africa is being hard pressed to sell off its primary resources to foreign interests. Many African states are becoming increasingly dependent on the cash that exports of minerals, timber and food bring. Meanwhile the rising costs of such resources are driving "land grabs" across the continent, where corporations and foreign states are buying or leasing vast tracts of land, said Swilling.

"Grabbing cheap land in Africa has become a popular sport," he said.

Over 50 million hectares of African land has been acquired by foreign interests in the last 10 years, according to Oxfam and the International Land Coalition, an NGO tracking the issue. That's more farmland than Canada has.

Much of Africa's soils are degraded and need rehabilitation, not exploitation, said Swilling. Food prices are going to rise and this is going to cause havoc in the future.

"Countries need to see their farmland and soil as a strategic priority, as part of their national security," he said.

While land grabs rightly captures media attention, most of Africa's export revenues come from selling off its mineral resources. That has to be carefully monitored and at the very least those revenues need to be invested in education and training and the creation of a manufacturing sector, said Swilling.

Education is crucial, agreed Fischer-Kowalski. "Investment in human capital is the key to being able to do more with less," she said.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=55614

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords ‘will return to Congress’

By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, May 12th, 2011 -- 5:59 pm

LOS ANGELES — US lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords, who was almost killed in a horrific shooting in January, will eventually return to Congress, a senior Democrat who saw her last week said Thursday.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the newly-elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Giffords -- shot in the head at point blank range -- had made "tremendous progress" in the fourth months since the Arizona attack.

"I do think she's gonna come back to Congress," she told Good Morning America on ABC television. "I mean the progress that she's making, I think that from what I understand, she's on track for that to happen," she added.

"I had dinner with her in Houston last Friday and she's beginning to walk now, really doesn't use the wheelchair," she added, saying Giffords "is responding in more complex sentences."

While declining to predict when Giffords could return to Congress, Wasserman-Schultz added: "She's making tremendous progress and we're all really proud of her."

Giffords has been undergoing rehabilitation to regain movement on the right side of her body after a bullet tore through the left side of her brain in a shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona on January 8.

Six people were killed, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, when a gunman opened fire at a political meeting Giffords was holding with constituents outside a grocery store.

Last month Giffords flew to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, command the space shuttle Endeavour on its final journey to the International Space Station.

But she returned to her Texas rehabilitation center after the launch was scrubbed a few hours before liftoff due to technical problems.

A new launch attempt is scheduled for next Monday. On Thursday its crew, including five Americans and an Italian, arrived back at Kennedy Space Center to prepare for the new liftoff bid.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/12/congresswoman-gabrielle-giffords-will-return-to-congress/

FACT Sheet: Tax Haven Abuse by the Numbers

• $100 billion: The amount that the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations estimated in 2008 that the U.S. lost in tax revenue due to offshore tax abuse every year
1

• $1 trillion: the amount of unrepatriated foreign profits sitting offshore
2

• $810 billion: The average outflow of illicit money from developing countries per year between 2000-2008 as estimated by Global Financial Integrity
3

• 18,857: The number of registered businesses at one address in the Cayman Islands
4

• 217,000: The number of companies housed at 1209 Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware
5

• 759: Number of offshore subsidiaries in tax havens for Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley combined
6

• 83: number of the 100 largest U.S. companies that use offshore tax havens - including the big banks taxpayers bailed out in 2008
7

• $57.2 billion – Amount of money Egypt lost to trade mispricing and other forms of commercial crime between 2000 and 2008
8

• $2: Daily earnings for at least one third of Egyptians
9

• 30%: Corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts in the mid 1950s
10

• 6.6%: Corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts in 2009
11

• 64%: Publicly traded U.S. parent companies incorporated in Delaware
12

• 51%: Publicly traded U.S. subsidiaries incorporated in Delaware
13

• 6.2%: Next highest percentage of subsidiaries incorporated in any other state
14


