A Most Profitable War

So here's a thought, one that I've not seen pitched out in the bizjournals or propagated by the business-oblivious American Left.

As America starts dropping bombs on Iran, and Iran inevitably chooses to retaliate in the only way it can, there'll be disruptions to Persian Gulf shipping.  Iran's Houthi proxies will start lobbing antiship missiles at passing commerce.  Shia Iran will pitch ballistics at the wealthy Sunni petrostates, and we'll see burning refineries and damaged or sunk tankers.  

Even if we don't see that happen, the markets will price that potentiality into a barrel for a while.

So the cost of a barrel of oil will rise, as will the price at the pump.  That's not collateral damage.  I'm kinda sorta of the mind that this is a goal.  Meaning, somewhere, someone knows that war with Iran is in America's financial interest.

I mean, the primary goal is advancing the interests of Bibi and the Arab Petrostates, who are largely now aligned.  But as a secondary goal, rising oil prices are in the direct interest of American petroleum producers.  

Because right now, the United States of America is sitting on a huuuuuuge reserve of shale oil.  In Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, we have the largest such reserve known to humankind.  It contains within it trillions of barrels, enough resource to keep us all burning carbon unabated for nearly a century.

But using that oil is very resource intensive.  It's a highly technical process, requiring substantial research and engineering, and thus has a far higher profit threshold than old-school oil drilling.  

If the price of oil, per barrel, is less than sixty five to seventy dollars?  Some production becomes unprofitable.  The farther below seventy bucks a barrel it falls, the more the business model for shale starts to collapse.  Below fifty bucks a barrel, it's time to shut down production.  You're spending more to get it out of the ground than you're making.

Three months ago, oil was running at $58 per barrel, meaning production was getting right near the edge of viability.

Now?

Now it's soared, up to nearly $75 a barrel, comfortably above the point at which domestic shale is commercially profitable.

For OPEC nations that traditionally drill, some losses and damage to production will be more than made up for by soaring profits.  For American production, this war could be a lifesaver.

Which is just such an odd, unpleasant business.

 

Being in on the Grift

One of the more peculiar things about our recent road-trip through the American South was the presence of Trump Stores.  

Generally speaking, I appreciate the South.  The pace of life, the easy sociability, and the use of the second person plural?  There's something to be said for Y'all Country.  But there's weirdness, too.  There's the juxtaposition of faith and decadence, of extreme wealth and poverty.  And, of course, the lingering racism.  The Trump Store is definitely a bit of Southern Weird.  We passed two of them in our travels, one in Western North Carolina and one in Tennessee, and both were just plain odd.

There they were, festooned with MAGA flags and images of the current president, looking for all the world like a far-right Spirit Halloween.  I was tempted to stop and check it out as we passed, just to go in and immerse the oddness, in the same way that I enjoy now and again dining at a local restaurant run by cultists.  But I didn't even suggest it to my wife, mostly because I knew she couldn't stomach the experience. 

If we were still in the lead up to an election, there'd have been a sense to 'em.  But we're not.  Trump merch just a fixture now, a permanent and peculiar part of our I'd-buy-that-for-a-dollar zeitgeist.  There's not ever been anything like this in my lifetime, this brazen embrace of politician as brand.  It's the teensiest bit pornographic.

Folks know there's money to be made off of the Trump name, and American neofascism has a healthy dollop of PT Barnum profiteering woven into its flag-festooned snake-oil DNA.

At the apex of the brand, a family business makes money hand over fist, selling access and power like never before.  It's not just cheaply made Bibles branded and sold for three times the going retail price.  Now that they're in power, it's $TRUMPcoin, a cryptocurrency that allows the wealthy to buy into the brand and get access and favors in return.  It's a $400,000,000 aircraft, offered up as a gift...not to the nation, but the president directly.   It's private clubs for the oligarchs, where just getting in the door will set you back $500,000.  Emoluments Shmemoluments!  There's money to be made!

And at the bottom of the food chain, folks buying shirts and hats and flags wholesale, which they then hawk online and at Trump stores.  

It's all just so danged crass and venal, pure 100% uncut American Mammonism injected straight into the veins of our Trump addiction.

I thought these things as I drove by, but I thought something else.  Don't be a hypocrite, I thought.

