Cash for Caulkers — giving homeowners a tax break or some other means to decrease the cost of energy retrofits — has been getting a bunch of publicity. It’s a great way of creating jobs, and estimates show that $2 billion in loan guarantees could leverage $20-$40 billion in financing. But David Dayen at firedoglake [...]
Entries from December 2009
How Cash for Caulkers Could Get Accidentally Chalked by Local Government
December 31st, 2009 · Comments Off
Tags: Finance · Good Jobs · Green Economy
Beyond The Underpants Gnomes: Playing the Vigil Move on the Corporate Accountability Board
December 30th, 2009 · Comments Off
[Part 3 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
Imagine if McKibben had decided to use the same move — vigils and other protests — but did it on the Corporate Accountability Board. Here’s how it might have played out.
Nine months before Copenhagen, 350.org would’ve said, f**k Copenhagen [...]
Tags: Global Economy · Green Economy · Movement Perspective
Play on the Corporate Board, Stack the Deck for Green Biz Guys & Gals
December 28th, 2009 · Comments Off
One of the many benefits of playing big on the Corporate Accountability Board is that it gives an assist to other players. Take Newsweek’s interview with 5 of the 800 CEOs who’ve signed the Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change. Newsweek asked:
Isn’t there an inherent contradiction between the interests of business and the environment?
Reinoldo [...]
Tags: Green Economy · Stacking the Deck
Beyond The Underpants Gnomes: Playing on the Corporate Accountability Board
December 22nd, 2009 · Comments Off
[Part 2 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
If you want to win the social justice game, first you have to figure out where you’re going to play.
Enviro groups do a lot at the local and state level, and they also go after individual corporations. But the [...]
Tags: Green Economy · Movement Perspective
Beyond the Underpants Gnomes
December 21st, 2009 · Comments Off
[Part 1 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
After I beat up on Bill McKibben, I felt a little bad. Ripping somebody for not having real strategy is kind of lame if you don’t have one yourself. So, the next few posts are my quick & [...]
Tags: Green Economy · Movement Perspective
How to Avoid Getting Fried by iPhones and Derivatives
December 14th, 2009 · Comments Off
Can we create rules to stop Wall Street from ripping us off? No, says Wall Street. You aren’t smart enough to understand what we do. Your rules and regulators will just get stomped by traders. All your pathetic attempt to keep up with us will do is stifle innovation. So shut up and let [...]
Tags: Finance · Stacking the Deck
Heck of a Job, Wired!
December 9th, 2009 · Comments Off
According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:
The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. [...]
Tags: Checks and Balances · Green Economy · Poverty · Race
Bill McKibben and The Underpants Gnomes, or Why We Keep Getting Our Asses Kicked
December 7th, 2009 · Comments Off
In a recent Nation article, Bill McKibben reviews Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice. McKibben likes the book, but he’s got one major problem with it:
Gore, I think, has reasonably answered … the good-faith (as opposed to talk-radio) objections of anyone wondering if the world really could exist without fossil fuels. The [...]
Tags: Green Economy · Movement Perspective
Former Credit Card Company CEO: We Rob the Poor to Give to the Rich
December 4th, 2009 · Comments Off
Speaking of thieves, it’s not everyday that a former CEO lays out how stacked the deck has become against working families. Atlantic blogger Mike Konczal on a recent Frontline special on the credit card industry:
[It] traces a narrative of the changing nature of credit and debit cards, where services and goods became [...]
Tags: Finance · Stacking the Deck
Epicurious Dealmaker: Set a Thief to Catch a Thief
December 3rd, 2009 · Comments Off
If we don’t want let Wall Street to walk all over us, we’ll need regulators who are ready to rock ‘n roll. Epicurious Dealmaker spells out who he thinks we need (and no, it’s not Cary Grant):
Many observers of the smoking wreckage which now passes for our banking system have opined that, [...]
Tags: Finance