Citations
1 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. TAX HAVEN BANKS AND U. S. TAX COMPLIANCE STAFF REPORT
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/071708PSIReport.pdf
This $100 billion estimate is derived from studies conducted by a variety of tax experts. See, e.g., Joseph
Guttentag and Reuven Avi-Yonah, “Closing the International Tax Gap,” in Max B. Sawicky, ed., Bridging the Tax Gap: Addressing the Crisis in Federal Tax Administration (2006) (estimating offshore tax evasion by individuals at $40-$70 billion annually in lost U.S. tax revenues); Kimberly A. Clausing, “Multinational Firm Tax Avoidance and U.S. Government Revenue” (August 2007) (estimating corporate offshore transfer pricing abuses resulted in $60 billion in lost U.S. tax revenues in 2004); John Zdanowics, “Who’s watching our back door?” Business Accents magazine, Volume 1, No.1, Florida International University (Fall 2004) (estimating offshore corporate transfer pricing abuses resulted in $53 billion in lost U.S. tax revenues in 2001); “The Price of Offshore,” Tax Justice Network briefing paper (March 2005) (estimating that, worldwide, individuals have offshore assets totaling $11.5 trillion, resulting in $255 billion in annual lost tax revenues worldwide); “Governments and Multinational Corporations in the Race to the Bottom,” Tax Notes (2/27/06); “Data Show Dramatic Shift of Profits to Tax Havens,” Tax Notes (9/13/04). See also series of 2007 articles authored by Martin Sullivan in Tax Notes (estimating over $1.5 trillion in hidden assets in four tax havens, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, and Switzerland, beneficially owned by nonresident individuals likely avoiding tax in their home jurisdictions), infra footnote 3.

2 Drucker, Jesse. “Tax Holiday for $1 Trillion May Lure Back Profits Without Growth.” Bloomberg. 17 March 2011 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/tax-holiday-for-1-trillion-may-lure-profits-without-spurring-u-s-growth.html

3 Kar, Dev and Curcio, Karly. Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries 2000-2009. Jan 2011

4 Government Accountability Office, International Taxation: Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with Subsidiaries In Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens or Financial Secrecy Jurisdictions, Dec 2008. http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d08778high.pdf

5 Shaxson, Nicholas. (2011) Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and The Men Who Stole the World (p.143). London: The Bodley Head

6 Government Accountability Office, International Taxation: Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with Subsidiaries In Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens or Financial Secrecy Jurisdictions, Dec 2008. http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d08778high.pdf

7 Id.

8 Kar, Dev and Curcio, Karly. Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries
2000-2009. Jan 2011

9 Bronner, Eithan. “Mubarak Denies Corruption and Defends His Legacy.” New York Times. 11 April 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/world/middleeast/11egypt.html?scp=1&sq=Egypt%20%242&st=cse

10 Kocieniewski, David. “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” New York Times. 24 March 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?_r=3

11 Id.

12Dyreng, Scott, Lindsey, Bradley P. and Thornock, Jacob R., Exploring the Role Delaware Plays as a Domestic Tax Haven 28 April 2011 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1737937

13 Id.

14 Id.

http://fact.gfip.org/documents/FACT_Tax_Haven_Abuse_by_the_Numbers.pdf?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=linktracking

How America Is Like 18th Century Europe: Our Imperialistic Attitude Has Led to Endless Wars

By William Astore, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on May 12, 2011, Printed on May 13, 2011

The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country” according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central reality of our post-9/11 world.  Our conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya remain instances of undeclared war, a fact that contributes to their remoteness from our American world.  They are remote geographically, but also remote from our day-to-day interests and, unless you are in the military or have a loved one who serves, remote from our collective consciousness (not to speak of our consciences).

And this remoteness is no accident.  Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged.

In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite.

Cynics might say it has always been thus in the United States.  After all, the War of 1812 was known to critics as “Mr. Madison’s War” and the Mexican-American War of the 1840s was “Mr. Polk’s War.”  The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a naked war of expansion vigorously denounced by American anti-imperialists.  Yet in those conflicts there was at least genuine national debate, as well as formal declarations of war by Congress.

Today’s ruling class in Washington no longer bothers to make a pretense of following the letter of our Constitution -- and they sidestep its spirit as well, invoking hollow claims of executive privilege or higher callings of humanitarian service (as in Libya) or of exporting democracy (as in Afghanistan).  But Libya is still torn by civil war, and Afghanistan has yet to morph into Oregon.

