California Free Press

Town Meeting State Bank Proposal Tests Voters' View Of Risk

5:00 am Thu February 27, 2014 from VPR, Vermont's NPR News Source

By Steve Zind

At least 20 communtities are considering Town Meeting resolutions asking voters to support the creation of a public bank.

Credit merznatalia / Thinkstock

Most Town Meeting resolutions concern issues or questions that are fairly easy to explain. Not so with the concept of a public bank. Yet, at least 20  communities will take up a Town Meeting resolution asking voters to support the creation of one.

The debate boils down to opportunity vs. risk. 

 

Listen  

   

There’s a lot packed into the arguments made by both sides, but before debating them many people at town meeting will want to know what a public bank is.

It doesn’t have individual accounts or ATMs or a Christmas Club. It’s where the state puts its cash. 

Right now Vermont’s money is in large global banking institutions. Most of it is deposited with TD Bank. The state draws on those accounts to pay its bills.

When it wants to raise money to fix bridges or fund a variety of projects, the state sells bonds through large banks and investment firms.

“We give our money somewhere else so they can collect the interest on the deposits and then we have to borrow it from Wall Street to do our own improvements,” says Gwen Hallsmith, who organized the drive to bring a state bank resolution before voters at Town Meeting.

Instead of going to the bond market, the state would use a public bank to loan out money to finance projects. 

Hallsmith says a public bank would save the state money, create jobs and eventually generate revenue.

The case for a state bank is made in a recent study written by Gary Flomenhoft of the University of Vermont Gund Institute for Ecological Economics.

It was commissioned by public bank advocates and Flomenhoft himself supports the idea.

Flomenhoft’s study says seven states have had public banks.  Three failed and three others were liquidated. North Dakota is the only state currently with a public bank.

Flomenhoft says North Dakota might offer some lessons but it shouldn’t be the model for Vermont.

He suggests taking an existing public non-profit agency that is already making loans and turning it into a bank – an agency like the Vermont  Economic Development Authority.

“We’ve already got very successful financial lending agencies with a good track record. Why reinvent the wheel?  Just give them the ability to take deposits,” says Flomenhoft.

A bill currently in the Vermont Senate that would turn VEDA into a public bank.

     "There are so many risks to a small little state like Vermont." - Cairn Cross of Fresh Tracks Capital 

 

It would start by giving the agency a banking license, so it could accept deposits and then put 10 percent of the state’s funds into it.  Supporters say the ultimate goal is to put all state money into the public bank.

Granting VEDA banking powers is an important part of creating a public bank.

One reason is state cash on hand at any given time fluctuates from well over $300 million to as little as $20 million. When funds are low VEDA would need to borrow low-cost money to manage cash flow just as a bank does.

State Treasurer Beth Pearce says an agency like VEDA is very good at what it does, but taking on a host of banking functions isn’t workable.

“For us to provide those services, I don’t believe is cost effective.  And it’s certainly not an area that we have experience in,” she says.

Pearce says she is all for using more state money to finance important projects, but she opposes the idea of a state bank that would have control of all of it.

Unlike personal bank accounts, state deposits in the big banks are not insured by the FDIC, but Pearce says the money is safe in those institutions because they have huge assets.

She says if Vermont’s relatively small cash assets were in a state bank that money would be at greater risk; for example if loans go bad.

And if the big credit rating agencies see a public bank as risky, it jeopardizes Vermont’s bond rating.

Pearce says that’s important because a lower bond rating makes it more expensive for the state and lending agencies to borrow money.

A poor bond rating "turns around and affects every Vermonter." Pearce says. "Whether it’s affordable housing, whether it’s a college education for students, commercial development in the state, commercial energy improvements in the state. Those are the types of things that benefit from our bond rating. I don’t want to put that at risk.”

Public bank supporters say the risk is overstated. They point to VEDA’s success and its high loan repayment record. Gary Flomenhoft argues that state money in large institutions like TD Bank is also at risk.

     "People are pretty angry at the banks and they want to do whatever they can to try to take away power from those 'too big to fail' banks." - Public bank advocate Gary Flomenhoft 

 

“The risk issue is important and there’s a question of whether our money is more at risk at TD Bank than it would be in a public bank,” he says.

Flomenhoft’s study says a large share of TD Bank assets is in risky financial products.  

TD Bank is one of the largest banks in the world.

Cairn Cross, who co-founded Fresh Tracks Capital in Shelburne, spent 10 years as a commercial banker.  Cross says money would be less secure in a Vermont state bank. 

“You’ve got concentrated risk within a geographical area. There are so many risks to a small little state like Vermont. TD is a huge giant,” he says.

Several years ago Cross encouraged lawmakers to look into the idea of a public bank. Now he says he’s convinced that a public bank for Vermont simply wouldn’t work.

Cross says opponents of a state bank are going to have their work cut out for them at town meetings where the resolution is discussed.

“The arguments against it are not easily addressed in sound bites,” says Cross. “The arguments for it are easily addressed in sound bites through a lot of populist sentiment: Big banks are bad and we need more local autonomy over our money.”

As far as Gary Flomenhoft is concerned the behavior of big banks is a good argument for a public bank.

“People are pretty angry at the banks and they want to do whatever they can to try to take away power from those too-big-to-fail banks,” he says.

Creating The World We Want

from thepeoplesvoice.org

February 22nd, 2014

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

In addition to knowing what we oppose, we are building the world we want to see

February marks the third anniversary of the 2011 revolt in Wisconsin, the occupation of the state capital and mass protests against the attack on workers. Wisconsin was the largest of the protests at that time, but across the United States there were a series of protests against foreclosures, austerity and the unjust economy.

The Wisconsin uprising, along with the Arab Spring and Indignado movement in Europe, inspired Occupy, a revolt that began on Wall Street and spread across the nation. It was a revolt against an economic system – big finance capitalism – that is causing a corrupt and unfair economy; as well as against a government that serves the interests of the wealthiest before meeting the necessities of the people.

People often want to know what the movement for social and economic justice wants. Occupy Wall Street issued its Declaration of the Occupation of New York City which laid out a series of grievances. But, in addition to knowing what we oppose, we need to define what we stand for. If we do not like big finance capitalism, what will take the place of the current economy?

During the organizing of the occupation in Washington, DC on Freedom Plaza we developed a list of 15 core crisis issues that the country is facing and we outlined solutions to them. These solutions are supported by super-majorities of Americans who, polls show, could rule better than the elites.

At the core of these solutions is the desire to put in place an economic democracy agenda, building institutions that are controlled by and benefit communities while also protecting the planet. By building wealth in a way that is more equitable and democratic, the rule of money is weakened. A democratized economy shifts political power away from concentrated capital to the public and further empowers people by meeting their basic needs for shelter , food, education, healthcare and income.

In many respects we are in a conflict with big finance capitalism and seeking to birth a new economy that serves the people. How do we get there? In her book, Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope, Cynthia Kaufman suggests we are in a variety of struggles and rather than seeking total replacement, we need to build healthy institutions while challenging those unhealthy ones we can defeat. Gar Alperovitz defines the transition as ‘evolutionary reconstruction’, a way that we gradually build a better world.

Economic Democracy

This week, we re-launched It’s Our Economy, a project dedicated to reporting on and assisting the growing movement for economic democracy. We define economic democracy as:

premised on the idea that people should not cede power to mega-corporations, big finance, or a “professional” political class. The people have the shared knowledge to help build an economy that works to strengthen communities and         build wealth for all, not just a few.We recognize the internal contradictions of big finance capitalism and we have seen the failures of state-based socialism and are seeking to create a new type of economy that is democratized, empowers people to gain control over their economic lives and encourages cooperative solutions that create wealth for ourselves and our communities….

Economic democracy also emphasizes the commonwealth. The commons includes not only roads, land, water and resources but also the knowledge and technology developed, often with public dollars, which has been built up over generations….

Economic democracy stands in contrast with neoliberal economics.Neoliberalism privatizes public goods and seeks to commodify everything possible to create profit-centers while cutting public services in the name of austerity.

One way to understand what makes healthy institutions that serve the people is to use a human rights framework. There are five human rights principles. These include:

Universality: Human rights must be afforded to everyone, without exception.

Equity: Every person is entitled to the same access to services and public goods.

Accountability: Mechanisms must exist to enforce the protection of human rights.

Transparency: Government institutions must be open and provide the public with information on the decision-making processes.

Participation: People need to be empowered to participate in the decision-making process.

The need for a new economy based on the goal of benefitting all people, not just the wealthiest, has become more urgent as the impact of the economic collapse and its false recovery are felt. These include high rates of Americans dropping out of the labor force, the wealth divide expanding, record poverty and lowered incomes for most people.

People Are Creating the New Economy in Many Ways

Political and economic leadership continues to go in the opposite direction of what people want: cutting the social safety net and doing little to invest in re-building the economy while the costs of energy, food, healthcare and other necessities rise. People across the country are acting on their own to build an economy that will serve them.

The building of the new economy, sometimes called a ‘solidarity economy,’ has been developing for many years, particularly in other areas of the world such as Latin America. As a result we can now see reports of its success. A fundamental belief of economic democracy is to build from the bottom up, starting with local communities. A report this week from the Institute for Self Reliance found that communities with buy local programs have seen local businesses grow three times as fast as communities without such programs and businesses report a 75% increase in customer traffic.

One key aspect of buying local is our food supply. The International Forum on Globalisation reports that “the average plate of food eaten in western industrial food-importing nations is likely to have traveled 2,000 miles from source to plate.” Around the country people are working to change that. Two programs that were in movement news this week were “Our Harvest” and “CropMobster.”

Our Harvest comes out of a 2009 agreement between the United Steelworkers and the Mondragon Co-op to create union co-ops. Our Harvest is a produce farm and food hub for aggregation and food processing. The goal is to re-create this model around the country to provide local foods and good jobs in union co-operatives.

CropMobster is a project from Petaluma, CA that seeks to redistribute food to reduce waste and to provide healthy food while growing a shared economy. CropMobster isaninstant-alert service linking communities-in-need with local farmers, producers and food purveyors who have excess food to sell or donate. In one year it has spread to the greater SF Bay Area, with a dozen counties participating. Already, more than 300,000 pounds of food has been saved and over 1 million servings eaten; more than 4,000 participants and hundreds of farmers and small food businesses are joining with CropMobster.

Another issue that has been in the news lately because of multiple environmental disasters is the quality of drinking water. The chemical spill in West Virginia, coal slurry spills, hydrofracking and pipelines bursting in multiple states have been a few examples of how fresh water is now at risk. In addition, the extraction of fossil fuels and uranium are consuming tremendous amounts of water even in areas that are facing droughts. Water will be an item on the political agenda at the state and national level. This week in Europe, 1.66 million people were able to put the issues of the right to clean water and stopping water privatization before the European Parliament.

At the center of so many issues – the environment, climate, water, air, jobs – is energy. President Obama and the bi-partisans in Congress continue to push a disastrous “all of the above” energy strategy that is leading to extreme energy extraction with terrible environmental consequences. The corporate duopoly seems unable to challenge big oil, gas, coal and nuclear to put in place the carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy that is needed.

In the absence of national leadership, people are moving forward. Over 80 landowners have dedicated nearly 20,000 acres to what will become the largest wind farm in South Dakota that will increase the wind energy output in the state by 50%. As solar rapidly grows in the United States, research is now showing that more people will be employed by solar than by oil and coal combined.

Big changes are also on the horizon in the labor front. There are widespread battles for raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and while many companies treat their employees as if they were disposable, in other workplaces employees are becoming owners so they can share in the wealth created by their labor. There is a growing movement for worker-owned cooperatives with national meetings in the United States and in Europe.

An example that was in the news this week was WinCo, a growing competitor to Walmart. WinCo is now operating 93 employee-owned stores in seven states with nearly 15,000 employees. The company has lower prices than Walmart and provides employees with a health plan that includes dental and vision as well as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan for their pension.

Other businesses are creating a more just world by redefining corporate charters so that one of their purposes is to provide public benefits rather than profits to investors. In the past few years, 20 states, including the District of Columbia, have enacted legislation that allows companies to register as benefit corporations and16 more statesare considering it. Delaware, the home of half of US corporations and two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, enacted a B Corp. law. This status protects corporations from lawsuits by shareholders for not maximizing profit, and it even gives shareholders the right to sue the corporation for failing to optimize its social mission.

We are Creating a Renaissance

The examples above just give a taste of all of the changes that are taking place to create new systems that replace the old failing ones. For more ideas, visit the “Create” section of PopularResistance.org or ItsOurEconomy.us.

What is amazing is that around the world, the same ideas and values are being put forward. People are joining together to create societies that respect life and the planet and that are more horizontal and just. We are truly in a time of transformation which is made more urgent by the many crises we face.

There has been talk of global revolution, and in some areas, revolution - the changing of governments - is occurring. But we are not yet in a global revolution. In his article, “Revolution, or Digital-Age Renaissance,” Bernardo Gutierrez writes, “Ruskoff argues that the revolution has not arrived and what we are experiencing is anew renaissance. ‘Renaissances are historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. It is the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. Renaissance is a dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence changes. The stories we have been using no longer work.’” Gutierrez explains that revolutions come after the renaissance.

Currently people are not only creating new systems, but they are questioning the stories that have been told to maintain the status quo and are recognizing that many of our restraints are artificial. People do have the ability to rethink the premises upon which we base our assumptions and to change their views and behaviors.

For decades we have been taught to believe in capitalism and neo-liberalism. We have been told that there will always be poor people and we must accept that. We’ve been told that wealth trickles down and that we should all compete to achieve the “American Dream.” We’ve thought that in order to achieve that dream we must go into debt. And we’ve believed that the people in power should be trusted to make decisions for us, that we didn’t have the capacity to make them.

All of that is changing and being turned in its head. Awareness is growing that we can do things differently. People are actively confronting the old ways through both resistance and the creation of new approaches or the re-emergence of older methods. One area is the recognition that there are alternatives to debt-based economies. This is not a new idea. There were debt jubilees in ancient history.

