Author: telegraph

Food For Sustainable Development

Posted on September 24, 2019

All companies in the food sector, both producers and distributors, should adopt clear guidelines, metrics, and reporting standards to align with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate agreement. Specifically, each company must address four critical questions.

Feeding a planet of 7.7 billion people is no easy matter. Every person on the planet needs, expects, and has the right to a healthy diet. Every farmer needs, expects, and has the right to a decent livelihood. The roughly ten million other species on the planet need a habitat in which they can survive. And every business that produces, processes, and transports food needs and expects to earn a profit.

It’s a tall order – and it’s not being fulfilled. Over 820 million people are chronically hungry. Another two billion or so suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, such as a lack of vitamins or proteins. Around 650 million adults are obese, an epidemic caused in part by ultra-processed foods that are stuffed with sugar, saturated fats, and other chemical additives.

But the problems go far beyond hunger and diet. Today’s agro-industrial practices are the main cause of deforestation, freshwater depletion and pollution, soil erosion, and the collapse of biodiversity. To top it off, human-induced climate change, partly caused by the food sector, is wreaking havoc on crop production. With more warming and population growth ahead, the crisis will worsen unless decisive changes are made.

The food industry is a powerhouse of the global economy and includes some of the best-known brand names, because we connect with them every day. Solving the many intersecting food crises will be impossible unless the food industry changes its ways.

Fortunately, there is an important glimmer of hope. A growing number of food companies understand the challenge and want to forge a new direction that is consistent with human health and planetary survival. We have been asked by some of these industry leaders, convened by the Barilla Foundation, to help identify the steps needed to align the food sector with sustainable development.

Our starting point is another source of hope. In 2015, all 193 members of the United Nations agreed unanimously to two vital agreements. The first, called Agenda 2030, adopts 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a roadmap to human wellbeing and planetary safety. The second, the Paris climate agreement, commits the world’s governments to taking decisive action to keep global warming to less than 1.5º Celsius. Both the SDGs and the Paris agreement require decisive changes in practices by the food industry.

In our report, we call on all companies in the food sector, both producers and distributors, to adopt clear guidelines, metrics, and reporting standards to align with the global goals. Specifically, each company must address four critical questions.

First, do the companies’ products and strategies contribute to healthy and sustainable diets? We know that the fast-food culture is literally killing us. The industry has to change, urgently, to promote healthy diets.

Second, are the company’s production practices sustainable? Too many companies are engaged in chemical pollution, massive waste from packaging, deforestation, excessive and poorly targeted fertilizer use, and other environmental ills.

Third, are the company’s upstream suppliers sustainable? No consumer food company should use products from farms that contribute to deforestation. The destruction of forests in the Amazon and Indonesia – literally a scorched-earth process – underscore the need to barcode all food products to ensure that they are sourced from sustainable farms.

Lastly, is the company a good corporate citizen? For example, aggressive tax practices that seek to exploit legal loopholes or weak enforcement processes should be avoided, as they deprive governments of the revenues needed to promote public services and thereby achieve the SDGs.

As part of our work, we examined the food industry’s current reporting practices. While many companies purport to pursue sustainable development, too few report on the healthfulness of their product lines or how their products contribute to healthy and sustainable dietary patterns. Too few recognize that they are part of the environmental crisis, either directly in their own production, or as buyers of products produced in environmental hotspots such as the Amazon or Indonesia. And companies don’t report in detail on their tax practices. In short, the food industry’s commitment to sustainability is still too often more high-minded sentiment than actual reporting and monitoring to ensure alignment with the SDGs and the Paris accord.

But we are not pessimistic. Around the world, young people are demanding a sustainable and safe way of living and doing business. We believe that companies, too, will change. After all, companies need customers who are satisfied, workers who are motivated, and the respect of society as a tacit “license to do business.” Some of the cases we analyzed give us hope that change is possible. As our project continues in the coming year, with the aim of working with the industry to ensure that performance, reporting, and monitoring are aligned with sustainable development, we will keep the public informed of what we see and learn.

The food sector is a key part of a larger picture. World leaders gathered at the UN this week to review progress – or lack thereof – on the SDGs and the Paris agreement. They must keep in mind one crucial fact: the world’s people are demanding change. We have the know-how and wealth to achieve a prosperous, inclusive, and sustainable world. The business sector must urgently recognize, acknowledge, and act upon its global responsibilities.

Hello From The Year 2050. We Avoided The Worst Of Climate Change – But Everything Is Different

Posted on September 12, 2019

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an underappreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the changes we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

As America’s new leaders began trying to mend fences with other nations, climate action proved to be a crucial way to rebuild diplomatic trust. China and India had their own reasons for wanting swift action—mostly, the fact that smog-choked cities and ever deadlier heat waves were undermining the stability of the ruling regimes. When Beijing announced that its Belt and Road Initiative would run on renewable energy, not coal, the energy future of much of Asia changed overnight. When India started mandating electric cars and scooters for urban areas, the future of the internal-combustion engine was largely sealed. Teslas continued to attract upscale Americans, but the real numbers came from lower-priced electric cars pouring out of Asian factories. That was enough to finally convince even Detroit that a seismic shift was under way: when the first generation of Ford E-150 pickups debuted, with ads demonstrating their unmatched torque by showing them towing a million-pound locomotive, only the most unreconstructed motorheads were still insisting on the superiority of gas-powered rides.

Other easy technological gains came in our homes. After a century of keeping a tank of oil or gas in the basement for heating, people quickly discovered the appeal of air-source heat pumps, which turned the heat of the outdoors (even on those rare days when the temperature still dropped below zero) into comfortable indoor air. Gas burners gave way to induction cooktops. The last incandescent bulbs were in museums, and even most of the compact fluorescents had been long since replaced by LEDs. Electricity demand was up—but when people plugged in their electric vehicles at night, the ever growing fleet increasingly acted like a vast battery, smoothing out the curves as the wind dropped or the sun clouded. Some people stopped eating meat, and lots and lots of people ate less of it—a cultural transformation made easier by the fact that Impossible Burgers turned out to be at least as juicy as the pucks that fast-food chains had been slinging for years. The number of cows on the world’s farms started to drop, and with them the source of perhaps a fifth of emissions. More crucially, new diets reduced the pressure to cut down the remaining tropical rain forests to make way for grazing land.

