Originally posted at Alternet.org

Fossil fuels are going to disappear, whether we like it or not. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are becoming scarcer, harder to extract and a greater danger to the global climate. If we proceed with business-as-usual, energy companies will take advantage of increasing scarcity to dominate the world economy by vacuuming up more money from the 99%. They will be able to ally with military and financial institutions to construct an energy-military-financial complex that could eventually reduce most of the rest of us to a form of debt peonage. On the other hand, if we could possibly elect a government that does what governments do best – build infrastructure – we can avoid a world of global warming and economic collapse by building enough wind farms, solar panels, and geothermal systems to power our economy and ignite a sustainable, broad-based period of economic growth. Of course, this will require a sea-change in the direction of the political system, along the lines of the Occupy movement, but there is too much at stake to throw up our hands in despair.

Originally posted at Social-Europe.eu written by Jonathan M. Feldman

In a panel discussion at New York University last month, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann, Craig Calhoun and other noted speakers addressed the question, “Does Capitalism Have a Future?” There wasn’t a consensus on the panel. At one extreme, Wallerstein described a capitalist system unable to sustain itself because of underconsumption and a growing international labor force of competing workers. In contrast, Michael Mann suggested that a Keynesian reflation attached to green jobs might sustain the capitalist economy through a Schumpeterian boom.

Both Democrats and environmentalists seem to be searching for new sources of support, according to articles from Thomas Edsall and Leslie Kaufman. For Democrats, the problem is the state of mind of the “white working class,” while for environmentalists the problem is to convince the public that something should be done about climate change. In both cases, the dilemma is the same: the solutions offered do not solve the existing problems, and the public knows it. The working class would likely be wooed if someone proposed a government-led policy of putting millions of people to work rebuilding our infrastructure and the manufacturing base. The general public would likely back policies to prevent global warming if someone advanced a credible program of building a carbon-free economy. Both could be combined in a program that would employ tens of millions to build sustainable transportation, energy, and urban infrastructure, as I have proposed. It will take a holistic — and therefore credible — plan to convince voters.

Originally posted at NewDeal20.org

The news from the world of global warming science is grim. We need to keep the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees centigrade or the climate could become extremely dangerous. To stay below that level would require a drastic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years. Many commentators, from Al Gore to Thomas Friedman to Lester Brown, have argued that we need a World War II type effort to prevent the worst of global warming. Such an effort would have the bonus effect of reviving the economy. When FDR was confronted with a world war, he converted as much as one third of the economy to that effort, with the federal government in the lead. The result: fascism was defeated along with what was left of the Great Depression. Can we do something similar today?

Cross-posted from NewDeal20.org

Occupy Wall Street has put a spotlight on the vast and growing economic inequality in the United States. It now takes its place as a top progressive priority — perhaps the highest priority it has experienced since the Great Depression.

Underlying this greater and greater inequality is a shift of wealth from manufacturing to the top 1 percent and the financial sector. Over the past 40 years, the sectors of the economy that grew in output share grew very little in employment share — making more money but paying it to a small group of people. The sectors of the economy that grew in employment share did not grow in output share, meaning that a growing number of workers had to share in a smaller pot of profits. From 1969 to 2007, the richest 1 percent has grabbed 15 percent more of the income of the United States, to a total of about 24 percent. Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector has lost a similar 15 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This has led to a downward shift in income for the bottom 99 percent.

Cross-posted from NewDeal20.org

The looming global warming catastrophe could be worse, in the long term, than any war, social collapse, or single famine in human history. We need to scale up renewable technologies as quickly as possible — by any means necessary. And that is exactly what the Chinese are doing. According to Steven Lacey at Climate Progress, while world solar cell manufacturing capacity was only 100 MW in 2000, it is now 50,000 MW –- and China by itself accounts for 57 percent. But this puts Americans, including Lacey and other environmentalists, in a peculiar position. On the one hand, we desperately want more solar and other renewable technologies. But on the other hand, by scaling up so fast, the Chinese might wipe out the American solar panel industry. Instead of trying to stop the Chinese from doing what they are doing, the U.S. needs to learn from them.