In the article, “Debt Refusal Essential To Rebuilding Popular Democracy,” the editor writes that “resisting debt is not only moral, it may be essential to re-envisioning a democracy built on legitimate bonds to our community.” StrikeDebt, which was organized out of Occupy Wall Street, teaches us that “working together to build greater economic democracy would mean weaving a dense, creative network where our debts are to each other, not tothem(read: the big banks).”StrikeDebt created a Debt Resister’s Manual and is organizing a nationwide debt resistance movement. Their new manual is due out soon.

Another area of renaissance is globalization. To date, globalization has been based on the neoliberal economic model that leaves poverty and environmental destruction in its wake. But now that we understand these consequences , it is becoming more difficult for governments to continue on this path. A case in point is the current Trans-Pacific Partnership which was negotiated for years in secret and the plan was to pass it quietly through Congress using Fast Track. That effort has stalled for now and instead civil society groups are working together to redefine what global trade should look like and how it should be governed.

There is a call for ‘deglobalization’ which does not oppose global trade but refers to orienting trade so our communities can build local economies, to produce goods that are needed and to become more self-reliant. A detailed plan for this is outlined in the blog on systemic alternatives. They write that deglobalization is not about withdrawing from the world economy but is about restructuring it: “Today’s need is not another centralized global institution but the deconcentration and decentralization of institutional power and the creation of a pluralistic system of state and non-state institutions and organizations interacting with one another, guided by broad and flexible agreements and understandings, which receive their authority and legitimacy from below.”

We have an opportunity right now while trade deals are stalled to redefine global governance. Collectively, the people can confront the dominant paradigms and global power structure and rebirth a world grounded in the principles of human rights and protection of the planet. Resistance is not only protest, but includes acts of creation. When you get involved in your community to build democratized economies, you are part of the global transformation.

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This article is produced byPopularResistance.orgin conjunction with AlterNet. It is based onPopularResistance.org’s weekly newsletter reviewing the activities of the resistance movement.

Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD are participants in PopularResistance.org; they  co-directIt’s Our Economy and co-host Clearing the FOG. Their twitters are@KBZeese and MFlowers8.

@KBZeese Shift Wealth:Economic Democracy Its Our Economy (www.ItsOurEconomy.US) Build power and resistance Popular Resistance (www.PopularResistance.org) Democratize the Media Clearing the FOG (Forces of Greed) Radio (http://www.ClearingTheFOGRadio.org) Video (http://www.ustream.tv/itsoureconomy)

Humanity's Crisis Is Systemic and Overwhelming—And the Only Way Out Is to Create Bold New Systems

from AlterNet / By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

 

The climate, economy, energy and social justice are at stake.

 

February 15, 2014  |  

 

 

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It is easy to become numb to the realities we face. We hear near daily reporting of severe crises covering so many aspects of people’s lives, they even include our survival on the planet. Sometimes these crises seem larger than anything humans have ever seen before.

Rather than becoming numb, many in the human community see this as an opportunity to put forward big visions for a very different future. 

 

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 It is easy to become numb to the realities we face. We hear near daily reporting of severe crises covering so many aspects of people’s lives, they even include our survival on the planet. Sometimes these crises seem larger than anything humans have ever seen before.Rather than becoming numb, many in the human community see this as an opportunity to put forward big visions for a very different future.  

On the agenda are transformative issues like:

- Creating a new democratic economy where people control their economic future at a time when big finance capitalism continues its collapse and the wealth divide has become so extreme that 85 people have wealth equal to 3.5 billion people.

- Rebuilding the ecology of the planet at a time when the oceans are threatened, when there is mass species die-off and as climate change threatens the planet in ways humans can barely imagine.

- Ending the extraction economy and shifting to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy when extraction has become extreme and risky with tar sands, fracking, mountain top removal and offshore oil drilling; and when the global impacts of the dangers of nuclear energy have become more evident as a result of Fukushima.

- Creating real privacy in our communications when technology allows the security state to conduct dragnet surveillance of virtually every communication by phone or the Internet on the planet.

- Ending war at a time when the war economy robs us of money needed for urgent necessities, when killing has become robotic and the deaths of civilians are hidden, when the most expensive and high tech military is unable to resolve conflict and when the war culture is infecting civilian police forces and youth culture.

These are a few examples of many fronts where people are urging dramatic new approaches. Other examples are free post-high school education, healthcare for all in a non-profit system, rebuilding cities with vacant housing turned into housing for those who need it, low cost or free mass transit replacing dependence on cars, a guaranteed national income as robots take the place of humans, global trade that puts people and the planet before profits for the wealthiest and recognizing the legal rights of indigenous peoples. The list is long. The crises we face are consequences of the global neoliberal economic system; therefore, systemic transformation is needed.

One of the beautiful things about these visions is that they are all achievable. Thousands are already working to make them a reality.

A Systemic Crisis Links Issues: Climate, Economy, Energy and Social Justice

As the problems grow in size, the response also needs to grow to confront them. One of the most urgent situations we face is the climate crisis. But, the climate crisis does not stand alone.

Recently at an organizing meeting in Chicago, Tim DeChristopher, a climate justice activist, said that one of the reasons progress has not been made in solving the climate crisis is that it was relegated to the realm of being an environmental issue. In reality, the climate crisis affects every area of our lives from food and water security to health to jobs and housing and, of course, energy and the environment.

At the meeting, activists from around the country who work on a broad range of issues joined together to start organizing a Global Climate Convergence. Another organizer, Deneicha Powell describes it as “a new education and direct action campaign uniting people in an intentional and organized way from a broad spectrum of grassroots social justice movements including anti-poverty, labor, peace, economic, racial, indigenous, immigrant and environmental justice groups as well as Medicare for All, sustainable food and natural health advocates and Occupy Wall Street networks among others.”

Ten days of actions are being planned from Earth Day to May Day to bring greater awareness to the connections between climate change and all areas of our lives and to show that we are going to have to work together with urgency in our communities to build political power and to put solutions in place together.

The climate and extraction battles are bringing young climate justice activists, environmentalists, ranchers and farmers together. Indigenous communities are leading the resistance to extreme energy extraction and the Keystone XL Pipeline. In New Mexico, the Navajo and Pueblo are fighting a uranium mine that will destroy sacred land and threaten their health. The Moccasins on the Ground project is training communities all across America in direct action so that many people will have the skills needed to protect the air, land and water.

Climate justice advocacy is one example of people that have never worked together before joining in specific campaigns and finding that unity creates greater impact. We also see it in the work to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and so far, it is succeeding in stopping Congress from passing the fast track bill, a law required in order to get this rigged corporate agreement into law. The growing opposition to the TPP is having a broader effect on the TPP negotiations. In advance of the next round of meetings, lawmakers from seven of the twelve countries involved are calling for the text of the agreement to be released to the public as has been the practice for every other trade agreement.

We also saw it on February 11 in the organized response to mass dragnet surveillance. “The Day We Fight Back” campaign brought together more than 6,000 websites that displayed a banner urging people to make phone calls and write emails to Congress calling for reforms to protect our privacy. In one day, 277,000 phone calls and emails were sent to Congress urging stopping the NSA and putting in place privacy protections.

Linking issues, joining together, working across issues and geography make us stronger.  We are confronting a systemic crisis that requires a systemic response and solidarity among movements.

A Systemic Crisis Needs New Systems that We Must Create

To achieve real solutions requires both resistance actions to stop what is harmful and constructive work to create alternative approaches. These are intimately connected. Resistance alone may lead to unjust solutions if there isn’t also work being done to build just alternatives to replace the current systems. The work being done to build alternatives that are just empowers more people not only through increased knowledge but also by fulfilling critical needs for housing, food and jobs among others. Building new systems is part of building a social movement that has political power.

Wen Stephenson wrote about some of the places where this is happening around the country like Boston, Boulder, Detroit and Richmond, CA in “From Occupy to Climate Justice.” In Kentucky, there is a deep connection between the fight for environmental and climate justice and building a new economy. Communities depend on coal not just for energy but also for jobs. Community support means transitioning to renewable energy sources to replace the coal and to an economy that provides employment. In South Dakota, more than 80 families are solving this problem by pooling their land to build a giant wind farm.

A similar struggle is happening in Lake Superior where indigenous communities and allies are trying to stop very destructive mines and at the same time find ways to support the community economically that are sustainable. Tribal members and others are deeply committed to preventing the land from being mined and are prepared to use direct action and litigation to stop the mining from going forward.

They are also showing that there can be an alternative to the environmental destructive bomb-bust extraction economy, an economy that dies when the extraction is complete, leaving behind an ecological disaster.  In 1880, 248,000 pounds of maple sugar came out of the region. Today, maple sugar sells for $22 dollars a pound. That one product would generate 5.4 million dollars.  The environment in the region has many sustainable resources that can create an economy that does not leave behind post-extraction ghost towns, but instead builds communities that can go on and on.

The fight against the extraction economy is a global struggle. In Ecuador, President Correa, who signed the new constitution granting the rights of nature in 2008, is now launching an assault on nature by selling land in the Amazon to gold mining corporations. The same tribe, the Shuar, that was the only tribe to defeat the Spaniards and Incas, has vowed to defend the land with their lives if necessary.  In Romania, the Rosia Montana community has been fighting off gold mining corporations for decades and is now asking for outside help so they can continue.

In both circumstances, the Shuar and Romanians see that traditional economies that sustained local communities will be destroyed by extraction that mostly enriches people outside the community, and they envision how their economies could continue in a longer-term, more successful way without extreme mining practices.

The new economy is not only being created in reaction to the extraction economy but also because the current economy is simply not working for most Americans.  As a result, democratic economic institutions are being put in place. Baltimore activists are organizing a conference, “Building Our New Economy Together,” this May 16-17 that will bring together national experts and local activists.  This is one of many conferences and meetings being held around worker cooperatives, links between farmers and people in need of food, community land trusts to control housing prices, participatory budgeting, moving beyond capitalism and creating a new economy.

Ending War: A New System for Resolving International Conflict is Needed

Another global crisis which is also connected to climate change, the unfair economy and the extraction economy is war. The United States military is one the biggest polluters and contributors to climate change. And most of our military actions, wars that are declared and some that are not, are over control of resources and economic domination.

A new effort is being organized that goes beyond traditional efforts to stop or end particular wars. World Beyond War is a global campaign to abolish war itself. So far the response has been very positive with thousands of people signing on to the pledge. The official launch date is September 21, the International Day of Peace.

People who have taken the pledge describe how war is connected to many other crisis issues,  prevents people’s necessities from being met and continues the destruction of the planet.  As David Swanson of World Beyond War summarizes “If we abolish war, humanity can not only survive and better address the climate crisis and other dangers, but will be able to create a better life for everyone. The reallocation of resources away from war promises a world whose advantages are beyond easy imagination.”

But, most important, people pierce the myth that ending war is impossible.  As with many changes that seemed impossible, in a time of crisis, views change.  Alice Slater of the Global Council of Abolition 2000 says:  “The abolition of war is an idea whose time has come. We are at a transformative moment in history.”  This is echoed by Judith Hand a founder of AFutureWithoutWar.org who writes “Human history has arrived at a pivotal moment. We can choose a path built on cooperation, where our caring and sharing side uplifts us, or we can continue to embrace a worldview where domination using violence imprisons us in cycles of killing and destruction. I’m a biologist, and war is not genetically fixed. War is a cultural invention.”

The power to create change will not come from the people who wage war. Russell Faure-Brac, author of Transition to Peace writes: “Change will not come from a President Gandhi.  Rather, the initiate for change will come from the bottom up as citizens force politicians to act.  We just need to put our voices together and get sufficiently organized.” Long-time peace and justice activist, David Hartsough cites a statement from President Eisenhower who made much the same point. Hartsough notes that Eisenhower said: “I like to believe that the people of the world will want peace so much that governments will have to get out of the way and let them have it.” Hartsough adds:  “When the people of the world decide to end war, we can end it.”

Transformation Starts with a Bold Vision for the Future

It is time to be bold in our thinking.  We are in a time of great transition.  In another era of change, Thomas Paine wrote “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” In many respects we are remaking the world. It is time to dare to dream about what you want the world to be like and join others in making it a reality.

In 1972, the 16-year old king of Bhutan decided to reject using Gross Domestic Product as the sole measure of his nation’s well-being and created the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH). The GNH looks beyond economic growth to evaluate other areas that affect people’s lives. Happiness is defined as “a state of being that one achieves when one is able to balance the needs of the body with the needs of the mind, when the material and the emotional, psychological needs are being met, within a stable, peaceful and secure environment.”

More than 40 years later, the GNH has changed the discussion at all levels, even internationally, to include consideration beyond economic indicators when determining the condition of businesses, cities, states and countries. The GNH created a cultural shift in the way that progress is measured.

On a smaller scale, there are many signs that people are thinking big, connecting their struggles and making a difference. Since 2007, a coalition of diverse groups has been meeting in North Carolina as a Peoples Movement Assembly to organize for social, economic and environmental justice. They are behind the Moral Mondays movement that is now spreading to other states. Recently, their yearly march in Raleigh, the Moral March which started as HKOJ (Historic Thousands on Jones Street), brought an estimated 80,000 people from inside and outside North Carolina.

The history of progress for humankind has always been one where the seemingly impossible becomes the new reality.  This new reality is borne out of the visions of humanity and the work of people seeking to remake the world in seemingly impossible ways.  Nelson Mandela said something that applies to all the great struggles of our era: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

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This article is produced by PopularResistance.org in conjunction with AlterNet.  It is based on PopularResistance.org’s weekly newsletter reviewing the activities of the resistance movement.

The United States of Poverty and Inequality

Published on Thursday, February 20, 2014 by Common Dreams

New report shows that no matter which state you live in, the 1% are making even more gains as the rest fall back

- Jon Queally, staff writer

From 1979 to 2011, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent. (Image: Common Dreams)Over the last three decades the wealth of the nation's very richest 1% has grown ten times that of the average worker and over that time period that same tiny elite has captured more than half of the entire income increases, leaving the bottom 99% to divide the remaining gains.

