Unequal distribution of temperature and green space is killing people.

Racial and economic inequality have always come with environmental inequality. The least powerful tend to be forced to live closest to our most dangerous waste products, from traffic pollution, to industrial or electronic waste. As the planet warms, there’s a new kind of environmental inequality, but rather than the things we’ve come to expect – poisoned air and water – we’re facing unequal distribution of temperature.

Equipped with heat sensors, this group of citizen scientists were participating in a groundbreaking study: the first ever street level assessment of heat in New York City. The goal was to find differences in neighborhoods – which communities were relatively cool? Which were sweltering hot? – and map the city’s heat inequality.

Joined by others in upper Manhattan and Harlem, the volunteers scanned temperatures along the streets with sensors attached to their cars and bikes. The results, presented to community members in January, showed a harsh reality of city living: the south Bronx was 8F (4.5C) hotter than the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, some of the city’s richest neighborhoods, just a few miles away.
“The variation in temperature is stark,” said principal investigator Liv Yoon. The data was analyzed by Climate Adaptation Planning and Analytics Strategies and is part of a nationwide heat-mapping initiative by Noaa. “The built environment really matters on how heat manifests and what people feel,” said Yoon.

The results mirror what residents and researchers have known and brought attention to for years: in cities like New York City,heat is distributed unequally – and people of color and low-income residents shoulder the highest burden of heat. Poor air quality, inadequate access to cooling and air conditioning further exacerbates the likelihood of heatstrokes and deaths from heat exposure. There are approximately 370 heat-related deaths in New York City on average each year, with the Bronx being especially vulnerable.

This is not a surprise. I’ve talked before about the various health benefits of living near greenery, and I think it’s no accident that wealthier parts of cities tend to have more trees, more parks, and more vegetation in general. As the temperature continues to rise, that inequality will increasingly become a matter of life and death.

Heat is especially severe for people with pre-existing conditions such as heart disease, and as higher night-time temperatures prevent people from recuperating overnight, it is also driving a rise in sleep-related mental health problems.

Some residents, who have been living in close proximity to sweltering asphalt and further away from parks and trees, may not be surprised by this.

“The thing is, we already knew where the hotter areas were,” said Yoon. “What we wanted to contribute is connecting the dots.”
Environmental advocates say the data, because of how granular it is, can help make the case that certain neighborhoods need better resources and access to green space.

“We have always gotten the brunt of the city’s pollution,” said Melissa Barber, researcher and co-founder of environmental justice group South Bronx Unite.

The difference in temperature between the south Bronx and the Upper West Side reflect a myriad of other environmental inequalities. There are five major highways that run through and around the south Bronx, including the hulking Cross Bronx Expressway, which contributes to the surrounding area’s noise and air pollution. Despite being bounded to the south by the Harlem River, the waterfront in the south Bronx is so developed that residents cannot readily access the blue space. Meanwhile, the Upper West Side sits between Central park and Riverside park, which looks out on to the Hudson River.

Asphalt roads and densely built buildings in cities trap heat. These urban pockets of heat can also overlap with other health disparities: the south Bronx has one of the highest asthma rates in the country. Residents here also live in housing that tends to trap heat, and where the median age of apartment buildings is nearly 90 years.

“These spaces are not only deprived because of the heat they’ve acquired, the existing infrastructure is failing as well,” said Satpal Kaur, an architect who volunteered in the heat-mapping survey.

Climate change is killing people right now, and it was entirely predicted that it would hit the poorest first and hardest. That very fact may well be part of why the richest among us felt comfortable ignoring the problem for their own benefit. As things continue to get hotter, and people continue to suffer and die because of it, remember this: We, as a species, have the resources to help. It does not have to be this way.

Ground-breaking research expedition gives dire new meaning to “glacial speed”

For a while now, glaciologists have been worried that as the oceans warm and rise, coastal glaciers will be lifted clear of the sea floor, allowing them to flow much faster. The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica has been of particular concern, because it’s holding back enough ice to raise global sea levels by as much as ten feet. If the glacier starts flowing into the ocean faster, the ice behind it will also speed up. As you can imagine, knowing the shape of the sea floor is key to understanding and predicting what the glacier will do. More than that, it can give us insight into what the glacier has done in the past.

