When Laissez-faire Loses Its Luster
This scene from the largely forgotten tv series Newsroom still sends chills down our spines. Even if it is just Hollywood, actor Jeff Daniels’ character Will McAvoy questioning this country’s greatness before millions of young, impressionable minds is a profile in courage far beyond any JFK immortalized. It’s also political and/or professional suicide, just ask Colin Kaepernick who tried a similar stunt in front of tens of millions of older, very unimpressionable minds, threatening the delicate balance of a $100 billion entertainment ecosystem. The short-lived prominence of both characters is proof positive the pursuit of truth quickly becomes unpatriotic when it cuts into profits in my country right or wrong.
As Trump refashions our country into his, profits, patriotism and prevarication are soaring, laying bare the deals with the devil that made this “God fearing” country “great,” starting with our original sin, slavery. Call us traitors, but NBN doesn’t want this country to be that kind of great ever again. Not when we can be so much greater.
Too heavy a price—ecological and economical—is paid for all these profits, almost entirely by those with no say in the country running up the tab: future generations of tax payers. So, it’s in their defense NBN wants to see Trump’s consumer-economy explode like the space shuttle Challenger. All those wonderful retail, and hospitality industry jobs he’s taking undue credit for? Get rid of most and those that remain make them much higher paying. The record military spending Trump leveraged for political gain? Well, too late for that. We want to see sharp increases in the costs of jet-skies, rib-eye steaks and sport utility vehicles with the life expectancy of a Bic lighter. Wait, there’s more.
We want to eliminate the charitable tax deduction and donations, with the possible exception of a revamped free press which bans anonymous sources and lowers libel thresholds. We want to restrict displays of crucifixes, hajibs, turbans, Stars of David, Gnishes and what-nots to inside homes and houses of worship. We want federally funded political campaigns with ranked voting and an end to corporate and individual contributions. And for God’s sakes, outlaw any guns outside of pistols and hunting rifles.
There, we said it. One might argue such whole-sale restriction on our freedom elevates NBN beyond traitorous to certifiably insane. How do we express who we are if not through the freedoms we enjoy and the causes we support? Why work so hard if not to enjoy the rewards?
NBN wants to suggest there are far greater rewards more easily attained which we nonetheless ignore at even greater peril. All these wonderful means of self-expression and fulfillment are not, and never were, freedoms. They are indulgences earned and enjoyed as often as not, directly or indirectly, at the cost of non-renewable natural and human resources. Here in the US, we’ve never seen our freedoms as indulgences because a nearly unlimited supply of those resources allowed the Founding Fathers to turn the New World into incredible money-making opportunities largely exhausted in the old. To make this point, NBN indulges in what the money makers will no doubt call revisionist history.
The colonies were not states as much as they were British business ventures disinclined to temper their private interests in England with the public’s in the colonies. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers knew to right this wrong they still had to put private interests at least on a par with the public’s or they couldn’t offer a deal better than the British. Letting private interests profit as much as possible from the public’s—most notably enslaving millions of Africans and Native Americans—not only greatly incentivized declaring independence, it jump-started this country’s historic global economic dominance. With its fundamental ethical encumbrances thus prioritized, fledgling US industry went to work on 3.8 million square miles of untouched natural and human resources which were monetized and exhausted with historic speed.
First, we wiped out the beavers and the entirety of eastern old-growth forests, along with the eons-old civilizations of the Native Americans who occupied them. New England whaling killed off global cetacean populations, while the south became the world’s fourth wealthiest economy at the expense of 4 million innocent lives lost to slavery and another 600,000 slaughtered in its abolition. In its place an ever growing supply of cheap, immigrant labor allowed for the country’s ever westward expansion at the continued cost of Native Americans and the resources they depended on, eventually converting some of the world’s richest grasslands into world-leading agricultural exports while turning the Gulf of Mexico into the world’s largest deadzone. Then mining opened up the west coast to ecologically devastating extraction industries we’re still paying a price for.
Did we leave anything out? Oh yeah, this country’s creation and subsequent domination of the fossil fuel industry earns us the title of lead contributors to global warming, what many scientists believe is the uber over-indulgence about to unwind centuries of civilization worldwide.