This is all based on a new state-level study, The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, which looks at how inequality has seized hold of the national economy both in the generation leading up to the great recession of 2008 and in the several years following where a so-called "recovery" was experienced by the financial elite while the majority of U.S. population continues to claw its way back.

“The levels of inequality we are seeing across the country provide more proof that the economy is not working for the vast majority of Americans and has not for decades,” said Mark Price, an economist at the Keystone Research Center, who co-authored the report on behalf of the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). “It is unconscionable that most of America’s families have shared in so little of the country’s prosperity over the last several decades.”

Check out the interactive state-by-state map on inequality generated by the study's authors.

Numerous studies in recent years have exposed the persistent pattern of income and wealth inequality in the United States, but as Price's co-author Estelle Sommeiller explains, “our study shows that this one percent economy is not just a national story but is evident in every state, and every region.”

Though some states show higher levels of inequality, the pattern nationally is firm. What is also made clear by the study is the degree to which specific policies--including the writing of tax law, the climate set for labor conditions, and the setting of wages--have all contributed directly to this pattern where those at the very top benefit from a growing economy and those at the bottom receive increasingly less reward for their hard work.

“It’s clear that policies were set to favor the one percent and those policies can, and should, be changed,” Doug Hall, director of the EARN program said. “In order to have widespread income growth, bold policies need to be enacted to increase the minimum wage, create low levels of unemployment, and strengthen the rights of workers to organize.”

Among the report's key findings:

• In four states (Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan, and Alaska), only the top 1 percent experienced rising incomes between 1979 and 2007, and the average income of the bottom 99 percent fell.
• In another 15 states the top 1 percent captured between half and 84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007. Those states are Arizona (where 84.2 percent of all income growth was captured by the top 1 percent), Oregon (81.8 percent), New Mexico (72.6 percent), Hawaii (70.9 percent), Florida (68.9 percent), New York (67.6 percent), Illinois (64.9 percent), Connecticut (63.9 percent), California (62.4 percent), Washington (59.1 percent), Texas (55.3 percent), Montana (55.2 percent), Utah (54.1 percent), South Carolina (54.0 percent), and West Virginia (53.3 percent).

• In the 10 states in which the top 1 percent captured the smallest share of income growth, the top 1 percent captured between about a quarter and just over a third of all income growth. Those states are Louisiana (where 25.6 percent of all income growth was captured by the top 1 percent), Virginia (29.5 percent), Iowa (29.8 percent), Mississippi (29.8 percent), Maine (30.5 percent), Rhode Island (32.6 percent), Nebraska (33.5 percent), Maryland (33.6 percent), Arkansas (34.0 percent), and North Dakota (34.2 percent).

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Toxic Chemicals Linked to 'Global, Silent Pandemic' Striking Children Worldwide

Published on Monday, February 17, 2014 by Common Dreams

"The presumption that new chemicals and technologies are safe until proven otherwise is a fundamental problem," study authors write

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Toxic chemicals including some pesticides and solvents may be behind the increasing number of cases of neurodevelopmental disabilities—including autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—among children, researchers warn.

"We have the methods in place to test industrial chemicals for harmful effects on children's brain development—now is the time to make that testing mandatory," stated study co-author Philippe Grandjean. The findings are presented in a study by Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Philip Landrigan, Dean for Global Health at Mount Sinai published online Saturday in Lancet Neurology.

"The greatest concern is the large numbers of children who are affected by toxic damage to brain development in the absence of a formal diagnosis. They suffer reduced attention span, delayed development and poor school performance. Industrial chemicals are now emerging as likely causes," said Grandjean.

The new study follows similar research by the authors published in 2006 in which they reviewed clinical and epidemiological studies and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic and toluene.

Grandjean and Landrigan's current review updates that list and adds six newly recognized developmental neurotoxicants: manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos and DDT (pesticides), tetrachloroethylene (a solvent), and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (often used as flame retardants).

Manganese has been linked to diminished intellectual function and impaired motor skills, and solvents have been linked to hyperactivity and aggressive behavior, the authors write.

The effects of neurotoxicity can be society-wide, the authors note, as loss of IQ points may bring down earnings thereby affecting GDP. They can be costly as well; for example, the annual cost of lead poisoning in the U.S. is $50 billion, while behavioral problems associated with neurotoxicant exposure could also require special educational services and may even lead to incarceration, the authors write.

"The presumption that new chemicals and technologies are safe until proven otherwise is a fundamental problem," the authors write, adding, "Voluntary controls seem to be of little value."

To confront this "global, silent pandemic," the authors urge an international strategy that takes a precautionary approach to fully evaluate new chemicals before they hit the markets. Testing on industrial chemicals and pesticides already on the market should also take place, they say.

"The problem is international in scope, and the solution must therefore also be international," Grandjean stated. "We have the methods in place to test industrial chemicals for harmful effects on children's brain development—now is the time to make that testing mandatory."

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Vicious Global Warming Feedback Loop Worse Than Feared

Published on Wednesday, February 19, 2014 by Common Dreams

Vicious cycle: amount of warming involved in Arctic ice loss, now amounts to roughly one-quarter of all warming

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

Melting Arctic sea ice (Photo: Ian Joughin / Source: LiveScience)

One of nature's key defenses against global warming—the reflection of the sun's rays away from Earth by Arctic sea ice—has fallen victim to... global warming. And according to a study published Monday, the vicious feedback loop is worse than previously thought.

The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the ability of the Arctic ice to reflect sunlight—known scientifically as albedo—has decreased dramatically since 1979, with the calculations showing the region's ability to reflect sunlight diminished more than twice what previous studies have shown.

As less of the sun's rays are reflected back into space, the open ocean absorbs more heat leading to additional ice melt in the region. The problem is both self-feeding and a source of deep concern for scientists and those concerned about climate change.

"That is big – unexpectedly big," said the study's lead author Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, on the rate of loss. "Arctic sea ice retreat has been an important player in the global warming that we've observed during recent decades."

And Mark Flanner, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan, told the New Scientist that the study "reaffirms that albedo feedback is a powerful amplifier of climate change, maybe even more so than is simulated by the current crop of climate models."

The reportis the first to use satellite measurements dating back to 1979 to gauge decreasing sunlight reflection in the region.

The amount of Arctic warming caused by this phenomenon now amounts to roughly one-quarter of the total warming caused by the greenhouse effect, said the researchers.

"Basically, it means more warming,"  said Eisenman.

From the study:

The Arctic sea ice retreat has been one of the most dramatic climate changes in recent decades. Nearly 50 years ago it was predicted that a darkening of the Arctic associated with disappearing ice would be a consequence of global warming. Using satellite measurements, this analysis directly quantifies how much the Arctic as viewed from space has darkened in response to the recent sea ice retreat. We find that this decline has caused 6.4 ± 0.9 W/m2 of radiative heating since 1979, considerably larger than expectations from models and recent less direct estimates. Averaged globally, this albedo change is equivalent to 25% of the direct forcing from CO2 during the past 30 years.

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Inequality, Productivity, and WhatsApp

by Robert Reich

Thursday, February 20, 2014

If you ever wonder what’s fueling America’s staggering inequality, ponder Facebook’s acquisition of the mobile messaging company WhatsApp .

According to news reports today, Facebook has agreed to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion.

That’s the highest price paid for a startup in history. It’s $3 billion more than Facebook raised when it was first listed, and more than twice what Microsoft paid for Skype.

(To be precise, $12 billion of the $19 billion will be in the form of shares in Facebook, $4 billion will be in cash, and $3 billion in restricted stock to WhatsApp staff, which will vest in four years.)

Given that gargantuan amount, you might think Whatsapp is a big company. You’d be wrong. It has 55 employees, including its two young founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton.

Whatsapp’s value doesn’t come from making anything. It doesn’t need a large organization to distribute its services or implement its strategy.

It value comes instead from two other things that require only a handful of people. First is its technology — a simple but powerful app that allows users to send and receive text, image, audio and video messages through the Internet.

The second is its network effect: The more people use it, the more other people want and need to use it in order to be connected. To that extent, it’s like Facebook — driven by connectivity.  

Whatsapp’s worldwide usage has more than doubled in the past nine months, to 450 million people — and it’s growing by around a million users every day. On December 31, 2013, it handled 54 billion messages (making its service more popular than Twitter, now valued at about $30 billion.)

How does it make money? The first year of usage is free. After that, customers pay a small fee. At the scale it’s already achieved, even a small fee generates big bucks. And if it gets into advertising it could reach more eyeballs than any other medium in history. It already has a database that could be mined in ways that reveal huge amounts of information about a significant percentage of the world’s population.

The winners here are truly big winners. WhatsApp’s fifty-five employees are now enormously rich. Its two founders are now billionaires. And the partners of the venture capital firm that financed it have also reaped a fortune.

And the rest of us? We’re winners in the sense that we have an even more efficient way to connect with each other.

But we’re not getting more jobs.

In the emerging economy, there’s no longer any correlation between the size of a customer base and the number of employees necessary to serve them. In fact, the combination of digital technologies with huge network effects is pushing the ratio of employees to customers to new lows (WhatsApp’s 55 employees are all its 450 million customers need).

Meanwhile, the ranks of postal workers, call-center operators, telephone installers, the people who lay and service miles of cable, and the millions of other communication workers, are dwindling — just as retail workers are succumbing to Amazon, office clerks and secretaries to Microsoft, and librarians and encyclopedia editors to Google.   

Productivity keeps growing, as do corporate profits. But jobs and wages are not growing. Unless we figure out how to bring all of them back into line – or spread the gains more widely – our economy cannot generate enough demand to sustain itself, and our society cannot maintain enough cohesion to keep us together.

Capitalism is the Problem, Economic Democracy the Solution

by Gary Engler / January 31st, 2014

from Dissident Voice

(A speech given at the One World Week Forum at the University of Warwick on January 30, 2014 on the topic of Capitalism and Sustainability: Can We Have It All?)

Can capitalism solve the problems of global warming and growing inequality?

It seems to me this is like discussing the issue of inappropriate hypersexual imagery bombarding 11-year olds and then asking: Can Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga fix the problem?

Real capitalism, not the theoretical version taught in school, is a system of minority rule in which a few people profit at the expense of others.

Real capitalists are always trying to cut their costs and increase their profits, which leads to unemployment, falling wages, rising economic disparity and not paying for the environmental damage they cause.

Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood produces incentives for capitalists to pass along the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Private ownership makes growing inequality inevitable. A system can proclaim itself democratic, but if a minority holds most of the economic, and therefore social and political power, that minority will inevitably reward itself, its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will be the result.

Capitalism is sociopathic. Its ideologues, like the late Margaret Thatcher, reject the social, claiming only individuals exist. Yet capitalism has driven individual producers to the fringes of economies. Most people, 90 per cent in the U.K., depend on wages or salary, working with others in cooperative, coordinated labour — social labour, but directed by wealthy minorities for their own profit.

Capitalism promotes greed. It boasts of this. So why would we be surprised when a small minority with most of the power looks after itself, in effect telling the rest of us: “Screw you and the planet you live on! We don’t care about global warming because we have the money to buy a nice place regardless of how high the oceans rise.”

Capitalism requires constant growth to satisfy its need for more profit. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with less stuff?

History shows capitalism reacts badly to declining markets. When the economy shrinks for a sustained period the system goes into crisis. Banks crash, unemployment grows and capitalists often turn to war to get their profits rising again.

The truth is a sustainable economy is incompatible with a system that constantly demands more profit.

To quote the greatest living English political philosopher, Russell Brand: “I know what the fucking system shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t destroy the planet and shouldn’t create massive economic disparity.”

Like Russell we know what we don’t like. That’s the easy part. But how can we get rid of capitalism and what is the alternative?

To answer we must go back to the issue of power and how to distribute it in a way that promotes the common good, a key element of which is a healthy environment. The best way is through more democracy. REAL democracy. Economic democracy.

Do you want an equitable, sustainable economy? Then help overthrow capitalism and create an economic democracy.

What exactly does this mean?

Let me give you an example: With the one pound one vote system that governs corporate capitalism, Richard Branson, with a net worth of 3.5 billion pounds get 3.5 billion votes. In comparison you get 147 and you get 58. Most of you poor buggers owe more than you own so you get no votes at all. Economic democracy means giving everyone the right to a voice and an equal vote in their communities’ economic decisions. When everyone has an equal right in decision-making, economies will be motivated by general wellbeing, not private profit. Economic democracy means eliminating the divide between workers and owners by making everyone an owner. Economic democracy means multiple owning communities  — local, regional, national, international — so that power does not become concentrated in the hands of a single central state. It means that wherever social labour occurs a system of democracy manages the enterprise.

Imagine companies that are democratically run by workers together with a local, regional, national or international government, whichever is appropriate to that enterprise; companies whose mandate it is to promote the common good, rather than the narrow self-interest of rich shareholders; companies that no longer have incentives to destroy the planet, but rather face real penalties for harming the environment.

Now, I know what at least some of you are thinking. This is not realistic. Your ideas are just pie in the sky. But the truth is capitalism has already created what one might call “objective conditions” that do indeed make economic democracy possible. Most people in most countries already depend on social labor. Most of you, if you find paid employment, will be salaried or wage workers. If we choose to fight for it, we can expand one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is most of our economy. If we elect governments committed to it, we could pass laws that limit private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others. We could create a system of social ownership with multiple democratic owning communities.

If we accomplish these three things — replacing corporate ownership with social ownership, replacing capitalist entitlement with equal human entitlement and replacing master-servant relations with workplace democracy — the system that drives enterprises to maximize profits, regardless of the consequences, would no longer exist.

Capitalism and sustainability, can you have it all? No. But there is a much better alternative: Economic democracy, a system that will offer authentic jobs, a nourishing work-life balance, your fair share of power and a healthy environment. This sounds like the essentials of a good life to me.

Gary Engler is an elected union officer and co-author of the just released New Commune-ist Manifesto — Workers of the World It Really is Time to Unite, an updating of the original designed to provoke discussion about the future of unions and the Left. Read other articles by Gary.

