Market Society: What I Thought Michael Sandel Might Have Addressed

When focusing a critical eye on the trends of American politics and economic opportunity, criticism often gets muddled in language that can be mistaken as a culture war being fought from the lower ranks against the top.  The language is couched in “tax the rich” rhetoric and the value of individual responsibility and liberty.

But this is several steps away from the core of the issue.  There is nothing in this debate that should be inherently about the top 1% against the rest.  There is nothing inherently wrong with a top 1% in and of itself.  We can’t all be in the top one percent.  We can’t all be in the top 30%.

Instead the issue begins — but doesn’t end — in the distribution between the spread of power and opportunity in our society.  It is curious to me that both on the left and right, the very top seem to be in the cross hairs, but the squabbles are fought mostly in an increasingly poorly defined and misunderstood middle.  And it all occurs behind the stubborn myth of self-made opportunity.

Self-made opportunity certain defines a great deal of success in the United States, but it isn’t the complete story. If it were, success would be more or less equally distributed across the globe.  The hard working entrepreneur in Somalia or Bangladesh would have his string of grocery and hardware stores across the country selling fruit and wrenches to his grateful neighbors.

It doesn’t work that way, and even a modest intellect probably can understand why.

Still, in this country, we have turned the market economy into a fetish.  That’s the real issue.  The market is supposed to solve everything, including such non-market problems like those of rights and equality.  Even tangible public goods like our physical infrastructure, the environment, education, and safety increasingly are left to the whims of the free market.  This has not turned out well.

Again, I think the root of the problem is the free market fetish.  I wrote a few days ago about reading Michael Sandel and my disappointment that he did not dig into the implications of this fetish.  The drift from a society structured around a market economy to one that is structured around a market society is about more than things being viewed as commodities to be bought and sold, it is about how we think about the very structure of society itself.

On left and right, politicians talk the Market Society rhetoric.  Listening to politicians today you would think small business and corporations cast the votes and the citizen rabble should shut up and hope gratefully for the scraps that will follow from market success.  That’s the problem.

Even worse, Democrats, but especially Republicans, vote for this structure.  Going back to the top 1% fixation.  Condemning wealth, even the most successfully wealthy, is almost taboo.  It is an attack on what we’re told are American values of freedom and responsibility.  In tax debates, the top 20% enjoy the same rhetorical protection.  (Perhaps this happens in part because 35% of Americans think they’re in the t0p 10%, but that’s a rather modest example of cognitive dissonance muddying our politics.)

What happens, I think, is we stop evaluating policy choices at a shared, public level and focus exclusively on individual cost and benefit.  When we fetishize wealth and markets, we give up on the individual.  Again, there is no reason why we should demonize wealth and success, but when the value of the market takes priority over the value of individual and the society, sustaining the fetish of markets becomes one benefits the few at the cost of the majority.

In short, the free markets don’t serve all, the become tools of the minority.  Too many people look away and live with this because they have been misled into thinking markets equal freedom and freedom equals markets.  That is the philosophy of oligarchies and aristocracy if only the elite have access to the markets.

We see this concession everywhere.  The idea  that if you cannot afford it you do not deserve it might be fine if you’re considering a luxury car, but health care?  Education?  Safe streets and a clean environment?

For generations economic opportunity, freedom, and growth thrived with strong government and public investment.  The market economy served the successful quite well while sustaining a healthy middle class.  It’s the transition away from this way of thinking about common investment to one where the market takes priority is one that needs more thought, especially as it affects how we structure our policies around market values before civic ones.

Related articles

• Reading Michael Sandel and Ready to Move On (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
• Michael Sandel: This much I know (guardian.co.uk)
• How the Market Economy Undermines Ethics (tikkun.org)
• A True Free Market (atruefreemarket.wordpress.com)
• How Business Ate My Brain (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)

 

The Weakest Anti-Tax Argument

There are a lot of bad reasons for cutting taxes — and some good reasons for some tax cuts — but few of the anti-tax cut arguments made in Minnesota today are as weak as the tax flight argument.  Much has been written debunking the Tax Flight Myth, but it persists, perhaps because sound economic reasons don’t fit our current fiscal situation.

