Tomorrow’s vote is first about an immediate threat to our democracy.  This threat comes primarily from the domination of large, mostly multi-national, corporations who wish to lock in their dominance by using government to limit competition.  The US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision accelerated this effort because it unleashed a flood of corporate cash, much of it provided in secret, into our political campaign system.

This multi-billion dollar effort is causing another, longer term problem:  We as a nation are not addressing our real needs and this means we are innocently taking massive and unnecessary risks.   What are those risks?

•  We are running larger deficits and debt than is necessary.  Yet we are being pandered to, again, with more tax cuts that are guaranteed to further increase deficits and debt.
•  We are much too dependent on fossil fuel energy.  Billions of people are climbing out of poverty worldwide and demanding a larger share of fossil fuel energy, which guarantees the price of these fuels will climb.  Yet we have no national program to install sustainable, clean energy systems which would insulate our country from the increasing cost of fossil fuels.   Importantly, this dependence threatens our national security as we are in danger of being in continual wars overseas protecting our fossil fuel sources.
• We are over using chemicals and hormones in our food industry.  This is not only degrading our environment but is also creating an epidemic of ill health outcomes, like diabetes, that are taxing our health care system and costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary spending annually.
• Our weather is very likely to become increasingly more severe due to global warming.  Yet we have not begun national programs, such as those for sustainable energy or more robust infrastructures, to prepare for dealing with these probable weather challenges.
• Our financial system is lopsided, favoring very large banking conglomerates that are shielded from competition and the dangers of their risk taking.    We have, so far, continued to socialize their losses which has removed their caution to risk taking.
• Our tax structure too much favors the incomes of the wealthy over the incomes of a majority of Americans.  Privileged rates are applied to wealthy incomes from dividends, capital gains and carried interest.  The tax laws are shot full of tax avoidance schemes designed for the wealthy like unified charitable trusts, irrevocable trusts, offshore accounts and trusts and estate taxes that avoid capital gains taxes altogether.   Combined with broad based tax cuts, these schemes guarantee high deficits and debt and the underfunding of necessary government programs like social security, medicare and medicaid.
• Our regulatory structures are too weak.  From bank risk taking, to environmental abuse, to a medical system focused on the more profitable business of treating symptoms rather than creating cures, regulators all too often look the other way or become enablers of corporations only concerned with the most profitable activity irrespective of the activity’s bad outcomes for individuals and the nation.

Beezer here.  Unfortunately one of our two political parties, the Republican party, is ‘all in’ supporting the efforts of multi-nationals.  They enable all these bad outcomes.  They support unlimited corporate campaign spending that dominates our national discussions and hides the real risks we are taking.  They favor a tax system tilted heavily in favor wealthy incomes, which in turn aggravates income inequality and suppresses both job creation and income gains for the majority of working Americans.   They pander to our want of lower taxes while endangering our needs for a safer, healthier and more competitive economy.   This is the precipice we face in tomorrow’s national elections.  If Republicans win tomorrow, then our needs will never be addressed without encountering some massive disaster of epic scale.  It’s that important.  We need to regain our ability to self-govern. 

The medical science community is united against the broad overuse of antibiotics in animal farming and the Federal Drug Administration’s (FDA) own research says the overuse threatens human health yet the FDA has denied two longstanding petitions aimed at reducing this dangerous overuse.

Why?  Because the FDA doesn’t have the manpower to enforce the regulations.  So they decided to make the guidelines recommended by the petitions voluntary.  Oh yeah, that’s going to work.  Nothing like the benefits of not being able to protect the public from raising super pathogens on animal farms.

The New York Times has an editorial about the FDA decision.  And we’ve written about the problem before here and here.

A recent outbreak of E. coli. poisoning in Germany that killed 31 people and made thousands more sick starkly underlines the danger being created by the overuse of low level antibiotics in agriculture, particularly in beef, hog and poultry farming.  While the German problem has been identified as coming from organically grown sprouts, the source of the E. coli. likely came from irrigation water contaminated by runoff from nearby animal farms or processors.

We’ve highlighted the danger of low level antibiotic use here, particularly regarding the efforts of Rep. Louise Slaughter  (D-NY) to pass legislation  prohibiting their overuse in farms.  The problem is straighforward:  The big Agriculture business model is based on the factory concept where huge processors cram animals into filthy lots filled with animal excrement and, unsurprisingly, pathogens.  To keep the animals alive long enough for slaughter, they are fed enormous amounts of antibiotics.  The pathogens adapt and in some cases are now untreatable.

This whole issue is the subject of a new article by two time Pulitzer prize winner Nicholas Kristof, published in the New York Times. 

The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.

Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.

Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.

Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.

Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of our agricultural system — I say this as an Oregon farmboy who once raised sheep, cattle and hogs — is the way antibiotics are recklessly stuffed into healthy animals to make them grow faster.

The Food and Drug Administration reported recently that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock, not humans. And 90 percent of the livestock antibiotics are administered in their food or water, typically to healthy animals to keep them from getting sick when they are confined in squalid and crowded conditions.