“Enlightened” War, Then and Now

History does not simply repeat itself, yet realities of power, privilege, and pride ensure certain continuities from the past.  Consider how today’s remote wars and the ways they reinforce existing power relations for a privileged and prideful elite echo a style of European warfare more than three centuries old.

Surveying the wreckage of the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), fought feverishly across Germanic territories by most of Europe, monarchs like Louis XIV of France began to seek to fight “limited” wars.  These they considered more consistent with the spirit of a rational and “enlightened” age.  In their hands, such wars became the sport of kings, the real-life equivalents of elaborate chess matches in which foot soldiers drawn from the lower orders served as expendable pawns, while the second or lesser sons of the nobility, fulfilling their duty as officers, proved hardly less expendable knights, bishops, and rooks.

As much as possible, the monarch and his retinue tried to keep war-making and its disruptions at a distance from thriving economic and manufacturing concerns.  In many cases, in the centuries to follow, this would essentially mean exporting war to faraway, “barbaric” realms or colonies.  In the process, death and destruction were outsourced to places and peoples remote from European metropoles.

In fact, this was precisely what enraged our founders: that the colonies in America had become a never-ending battleground for French and British imperial ambitions from which the colonists themselves reaped the whirlwind of war while gaining few of its benefits.  A close reading of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, reveals a proto-republic’s contempt for wars fought at a king’s whim and guaranteed to reduce the colonists to so much cannon fodder.

Refusing to surrender the hard-fought right as British men to have a say in how they were taxed, how their families and lands were defended, and especially for what purposes they themselves fought and died, the founders forged a new nation.  Given this history, it’s not surprising that they granted to Congress, and not to the President, the power to declare and fund war.

In this way, a noble experiment was born, and it worked, however imperfectly, until the devastation of a new thirty years’ war in Europe (better known as World Wars I and II) propelled the United States to superpower status with all its accompanying ambitions stoked by existential fears, whether of yesterday’s godless communists or today’s god-crazed terrorists.

Inside the Washington Beltway: The New Court of Versailles

In the eighteenth century, France was the superpower of Europe with a military that dwarfed those of its neighbors.  And who dictated France’s decisions to go to war?  The answer: the king, his generals, and his courtiers at the Court of Versailles.  In the twenty-first-century, the U.S. celebrates its status as the world’s “sole superpower” with a military second to none.  And who dictates its decisions to go to war?  Considering the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, the answer is no less obvious: the president, his generals, and his courtiers within the vast edifice of Washington’s national security state.

France’s “enlightened” wars were fought by professional armies and mercenaries, directed by a unitary executive who did as he pleased, and endured by the lower orders who had no say (even though they provided the brawn and blood).  Similarly, our twenty-first century masters plunge us into their version of enlightened wars and play their version of global chess matches.

The analogy can be pushed further.  In pre-revolutionary France, the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility) constituted less than 2% of the population but controlled nearly all of France’s wealth and power.  Their unholy alliance kept the Third Estate (everyone who wasn’t a churchman or a noble) under their collective thumb.

Now, consider the United States today.  Our equivalent to the First Estate would be the clergy of finance and banking (the religion of the almighty dollar).  Look for them in their houses of worship on Wall Street.  Our Second Estate equivalent would be the movers and shakers inside Washington’s Beltway.  Look for them in the White House, the Pentagon, Congress, and on K Street where the lobbyists for the First Estate tend to congregate.  The unholy alliance of these two estates leaves the American Third Estate -- you and me -- with the deck stacked against us.

When it comes to war, the American ruling class has relegated the members of its Third Estate alternately to the role of “foreign legionnaires” in overseas service, or silent spectators passively watching moves on the big board.  These, in turn, are continually interpreted for us by retired members of the Second Estate: generals and admirals in mufti, hired by the corporate media to provide color commentary on Washington’s wars.

Small wonder that today’s Beltway elite is as imperious and detached as yesterday’s Court of Louis XIV.  A colleague of mine recently endured a short audience with some members of our Second Estate near Dupont Circle in Washington.  In his words: “They were at once condescending and puzzled by ‘tea party types,’ as they referred to them, which was to say that they inadvertently admitted to being out of touch and were pretty okay with that.  ‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘you cannot continue to pick someone’s pocket while hectoring him about how stupid and uninformed he is and then be surprised that he gets angry.’”