Leave the technical arguments to the experts which, of course, will mean nothing to the anti-tax folks anyway.  So I will focus on the absurdity of the Tax Flight argument and point out why it really isn’t a persuasive one in smart tax circles.

If the argument is going to be persuasive, there needs to be some sort of advantage or gain in the argument.  The Tax Flight people seem to think people will take their side of the argument because they don’t want them to leave.  I think that’s a weak argument.

People who support fair tax policy, community investment, and a smart government might hope this rhetoric isn’t a threat but rather a promise.  After all, if you want to fix government and resolve problematic funding issues do you want anti-tax takers getting in the way?  Probably not.  South Dakota is waiting and you’re free to leave.

But let’s hope they don’t leave too soon.  Watching the anti-tax crowd get all puffed up and threaten to leave is kind of fun in the way that listening to a petulant brat threatening to run away from home is fun.  It’s almost cute.

We could do what smug parents do and offer to pack the suit case, but I think a better approach — one that is both good for the state’s bottom line and like a good kick in the ass as they leave — would be a tax on interstate moving services. I don’t know…30% on interstate moving contracts seems like a good sting.

How about a tax on home sales not reinvested in the state?  Now there is a good idea!

Of course this isn’t a good idea and I am only being flippant, but it is a fun idea, at least when you think about sticking it to anti-tax hysteria.  It wouldn’t really wouldn’t do much anyway.  Even if you could tax people moving for tax purposes, it wouldn’t amount to much.  Tax flight isn’t a big deal.

People want to live in places with a high quality of living just as people choose to live in better neighborhoods.  Places with a high quality of living require support, including smart public investment.  It is one thing to say you don’t like taxes.  It is another to understand how your taxes are being invested.  In an era of reckless public disinvestment and chronic underfunding of government, it isn’t clear to me that many anti-taxers understand the benefits of fair tax policy and adequate public funding of state services in the first place.  And that is at the heart of the problem.

Taxes are not inherently bad, but how we raise taxes and how we manage revenues has become a mess.  It is a wicked brew of favors, incentives, and transfers increasingly skewing away from the common good and toward special interests.  A simple, progressive income tax — combined with business tax parity — can keep the state economically competitive and fund government services.  The system also needs property tax reform that finds a balance which will restores stronger state-funded local government aid.

Grown ups discuss things like this.  Children threaten to run away from home.

Population and the Limits of Earth’s Biomass

Categorize this under things I thought about as a kid.

When I was a boy I thought I might be a scientist.  I probably imagined myself in all the cliché roles for boys.  (For the record, however, being a fireman never interested me, but being a railroad engineer did.)

Among the questions that got into my head at a young age and stuck with me for years was how overpopulation could work.  I reasoned that the planet could only support a certain level of biomass and that the natural order of things would maximize that biomass.  So I wondered…how can we ever overpopulate ourselves to death?

If you start to think about the question from this perspective, the importance of conservation makes a lot of sense.  So does the business of food production and politics of allocation.

I learned later that Thomas Malthus warned if population outgrew resources, disease, death, and disorder would plague the world.  But Malthus also thought there some inherent self-regulation existed in the system to control population.

For centuries disease and famine simply fulfilled a role in the natural order of things.

In 1970 Norman Borlaug – distinguished agronomist and University of Minnesota graduate — won the Noble Prize for his work in developing disease resistant wheat which was said to have helped save a quarter of the world’s population from starvation.  Growing up in the 1970s some people started talking less about the danger of overpopulation.  Science would save the day.

Norman Borlaug

Of course smarter people than a 10 year old kid thought about this, too, and still do, but maybe enough of us don’t think about this to make a difference.  Isn’t it the case that even with increased productivity there can only be so much living biomass on the planet at any given time on net?  If less wheat dies of disease and helps support more people, somewhere else something else has to lose, right?

And today we see it.  With more and more people on the planet, there is less of other things.  Think about it.  From the passenger pigeon to depleted oceans, on balance there is less of other living things as there becomes more of us.

So I read this past Sunday about a scientist who has bio-engineered artificial beef, one cell at a time, in a  lab.  He suggests that developing his process to be economically efficient on an industrial scale could satisfy the growing demand for meat as the world become more prosperous.  But can we really?  Where would this bio-material come from that creates the manufactured meat?

