Oliver Milman — More than half US population lives amid dangerous air pollution, report warns

Not just climate change. I changed my place of residence, previously large cities, in 1973, something I would not have done otherwise. Never looked back. I did some short stints in cities since, working on projects, fortunately never in stinkpots.

The Guardian
More than half US population lives amid dangerous air pollution, report warns
Oliver Milman

Bill Mitchell — Governments do not need the savings of the rich, nor their taxes!

In Chapter 24 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy towards which the General Theory might Lead, John Maynard Keynes confronted the issue of the “arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes” in capitalist economies. The argument he advances in that Chapter of his 1936 book contains guidelines for the progressive left that some just cannot seem to grasp. In short, governments (as our agents) do not need the savings of the rich to ensure that society prospers. There was another interesting contribution in 1946 from the American statistician and economist – Beardsley Ruml – who wrote that “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete”. The progressive left would be advised to study his work and stop building political policy platforms on the claim that governments needs to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes so that adequate public services and infrastructure can be provided. The incomes and taxes paid by the rich are largely irrelevant to the capacity of a national, currency-issuing government to provide first-class public services and infrastructure. It is time to re-frame the debate and the way in which progressive political forces state their policy aspirations….

According to functional finance, the purpose of taxation is to control inflation rather than fund government that is a currency sovereign.

Taxes also discourage behaviors that are taxed. Therefore, taxes can also serve as a negative incentives for negative externalities.

Is the political power and social influence that great wealth accrues a negative externality, for example, leading to cronyism and corruption? If so, should it be taxed away to level the playing field? This is the debate that we should be having.

So the government might impose taxes:

1. To control inflation.

2. To redistribute purchasing power from the rich to the poor (high income to low income).

3. To alter the allocation of resources away from undesirable ends – such as tobacco taxes.

4. To provide some hypothecated public transparency for major projects/programs.
So from a functional finance perspective, taxation must be designed to advance these purposes and the public discussion must be about the idea of public purpose and never about raising revenue.

So from a functional finance perspective, taxation must be designed to advance these purposes and the public discussion must be about the idea of public purpose and never about raising revenue.…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Governments do not need the savings of the rich, nor their taxes!Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

John McMurtry — The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution

This is a long post that summarizes Prof. Murtry's book, The Cancer of Capitalism. Download a free PDF of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 1999). I have extracted a summary of the summary but the whole post is worth a read.

It's not in paradigm with MMT but that he not his focus and he cuts to the case about what is truly important economically and socially — "life capital" as that which supports evolving life and is not life-damaging.

As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like GDP, commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically attacked rather than advanced.…

“the neo-liberal turn”:

• Rationality = Self-Maximizing Choice 
• = Always More Money-Value for Self is Good 
• = Self-Multiplying Sequences of Ever More Money to the Top Under 1%
• = the Ruling Growth System with No Committed Life Functions
• = All Else is Disposable Means to this Multiplying Pathogenic Growth

One can test this ruling moral meta program on every degenerate trend.…

None of this can be seen by [neoclassically based conventional] ‘Economics’ because it is a pseudo-science.…

… whatever does not fit this a-priori life-blind construction is heretical in graduate schools supplying economic advisers to governments and corporations, and taboo in the corporate press and media to the extent of its contradiction. It is not only a mechanical model, but is absurdly “freedom” and “well-being at the same time. Whatever deviates from it, conversely, is “irrational” or “despotic”. At the system-wide level of ruling story, the plot is universal for all societies. Purely self-maximizing atomic selves in the market are believed to necessitate the best of possible worlds by an invisible hand of competition ensuring lowest money costs. Life costs do not compute, and “economic growth” is consistent with destroying all life support systems.…

Societies have thus been everywhere ‘restructured’ as subordinate functions to the inexorable transformation of humanity and the world into ever more private commodities and profits...