Ok, that’s the tree-hugger, liberal, snowflake version of American history, how about looking from another perspective. Our constitutionally protected right to pursue the American dream with minimal government intervention allowed this country to make a home and future for 20 generations of hungry immigrants. It financed what was once the world standard in public education—and is still in higher education—with more than enough money left over to birth and nurture an environmental movement underpinning global conservation efforts today. We created the worldwide web, personal computers, and the light bulb; we make the world’s best microprocessors and hundreds of other things that modern society cannot possibly do without and our medical technology is first in the world, if not our means of deploying it.
Did we leave anything out? Oh yeah. This nation’s initial indifference to human rights aside, America’s founding was premised on the promise of a better life for all races and creeds, making a motto of human history’s single greatest contribution to civilization: the concept, if not always the practice of, unequivocal equality.
That’s such an impressive track record, even the most empathetic American has to agree the ends have in many respects justified the means in our checkered past. Leaving us with the question that has us so divided today over the country’s tomorrow: do we double down on the freedom or the equality? As expected, NBN lobbies for the latter largely because we believe those limitless resources that bought us so much freedom are running low, as they already had in Europe 400 years ago when the Founding Fathers crossed the pond. That’s why so much of Europe embraces higher levels of taxes and public service than The States. Their 1,750-year jump on resource exploitation means they already settled the question this country faces today: Do we increase freedom or governance to ensure the equitable distribution of our remaining public resources so we don’t end up killing each other over same?
It’s NBN’s theory that it’s the discovery of those vast resources at the dawn of the industrial revolution that gave this country its golf courses, steaks, big cars, houses and attitude all with comparatively little killing. That, and the hundreds of millions of lives spent leveraging them into a “better life for our kids,’ and what today is by far the world’s greatest accumulation of private wealth. But now, thanks to technology and all that wealth, this country really does have a chance to offer our kids, ourselves, this country, and the world a better life. Not striving for the “American Dream”, but living it by leveraging the most precious resource of all: our time. How? That’s for another issue of NBN.
Monthly Musings
We Cast Our Vote For…
NBN Early Presidential Endorsement: The lesser of two evils, again.NBN will likely be voting for Joe Biden this election, but after seeing our fellow middle-aged, white Americans once again fall into the thrall of a bad actor, literally and figuratively, our inner anarchist might just join them and vote for Donald Trump. Yes, NBN is all about cautious, conservation-minded governance a la Jimmy Carter and Barrack Obama. We’re also a little jaded after seeing how easily our electorate has once again been beguiled into subverting decades of science, sacrifice, and conservation for the promise of big cars, houses, and 401Ks paid for by those who can’t cast a vote. It seems our fellow Americans don’t want to do due diligence, deliberate and then decide. We want to sit back and be sold between touchdowns on weekends. That’s why we’re stuck with Sen. Joe Hide-Your-Corporation-in-My-State Biden and Generalissimo Donald Greed-Is-Good Trump: angry old white guys, and their obedient wives. How is it the same generation that cleaned their dinner plates for the sake of starving children in China are so easily suckered by a snake oil salesman who weighs their lives against gold-plating on private jet seat belts? It’s called branding. In Trump’s America, waste isn’t trash, it’s luxury. We win, we don’t play the game. Excess isn’t too much, it’s success. We don’t make America great, we make it great again because nothing sells old white voters like the good ‘ol days when our dominance went unchecked. This country has accumulated the wealth and developed the technology to make America great in ways the two godawful candidates now running will never understand, while the one guy who does is out of the running, again. So, unless Biden has an astonishing VP pic and develops a heart murmur before elections, yeah, why not vote for Trump? Then move to Canada, sit back and enjoy the show.