And what it has done in the past is worrisome, to say the least:

For the first time, scientists mapped in high-resolution a critical area of the seafloor in front of the glacier that gives them a window into how fast Thwaites retreated and moved in the past. The stunning imagery shows geologic features that are new to science, and also provides a kind of crystal ball to see into Thwaites’ future. In people and ice sheets alike, past behavior is key to understanding future behavior.

The team documented more than 160 parallel ridges that were created, like a footprint, as the glacier’s leading edge retreated and bobbed up and down with the daily tides. “It’s as if you are looking at a tide gauge on the seafloor,” said Graham. “It really blows my mind how beautiful the data are.”

The image is a collage of pictures showing renderings of the sea floor, with regular

a–d, Examples of high-frequency sidescan imagery illustrating the back-stepping conformity of ridge shape (a), non-alignment of ribs to underlying lineations (b), rib formation on terraces (c) and the ‘beading’ (red circle) and overprinting (red arrow) of existing subglacial features (d). e, Multibeam hillshade showing fine-scale landforms, <20 cm high, crossing lineation ridges and grooves. f, Corresponding profile X–X′, demonstrating the subtle geometries of some of the landforms (5–20 cm) and their surprising depth (>740 m). g,h, Multibeam swath bathymetry covering the longest series of ribs (profile Y–Y′ and Z–Z′ combined; stars mark start and end of profile sections). Inset shows close-up example of lateral continuity in the southern portion of the ribs. Black arrows in ‘b’ mark lateral continuation of one oblique ridge. Yellow arrows in each image show ice flow direction inferred from lineations.

Beauty aside, what’s alarming is that the rate of Thwaites’ retreat that scientists have documented more recently are small compared to the fastest rates of change in its past, said Graham.

Yeah, “alarming” feels like the right word.

With global warming, it’s not just the changes that are happening that causes problems – it’s the speed. Faster changes mean more people dead. It really is that simple. That’s also why slower action to respond to climate change means more people dead. We know that this sea level rise is coming, we know we’re not ready for it, and we’re doing next to nothing to get ready. The death-cult of Neoliberalism, with its dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire capitalism, could not have taken over the United States at a worse time.

To understand Thwaites’ past retreat, the team analyzed the rib-like formations submerged 700 meters (just under half a mile) beneath the polar ocean and factored in the tidal cycle for the region, as predicted by computer models, to show that one rib must have been formed every single day.

At some point in the last 200 years, over a duration of less than six months, the front of glacier lost contact with a seabed ridge and retreated at a rate of more than 2.1 kilometers per year (1.3 miles per year) — twice the rate documented using satellites between 2011 and 2019.

“Our results suggest that pulses of very rapid retreat have occurred at Thwaites Glacier in the last two centuries, and possibly as recently as the mid-20th Century,” said Graham.

“Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future – even from one year to the next – once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed,” said marine geophysicist and study co-author, Robert Larter, from the British Antarctic Survey.

Completely aside from its implications, this mission was an accomplishment all on its own. Getting close to the edge of a rapidly retreating glacier is difficult and dangerous. In this case, it was only possible because of record lows in sea ice, combined with advances in technology.

To collect the imagery and supporting geophysical data, the team, which included scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, launched a state-of-the-art orange robotic vehicle loaded with imaging sensors called ‘Rán’ from the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer during an expedition in 2019. Rán, operated by scientists at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, embarked on a 20-hour mission that was as risky as it was serendipitous, Graham said. It mapped an area of the seabed in front of the glacier about the size of Houston – and did so in extreme conditions during an unusual summer notable for its lack of sea ice. This allowed scientists to access the glacier front for the first time in history.

Anna Wåhlin, a physical oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg who deployed Rán at Thwaites, said, “This was a pioneering study of the ocean floor, made possible by recent technological advancements in autonomous ocean mapping and a bold decision by the Wallenberg foundation to invest into this research infrastructure. The images Ran collected give us vital insights into the processes happening at the critical junction between the glacier and the ocean today.”