Behind every step of degeneration lie failures of social knowledge:

(1) failure to diagnose the regulating value mechanism at work; 

(2) failure to connect across the domains of life despoliation as predictable from the system’s blind money-demand multiplications;

(3) failure to define or demand any public policies against its despoiling and devouring life support systems with the public increasingly financing the out-of-control feeding cycles; 

(4) failure to recognise any life-value principle or ground of the real economy itself.…

Thus an absurd metaphysics comes to rule which cannot be decoded because its first principles and axioms are a-priori dictates not subject to critical examination. The first principle of this life-blind economics begins by disconnection from all life requirements, grounds and and needs – thus mutating the economy’s provision of otherwise scarce material life goods into an opposite meaning where life goods and life capital do not exist. Capital is assumed as private money-sequences multiplying themselves with life capital blinkered out. Private commodities are assumed to be ‘goods’ although they are in fact increasingly bads for organic, social and ecological life hosts.…

Capital is not life wealth that can produce more life wealth without loss, but increasing transnational private money sequences hollowing out life capital on every plane.…

At the normative level of this doctrine, a ludicrous and fatal doctrine of freedom rules the war and peace of nations beneath consciousness of it. Freedom = freedom for private money demand only = in proportion to the amount controlled = ever less freedom for those with less of it = no right to life for those without it.…

This criterion of life value is no more a matter of opinion than people’s life necessities are. But what are these life needs that no economic paradigm – orthodox or revolutionary – defines? They are in every case that without which life capacities are reduced. Life capital, in turn, is that which produces and reproduces these life goods – from literacy and extending knowledge to the soil we grow in and air we breathe. The ruling value mechanism miscalled ‘the global economy’ is the opposite. It attacks life goods and capital everywhere as ‘externalities’ to its self-multiplying money-sequence and commodity cycles. But because such growth is assumed to be growing life value, the greatest value reversal in history is unseen.…

The underlying turning point is as old as human evolution itself. Every human advance is by knowing what enables life through time from what does not. Collective life advance is transmitting this life-and-death knowledge across selves and generations. The life capital code holds across cultures. Life goods are always that without which life capacities decline and die. All real needs, all real demand, all real supply, and all real economics are known by this criterion. The lost line between good and evil is found in this principle, and so too human freedom and well-being.
We can define the meaning more concretely as follows Every human life suffers and degenerates towards disease and death without breathable and unpolluted air, clean water and waste cycles, nourishing food and drink, protective living space, supportive love, healthcare when needed, a life-coherent environment, symbolic interaction, and meaningful work to perform. All are measurable in sufficiency across cases. All are now degraded, polluted or perverted by the self-multiplying money-capital system defined above.

Collective Life Capital the Missing Link across Divisions

Collective life capital is the long-missing principle of the common interest and collective agency. The life capital code goes deeper than gender, culture or individual differences, and includes past as well as future generations by definition. It is objective, impartial, and universally applicable. It is the ultimate regulator of the economic principles of efficiency, productivity and development. It grounds political legitimacy and supersedes ruinous man-nature, economy-environment splits and individual-social conflicts of interest. By its regulation, freedom is made responsible to its own conditions of possibility. Life capital defines an inner logic of life value which cannot in principle go wrong within or beyond economics. 

Collective life capital is the missing common ground and measure across the lines of death itself. It is the this-worldly bridging concept across the impasse of global culture wars, economy-versus–environment thinking, present-versus-future interests, male versus female conflicts, and all other warring dichotomies wrenching us from our shared life ground beneath property lines and the mors immortalis of reality on earth. 

The difference from received ultimate principles of value across time and theories is in the objective precision of meaning and direction when value judgement and decision are governed by its laws of: (1) life value regulator from start to finish, (2) production of more life value capacity through generational time, (3) life-value measure to tell greater from lesser in any domain by margins of capacity loss or gain, (4) cumulative life gain as the organizing goal of the process throughout, and (5) the meta principle: the more coherently inclusive any decision or action is in enabling life capacities, the better it always is for the world.…

Obviously a real economy would regulate for life capital conservation and advance with money sequences only as means [rather than as an end].