This article was posted on Friday, January 31st, 2014 at 7:01am and is filed under Capitalism, Democracy, Economy/Economics, Environment.

Green Light for City-Owned San Francisco Bank

Posted on Aug 2, 2013

idleformat (CC BY 2.0)

By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

This piece first appeared at Web of Debt.

When the Occupiers took an interest in moving San Francisco’s money into a city-owned bank in 2011, it was chiefly on principle, in sympathy with the nationwide Move Your Money campaign.  But recent scandals have transformed the move from a political statement into a matter of protecting the city’s deposits and reducing its debt burden. The chief roadblock to forming a municipal bank has been the concern that it was not allowed under state law, but a legal opinion issued by Deputy City Attorney Thomas J. Owen has now overcome that obstacle.

Establishing a city-owned San Francisco Bank is not a new idea. According to City Supervisor John Avalos, speaking at the Public Banking Institute conference in San Rafael in June, it has been on the table for over a decade. Recent interest was spurred by the Occupy movement, which adopted the proposal after Avalos presented it to an enthusiastic group of over 1000 protesters outside the Bank of America building in late 2011. David Weidner, writing in the Wall Street Journal in December of that year, called it “the boldest institutional stroke yet against banks targeted by the Occupy movement.” But Weidner conceded that:

Creating a municipal bank won’t be easy. California law forbids using taxpayer money to make private loans. That would have to be changed. Critics also argue that San Francisco could be putting taxpayer money at risk.

The law in question was California Government Code Section 23007, which prohibits a county from “giv[ing] or loan[ing] its credit to or in aid of any person or corporation.” The section has been interpreted as barring cities and counties from establishing municipal banks. But Deputy City Attorney Thomas J. Owen has now put that issue to rest in a written memorandum dated June 21, 2013, in which he states:

1. A court would likely conclude that Section 23007 does not cover San Francisco because the City is a chartered city and county. Similarly, a court would likely conclude that Article XVI, section 6 of the State Constitution, which limits the power of the State Legislature to give or lend the credit of cities or counties, does not apply to the City. . . . [A] court would likely then determine that neither those laws nor the general limitations on expending City funds for a municipal purpose bar the City from establishing a municipal bank.

 2. A court would likely conclude that the City may own stock in a municipal bank and spend City money to support the bank’s operation, if the City appropriated funds for that purpose and the operation of the bank served a legitimate municipal purpose.

A number of other California cities that have explored forming their own banks are also affected by this opinion. As of June 2008, 112 of California’s 478 cities are charter cities, including not only San Francisco but Los Angeles, Richmond, Oakland and Berkeley. A charter city is one governed by its own charter document rather than by local, state or national laws.

Which Is Riskier, a Public Bank or a Wall Street Bank?

That leaves the question whether a publicly-owned bank would put taxpayer money at risk. The Bank of North Dakota, the nation’s only state-owned bank, has posed no risk to depositors or the state’s taxpayers in nearly a century of successful operation. Further, in this latest recession it has helped the state achieve a nationwide low in unemployment (3.2%) and the only budget surplus in the country.

Meanwhile, the recent wave of bank scandals has shifted the focus to whether local governments can afford to risk keeping their funds in Wall Street banks. 

In making investment decisions, cities are required by state law to prioritize security, liquidity and yield, in that order. The city of San Francisco moves between $10 billion and $12 billion through 133 bank accounts in roughly 5 million transactions every year; and its deposits are held chiefly at three banks, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Union Bank. The city pays $2.7 million for banking services, nearly two-thirds of which consist of transaction fees that smaller banks and credit unions would not impose.  But the city cannot use those smaller banks as depositories because the banks cannot afford the collateral necessary to protect deposits above $250,000, the FDIC insurance limit.

San Francisco and other cities and counties are losing more than just transaction fees to Wall Street. Weidner pointed to the $100 billion that the California pension funds lost as a result of Wall Street malfeasance in 2008; the foreclosures that have wrought havoc on communities and tax revenues; and the liar loans that have negatively impacted not only real estate values but the economy, employment and local and state budgets. Added to that, we now have the LIBOR and municipal debt auction riggings and the Cyprus bail-in threat.

On July 23, 2013, Sacramento County filed a major lawsuit against Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and other mega-banks for manipulating LIBOR rates, a fraud that has imposed huge losses on local governments in ill-advised interest-rate swaps. Sacramento is the 15th government agency in California to sue on the LIBOR rigging, which Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi calls “the biggest price-fixing scandal ever.” Other counties in the Bay Area that are suing on the LIBOR fraud are Sonoma and San Mateo, and the city of Richmond sued in January.  Last year, Bank of America and other major banks were also caught rigging municipal debt service auctions, for which they had to pay $673 million in restitution.

The question is, do taxpayers want to have their public monies in a bank that has been proven to be defrauding them?

Compounding the risk is the reason Cyprus “bail in” shocker, in which depositor funds were confiscated to recapitalize two bankrupt Cypriot banks. Dodd-Frank now replaces taxpayer-funded bank bailouts with consumer-funded bail-ins, which can force shareholders, bondholders and depositors to contribute to the cost of bank failure. Europe is negotiating rules imposing bail-ins for failed banks, and the FDIC has a U.S. advisory to that effect. Bank of America now commingles its $1 trillion in deposits with over $70 trillion in risky derivatives, and has been pegged as one of the next banks likely to fail in a major gambling mishap.

San Francisco and other local governments have far more than $250,000 on deposit, so they are only marginally protected by the FDIC insurance fund. Their protection is as secured creditors with a claim on bank collateral. The problem is that in a bank bankruptcy, state and local governments will fall in line behind the derivative claimants, which are also secured creditors and now have “super-priority” in bankruptcy. In a major derivatives calamity of the sort requiring a $700 billion bailout in September 2008, there is liable to be little collateral left for either the other secured depositors or the FDIC, which has a meager $25 billion in its insurance fund. Normally, the FDIC would be backstopped by the Treasury – meaning the taxpayers – but Dodd-Frank now bars taxpayer bailouts of bank bankruptcies caused by the majority of speculative derivative losses.

The question today is whether cities and counties can afford not to set up their own municipal banks, both to protect their money from confiscation and to take advantage of the very low interest rates and other perks available exclusively to the banking club. A government that owns its own bank can keep the interest and reinvest it locally, resulting in government savings of an estimated 35% to 40% just in interest. Costs can be reduced, and taxes can be cut or services can be increased. Banking and credit can become public utilities, sustaining the local economy rather than mining it for private gain; and banks can again become safe places to store our money.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt and its 2013 sequel, The Public Bank Solution. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com, http://PublicBankSolution.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.

Extreme Weather Watch: January 2014 - 30 million Americans Had Flights Canceled or Delayed

by John Lawrence from San Diego Free Press

More than 49,000 flights were canceled and another 300,000 delayed in January as airlines lost $75 million to $150 million because of costs such as deicing jets as well as lost revenue. 30 million people had their flights canceled or delayed. Flight cancellations cost passengers an extra $2.5 billion in meals and extra hotel bills in January alone. Many stranded passengers had to wait days — and in a few extreme case up to a week — to get a seat on a flight out. After viewing the Super Bowl many fans had their flights home canceled. Even the victorious Seattle Seahawks experienced flight disruptions. Their charter flight was delayed by a snowstorm in Newark, NJ. After a couple of hours on the tarmac, the plane finally took off, only to be diverted to Minneapolis. They finally made it home hours after their scheduled arrival time.

The first month of the year included four of the 10 coldest days during the 21st century in the contiguous 48 states and record snowfall across the country. Chicago was at one point colder than the South Pole, and an ice storm stranded thousands of drivers on Atlanta-area highways.

The first week of January saw winter storm Hercules shutting down airports and creating hazardous road conditions. A massive winter storm pounded the Northeast with heavy winds and driving snow, shutting down Boston's airport, and prompting cancellations of thousands of flights as well as state emergency declarations in New York and New Jersey. The onslaught continued with more heavy snow, howling winds and bitterly cold temperatures. Freezing temperatures with below-zero wind chills in some places complicated life for residents from Minnesota to Maine. At least 15 people died and thousands lost power to their homes and businesses.

Record low temperatures were recorded across the US. Altogether more than 200 million people were affected, in an area ranging from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and extending south to include roughly 187 million Americans in the Continental United States. The severe Arctic air outbreak due to the Polar Vortex sent temperatures in New York City plummeting to a record low of 4°F on January 7, which broke a 116-year record. The cost of propane used to heat houses and barns skyrocketed. 24,000 residents lost power in the midwest.

In Minnesota, all public schools statewide were closed on January 6 by order of Governor Mark Dayton. This had not been done in 17 years. In Indiana, more than fifty of the state's ninety-two counties, including virtually everywhere north of Indianapolis, closed all roads to all traffic except emergency vehicles. In Michigan, the mayor of Lansing issued a snow emergency prohibiting all non-essential travel as well as closing down non-essential government offices. In Wisconsin, schools in most (if not all) of the state were closed on January 6 as well as on January 7. When the second cold wave emerged, schools were also closed on January 27 and 28. In Ohio, schools across the entire state were closed on January 6 and 7.

Research on a possible connection between individual extreme weather events and long-term anthropogenic climate change is new and the topic of scientific debate. Prior to the events of January 2014, several studies on the connection between extreme weather and the polar vortex were published suggesting a link between climate change and increasingly extreme temperatures experienced by mid-latitudes (e.g., central North America). This phenomenon can be understood to result from the rapid melting of polar sea ice, which replaces white, reflective ice with dark, absorbent open water (i.e., the albedo of this region has decreased). As a result, the region has heated up faster than other parts of the globe. With the lack of a sufficient temperature difference between Arctic and southern regions to drive jet stream winds, the jet stream may have become weaker and more variable in its course, allowing cold air usually confined to the poles to reach further into the mid latitudes.

Near the end of the month the Deep South saw record low temperatures, snow and ice. People were trapped in their cars on freeways overnight. Some made it to makeshift shelters in stores. School children were forced to remain at their schools over night. Matthew Miller spent part of one morning handing out food and drinks to motorists stranded on the Downtown Connector in Atlanta.

“Traffic was stopped all night so I just came out to give out some free food and hot drinks,” said Miller, who was dispensing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, various cereals and hot chocolate. “I saw on Facebook that people had been out here for 18 hours and were complaining of being hungry and thirsty and just thought I would try to help out any way I could,” Miller said.

Due to the number of accidents involving tractor-trailers, tractor-trailers were advised not to enter Georgia at all. Tractor-trailers have been an enormous headache, clogging up interstates and requiring major equipment muscle and coordination to move. GDOT Deputy Commissioner Todd Long surveyed a bank of video screens at the Traffic Management Center and pointed to example after example of tractor-trailer tie-ups. “What’s in common in every single accident we have today?” Long said. “Tractor trailers.”

Meanwhile California saw record low rainfall for the month of January. Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency. Many areas closed out the month with zero measurable precipitation, including the Los Angeles Civic Center, San Diego, Riverside, Fullerton and Santa Maria.

About two-thirds of California is gripped by “severe” or “exceptional” drought, the most severe conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website. Nine percent of the state - all in the San Joaquin Valley - is considered exceptionally dry, according to the website. It’s the state’s most severe drought since at least 1977, according to Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District.

With California’s snowpack at just 12 percent of the average for this period, the state Water Resources Department said Jan. 31 that it was allocating no water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to local water agencies, the first time in state history. Snowmelt and rain feeding the delta makes it the single largest source for California’s 38 million residents and 25.4 million acres of farmland.

The three-year long drought plaguing the western United States is only likely to get worse over the next year, forecasters and climate scientists say, given a dismal snowpack that has officials in many states worried. The stakes are high for California, the country’s most populous state with 38 million residents. It has a $44.7 billion agricultural industry that generates more than $100 billion in related economic activity. California produces nearly half of all U.S.-grown fruits, nuts, and vegetables and it is the leading dairy state. The state’s farm cash receipts in 2012 were $13 billion more than that of Iowa, the No. 2 agricultural state. Because California farms depend heavily on irrigation to sustain production during the dry season, drought constitutes a dire threat to the state’s economy. Farmers are applying for unemployment.

The potential for devastaing fires is great as California vegetation just gets dryer and dryer. Across California, vegetation that typically rehydrates with rain between December and April continues to get dryer and more dangerous. The fires so far this winter have been relatively moderate compared with some of the state’s largest, but officials worry that the fires will get worse as the fuel gets even dryer. California is bracing for what officials fear could be an unprecedented fire season fueled by record dry conditions that show no signs of letting up.

 

 

 

Corporate Cronyism: The Secret to Overpaid CEOs

by Dean Baker

Truthout, February 17, 2014 from Huffingtonpost

It’s hardly a secret that the heads of major corporations in the United States get mind bending paychecks. While high pay may be understandable when a top executive turns around a failing company or vastly expands a company’s revenue and profit, but CEOs can get paychecks in the tens or hundreds of millions even when they did nothing especially notable.

For example, Lee Raymond retired from Exxon-Mobil in 2005 with $321 million. (That’s 22,140 minimum wage work years.) His main accomplishment for the company was sitting at its head at a time when a quadrupling of oil prices sent profits soaring. Hank McKinnel walked away from Pfizer in 2006 with $166 million. It would be hard to identify his outstanding accomplishments.

But you don’t have to be mediocre to get a big paycheck as a CEO. Bob Nardelli pocketed $240 million when he left Home Depot after six years. The company’s stock price had fallen by 40 percent in his tenure, while the stock its competitor Lowe’s had nearly doubled.

And then we have the CEOs in the financial industry, heads of huge banks like Lehman’s, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch, or the insurer AIG. These CEOs took their companies to the edge of bankruptcy or beyond and still walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in their pockets.

It’s not hard to write contracts that would ensure that CEO pay bears a closer relationship to the company’s performance. For example, if the value of Raymond’s stock incentives at Exxon were tied to the performance of the stock of other oil companies (this can be done) then his going away package probably would not have been one-tenth as large. Also, there can be longer assessment periods so that it’s not possible to get rich by bankrupting a company.