In other words, the low-hanging fruit was quickly plucked, and the pluckers were well paid. Perhaps the fastest-growing business on the planet involved third-party firms that would retrofit a factory or an office with energy-efficient technology and simply take a cut of the savings on the monthly electric bill. Small businesses, and rural communities, began to notice the economic advantages of keeping the money paid for power relatively close to home instead of shipping it off to Houston or Riyadh. The world had wasted so much energy that much of the early work was easy, like losing weight by getting your hair cut.

But the early euphoria came to an end pretty quickly. By the end of the 2020s, it became clear we would have to pay the price of delaying action for decades.

For one thing, the cuts in emissions that scientists prescribed were almost impossibly deep. “If you’d started in 1990 when we first warned you, the job was manageable: you could have cut carbon a percent or two a year,” one eminent physicist explained. “But waiting 30 years turned a bunny slope into a black diamond.” As usual, the easy “solutions” turned out to be no help at all: fracked natural-gas wells were leaking vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and “biomass burning”—cutting down forests to burn them for electricity—was putting a pulse of carbon into the air at precisely the wrong moment. (As it happened, the math showed letting trees stand was crucial for pulling carbon from the atmosphere—when secondary forests were allowed to grow, they sucked up a third or more of the excess carbon humanity was producing.) Environmentalists learned they needed to make some compromises, and so most of America’s aging nuclear reactors were left online past their decommissioning dates: that lower-carbon power supplemented the surging renewable industry in the early years, even as researchers continued work to see if fusion power, thorium reactors or some other advanced design could work.

The real problem, though, was that climate change itself kept accelerating, even as the world began trying to turn its energy and agriculture systems around. The giant slug of carbon that the world had put into the atmosphere—more since 1990 than in all of human history before—acted like a time-delayed fuse, and the temperature just kept rising. Worse, it appeared that scientists had systematically underestimated just how much damage each tenth of a degree would actually do, a point underscored in 2032 when a behemoth slice of the West Antarctic ice sheet slid majestically into the southern ocean, and all of a sudden the rise in sea level was being measured in feet, not inches. (Nothing, it turned out, could move Americans to embrace the metric system.) And the heating kept triggering feedback loops that in turn accelerated the heating: ever larger wildfires, for instance, kept pushing ever more carbon into the air, and their smoke blackened ice sheets that in turn melted even faster.

This hotter world produced an ongoing spate of emergencies: “forest-fire season” was now essentially year-round, and the warmer ocean kept hurricanes and typhoons boiling months past the old norms. And sometimes the damage was novel: ancient carcasses kept emerging from the melting permafrost of the north, and with them germs from illnesses long thought extinct. But the greatest crises were the slower, more inexorable ones: the ongoing drought and desertification was forcing huge numbers of Africans, Asians and Central Americans to move; in many places, the heat waves had literally become unbearable, with nighttime temperatures staying above 100°F and outdoor work all but impossible for weeks and months at a time. On low-lying ground like the Mekong Delta, the rising ocean salted fields essential to supplying the world with rice. The U.N. had long ago estimated the century could see a billion climate refugees, and it was beginning to appear it was unnervingly correct. What could the rich countries say? These were people who hadn’t caused the crisis now devouring their lives, and there weren’t enough walls and cages to keep them at bay, so the migrations kept roiling the politics of the planet.

There were, in fact, two possible ways forward. The most obvious path was a constant competition between nations and individuals to see who could thrive in this new climate regime, with luckier places turning themselves into fortresses above the flood. Indeed some people in some places tried to cling to old notions: plug in some solar panels and they could somehow return to a more naive world, where economic expansion was still the goal of every government.

But there was a second response that carried the day in most countries, as growing numbers of people came to understand that the ground beneath our feet had truly shifted. If the economy was the lens through which we’d viewed the world for a century, now survival was the only sensible basis on which to make decisions. Those decisions targeted not just carbon dioxide; these societies went after the wild inequality that also marked the age. The Green New Deal turned out to be everything the Koch brothers had most feared when it was introduced: a tool to make America a fairer, healthier, better-educated place. It was emulated around the world, just as America’s Clean Air Act had long served as a template for laws across the globe. Slowly both the Keeling Curve, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, and the Gini coefficient, measuring the distribution of wealth, began to flatten.

That’s where we are today. We clearly did not “escape” climate change or “solve” global warming—the temperature keeps climbing, though the rate of increase has lessened. It’s turned into a wretched century, which is considerably better than a catastrophic one. We ended up with the most profound and most dangerous physical changes in human history. Our civilization surely teetered—and an enormous number of people paid an unfair and overwhelming price—but it did not fall.

People have learned to defend what can be practically defended: expensive seawalls and pumps mean New York is still New York, though the Antarctic may yet have something to say on the subject. Other places we’ve learned to let go: much of the East Coast has moved in a few miles, to more defensible ground. Yes, that took trillions of dollars in real estate off the board—but the roads and the bridges would have cost trillions to defend, and even then the odds were bad.

Cities look different now—much more densely populated, as NIMBY defenses against new development gave way to an increasingly vibrant urbanism. Smart municipalities banned private cars from the center of town, opening up free public-transit systems and building civic fleets of self-driving cars that got rid of the space wasted on parking spots. But rural districts have changed too: the erratic weather put a premium on hands-on agricultural skills, which in turn provided opportunities for migrants arriving from ruined farmlands elsewhere. (Farming around solar panels has become a particular specialty.) America’s rail network is not quite as good as it was in the early 20th century, but it gets closer each year, which is good news since low-carbon air travel proved hard to get off the ground.