The organizing principle of real economy is long anticipated by China’s Tao-Te Ching and the West’s autarkia of human self-realization, and many prove it in their own lives. Minimal demand on short resources to enable maximum life capacities is the war of recovery on social as well as individual levels. While every corporate state now presses for ever more energy extraction and use with no limit of public and life costs at every imaginable level, the root of economic rationality – ration to need – is effectively taboo in official culture. 

Once the life-capital system decider kicks in, the rules of selection for what compossibly enables rather than disables human and fellow life on earth become evident to reason and learning from mistakes – the ultimate incapacity of the now ruling global system. This is the transformation to true economy and life emancipation, and it can only proceed in accord with the life capital principle that holds across individual, social and environmental life hosts.

Global Research

The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution
John McMurtry, FRSC is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada. Most recently, he has focused his research on the value structure of economic theory and its consequences for global civil and environmental life. (Wikipedia)

Timothy Cama — Senate GOP steeling for battle against EPA

Because mandate.

The Hill
Senate GOP steeling for battle against EPA
Timothy Cama

Qin Guangrong — Chinese Shift: Put the Environment Above GDP Growth

"We would rather reduce our growth rate a bit in order to protect the environment and never seek short-term economic development at the expense of the environment. We should never pursue a 'pollution first, treatment later' approach. "

World Post
Chinese Shift: Put the Environment Above GDP Growth
Qin Guangrong | Communist Party Secretary of Yunnan Province, China

Rebecca Leber — Exxon CEO Joins Suit to Stop Fracking By His Home Because He's Worried About His Property Values

But Big Oil Exec Rex Tillerson is fine with hydrofracking when it adversely affects others.

AlterNet
Exxon CEO Joins Suit to Stop Fracking By His Home Because He's Worried About His Property Values

Rebecca Leber, Climate Progress

Robin Broad — Governments and Activists are Fighting the Corporate “Right” to Sue Governments

This post is drawn from a new article regular TCB contributor Robin Broad wrote with John Cavanagh, “A Strategic Fight Against Corporate Rule,” The Nation, February 3, 2014.

TripleCrisis
Governments and Activists are Fighting the Corporate “Right” to Sue Governments
Robin Broad

Ari Phillips — Ford Debuts New Car That Saves Each Driver Four Metric Tons Of Greenhouse Gas Per Year

That's a state of the art solar panel on the roof.

Climate Progress
Ford Debuts New Car That Saves Each Driver Four Metric Tons Of Greenhouse Gas Per Year

Ari Phillips

Pope Francis — Evangelii Gaudium, 56

Conservatives seem to have caught their breath and are now attacking the Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis as "Marxist." Here is the passage in especially in question.

56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. — Evangelii Gaudium

Marxist? Really?

Richard D Wolff — Capitalism and Unemployment

Unemployment has three dimensions that often escape public discussion, perhaps because they raise such fundamental questions about the capitalist system. The first dimension concerns the immense losses for society from the kind of unemployment capitalism reproduces and that we suffer today....

Capitalists make those decisions based on what is privately profitable for them, not on what is lost to society. And that loss is huge....

The second dimension of unemployment is the actual costs it imposes on society, costs not borne entirely, or even chiefly, by the capitalists whose decisions determine unemployment....

Capitalism socializes unemployment's immense costs.... [negative externality]The third dimension of unemployment concerns how capitalism distributes unemployment among workers....

Capitalists defend their "right" to hire and fire as an "entitlement" that cannot be questioned. Yet it surely should be challenged on grounds of its undemocratic nature and its perverse social results.

Not to mention the immense cost of socializing the consequences of unemployment, which constitutes a public subsidy to the ownership class that externalizes the cost to society as a whole and saves the subsidy. For example, Walmart is complaining that its profits are falling due to food stamp cuts. It's also clear from the data that the deficit spending stimulus is approximately equal to corporate gains.

