Rethinking the Economy

Some folks have argued that given the Republican’s Obama-must-fail strategy and the Conservadems desire to punish working families, there’s no way Obama could have prevented the economy from going off the cliff. Brad DeLong has published a great, depressing talk that’s a center-liberal economist perspective on what Obama could’ve done despite these obstacles.
Although [...]

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One of the things I figured out while consolidating my core principles down to just three is that a number of the free-floating principles and strategies I wasn’t sure how to categorize will fit into Stack the Odds in Favor of the Good Guys:

Make It Easy
Make It Visible
Level the Playing Field
[...]

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My headbanging is beginning to pay off. After messing around a bit, I figured out how to take some of the Principles I’ve been discussing and incorporate them in other Principles. For example, I figured out that Make It Easy is isn’t a separate principle, it’s just one strategy that’s part of Stack the Odds [...]

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Some great news from one of my fav groups, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. After years of fighting, a victory:
We have some great news to announce: The coal-burning power plant proposed by the East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) has been canceled by the utility.
EKPC has entered into an agreement with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, [...]

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The intro I wrote last week? Nice idea but no cigar. It feels gimmicky. Maybe it’s that it sounds too formal? Or maybe it’s that the “no accident” approach isn’t working for me (although I think it does for Demos and Topos).
But the intro does have a few strengths. It’s stronger than the [...]

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Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr, author of Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. on why a carbon tax might help, but it ain’t enough: because People Aren’t Calculators
The most that price can really do is enhance motivation to act. If we get the prices right, it does not make it [...]

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The American Prospect has an interesting series of articles on how CWA, the Steelworkers, SIEU, and other US unions have been reaching out to European unions for help in organizing. You may not realize it, but if there’s a school bus that gets your kid to school, or there’s a security [...]

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Another smart, quick Dean Baker smackdown:
The NYT Doesn’t Know That We Have 15 Million People Unemployed
That is the only thing that readers can conclude from its heroic efforts to balance the budget in 2030. This exercise is utterly mind-boggling. We have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up [...]

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It feels like I’m getting close to having the right pieces for my framework. Where I’m still really struggling is gluing them together. So, I’ve been playing around with a new way of an intro for my framework that riffs off of Demos/Topos’ Promoting Broad Prosperity. Here’s the longer version:

The middle class is in trouble [...]

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Fast Company has an interesting article about Starbucks’ efforts to figure out a way of making their cups sustainable. Most of the article focuses on Starbucks’ trials and tribulations – it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than it might at first seen. But near the end of the article, Fast Company gets [...]

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