If anyone were putting a check on CEO pay, these sorts of practices would be standard, but they aren’t for a simple reason. The corporate directors who are supposed to be holding down CEO pay for the benefit of the shareholders are generally buddies of the CEOs.

Corporate CEOs often have considerable input into who sits on their boards. (Some CEOs sit on the boards themselves.) They pick people who will be agreeable and not ask tough questions.

For example, corporate boards probably don’t often ask whether they could get a comparably skilled CEO for lower pay, even though top executives of major companies in Europe, Japan, and South Korea earn around one-tenth as much as CEOs in the United States. Of course this is the directors’ job. They are supposed to be trying to minimize what the company pays their top executives in the same way that companies try to cut costs by outsourcing production to Mexico, China, and elsewhere.

But friends don’t try to save money by cutting their friends’ pay. And when the directors themselves are pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for attending 4-10 meetings, there is little incentive to take their jobs seriously.

Instead we see accomplished people from politics, academia, and other sectors collecting their pay and looking the other way. For example, we have people like Erskine Bowles who had the distinction of sitting on the boards of both Morgan Stanley and General Motors in the years they were bailed out by the government. And we have Martin Feldstein, the country’s most prominent conservative economist, who sat on the board of insurance giant AIG when it nearly tanked the world’s financial system. Both Bowles and Feldstein were well-compensated for their “work.”

Excessive CEO pay matters not only because it takes away money that rightfully belongs to shareholders, which include pension funds and individuals with 401(k) retirement accounts. Excessive CEO pay is important because it sets a pattern for pay packages throughout the economy. When mediocre CEOs of mid-size companies can earn millions or tens of millions a year, it puts upward pressure on the pay of top executives in other sectors.

It is common for top executives of universities and private charities to earn salaries in the millions of dollars because they can point to executives of comparably sized companies who earn several times as much. Those close in line to the boss also can expect comparably bloated salaries. In other words, this is an important part of the story of inequality in the economy.

To try to impose the checks that don’t currently exist, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has created Director Watch. This site will highlight directors like Erskine Bowles and Martin Feldstein who stuff their pockets while not performing their jobs.

CEPR also worked with the Huffington Post to compile a data set that lists the directors for the Fortune 100 companies, along with their compensation, the CEOs’ compensation, and the companies’ stock performance. This data set is now available at the Huffington Post as Pay Pals.

Perhaps a little public attention will get these directors to actually work for their hefty paychecks. The end result could be to bring a lot of paychecks for those at the top back down to earth.  

Challenge to Mayor Kevin Faulconer: End Homelessness Now

by John Lawrence from San Diego Free Press

You kibitz with the homeless in your campaign ads. Now that you're Mayor Kevin Faulconer, are you really going to do anything about it? Or are you going to continue to procrastinate. Other cities are ending homelessness from Phoenix to Salt Lake City to Nashville. You have the model to follow. It's a no-brainer. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Just follow their successful models. You don't have to continue to study the problem in order to address it ten years from now.

These cities and others have decided that treatment and supportive services should not be conditions or precursors to permanent housing. Instead, the very ability to address personal mental health goals, beat addiction and gain stable employment stems from the safety and stability that comes from having a permanent home. This approach is called Housing First. 

By moving people directly into permanent housing and then continuing to work to address their health, mental health and employment needs, thousands of chronically homeless people have been moved off the streets for good - many of whom were homeless veterans. The idea is to provide the homeless with homes right away and then address other problems as needed.

According to Jake Maguire's blog on the 100,000 homes website:

This approach was invented and pioneered by Dr. Sam Tsemberis, the founder of Pathways to Housing, in New York City in the late 1990s and soon adopted by the federal government and many state, local and non-profit agencies. In contrast to less effective, more traditional models, housing first does not force homeless people to complete or comply with treatment, mental health care, employment training or other services in order to access and maintain permanent housing. Instead, it rests on the evidence-based view that stable housing puts people in a better position to benefit voluntarily from these services over time.

The transformation of the appearance of some of the formerly homeless once they are housed is simply miraculous, and most of them make the transition successfully providing some additional social services like drug and psychological counselling are provided. The homeless are just like you and me except that they have no support system. They have run out of friends' couches to sleep on, run out of friends and, in some cases, never even had any friends to begin with. But as the Good Book says: "There but for the Grace of God go I." They need society to be their support system. No matter how many mistakes they've made in life, they don't deserve to be sleeping on the streets. Just as the father accepted the Prodigal Son with open arms, we as those who have been much luckier despite our many screw-ups need to accept them back into the human family. A home is the first step in turning their lives around, and it has been demonstrated in many cases to have brought stability into their lives while at the same time lowering taxpayer burdens.

Unrecognizable--that’s how homeless advocate Becky Kanis described the transformation of hundreds of thousands of homeless people once they are given a home.

“There is something that's really dehumanizing about living on the streets in so many ways,” Community Solutions’ Kanis told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper. “And then, really, in a matter of days, from having housing, the physical transformation is almost immediate and they're unrecognizable from their former selves.”

Take Donald Shelton for example. He was homeless for 15 years. Much of that time was spent in front of Union Station in Washington, DC, where he was often referred to as “The General.” In August 2010, Donald was placed in an apartment with his cat, Crystal. When asked what housing means to him, Donald said, "You have your privacy and it’s yours.”

On a segment of 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper talks about his changed attitude towards the homeless:

“It really changes your perception of the problem of homelessness and the people who end up being homeless,” said Cooper. He took the lesson home to New York City, where a homeless man panhandles and camps outside Cooper’s front door.

“Before the story, it really annoyed me,” says Cooper  “I just ignored him. I just pretended he wasn't there. And after the story, I was like, ‘This is ridiculous. This is my issue. Me pretending not to see this person is insane and offensive.’"

 After the assignment, Cooper decided to approach the homeless man, ask his name, and engage him in conversation. Now, he regularly greets the man and talks with him.

 “Anytime you stop and talk to somebody and you learn about them, you start to walk in their shoes a little bit and you see things through a different lens,” said Cooper.

The Housing First approach has also been shown to be beneficial to taxpayers as the cost of providing housing and social services has been found to be cheaper than multiple visits to the emergency room and other costs of dealing with the homeless on the streets. As a result, they make less frequent use of expensive, publicly funded services like emergency rooms, shelters and jails. If a homeless person receives social security or disability income they must pay 30% of their income towards their housing in the 100,000 homes program. Some landlords and other local philanthropists have offered 1% of their units free to the homeless in the effort to get them off the streets. Some cities are matching up their millionaires with their homeless and asking the millionaires to provide support for a few units.

For instance, Nashville with the help of its Partners, Sponsors and Allies is doing the following:

The How’s Nashville campaign is driven by community partners who assist vulnerable and chronically homeless people with permanent supportive housing. Our goal is to move people who are at risk of dying in the streets into apartments. Once housed, How’s Nashville partners are linking people with case management – a social worker who connects a resident with support services and follows up with the resident on a regular basis. Our ultimate goal is to support people so they can successfully remain in housing.

There is also the additional good feelings generated by knowing that you live in a city that truly provides for "the least of these our brethren." Stepping out onto the sidewalk knowing that you won't have to stumble over people sleeping on the street, navigate a row of homeless tents and carts or step in feces upgrades the image of a city beyond measure. Housing First looks for the most disadvantaged homeless and takes them off the streets first so they won't die there. This is also the most humane approach servicing the needs of "the least of these."

So how about it, Mayor Faulconer. Were your campaign ads featuring the homeless only so much balderdash? Or are you willing to follow up your purported concern for the homeless by putting your energy and efforts into really doing something about it as so many other cities have done and are doing among them Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Nashville, Houston, Los Angeles and many others. Talk is cheap. Campaign ads are cheap. Let's see some commitment and some action. It speaks louder than words.

See a list of 100,000 Homes sponsors and partners here.

 

France to Tell GMOs ‘Au Revoir’ by Restoring GMO Ban

by Christina Sarich

Natural Society/ News Report

 

Published: Wednesday 19 February 2014

 

Only five states wanted GM corn, but the way the weighted voting system is set up in the EU, the Commission is now obliged to pass the GMO crop initiative.

 

The French are preparing to restore a GMO maize ban in their country just before farmers prepare for Spring planting. A Senator of the currently ruling socialist party is calling for a ban to counteract an anticipated swell of activist upset over genetically modified organisms.

Formerly, France banned Monsanto’s GMO maize called MON 810, which was then the sole maize crop allowed to be grown in the European Union. Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto was effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider the fact that France is the largest grower of crops in all of Europe, making it an agricultural behemoth of sorts. 

Now the new ban would target all GMO maize in the country, including any new strains that would be developed and introduced to the public in the future. This would block biotech companies like Dow Chemical and DuPont who were hoping to introduce their own versions of GMO corn later in the year. The ban is of even more significance since Dow and DuPont Chemical companies have been given a seal of approval by the European Union to grow their GMO corn. The vote which took place that could have vetoed the proposition lost 19 to 28, with 4 member states abstaining from voting. This means only five states wanted GM corn, but the way the weighted voting system is set up in the EU, the Commission is now obliged to pass the GMO crop initiative.

In Germany, they are already planning to abstain from voting to approve the cultivation of 1507 maize. The draft legislation in France calls for all GMO maize to be inspected and destroyed if found. “We do not want to have the cultivation of [TC1507] in Germany,” Friedrich told Bayern2 radio.

France is currently the largest EU grain producer, so its decision will affect surrounding countries as well. Right on the heels of Russia considering a complete GMO ban, this would be a double-hit for biotech should both countries follow through with their draft propositions.

Public Bank Proposal on Town Meeting Ballots Across Vermont

from the Vermont Valley News

By Warren Johnston, Valley News Staff Writer

Sunday, February 16, 2014 (Published in print: Sunday, February 16, 2014)

 

Voters in three Vermont towns in the Upper Valley and 17 other communities in the state will face a simple question at Town Meeting this year: Should the Legislature be urged to examine the creation of a state bank?

The answer is anything but simple — for both supporters and opponents.

Advocates argue that creating a state bank will save Vermont hundreds of millions in tax dollars while putting the state on a path to a sustainable economic future. Opponents view a state bank as a potential threat to the state’s 20 community banks, one that could even jeopardize their future solvency.

In short, the battle lines are drawn between visionaries and the financial establishment on an issue that has been kicking around for the last six years. This year, the fight has begun anew in Montpelier over three bills pending in the House and Senate that address the matter.

Voters in Royalton, Randolph and Tunbridge will answer the question. If they say yes, they will add support to Senate Bill 55, a compromise holdover from the last legislative session that calls on the Legislature to study the creation of a state bank.

Already moving through both houses are additional bills that would require the state to deposit 10 percent of its reserve funds — about $35 million a year — with the Vermont Economic Development Authority and to allow VEDA to operate as a state bank. The Senate bill, which was introduced by Sen. Anthony Pollina, P-Middlesex, Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Bethel, and four other state senators, calls for the money to be used for loans for such purposes as community and economic development, weatherizing homes, renewable energy, reducing student loan rates and others.

There will likely be some progress on both the House and Senate bills by mid-March, McCormack said.

“I’m not completely sold on establishing a state bank, but at first blush it looks like a good idea that could save some money. I co-sponsored the bill because I think we should take a look at it,” he said.

Senate Bill 204, and a matching bill in the House, follow closely the findings released in January of a peer-reviewed study, evaluated and written by the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont and compiled by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts.

The Gund study did not recommend that Vermont start a state bank from scratch, but suggested an expansion of VEDA, which essentially functions as public bank now.

 Establishing a bank that accepts only 10 percent of the state’s reserve funds is not a problem for community banks, said Ken Wells, senior vice president at Mascoma Savings Bank.

“Our concern is that government entities don’t shrink. They only grow, and if the state bank starts taking deposits from towns, school districts and municipalities, which we accept, and makes loans to businesses and homeowners, then the state has created a tax-exempt competitor that would put us at a great disadvantage,” Wells said.

All of the state’s 20 community banks oppose Senate Bill 204, said Chris D’Elia, president of the Vermont Bankers Association.

“We support depositing 10 percent of the state’s surplus funds in VEDA and the other Vermont authorities and using the money for the projects that are outlined in the bill. We think that would be wonderful and would help the state. What we oppose is letting VEDA operate as a bank. We think that’s a bad idea for a number of reasons,” D’Elia said.

The current method of financing for VEDA requires that state funds be appropriated to VEDA by the Legislature or through floating bonds. Neither of these methods allows VEDA to leverage the funds it receives to create more money the way banks are allowed to do.

The Senate Government Operations Committee has been holding hearings on Senate bills 55 and 204 and will make recommendations to the Senate Finance Committee.

On Feb. 5, State Treasurer Beth Pearce testified in support of the concept of 10 percent for Vermont but in opposition to making VEDA a bank. The state treasurer said putting state revenues into a state bank is more risky than depositing them into a large bank.

The companion bill, House Bill 627, has been assigned to the Commerce and Economic Development Committee.

Interest in public banks has been growing nationwide in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis. During the last legislative session, Vermont lawmakers considered — but didn’t pass — bills to study the impact of a state bank based on the model of North Dakota, which established its state bank in 1919 .

The proposed legislation was reintroduced this session, but proponents say the Gund study makes the bill moot.

 The North Dakota bank, the only state bank in the country, typically returns 70 percent of its earnings to the state. In 2009, during the national banking crisis, the state bank delivered a $30 million dividend to public coffers. The North Dakota model, under which the state bank makes residential and business loans and operates much as a commercial bank, wasn’t supported by the Gund study, however.

A coalition of organizations, individuals and businesses called Vermonters for a New Economy commissioned the Gund study with funding from the Donella Meadows Institute of Norwich. The study supports the views of proponents that Vermont could save hundreds of millions of dollars, stimulate business and create jobs by establishing a state bank.

While the Donella Meadows Institute does not endorse the findings of the study, it funded the research, which the institute stands behind, to foster a discussion between proponents and opponents, institute Chairman Wayne Barstad said in a letter to the Valley News published Jan. 18.