What’s changed most of all is the mood. The defiant notion that we would forever overcome nature has given way to pride of a different kind: increasingly we celebrate our ability to bend without breaking, to adapt as gracefully as possible to a natural world whose temper we’ve come to respect. When we look back to the start of the century we are, of course, angry that people did so little to slow the great heating: if we’d acknowledged climate change in earnest a decade or two earlier, we might have shaved a degree off the temperature, and a degree is measured in great pain and peril. But we also know it was hard for people to grasp what was happening: human history stretched back 10,000 years, and those millennia were physically stable, so it made emotional sense to assume that stability would stretch forward as well as past.

We know much better now: we know that we’ve knocked the planet off its foundations, and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries, is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We’re dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far we haven’t crashed.

CEOs Have The Whole System Gamed

Posted on August 23, 2019

Average CEO pay at big corporations topped 14.5 million dollars in 2018. That’s after an increase of 5.2 million dollars per CEO over the past decade, while the average worker’s pay has increased just 7,858 dollars over the decade.

Just to catch up to what their CEO made in 2018 alone, it would take the typical worker 158 years.

This explosion in CEO pay relative to the pay of average workers isn’t because CEOs have become so much more valuable than before. It’s not due to the so-called “free market.”

It’s due to CEOs gaming the stock market and playing politics.

How did CEOs pull this off? They followed these five steps:

First: They made sure their companies began paying their executives in shares of stock.

Second: They directed their companies to lobby Congress for giant corporate tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Third: They used most of the savings from these tax cuts and rollbacks not to raise worker pay or to invest in the future, but to buy back the corporation’s outstanding shares of stock.

Fourth: This automatically drove up the price of the remaining shares of stock.

Fifth and finally: Since CEOs are paid mainly in shares of stock, CEO pay soared while typical workers were left in the dust.

How to stop this scandal? Five ways:

  1. Ban stock buybacks. They were banned before 1982 when the Securities and Exchange Commission viewed them as vehicles for stock manipulation and fraud. Then Ronald Reagan’s SEC removed the restrictions. We should ban buybacks again.
  2. Stop corporations from deducting executive pay in excess of 1 million dollars from their taxable income – even if the pay is tied to so-called company performance. There’s no reason other taxpayers ought to be subsidizing humongous CEO pay.
  3. Stop corporations from receiving any tax deduction for executive pay unless the percent raise received by top executives matches the percent raise received by average employees.
  4. Increase taxes on corporations whose CEOs make more than 100 times their average employees.
  5. Finally, and most basically: Stop CEOs from corrupting American politics with big money. Get big money out of our democracy. Fight for campaign finance reform.

Grossly widening inequalities of income and wealth cannot be separated from grossly widening inequalities of political power in America. This corruption must end.

CEOs Are Finally Admitting To Shortchanging Society

Posted on August 23, 2019

On Monday, 181 of the nation’s leading CEOs issued a statement pledging that, above all else, corporations must have a commitment to all their stakeholders, including customers, workers, suppliers and the communities where they operate.

It’s about time. For more than two decades, this group — known as the Business Roundtable — had asserted that the principle purpose of a corporation was to “generate economic returns to its owners.” This previous assertion of “shareholder primacy” was self-serving and enormously destructive. Leading CEOs, including many who signed the new statement, have caused grave damage to the American economy and society. And that damage continues.

For decades, many of America’s top CEOs have pushed for unaffordable personal and corporate tax cuts, a rollback of environmental protections, sky-high salaries for themselves and stagnant wages for their workers, abusive financial practices, unaffordable drug prices and unhealthy food products. These actions have contributed to a massive rise in inequality of wealth and income, environmental destruction, huge budget deficits, financial crises, and death and despair due to the egregious failures of the corporate health care and food industries.

Things have gotten wildly out of hand since the late 1970s. That’s when US Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell Jr. opened the floodgates of corporate money in politics. In his opinion in the case First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Powell held that political spending by corporations is protected by the First Amendment. Then, in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan became president and proceeded to slash top personal and corporate tax rates, deregulate industry and attack the unions.

In 1978, CEO salaries were 23.1 times the average wage of workers in the same industry. In 2018, they were estimated to be an astounding 221 times the average wage. Corporate profits after tax have also soared, from an average of 6.9% of GDP during the 1970s to 9.9% of GDP during this decade. In the meantime, average hourly earnings, adjusted for consumer price inflation, stagnated between 1978 and today.

The chairman of the Business Roundtable, JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon, declares that “major employers are investing in their workers and communities.” But the most conspicuous recent corporate “investment” after the 2017 tax cuts has been share buybacks — a move that aims to boost stock prices and the value of stock options held by the CEOs.

Major companies have also used their market power to get away with abusing the public interest. JPMorgan Chase has been fined at least $13 billion from the 2008 financial crisis alone, and has been fined since. And according to a recent analysis by several non-governmental groups, JPMorgan ranked as the largest bank financier of fossil fuel investments since the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015.

Pervasive corporate abuses include financial violations across Wall Street, indictments for massive fraud (Wells Fargo), a settlement over privacy violations (Facebook) and an opioid epidemic allegedly spurred by corporate greed (Purdue Pharma). And fast-food and soda beverage companies may say they are offering healthy options and providing the necessary nutrition info, but the truth is they are stoking obesity and metabolic diseases.

The idea that the corporate purpose should focus on profits alone was promoted by free-market academic economists, such as Milton Friedman, who wrote that if a corporate CEO did not aim to maximize profits, the CEO in effect was squandering the owners’ money. Yet Friedman ignored the great harms that CEOs cause when they abuse their company’s market power or meddle in politics through corporate lobbying and campaign funding.

In the real world, not Friedman’s idealized one, CEOs use corporate influence and money to curry Congressional support for tax cuts, deregulation and bailouts. They exploit their monopoly power in the marketplace, deploy legions of corporate law firms to evade prosecutions, hide taxes in offshore havens and often cheat when the expected costs of fines are less than expected profits. When the abuses pile up to the extent of inciting a financial crisis, they turn back to the government for bailouts. Through it all, they enjoy impunity: sky-high CEO salaries and little responsibility for harms done to customers, workers and communities.

