Missoula, Montana; Boulder, Colorado; and South Miami, Florida, have all done it, but you know it’s really catching on when the Big Apple jumps on board. The New York City Council voted Wednesday to get rid of corporate personhood in a growing nationwide backlash against the much-maligned Citizens United ruling.
via New York City Council Votes Against Corporate Personhood, Citizens United | Truthout.
Startling research published by the TUC today calculates that the unpaid overtime worked by British employees is equivalent to more than a million extra full-time jobs. That’s two billion hours given to employers for free. It’s also two billion hours that people don’t spend with their families, volunteering in their communities, exercising, or just relaxing.
via Mike Harris – Two billion reasons to rethink the economy | the new economics foundation.
Economist John Quiggin writew:
I have piece in the National Interest about developments in non-carbon based energy. It ran under the headline “The end of the nuclear renaissance”, but that’s only half the story and probably the less interesting half. The real news of 2011 was the continued massive drop in the price of solar PV, which renders obsolete any analysis based on data before about 2010. In particular, anyone who thinks nuclear is the most promising candidate to replace fossil fuels really needs to recalibrate their views. There’s a case to be made for nuclear as a backstop option, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was even two years ago.
via Solar PV: no longer “the energy of the future and always will be” — Crooked Timber.
THE end of the Iraq war occasioned few reflections on the scale of destruction we have wrought there. As is our habit, the discussion focused on the costs to America in blood and treasure, the false premises of the war and the continuing challenges of instability in the region. What happened to Iraqis was largely ignored. And in Libya, the recent investigation of civilian casualties during NATO’s bombing campaign was the first such accounting of what many believed was a largely victimless war.
We rarely question that wars cause extensive damage, but our view of America’s wars has been blind to one specific aspect of destruction: the human toll of those who live in war zones.
We tune out the voices of the victims and belittle their complaints about the midnight raids, the house-to-house searches, the checkpoints, the drone attacks, the bombs that fall on weddings instead of Al Qaeda.
Fact is, to reduce spending, major defense systems will have to end, the size of the U.S. Army and Marines will have to be dramatically reduced, enormous cuts will have to be made on salaries, pensions and health care benefits for troops and military retirees, and America’s vast worldwide system of bases oversea must be slashed. In slow-motion recognition of that fact, the Defense Department is already planning to shrink the army and Marines, and to shift planning away from land wars and counterinsurgency wars to power-projection via the air force and navy. Some of that, naturally, will be designed to build up U.S. forces in the Pacific to counter China, a fool’s errand if there ever was one – especially since China’s military is unable to do much outside its borders and lacks anything close to American technology. Far better to find a peaceful accommodation with China that recognizes Beijing’s legitimate national security interests and that doesn’t seek to sustain American hegemony in the Far East.
The open letter … brought to the surface long-simmering tensions. In the past several years, staffers have faced temporary pay cuts, layoffs, and buyouts. They have worked since March without a new contract. Regarding ongoing negotiations, the letter notes that Sulzberger’s “negotiators have demanded a freeze of our pension plan and an end to our independent health insurance.” O’Meara said staffers did not receive a raise this year.
Such compensation and benefit issues are playing out while the Times faces a problem with retention, as executive editor Jill Abramson acknowledged when she landed the paper’s highest-ranking masthead job last June. The Times, which could once keep high-profile reporters and editors from heading to rival newspapers based on the paper’s cachet alone, has recently faced increased competition for top talent from non-traditional outlets, such as Bloomberg News, ESPN, and The Huffington Post.
via New York Times Staffers Express ‘Profound Dismay’ With Management.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
The Republicans believe they have President Obama in a box: either he approves a controversial Canadian oil pipeline or they accuse him of depriving the nation of jobs. Mr. Obama can and should push back hard.
This is precisely the moment for him to argue the case for alternative fuel sources and clean energy jobs — and to lambaste the Republicans for doubling down on conventional fuels while ceding a $5 trillion global clean technology market (and the jobs that go with it) to more aggressive competitors like China and Germany.
Truth and Traditions 