changes to their municipal drinking water systems

Six of the 11 Michigan cities that have come under state emergency management since 1990 also saw changes to their municipal drinking water systems, the most common being rate increases, water shutoffs for nonpayment and the privatization of water services or infrastructure.

 ....

The researchers also measured community characteristics beyond financial health—including
reliance on state revenue sharing,
the proportion of Black residents and
median household income—

that may have increased the likelihood that cities were targeted for emergency management.

Hughes and her co-authors expected that at least one of the financial indicators used by the state, or a composite financial health score based on all the indicators, would be able to identify all 11 Michigan cities that have experienced takeover.

Surprisingly, that was not the case. The composite financial stress score captured just 45% of those cities. But a city's level of reliance on state revenue sharing captured 82% of the takeovers, while the percentage of Black residents and median household income correctly predicted 64% and 55% of the takeovers, respectively.

"These findings support previous work challenging the technocratic and rational basis of state municipal takeover laws and pointing to the inherent politics in municipal takeovers, specifically the bias and structural challenges facing Black and poor communities," the authors wrote.

The media-coverage portion of the two-pronged study showed that Michigan cities that have come under emergency management were more likely to have changes made to drinking water services than 10 similarly financially stressed Michigan cities that did not come under emergency management.

 

Six of the 11 Michigan cities subjected to emergency management saw changes to their drinking water systems that were implemented to save money or to reduce expenditures. In many cases, those decisions led to poor water quality, service unreliability and increases to water bills, according to the researchers. The 10 comparative cities did not experience any such changes.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-municipal-takeover-michigan-rational-apolitical.html

 “Liberalism is not, in fact, in disarray. Indeed, in many senses it’s a thumping success. Only three decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, neoliberalism, which preserves the classical doctrine’s package of liberties and rights while installing the market, rather than government, as the ultimate arbiter of wealth distribution, has established itself as a political state of nature throughout much of the developed world…. Who exactly is this book for? Occasionally, through use of the second person, the answer slips through: Last Best Hope is for people who needed the shock of the pandemic to “realize that the miraculous price and speed of a delivery of organic microgreens from Amazon Fresh to your doorstep depends on the fact that the people who grow, sort, pack, and deliver it have to work while sick.” In other words, it’s for people like George Packer: comfortable, middle-class professionals who have come to a belated understanding of the American economy’s brutalities, but don’t want things to change so much that they lose the country that has made them a success and brings them their microgreens.”

“George Packer’s Center Cannot Hold” [The New Republic]. 

Food production generates more than a third of manmade greenhouse gas emissions – a new framework tells us how much comes from crops, countries and regions

September 13, 2021 11.06am EDT

 Xiaoming Xu Postdoctoral Research Associate in Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  

Atul Jain Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 In a new study, we show that the food system generates about 35% of total global man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Breaking down this share, 

production of animal-based foods – meat, poultry and dairy products, including growing crops to feed livestock and pastures for grazing – contributes 57% of emissions linked to the food system. 

Raising plant-based foods for human consumption contributes 29%. 

The other 14% of agricultural emissions come from products not used as food or feed, such as cotton and rubber.

We are atmospheric scientists who study the effects of agriculture and other human activities on Earth’s climate. It’s well known that producing animal-based foods generates more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based foods, which is why shifting toward a more plant-based diet is recognized as an option for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. 

 ...

Land use change – clearing forests for farms and ranches, which reduces carbon storage in trees and soils – accounts for 29% of total food production greenhouse gas emissions. Another 38% comes from farmland management activities, such as plowing fields, which reduces soil carbon storage, and treating crops with nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers also burn a lot of fossil fuel to run their tractors and harvesters.

Raising livestock generates 21% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production. It includes methane belched by grazing animals, as well as methane and nitrous oxide released from livestock manure. The remaining 11% comes from activities that occur beyond farm gates, such as mining, manufacturing and transporting fertilizers and pesticides, as well as energy use in food processing.

 

 

Among animal-based foods, beef is the largest contributor to climate change. It generates 25% of total food emissions, followed by cow milk (8%) and pork (7%). 

Rice is the largest contributor among plant-based foods, producing 12% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector, followed by wheat (5%) and sugarcane (2%). Rice stands out because it can grow in water, so many farmers flood their fields to kill weeds, creating ideal conditions for certain bacteria that emit methane.

 

Among individual countries, China, India and Indonesia have the highest emissions from plant-based food production, contributing 7%, 4%, and 2% respectively of global food-related greenhouse gas emissions. The countries with leading emissions from the production of animal-based foods are China (8%), Brazil (6%), the U.S. (5%) and India (4%).