Truthout
Capitalism and Unemployment

Richard D Wolff | Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Richard Wolff — Nothing’s changed: Both political parties aim to protect and reinforce the capitalist system

The economic aim of both major US political parties is, in the end, the same: to protect and reinforce the capitalist system.

The Republican party does so chiefly by means of a systematic, unremitting demonization of the government. They blame it for whatever ails the capitalist economy. If unemployment grows, they point to government policies and actions, and attack particular politicians for what they did or did not do to stimulate the economy, directing criticism away from the employers who actually deprive workers of their jobs.

Republican solutions for capitalism’s ills always involve reducing the government’s demands on private capitalists – lower their taxes, deregulate their activities, and privatize government production of goods and services. Their program for the future is always: free the private capitalist system from government intervention, and you will get “prosperity” and growth.

The Democrats protect and reproduce the system by assigning to the government the task of minimizing the problems that beset capitalism. So, for example, they want the business cycles that are an inherent affliction of capitalism to be foreseen, planned for, minimized and overcome by government intervention. This is the underlying purpose of Keynesian economics and the monetary and fiscal policies it generates.

Beyond cycles, capitalism’s more long-term problems, such as tendencies to produce greatinequalities of income and accumulated wealth, lead Democrats to propose very modest government redistribution programs. Minimum wages, progressive tax structures, food, housing and other subsidies, and freely-distributed public services exemplify Democrats’ Bandaids meant to protect capitalism from its own potentially self-destructive tendencies...

The Raw Story
Nothing’s changed: Both political parties aim to protect and reinforce the capitalist system
Richard Wolff, The Guardian

When capital is institutionally favored over other key factors, labor and the environment, then a power structure and a privileged class results whose objective is not efficiency of capital but rather expansion of class privilege evinced as power and wealth. This results in social, political and economic distortion and systemic dysfunction at the expense of the other factors, labor and the environment.

AFP — World Health Organization: Outdoor air pollution a leading cause of cancer

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday classified outdoor air pollution as a leading cause of cancer in humans.

“The air we breathe has become polluted with a mixture of cancer-causing substances,” said Kurt Straif of the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

“We now know that outdoor air pollution is not only a major risk to health in general, but also a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths.”

The IARC said a panel of top experts had found “sufficient evidence” that exposure to outdoor air pollution caused lung cancer and raised the risk of bladder cancer.

Although the composition of air pollution and levels of exposure can vary dramatically between locations, the agency said its conclusions applied to all regions of the globe.

Air pollution was already known to increase the risk of respiratory and heart diseases.

The Raw Story
World Health Organization: Outdoor air pollution a leading cause of cancer
Agence France-Presse

The Green Man — Congressional Democrat Proposes Ban On Climate Action

Yesterday, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives stepped up to deal with the issue – by protecting the market forces that have led to the climate crisis in the first place. Congressman Nick Rahall introduced H.R. 1486, legislation that would make it against the law for the government to shift the expense of carbon dioxide pollution from individuals and small businesses to the corporations that release the pollution in the first place. Rahall’s bill would ban an entire category of action to confront climate change, with the goal of protecting the dirty energy dominance of fossil fuels corporations.

Irregular Times
Congressional Democrat Proposes Ban On Climate Action
The Green Man

James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore — Climate Cover-Up

DeSmog Blog

Climate Cover-Up  The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore

Jeff Spross — Bombshell IMF Study: United States Is World’s Number One Fossil Fuel Subsidizer

Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

Climate Progress
Bombshell IMF Study: United States Is World’s Number One Fossil Fuel Subsidizer
Jeff Spross

As Warren Mosler says, a subsidy is a negative tax. Now we learn that it is necessary not only to eliminate the subsidies but to increase taxes and regulation (which increases costs) in order to save the home planet.

But developing an inexpensive, renewable, clean source of transportable energy is of the highest priority to avoid severe culling of the species.

David Bollier — Viewing Education as a Commons

Enclosures bring with them a pathology that most markets entail, however. Their success often stems from "externalizing" as many costs as they can onto the community, students or future generations, so that the business enterprise can become more "efficient" and "productive." This is how markets routinely function -- by generating externalities. It is why industry does not take adequate account of the long-term health of nature.