“Our hope is that a healthy discussion … of public banking can help the larger public achieve greater clarity and help the Vermont Legislature and other decision-makers decide on the best course of action for the residents, businesses and communities of the state,” Barstad said in the letter.

VEDA, along with Vermont Housing Finance Authority and Vermont Student Assistance Corp., have the unrestricted net assets to meet the capital requirements for a bank and adequate holdings of securities to serve as collateral for short-term loans, the study found. It noted that, while the North Dakota model might not be the best for Vermont, the combined operations and assets of VEDA and VHFA are equivalent to the North Dakota institution.

During the last fiscal year, the state deposited funds totaling more than $313 million in two banks, TD Bank and Peoples Bank. The state could earn a better rate of return on those funds by switching to a state bank, the study says.

“If deposits of state cash funds were used for VEDA and VHFA loans, $263.2 million in public lending could result in 2,535 jobs, $192 million in value added (gross state product) and a $342 million increase in state output,” the study says. “If used to finance state capital expenditures, funding through a public bank could save close to $100 million … due to most interest payments no longer leaving the state.”

The campaign for the Town Meeting warning articles was spearheaded by Pollina and Gwendolyn Hallsmith, executive director and founder of Global Communities Initiative based in Montpelier.

Hallsmith is one of the co-founders of Vermonters for a New Economy, and she has been an outspoken advocate for public banking, complementary currencies, new measures for economic progress such as the “Genuine Progress Indicator” and “Gross National Happiness,” and democratic ownership models like co-ops and worker-owned businesses. She announced earlier this month that she is running for mayor of Montpelier, where she was recently fired from her job as director of planning and community development, which she had held for seven years.

Last year, Montpelier Mayor John Hollar accused her of being “anti-capitalist,” and called her tenure into question, sparking a controversy over her right to advocate for New Economy issues as a private citizen, Hallsmith said in an email announcing her candidacy for mayor.

Prior to working for Montpelier, Hallsmith was the town manager in Randolph.

Smaller, local banks aren’t able to handle state deposits that amounted more than $300 million last year, so Vermont has to send those funds to large, out-of-state national banks, which invest the money in Wall Street, Hallsmith said in an interview in January.

“A public bank would be able to help local banks underwrite their lending capacity, and also would help fund and coordinate existing agencies that are already lending funds to small businesses,” she said.

For example, with backing of the Bank of North Dakota, community banks in that state are able to make larger loans that they would not be able to make. Those loans are now falling to larger national banks. The big banks that are receiving Vermont’s deposits are sending that money to Wall Street for investments and are not putting the money back into the state, Pollina and other supporters of the state bank have said.

That’s not true, D’Elia of the Bankers Association said.

“TD Bank invest heavily in Vermont with business and residential loans and community support. The bank also employs hundreds of Vermonters and contributes to local economies,” he said.

Another issue with a state bank is liquidity. The state now deposits funds on a short-term basis so that the money can be used when needed. If funds deposited in a state bank are loaned out for long-term projects as specified in the Senate and House bills, then the money would not be available for budgeted needs. The state would have to turn to bonds to fund budgets. Bond ratings could be hurt and increase the cost of borrowing, D’Elia said.

“The cost of things like building schools and other projects could be affected.”

Another problem with a state bank is liability. What happens if the bank fails?

“Now, state funds deposited with TD Bank are protected by an irrevocable letter of credit from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh. If TD Bank fails, and that’s not going to happen, all the state has to do is contact the bank in Pennsylvania to get the money. … If a state bank suffers losses, they will be borne by the taxpayers,” he said.

“We support local investment, and we are part of the local community and have been for many years. We’d like to help make the state more efficient and work in partnership with the proponents of a state bank to come up with something that is the best for all of us,” D’Elia said.

Warren Johnston can be reached at [email protected] or  603-727-3216 .

Human and Natural-Caused Climate Change

by Frank Thomas

Within three decades scientists warn, warming will be irreversible. The world’s top scientists have just formally embraced an upper limit on greenhouse gases for the first time … establishing a target level at which humanity must stop spewing them into the atmosphere or face catastrophic climate changes. Scientists warned the target was likely to be exceeded in a matter of decades unless steps were taken soon to reduce emissions. The experts cited a litany of changes already under way, warned that they were likely to accelerate and expressed virtual certainty that human activity was the main cause.

This was reported last September in the International Herald Tribune and was taken from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2012.

One of the world’s leading climate researchers, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. Center for Atmosphere Research in Boulder, Colorado came up with the best single, simple explanation of climate change. His concise explanation – with which I fully agree from my ongoing examination of what’s going on with climate change – was :

The Earth is habitable because of a natural greenhouse effect brought about mainly by water vapor (60%) and carbon dioxide (26%). Otherwise, Earth’s average temperature would be below zero Fahrenheit. Humans are altering the composition of the atmosphere, mainly by fossil fuels. As a result, carbon dioxide has gone up over 35%  (as of Dec. 2010 or 43% as of Dec. 2013) since pre-industrial times and over half of that is since 1970. This changes the greenhouse effect and traps radiation that would otherwise escape to space, thus producing warming. The warming is manifested in many ways, not just increasing surface temperatures, but also melting ice, and changing the hydrological cycle and thus rainfall. Since 1970, the effects are large enough to be outside the bounds of natural variability for global mean temperatures, but global warming does not mean inexorable increases in temperature year after year owing to natural variability.”

So much for the unfounded reactions of die-hard climate change skeptics who in effect say greenhouse gases (GHGs) do not impact climate volatility. The recent revelation of a 60% increase in the Arctic ice cap over the last 12 months does NOT support the deniers' propaganda that climate change is inherently NOT human caused … that it’s a cycle and fluctuation process naturally caused which has existed for millions of years. Pure nonsense, no scientific basis whatsoever! Pages and pages of myths have been taken down with the force of hundreds of scientific papers. Consequently, 97% of climate scientists, every major scientific body in the world and a large segment of the general public agree human GHG emissions are changing the climate. But with the exception of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and California, global action has been tragically weak to what is globally happening.

The 259 scientists from 39 countries who drafted the 5^th IPCC REPORT are more convinced than ever that global warming is “unequivocal” and humans have been the primary cause of it over the last 60 years. That the warming-up trend is human caused is now considered “extremely likely” or a 95-100% certainty, an upgrade  from a “very likely” 90%-100% certainty in the 4^th IPCC report.

What the authors are not so confident about is the slowdown in the rate of warming over the past decade or more – despite sharply rising carbon dioxide concentrations. The report admits this is not fully understood, but the most plausible answer is the natural variability of climate. The report concludes that the long “pause” in the rate of increase in warming – the highest average global temperature occurred 15 years ago – is partly due to changes in the system. For example, this includes a redistribution of heat within the ocean, and factors such as solar output. Also aerosols produced by volcanic eruptions can reflect radiation back into space, thus having a cooling effect.

Of course, there are some big uncertainties, e.g., the likely amount of warming at given levels of GHG emissions, how much the sea level will rise which can be quite different for Northern and Southern Hemispheres and at what point there is certainty that plants and animals will largely be exterminated. But the IPCC report is adamant in saying that even a future “warming pause” of 15 years is too short a period to make a clear judgment. As one American scientist who participated in writing the 5^th report commented, “People think that global warming means every year is going to be warmer than the year before. It doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a stair-step process.”

As stated, the temperature ups and down are short-term fluctuations, mostly reflecting natural variability within the past underlying 60-year gradual trend of warming of surface air temperatures. But despite short term fluctuations there has been an inexorable retreat of mountain glaciers and Arctic sea ice in the last 30 years. Also Arctic (and Antarctic) oscillations which intensify stratospheric wind speeds have in turn increased earth warming via a stratospheric positive feedback. Other contributive factors are an ecologically destructive deforestation on a massive scale and soaring ocean acidification that’s destroying phytoplankton that generates much of the atmosphere’s oxygen. As the oceans absorb more anthropogenic (definition: of, relating to, or resulting from the influence of human beings on nature) CO2, this has a severe affect on coral reefs and causes coral bleaching. The present fossil fuel acidification is much faster than natural changes and so this acid spike will be more intense than the Earth has seen in the last 800,000 years as reported by the Royal Society of UK.

From my studies, it’s of course clear that natural external climate variations – like volcanic eruptions and fluctuations in solar output – play a role. For example, the mid-century 1930-40 warming was to a significant extent caused by an increase in solar radiation. The sharp, sudden short-lived drop in global surface air temperature in 1991 was caused by the Philippine volcano, Mt. Pinatubo. A well-known example of an internal natural climate variation is El Nino. Every four years this causes a warming of the Equatorial Pacific. This happened in 1997-98 and contributed significantly to making 1998 the warmest year in the world to date. 

As summarized in the 5^th IPCC report: because of natural changes in the climate, ‘trends’ based on short term records are very sensitive to the beginning-and-end date. They do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. The larger trend is clearly towards warming. Each of the past three decades has been warmer than all others since 1850, and the first decade of the 21^st century was the warmest.

The point is that natural fluctuations have to be set aside or ignored to correctly see the human influence on climate. As one scientist noted:

Had forecasters extrapolated the mid-century warming into the future, they would have predicted far more warming than actually occurred. Likewise, the subsequent cooling trend, if used as a basis for a long-term forecast could have erroneously supported the idea of a rapidly approaching ice age. The detection of the (human determined) anthropogenic climate direction thus requires at least the analysis of long-term records. This is because we can easily be fooled by the natural fluctuations or background noise level, and we need to understand their dynamics to better estimate the internal noise level, i.e., the anthropogenic emission of GHGs (Professor of Physics Mojib Latif of Kiel University). 

IPCC scientists believe Arctic summer ice has already vanished more quickly in the past 30 years than in the previous 2000 years! Also, it may vanish completely before the middle of this century. This is the long-term trend in the face of superimposed short-term climate fluctuations like the recent 2012 Arctic ice cap increase. One climate scientist says, “The GHGs in the atmosphere will continue to accumulate for years, possibly decades, which together with the climate inertia of the climate system will support further warming.” This is another reason IPCC scientists conclude a long-term trend towards increasing anthropogenic earth warming – made worse by positive feedbacks like the Arctic Oscillation and a potentially huge methane release in the Arctic – is a not too distant reality. For example, consider global vehicle registrations, which have increased from 250 million in 1970 to 1 billion in 2010, and are forecasted to reach 2 billion by 2020. The change to electric vehicles will not diminish GHGs as long as the electrical energy to power them is produced by power plants which burn fossil fuels.

On the positive side, Nature Geoscientist published a recent study suggesting the planet may warm more slowly than feared, perhaps buying an extra decade for more aggressive near-term actions and policies to improve energy efficiency, to rigidly limit and phase out CO2 intensive coal-fired power plants, to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and transition out of oil. Global emissions can be slowed and reduced if we cut our GHG emissions, plant millions of trees and halt the slashing of forests, insulate homes and commercial buildings, use solar/wind for heating and cooling, use geothermal energy for vehicles, convert to bio-diverse organic agriculture, harvest phytoplankton in mass to strengthen sea-oxygen production and neutralize carbolic acid in seas. As CO2 concentrations reach 450 ppm, scientific research shows that this will result in grave harm to marine ecosystems and produce several ocean biogeochemical changes.

While a slowdown in earth warming – despite soaring CO2 emissions – may offer more time to take action on the exceptional hazards of climate change, TIME is getting TIGHTER and TIGHTER. COSTS of inaction are getting HIGHER and HIGHER. Delay will make us more dependent on vastly new technological innovations that carry the high risk of not being developed in a timely manner. We’re in an unstable climate system exposed to “forcings” from changes in solar radiation and greenhouse gases. In the words of Richard Alley, a world leading glaciologist and recognized analyst of Greenland ice cores:

“Abrupt climate change could always occur. But the existence of forcings greatly increases the number of possible mechanisms for abrupt change. And the more rapid the forcings, the more likely it is that the resulting change will be abrupt on the timescale of human economies or global ecosystems.”

Alley and most scientists agree that humanity is today pushing planetary life systems toward their limits. The “greenhouse effect” is good up to a point since without it planet Earth would be frozen. But there can be too much of a good thing. The man-made greenhouse gas effect is putting even more energy into the entire global system, and this will only increase global warming and wild weather volatility. Furthermore,this will be amplified by feedback effects. This global reach differs from natural oscillations that primarily redistribute heat.

The stakes are HIGH. Will we face the facts … or will we irresponsibly continue gambling that anthropogenic GHGs will not lead to an extensive ecological-human extinction by mid-century?     

February 8, 2014                                                                                       

Frank Thomas, The Netherlands

America’s “We” Problem

Robert Reich

Friday, February 14, 2014                

America has a serious “We” problem — as in “Why should we pay for them?”

The question is popping up all over the place. It underlies the debate over extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed and providing food stamps to the poor. 

It’s found in the resistance of some young and healthy people to being required to buy health insurance in order to help pay for people with preexisting health problems. 

It can be heard among the residents of upscale neighborhoods who don’t want their tax dollars going to the inhabitants of poorer neighborhoods nearby.  

The pronouns “we” and “they” are the most important of all political words. They demarcate who’s within the sphere of mutual responsibility, and who’s not. Someone within that sphere who’s needy is one of “us” — an extension of our family, friends, community, tribe – and deserving of help. But needy people outside that sphere are “them,” presumed undeserving unless proved otherwise.

The central political question faced by any nation or group is where the borders of this sphere of mutual responsibility are drawn.

Why in recent years have so many middle-class and wealthy Americans pulled the borders in closer?

The middle-class and wealthy citizens of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, for example, are trying to secede from the school district they now share with poorer residents of town, and set up their own district funded by property taxes from their higher-valued homes. 

Similar efforts are underway in Memphis, Atlanta, and Dallas. Over the past two years, two wealthy suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, have left the countywide school system in order to set up their own.

Elsewhere, upscale school districts are voting down state plans to raise their taxes in order to provide more money to poor districts, as they did recently in Colorado. 

"Why should we pay for them?" is also reverberating in wealthy places like Oakland County, Michigan, that border devastatingly poor places like Detroit.