Monday’s statement won’t necessarily change the behavior of these companies, but it should definitely change society’s attitude toward the corporate sector. The game is up. The CEOs are admitting it. Corporations have not been representing the stakeholders. They’ve been representing the managers and owners. Consumers and workers have been paying the price of corporate abuses, and citizens have been footing the fiscal bills of bank bailouts, unaffordable corporate tax cuts and tax evasion.

The 2020 elections should be the reckoning. The US political system is in the hands of the corporate lobbies, including Wall Street, private health care, the military armaments and gun industries, privately owned prisons and Big Oil. These lobbies have used market power and political influence to write their own ticket to wealth. We need to elect candidates who will stand up to the corporate sector rather than take money from it.

Companies must have a public purpose beyond greed. Wresting our democracy back from corporate power will take years but should be at the forefront of American politics. It’s a vital task that certainly can’t be left to some soothing new words from the CEOs.

Niki Ashton Calls For Hospital In Island Lake Region, Inquiry Into First Nations Access To Health Care

Posted on August 23, 2019

Residents of the Island Lake region in northern Manitoba are desperate for better health care services.

On Wednesday residents from the region–about 600 kilometres north east of Winnipeg–demonstrated in front of one of the city’s hospitals, demanding better access to health care in the region’s four First Nation communities of Theresa Point, Garden Hill, Wasagamack and Red Sucker Lake.

There is one health facility in the region, but it’s overwhelmed and often inaccessible.

On Friday the area’s member of parliament delivered the demonstrators’ message in Ottawa.

“Those who gathered in Winnipeg this week come from some of the most remote communities in our country,” said Churchill—Keewatinook Aski MP Niki Ashton.

“Some of those who took part are sick or have loved ones who are fighting for their lives, and yet they took the time to find their strength and have their voices heard,” she continued. “They took a stand and have taken a stand on the behalf of many. They and I and many others are calling for the justice of the people of Island Lake.”

Ashton said Island Lake residents currently travel about 600 kilometres to Winnipeg in order to access health care services.

“Even to this day this federal government is continuing policies of colonization aimed at the First Nations, and now where is that more evident than when it comes to health care,” she said.

Ashton called on the Liberals to address the situation immediately by funding a new hospital in the region and calling an inquiry into the health care that First Nations receive.

The Amazon Rainforest Is Burning

Posted on August 22, 2019

The world is reacting in fear and outrage right now at the sight of what’s happening in the Amazon. NASA satellites show huge plumes of smoke drifting up from the burning forest; in Sao Paulo, the biggest city in the western hemisphere, night fell at 2 p.m. earlier this week when the smoke blotted out the sun.

Presiding over this debacle is the South American equivalent of Donald Trump, a blighted man named Jair Bolsonaro who won the presidency last year amidst rampant corruption and nationalism. He’s encouraged ranchers and loggers to “open up” the Amazon, and the flames are the natural result, as they burn the forest to create new pasture land for cattle or fields to grow soy. When challenged, he’s insisted that environmentalists must be setting the fires to make him look bad.

But of course he must be challenged, and by all of us — the Amazon is one of the most important physical features on the planet, as key to our continued survival as the polar ice caps or the great oceans. Its vast sea of trees breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen, creating as much as a fifth of the planet’s supply. Read that again — it accounts for every fifth breath you take. If you burn down the forest, you make it impossible to deal with climate change.

And so it’s good news that around the world (with the obvious exception of the White House), national leaders are demanding action. They should; what happens in the Amazon travels fast, affecting every place on Earth.

Of course — and here’s the rub — the same could be said for lots of things. Think about the great carbon deposits of North America — the Powder River Basin coal of the Dakotas, the massive Permian or Marcellus oil and gas deposits, the tarsands of Alberta. If we dig these up and burn them, we make it impossible to deal with climate change. And that’s just what we’re doing, of course — the U.S. has now become the largest producer of hydrocarbons on planet earth, passing Russia and Saudi Arabia, a strategy that President Obama called “energy independence” and that Trump, a far cruder man, calls “energy dominance.”

Call it what you will, it does damage on the same kind of scale as those fires in the rainforest. If you burned all the economically recoverable oil in Canada’s tar sands, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would go from its already much too high 410 parts per million to over 540 parts per million. From one patch of ground in one province. That’s why people have worked so hard to block the Keystone XL pipeline, and Line 3 and Line 5 in the upper Midwest, and the TMX pipeline across western Canada. It’s why so many of us have been to jail. Because we understand physics and chemistry enough to know that everything’s connected. What happens in the Amazon matters to Americans. What happens in Alberta sets fires in California. What happens in Texas floods people in India.

All of this explains why, on Sept. 20, the largest day of climate action yet will take place on every corner of the planet. Following the lead of Greta Thunberg and innumerable other youth climate leaders, adults will join for a day in the climate strikes that have galvanized the world this past year. Athletes and chefs, bus drivers and college professors — millions of people will be taking part of the day off to join in this worldwide protest, organized at globalclimatestrike.net.

The worldwide part is critical. The climate crisis is the ultimate reminder that, like it or not, we’re all hitched together. When you cut down the Amazon or dig up the coalfields of Montana, you’re messing with the future of the entire planet. And it’s time for the entire planet to say no.

Stephanie Kelton Is The Economist Who Believes The Government Should Just Print More Money

Posted on August 20, 2019

Stephanie Kelton, a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders and a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University, is popular in a way that economists, almost definitionally, are not. Filmmakers trail her with cameras; she goes on international speaking tours and once sold out a basketball arena in Italy.

Kelton is the foremost evangelist of a fringe economic movement called Modern Monetary Theory, which, in part, argues that the government should pay for programs requiring big spending, such as the Green New Deal, by simply printing more money. This is a polarizing idea. This spring, Kelton spoke at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival, held in a converted warehouse in Tribeca, where earnest networkers milled around taking notes. On the dais, a Journal staffer introduced Kelton as an economist with an idea “that will either solve the world’s problems or send it into ruin!” She made a face, and then walked onstage.