“It was truly a once in a lifetime mission,” said Graham, who said the team would like to sample the seabed sediments directly so they can more accurately date the ridge-like features. “But the ice closed in on us pretty quickly and we had to leave before we could do that on this expedition,” he said.

While many questions remain, one thing’s for sure: It used to be that scientists thought of the Antarctic ice sheets as sluggish and slow to respond, but that’s simply not true, said Graham.

“Just a small kick to Thwaites could lead to a big response,” he said.

And that brings us back to our regularly scheduled existential dread!

I believe this glacial retreat, and associated sea level rise are going to happen. I do not think it is a question of “if”, but of “when”. I suppose it is hypothetically possible that all of the world’s rich and powerful decide to completely change how they’ve always behaved. It’s “possible” that they could invest in truly dealing with climate change and its attendant problems. Were that to happen, it’s possible that through herculean effort, we could even stop the warming in my lifetime. Maybe.

I think it is equally possible that I will be named king of the world.

The unfortunate reality is that before we can devote the needed time and resources to climate mitigation and adaptation, we need revolutionary political and economic change. It’s my hope that in working towards that will also push more incremental change, like the recent climate bill. Things like that will never be enough to solve the problem, but they can slow things down, and buy us the time that this research shows we very much need.

This is one more warning among so many that it almost feels like white noise at this point. I think that could be a very real danger. In addition to our propensity to think that “the weather has always been like this”, after a certain point we just don’t have the energy to get worked up over every new apocalyptic update. I think the antidote to that is to keep the focus on the step we’re currently on – building collective power. Networking and organization aren’t just tools for affecting political change – they can also make a community more resilient, and better able to survive the disasters that our governments are too corrupt and incompetent to prevent.

When disaster strikes, humanity is always forced back to our single greatest strength – the ability to work together to achieve more than any of us could alone. Warnings like this give us a heads-up that we need to be exercising that muscle now, so that it’s fit for purpose when we really need it.

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Video: Let’s talk about Labor Day’s origins…

Two posts today! How exciting!

For those of you who don’t know, because of the relentless drive to crush left-wing thought and politics in the United States, that country (and Canada, because of course) celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September. The decision to have it then rather than on May 1st, when everyone else celebrates Labor Day, was almost certainly made to avoid tying the holiday to the global struggle for workers’ rights.

As usual, Beau gives a good overview of the history, and includes a point that I think we would all do well to remember. Too often, when we celebrate victories or “heroes” of the past, we place those people and events on pedestals. On the one hand, I get the desire to do that, but it lowers those of us living today by comparison. The reality is that people are just people, and our role in the labor movement today is just as important as any worker of the past. The fight continues, and the idea that it’s a thing of the past – as with every other movement for change – is just an effort to protect the status quo.

“Labor day is for you.“

Video: Can Capitalism Solve World Hunger?

In writing about yesterday’s good news, I mentioned the fact that we currently produce more food than is needed to end world hunger. As usual, Second Thought provides a nice, approachable overview of the scale of the problem, why capitalism cannot solve world hunger (and why, as I’ve explained, that means capitalism also can’t solve the coming famines caused by global warming).

There’s one point I wanted to add that’s often left out of conversations about this topic. As I briefly discussed in this post, there’s a big portion of farmland that could grow food for people, but is instead dedicated to growing food for livestock. While some of that is hay, a lot of it is various grains fed to livestock like cattle. That means that actually feeding everyone with our current system would require a shift away from animal agriculture. Basically, we need to start growing more food for us, and less food for our food. I can imagine a variety of reasons why this is left out so often, but that speculation on that matters less to me than just correcting the deficiency.

What the video DOES cover well is the role that the IMF and World Bank has played in the unequal distribution of food, for the sake of profits for the upper class of wealth countries. With all of that said, I hope you enjoy the video!