Whether it be unwashed “tea party types,” “retarded” (according to ex-courtier Rahm Emanuel) progressives, or other members of a disgruntled American Third Estate, the Washington elites who wage war in our name simply couldn’t care less what we think, just as Louis XIV and his court couldn’t have cared less about their subjects’ desires.

Endless “limited” wars fought for the interests of the ruling class, massive deficit spending on those wars, a refusal to recognize (or even understand) the people’s growing disgruntlement, a “let them eat cake” mentality: all of this is familiar to a historian.  And like those old French masters of limited war, our new masters of war are hemorrhaging legitimacy.

The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes

In isolating the American Third Estate from war -- indeed, in disengaging it from any meaningful public debate about this nation’s perpetual war-making -- our rulers have conspired to advance their own interests.  Yet in deciding everything of importance out of view, they have unwisely eliminated any check on their folly.

Consider again the example of pre-revolutionary Versailles.  A top-heavy, remarkably dissolute, and openly parasitic bureaucracy plundered the commonweal of France in its pursuit of power and privilege.  Can we not say the same of Washington today?  In its kleptocratic tendency to enrich itself and its accountability-free deployment of military power globally, the American ruling class bears a certain resemblance to French kings and their courts which, in the end, drove their country to economic ruin and violent revolution.

Fed up with its prodigal and prideful rulers, France saw the tumbrels roll and the guillotine blades drop.  How many more undeclared “enlightened” wars, how many more trillions of dollars in war-driven debt, how many more dead and wounded will it take for the American people to reclaim their power over war?  Or are we content to remain deferential to our ruling class and court -- and to their less-than-liberty-loving overseas creditors -- until such a time as their prideful wars and prodigal trillion-dollar-plus “defense” budgets bring our great democratic experiment crashing down?

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

© 2011 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150915/

Study: 44 million could lose Medicaid coverage under GOP plan

By Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau

10:07 AM PDT, May 10, 2011

Reporting from Washington

House Republican plans to repeal the new healthcare law and to convert the Medicaid insurance program into a block grant to states could force as many 44 million poor and disabled Americans out of the program over the next decade, according to a new analysis by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

Hardest hit would be states, many in the South and West, that have not built up their healthcare safety nets in recent years.

These states would have received a large influx of federal money in the healthcare law President Obama signed last year. In 2014, the law will make all Americans making less than 133% of the federal poverty level eligible for Medicaid.

The House GOP plan, authored by Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), would eliminate that expansion and also slash $750 billion in federal spending on Medicaid over the next decade. The plan was approved by the House last month, though it is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The Medicaid program, which insures more 50 million poor and disabled people, is jointly funded by the federal government and by the states, each of which operates a slightly different program.

Because of these differences, the cuts to each state would vary widely, according to the analysis of Ryan's plan.

Florida, for example, could see a 44% cut in federal funding for its Medicaid program by 2021, the report concludes.

Other states projected to see major cutbacks in federal aid include Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Oregon and Nevada.

Nationally, the Kaiser report estimates that federal assistance for Medicaid will drop 34%. Illinois, with a projected 32% cut, and California, with a 31% cut, are expected to suffer relatively less than some other states.

Least affected would be Washington, Vermont, Minnesota, the District of Columbia and Iowa.

Many states are already struggling to hold together their Medicaid programs while trying to balance budgets and deal with millions of new enrollees who signed up for the insurance program during the last recession.

Ryan has touted his budget plan as a way to preserve Medicaid by offering states more flexibility to wring savings from their programs. "States will no longer be shackled  by federally determined program requirements and enrollment criteria," he said of the block grants.

But many experts -- including the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office -- have concluded that House budget proposal would more likely simply result in major cutbacks.

"The repeal of the ACA combined with the adoption of the Medicaid block grant would add millions more to the  number of uninsured Americans and  compromise Medicaid's role as the health safety net in the next recession," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

The commission produced the report in conjunction with the Washington, D.C.,-based Urban Institute.

noam.levey@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-gop-medicare-analysis-20110510,0,2528525,print.story