Our framework also shows that raising animal-based foods consumes six times as much land as producing plant-based foods. 

we estimate that 13% of total agricultural land is being used to produce plant-based foods. The other 77% is being used to produce animal-based foods, including croplands that are growing animal feed and grazing lands. The remaining 10% is being used to raise other products, such as cotton, rubber and tobacco.

 

 

 

 

https://theconversation.com/food-production-generates-more-than-a-third-of-manmade-greenhouse-gas-emissions-a-new-framework-tells-us-how-much-comes-from-crops-countries-and-regions-167623

government-sponsored infrastructure, progressive taxation, and anti-monopoly legislation,

 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/13/the-vocabulary-of-neoliberal-diplomacy-in-todays-new-cold-war/ 

Michael Hudson

The problem, of course, is that just as the United States, Germany and other nations grew into industrial powers in the 19^th and 20^th century by government-sponsored infrastructure, progressive taxation, and anti-monopoly legislation, the post-1980 rejection of these policies has led them into economic stagnation for the 99 Percent burdened by debt deflation and rising rentier overhead paid to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors. China is thriving by following precisely the policies by which the former leading industrial nations grew rich before suffering from the neoliberal financialization disease. This contrast ....

China recognized from the beginning that its insistence on maintaining control of its economy – steering it to promote overall prosperity, not to enrich a client oligarchy fronting for a foreign investor class – would create political opposition from U.S. Cold War ideologues. China therefore sought allies from Wall Street, offering profit-making opportunities for Goldman Sachs and other investors whose self-interest has indeed led them to oppose anti-China policies.

 ..

 John McCain characterized Russia as a gas station with atom bombs (neglecting to acknowledge that it is now the world’s largest grain exporter, no longer dependent on the West for its food supply – thanks largely to U.S.-sponsored trade sanctions). The corollary image is the United States as a financialized and monopolized economy with atom bombs and cyber threats, in danger of becoming a failed state like the old Soviet Union but threatening to bring the entire world economy down with it if other countries do not subsidize its debt-ridden New Cold War economy.

 

...

What is autocracy and “authoritarianism”?

Foreign moves to defend against U.S. financial takeovers and sponsorship of client oligarchies are denounced as authoritarian. In the U.S. diplomatic vocabulary, “autocracy” refers to a government protecting the interests of its own population by resisting U.S. financial takeover of its natural resources, basic infrastructure and most lucrative monopolies.

All successful economie throughout history have been mixed public/private economies. The proper role of government is to protect economies from a rentier oligarchy from emerging to polarize the economy at the expense of the population at large. This protection requires keeping control of money and credit, land and natural resources, basic infrastructure and natural monopolies in the hands of governments.

 

...

The liberal mass media, academia, and “think tank” lobbying institutions, policy foundations and NGOs sponsor the above-described rhetoric of free markets to create vehicles for capital flight, money laundering, tax evasion, deregulation and privatization (and the corruption that goes with emerging kleptocracies). Neoliberal doctrine depicts all public moves to protect general prosperity from the burden of rentier overhead as being authoritarian autocracy “interfering” with property rights.

...

China is defending itself not only by the productive industrial and agricultural economy its socialist government has sponsored, but by a guiding concept of how economies work. China’s economic managers have the classical concepts of value, price and economic rent, that distinguish earned from unearned income, and productive labor and wealth from unproductive and predatory financial and rentierfortunes.

These are the concepts needed to uplift all society, the 99 Percent rather than just the One Percent. But the post-1980 neoliberal reaction has stripped away from the Western economic vocabulary and academic curriculum. The present economic stagnation, debt burden and locked-in zero interest rates are a policy choice by the West, not a product of inevitable technological determinism.

 

 

 

Left-wing and Right-wing authoritarians - striking similarities

Study: Left-wing authoritarians share key psychological traits with far right

by Emory University

 By Carol Clark | eScienceCommons | Sept. 9, 2021

 https://phys.org/news/2021-09-left-wing-authoritarians-key-psychological-traits.html

In addition to the striking similarities between the two political extremes, the research also highlighted a key difference between the two: Left-wing authoritarians were more likely to perceive the world as a dangerous place and experience intense emotions and a sense of uncontrollability in response to stress. Right-wing authoritarians were more cognitively rigid, less open to new experiences, and less likely to believe in science. 

 

...

The good news is that both extreme authoritarianism and a tendency toward political violence appear relatively rare, Costello adds. Out of a sample size of 1,000 respondents, drawn from the online research tool Prolific and matched to the demographics of the U.S. population for age, race and sex, only 12 reported having engaged in political violence, and they all scored high for authoritarianism.