"Now, all of a sudden, they’re having problems and they want to give part of the responsibility to the suburbs?" says L. Brooks Paterson, the Oakland County executive. “They’re not gonna talk me into being the good guy. ‘Pick up your share?’ Ha ha.”

But had the official boundary been drawn differently so that it encompassed both Oakland County and Detroit – say, to create a Greater Detroit region – the two places would form a “we” whose problems Oakland’s more affluent citizens would have some responsibility to address.

What’s going on?

One obvious explanation involves race. Detroit is mostly black; Oakland County, mostly white. The secessionist school districts in the South are almost entirely white; the neighborhoods they’re leaving behind, mostly black.

But racisim has been with us from the start. Although some southern school districts are seceding in the wake of the ending of court-ordered desegregation, race alone can’t explain the broader national pattern. According to Census Bureau numbers, two-thirds of Americans below the poverty line at any given point identify themselves as white.

Another culprit is the increasing economic stress felt by most middle-class Americans. Median household incomes are dropping and over three-quarters of Americans report they’re living paycheck to paycheck. 

It’s easier to be generous and expansive about the sphere of ”we” when incomes are rising and future prospects seem even better, as during the first three decades after World War II when America declared war on poverty and expanded civil rights. But since the late 1970s, as most paychecks have flattened or declined, adjusted for inflation, many in the stressed middle no longer want to pay for “them.”

Yet this doesn’t explain why so many wealthy America’s are also exiting. They’ve never been richer. Surely they can afford a larger “we.” But most of today’s rich adamantly refuse to pay anything close to the tax rate America’s wealthy accepted forty years ago. 

Perhaps it’s because, as inequality has widened and class divisions have hardened, America’s wealthy no longer have any idea how the other half lives. 

Being rich in today’s America means not having to come across anyone who isn’t. Exclusive prep schools, elite colleges, private jets, gated communities, tony resorts, symphony halls and opera houses, and vacation homes in the Hamptons and other exclusive vacation sites all insulate them from the rabble. 

America’s wealthy increasingly inhabit a different country from the one “they” inhabit, and America’s less fortunate seem as foreign as do the needy inhabitants of another country. 

The first step in widening the sphere of “we” is to break down the barriers — not just of race, but also, increasingly, of class, and of geographical segregation by income — that are pushing “we Americans” further and further apart.

Why The Three Biggest Economic Lessons Were Forgotten

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, February 11, 2014                

Why has America forgotten the three most important economic lessons we learned in the thirty years following World War II?

Before I answer that question, let me remind you what those lessons were:

First, America’s real job creators are consumers, whose rising wages generate jobs and growth. If average people don’t have decent wages there can be no real recovery and no sustained growth.

In those years, business boomed because American workers were getting raises, and had enough purchasing power to buy what expanding businesses had to offer. Strong labor unions ensured American workers got a fair share of the economy’s gains. It was a virtuous cycle.

Second, the rich do better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than they do with a large share of an economy that’s barely growing at all.

Between 1946 and 1974, the economy grew faster than it’s grown since, on average, because the nation was creating the largest middle class in history. The overall size of the economy doubled, as did the earnings of almost everyone. CEOs rarely took home more than forty times the average worker’s wage, yet were riding high.

Third, higher taxes on the wealthy to finance public investments — better roads, bridges, public transportation, basic research, world-class K-12 education, and affordable higher education – improve the future productivity of America. All of us gain from these investments, including the wealthy.

In those years, the top marginal tax rate on America’s highest earners never fell below 70 percent. Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower the tax rate was 91 percent. Combined with tax revenues from a growing middle class, these were enough to build the Interstate Highway system, dramatically expand public higher education, and make American public education the envy of the world.

We learned, in other words, that broadly-shared prosperity isn’t just compatible with a healthy economy that benefits everyone — it’s essential to it.

But then we forgot these lessons. For the last three decades the American economy has continued to grow but most peoples’ earnings have gone nowhere. Since the start of the recovery in 2009, 95 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent.

 

What happened?

For starters, too many of us bought the snake oil of “supply-side” economics, which said big corporations and the wealthy are the job creators – and if we cut their taxes the benefits will trickle down to everyone else. Of course, nothing trickled down.

Meanwhile, big corporations were allowed to bust labor unions, whose membership dropped from over a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to under 7 percent today.

Our roads, bridges, and public-transit systems were allowed to crumble under the weight of deferred maintenance. Our public schools deteriorated. And public higher education became so starved for funds that tuition rose to make up for shortfalls, making college unaffordable to many working families.

And Wall Street was deregulated — creating a casino capitalism that caused a near meltdown of the economy six years ago and continues to burden millions of homeowners. CEOs began taking home 300 times the earnings of the average worker.

Part of the reason for this extraordinary U-turn had to do with politics. As income and wealth concentrated at the top, so did political power. The captains of industry and of Wall Street knew what was happening, and some played leading roles in this transformation.

But why didn’t they remember the lessons learned in the thirty years after World War II – that widely-shared prosperity is good for everyone, including them?

Perhaps because they didn’t care to remember. They discovered that wealth is also relative: How rich they feel depends not just on how much money they have, but also how they live in comparison to most other people.

As the gap between America’s wealthy and the middle has widened, those at the top have felt even richer by comparison. Although a rising tide would lift all boats, many of America’s richest prefer a lower tide and bigger yachts.

Why the Lousy Jobs Report Boosted Wall Street

by Robert Reich

Saturday, February 8, 2014                

The stock market surged yesterday after the lousy jobs report. The Dow soared 160 points Friday, while the S&P 500, and Nasdaq also rose.

How can bad news on Main Street (only 113,000 jobs were created in January, on top of a meager 74,000 in December) cause good news on Wall Street?

Because investors assume:

(1) The Fed will now continue to keep interest rates low. Yes, it has announced its intention of tapering off its so-called “quantitative easing” by buying fewer long-term bonds in the months ahead. But it will likely slow down the tapering. Instead of going down to $55 billion a month of bond-buying by April, it will stay at around $60 billion to $70 billion.

(2) The slowdown in the Fed’s tapering will continue to make buying shares of stock a better deal than buying bonds – thereby pushing investors toward the stock market.

(3) Continued low interest rates will also continue to make it profitable for big investors (including corporations) to borrow money to buy back their own shares of stock, thereby pushing up their values. Apple and other companies that used to spend their spare cash and whatever they could borrow on new inventions are now focusing on short-term stock performance.

(4) With the job situation so poor, most workers will be so desperate to keep their jobs, or land one, that they will work for even less. This will keep profits high, make balance sheets look good, fuel higher stock prices.

But what’s bad for Main Street and good for Wall Street in the short term is bad for both in the long term. The American economy is at a crawl. Median household incomes are dropping. The American middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. And as companies focus ever more on short-term share prices at the expense of long-term growth, we’re in for years of sluggish performance.

When, if ever, will Wall Street learn?

Bill McKibben: We 'Dont Trust' Obama on Climate Change

Published on Friday, February 7, 2014 by Common Dreams

Environmental leader says Obama can stand up for the planet's health or fossil fuel industry, but his legacy will suffer horribly if he chooses wrong

  - Jon Queally, staff writer

'People don't trust him on [the climate change] issue,' said Bill McKibben (r) while speaking with Bill Moyers about President Obama and the Keystone XL. 'He's done some good things, but his record is mixed at best.' (Source: Moyers Media)In an interview with veteran journalist Bill Moyers set to air Friday evening, author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, a key voice in the climate justice movement, says that President Obama's looming decision to approve or reject the Keystone XL tar sands will be the ultimate indicator of whether his loyalties reside with the health of the planet and future generations or with the desires and financial interests of the fossil fuel industry.

According to McKibben, the climate movement does not trust Obama to do the right thing on the pipeline, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence and outpouring of opposition to the tar sands project. "He's done some good things, but his record is mixed at best," McKibben tells Moyers. "And he will be remembered at the moment, as the president who produced more carbon than anybody thought possible, unless he begins to act now with real power."

Articulating the very precise moment that we're in and why the stakes surrounding Keystone XL and our overall relationship to fossil fuels are so dramatically heightened at the moment, McKibben says:

Most people understand that we're in a serious fix. Eighty percent of American counties have had some kind of climate disaster in the last two or three years.

Two years ago, the New York City subway system filled with salt system, you know? Sandy was the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras. How many warnings do we want?

The world is changing. Things are possible now that weren't before because we're changing the climate.

I mean, it feels like God's doing his level best to tell us the fix that we're in, one crazy episode of weather after another. These are the alarms from a system that's beginning to swing out of control. We're supposed to be Homo sapiens. Intelligence is supposed to be our mark. We've been given the warning by our scientists who have done a terrific job at reaching consensus on a different problem in physics and chemistry. They've told us that we're in deep trouble. They've told us what we need to do, get off fossil fuel. The question now is whether we're actually going to respond to that.

And it's like a sort of, well, it's like a kind of final exam for the question, was the big brain a good adaptation or not, you know? We're going find out in short order. And each of these things that comes up like the Keystone pipeline is a kind of pop quiz along the way. And so far we're failing more of them than we're passing.

The remarks come one week since the State Department released its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on the pipeline project which green groups said contained all the information the president and Secretary of State John Kerry need to reject the project once and for all.

Though many mainstream news outlets followed the oil industry spin that tried to play the FEIS findings as a move closer to presidential approval, climate experts and opponents of the pipeline were quick to counter that narrative by saying the report clearly shows the climate impact of tar sands would make it impossible for Obama to say "yes" if he intends to keep his pledge to seriously address the crisis of global warming.

As McKibben explains, the story being peddled by the oil industry, the pipeline companies and their political backers is "unraveling" quickly in the face of the evidence. "The idea that [completing Keystone XL] would make no difference is crazy. It's a pipeline that would carry 800,000 barrels of oil. In the last two weeks, the head of TransCanada itself has said, if we can't build this pipeline, then the expansion of the tar sands is called into question."

On the Monday following the FEIS' release, thousands of climate activists in hundreds of locations across the U.S. and Canada held vigils as they called on Obama to fulfill his promises, follow the science, and say "No" to the pipeline. Led by green organizations, indigenous groups, young people and students, and concerned landowners along the pipeline route, the broad and diverse movement has vowed to fight against Keystone XL even if it gains Obama's approval. So far, nearly 80,000 people have now pledged to commit acts of civil obedience if the greenlight comes from the White House.

"What counts in moments like these are not the words in Washington’s reports, but rather the voices of people in the streets—that’s what changes the equation for the President," said 350.org online organizer Duncan Meisel in a letter to his group's members this week.

In that vein, students and youth leaders of the climate movement have announced a White House civil disobedience action on March 3rd to drive their point home. As The Nation's Peter Rothberg reports:

The sit-in is expected to be the largest act of civil disobedience by young people in the recent history of the environmental movement and it will be led by just the demographic that helped propel Obama to the presidency. The protest, known as “XL Dissent,” is meant to send a clear signal to President Obama that the base that helped elect him sees Keystone XL as a decision that will define his entire legacy.

“Obama was the first president I voted for, and I want real climate action and a rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Nick Stracco, a senior at Tulane University. “The people that voted him into office have made it absolutely clear what we want, and that’s to reject Keystone XL.”

And that's the message from McKibben as well. Championing the movement of which he feels part of—though not necessarily a leader of—McKibben said:

The movement we're trying to build looks more like we want the energy system to look like. Millions of solar panels on millions of roofs, all interconnected and tied together in the same way. That's what this political, this kind of fossil fuel resistance spread out around the world, almost as sprawling as the fossil fuel industry itself.

And for many, many sides and in many, many ways, through money, through political pressure, through sometimes civil disobedience. We've got to come at these guys. And people are figuring that out. Not because I'm telling them what to do, because it becomes clearer all the time as people get engaged.

Watch the whole interview below (check local listings here):

________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Why Widening Inequality is Hobbling Equal Opportunity

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Is it to be inequality or equal opportunity? 

Under a headline “Obama Moves to the Right in a Partisan War of Words,” The New York Times’ Jackie Calmes notes Democratic operatives have been hitting back hard against the President or any other Democratic politician talking about income inequality, preferring that the Democrats talk about equality of opportunity instead.

"However salient reducing inequality may be," writes Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, “it is demonstrably less important to voters than any other number of priorities, incudlng reducing poverty.”

The President may be listening. Wags noticed that in his State of the Union, Obama spoke ten times of increasing “opportunity” and only twice of income inequality, while in a December speech he spoke of income inequality two dozen times. 
But the President and other Democrats — and even Republicans, for that matter — should focus on the facts, not the polls, and not try to dress up what’s been happening with more soothing words and phrases. 

In fact, America’s savage inequality is the main reason equal opportunity is fading and poverty is growing. Since the “recovery” began, 95% of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, and median incomes have dropped. This is a continuation of the trend we’ve seen for decades. As a result:

(1) The sinking middle class no longer has enough purchasing power to keep the economy growing and creating sufficient jobs. The share of working-age Americans still in the labor force is the lowest in more than thirty years. 

(2) The shrinking middle isn’t generating enough tax revenue for adequate education, training, safety nets, and family services. And when they’re barely holding on, they can’t afford to — and don’t want to — pay more.

(3) Meanwhile, America’s rich are accumulating not just more of the country’s total income and wealth, but also the political power that accompanies money. And they’re using that power to reduce their own taxes, and get corporate welfare (subsidies, bailouts, tax cuts) for their businesses.

All this means less equality of opportunity in America. 
Obama was correct in December when he called widening inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” He mustn’t back down now even if Democratic pollsters tell him to. If we’re ever to reverse this noxious trend, Americans have to hear the truth. 

U.K.’s January Flooding Surpasses All 247 Years of Data on the Books

Ari Philips

ThinkProgress/ News Report

Published: Sunday 2 February 2014

 

 

 

As California sees the future impacts of climate change playing out in the form of epic drought on one side of the globe, across the map in the U.K. residents are seeing an opposite but related climate effect: Severe and unprecedented flooding.

As California sees the future impacts of climate change playing out in the form of epic drought on one side of the globe, across the map in the U.K. residents are seeing an opposite but related climate effect: Severe and unprecedented flooding.