Good news: Bioengineered photosynthesis hack promises to dramatically increase yields in a variety of crops

Norman Borlaug is widely credited for saving a billion people from starvation. This comes from his development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties, which play a real role in the over-abundance of food we currently produce. It remains the fact that, despite hunger still being a big problem in the world, we produce enough food to feed billions more people than are currently alive. Nobody starves because we can’t feed them – they starve because their miserable deaths are more profitable than their lives. That said, I fully expect climate change to cause ever-increasing difficulties for the conventional farming practices on which we rely. This means that even if we do manage to build a society that values life, we may be hard-pressed to grow enough food to keep people alive on a rapidly warming planet. No matter what the future holds, Borlaug’s work will continue saving lives in to the future. It now appears that there may be another similar advance in another staple crop – soybeans:

Photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yield, is a surprisingly inefficient 100+ step process that RIPE researchers have been working to improve for more than a decade. In this first-of-its-kind work, recently published in Science, the group improved the VPZ construct within the soybean plant to improve photosynthesis and then conducted field trials to see if yield would be improved as a result.

The VPZ construct contains three genes that code for proteins of the xanthophyll cycle, which is a pigment cycle that helps in the photoprotection of the plants. Once in full sunlight, this cycle is activated in the leaves to protect them from damage, allowing leaves to dissipate the excess energy. However, when the leaves are shaded (by other leaves, clouds, or the sun moving in the sky) this photoprotection needs to switch off so the leaves can continue the photosynthesis process with a reserve of sunlight. It takes several minutes for the plant to switch off the protective mechanism, costing plants valuable time that could have been used for photosynthesis.

The overexpression of the three genes from the VPZ construct accelerates the process, so every time a leaf transitions from light to shade the photoprotection switches off faster. Leaves gain extra minutes of photosynthesis which, when added up throughout the entire growing season, increases the total photosynthetic rate. This research has shown that despite achieving a more than 20% increase in yield, seed quality was not impacted.

“Despite higher yield, seed protein content was unchanged. This suggests some of the extra energy gained from improved photosynthesis was likely diverted to the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the plant’s nodules,” said RIPE Director Stephen Long (CABBI/BSD/GEGC), Ikenberry Endowed University Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology.

This is very, very, very good news. As a species, we currently get about 17% of our protein from the oceans, and that is devastating oceanic ecosystems. While many of us really need to decrease our protein intake, the fact remains that we need to stop commercial fishing. That means that we’re going to need alternate sources of protein – doubly so because we really ought to get rid of most animal agriculture (though we need to keep some for those with dietary restrictions, and we need to guarantee access to good food, so the decrease in animal agriculture doesn’t suddenly make it astronomically expensive to exist if you require meat to survive). As with most innovations, this one by itself isn’t going to solve all our problems. That said, this could solve a lot of problems, and make it much easier to feed people despite the decline in good farming conditions around the world.

What’s more, this innovation is not limited to soybeans – it seems like it could be used for a wide variety of crops:

The researchers first tested their idea in tobacco plants because of the ease of transforming the crop’s genetics and the amount of seeds that can be produced from a single plant. These factors allow researchers to go from genetic transformation to a field trial within months. Once the concept was proven in tobacco, they moved into the more complicated task of putting the genetics into a food crop, soybeans.

“Having now shown very substantial yield increases in both tobacco and soybean, two very different crops, suggests this has universal applicability,” said Long. “Our study shows that realizing yield improvements is strongly affected by the environment. It is critical to determine the repeatability of this result across environments and further improvements to ensure the environmental stability of the gain.”

Additional field tests of these transgenic soybean plants are being conducted this year, with results expected in early 2023.

“The major impact of this work is to open the roads for showing that we can bioengineer photosynthesis and improve yields to increase food production in major crops,” said De Souza. “It is the beginning of the confirmation that the ideas ingrained by the RIPE project are a successful means to improve yield in major food crops.”

The RIPE project and its sponsors are committed to ensuring Global Access and making the project’s technologies available to the farmers who need them the most.

“This has been a road of more than a quarter century for me personally,” said Long. “Starting first with a theoretical analysis of theoretical efficiency of crop photosynthesis, simulation of the complete process by high-performance computation, followed by application of optimization routines that indicated several bottlenecks in the process in our crops. Funding support over the past ten years has now allowed us to engineer alleviation of some of these indicated bottlenecks and test the products at field scale. After years of trial and tribulation, it is wonderfully rewarding to see such a spectacular result for the team.”