Cross-posted from NewDeal20.org

Recently, a crop of articles has appeared that argue that “our economy will thrive only when we make what we invent,” as Susan Hockstein, President of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, recently concluded in a New York Times op-ed. Hockstein is challenging the idea that the United States can somehow be a world-class source of innovation without actually producing the new products. As she points out, in the past, “with design and fabrication side by side, insights from the factory floor flowed back to the drawing board.” She echoes the research of Professors Pisano and Shih, from an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which they wrote, “The U.S. has lost or is in the process of losing the knowledge, skilled people and supplier infrastructure needed to manufacture many of the cutting-edge products it invented.” When engineers could go down to the factory floor and look at the results of their design decisions, it was much easier to create yet more innovations. A major criticism of a corporation (such as GM) used to be that the design engineers would take their designs and “throw them over the wall” to the factory floor without worrying about how the designs fared in a factory setting. Now we throw the designs over the Pacific Ocean to China.

Cross-posted from NewDeal20.org

Between 1962 and 2009, the cumulative trade deficit of the United States almost exactly equaled the cumulative Federal budget deficit: 7,426 billion for the budget deficit, a couple of billion less for the trade deficit. That is, when you add up all the deficit numbers for those 28 years, both the trade deficits and the budget deficits have generated the same amount of red ink. The Republican House members, in particular, use fear-mongering to convince the public that the federal budget deficit is going to destroy the economy. But what about the trade deficit?

On June 18th Van Jones gave a rousing speech at Netroots Nation, calling for a new effort to “Rebuild the American Dream”. Moveon.org and several other organizations have come together to build a new movement to rebuild the American dream, and this past weekend, 25,000 people went to over 1500 house parties to talk about a potential set of issues that could constitute a “Contract for the American Dream”. My wife and I headed down to Greenwich Village for one of the many completely filled house meetings. As one of our group summed up the meeting, it was a “good” meeting, one we were happy to attend.

Natural gas is being touted as a fuel of the future, a way to bridge the gap between a dirty energy and clean energy economy. But according to numerous articles and a report from David Hughes at the Post-Carbon Institute, what we may have is another bridge to nowhere (page numbers in this post refer to Hughes’ study). Fracking, the rapidly expanding technique for pulling natural gas out of the ground, may be worse for global warming than coal, ultimately very expensive, and not productive enough to make much of a difference in natural gas supply anyway.

The following is a slightly edited version of a set of articles that appeared on NewDeal20.org, the blog site for the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Institute.

Paul Krugman recently argued that “manufacturing is one of the bright spots of a generally disappointing recovery, and there are signs — preliminary, but hopeful, nonetheless — that a sustained comeback may be under way.” He points out that the gap between what we sell and what we buy has been improving. This must be set against a background of a manufacturing decline in the United States of historic dimensions; even without adjusting for inflation, the trade deficit in goods for the United States between 2000 and 2010 was 7 trillion dollars. A turnaround in the attention of more perceptive economists and a turnaround in manufacturing may be in the works. But before that, the crucial question is: Why is manufacturing so important?

The current conventional wisdom for many in the U.S. is that the less government is involved with the economy the better. But this is precisely the moment in history when more government is needed. Without government intervention, the recovery will continue to stagnate, the economy as a whole will remain off balance, and we won’t be able to meet the challenges facing the country.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

We often hear that a globalized economy is the best kind of economy. But could a world economy based on a set of strong regional systems, each one centered around a thriving manufacturing sector, serve us better in the long run? I argued in the first post of this series that economies are ecosystems, and that manufacturing is a necessary part of an economic ecosystem. In my second post, I proposed that manufacturing underlies economic growth, and machinery can allow us to have ecologically sustainable growth. Now I want to pursue how the innovation that underlies beneficial manufacturing growth is dependent on the close proximity of the various “niches” of the economic ecosystem, and what this means to our perception of how the global economy functions best.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

Robert Bryce is very good at advancing sophisticated arguments that try to show that what many people believe is not so. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, he gives a worthwhile critique of renewable energy — after all, every technology should be analyzed for its strengths and weaknesses. The larger question, which his piece does well to illuminate, is this: in an imperfect world, what constitutes an economically and ecologically sustainable national energy system? How do we create one that is as low-cost as possible in the long run, one that is not based on a resource that will run out, and one that will emit as little carbon and pollution as possible? The problem is that his favored alternatives, natural gas and nuclear power, have serious flaws that need to be addressed. In the end, a mixture of solutions will be necessary for creating a sustainable energy future.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