I’d been stewing for a few months in the melange of blogs and YouTube videos and white papers that make up much of the M.M.T. world. Some intricacies lay beyond me—a hazy blur of literature about floating exchange rates and reserve currencies addled my brain. But the basic principle of M.M.T. is seductively simple: governments don’t have to budget like households, worrying about debt, because, unlike households, they can simply print their own money. So M.M.T. proposes that the constraint on government spending shouldn’t be debt but inflation: How much new money can you pump into the economy before prices rise?

Among a certain crowd—mostly online, and mostly on the left—M.M.T. has ignited a revolutionary fervor. On M.M.T. blogs and on M.M.T. Twitter, adherents imagine a world built on M.M.T. principles, in which the government provides guaranteed jobs, health care, and affordable college, and launches clean infrastructure projects to replace our crumbling highways, airports, and bridges. Kelton, who does at least five interviews per week, plus lectures, speaking gigs, and conferences, is, more than anyone, responsible for building M.M.T.’s digital army. She has written regular columns for Bloomberg; started the movement’s most influential blog, New Economic Perspectives; and is working on a book, “The Deficit Myth,” which will come out next year. “It’s pretty obvious she has become the most visible face of M.M.T.,” Randall Wray, one of the economists who first developed the theory, said. “She perfected the way to present these ideas to the public.”

An introduction to M.M.T. can provoke strong reactions. Maybe it’s not for you, and you find it ridiculous or even a little scary, or maybe it blows your mind—like your first time trying marmite or dropping acid. Kelton acts as a spirit guide. When she began her talk at the Wall Street Journal festival, I found a seat in the second row of the theatre, behind a woman in a white sweater with an eager, expressive face. She said her name was Ann. Ann had never heard of M.M.T.

Onstage, Kelton lamented, “There’s so much pressure on candidates to pay for everything. I don’t see anyone—I mean, I’ll just be honest, I don’t really see any Presidential candidates putting forward ambitious agendas and saying, ‘We’re not going to try to pay for any of this.’ ”

I saw Ann’s face register various states of shock. She mouthed, “What?!”

“It’s a tough sound bite,” the moderator, the Journal’s financial editor, Charles Forelle, said.

Kelton replied, “It is, right?” She went on, “What we’ve done to ourselves is to just leave trillions of dollars, literally, on the table, by not taking advantage of the fiscal space that we have, by running our economies below potential, by living below our means as a nation, year after year after year.”

The session wound down. “O.K.!” Forelle said. “Hands up if anybody’s got a question.” He peered out at the audience. “Oh! We’ve got a lot of questions!”

Kelton often hears the same concerns about M.M.T., and most are about inflation. How soon will we become Zimbabwe, which printed so many Zimbabwean dollars that inflation peaked, in 2008, at an annual rate of ninety sextillion per cent? Never according to Kelton; under M.M.T., the focus is sustainable inflation, whereas fiscal traditionalists worry about the deficit and don’t consider inflation at all. Doesn’t M.M.T. then require accurate forecasting of inflation risk? Yes, and, Kelton conceded at the festival, the models aren’t perfect, “but we can do a pretty good job.” And, anyway, government spending, she believes, is responsible for just a small part of inflation.

Ann raised her hand but didn’t get called. When it was over, I caught up with her. “Did you hear me just say ‘Holy cow’?” she said. “It just seems like it’s exactly backward. But she did it so well that I can’t figure out why.”

I asked Ann whether she found Kelton convincing. “I mean, kind of!” she said. “I know what she said was brilliant; I just can’t believe her. She’s gotta be wrong.”

Kelton believes that, though M.M.T. is a new framework, it builds on old ideas found buried and forgotten in the work of foundational economists. The first person to begin assembling the pieces was a hedge-fund executive named Warren Mosler. A polymath with an iconoclastic streak, Mosler shopped around his ideas about money creation and the deficit in the early nineties, looking for allies and finding none. Working some connections, he eventually, in 1993, scored a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld, who was then working as an executive in the private sector. Rumsfeld said he could spare an hour at the Racquet Club of Chicago, in the steam room. Both men wore towels. When they emerged from the muggy haze, Mosler had won an ally.

Rumsfeld agreed to set up Mosler with a few economist friends. Most helpful was Art Laffer, the architect of supply-side economics, whose lifework, arguing for reducing taxes on the rich, recently earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump. Laffer had popularized the contentious notion that reducing taxes can actually increase tax revenues. Mosler, by contrast, wanted to prove that tax revenues were irrelevant to government spending. But Laffer helped Mosler workshop his ideas and directed him to a group of post-Keynesian economists who ran a boisterous Listserv—a Reddit for the dial-up age. Mosler logged on and found the economists who became M.M.T.’s founding thinkers.

Today, Mosler lives in St. Croix, a U.S. territory where he can avoid paying ninety per cent of his federal income tax. (“This is an actual U.S., federally sponsored program,” he told me. “I’m doing my patriotic duty.”) Mosler estimated that he has contributed about three million dollars to the M.M.T. movement in the course of a couple of decades, and, “if anything, I get kind of defensive about not having spent more.” The money has subsidized academic posts, conferences, and scholarships and has helped turn institutions like the Levy Institute, at Bard College, and the University of Missouri–Kansas City into fertile grounds for M.M.T. thought.

Kelton first encountered M.M.T. in the mid nineteen-nineties, when, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, she came across Mosler’s online agitating. Kelton applied for a fellowship at the Levy Institute, where many of the early M.M.T. thinkers had gathered. There, in 1998, she authored one of M.M.T.’s foundational texts, a paper titled “Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?” The paper concludes that taxes don’t actually pay for anything—that the federal government spends first, then taxes some of that money back later. Kelton went on to get her Ph.D. from the New School, then was hired by U.M.K.C. In 2013, she became the chair of its economics department. Soon, she became the preferred interlocutor of hedge-fund managers and politicians who had questions about M.M.T. She held meetings with members of Congress. Larry Summers, who had recently stepped down as the director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, solicited M.M.T. literature.

