Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Every state can create clean energy funds, or CEFs, which are typically supported by a small surcharge on monthly electricity bills. So far 22 states have done so, generating $2.7 billion overall for the clean technology sector during the past decade. Most have used the money to install tens of thousands of solar panel arrays, wind turbines and biomass facilities.
Whether massive robo-signing occurred is no longer in issue. The question that needs to be investigated is why it was being done. The alleged justification—that the bankers were so busy that they cut corners—hardly seems credible given the extent of the practice. The robo-signing largely involved assignments of mortgage notes to mortgage servicers or trusts representing the investors who put up the loan money. Assignment was necessary to give the trusts legal title to the loans. But assignment was delayed until it was necessary to foreclose on the homes, when it had to be done through the forgery and fraud of robo-signing. Why had it been delayed? Why did the banks not assign the mortgages to the trusts when and as required by law?
While a great many commons seek to develop alternatives to conventional businesses – and even to bypass markets altogether – the struggle to democratize capital should not be lost in the shuffle. Popular ownership of capital assets and business enterprises is still a great strategy for building the commons and advancing the public good. Fortunately, there’s a growing enthusiasm for this approach.
A day of hard rain and wind could not dampen the spirits of activists representing the 99% as they gathered at Justin Herman Plaza (dubbed Bradley Manning Plaza by locals) in San Francisco on Friday, January 20th, 2012, to mark the dark anniversary of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with a day of action. Organized by a coalition of over 55 Bay Area organizations and dozens of OccupySF affinity groups, protestors disrupted business as usual with demands that banks end predatory evictions and foreclosures and that corporations lose the rights of personhood.
Most of us dress ourselves each morning with garments that were grown, processed, designed and sewn by an anonymous supply chain. A combination of animal, plant, machinery, imagination, and technical skill came together to clothe you, but it is rare to have connection to any of these real life elements. It is the goal of one central Californian community’s members to put a face on their wardrobes, and to uncover, develop, and build a new way of engaging with the textiles of their lives. A bioregional supply chain known as a Fibershed is being grown out of a region with a 150 mile diameter — the epicenter just north of San Francisco.
Here is the January Transition podcast, lovingly spliced together in order to offer a more in depth look at three of the stories from last month’s round-up. You’ll hear about how Transition Chesham’s local produce market was recently voted the greenest market in Britain, how Transition Town Whitehead are planning to plant 60,000 trees over the next few weeks, and how Transition Town Shrewsbury stepped in when the local council announced that it was stopping collecting cardboard for recycling, and did it themselves. I hope you enjoy it, and do let us know what you think.
Social scientists often cite the handicap that we are not permitted to conduct experiments on humans as an excuse for why social science advances more slowly than the physical sciences. But fracking provides an interesting social experiment playing out right before our eyes. In Pennsylvania, gas and natural resource companies have been sufficiently powerful to prevent passage of a statewide ban on fracking; as a result 8000 permits have been issued and 4000 wells dug since 2008. Just across the Delaware River, New York State has issued a temporary ban on fracking in Marcellus Shale pending release of a study and new regulations by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The issue has become so controversial that the NYSDEC report may now be delayed until 2013.
The indifference of the Metropolitan Police to the murder of Stephen Lawrence rightly led to private soul-searching and public examination of procedures, and we have to hope that our country and particularly our police service is better as a result. But there is a more insidious form of racism that goes unquestioned and causes the death of far more people. This is the racism of an economic system that values the lives of the poor differently from the lives of the rich.
It’s late December and an icy fog cloaks the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh. Here, far from the cities, smoke rises in dense, choking spirals from meagre wood fires and scantily-clad children shiver against the cold. These are largely farming families, and their mud huts fortified by the occasional brick wall are for the most part devoid of light, heat or clean water. But it is here in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest and poorest states, far away from the country’s straining power grid, that US-born entrepreneurs Nikhil Jaisinghani and Brian Shaad have started to pioneer a wholly different energy system, designed to meet some of the most basic needs of the poorest.
This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains…But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history.
In the 1990s, Richard J. Jackson had an epiphany while driving on the car-choked Buford Highway, on his way to his job at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America,” he says. Dr. Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health, has since become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.
When asked whether people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated by “jealousy or fairness” Romney insisted, “I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.” And in this election year he advised that if we do discuss inequality we do so “in quiet rooms” not in public debates. A public debate, of course, is inevitable. And welcome. To help that debate along I’ll address the five major statements that comprise the Republican argument on inequality.