Maybe there is a limit to the number of people the planet can support, but it is less of a question about people outstripping the ability to produce the food to support a population than it is a matter of consuming too much of the overall biological resources that exist on the planet.

It seems to me that the “stuff” that can be living things on the planet must always have been allocated to its maximum potential.  We’re just reworking how it is allocated.  That might be where limits exist.  Looking at where we are today, for example, one might not conclude that there is an association between more wheat in the fields and fewer fish in the ocean, but maybe a relationship exists.

It is worth thinking about.

Related articles

• Meet Norman Borlaug, A Hero You’ve Never Heard Of (prosebeforehos.com)
• Why now? (kalianiello.wordpress.com)
• Science & Technology – Re: New Study Reconfirms that Overpopulation is Not a Threat (disclose.tv)
• Without adequate funding, deadly wheat disease could threaten global food supplies (eurekalert.org)

Daily Kos Con Chart

This really isn’t a post, it is plagiarism.  In fact, I depend on Ed Darrell retweeting Nancy Flanagan — two people I have never met — for enabling my sin.  (Thank you.)  But I enjoyed this Daily Kos post so much, I had to share it and I can only wish it were my own.

Here you are, The Daily Kos Guide to the Conservative Movement!  Other than being too soft on the cons, try to find any fault in it.  If ever there were a better example of “funny because it is true” I haven’t seen it.

Enjoy!  And share.

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Correcting a Well-Placed Comment About Public Investment in Infrastructure

The New York Times reported on President Obama’s Miami speech yesterday where he proposed a program of public and private investment to pay for national infrastructure improvements.  The article quotes Ken Orski, the editory of Innovation Briefs and a transportatoin official for Richard Nicon and Gerald Ford.

Ken Orski tells us that back in the 19th century, canals and roads were financed with private money and suggests that public spending did not occur until Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This is not correct.

As far back as the 18th century government — federal, state, and local — invested in transportation.  None other than small government president Thomas Jefferson advocated for federal surpluses to be applied to infrastructure including canals and other “great objects” underway in the nation.  In fact, the Jefferson administration preferred government investment to private for the purposes of enabling free commerce.

Preceding the Civil War, federal investment — those pursued by Jefferson — did decline, but that did not mean private enterprise picked up the slack.  For the most part it shifted to the state level.  States spent nearly 10 times federal investment, but both were large sums for the era, nearly half a billion dollars preceding the Civil War.

The New York Times article also uses the railroad industry as an example of privately funded infrastructure investment.  This also is not entirely true, especially when you take into account the enormous grants of land.  During the 19th century tens of millions of acres were given to railroad interests which could then be sold or leased for profit to support rail investment.

The only large scale privately funded rail system in the United States was James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway lines out of St. Paul, Minnesota, but even here there were gifts of land in place.

The point is, since the founding of the United States, government as invested in infrastructure.  The investments increased in the New Deal era and throughout the strong post-World War decades of the second half of the 20th century, but public investment did not begin with the New Deal as Mr. Orski implies and as reported by the New York Times.

Misrepresenting facts makes sensible public policy decisions more difficult as some people are likely to think that we somehow did things differently and better in the past.  It paints the wrong picture because we did, in fact, do things differently and better in the past, but that was not a past reliant more on private investment, it was a past when shared public investment built and sustained a strong America.

Related articles

• In Miami, Obama pushes for infrastructure plan (latimes.com)
• What You Need to Know About President Obama’s Plan to Improve American Infrastructure (whitehouse.gov)
• Obama unveils plans to pump billions into US infrastructure in Miami speech (guardian.co.uk)

“Courting Cowardice” and Then Some

I was going to write about the United States Supreme Court Courting Cowardice, but Maureen Dowd did so already and did a very nice job.   (Good work.)

But…you know…well, no, I don’t know.  Something doesn’t seem right with the courts.  The Supreme Court feels especially squishy, intellectually vulnerable to the push and pull of ideology and public opinion.  Cynics — of which there are many, too many — might try to convince me that the courts have always been this way and even worse.  But I don’t know…

Someone stick a pin in their butts..

Maybe I never really paid attention before and I like to think I am a guy with a propensity to pay attention.