Enclosures of public schools are doing the same thing. They exclude those students who are more difficult or costly to teach -- the low achievers, those with learning disabilities, and those who may not fit in. They regard students (or their parents) as "consumers," not as co-producers and collaborators in the educational process. Learning that cannot be measured in clear metrics (and therefore which cannot be a basis for market competition) are regard as secondary or inconsequential. The shared commitments of a community to each other, or the need for inclusiveness and social equity, are not seen as important because, as in any market, we are all "individuals." These are just a few reasons why the market paradigm is inappropriate as a regime for understanding the challenges of education and managing public schools.

David Bollier
Viewing Education as a Commons

The "tragedy of the commons" now being applied to public education with the claim that private enterprise can do it more efficiently and effectively, but this is only the case due to generating externalities that are not computed in determining true cost and true price.

Jeff Spross — In Australia, Wind Power Is Already Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels, And Solar Is Right Behind

According to the latest research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, electricity from wind power can now be supplied more cheaply in Australia than power from either coal or natural gas — and solar and other forms of renewable energy aren’t far behind.
Older coal-fired power plants from the 70s and 80s still compete at lower prices than renewables — but only because their construction costs have depreciated. For the deployment of any new power generation in Australia, renewables now appear to be the way to go.

Australia currently charges polluters $23 in Australian dollars per metric ton of carbon they emit, but the study concluded that wind power would still undercut fossil fuels even without that correction of the market’s failure to properly build in the costs of carbon pollution....

Climate Progress
In Australia, Wind Power Is Already Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels, And Solar Is Right Behind
Jeff Spross

First study showing Northern Hemisphere enveloped by Fukushima radiation

AbstractMassive amounts of anthropogenic radionuclides were released from the nuclear reactors located in Fukushima (northeastern Japan) between 12 and 16 March 2011 following the earthquake and tsunami. Ground level air radioactivity was monitored around the globe immediately after the Fukushima accident. This global effort provided a unique opportunity to trace the surface air mass movement at different sites in the Northern Hemisphere. Based on surface air radioactivity measurements around the globe and the air mass backward trajectory analysis of the Fukushima radioactive plume at various places in the Northern Hemisphere by employing the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory model, we show for the first time, that the uninterrupted complete revolution of the mid-latitude Surface Westerlies took place in less than 21 days, with an average zonal velocity of >60 km/h. The position and circulation time scale of Surface Westerlies are of wide interest to a large number of global researchers including meteorologists, atmospheric researchers and global climate modellers.
© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Science of the Total Environment 438 (2012) 80–85
Tracking the complete revolution of surface westerlies over Northern Hemisphere using radionuclides emitted from Fukushima
M.A. Hernández-Ceballosa, Department of Applied Physics, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain, G.H. Hong, Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute, Ansan 426–744, South Korea , R.L. Lozano a , Y.I. Kim Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute, Uljin 767–813, South Korea, H.M. Lee, Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute, Ansan 426–744 , S.H. Kim Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute, Ansan 426–744 , S.-W. Yeh, Department of Environmental Marine Science, Hanyang University, Ansan, 426–791, South Korea , J.P. Bolívar, Department of Applied Physics, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain, ⁎, M. Baskaran, Department of Geology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA a Department of Applied Physics, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain
(H/t Peak Oil)

Tara Lohan — Romney Releases Energy Plan for the 19th Century: We Are Doomed

Here's a frightening look at what a Romney-Ryan ticket looks like for the environment and our future.

AlterNet
Romney Releases Energy Plan for the 19th Century: We Are Doomed
Tara Lohan

Paul B. Farrell — Big Oil is Earth’s Public Enemy No. 1

Commentary: 200-year supply but we’re all dead in 50
Read it at MarketWatch
Big Oil is Earth’s Public Enemy No. 1
Paul B. Farrell