Rethinking the Economy

When two feet of snow slowed DC life to a crawl last week, I started catching up on old New Yorker’s. In an interesting December article on China’s “crash program for clean energy,” one paragraph caught my eye:
[a] message is gaining currency in Congress; it frames American leadership as manifesting not so much [...]

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[Part 6 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
Taking on corporations around the globe may sound insanely ambitious, but boring it’s not. But using local/state government? It’s more Kumbaya than Mortal Kombat. Sure, there’s evil here — just ask the environmental justice groups who fight [...]

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While researching the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes post on the state/local board, I ran across a fascinating document — Seoul, Korea’s announcement of their master plan for tackling global warming. Seoul has committed itselt to the ambitious goal of creducing CO2 emissions 40% by 2030 — and creating 1 million new green jobs [...]

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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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From inside US Trade, courtesy of David Sirota:
Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles [...]

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In an aggressively global economy, do we really have any power anymore? If we try to change the rules in the US, won’t business just outsource everything to China?
Actually, according to BusinessWeek, Europe just showed us we’ve got a lot more power than you think. Europe’s in the middle of passing a bunch of new [...]

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