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{ Installment 7 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

The elusive threshold

Paradoxically, the concept of a traffic-optimal top speed for transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger, whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver. Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger and too high to convey the sense of a limit to the three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power.

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While Bloomberg News was boasting that Chevron might be able to muscle its way out of paying a cent for the environmental damage that Texaco wrought upon Ecuador, Democracy Now! was reporting on the hypocrisy of Chevron’s legal maneuvers, led for years by our own Deval Patrick. Which side are you on, Governor Patrick?

Continue reading Chevron ordered to pay $17 billion for Ecuador pollution
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This article is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book which has the working title ‘The End of Growth’ and is set for publication by New Society Publishers in July 2011. Given the urgency and fragility of the global economic crisis, the Post Carbon Institute is serializing the rough content as Richard writes it. Additionally, Richard will be offering ‘live peeks’ at the events and information that inform his writing process through Facebook and Twitter accounts created expressly for this publication.

The article was originally published as the MuseLetter #222

Introduction: The New Normal

The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.

The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades-a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.

Continue reading Intro: The End of Growth
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{ Installment 6 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

The radical monopoly of industry

A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.

Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed-and with it the cost-of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.

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{ Installment 5 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

The ineffectiveness of acceleration

It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society, while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that transportation claims.

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Report: Austerity Policies Worsen Racial Economic Inequalities, Hit Blacks and Latinos Hardest

United for a Fair Economy Releases State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom? for MLK Day

by United for a Fair Economy, reprinted from Common Dreams

BOSTON — The official unemployment rate is 15.8 percent among Blacks and 13 percent among Latinos; Blacks earn only 57 cents for each dollar of White family income, Latinos earn 59 cents; and Blacks have only 10 cents of net wealth while Latinos have 12 cents to every dollar of net wealth that Whites have. As documented in the “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?,” this is the precarious state in which Blacks and Latinos find themselves as the nation, still struggling amidst the Great Recession, remembers the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was gunned down while leading the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.



“Austerity measures based on the conservative tenets of less government and lower taxes will ratchet down the standard of living for all Americans, while simultaneously widening our nation’s racial and economic divide.” said Brian Miller, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the report.

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and Spawned a Global Crisis

{ Cross-posted at Blue Mass Group }

Excerpted from THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis by Michael W. Hudson. Published in November by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Michael W. Hudson. Reprinted with permission of Times Books. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Bait and Switch

A few weeks after he started working at Ameriquest Mortgage, Mark Glover looked up from his cubicle and saw a coworker do something odd. The guy stood at his desk on the twenty-third floor of downtown Los Angeles’s Union Bank Building. He placed two sheets of paper against the window. Then he used the light streaming through the window to trace something from one piece of paper to another. Somebody’s signature.

Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t held a steady job in years. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew about financial sleight of hand-at that time, he had a check-fraud charge hanging over his head in the L.A. courthouse a few blocks away. Watching his coworker, Glover’s first thought was: How can I get away with that? As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street’s most respected investment houses.

Continue reading How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America…
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I am no expert on Wall Street shenanigans or the economy more generally, but thanks to The Automatic Earth, it’s always possible to see what’s being reported in business news, with a bit of insight into the bigger picture. (I suppose I should also shout out Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture since that’s where they picked up on the story I’m sharing here… but I’d have to say that The Automatic Earth presents a much bigger picture).

While corporate media makes big noise about inaugural pageantry in Boston and in Washington DC, and even less meaningful distractions, some incredible Wall Street maneuvering is happening without much fanfare.

In what Ritholtz calls a “back door bailout of the banks”, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been negotiating with Bank of America, JP Morgan and others who sold them no-verification “liars loans”, namely via “buy back demands.”

Bank of America just settled these demands with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for a total of $4.1 billion. But the Freddie deal is particularly insidious.

Continue reading $127 billion giveaway to Bank of America?

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Hat tip to Shirley for this great news

According to the Boston Business Journal:

The Massachusetts Department of Revenue estimates that a drop in the state’s corporate tax rate will save corporations $148.5 million in the current fiscal year.

The corporate tax rate dropped to 8.25 percent as of Jan. 1, down from 8.75 percent. The DOR estimated that 35,000 Massachusetts-based businesses will benefit from the reduction. In a statement, Gov. Deval Patrick said the tax cut aims to free up money that could be used for job creation and business development at Bay State corporations.

It’s the second year in a row that the state’s corporate tax rate has gone down. The rate fell from 9.5 percent to 8.75 percent last year. It’s also scheduled to decline further next year, to 8 percent.

The DOR estimates the tax relief to corporations will reach a total of $411 million spread over fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012. The reductions are the result of corporate tax reform signed by Patrick in July 2008.

Happy new year, indeed! (and next year too!)  

Continue reading Happy new year, Massachusetts corporations!