Are People Capable of Self Destructive Greed?

Ben Stein opined on Wall Street’s windfall on the CBS Sunday Morning show today. I cannot find his piece on the internet yet. It was excellent.

Stein first discusses the severe hardships and economic fears of the typical American family today, then he points out that the banks were rescued from certain oblivion only through hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts and finally discusses how banks are now rewarding themselves with record bonuses.

Stein then concludes by asking (to paraphrase); "Is this the America that we are asking our sons and daughters to fight for and defend?" "Is this the America that we were brought up to believe in?"

After his piece, I had an epiphany of sorts. Perhaps the greatest error of all in the past for Ben Stein ("everything is OK") and Alan Greenspan ("the markets will self-correct") was an error in judgment regarding the basic integrity and sensibility of people. Perhaps it was an assumption that: "Surely in a democracy no one would ever be allowed to intentionally destroy an economy in the pursuit of self-interests."

I suspect they both now understand that some people will take greed and selfishness to this level of destruction. Further that the political and financial processes can be and were manipulated to where the traditional self-correcting mechanisms of democratic institutions were corrupted and rendered inoperable.

It is mind boggling that we allow these behaviors to continue when they are clearly leading us down a path of self-destruction.

The New Submerging Markets

Banks should be required to mark to market and those that are insolvent should be nationalized and put out of their misery.

It is not too late. Perhaps it would have been unwise one year ago, but today the financial markets have stabilized and will be better able to handle the truth concerning the insolvency of certain banks.

As long as we play this game of balance sheet fiction, we will continue to misallocate capital and generate (literally) false profits by some banks while other banks operate in zombie mode. All the while allowing these institutions to continue the practice of excessive salaries and unconscionable bonuses.

Under the present scenario, the working class is decimated, the middle class is impoverished and the nation's economy as a whole continues to slip to second rate status.

Yet we continue to allow investment banking liberals and corporate management conservatives to game the system and self-justify, rationalize their indulgent and destructive practices.

This will not going to end well.

The United States is rapidly transitioning from being the leader of the world to becoming the leader of the banana republics, where the vast majority are impoverished and controlled by a few ultra-wealthy elite.

We are the antithesis of the "Emerging Markets". The United States now is the leader of a new economic movement. The movement should be called the "Submerging Markets". For we are certainly drowning in our own corruption and greed.

What Were We Thinking?

I agree with those who say that what we are experiencing is climate change and not global warming. The climate always changes. At one time much of North America was covered with glaciers. At another time crops were grown on Greenland.

We do not understand nearly enough about how the various systems interact to accurately model climate change with today’s base of knowledge.

What we do understand is the climate science industry believed in “the end justifies the means” and they have most likely hopelessly corrupted much of the data and scientific work to date.

It has happened before where the global community becomes enraptured with a cause only to wake up and ask, “What were we thinking?” Global fascism in the 30s, global communism in the 60s, global climate-ism today.

Is It Really All Due To CO2?

Humans generally think and react based on the more primitive but dominant emotional sectors of the brain. An example is how fear and greed drive stock trading.

When applied to CO2-based global warming, many people emotionally want CO2 to be the cause of global warming because this conforms with their belief that the human species should conserve resources, stop the spread of urban sprawl, discourage private autos and encourage public transit.

Thus, it is quite possible that climate science has been “directed” towards CO2 as the main cause because of the strong, emotive desire for it to be so by those who awarded grants and performed peer reviews.

Some of the “pre-frontal cortex” facts are:

1) CO2 is a rather minor, rare component of the atmosphere comprising only 3.8 out of every 10,000 molecules.

2) The “greenhouse gas” physical properties of CO2 by themselves cannot cause runaway, devastating global warming. Rather the climate models must incorporate “positive feedbacks”. They model that the increase in CO2 drives increased humidity and cloud cover which ultimately drives the runaway AGW. These positive feedbacks are controversial in the scientific community, are not fully understood and may be offset by negative feedbacks that also are not well understood.

Other variables might play a greater role in climate change than peer reviewed and accepted studies to date have allowed to be determined.

An example is Urban Heat Island effects – Dense urban areas are much hotter than rural areas. This can have two effects on climate science. First, increased global urbanization will play a direct role in global warming from heat radiated off of buildings, asphalt, lack of vegetation, etc. Secondly, many of the land based temperature gages that originally were in rural locations just outside of the urban areas now are located within them due to expanding urbanization over the years. Thus they give false readings of increased temperatures unless they are adjusted and the adjustments are subject to scientific judgment and manipulation.

It is a basic desire of most environmentalists and urban planners to promote dense urban development. Thus there would be cognitive dissonance if a scientific studies were to conclude that urban areas are a significant contributor to global warming. Thus scientists whose work reached this conclusion would most likely never see a second round of grant funding.

Other variables that may have been under-researched/emphasized include solar radiation cycles, solar wind, global land use patterns e.g. forests converted to agriculture, ocean cycles, etc.

Also, many skeptics believe that the consequences of global warming have been portrayed only in the negative. What is not revealed they feel are the increases in food production, the health benefits to the elderly and infirmed from less cold climate and the ability for man and animals to adapt and migrate as temperatures slowly change.

So, all we ask is that you look at climate change with an objective eye and reach your own conclusions after reviewing both sides of the issue rather than accepting the conventional wisdom of a science that potentially has been corrupted by well meaning but nevertheless scientifically dishonest individuals.

I would encourage you to at least read the article by Professor Lindzen from MIT. He is a distinguished professor whose comments you will be more likely to accept than those of bloggers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion