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Ready or Not | Adapte We Must | Earth Island Institute

1 Sep

Apart from a few holdouts, the global scientific community agrees that the growing number of weather-related catastrophes are linked to climate change – the fallout from a warming world. No longer can we rely on the stable climate that has sustained our “good life” on Earth. Bigger, meaner, and more frequent storms, heat waves, fires, floods, and droughts are the new normal.

It is unquestionably time to bring adaptation into the climate change conversation.

Let’s face it: We’ve failed at mitigation so far. Our two-decade-old global framework to address climate change is woefully inadequate. The Kyoto Protocol is a mess of unmet goals and bickering governments. Carbon trading schemes have been fraught with fraud, theft, and even the involvement of organized crime. Here in the US, the Senate couldn’t manage to pass watered-down climate legislation last year. Meanwhile, there are more greenhouse gases in the air than ever.

via Ready or Not | Earth Island Journal | Earth Island Institute.

What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber « naked capitalism

31 Aug

Tell this to the Republicrats:

In fact, the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means ‘return to mother,’ since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.

Is ‘wage slavery’ a mere metaphor? Perhaps not. Read the following paragraphs (I bolded the last one, the ‘money graph, as it were):

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

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Where Pay for Chief Executives Tops the Company Tax Burden – NYTimes.com

31 Aug

“We have no evidence that C.E.O.’s are fashioning, with their executive leadership, more effective and efficient enterprises,” the study concluded. “On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that C.E.O.’s and their corporations are expending considerably more energy on avoiding taxes than perhaps ever before — at a time when the federal government desperately needs more revenue to maintain basic services for the American people.”

The study comes at a time when business leaders have been lobbying for a cut in corporate taxes and Congress and the Obama administration are considering an overhaul of the tax code to reduce the federal budget deficit.

via Where Pay for Chief Executives Tops the Company Tax Burden – NYTimes.com.

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Warren Buffet: Tax the Rich

29 Aug

And Buffet should know. He’s among the richest of the rich. This is an hour-long conversation with Charlie Rose.

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After Irene, Jersey City, NJ

29 Aug

Liberty Marina, on the Hudson River:

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Entrance to Liberty State Park (also on the Hudson):

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Inside an abandoned building near Liberty State Park:

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Communipaw, just South of Grand (my neighborhood):

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Communipaw Avenue is on a foot path originally laid down by the Lenni Lenape, who lived here when Henry Hudson landed in 1609. He landed on the shore of what is now Liberty State Park.

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The Economics of Happiness – Jeffrey D. Sachs – Project Syndicate

29 Aug

Third, happiness is achieved through a balanced approach to life by both individuals and societies. As individuals, we are unhappy if we are denied our basic material needs, but we are also unhappy if the pursuit of higher incomes replaces our focus on family, friends, community, compassion, and maintaining internal balance. As a society, it is one thing to organize economic policies to keep living standards on the rise, but quite another to subordinate all of society’s values to the pursuit of profit.

Yet politics in the US has increasingly allowed corporate profits to dominate all other aspirations: fairness, justice, trust, physical and mental health, and environmental sustainability. Corporate campaign contributions increasingly undermine the democratic process, with the blessing of the US Supreme Court.

via The Economics of Happiness – Jeffrey D. Sachs – Project Syndicate.

Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times

29 Aug

Where this is headed is to a shorter work week. And leaves more time for drumming and dancing, community gardens, and everyone teaching skills to kids and one another.

After surveying policies around the world, we found that there is one that clearly dominates in terms of impact and cost-effectiveness: work-sharing. The idea is simple. Currently, firms mostly respond to weak demand by laying off workers. Under a work-sharing program, firms are encouraged by government policy to spread a small amount of the pain across many workers.

In Germany, for example, which has used work-sharing aggressively in this downturn, a typical company might reduce the hours of 50 workers by 20% rather than laying off 10 workers. The government would then provide a tax credit to make up for most of the lost pay, with the employer kicking in some as well. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.

via Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times.

How Resilient is the Internet?

28 Aug

I live in Jersey City, NJ, not too far from the waterfront (Hudson River / New York harbor). I’ve been glued to the internet getting up dated information about Irene.

Now, one of the power generating stations in JC has been flooded. They’re closing down for emergency repairs. But I’ve still got power. But if my power goes out . . .

No internet for me.

It’s clear to me that the internet needs to be entirely off the main power grid. I don’t know what that means, technically. If I had a small solar generator & bettery back-up sufficient for my lap-top, that would get my machine off the grid. But, is there wifi in my area? I don’t know, but probably should. If so, is it independent of the main power grid? Don’t know.

But what I do know is that the whole thing, ends-to-ends, needs to be OFF THE GRID.

I’d like to think that the Defense Department has made their communications independent of the main power grid. If anyone has the means and the motive, they do. But we ALL need to be independent of that grid.

Does America Need Manufacturing? – NYTimes.com

27 Aug

If America wants to stay competitive in the world of green energy technologies, it will have to invest in local facilities for manufacturing those technologies. They are not so easy to off-shore as software and services.

“Now I think we’re at a really different moment,” Berger says. “We’re seeing a wave of new technologies, in energy, biotechnology, batteries, where there has to be a closer integration between research, development, design, product definition and production.”

One challenge to moving in this direction may be that our banks, hedge funds and venture capitalists are geared toward investing in financial instruments and software companies. In such endeavors, even modest investments can yield extraordinarily quick and large returns. Financing brick-and-mortar factories, by contrast, is expensive and painstaking and offers far less potential for speedy returns. Berger maintains that for the economy to get “full value” from our laboratories’ ideas in energy or biotech — not just new company headquarters but industrial jobs too — we must aspire to a different business model than the one we have come to admire.

via Does America Need Manufacturing? – NYTimes.com.

A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now | Common Dreams

26 Aug

This is a perfect time for a cooperative economy. Considering the disproportionate struggles faced by women and people of color during a recession, the cooperative economy presents an opportunity for all people, to leverage more power by making themselves the bosses, sharing ownership, and taking a collective approach to good management. Many people have already been let down by a top-down corporate or non-profit model in a recession-ridden society. Now is the time to rebuild the system, and build a society founded on justice, dignity, and respect for people and the planet.

via A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now | Common Dreams.

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