The single state of North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans.

This cavalier use of low-level antibiotics creates a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The upshot is that ailments can become pretty much untreatable.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, a professional organization of doctors, cites the case of Josh Nahum, a 27-year-old skydiving instructor in Colorado. He developed a fever from bacteria that would not respond to medication. The infection spread and caused tremendous pressure in his skull.

Some of his brain was pushed into his spinal column, paralyzing him. He became a quadriplegic depending on a ventilator to breathe. Then, a couple of weeks later, he died.

There’s no reason to link Nahum’s case specifically to agricultural overuse, for antibiotic resistance has multiple causes that are difficult to unravel. Doctors overprescribe them. Patients misuse them. But looking at numbers, by far the biggest element of overuse is agriculture.

We would never think of trying to keep our children healthy by adding antibiotics to school water fountains, because we know this would breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It’s unconscionable that Big Ag does something similar for livestock.

Louise Slaughter, the only microbiologist in the United States House of Representatives, has been fighting a lonely battle to curb this practice — but industrial agricultural interests have always blocked her legislation.

“These statistics tell the tale of an industry that is rampantly misusing antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living conditions among animals,” Slaughter said. “As they feed antibiotics to animals to keep them healthy, they are making our families sicker by spreading these deadly strains of bacteria.”

Vegetarians may think that they’re immune, but they’re not. E. coli originates in animals but can spill into water used to irrigate vegetables, contaminating them. The European E. coli outbreak apparently arose from bean sprouts grown on an organic farm in Germany.

One of the most common antibiotic-resistant pathogens is MRSA, which now kills more Americans annually than AIDS and adds hugely to America’s medical costs. MRSA has many variants, and one of the more benign forms now is widespread in hog barns and among people who deal with hogs. An article this year in a journal called Applied and Environmental Microbiology reported that MRSA was found in 70 percent of hogs on one farm.

Another scholarly journal reported that MRSA was found in 45 percent of employees working at hog farms. And the Centers for Disease Control reported this April that this strain of bacteria has now been found in a worker at a day care center in Iowa.

Other countries are moving to ban the feeding of antibiotics to livestock. But in the United States, the agribusiness lobby still has a hold on Congress.

The European outbreak should shake people up. “It points to the whole broken system,” notes Robert Martin of the Pew Environment Group.

We need more comprehensive inspections in the food system, more testing for additional strains of E. coli, and more public education (always wash your hands after touching raw meat, and don’t use the same cutting board for meat and vegetables). A great place to start reforms would be by banning the feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock.

Beezer here.  This is just another example where sensible regulation is being stopped by monied special interests.  Whether it’s financial regulation, or agriculture regulation, or environmental regulation in the US campaign money talks and sensible government walks.   We’ve become an oligopoly nation, one where a very few very wealthy citizens control government policy.   Our current economic problems stem from this control and soon, no doubt, these problems will be joined by terrible health issues too. 

As America’s Industrial Ag. megalith continues to pump out lousy food and toxic chemicals into our bodies, the natural response to use local farming is growing like there’s no tomorrow.

From a USA Today news article here.

“The “local” movement — buying and eating food produced locally rather than shipped from thousands of miles away — has been gaining steam with the steady growth of farmers markets and a phenomenon called community-supported agriculture. CSA members purchase shares of a farmer’s crop for the season. The government doesn’t track the numbers, but Local Harvest, a nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets and other local food sources, estimates that tens of thousands of American families belong to CSAs, and supply trails demand. The number registered with Local Harvest alone indicates how quickly CSAs have multiplied over the past decade: The directory’s listing has increased from 374 farms in 2000 to 3,660 today.”

Additionally, the Farmer’s Market phenomenon where urban areas set up local farm bazaars, normally once a week, is also growing.  From the USDA this:

Historically, in the worst of our times strong leadership not only acknowledges the difficulties, they also talk of the opportunities.  Leaders who constantly and consistently remind the public of hope, of opportunities, can energize their citizens against unexpected setbacks. 

President Obama, whose last book was called “The Audacity of Hope,” needs to return to exactly what got him the Presidency.  It’s time he again remind America of hope, and of the tremendous opportunities before us now more than ever before.

With all the mis-steps in the economy right now, it may sound counter-intuitive to talk up hope and opportunities.  The truth is it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s a no-lose position politically.

The financial meltdown and severe recession, the British Petroleum deep water oil rig disaster, the nasty and divisive health care reform fight and other problems have pushed politicians into endless rounds of finger pointing and negativity.   No one talks of opportunity.  Hope has been banned to the locker room.

Now is precisely the time to talk of opportunities.  But where, exactly, should Obama focus these positive attitudes?

In a word, jobs.  Not just jobs for next Friday, but long term jobs that will pay well and be sustainable.  The nice reality is that there are many opportunities to accomplish these goals.  And most citizens understand these things don’t happen overnight.   This realization, if the discussion turns to hope and opportunity, helps take some pressure off the next election.  Adults understand that gratification may need to be postponed in order to make the big gains.  

