Erratum to Obama's New New Deal and the Irreversible Crisis (Socialism and Democracy, 23, 2 (55-69), 10.1080/08854300902904766);Obama's new New Deal and the irreversible crisis

Socialism and Democracy

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 55-69

  Meyerson, Gregory ^a   Roberto, Michael Joseph ^a  

^a North Carolina State University s College of Design   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70449596238     PISSN: 08854300     EISSN: 17452635     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08854300903357220     Document Type: Erratum

References (45)

1. "Obama. . . Seeks Budget to Reshape US Priorities," New York Times, February 27, 2009.
2. Patrick Manning, "Obama Budget Projects Record Deficits and Borrowing," February 27,2009, www.wsws.org. Manning adds: "The ten-year budget projection, covering the years 2010 to 2019, shows the annual deficit declining to $533 billion in fiscal 2013 - still larger than any previous year before the crash of 2008 - and then beginning to rise again. By 2019, the US national debt is estimated at $13.8 trillion, a sum equivalent to the entire US Gross Domestic Product last year."
3. The latest Commerce Department figures show that the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 6.2% in the last quarter of 2008, the sharpest quarterly decline since 1982. http://seekingalpha.com/article/123342-commerce-department-reports-sharpest-economic-contraction-since-82
4. David Harvey, "Why the US Stimulus Package is Bound to Fail," www.marxmail.org.
5. Students of the current crisis would be well served by revisiting Lewis Corey's highly informative Depression-era work, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici-Friede, 1934). Among other salient points, Corey demonstrates how the restriction of production, which is always relative under capitalism, becomes absolute in the epoch of capitalist decline. Unlike the crisis of overproduction that defined the deepening of the Great Depression, the current crisis stems from the long-term impact of financialization and deindustrialization, which has systematically decimated the real, productive economy.
6. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 175.
7. "Franklin Delano Obama?" New York Times, November 10, 2008.
8. "Who'll Stop the Pain?" New York Times, February 20, 2009.
9. "Climate of Change," New York Times, February 27, 2009.
10. Dean Baker, "Spending Versus Tax Cuts: Who Pays the Cost of Political Compromise?" Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 2009, www.cepr.net/documents/publications/2009-01-Spending-Vs-Tax-Cuts.pdf
11. Dean Baker, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (Sausalito, CA: PoliPoint Press, 2009), 6f.
12. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (London & New York: Verso, 2006), 97-143.
13. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 116.
14. Ibid., 48f.
15. Ibid., 139.
16. See Kunstler's blog, Clusterfuck Nation, at http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/
17. Harvey, "Why the US Stimulus Package is Bound to Fail" (note 4).
18. For a more detailed elaboration of this position, see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2008). Arrighi, it should be noted, differs from Harvey and Foster in that he sees the China developmental model as a rival but a non-imperialist rival. Leo Panitch disagrees with this basic position, arguing that US hegemony is relatively secure and that, even with all its debt, it is still the safest place for global capital (Panitch interview: www.creative-i.info/?p=4735).
19. For an argument that the US is declining but China lacks the where- withal to become a new hegemon, thus leaving the globe without hegemon, see Minqi Li, The Rise of China and the Demise of the World Capitalist Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
20. Obama failed to heed the warning of a top Chinese official who had advised the United States in December: "Be nice to the countries that lend you money." Gregory Chin and Eric Helleiner, "Calling China's Bluff," January 2009, www.ForeignPolicy.org.
21. "Geithner Hints at Harder Line on China Trade", New York Times, January 23, 2009.
22. Bill Van Auken, "Hillary Clinton Presses China To Keep Buying US Debt," February 24, 2009, www.wsws.org
23. Michel Chossudovsky, "America's Fiscal Collapse," www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12517.
24. "China Losing Taste for Debt from US," New York Times, January 8, 2009.
25. Finance Minister Xie Xuren warned that a 3% decline in revenue would make 2009 "a difficult fiscal year," likely further slowing overall accumulation of foreign Treasury notes. For details on the precipitous drop in direct foreign investment, housing bust, the drastic decline in value of Chinese stocks, and the cutback in US demand for Chinese imports - all of which necessitate a Chinese stimulus plan, see "China's Route Forward," New York Times, January 23, 2009.