Make America Think Again
Andrew Yang was the first candidate to offer an option to Americans who value their free time as the truest measure of wealth, although we suspect Yang was not fully aware he was doing so. His promises of universal basic income and universal health care offered an option to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without ever having to work a day of your life. In order to avoid that rather awkward, socialism-esque branding message, Yang said the UBI was simply an economic buffer to lessen the headwinds from disruptive technologies upending entire industries at increasingly regular intervals. Au contraire, Mr. Yang. We live in a country where we each generate 4.2 pounds of trash a day, where seven percent of homes are vacant while .17 percent of the population is homeless, 40 percent of food goes uneaten, mountains of perfectly good electronics are discarded, and free wifi networks are expanding everywhere. Add on $12k a year and free health care and you can leverage that excess into a career spent watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns and pounding Doritos all day. Or, if that gets boring, take any of the countless free online college courses, offer your services to crowd-sourced citizen science or write a blog. Fix up your home, or apartment, volunteer in your community or go fishing. This may not be the American Dream that inspired generations of Americans to put our noses to the grindstone and work for the weekend at jobs that let us die with the most toys. But what Yang understands is technology does not abide such work-a-day sentiments and will soon be forcing us all to make better use of our free time by giving us a whole lot more of it, whether we want it or not.
Make America Waste Again
The federal government has set the individual poverty level for 2020 at $12,760 with an extra $4,480 added on for each additional household member.Those of you thinking you can’t possibly survive on $12k a year, let alone support a family of four on $26,200 a year consider this: On average our bodies burn about 3,000 calories a day. That means NBN’s daily breakfast of grains, nuts and fruit add up to about half of our daily personal energy requirements. Then we burn anther 70,000,000 calories or so driving our car, heating and or air conditioning our homes, running appliances, and eating two more meals with cookies and ice cream for dessert. These largely finagled figures are nonetheless probably close caloric consumption calculations of how much excess energy the average American exhausts in one day. Which is why NBN is so adamant about our very simple message, we hate waste: There is so damn much of it and the overwhelming majority comes from nonrenewable resources. None more precious than our time on this planet, which so many of us waste at work like sailors on shore leave. There are those with jobs they’d as happily do as watch tv, play golf, or go fishing. (Well, maybe not fishing.) But the vast majority of Americans spend at least half their life doing stuff they’d really rather not just so they can continue to waste all that energy and ensure their kids get to do the same and more. Yes, that’s another completely fabricated statistic, but again does anyone doubt it? Why are we Americans so wasteful? Pretty much because we’ve been convinced for generations by those who sell the stuff we waste that it’s the American Way. And let’s face it, wasting energy can be a lot of fun. So is exerting it, which is also so much healthier. NBN doesn’t want to be the scold or sandwich board apocalyptic. Quite the opposite. Technology is catapulting us into an age where we can have our cake and eat it too, we just cannot take two bites and throw out the rest. Or at the very least, if we wish to, we should pay a whole hell of a lot more for doing so, so future generations won’t have too.
They Got A Name For That
Drawing distinctions between the desperate is dangerous practice, but there are different degrees of homelessness we might want to weigh as we decided who we elect to help them, or not. There’s the immigrant homeless escaping corrupt, crime-ridden, collapsing countries for a better life in The States. There are the alcohol and drug addled homeless who have abandoned the search for same. Then there’s a third class of homeless that might hold out hope for the other two and even the rest of us working stiffs. Freegans, aka trash pickers, earn an interesting, if not esthetically enticing living leveraging the excesses of a country that buys disposable everything into a lifestyle that worries about nothing. Trash picker, aka Zabaleen, is a bona fide occupation in third-world countries. Why not open up that market to those most in need in The States by placing deposit premiums on all single-use products, not just bottles. Sharply increasing the costs of single-use products and packaging will only be an incremental erosion of every American’s God-given right to buy and throw out as much stuff as they want. At the same time, it turns those excesses into a supplemental income, or carefree livelihood, for those who can’t afford that right or choose to waive it. It also affords the former a chance to profit from our consumer culture while eliminating a mounting problem in the age of Trump: trash. Industrial scale, single-stream recycling programs are being abandon wholesale because the raw material—our trash—is too dirty to make it pay. Fixing redemption costs to products designed to be discarded will cover the cleaning cost either by letting the consumer, or those less inclined to consume, share in the profits of a culture defined by consumption.