Combined with changes in farming practices, an increase in indoor farming, and increased reliance on things like microalgae and edible bacteria, this could save billions of lives, if we can build a society that sees that as a thing worth doing.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: True Facts about the slime mold

Today was more or less a day off. Enjoyed napping with rain on the windows, shaved parts of my head, and met up with some cool people for drinks and conversation. A pleasant time was had by all, except His Holiness, who is doubly angry. Not only did we go out, we’ve also had to cut back on his kibble, because he’s been progressing in his effort to become a literal furball. I hope you’re all having a pleasant weekend, and in service of that, here are some true facts about slime mold. These are some of the strangest and most fascinating organisms out there, and this video is a great overview of their bizarre lives.

Shocking and unexpected news! Overfishing and climate change are bad for fish!

So, I actually think there’s a lot of value in doing research on subjects with “obvious” answers. We’ve done a lot of damage to this planet by assuming we already know what’s what, and I think that it would be reckless and short-sighted to assume that because we know more than we used to, we don’t need to examine what we think we know. That doesn’t mean wandering through life in a state of existential befuddlement, but it does mean scientists actually taking the time to check that we’re right.

This kind of research is also useful in a world full of highly-paid industry propagandists who spend all of their time finding ways to spread doubt about the harm done by various industries. In this case, the fishing industry, and the fossil fuel industry (because of course).

Researchers at UBC, the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and University of Bern projected the impact that different global temperature increases and ranges of fishing activity would have on biomass, or the amount of fish by weight in a given area, from 1950 to 2100. Their simulations suggest that climate change has reduced fish stocks in 103 of 226 marine regions studied, including Canada, from their historical levels. These stocks will struggle to rebuild their numbers under projected global warming levels in the 21st century.

“More conservation-oriented fisheries management is essential to rebuild over-exploited fish stocks under climate change. However, that alone is not enough,” says lead author Dr. William Cheung, professor in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). “Climate mitigation is important for our fish stock rebuilding plans to be effective”

The research team, including co- author Dr. Colette Wabnitz of Stanford Centre for Ocean Solutions, used computer models to find out the climate change levels at which over-exploited fish stocks cannot rebuild. Currently, the world is on track to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming relative to preindustrial levels and approach two degrees in the next few decades, says Dr. Cheung.

The study projected that, on average, when fisheries management focuses on the highest sustainable catch per year, the additional climate impacts on fish at 1.8 degrees Celsius warming would see fish stocks unable to rebuild themselves.

If people around the world fished only three quarters of the annual highest sustainable catch, fish stocks would be unable to rebuild at a higher degree of warming, 4.5 degrees.

That last bit strikes me either over-optimistic, or over-pessimistic. I do believe that if we were to dramatically decrease fishing, fish populations would recover, even with another degree of warming, but at 4 degrees? At that point it seems like mass extinction would be far more likely than not, even without overfishing. Still, if we get to that temperature and we haven’t made dramatic change to society, I doubt that we’ll have the capacity for over-fishing, even if we do somehow still exist, and still have most of our current technology.

On the one hand, I appreciate the rosy view of the future. I also would like to think that there would be a way for humanity to thrive even at those temperatures, but I think that in order to get there, we will have to have already solved problems like overfishing. This article feels a bit like the whole “end of history” thing, where it’s assumed that Liberal Democracy with minor adjustments is the “final form” of human politics, and the need for revolutionary change – despite all evidence to the contrary – is a thing of the past.

It is entirely possible that I’m reading far too much into this, but I feel like it’s an example of how the indoctrination of our society has placed boundaries on the kinds of society we’re capable of imagining. I don’t know whether those limitations also influence the design of models like this. I certainly hope they don’t, but when I see that kind of projection, I do have to wonder what’s being missed because nobody involved in the research would even think to check it. It’s not a new problem by any stretch, nor is it limited to our society. I think this is a concern in any society, which is part of why institutionalized hierarchies seem like a dangerous thing to have normalized. I mainly focus on the society in which I live, because I can clearly see the path that we’re on because of it, and it does not look good.