I, too, have been making money off of the Trump name.  I've self-pubbed a whole bunch of my manuscripts through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service over the years.   Of them, only one has sold in even modest numbers.  Since the election, a book I wrote back in 2022 has moved a couple of copies a day, every day.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, and it's written in the voice of Satan himself.  It goes for $6.66 a copy, a low, low price selected more for symbolic value than for profit margin.  Amazon gets most of that, and I get about a buck.  Still, that's money.

Though I had to write the book to exorcise Trump-hatred from my soul, I've always felt a little weird about making even modest bank on it.  Those royalty checks ain't a livin', but they're not nothin', either.  How, I mused as we drove, am I different from that Trump Store owner?

Thankfully, Jeff Bezos has solved that problem for me.  

On demand printing costs have risen, and so I recently got a message from Amazon noting a rejiggering of their royalty payment policy.  Come June 10, every self-pubbed paperback on Kindle Direct Publishing that's selling for less than ten bucks will yield no royalties at all.  Not one thin dime.  So every penny of that Six Dollars and Sixty Six cents will go right into Amazon's pocket.  

In a little under two weeks, I'll get nothing from the Great Grift at all.

It feels liberating.

Hung Out To Dry

When our twenty-year-old dryer punked out last month, I faced something of a conundrum.

On the one hand, I struggled for a bit with the idea that we even needed a dryer.  Our unfinished laundry room already had multiple clotheslines stretched under the ceiling, with enough room for nearly a week's worth of washing.  It takes a full day to get things dry that way, but it does work.

For one weekly wash, and for the next, that was how I rolled, and it was unsurprisingly effective.  Of course, some things...like towels, for pointed instance...dried into hard boards, all of the fluffy softness replaced with a faintly abrasive surface.  My jeans were similarly rigid.  Despite the Laconic appeal of such things, there's just no way my wife was going to tolerate towels so rough they'd annoy a desert mystic.

That, and I knew that once we got into summer, that area of the house gets quite humid, to the point of requiring a dehuey to keep the space from becoming unbearably musty.  Eventually, stuff wouldn't dry down there.

So a dryer it was.  The challenge, though, was finding a dryer that was just a dryer.  Meaning, it tumbles clothes and blows dry, heated air through them as they tumble, and that's it.  Dryers really don't need to do anything else.

But almost every dryer out there was farkled out the wazoo.  Meaning, they were stuffed full of utterly pointless gimcrackery.  WiFi enabled and with downloadable app connectivity, with chipsets and control screens and dozens of other utterly irrelevant and pricey features.  I could check on my dryer anywhere on the planet!  Why would I want to do so?  What's the use-case for such a thing?  Gosh, say the designers, don't worry your pretty little head about that. 

Almost all dryers were like this.  I found one that wasn't, one that was...as best I could tell...simply a rebadged version of the same decades-old unit that had finally given up the ghost.  No electronic controls, just knobs.  All mechanical.  There we go.  Just what I need.

But there was a challenge:  It wasn't in stock most places.  There were plenty of the overpriced doohickey-laden critters, all of which were selling for hundreds...and in some cases, over a thousand...more.  The most simple, most affordable, functional dryer?  Most places, it was backordered.  

Meaning, people want it.  Every one they make, people buy.  I found one, but it took time.

And here, I see something of a market failure.  Because profit maximization often requires that a manufacturer manufacture not just products, but demand.  And all one wants in an appliance is that it does its job.

Or so I'd think, but I suppose I'm peculiar.  Perhaps we'd all rather pay more for irrelevant features, pointless connectivity, and counterproductive overcomplication.  Perhaps we prefer having our actual needs ignored, and replaced with synthetic desires.

Perhaps we enjoy being hung out to dry. 

The Problem with Nonprofits

The past couple of nights, I've settled in to engage with an old friend.  Clive Staples Lewis was a major part of my childhood and my youth.  My encounter with his mind and with his faith left me with a Christianity that has been able to robustly engage with reality.  I do not fear science, nor am I troubled in my encounter with other faith traditions.  Much of that has to with the gentle, earthy, intelligent faith that radiates from both his fiction and his theology.

So I've been reading The Weight of Glory, a refreshingly short collection of his essays and "sermons."  His mind and his use of language continue to be taut and delightful, even after all these years.  It's one of the reasons I continue to consider him a primary spiritual teacher.

One thing hit me, straight off the git go, and that was a challenge in the titular essay to the idea of defining ourselves by negation.   Is the highest value "unselfishness," he asks?  He'd been hearing that, evidently, and had an issue with it.  