Listening to so-called highlights from today’s Supreme Court hearings has me questioning the both the judicial and the intellectual integrity of the bench.  Aren’t the justices supposed to be refereeing the law?  Instead they seem to be talking from the gut, as you might expect people to talk at a cocktail party, especially one where they might be hedging  in order to fugue properly the social scene.

Is that what a Supreme Court justice does?

The court’s role is fairly direct.  They judge the constitutional validity of the legislative and legal proceedings.  Isn’t that right?  Especially for justices who claim to protect the Constitution as an objective and fixed code, it seems to me that a lot of the questioning in hearings is nonsense.

Should, for example, the court pass on hearing a case because we don’t have a history of social outcomes or a view of the future bearing on the case as Alito suggests?

What kind of cop out is that?  I thought we judged cases based on its constitutionality.  A copy of the Constitution, Justice Alito, certainly must be in your office somewhere (or you can find the Constitution online) along with a history of case law appropriate for assessing minority rights.

The issue before the court isn’t about making peace between warring parties, it about the rights of United States citizens.  Surely there’s something in our history to help the Supreme Court with that sort of assessment.

Furthermore, if the rights protected by the Constitution are objective and eternal rights, what will change 10 or 50 years from now anyway?  Passing judgement on legal matters based on social reaction is shirking the responsibility of the court, is it not?

I have thrown a lot of question marks in this post, but that simply shows that I am utterly confused.  What the hell is so great about the Supreme Court if it starts thinking and acting like  radio talk show hosts or pundits sitting around a table on a Sunday morning news program?

Related articles

• Supreme Court shies away from legalising gay marriage in America (telegraph.co.uk)
• Cowardice As a Political Philosophy (gawker.com)
• Alito’s provocative question (kstreet607.com)

Roe v. Wade, Gay Marriage, and the Supreme Court

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear cases concerning marriage rights this week, there has been increasing talk about how this decision parallels the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling in 1973.  Maybe it is the timing — an even forty years apart — but I don’t understand the comparison.

Of course I don’t understand opposition to marriage equality in the first place.  I simply don’t see why the opposition opposes!  I don’t mean to sound disinterested and unconcerned — because I am not — but who cares?!

Alas, people do care, they care enough to impose their personal views to the extent that they want to codify personal beliefs over personal rights.  I understand the bigotry — we are not perfect — but the laws are in place to protect rights from bigotry.  And now to confuse the issue with parallels to Roe v Wade adds another layer of irrelevance.

Let’s suppose arguments opposing abortion rights are valid insofar as they are making a claim that the rights of a living person are at stake.  Laws opposing abortion are intended to protect those rights — the right of life, liberty, and ultimately the pursuit of happiness — are at stake.

Where is the similar argument in the marriage debate?

People opposed to marriage inequality like to argue that children suffer when raised in a household with same-sex parents.  Never mind that this myth has been dispelled, but if that is the test, where does that test end?

One might argue, for example, that children of young parents are disadvantaged.  Or maybe a parent who is estranged or away from home too much isn’t an effective parent.  Perhaps children of parents with addiction or crime problems create more challenges for children.  As a point of fact, these last three examples do create measurable challenges for children.  Do we outlaw these relationships?

For a party that defends the concept of small government, they seem eager to overstep their bounds on this issue.

The Constitution of the United States should be the law that defends minority rights, not one that is abused to enforce majority opinion over minority rights.  That’s the point of liberty for all, correct?

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

This brings me to another part of this Supreme Court confusion that troubles me.  It is something Justice Anthony Kennedy said.  He said, “A democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say.”

Wait a minute.  Did Kennedy just argue for his own irrelevancy?  What, exactly, is the role of the Supreme Court of the United States?  He seems to be arguing for rule by referendum, even rights by referendum.  Isn’t that exactly contrary to the founding principles of this country?

Especially with partisan courts, including the Supreme Court and the ideological process of appointing and approving justices, this comment seems absolutely strange.  Or I am missing something.

We entrust the justices of the Supreme Court to assess cases based on the constitutionality of the law.  The fact that they are nine unelected people is essential, they should not feel beholden to political affiliations and thereby (we hope) be free to be objective.  Kennedy says just the opposite.  What is he doing on the court?  The court shouldn’t be “deciding”, as he claims it is, it should be refereeing, establishing Constitutional validity.