While at U.M.K.C., in 2008, Kelton unsuccessfully challenged a Republican incumbent for a seat in the Kansas legislature. She campaigned on economic issues and pitched her “commitment to fiscal discipline.” (M.M.T. spending theories don’t apply at the state level, because states can’t create more currency.) She offered tepid support for abortion and said that she believed “that marriage is defined as a bond between a man and a woman.” (Kelton now says she has supported gay marriage from her earliest thinking on the issue.) She told me that she’s been asked about running for the U.S. Senate, from Kansas, but doesn’t want to relocate her two school-age children. Since 2017, Kelton has been a professor at Stony Brook, and she has a visiting appointment at the New School.

Several of Kelton’s colleagues told me that she can be playfully funny, but, when we met, in a New School conference room overlooking Fifth Avenue, she spoke with the intense focus and faith of a crusader. For Kelton, M.M.T. would form the basis of a new approach to policymaking, in which our political imagination is broadened. The important question, she said, shouldn’t be “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” She uses the mobilization for the Second World War as an example; the country focused on maximizing its resources to make planes and guns and food. The deficit was not a concern.

In the economy that Kelton envisions, spending would rise and fall with the economic cycle. Sometimes, if the economy were overheating, the government might call for a budgetary surplus. This is, basically, standard Keynesianism: spending during downturns, which then tapers as the economy reaches full employment. Kelton and others add a federal jobs-guarantee program—she calls it an “automatic stabilizer.” When the economy tanks, more people enter the program, and spending increases. When the economy improves, people move on to better, private jobs, and spending shrinks.

“Winning, for me, looks like prioritizing human outcomes over budget outcomes,” she told me. “Winning looks like handing the Congressional Budget Office a piece of legislation and saying, ‘This legislation is designed to lift ten million kids out of poverty. Tell me, will it be successful? Tell me, does it carry inflation risk? Do I have the offsets right?’ And then we vote.”

The current economic conditions look pretty good for M.M.T. In Japan, where deficits are high and the interest rate is set at less than zero, the economy has met with no calamity. When Congress passed a tax cut in 2017, the C.B.O. predicted that there would be a jump in interest rates caused by the deficit. This hasn’t happened. Still, most mainstream economists view M.M.T. as the Cult of the Magic Money Tree, deriding what they see as its theorists’ preference for analogy over mathematical modeling or empirical evidence. “What most concerns me is I can’t actually quite figure out what it is,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Times columnist, told me. Krugman is a political progressive, and he agrees with many of the spending programs that M.M.T. proponents support. But, he said, “I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is exactly that they think.”

The rhetorical simplicity that frustrates professional economists is, for a layman, part of M.M.T.’s appeal. A framework called sectoral balances undergirds much of the theory. Kelton, in her speeches and writing, likes to explain it this way: the government and the private sector are on two sides of a balance sheet. If the government has a deficit, the private sector must have a surplus. “Their red ink is our black ink,” Kelton said. This is a useful model, but, in the real world, the math isn’t as clean. When the government spends, most of the money ends up in the hands of the people, but there are leakages on the way—to international markets, most significantly. (Also, to corruption.) Interest rates, too, are heavily influenced by the global economy. If the American government has a deficit, the private sector has a surplus. But whose private sector?

One frequent critique of M.M.T. is that it’s basically Keynesianism with some social-media-influencer branding. This elides a few important differences between the two schools of thought, including how each handles the interest rate. According to most mainline economists, the bigger the deficit the more the government has to borrow, which means that, past a certain point in the economic cycle, the interest rate may have to go up. This stifles private investment and chokes off growth. Kelton argues that the Fed can, and should, set the interest rate near zero—problem solved. Abstract economic questions being what they are, this debate is not likely to kill at parties. But the interest-rate question is perhaps the key difference between M.M.T. and Keynesianism. Under an M.M.T. framework, with the interest rate set near zero, Congress would take on the Fed’s dual mandate to control inflation and reduce unemployment. If inflation is expected to rise, this could present Congress with tough decisions on spending and taxing that neither political party wants to make. “It’s helpful advice for some political universe that I’ve never visited,” Krugman said.

At the moment, interest rates remain stubbornly low. Krugman told me that, in this environment, he actually agrees that the deficit isn’t much of an issue. He just finds M.M.T. inscrutable and its policies unrealistic. The jobs guarantee, he said, would offer a fine economic stabilizer, but it would never get passed. “Were people like me arguing, frantically, for more government spending of one sort or another to prop up the economy when interest rates hit zero? The answer is yes!” Krugman told me. “I don’t know how much more vehement we could’ve gotten. But we didn’t get it. To say, ‘Ah, but this wouldn’t be a problem if we had a federal jobs guarantee’ is true but not really helpful.”

These fundamental criticisms extend across the political spectrum. Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, told me that M.M.T. raised a few interesting questions, but that “it has no coherent framework at all.” Like Krugman, he thought that expecting Congress to fulfill the Fed’s role demonstrated “breathtaking naïveté.” Hubbard, who has warned consistently about the dangers of debt, was also an architect of George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which added an estimated three hundred billion dollars per year to the deficit. But Hubbard argued that the private-sector gains from the cuts would be worth the added deficit, and he said he never denied that the country would have to pay off that debt in one of two ways: taxes or inflation. “I think the country can have more debt than it has now. I view that as an open and interesting question that we can talk about,” Hubbard said. “But the free lunch is just silly. No serious person believes this.”

For several years, Kelton’s most prominent supporter has been Bernie Sanders. But even he has used M.M.T. as more of a provocation than a prescription. In December, 2014, Sanders, then the incoming ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, was looking for a chief economist. He called Kelton. Kelton recalled that Sanders asked what she would do if she were him. “I said, ‘What do you mean? If I were you, Senator Sanders? Or if I were you, maybe I’m going to run for President?’ ” Both, he suggested. “My instinct was that this was more than just taking a position for the Senate Budget Committee,” she told me. “This had the potential to be part of something more exciting.” Kelton worked for the Democrats throughout the 2015 budget negotiations and became an adviser to Sanders’s Presidential campaign that spring.