Why should we assume that "selfishness" has a right to dominance, with the good only existing in relation to a dark but more essential state of being?

Instead, it is more transforming and powerful to assume that our purpose is the good, which exists as a free-standing potential reality that is fundamental and positive.  This, he articulates as love, in the most radical sense of the word.  Let "love" exist as an affirmative, potent, gracious primacy in our self-understanding, Lewis suggests.

His observation sent my mind cascading off in several directions, which my mind tends to do.  One reaction touched on an old pattern of thought, having to do with the way our culture views actions taken for the benefit of others.  These are the things we do together for joy or for compassion.  These are the arts, and music, and working together for the good of all.  We make gardens.  We feed the hungry.  We visit the prisoner.  We worship and teach.  We sing and dance and share our stories and our art.

When we create organizations for the purposes of creating the good, we have a name for them.  Or rather, we have a new name for them.

We used to call them "charities."  Charity means "love," from the Latin root word caritas.  These were collective undertakings of love, community efforts done for the purpose of manifesting a more gracious state of being in the world.  But beginning in the late 1980s, our language began to change.

What mattered to our secular market culture was profit, and the power conveyed from the generation and accumulation of capital.  So what had once been called "charity" became defined as a negation, a shadow state of being.  They are not "love organizations."  

They are "non-profit organizations."  And so "nonprofit" became the defining term for that form of activity, something we do when we're not doing "profit," the thing that is most important in our culture.

Outside of our fiercely market-driven nation, an interestingly parallel semiotic event occurred in the social democracies elsewhere in the world.  

There, it is government that has primacy, setting the boundaries for culture through the use of law, regulation, and coercive authority.  In Europe and elsewhere, what had been known as "charitable" organizations now became increasingly known as "nongovernmental" organizations.

In both cases, what had been an affirmative statement became a negation.

For ten years of my life, before I entered the pastorate, I was immersed in the world of studying nonprofits.  The whole time, this negative ideation troubled me.  Well, not the whole time.  I did actually get some work done, when I wasn't musing philosophically out of the window of my office.  

This telling way of using language to indicate dominant cultural values really did stick with me.

Because business and government are all well and good.  But profit and power should not be given primacy of place in our self-understanding.  They are not our purpose.

Sermon Remnants: Prophet and Profit

Pretty much every Sunday, there are dozens of possible sermons that can be preached on any given passage.  Unfortunately, many pastors preach three or four of them all at once, oblivious to the principle of, you know, sticking to a theme and making a manageable number of points. 

I can't stand rambling, unstructured preaching, but I still find myself surfacing competing concepts as I try to cobble together fifteen-to-seventeen minutes of Sunday God Talk.  So something invariably gets discarded.

In my current context, I try to keep to basic bible teaching, core concepts and context, lightly seasoned with personal anecdotes and cultural references.  It's what folks want...and, frankly, need.  So this week, macroeconomics and ethics got dropped by the wayside.  Clutter, dontcha know.

This week's passage was a ferocious social commentary, a radical prophetic indictment of the concentration of wealth among the social and economic elite of Jerusalem.   The word Micah receives from God powerfully resonates in our current context, and seems particularly...difficult...as a standard against which to assess the morality of the global marketplace.

As I was reviewing the broader context of Micah, one thing that struck me again was the phrase in Micah 6:10, where the "short ephah" is declared accursed.   As the ephah is a unit of measure by which a dry good or product is measured, providing a "short ephah" means that you are giving someone less than what they pay for.  It's an indictment of those Jerusalem merchants who would use scales weighted in their favor, giving people less so they could profit more.

But the core ethic of capitalism is profit maximization.  The purpose of any corporate or profit-seeking entity is, or so we are told, to maximize returns.  Period.  Market entities serve no other purpose.

Which leads me to wonder...what constitutes the ethic of the "short ephah?"  Is it simply false measures?  Or can it be any effort to bleed out every last shekel from the guy on the other end of the exchange?   What is the ethical distinction between profit maximizing and profiteering?

Making a profit just doesn't seem inherently evil That can be simple success founded in hard work, the sort of thing that comes with a bountiful harvest.  But profit maximization as a goal, while it may have worked for Milton Friedman, just has never seemed compatible with the basic principles of ethics laid out in Torah.  Or the prophets. 

Or by Jesus, if we get down to it.