Underlying most debates about economic policy lurks a single question: what causes economic growth? This question is key when an economy is stagnating or declining. The answer decides the fates of Presidents, political parties, and whole nations.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org, reposted at DailyKos

Question: Why are we using mainstream economic ideas rooted in the 19th century to deal with 21st century challenges to our global civilization and to our national economies? No wonder political debates can seem like running in mud. Progressives are constantly being dragged down into a fantasy world of perfect markets, balanced budgets, and very limited government intervention. Neoclassical economics was not designed to deal with the complexities of a global industrial civilization that is endangering its own existence ecologically with global warming and ecosystem destruction, and economically with an out-of-control financial sector. It wasn’t designed to solve the problems of the world central economy, the United States, and its seriously declining manufacturing sector.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org, and mentioned by meteor blades on DailyKos

Paul Krugman recently argued that “manufacturing is one of the bright spots of a generally disappointing recovery, and there are signs — preliminary, but hopeful, nonetheless — that a sustained comeback may be under way.” He points out that the gap between what we sell and what we buy has been improving. This must be set against a background of a manufacturing decline in the United States of historic dimensions; even without adjusting for inflation, the trade deficit in goods for the United States between 2000 and 2010 was 7 trillion dollars. A turnaround in the attention of more perceptive economists and a turnaround in manufacturing may be in the works. But before that, the crucial question is: Why is manufacturing so important?

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

It’s not pretty when several irrational ideas collide. On Thursday May 12, the Senate conducted a hearing to discuss the removal of a $2 billion per year tax break for the top 5 oil companies. The NYT called the testimony at the hearing “A big whine for big oil.” Eliminating a tax break like this should be a no-brainer, but that idea is blocked by six irrational notions from the right that come together in an explosion of false logic:

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

In a recent column in the NYTimes, Charles Blow sounds like he has taken a page from FDR’s famous “economic royalist” speech. Talking about what he calls “the right’s flimsy fiscal argument,” Blow claims that:

"It all loses traction as more Americans begin to see the far right for what it truly is: a gang of bandits willing to sacrifice the poor and working classes to further extend the American aristocracy — shadowy figures who creep through the night, shaking every sock for every nickel and scraping their silver spoons across the bottom of every pot".

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

Dear Mr. Herbert,
I was sad to hear that you will no longer be writing for the op-ed page of the NYTimes. Your critical perspective on the class war being waged against the middle and working class and the poor, on the waste and recklessness of our wars, and on the wrenching struggles of ordinary Americans made you an invaluable voice. But I want to suggest that even more important than those insights was your consistent attempts to point to a better future, and the path to getting there, by rebuilding our infrastructure. I hope that in your forthcoming book you make that effort a substantial part of your argument.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

On March 14th, the NYTimes stated that “This page has endorsed nuclear power as one tool to head off global warming. We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it will remain a valuable tool.” I want to argue that, to the contrary, the lesson to be learned from the catastrophe in Japan is that nuclear power is not even part of a sustainable solution to global warming. The whole idea behind preventing global warming is to protect the Earth’s ecosystems, collectively known as the biosphere. You can’t save the biosphere if it’s irradiated. The same problem rears its ugly head with most biofuels, certainly with corn ethanol; it won’t matter if the climate isn’t changing if the planet has been turned into one big desert because the soils and fresh water have been destroyed.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org and promoted to Community Spotlight on DailyKos

In my last post, I started to discuss a speech by the founders of the Breakthrough Institute, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (N and S). In this post, I will discuss their presentation of 12 theses of environmental thought, which they hope will supply “underlying assumptions for a new, post-environmental climate movement.”

