{ Installment 8 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Degrees of self-powered mobility

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel-probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions-finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.

The video says it all.

From Boston.com: “Let me just also say, there’s a conversation we’re going to have to have …that I’ve been trying to have since the first few weeks I’ve been in this job, and it has to do with communication,” the governor said. “I can’t compete if I don’t know something’s at risk.”

“Massachusetts has been kind to Fidelity. I know that’s a two-way street, but if we’re going to build on what we have here, then they need to tell me what they need and I need to be able at least to have an opportunity to respond,” he said.

The governor added: “I feel disappointed and frustrated.”

Governor Patrick,

You are not dating Fidelity, and this is not a question of communication. This is about government officials lying prostrate on the floor before all-powerful corporations. This is about giving away our tax dollars to unscrupulous, very profitable, greedy bastards, when we ABSOLUTELY cannot afford it.

When you ran for re-election, you failed to make an issue about these indefensible giveaways, even while your Green-Rainbow opponent raised the issue. You praised yourself for weak claw-back provisions in future tax giveaways, rather than challenging the idea of giving away tax dollars to corporations trying to hold us hostage to their agendas.  

In Yemen:

At least two people have been killed and more than 300 injured after Yemen security forces stormed a protest site where thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators have been camped out for weeks, demanding the ouster of the country’s leader.

In a pre-dawn raid on Saturday, police are said to have used tear gas and hot water mixed with gas to disperse the demonstrators.

Meanwhile, a teenage boy was killed in separate clashes between security forces and protesters in the city of Mukala.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from the capital Sanaa, said that the situation remains tense, and that the opposition is accusing the government of committing crimes against the protesters.

“They also say the raid will speed up the revolution, and that president Ali Abdullah Saleh must go now before [he] faces the wrath of the people,” he said.

Also on Saturday, at least three students were injured when security forces opened fire at protesters in the city of Taiz, where residents had gathered to demand that Saleh be put on trial.

The clashes come after tens of thousands of protesters marched on the streets of the capital on Friday, drawing record crowds in a continuing push to demand the ouster of Saleh, who has been in power since 1978.

The following piece from Arun Gupta, a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper, puts the disaster in Japan in context.

From Climate Solutions

By Arun Gupta

This century, barely out of the box, is already flush with mega-disasters: Hurricane Katrina, Haiti’s earthquake, the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake, the BP oil spill, Cyclone Nargis and the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, and now Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns.

In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Robert Greenstein, suggested that cutting tax expenditures (i.e., spending delivered through the tax code), and not program cuts, should be the focus of attempts to bring our federal deficit under control.

Below are excerpts from CBPP’s Off the Charts blog:

The costs of tax expenditures are large.  In 2010, individual tax expenditures totaled nearly $1 trillion, and total tax expenditures – both individual and corporate – amounted to $1.05 trillion.  This greatly exceeded the cost of Medicare and Medicaid combined ($719 billion), Social Security ($701 billion), and non-security discretionary programs, which stood at $589 billion, a little over half of the cost of tax expenditures.

From the Post Carbon Institute

Posted Oct 1, 2010 by Richard Heinberg

This is the second part of a two-part post from a new book-in-progress with the working title ‘The End of Growth’. Only some of the book’s contents will be serialized this way. The final product, with graphs and footnotes, will be published by New Society Publishers in September 2011. Read Part 1 here. Read more ‘End of Growth’ excerpts.

Business Cycles, Interest Rates, and Central Banks

We have just reviewed a minimalist history of human economies and the economic theories that have come into vogue to explain and manage them. But there is a lot of detail to be filled in if we are to understand what’s happening in the world economy today. And much of that detail has to do with the spectacular growth of debt-in obvious and subtle forms-that has occurred during the past few decades. That phenomenon in turn must be seen in light of the business cycles that characterize economic activity in modern industrial societies, and the central banks that have been set up to manage them.