Sanders, however, has never offered an endorsement of M.M.T. When asked, in February, how he planned to pay for his policies, Sanders responded, “Am I going to demand that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes? Damn right, I will!”

Kelton and Mosler believe that taxing the wealthy does nothing for a big program like the Green New Deal: taxes don’t fund spending, after all, and wealth taxes won’t control inflation. “If you did an ambitious Green New Deal, two to three trillion a year over ten years, and you tried to pay for it with a wealth tax, you’d get massive inflationary pressures,” Kelton told me. “You’ve removed all the income from people who aren’t going to spend it.” To remove cash from the monetary base, and thereby offset inflation, you have to tax the people who spend most of their income—the poor or middle classes. (According to M.M.T., the converse is also true—if you want to spur growth, tax cuts should target the poor and middle class.)

Mosler told me that he has met with Sanders’s staffers, and many of them expressed a familiarity with M.M.T. “The staff read my book. They’re all really good with this stuff,” he said. “But Bernie doesn’t go there. They kind of roll their eyes and say, ‘Look, we try.’ ” Mosler has his own remedy for inequality, “but it’s so counterintuitive that it catches people out,” he said. Part of it “is to eliminate the federal income tax entirely, corporate and individual. And replace it with just a property tax.”

When I mentioned the idea to Kelton, she said that Mosler’s proposal would make sense, in theory, if the country’s tax system could be redesigned from scratch, but that it’s not realistic. “If you say, ‘Eliminate the corporate income tax,’ Bernie’s head would explode,” she said.

Warren Gunnels, Sanders’s staff director, told me that Sanders hired Kelton because they agree on the policies that form Sanders’s platform. “She’s one of the leading economists who’s trying to create an economy for all,” he said. “We need more economists like her.” But, he said, “M.M.T. never really crossed our mind, to be honest. We never looked at M.M.T. as a theory that we should adopt.”

After my call with Gunnels, Kelton e-mailed me to say that portraying Sanders as opposed to M.M.T. “would be a mistake.” She went on, “Senator Sanders knows that Congress needs to be able to spend without that artificial constraint. Presidential candidate Sanders, like every other presidential candidate, is trying not to get called out by literally everyone for proposing stuff he ‘can’t pay for.’ You have to know this is how the game is played.”

Kelton is mostly alone among the M.M.T. crowd in this view of Sanders. James Galbraith, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an M.M.T. supporter, was an economic adviser to The Sanders campaign in 2016, but he told me that he considered himself more of a fan than a counsellor. “The fact is that Bernie Sanders doesn’t need a lot of advice from people like me. He knows exactly what he wants to do,” Galbraith said. “And those views are fiscally more traditional than the M.M.T. perspective.”

Kelton is perhaps more pragmatic than most academics. Randall Wray, the economist who helped develop M.M.T., traced Kelton’s moves: scholarship to blog to Twitter to Washington. “These are all things normal academic-type people don’t want to do at all,” he said. “And then getting involved more directly with Bernie. Even though he has never come out with a strong endorsement of M.M.T., it really doesn’t matter. It gave the access, for her, to the media. He’s going to have the right policy proposals.” Whether Sanders endorses M.M.T., he said, “is sort of irrelevant.”

For the moment, most of the major M.M.T. thinkers are staunch progressives. But M.M.T.’s politics are difficult to categorize. “It can lead you to the left or the right,” Kelton told me. “You could use it to say we should have tax cuts to lower unemployment.” Mosler, who used to identify as a “Tea Party Democrat,” told me that he speaks to Tea Party groups about M.M.T. and is received warmly. Kelton often exchanges ideas with John Carney, an economics columnist at Breitbart, who considers himself a “fellow-traveller” of the M.M.T. movement. “I think, functionally, Donald Trump has a lot of M.M.T. in him,” Carney told me. “He doesn’t think we need to cut Social Security. He doesn’t think that the deficit is a problem for the United States government right now. He thinks that if you can borrow cheaply you should and that interest rates should be low. Those are all positions that the M.M.T. people would agree with.” The idea for the job guarantee, he added, is “very close to what Make America Great is. We don’t want welfare, we don’t want handouts, we want good jobs for the American people.” Carney predicted more support for M.M.T. from the right once politicians realize that it can justify deep tax cuts.

This shift, if it is to occur, seems far off. Earlier this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly expressed interest in M.M.T. Subsequently, five Republican senators, led by David Perdue, of Georgia, introduced a resolution that sought to offer an official condemnation of M.M.T. The resolution demonstrated M.M.T.’s growing clout, but it also underscored the fact that Kelton’s battle is over M.M.T.’s legitimacy, not its politics. Allies are valuable. “Maybe just the fact that she’s e-mailing with a Breitbart editor is a sign that she wants a broad evangelism for M.M.T. and not just to be a darling of the left,” Carney said. But he noted that there are fraught political decisions to be made. “The way I put it is, can the government build a gun range? Is that an O.K. job-guarantee job? Can the job guarantee be used to build a border wall?”

I asked Kelton if she worries at all about these fights, further over the horizon. “At the end of the day, what I really hope for is just a better debate,” she told me. “Let both sides put forward their best ideas.”

This is the ultimate dream of M.M.T.: freed from false financial shackles, we could debate, on honest terms, the most fundamental political questions. If money weren’t an issue, would we want to scrub carbon from the atmosphere? Pay for reparations? Expand ice? Maybe we just want to be left alone, with our tax money in our pockets and some Social Security checks when we age. M.M.T.’s architects describe their vision as encompassing not just a better economy but a better, healthier body politic—a goal that is, given the state of things, almost certainly doomed, but is admirable nonetheless. Deficits do matter—not just the financial ones.

