The first step is to abandon GDP, for it does more harm than good. The more difficult task is to agree on a basic set of alternative global indicators. Sustainability must be the guiding principle. Once better common metrics are established, the world market could actually begin to function as a valuable enforcement mechanism.
via Rethinking GDP: Why We Must Broaden Our Measures of Economic Success | The Nation.
If you want to transform the economy, you have to cut Wall Street down to its proper size. One way to do that is to tax the short-term speculative activities that dominate and distort financial markets.
For ordinary investors, the costs would be negligible, like a tiny insurance fee to protect against crashes caused by speculation. But for the highfliers who are most responsible for the financial crisis, the tax could raise the cost of highly leveraged derivatives trading and stock-flipping enough to discourage the most dangerous behavior.
via Cut Wall Street Down to Size With a Financial Speculation Tax | The Nation.
Looks like Chicago’s got a good start on a transition plan:
Back in 2008, the city formed the Chicago Climate Action Plan to figure out how to mitigate the inevitable. The plan includes a bundle of useful information, such as how the city’s atmosphere is changing and ways people can get involved.
Planners are also figuring subtle ways to blend ecological improvements into the city’s facade. For example, permeable pavement and rainwater catchments will easily advance existing urban structures. The city also has the most green-roofs built or being planned for. Globally, it is the only city to have four buildings awarded LEED platinum status.
Yet if any taxonomic dynasty is entitled to the originalist mantle, to the designation of genuine emblematic earthling animal, and also to brand the rest of us the alien arrivistes, it is the jellyfish. A diverse group of thousands of species of gooey, saclike invertebrates found throughout the world, the jellyfish are preposterously ancient, dating back 600 million to 700 million years or longer. That’s roughly twice as old as the earliest bony fish and insects, three times the age of the first dinosaurs.
“Jellyfish are the most ancient multiorgan animal on earth,” said David J. Albert, a jellyfish expert at the Roscoe Bay Marine Biological Laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia.
And maybe their long tenure on earth has taught them something. So, what can WE learn from them?
via Much More to Jellyfish Than Plasma and Poison – NYTimes.com.
Instead of just hoping that Republicans continue to play to their Tea Party base and implode in a general election, Democrats should be taking this moment to lead and to educate, not just on the practical virtues of Medicare for all but on the principle of social solidarity behind it.
Wilmers, it turns out, is that rarest of birds: a banker willing to tell harsh truths about banking. That, for instance, much of the money the big banks earn comes from trading profits “rather than the prudent extension of credit that furthers commerce.” That derivatives had helped bring about the crisis and needed to be regulated. That bank executives were wildly overpaid. That the biggest banks — the Too Big to Fail Banks — were operating, as he put it, an “unsafe business model.”
via The Good Banker – NYTimes.com.
Maybe a return to Truth and Traditions will get the Earth to change its mind:
Following a recent series of disastrous floods along the Mississippi River and destructive tornadoes across much of the United States—as well as a year of even deadlier natural catastrophes all over the world—the Earth said its options for strongly implying that it no longer wants human beings living on it have basically been exhausted.
But in the wake of the financial crisis, they [ideas and initiatives in socially and environmentally responsible economics] have proliferated and earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among the usual suspects on the left. As the threat of a global climate crisis grows increasingly dire and the nation sinks deeper into an economic slump for which conventional wisdom offers no adequate remedies, more and more Americans are coming to realize that it is time to begin defining, demanding and organizing to build a new-economy movement.
And:
At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food.
Dear Rep. Chris Murphy:
Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) is introducing new legislation – the Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011.
As your constituent, I am writing to urge you to co-sponsor his bill to ensure a safer future for all Americans. Rep. Markey said:
A nuclear disaster could happen here in America just as it has in Japan, our technological equal. This legislation will ensure that the lessons to be learned from the nuclear meltdown in Japan are incorporated into U.S. regulations to ensure the safety of our nuclear power plants in the United States.
As these catastrophic events have unfolded, it has become clear that the meltdown did not occur primarily because of earthquake-related damage; rather, it occurred because of a prolonged loss of electricity to the reactor cores and their spent nuclear fuel pools. Such events could be caused not just by earthquakes or tsunamis, but by severe storms, terrorist attacks or other events.
The Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011 will impose a moratorium on ALL new reactor licenses, reactor designs or license extensions until new safety requirements are in place.
If you or your staff have questions or need more information – or if you would like to cosponsor the legislation, please contact Dr. Michal Freedhoff of Markey’s staff at 202-225-2836.
Yours truly,
Charlie Keil
PS: People in Connecticut will be chernobylized and fukushima’d by Indian Point, geologically the most dangerous nuke plant in America! There are plants on fault lines in California that are less likely to “blow” or go “china syndrome” than Indian Point. Haven’t heard you say one mumblin word about the dangers of Indian Point. Do you know which way the wind blows most of the time? From the West to the East?
Don’t think I will vote for a Senator or a Congressman who doesn’t know which way the wind blows.
WASHINGTON – The closest nuclear power plant to tornado-ravaged Joplin, Mo., was singled out weeks before the storm for being vulnerable to twisters.
via ‘Tornado Alley’ reactor not fully twister-proof – Yahoo! News.
Surprise, surprise! How many US nuclear reactors will be in the way of major storms in the next 3 months, 6 months, year?
Truth and Traditions 