Fracking democracy
In 2010, Pittsburgh’s City Council voted unanimously to ban hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction within city limits. Now the Pennsylvania legislature is moving to deny local governments the right to protect the local environment:
We don’t have a fracking problem. We have a democracy problem.
Read about it here.
Globalization of protest
From Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz:
The best government that money can buy is no longer good enough.
Read his piece here.
Commies Under The Bed?
From Miles, November 28, 2011:
What is the difference between what you propose and communism?
Econ4 replies:
Gee, red-baiting is so last century. But we’re glad you asked. Check out our mission statement where we set out Econ4’s four necessary conditions for a healthy economy:
1. A level playing field.
2. Resilience.
3. True-cost pricing.
4. Real democracy.
Doesn’t sound like actually existing communism. Or like actually existing capitalism. If those were the only two choices, economics really would be a dismal science. They aren’t, and it doesn’t have to be.
Video: America Beyond Capitalism
“If it can happen in Cleveland, it can happen anywhere.” Gar Alperovitz on an alternative to state socialism and corporate capitalism:
Source: The Real News Network.
Economics 4 People
From the Valley Advocate of Northampton, Mass.:
Popular economics education? The phrase seems oxymoronic. What field is more institutionalized and less popularized than economics?
Yet here is Econ4, a new initiative floating around the outskirts of economic academia, aiming to “end intellectual monoculture in the economics profession.”
Why are they doing this? And just what do they hope to accomplish?
“In the wake of the financial crisis, there was a need and demand for a better understanding of economics, more rooted in reality,” James Boyce tells me as we talk in his office. “You can’t delegate this stuff to the high priests of academia, Wall Street, and the Treasury Department.”
Read more here.
Cap-and-dividend climate policy
This short cartoon from www.capanddividend.org lays out how a cap-and-dividend climate policy would work:
Source: Cap’n Dividend.
The case for true-cost pricing: Indian Point nuclear plant
“Indian Point: The Next Fukushima?” Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Victor Gilinsky, writing in The New York Times:
Some 160,000 Japanese are still displaced because the radioactive contamination — in an area far less populated and less dense than the New York area — was so intense and far-reaching. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s cost-benefit analyses for Indian Point and other nuclear plants in the United States do not factor in these possibilities.
Read the entire piece here.
Econ4 in Chronicle of Higher Ed
Recently critics have mounted a more fundamental line of attack on mainstream economists, taking aim at the ideology that has grown dominant over the past 30 years, which they say played a significant part in causing the Great Recession and not doing much to help solve it.
Read the entire piece here.
The High Price of Materialism
A new video from the Center for a New American Dream.
Source: http://www.newdream.org/resources/high-price-of-materialism
“Get It Done”
Youth delegate Anjali Appadurai at the Durban climate summit.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3e6G_7GY4.