Bounty Hunters Are A Lethal Weapon In A Justice System Corrupted By Money

Posted on August 18, 2019

Today, I live in Brooklyn, but I didn’t grow up in New York. I’m country. I grew up in a small Kentucky town and was a part of a church that taught us a verse from the Bible that says “the love of money is the root of all evil.” For my whole life, even as my faith has struggled, I’ve held on to that verse and have believed that wherever we find evil, we’ll always find a money trail somewhere nearby.

And I have long since believed that profit, jobs, and wealth are at the center of the explosive growth of America’s mass incarceration crisis – and not just with jails, prisons, and police, but with the offshoot industries that survive and thrive on the back of our crooked legal system. One of these crooked industries involves bounty hunters, and there’s been an incredible injustice with a group of them killing an innocent man in Tennessee and avoiding any real punishment for it.

Jalen Johnson Milan was a beloved 24-year-old father of three young children in Clarksville, Tennessee, about an hour north of Nashville. Two years ago, on a spring evening in April of 2017, Jalen and some buddies, including his cousin, Jaden Hogan, who was driving, took a trip to the local Walmart where they ended up parking next to a car that had a drug informant inside named Kirsten Mahon.

When I say “drug informant,” am I right that your first assumption is that this is about to be a story on a police sting gone awry? You’d think so, but this was something altogether different.

According to surveillance video from the Walmart, within seconds of pulling into that parking spot, their car was surrounded by seven men who frantically yelled from every side, telling Jalen and his friends to get out of their car. The seven men had guns drawn. One of the men who surrounded the vehicle smashed open a window. Freaking out, Jaden Hogan, the driver, backed out of the parking spot, and then mashed the gas to the floor, so that he could get them all away from these men with guns.

They didn’t know if it was a gang, robbers, or police surrounding them, but it was clear their lives were in danger. Put yourself in that position, and imagine your car being surrounded by seven rough-looking dudes with guns drawn who did not identify themselves as

When Jaden sped away, two of the seven men who surrounded the car, Joshua Young and Roger West Jr., unloaded their guns, firing shot after shot. Jaden, the driver, was hit in the neck, and Jalen was mortally wounded, with a bullet ripping through his heart and lungs. Investigators later tested every bullet at the scene and determined that they all appeared to have been fired by Young and West, according to reporting by The Leaf Chronicle, a newspaper in Clarksville that has provided consistent coverage of the case.

Those seven men got into their car, and for nearly seven miles they chased their prey through Clarksville. Jaden Hogan, the wounded driver, frantically called 911 from the parking lot before the chase was even fully underway, telling the operator that they had been surrounded and shot by a group of men, and that they were fleeing for their lives, speeding down a local road. But here’s the weird thing: The shooters also called 911 saying that they were in an emergency situation as they claimed to be chasing down a local drug dealer named William Ellis.

With both parties on the phone with 911, one of the dispatch operators advised the injured men to pull their car over and surrender to the men who just shot them. But remember this: The shooters weren’t police officers. They weren’t FBI officials or from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They hadn’t been to anybody’s police academy, and they damn sure weren’t supervised by any serious government agency.

They were a ragtag group of bounty hunters and bail bondsmen who were searching for a man named William Ellis who owed them a lot of money because he had skipped bail on two different occasions — leaving debts of thousands of dollars to the bail bondsmen. They had paid a desperate local sex worker, Kirsten Mahon, who struggled with drug addiction, to set up a fake drug deal with Ellis so that they could perform what they called a routine “snatch and grab,” possibly squeeze some money out of him, and then turn him over to authorities. This is routine work for bail bondsmen and bounty hunters.

Except William Ellis wasn’t in the car they had shot and chased; Kirsten Mahon later testified that she tipped Ellis off in advance that people were looking for him. By the time Jaden Hogan finally pulled his car over, his cousin Jalen was already dead. The bullets recklessly fired at the car seven miles prior had ripped his insides all up. The bounty hunters and bail bondsmen would eventually swear under oath that the men in the car shot at them too, but not a single gun was found on their prey, not a single shell casing found in their car, and investigators determined that every bullet fired appeared to be fired at the victims — not from them.

Nine days later, county prosecutors threw the book at the bounty hunters and bail bondsmen — charging them with a slew of crimes ranging from first-degree murder, attempted murder, aggravated kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and damn near every other charge you can think of. It took two years for the case to finally come to trial. It was complicated as hell with 50 different witnesses, hundreds of pieces of evidence — and two of the seven defendants had flipped, agreeing to testify against the other five. Altogether, the five remaining men faced a combined 80 charges.

In the end, earlier this month, a jury found the five men not guilty on 79 different charges — only convicting one man, Joshua Young, with recklessly firing his gun in the Walmart parking lot. He might not even go to jail.

Listen, I’m a prison abolitionist. I’d like to see the whole legal system torn down and rebuilt from scratch. But how in hell a group of pissed off bounty hunters and bail bondsmen can kill an innocent man, in what at very best has to be described as a case of mistaken identity, and get away with it, is beyond me. Defense attorneys basically suggested 101 conspiracy theories, effectively planting doubts in the mind of the jury, that William Ellis really was in that car and disappeared somewhere — even though nobody ever saw any such thing happen. The attorneys also suggested that the victims really did have guns and fired them, even though no evidence whatsoever showed such a thing. Their ploy worked — in great part, I believe, because the jurors treated the bail bondsmen and bounty hunters like they would have treated law enforcement officers, giving them respect and deferring to their storyline.

In the end, it’s gun violence run amok. Jalen Milan was one of the nearly 40,000 people shot and killed that year in our country – which more and more resembles the Wild West. And at the center of these past few years, which have been some of the deadliest years ever measured for gun violence, with almost no progress whatsoever on substantive gun reform, is money. It’s always money. Money for campaigns from the NRA. Profits for the firearms industry. Money for lobbyists. And again, right at the center of the shooting death of an innocent young father, were bounty hunters and bail bondsmen so determined to get back their money from a man that they shot a stranger, thinking it was him. Guns are a problem, but dammit, the money trail is never far behind.