April 15, 2022

It’s Time to Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry — From Thom Hartmann: “Squeals of “socialism!” aside, we know how to do this and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war: this time, it’s about saving the world …” 

From Bay Journal, another pressing reason our electric power system must be publicly owned: “The rollout of solar and other renewable energy projects that Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia are counting on to end fossil-fuel reliance is caught up in a review bottleneck that is severely hampering the transition.”

Inflation Pt. 1 — Why is inflation higher in the US, where megacorps have nearly unregulated pricing power, compared to other rich-world nations? Woops, look over here, can we interest you in some slaughter of civilians? Corporate Media Ignores Bernie’s Corporate Greed Hearing: “Massive coverage of the war in Ukraine does not offend advertisers, while the corporate war on consumers directly involves corporate advertisers.” By Ralph Nader via Portside. 

And Pt. 2  Inflation: Reframing the Narrative from The Bullet via Portside — Sam Gindin suggests higher interest rates won’t remedy the specific sort of inflation we are experiencing; “What higher interest rates are most likely to bring on is both a stagnant economy and continued inflation — stagflation. Moreover, since the shortages are generally understood to be temporary and expected to self-correct in a year or two, the appropriate response isn’t to add to the transitional pain, but rather to take steps to alleviate the most extreme social impacts of price increases.”

Federal Workers: recent guidance on labor relations from the Office of Personnel Management, which stems from a Biden executive order, is much to do about nothing. With the exception of very weak local unions combined with unusually backwards management, these are rights that we already have. The Biden executive order appears to me to be mostly the same.

“How did schools and libraries come to claim that technology could solve poverty? Why did this belief seem so forceful in the early 2010s? What do we mean when we say kids should have access to technology?” Those questions and many more are covered in this interview with professor Daniel Greene, a DC lifer whose book, The Promise of Access, is in many ways about the tragedy of “the city’s failure to meet the needs of poorer residents, while putting the interests of a new generation of gentrifiers first.”

On the Global Ecosocialist Network, our comrade David Schwartzman writes that the Pentagon doesn’t only contribute to ongoing climate catastrophe via emissions: “… its role as the enforcement arm of the Military Industrial complex and its imperialist regime change agenda … stands in the way of achieving the global cooperation needed to meet the IPCC goal, along with the $2 trillion a year now going to the global military expenditures.”