Inflation: a look at the numbers
US consumer price index, quarterly change, October 2021 through September 2022:
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
How to Unf*ck America, Episode 1: Intellectual Property
Check out this new series featuring economist Dean Baker, brought to you by the Institute for New Economic Thinking:
See more about the “Unf*ck America” series here.
Roots of addiction
In a remarkable and impassioned speech to the UN General Assembly, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro had this to say:
Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit and money. This is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.
Watch his entire 20-minute speech: in Spanish here and in English translation here.
Standing up to power and plunder
In this must-see video, Robert Reich makes the fossil-fuel connections between standing up to Putin and saving the Earth’s climate:
Malfunctioning market signals
Cautionary lessons from Germany’s plight:
The shifting landscape raises pointed questions: Is an economy built on energy-hungry industries sustainable when fuel is very expensive? Can an export-driven strategy succeed when major trading partners are vulnerable to sanctions, and when countries are more keenly attuned to the security risks of globalized trade?
Some economists have argued that the German business models were partly based on an erroneous assumption and that cheap Russian gas wasn’t as cheap as it looked.
The economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, said the market failed to accurately price in the risk — however unlikely it may have seemed at the time — that Russia could decide to reduce or withhold gas to apply political pressure.
It would be like figuring the costs of building a ship without including the cost of lifeboats.
“They didn’t take into account what could happen,” Mr. Stiglitz said.
Read more here.
Turning back the clock
The US Supreme Court’s decision to block regulation of carbon emissions at power plants is about more than power plants and more than climate change: it’s part of a long-term effort to return to the laissez-faire environment of the 19th century. Too bad we can’t turn back the climate clock, too.
In 1971, a lawyer who had represented the tobacco industry named Lewis F. Powell Jr. — whom President Richard M. Nixon would soon put on the Supreme Court — wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It is seen as an early call to action by corporate America and its ideological allies….
His memo set out a blueprint to fund a movement to turn public opinion against regulation by equating “economic freedom” for business with individual freedom. In line with that vision, wealthy elites financed a program to build political influence…
The prospect that the Republican-appointed supermajority on the court may be just getting started in assaulting the administrative state over the coming years is alarming those who say the United States needs regulations to have a civilized society.
“If you don’t have regulations, then the only people who will benefit will be those who, with no rules, will make more money,” said Marietta Robinson, a former Obama appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission who teaches about administrative agencies at George Washington University’s law school. “But it will be to the great detriment to the rest of us.”
Read more here.
Connecting the dots: fossil-fueled murder
Climate change, Ukraine – young activists are connecting the dots:
Watch the video HERE.
Read more here.
From vaccine apartheid to climate apartheid
The world could vaccinate everyone who wants be vaccinated, but hasn’t. Vaccine apartheid tells us something about how the world is (or isn’t) responding to the climate crisis, too:
But what is in retrospect perhaps the most concerning came in May 2021, when the International Monetary Fund calculated that the full cost of vaccinating the large majority of the world’s vulnerable people would be $50 billion — just 1 percent of the money spent by Congress on pandemic relief….
Faced with the choice — between one future in which everyone in the world was better off through expansive protection and one of more limited vaccination in which the rich were somewhat protected and others remained much more vulnerable — the wealthy nations of the world didn’t take the path that maximized overall protection and prosperity.
Read more here. Then think about how you can join with others to do something about it.