The fact that we have serious people considering anti-marriage rights laws in the first place is frightening.  The fact that argument exposes  the politicized — and apparently constitutionally apathetic — Supreme Court shows a judicial and legal crisis as it relates to our most basic rights.

We have a problem here.  Why aren’t people outraged?

Related articles

• Gay-marriage cases to define Supreme Court legacy (Reuters) (newsdaily.com)
• Shadow of Roe v. Wade Looms Over Ruling on Gay Marriage (dailyqueernews.wordpress.com)
• Oops: Top Republican Senator Inadvertently Embraces Roe v. Wade (thinkprogress.org)

How Business Ate My Brain

Listen to any politician or public policy wonk and you hear strong, unbroken business first rhetoric.  In fact if you think Citizens United is strange for essentially elevating corporations to citizen status, listen to politicians.  One would be forgiven to think that government represents business first, people second.

Has it always been this way?

In Minnesota some people want to slow down and take a look at sand mining operations developing primarily in the state’s southeastern counties.  Sand is used in frac mining — another business-first juggernaut that might need scrutiny — and there is a lot of sand miners need in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Some people living in those areas want development to slow down, primarily to study impact on the environment and the local economy.

But you will hear politicians push back.  They don’t want the business to go elsewhere.

Frac Sand Mine near LaCrosse, WI.

Well, what if it might be preferable for that business to go elsewhere?  Suppose the frac sand mining operations cause long-term harm that outweighs short-term gain, for example?

Well, maybe, but the Business Zombies don’t give those possibilities much of a chance.  As quickly as a pragmatic argument like that emerges, it is chomped down by the Business Zombies.

This is just one example.  We could consider many others, like frac mining itself.  From the mad sweep to deregulate industry to dismantling pro-(domestic) business trade policy to enthusiastic tax giveaways, it is all done in the name of business.

On the other end we no longer find the political will to fund important social contracts that serve people, programs like Medicare and Social Security; we compromise our environmental protection laws; we cut funding for schools; we support unbalanced tax policies that hurt families; and the list goes on.

Why?  Because the Business Zombies have taken over.  Government of business, by business, for business…especially if you’re a multinational, tax-evading, increasingly foreign-owned business.  Domestic business?  Well, you have had your chance.  Quietly go away.

I understand the importance of business and jobs, but business and jobs don’t preclude some thoughtful commonsense.  The fear of being marked as anti-business in this country leads to too many things happening too recklessly.  Everything is put into a context that business means everything.  It doesn’t.  If a business destroys the land, ruins the local economy, and shifts long-term priorities away from people, that’s a bad thing.  The costs are too high.

Where is the harm in asking whether something good for business is bad for people?

Related articles

• Please Sign Moratorium Petition (wisair.wordpress.com)
• Red Wing mayor hired for frac sand lobbying (lacrossetribune.com)
• Schmit calls for statewide survey on frac sand mining (minnesota.publicradio.org)
• Frac sand mining awakens activism in southeastern Minnesota (startribune.com)

The Problem with a Common Anti-Marriage Argument

Autumn Leva, the myopic spokeswoman for the ironically-named Minnesota for Marriage, restated a common and irrelevant argument for denying universal marriage rights in Minnesota.

She said again that polls show that most Minnesotan’s don’t want marriage redefined.  Therefore, it is important that Minnesotans get out and oppose marriage equality.

What people like Leva don’t understand is how their arguments in fact reinforce the need for a law ensuring marriage equality.  The very fact that a majority attempts to impose its will on a minority only by virtue of majority opinion is a a sound argument for a law protecting minority rights.  If Leva and her horde don’t know what that law is, it is the Constitution.

Leva has the right to hold her bigoted opinions, but she does not have the right to expect her ignorance to be codified in state law, especially in opposition to constitutional rights.

The ignorant and the paranoid often are the most easily frightened and manipulated.  Perhaps if someone like Autumn Leva stepped back and really asked why her marriage would be threatened by broadening the scope of marriage.

How does one marriage impose on the rights of another marriage?  Arguments about “tradition” and “religion” don’t hold up.  These are not valid claims that have any bearing on rights.  Likewise, to make the subjective argument that families are stronger with a mother and father are not any more valid than proposing a law banning single-parent families.  Move on and tell us what the problem is with marriage.