I suppose this is an odd conclusion for an article about fish populations, but I think there’s a degree to which we need to become more comfortable with political uncertainty. Not the “will the president try to become a dictator?” kind, but rather “our society is flexible enough that we might briefly form a formal institution in order to get something particular done, and then dissolve that institution”. Maybe a circumstance will arise in which we need a corporate structure with incentives to work particular jobs, but that doesn’t mean that that institution will need to exist in perpetuity. The same is true of governments, nations, and borders. There may be a case for setting certain geographical boundaries – bioregionalism is interesting, and when it comes to commons like the oceans, it’s clear that some coordination is required.

But I think we may need to let go of the notion of an ever-lasting government as a means of achieving security and stability. It doesn’t seem to be providing either very well, especially with a global perspective.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The Perverse Incentives of Utility Companies

There are a lot of ways in which our political and economic system is set up to prevent effective environmental action of an type. It’s one of the reasons why I think we actually need “revolutionary” systemic change. As things stand, the most powerful entities in the world are fighting against climate action, which means that until we take their power away, we will not be able to change course. We might be able to slow down a touch, or make slight changes in direction, but everything about our world is designed to block radical change in a leftward direction. It’s pretty obvious that moving things to the right is easier at this point.

This video breaks down how that problem manifests with utility companies in the United States, and I have to say that while I knew the situation was bad, I didn’t know it was this bad. I think a key thing to understand going into this is that “The Free Market” has always been a myth. It never existed, and never could exist. Even if we reset everything to zero tomorrow, under the right-wing libertarian model, you’d quickly see people accumulating wealth and power, and using that to manipulate the market just as they do today. That means that from the beginning of capitalism, the boundaries, freedom, and incentives of “The Free Market” have always been set by the government, generally following the interests of the capitalist class.

With that as an introduction, the TL:DW of this video is that all of the profit incentives for utility companies, combined with corporate law, basically require them to oppose distributed power generation, renewable energy, grid maintenance, and a whole host of other things. The end result is that the incentive structure is set up based on the circumstances and thinking of the 1930s, and the U.S. government has become too dysfunctional to change course since then. This is one of many reasons why capitalism needs to be replaced with something that actually values life and freedom, if we want humanity to survive, which I do.

What Evo Morales did for Bolivia

When I was a kid, and nobody knew what an asshole Scott Adams is, I loved reading Dilbert. I think part of it was that I spent a fair amount of time hanging out at the office where my dad worked, so office humor clicked with me. I’m bringing this up because as far as I know, a Dilbert strip was the first time I was made aware of the existence of Bolivia. Basically, Dogbert gets extremely rich, goes a little power-crazy, and “buys Bolivia”. In context, Bolivia was cast as poor and possibly backwards, like the fictional nation of Elbonia. Bolivia was a poor country, and that’s all there was to it.

I learned more as life went on, but it wasn’t until I heard Michael Brooks talking about Evo Morales on The Majority Report that I actually started learning anything about the country of Bolivia, rather than the comic strip stereotype. As with most South American countries, Bolivia has a large Native American population that has largely been kept out of power by the Europeans who made up the country’s government. It’s a story of colonialism, oppression, and genocide, and as with all such stories, the idea that Bolivia is “poor” was always a lie. The poverty experienced by the Bolivian people was in service to the enrichment of their rulers, and of capitalists on a global scale. Most recently, Bolivia has gained attention for its rich supply of lithium, and those watching events were quick to point at that the coup that removed Evo Morales from power in 2019 was likely tied to the decision to nationalize Bolivia’s lithium industry, and to focus on Bolivian manufacturing. That meant that rather than selling raw lithium on the international market, and then buying it back in products at a markup to enrich other people, Bolivia would make products in Bolivia, and sell those, thus keeping the profits from that industry within Bolivia. This would definitely cut into the profits of those people currently relying on cheap lithium to get rich off things like electric cars and house batteries, and so it wasn’t a stretch to assume that this coup, like many others around the world, was about preserving the wealth and power of the capitalist class. I think that this case is strengthened by evidence of ongoing efforts to prevent Morales’ MAS party from returning to power, following the bloody failure that was the brief Añez regime.