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org; promoted to Community Spotlight on DailyKos

In 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism” that shook the environmental community — although probably not quite enough. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (N and S) have gone on to form The Breakthrough Institute, arguing that we need technological breakthroughs in order to solve our biggest environmental problem, global warming, as well as advocating for what they see as innovative solutions to various other problems.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

Egypt, which was once the breadbasket for the Roman Empire, is now one of a growing number of food basket cases. A thriving center of trade and industry centuries ago, it is now marked by unemployment and dependence on tourism. Instead of dealing with these mounting problems, the Mubarak regime has swept everything under the rug and skimmed billions from the country. No wonder the population is in revolt.

Originally posted on

Recently Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize-winning economist and Senior Fellow and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute, gave a very interesting speech in South Africa concerning climate change and the global economy. He argued that by implementing policies that help to reverse global warming, we can also reverse the global economic downturn. Although he also pointed out many barriers to doing so, he outlined some interesting policy proposals.

Originally posted on ThePeoplesView.net

Electoral victories are sometimes built on hopes and dreams, sometimes on fear and anger, sometimes on both. Over the past 30 years progressives have often resorted to emphasizing fear of the Republicans – completely justified, in my view. President Obama’s 2008 campaign, however, showed that progressives can also win by inspiring hope.

And yet, particularly in bad times, hope can be a hard emotion to come by. The President stepped into what may be the worst economic situation in American history, which I will explain in a bit. Since the President couldn’t wave a magic wand and make up for decades of economic decline in two years, enough people in enough suburban districts got confused and voted for Republicans in 2010. While their wins are certainly sobering, it doesn’t mean we have to give up on hope – on the contrary, it is important to be as audacious as ever.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

During the next year look for the incremental unfolding of the three epic environmental crises of our time — global warming, peak resources, and ecosystem destruction (which took place more quickly in the Gulf of Mexico this year). The victories of the Republicans in 2010 probably means that little or nothng of environmental value will be passed in the next Congress. President Obama may be able to accomplish some important initial steps, like imposing some greenhouse gas emissions standards on power plants, although even in the best case regulations wouldn’t take effect until 2012. It may be, however, that grim news from the environmental front could set up a wider consensus to try new approaches.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

As incredible as it sounds, Republican presidents, along with their Republican Congresses, have initiated some of the biggest public works projects in American history. Theodore Roosevelt single-mindedly pursued the construction of the Panama Canal and Calvin Coolidge signed the legislation to build what became known as the Hoover Dam. Democratic presidents continued and expanded on these accomplishments, as when FDR followed up on the Hoover Dam and built many others, including the TVA system. During his administration, the first ideas and plans for a national highway system were developed, which that great socialist Dwight David Eisenhower then pushed through in 1956.

Originally posted on NewDeal20.org

p>After the 2010 elections, progressives need a good alternative to the Republican slogan “less taxes”. Even though less taxes will lead to an even worse economy, at least it’s an idea that indicates to its intended audience that the Republicans have an answer to the question, “how can we end the Great Recession?”

There may be a trend, if not a consensus, forming around the idea of “more jobs”, emerging from the center-right all the way through to the left. In fact, at the far right of the Democratic party we have the example of David Brooks, who wrote about the Midwest: “If America can figure out how to build a decent future for the working-class people in this region, then the U.S. will remain a predominant power. If it can’t, it won’t… The Midwest has lost a manufacturing empire but hasn’t yet found a role… Voters in this region face structural problems, not cyclical ones. Intensely suspicious of government, they are nonetheless casting about for somebody, anybody, who can revive their towns and neighborhoods.” Democrats have failed this region, says Brooks, and I can’t argue with him. The obvious answer is to bring manufacturing back to the region, and if the Democrats can do that, then they will reclaim the Midwest, and with it, the Federal government.

Currently, there seems to be no consensus on what a progressive candidate should stand for, particularly in terms of the economy. Reregulating the financial system, as important and difficult as it would be to achieve, will not by itself rebuild the middle class. Neither would Medicare for all, as critical as that would be, or ending our wars, or even forcing China to revalue its currency. The rot in the US economy is too great to be healed by simply stopping many of our destructive policies.

It seems to me that the centerpiece of a progressive economic agenda has to be about creating and maintaining jobs: permanent, high-skilled, good-paying jobs. And not just a million jobs here and there, but tens of millions of good jobs, to bring under- and unemployment down, lift the new (and old) poor out of poverty, and retain what remains of the American middle class.