Rethinking the Economy

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 [...]

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[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 [...]

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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 [...]

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[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 [...]

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[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 & [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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