It’s not just about “me,” and it’s not just about “now.”

So get back to talking about them.  Use some of the setbacks as foils to highlight hope and opportunity.  We can be cleaning up an accidental oil volcano and Wall Street while spotting the opportunities and working on them.  They aren’t mutually exclusive.  In fact, cleaning up the oil volcano and Wall Street are part and parcel of understanding where the opportunities are.

The oil accident can shed a spotlight on the sustainable energy opportunities.  It is a perfect foil for explaining how America can free itself from such disasters, and along the way create entire new industries.  Industries that leverage America’s world leading technology to create corporate profits, livable wages and stability. 

A bank system that is out of control blows up with tremendous negative consequences for an economy.  This everyone understands all too well.  Reining in speculation and unethical behaviour makes the markets more transparent and reduces volatility.  And most importantly, stability reduces the cost of doing business.  Uncertainty is very expensive.

What’s a Wall Street cleanup a foil for?  It’s a foil for returning the focus to investment in the opportunities instead of just casino like speculation.  A nation not distracted by turbulent financial markets is one that can better identify where the next generation of growth is likely to come from.

What about the deficits?  Where’s the opportunity there?  The opportunity is jobs.  If American leverages its natural optimism and identifies the opportunities, then the new jobs and wage gains will eliminate the deficits.  Having smarter government spending helps, but the main dynamic that balances budgets comes from innovation and job creation.

And above all it’s not about tax cuts.  It’s about new jobs.  Businesses don’t go out and buy new equipment and hire new workers because the government gives them a tax credit.  They buy new equipment and hire more people because there are new opportunities.

At bottom, this is why the focus on opportunity needs to be kept front and center, particularly when politics seems all about a lack of hope and no one seems capable of looking for opportunity.  

Whether it’s tackling new energy industries, or building new railroads, or building new cars, or improving our farm system to produce better food, just asserting we have all this work to do and we’d better get about it will be a self fulfilling prophecy.  

Time to stop whining.  Time to get back to work.  Talk about the opportunities, Mr. President.  People are forgetting how many are right in front of us.

In an interview on CNBC Friday, former President Bill Clinton advised that America needs to “..get back in the tomorrow business.”

Beezer agrees wholeheartedly.  

But doing well in the “tomorrow business” takes a willingness to change, said Clinton.  Change is difficult, particularly when the nation is trying to recover from a near death financial collapse.  A large debt bubble burst and that means balance sheets, both private and public, have suffered and need re-balancing.

Today’s world is all about speed and complexity.  We’re learning the hard way that our technology innovations are not an unalloyed benefit.   Unrestrained speed can race ahead of comprehension.  Complexity can do the same thing.  As we’ve all just seen the past two years, in combination, speed and complexity can blindside humanity.

The antidotes to speed and complexity are simplicity, clarity and understanding.  These are the changes we need to make in order to get back in the “tomorrow business.”

Take speed.  Technology has always been about tomorrow.  It’s brought us the internet, which has with blinding digital speed connected the globe in ways unimaginable twenty years ago.  Computational power, harnessed by science, has brought about tremendous advances in just about every aspect of our lives, and no doubt will continue to do so.

Science brings well understood disciplines that enforce speed limits.  That’s not the case in the realm of social man.  For example, the internet produces a flood of information that washes over us daily from all over the world.  But all this information can impede our ability to comprehend.  It arrives and leaves in a digital flash, long before any real understanding.   More is not always better.  Complexity and speed can overwhelm social man’s constructs.

The current difficulties with too much speed and complexity arrived from the financial industry.  Finance is a social construct, not a scientific one.  Financial “innovations” are not the same as scientific “innovations.”  A scientific innovation adds to understanding.  Financial innovation, as we’ve learned, may do precisely the opposite.

In a complex social world, financial products need to be stable and simple enough for social understanding.  We were fooled into thinking complex derivative securities–an “innovation” we were told–would enhance our well being.   In an interconnected financial world, the tools of finance need to be clear and transparent to everyone.  These tools, the common language of finance if you will, are not improved by complexity. 

Complexity is the enemy of finance.  It’s like driving a car with an opaque windshield.   Add to that speed and you’re bound to crash.  Or to continue the analogy of language, complexity turns finance into Babylon where many languages are used instead of one with widespread understanding.

So in finance the “change” needed is one of returning to a common language that uses common tools.  Complex derivatives need to be limited only to those with widespread understanding.  Only those derivatives that are transparent and whose price can be easily and safely ascertained on a public exchange should be allowed.   Remember these necessary social constructs; simplicity, clarity and understanding.

Unfortunately, when a problem is encountered in a social realm (for this post it’s finance, but we face the same problems in complexity and speed with energy, health care, agriculture and even our politics), the necessary changes will run into opposition by segments that benefit from the system that needs reform.

Nevertheless the changes have to be made.  We won’t get back in the business of “tomorrow” until they are.