If, after all, marriage is about commitments of love, faith, and responsibility, one should argue that is a matter of natural rights which should be inherent to all, correct?

Any group trying to restrict rights based on social prejudice stands on the wrong side of the argument.

Plus it is mean spirited, petty, and flat out silly to whimper and whine about someone else’s pursuit of happiness and security.  Did we outgrow this in the school playground?

Alas, such is the state of regressive politics today.  History will show that some of us are better than others and the sooner the better.  Stand up to anti-marriage bigotry and support marriage equality for all people whether straight or not.

Related articles

• Minnesota United for all Families (mnunited.org)
• ‘Concerned Minnesotan Father’ Unintentionally Funny Video On The Power Of Sperm And Colons (VIDEO) (addictinginfo.org)
• Gay Marriage Supporters Throw Fund Raising ‘House Parties’ (kstp.com)
• Right Wing Still Battling Gay Marriage! (americanliberaltimes.com)
• A Point Opposing Gay Marriage (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
• In Defense of “Bigot” (allitletourinyellow.wordpress.com)

 

Shut Down Simple-Minded Tax Cut for Job Creators Rhetoric

The simple-minded arguments promoting tax cuts for so-called job creators are misleading, incorrect, and frankly very stale.   For the most part, they do not fit the current economic environment and reflect a level fiscal irresponsibility that is in large part a cause of our national budget mess.  Smart tax policy has been absent for too long and it is time for that to change.

No smart business owner is going to hire people simply because he has more money.  If you manufacture widgets and you have a warehouse full of unsold widgets, what incentive do you have to hire more people to make more widgets?  You don’t have any incentive to do so.  What will you do with the additional widgets and the added costs needed to produce them?

The anti-tax movement argues that we need to ensure that “job creators” have the resources – i.e., money – to hire workers.  This argument has justified decades of increasingly unbalanced tax policy which favors the so-called job creators.  It is the “trickle down” or supply-side model that is not working, especially in our current depressed economy.

If the trickle down model did indeed work, we should be awash in jobs now.  The wealthiest among us are doing well.  They have money to invest.  Why are they not investing those resources here to create jobs here?  Because there is no demand for the goods and services in which they might invest.  Corporations likewise are sitting on record cash reserves.  Again, they are not investing here because it is not justified by demand.

If we want to stimulate growth, we need policy that puts more money in consumer bank accounts.  Often by sheer necessity, they spend the cash they have which then pushes up the demand we need.  Misleading rhetoric about “makers” and “takers” is unfair and incorrect.  One can make the argument – especially in the current market environment – that the middle and working class are the job creators.  Without growth their spending stimulates, we will be locked in stagnate economic growth.

Of course there is some investment underway.  However when businesses do invest, it is increasingly likely that they are investing in cheaper labor markets in the global economy.  We have a systematic labor and demand problem in the United States.  Maintaining tax cuts, subsidies, and other financial incentives behind the argument that it will spur growth has been proven a failed policy in the status quo and does not address the decline of our comparative advantages in the world economy.  We are poorer, less educated, and most importantly lagging behind other countries in our infrastructure and research investments.

Our remaining global stronghold is our financial sector – and to some extend our nation’s monetary system and reserve, although Republicans are determined to undercut that – but this sector serves a very small number of Americans.  Even American workers investing in 401(k)s see less from the financial sector as they have less income to invest and suffer most from the current era’s boon and bust market cycles.

We cannot expect to compete in old manufacturing sectors where we can no longer compete on the labor market, unless we want to undercut the middle class prosperity that has been a part of the American way of life for generations (which in fact is happening now).  We should instead be investing in future economic opportunities, maintaining a secure and educated workforce, and investing in smart infrastructure to sustain future growth.  But we are not doing this.  We are giving tax cuts instead and expecting something magical to happen.

Unfortunately, nothing magical is happening.  That’s obvious to anyone paying attention to our country’s economic trends over the past couple decades.

My two cents.

Related articles

• We Do Not HAVE to Cut Entitlements (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
• Taxes Aren’t Theft, Tax Cuts For The Wealthy Are Theft (seeingtheforest.com)
• Boehner Says Taxes Are Theft, Here Is An Answer (ourfuture.org)