At a high level, I know what question I’m trying to answer:
if the market isn’t natural and inevitable, then what’s the alternative?
But then when I tried to go deeper and figure out in a more detailed way what problem I’m trying to solve, I kept getting stuck.

But really, I’m not getting stuck on defining the problem. I’m getting stuck because even though I think of myself was trying to write to a wide audience, in my heart I am aiming at fellow lefties.

And then it hit me. Sure, I’m failing – but so are most lefties and other progressives. They haven’t been able to convince enough folks
a) that their lefty ideas aren’t crazy & completely unrealistic
b) to build a movement

What I need to do is stop worrying about talking to my fellow lefties – at least for now – and instead focus on trying to talk to most folks who think the world is screwed up but don’t know what to do or if they can do anything about it.

It’s going to take some time to wrap my head around this new approach. More on it in a few weeks.

About two-thirds of all proven reserves of oil, gas and coal will have to be left undeveloped if the world is to achieve the goal of limiting global warming at two degrees Celsius, according to the chief economist at the International Energy Agency.

Addressing participants in the latest round of UN climate talks in Bonn, Fatih Birol said this should be an “eye-opener” for pension funds with significant investments in the energy sector – particularly in coal – as well as for ratings agencies.

He predicted coal would be hardest hit in the “unburnable carbon” scenario, followed by oil and gas. “We cannot afford to burn all the fossil fuels we have. If we did that, it [average global surface temperature] would go higher than four degrees.

Rising seas and increasingly severe weather are expected to increase the areas of the United States at risk of floods by up to 45 percent by 2100, according to a first-of-its-kind report released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday. These changes could double the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance Program and drastically increase the costs of floods, the report finds.

The report concludes that climate change is likely to expand vastly the size and costs of the 45-year-old government flood insurance program. Like previous government reports, it anticipates that sea levels will rise an average of four feet by the end of the century. But this is what’s new: The portion of the US at risk for flooding, including coastal regions and areas along rivers, will grow between 40 and 45 percent by the end of the century. That shift will hammer the flood insurance program. Premiums paid into the program totaled $3.2 billion in 2009, but that figure could grow to $5.4 billion by 2040 and up to $11.2 billion by the year 2100, the report found. The 257-page study has been in the works for nearly five years and was finally released by FEMA after multiple inquiries from Climate Desk and Mother Jones.

The report attributes only 30 percent of the increased risk of flooding to population growth; 70 percent is due to climate change. FEMA designates what are known as special flood hazard areas, where there is a 1 percent risk in any given year of a major flood occurring. (They’re also known as 100-year floodplains.) If you have a federally backed mortgage on your home and it’s in a special flood hazard area, you are required by law to carry flood insurance. As of 2013, the NFIP insures 5.6 million properties. But that number could double by 2100, to as many as 11.2 million, the report found.

Having to insure twice as many properties would be a big deal for the NFIP. It generally works like any other insurance program, using the premiums that policy holders pay in each year to cover losses when they occur. But the program has been walloped by major storms in the past decade. The NFIP went $16 billion in debt on Hurricane Katrina and after Sandy will be $25 billion in the hole, a debt it may be unable repay. The report projects that the average loss on each insured property could increase as much as 90 percent by 2100. If future storm victims aren’t forced to eat their losses, taxpayers may have to cover the difference.

And that’s assuming that sea levels rise by only 4 feet in the next 86 years, which only makes sense if you assume we’re going to aggressively act to stop climate change.

It’s not clear how much aggressively acting to stop climate change will cost; a lot of the costs will be offset by major benefits just as the Clean Air Act did. But the evidence is now overwhelmingly clear: not aggressively acting to stop climate change will cost a lot more.

I keep coming back to 3 sides of a triangle:

• Thinking about Power
• Taking Ownership
• We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are

I’m pretty clear about why thinking about power in the economy is critical. Some of the core pieces:
-using institutions to build power
- sustaining power
- scale
- checks & balances
- mobilizing vs. demobilizing people

Although it isn’t a strong, I’m also in good enough shape in explaining why it’s critical to confront the limits of our power, a.k.a. We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are. So core pieces:
- regardless of whether you want “more” or “less” government, have to assume that whatever we do/build may turn on itself
- the best way to deal with it: matter-of-factly embrace the fact that We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are and create democratic structures & shared power and accountability & a pilot projects/feedback loop/humility/etc. approach.

As is obvious from my semi-cryptic shorthand, both of these could use a lot of fleshing out. But I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what it would take to do that.

Where I’m still really struggling: explaining why taking real ownership is critical to building an economy that works for everybody. In my gut, I know that “More Power to the People, Less Power to the Corporations” isn’t enough. But when I try to explain why, it ends up feeling obvious and unimportant.

So, in the next couple of posts I’ll try to uncover why I think it matters so much.