26. Pieter Bottelier, "China's Economic Downturn: Employment is The Critical Issue," China Brief, Vol. 9, Issue 3, February 4, 2009, www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief.
27. See George Monbiot, "One Shot Left," The Guardian, November 25, 2008.
28. Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 6.
29. Arjun Makhijani, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for US Energy Policy (Takoma Park, MD: IEER Press, 2007).
30. See George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2009), 61.
31. and Peter W. Huber & Mark P. Mills, The Bottomless Well (New York: Basic Books, 2006), ch. 7.
32. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 56f. We would note that the mere fact that China and India are presumably still progressing up the curve could mean, given time constraints, that the world could not avert the climate crisis even were the curve correct.
33. Minqi Li, "Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism", Monthly Review, July/August 2008, 59.
34. To give the reader a sense of these requirements: In 2004, the US used on average 3.35 TW of power. How many large windfarms would it take to produce this kind of power, and how much space would it require? The largest US windfarm, Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas, has a 730 MW nameplate capacity. But this number is misleading since wind (unlike nuclear) does not produce at anything resembling full capacity (and of course the wind does not blow all the time); 20% capacity is a reasonable number. To power the US economy on wind would require (putting aside other logistical problems) about 4 million sq. km, more than all US farmland. David Mackay, in Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air (Cambridge: UIT, 2009), has noted that wind power uses 500 times as much space as nuclear per unit of energy (167). Defenders of wind will note that this large amount of space does not preclude other activities, like farming around the turbines, but an expanding economy will nonetheless eventually set space-limits. The problem of intermittency is equally intractable; mere geographical distribution cannot assure that missing wind power will be offset by an equivalent amount elsewhere.
35. William Tucker, Terrestrial Energy (Savage, MD: Bartleby Press, 2008), 158f.
36. Mackay, Sustainable Energy (note 32), 62.
37. Tom Blees, Prescription for the Planet (Amazon: Surge Press, 2008), 75.
38. Ibid., 68f.
39. On a recent Booknotes appearance (February 27, 2009), Van Jones responded to an audience member worried about a nuclear renaissance by saying that nuclear power took up too much space, and that in a given space, you could get the same amount of solar power. His facts are off, however, by about a factor of 80! Solar One, the solar farm in Nevada, produces, on about the land for a modern nuclear power plant, 64 MW of power compared to 1 GW nuclear. When you factor in an optimistic 25% real capacity, the nameplate capacity is reduced to 16 MW. In his book, The Green Collar Economy, Jones also refers to the mythical "tons" of CO2 emitted in the nuclear production process without mentioning the far greater number of "tons" emitted in construction of wind turbines. Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn suggest, in Earth: The Sequel (New York: Norton, 2008), 149, citing the National Renewables Energy Laboratory, that geothermal could provide up to 20% of US power by 2025. But Mackay shows that with geothermal, "the speed at which heat travels through solid rock limits the rate at which heat can sustainably be sucked out of the earth's red-hot interior." What this means is that with pumps sunk at the ideal levels all around the globe, geothermal could sustainably produce about 2 KWH/Person/day, about.08% of current US energy requirements (Sustainable Energy, 96).
40. For problems running a hydrogen economy using solar power, see David Strahan, The Last Energy Shock (London: John Murray, 2007), 95f.
41. Hansen notes that "it is essential that dogmatic 'environmentalists,' opposed to all nuclear power, not be allowed to delay the R&D on 4th generation nuclear power." See James Hansen's letter to Obama, "Tell Barack Obama the Truth - the Whole Truth," www.columbia.edu/jeh1/mailings/20081121_Obama.pdf.
42. See Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (New York: Norton, 2006), 121-30. According to Blees (Prescription for the Planet, chaps. 5 & 7), we could even run our cars safely - on boron, and utilize syngas produced from the plasma conversion of our waste as fuel for high energy industrial processes. Even without the boron, the production of electric cars, which Li (note 31) figured would take decades, would be much sped up with a crash program to build the IFR.
43. Li, "Climate Change" (note 31), 61.
44. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: NLB, 1975), 486.
45. Gregory Meyerson and Michael Joseph Roberto, "It Could Happen Here," October 2006, www.monthlyreview.org/1006meyerson.htm