According to the world’s longest-running weather station, the Radcliffe Meteorological Station at Oxford University, more rain fell there in January than during any winter month since daily recording started in 1767. Total rainfall last month was around 5.8 inches, more than three times the average.

It doesn’t look like February will bring much respite from the deluge. “There will be more wet and windy weather from the Atlantic this week,” Met Office forecaster Callum MacColl told the Guardian. “And the 15-day outlook sees the unsettled theme very much continuing.”

The “unsettled theme” applies to the impacts the wet weather is having on communities as well as the conditions that give rise to it. Last week U.K. Environment Minister Owen Paterson ordered for a plan that creates a long-term solution to deal with the flooding, as efforts to keep the damages at bay tested the limits of the country’s Environment Agency’s resources.

The Environment Agency has issued nine severe flood warnings — the highest level of alert — in parts of Southern England and Wales where up to 1.2 inches of rain is scheduled to fall over the weekend. The Agency considers lives to be in danger and is discussing the option of deploying military amphibious vehicles with the Ministry of Defense to help those in need.

Flooding is expected to be the greatest threat of a changing climate posed to the country, according to a 2012 report published by the U.K.’s environment department.

Models show Britain will see an average increase of between four and 12 percent rainfall in the next 20 years.

“We are seeing more extreme temperatures and more intense rainfall events around the world,” Dr. Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office Hadley Centre, told The Telegraph. “The expectation in a warming world is for an increased frequency of heatwaves and greater moisture in a warmer atmosphere is expected to lead extreme precipitation events, more intense and more frequent.”

Post Office Banking Could be the Start of Something Big

Richard (RJ) Eskow

Campaign for America’s Future/ Op-Ed

Published: Friday 7 February 2014

 

The postal banking concept deserves consideration on its own merits. But there’s another compelling reason to support it; It could be the start of something big.

It seems like an idea whose time has come. With one in four American households partially or entirely excluded from the current banking system, and with the U.S. Post Office in search of additional revenue, why not use the postal system to offer banking services to lower-income households?

In fact, this is an idea whose time has already come, more than once. Many nations – among them Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Israel, and Brazil – provide or have provided some form of postal banking services. So did the United States, until 1966.

It’s hardly a radical idea. The U.S. system was voted into law in 1910, during the presidency of William Howard Taft. In any case, a better way to describe it would be as a beginning.

What better way to start a much-needed transformation of our financial sector than by providing services to those communities the financial industry refers to as the “unbanked”? Right now those communities are routinely victimized by predatory payday lenders. As wefirst reported in 2010,

“Studies have shown that payday lenders disproportionately exploit minority neighborhoods with loans that are issued at an average annual interest rate of 455%. The average number of loan each borrower takes out is nine per year, according to one study, as these high rates lead to a cycle of indebtedness.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has endorsed the postal-banking concept, which David Dayen describes in more detail here. As Sen. Warren wrote recently, “if the Postal Service offered basic banking services — nothing fancy, just basic bill paying, check cashing and small-dollar loans — then it could provide affordable financial services for underserved families, and, at the same time, shore up its own financial footing.”

The report that stimulated all this new discussion was written by the Post Office’s Inspector General, and it makes a compelling case.

                                    

Who wouldn’t benefit from this proposal? Well, there are the payday lenders, of course. Then there are the politicians they support, and to serve them in return, like Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. The other politicians and lobbyists who feed at the trough, a spectacle which only becomes publicly visible when their lobbying succeeds – which is often.

And then there are the big banks who underwrite the payday lending industry to a large, and largely invisible, extent. Those banks were bailed out by the American taxpayer, and continue to benefit from implicit and explicit government subsidies.

As the big-money interests band together to decry postal banking as “socialism,” it might be worth asking them why it’s not socialistic to keep bailing out the private-sector predators who currently dominate this market.

But there are other reasons to support this concept, too. If it works – and it will, if managed correctly – it will be a great boon for the transformative idea of public banking.  Public banking can include state-owned lending institutions like the Bank of North Dakota, county banks, and cooperatives. President Obama’s MyRA savings plan is also a form of public banking. Even Sen. Warren’s plan to link student loan rates to the rates which private banks get from the Federal Reserve is a variation on the public-banking theme.

Bankers, lobbyists, and their political apologists constantly tell us that the private sector can manage money better than the government can. If so, they should have no compunction about supporting this idea. Private lenders will still be free to compete for this business. If they can offer a better and more reliable product, and they can do so legally and ethically, they have nothing to fear.

They do have something to fear, of course: competition. While they claim to embrace it, they have no interests in proving their worth by competing on a level playing field with government – or, for that matter, with their own smaller competitors like credit unions and community banks.

Government institutions like the Post Office have a number of advantages over the big banks. For one thing, they have publicly accountable inspector generals, like the one who wrote this report. As has been demonstrated by recent experience, the private banks do not. Instead, powerful Wall Street institutions have a history of fraud and criminality that has been tacitly encouraged by lax law enforcement in Washington.

The situation has gotten so bad that the editor-in-chief of American Banker concluded this week that “bank executives would be crazy to hold back (from unethical and corrupt acts). If they get caught, they can pay their way out of the problems with shareholders’ money. And if their misdeeds pay off as expected, the profits will goose their pay.”

In a situation like that, who would you trust with your money: a powerful Wall Street banker, or a government institution? It’s time the big banks competed for the public’s business and stopped being the primary recipients of the public’s largesse. We need a sea-change in the banking industry. Public banking could provide it – either by transforming the banking system, or by forcing it to transform itself through genuine competition.

The postal banking concept deserves consideration on its own merits. But there’s another compelling reason to support it: It could be the start of something big.

West Coast’s First Offshore Wind Turbine Gets Green Light for Development

Brandon Baker

EcoWatch/ News Report

Published: Friday 7 February 2014

 

“The WindFloat Pacific project is the latest in a series of lease initiatives BOEM has undertaken to move forward offshore wind energy development.”

The development of what should be the U.S.’ first offshore wind farm on the West Coast received a boost this week, earning approval to begin building. 

The approval of a five-turbine, 30-megawatt (MW) pilot project off Coos Bay in Oregon was announced Wednesday by Gov. John Kitzhaber, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Tommy Beaudreau. The farm would be about 15 miles from shore in about 1,400 feet of water, according to The Associated Press.

Seattle-based Principle Power will use a floating wind turbine technology that has not been deployed in U.S. waters but has been used in Europe and Asia. Belinda Batten, director of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center at Oregon State University, told The Associated Press that plans for offshore farms on the West Coast had yet to surface because of different technological needs to deal with the Pacific Ocean getting deeper more quickly than the Atlantic or other areas. Turbines off the Atlantic coast will be anchored to the seabed.

 The Coos Bay project will use electrical cables and a single power cable to transmit electricity back to the mainland. “We’re not as anxious to commercialize it, but it’s still worth getting the projects into the water and testing them,” Batten said. “As we learn how to deploy and maintain them, the price will come down.”

Using statistics from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Interior estimates that the West Coast is capable of producing more than 800 gigawatts (GW) of wind energy—which equals more than three-quarters of the nation’s entire power generation capacity, according to North American Wind Power. The estimate for the whole country is nearly 2,000 GW.

“The WindFloat Pacific project is the latest in a series of lease initiatives BOEM has undertaken to move forward offshore wind energy development,” Beaudreau said. “On the Atlantic Coast, the five commercial project leases we’ve issued, if fully developed, could generate enough renewable energy to power 1.4 million homes.”

Atlantic coast projects include a pilot project in Maine that developers hope will give way to a 500-MW farm, as well as a wind farm to be constructed off the shores of Cape Cod, MA that has been stymied by lawsuits from opposers.

The Real Job Creators: The US Military and the Military-Industrial Complex

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

In 1961 President Eisenhauer warned us about the military-industrial complex (MIC). He said, "We annually spend on military security more than  the net income of all United States corporations." Since then spending on the military and the MIC has only skyrocketed. Taken together, they, not the rich, are the main job creators in the US. If you graduate from high school and can't get a job, no problem. The military will accept you with open arms, provide you with on-the-job training, even give you a signing bonus. Why stand in an unemployment line or apply for a job along with 500 other applicants? Or go into debt to attend some schlock college?

If you're a college graduate and can't get hired, try the MIC: the NSA, the CIA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics - they're the real job creators. The cost plus contracts that the defense contractors work under guarantee that there will be lots of jobs available. Why? Because the more they spend on labor including unionized labor, the more they make in profits. That's the essence of a cost plus contract. The more something costs, the more profits they make. Usually they make a 10 % profit over and above all they manage to spend including cost overruns. It's the exact reverse of the commercial economy where they try to get rid of unions. Unions and the MIC are on the same wavelength. The more they pay labor, the more profits they make.

Despite spending trillions of dollars on war and preparation for war since 9/11, the US has managed to destabilize the middle east, incur great loss of life and limb of both US and foreign citizens and create millions of displaced persons and refugees. AND FOR WHAT? Iraq was a stable society before George W Bush decided to invade it in order to be a war time President and wrap himself in glory (remember "Mission Accomplished"?). Now it's being taken over by Al Qaeda and people there have to fear for their lives on a daily basis. When Saddam was there, Iraq was a stable society and there was no possibility of Al Qaeda gaining a foothold because Saddam hated them. Egypt was a stable society before they decided to get rid of Mubarek and now Egypt is in a state of chaos. Syria is busy blowing everyone and everything up. Same goes for Libya. What has been accomplished by the US military? Answer: the destabilization and widespread misery of the middle east and northern Africa and the waste of trillions of dollars that could have been spent on improving the lives of American citizens.

The Syrian refugee crisis has exploded from about 270,000 people a year ago to today’s tally of more than two million who have fled the country. The pace of the diaspora has been characterized by the United Nations as the worst since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In addition, an estimated 4.25 million Syrians have been displaced within their country, bringing the total number forced into flight to more than six million.

If we hadn't spent a cent on the military and the MIC, great portions of the world would be better off today, and we could have spent that money on improving the lives of American citizens and the state of American infrastructure. The United States has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Results? Destabilization, chaos, refugee crises and lost opportunities to improve the lives of American citizens and citizens of other countries.

If we want to shrink the size of the MIC, a good place to start is here in San Diego. San Diego is home to the largest concentration of military in the world. Total employment in the sector accounts for one of every four jobs in the San Diego region. This includes uniformed military, defense contracting and civilian employment, and related support employment. San Diego is the home port for more than 60 percent of the ships in the Pacific Fleet. Expertise in the defense-related research and development includes command and control systems, reconnaissance and surveillance systems, unmanned vehicles and cyber security. Not to mention - drones.

If we want to establish a demilitarized-industrial-complex zone in San Diego, what necessarily follows is a loss of jobs in San Diego. Yet no politician, not even David Alvarez, will consider such a possibility. There is no possibility of transitioning military related jobs to jobs in the civilian sector. We are stuck with the world's largest military and being a militarist nation, the world's largest bully! The U.S. spent more on defense in 2012 than did the countries with the next 10 highest defense budgets combined. The fact that we are absolutely dependent on military and MIC jobs in San Diego is tantamount to the fact that the US is stuck in the mold of a national militarist state. The US economy is utterly dependent on war and preparation for war despite the fact that all this spending and all these jobs have done nothing to make the world a better place. In fact it has done a lot to make the world a worse place.

The Barrio Logan Community Plan has had to do battle with defense contractor General Dynamics which owns NASSCO, a division that repairs Navy ships. GD even enlisted the help of its unionized workers to lobby against the BLCP on the grounds that jobs would be lost if the BLCP was approved. However, when the union figured out it was lied to by GD and NASSCO, they switched sides. The city council finally gave approval to the BLCP, but GD and NASSCO were not giving up. They have run a campaign to get enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot and have the voters decide. Meanwhile, they can lobby, advertise and try to convince the voters that the BLCP should not go into effect. The MIC is firmly committed to staying in San Diego.

This issue now is at the heart of the mayoral race between Kevin Faulconer and David Alvarez. Alvarez wants the BLCP implemented while Faulconer continues to purvey the lie that 46,000 union jobs will be lost. Imagine that - a Republican campaigning for union jobs! It is inconceivable that any candidate, left or right, would campaign on the platform that military related jobs should leave San Diego. That's how you know we are deeply and inextricably living in a national militarized state - when military related jobs are necessary to the functioning of the economy and to the maintenance of jobs. All those trillions of dollars spent on the military and MIC went to someone's job or to corporate profits.

Meanwhile, a staggering number of women and children are at risk of falling into poverty. An estimated 42 million women — and 28 million dependent children — are saddled with financial hardship. According to a recent report, Maria Shriver said, ""These are not women who are wondering if they can 'have it all'. These are women who are already doing it all — working hard, providing, parenting, and care-giving. They're doing it all, yet they and their families can't prosper, and that's weighing the U.S. economy down."

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US gets a D+ on its infrastructure which needs $3.6 trillion in repairs. But fear not. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is continuing a vast construction program in Afghanistan, renovating bridges and building facilities for Afghan security forces. How nice of them. Do you think they might some day renovate bridges in this country?

Will San Diego ever transition to a truly civilian economy and away from a military related economy? 2014 doesn't auger well for that scenario. "San Diego has emerged as an Unmanned Systems [that's MIC speak for drones] hub. Recognizing the talent and opportunities present in the region, defense innovator Northrop Grumman designated San Diego its Unmanned Systems Center of Excellence. The designation meant 300 more jobs at the company's Rancho Bernardo location."

And then we have this quotidian prognosis: "The United States defense strategy has deemed that a Pivot to the Pacific, aligning defense resources with the Pacific Rim, is a crucial foreign policy strategy. Because of San Diego's location and existing military footprint, this meant the region was well-positioned, despite sequestration, to gain valuable resources. The USS Reagan and its 2,500 person crew returned to San Diego after a year in maintenance. The USS Vinson, and its 6,000 plus crew, also returned to its port in San Diego. According to the SDMAC Military Economic Impact Study, the two aircraft carriers home ported here will each add about $500 million to the economy."