Jane McAlevey has an interesting piece on NYC’s Make the Road, a 12,000 person immigrant workers organization that

is a unique amalgam of worker center, legal clinic, citizenship school, mutual aid society, policy shop, protest factory and church. Its four offices in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island are an egalitarian oasis for members, who gather there for conversation and classes. According to Javier Valdés, one of three co–executive directors, “We have created a physical space where people feel dignified and at home—because outside the four walls of our offices, the world can feel really crappy. When people walk through our doors, we want everyone to feel respected and comfortable. In our experience, organizing from anger alone is not enough; part of why people stay involved and active at Make the Road is because we have built a community based on love alongside our highly agitational campaigns.”

Make the Road isn’t just fusing culture with organizing; it is fusing workplace and community issues that are of equal concern to its members. This multi-issue approach stands in contrast to that of traditional worker centers, unions and community-based organizations… as it weaves together issues like stop-and-frisk racial profiling, affordable housing, environmental and civil rights, and workplace justice. Perhaps most surprising, given its base among Catholic Latino immigrants, is its campaign for tolerance and against the discrimination directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer people.

in less than one year, workers at six different carwashes have voted yes to forming a union in National Labor Relations Board elections.

a commitment to building a high-participation organization. What it calls its “high touch” model, with dozens of weekly meetings, creates points of entry and opportunities for leadership development for Make the Road’s thousands of members. At committee meetings, where the dinner is often cooked by members at the office and served by teams carrying army-size pots of beans and rice, members discuss recent actions and plan for new ones. In addition, the group makes many of its services—from legal help with bad landlords or bad bosses, to ESL classes, citizenship classes and more—conditional on members’ participating in at least two activities per month, creating a sustained participation level where activism constitutes a kind of dues.

The pathway to the American Dream,” he argues, in an e-mail he sends me shortly after we meet, “revolves around a job for which the individual is paid a living wage—enough to meet their basic needs—and an opportunity for upward income mobility. To create that pathway our public institutions (government) and our economy must be aligned around the same goal: to ensure an equal opportunity for all Americans to achieve their shared aspirations.” For Kitzhaber, poverty and ill health are too often the result of inadequate education; fixing these problems is what he calls the “left side” of his unified theory. On the right side, he talks about the need to invest in clean technologies and renewables, to open routes to prosperity that neither denude the environment nor leave millions unemployed.

prenatal counseling, and involves better nutrition programs, parenting classes and medical clinics in school settings. He wants to prepare all kids for kindergarten, have them reading at grade level by third grade, and get middle school kids ready for high school. He wants high school kids taking community college and university classes. Kitzhaber’s integrated model continues all the way through graduate school.

Schools that meet those standards are labeled “model” schools, and are essentially given the funds and space to pursue their specialized projects. Those with poor success rates are categorized as “focus” or “priority” schools; the state assigns them “coaches”—retired administrators and other education specialists—who work with the principal and teachers to improve administration and classroom methods.

Gladstone Center for Children and Families (GCCF), half an hour’s drive south of Portland, [where] the early-childhood pieces of the puzzle, on which all these other hopes rest, are already falling into place. There, in a converted 1960s Thriftway supermarket bought by the school district at a hefty discount back in 2005, more than 180 kids are concentrated in a stand-alone, full-day kindergarten, whose capacious windows look out onto fields and evergreen groves. Eighty local preschoolers also show up for Head Start sessions. And local families regularly attend afternoon and evening story times. Young adults attend parenting classes, and Clackamas Community College runs GED classes for Spanish speakers.

The classrooms, ranged along a central hallway, are spacious, with kids seated around six-sided wooden tables, their art lining the walls. Outside is a playground centered around a large red, yellow and blue climbing structure. Off to its side is a garden, which kindergartners plant in the spring, leaving the harvest to next fall’s incoming class. At the far end of the campus, a medical clinic offers pediatric services, adult medical checkups, shots and mental health referrals. There are two dental clinics in the area, to which campus doctors refer patients. And in a nearby building, WIC vouchers are provided as a part of the hub of onsite services offered through the GCCF.

moving more than 90 percent of the state’s Medicaid patients—about 600,000 people—into Coordinated Care Organizations, where primary care, wellness clinics, mental health centers, opticians and other services are either concentrated in one place or coordinated among the practitioners, allowing greater convenience for patients….

One goal is that clinicians will catch problems before they escalate into expensive crises. CCOs are paid not by the number of tests they do or the number of hospital admissions they preside over, but by the number of patients they have and their health outcomes….

The governor talks of how a coordinated-care model would identify congestive heart failure patients at risk of catastrophic illness during heat waves and install air-conditioning units in their homes rather than wait, as the current system does, for them to get so sick they have to be admitted to a hospital ICU, at enormous cost. “The best hospital bed,” explains [health director]Goldberg, “should be an empty bed. That should be the goal of our healthcare system. Ultimately, our goal should be to keep people out of the hospital—fewer hospital beds and a healthier population.”

Caterpillar’s CEO Doug Oberhelman, who’s also the chairman of the highly influential National Association of Manufacturers, isn’t shy about pushing for policies that’ll benefit folks like himself.