Edit: As was pointed out in the comments, it IS worth mentioning that Morales seeking a third term came after he had served two terms, and had championed a constitution limiting presidents to two terms.

I’m writing all of this as an introduction to a twitter thread I came across that I thought was worth sharing. Morales served as president of Bolivia from 2006 until the 2019 coup. At the time, I heard people saying that him being president for that long was “dictator behavior”, and evidence that the coup might be the sort of uprising we ought to support. I did not hear any clear answer as to why that wouldn’t also justify an uprising against Angela Merkel, who was Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. When there’s controversy surrounding a politician, people find things to hate, and find excuses to justify their hatred. That can make it difficult to figure out what’s actually going on. At times like that, I find it useful to look not at the rhetoric and claims being made, but at the material circumstances. What effect did the governance of Morales and the MAS party have on the people of Bolivia?

The answer to such a question is always going to be complicated, but I think this is one of those times where it’s safe to say that Morales’ government did good things for his country. This thread is a decent look at why people support him, and the MAS party more broadly:

There’s this weird phenomenon, where if people have a bad feeling about a particular politician, any bad things at all will be justification enough to condemn them wholly. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I think it’s a destructive shortcut we take to avoid the work of learning more about the actual material situation in question. The system that the MAS party has started creating is not a utopia, but it seems to be a lot better than the hell-world capitalism has been creating.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

It’s not your imagination. The system really was designed to keep you down.

I think that education should be treated as a public good. It should be free at the point of service, like healthcare, and it should be available in some capacity throughout a person’s life. I also think that we should stop viewing childhood education as job preparation. The current system seems designed to train us all to be happy working for the wealth and power of someone else, and to be accustomed to having no control over our lives. Some schools push back against this, to some degree, but it’s not nearly enough.

The current system also presents student loan debt – the only debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy (thanks Biden) – as a regrettable necessity for getting higher education. If you don’t go to college, your poverty is your own fault, and if you do, you debt is also your own fault. Looking at it from the outside, it might almost look as if the system was designed to either keep poor people from education, or to trap those who do get educated in debt bondage, forced to work for a member of the capitalist class until the debt is paid off.

It might look that way, because apparently it is that way. Remember how it came out that the U.S. War on Drugs was a political project to use the government to repress black and left-wing people? That was not an aberration.

In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.

Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”

That last claim is depressingly familiar. It makes me think of the various right-wing pundits who insist that the Nazis were left wing, while those same pundits work tirelessly to build fascism in the United States. It also makes me think of all those who have spend the last few years insisting that U.S. fascists are being FORCED to become violent bigots, because the left is just going too far with their evil demands for things like universal healthcare or food for children. In the end, it feels like it always come back to literal class warfare waged by the rich.

“For a strong and healthy working class is the thing that I most fear”

In terms of the health of the working class, a combination of predatory capitalism, a sadistic healthcare system, and corporate pollution make sure that nobody can be sure of their future. In terms of strength? Well, they say knowledge is power, so they had to either block access (the traditional way), or find some other way to guarantee obedience.

The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”

Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”

In practice, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”

In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.

Student debt, which had played a minor role in American life through the 1960s, increased during the Reagan administration and then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.

Of course, if you want to avoid debt peonage, you can always sign up for the U.S. war machine. Maintaining the global capitalist order requires a lot of bloodshed, and since the draft became politically radioactive, our ruling class has found other ways to find new cannon fodder.

It really seems as though the election of Donald Trump was a signal to all of these people that they no longer needed to wear those uncomfortable masks. No, not the COVID masks, the ones they wear to pretend they value life, freedom, democracy, or any of those other hippie fantasies. That said, COVID really did seem to be the last straw for these people. It was breathtaking to watch them openly tell the world that they wanted to sacrifice the poor so they could keep getting richer.

Biden’s small debt relief will help a lot of people, and the changes made to interest rates will help many more; but as ever, we must use our celebration to underscore the simple fact that this is not enough. It can never be enough until we long longer live in a system designed to prevent freedom and democracy from ever becoming a reality.

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