Over the past two years the Caterpillar chief has emerged as a powerful advocate for policy changes he believes will boost exports and create jobs: looser trade restrictions, a lower corporate tax rate, and greater infrastructure spending.

In January 2012, Caterpillar locked out union workers at a locomotive factory in Ontario after they rejected a pay cut of about 50 percent; the company shuttered the plant and moved production to Muncie, Ind., where workers accepted lower wages. Last May, Caterpillar took a hard line during negotiations with employees at its Joliet (Ill.) hydraulic-parts factory, insisting on cuts to health care and other benefits. After striking for three months, employees caved at the end of the summer. Senior workers’ wages were frozen for six years. Caterpillar is currently battling union workers at its Milwaukee plant….

John Arnold, a 35-year-old parts auditor at Caterpillar’s Morton (Ill.) distribution facility, says some of his co-workers are on food stamps. “I don’t understand how a company can make billions and billions of dollars in profits and have people on welfare,” says Arnold, who has worked for Caterpillar since 1999 and makes $15.66 an hour.

“We have to be competitive if we’re gonna win. And frankly, if we’re not competitive … we’re not gonna be here in the next 30 years. That’s a simple message, but”—he starts to hammer his hand against the table, punctuating his words with raps—“it’s very  … very … tough.” After a pause, he lets his hand lay flat.

“I always try to communicate to our people that we can never make enough money,” Oberhelman continues. “We can never make enough profit.”

When Caterpillar offers jobs in nonunion Southern states that pay $12 an hour, applicants line up around the block. “You’re basically expendable,” says Emily Young, a welder who has worked at Caterpillar’s Decatur plant for eight years. “For every one person who doesn’t work, there’s five waiting in line.”

In Econ 101land, markets are the most efficient way to organize the economy. In the last decade or so, the assumptions propping up this belief have been ripped to shreds. As Stiglitz recently summed it up:

economies are not necessarily efficient, stable or self-correcting.

Both books do a great job of kicking Exon101′s butt. But if Econ101 is about as accurate as Apple’s maps when they first came out, Stiglitz and Chang don’t do much better. Sure, they’ve got their list of places we should visit. It’s the same list — Top 10 Spots for Revitalizing and Renewing Economies on the Rocks — you’ve seen on most liberal blogs. But what are the rules that explain why visit these destinations and not others? How do we get there, and what do we do if the path to them is blocked or we get lost? S&C don’t have an app for that.

Neither do I. At least now I know I’m in good company.

Last week, North Carolina’s Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved a law that would ban car companies from selling their cars directly to consumers. Tesla, the electric car company, doesn’t want to work through dealerships. And the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association isn’t happy.

it’s not Tesla per se that worries the dealers. It’s the precedent. The prospect threatens the livelihood of North Carolina’s 7,000 licensed dealers, who invest millions in building big lots and showrooms to efficiently move product, say supporters of the bill.
“We care about the franchise system,” said Robert Glaser, president of the N.C. Automobile Dealers Association. “The whole point of the retail system is to protect the consumer.”

The local dealer is the customer’s point of contact on malfunctions, defects and recalls, Glaser said. Automakers are designers, manufacturers and wholesalers that remain largely invisible to the car buyers, he said.

Apparently, Robert “Chairman Mao” Glaser doesn’t trust consumers to decide by themselves whether they want to use dealers for that – Big Government is going to get to decide for them.

But it’s not just about taking away consumers’ freedom.

“You tell me they’re gonna support the little leagues and the YMCA?” Glaser asked, directing his glance at the Tesla contingent milling about a few feet away in the legislative building.

Because Lord knows, that’s what a “free market” is all about – companies competing to show politicians who will sacrifice more of their profits to support whatever causes the politicians care about.

Although the bill passed unanimously, not everybody is entirely comfortable with it. Before he voted for it, Sen. Josh Stein of Wake County got assurances that the bill would be “fine-tuned.”

Stein considers Tesla a startup that should be exempt from the state’s dealership provisions until it becomes big enough to be considered a competitor.

Way to go with keeping government out of meddling with “the market,” Josh!

The article points out another state also has laws blocking direct auto sales to the public. Which commie pinko state would that be? Texas.

I don’t know what will work. But figuring out that this approach won’t work is a step in the right direction.

I’ve got the start – I can pretty fluently explain how the way we think about the economy hides/obscures how much we intervene.

I’ve got the part about power and justice – if our society is intervening so much, who gets to decide how we intervene & who benefits?

Where I’m still stuck: taking ownership of the power we have and dealing with the limits to our power (i.e., We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are). I know it’s important, and when other theories don’t include it it feels to me like something’s missing. But I don’t know why it’s interesting and nonobvious.

So the question I need to answer is:
Why is it crucial that when we think about how & who gets to shape the economy, we think about:
– Taking ownership
– Dealing with the limits of what we can do

For example:
– what if you don’t include it? What problems does that cause?
– Why does it bother me when it isn’t included in other folks’ theories/arguments?

Stay tuned…