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A Good Life for the 99%

Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival.
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To achieve this, the authors envisage three steps: more than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week; encouraging people to eat less red meat, which is the main driver of deforestation and ecological destruction; and refocusing the economy toward low-consumption activities by more than doubling education spending to €8,400 (£7,250) a person and healthcare spending to €14,400.

Annual per capita red meat consumption in the US fell 15% to 101 pounds in the past 10 years, according to the US Department of Agriculture. It's down by a third since the early 1970s ...

Those below the age of 29 and above the age of 66 were least likely to eat large amounts of beef. Rose said this indicated that the younger generation might be more interested in mitigating the effects of climate change.

"There's hope in the younger generation, because it's their planet they're going to inherit," Rose said. "I've seen in my classes that they're interested in diet, how it impacts the environment, and what can they do about it."

Both the Republicans and Democrats will regard most of these proposals as naked Socialism. America still cleaves to the idea of unrestrained individuation. Its corporate and oligarchical masters will ruthlessly attack any attempts to raise taxes on the rich as an egregious assault on freedom. This will be echoed across much of Western Europe, as its still dominant creed of neoliberalism doubles down in its refusal to own the disasters it has spawned.

Welcome to Project 2052
A Website of Revolutionary Speculative Short Fiction, Visual Art, and Poetry, Set in the World of Everything for Everyone

Series editors: Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien, in close collaboration with Common Notions Press

• wapo editorial board: "Government ownership is a path to poverty"


• reason: "Bernie Sanders' AI Wealth Fund Bill Shows That He Doesn't Understand AI or Wealth"[4,5]

Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society: Increasingly, my view is that the fundamental problem is that most value is collective. And I don't mean globally collective in a vague way—that it's all contained in the whole world. I mean that there are lots of groups where it's actually the group, not the individual involved, that creates the value and that most of the problems of inequality are not fundamentally problems about some sort of economic inequality, but problems of treating that collective value as being the private property of some individual, which it's not. What that ends up creating I don't think of, even primarily, as economic inequality because money itself, the whole basis of talking about and measuring income, is fundamentally missing a lot of what's going on, which is that people have to have more equal voices in, and more collective governance of, the collective value that they create.

1. give everyone entitled to use them a say in running them;


2. set clear boundaries to keep out those who are not entitled;


3. appoint monitors who are trusted by users; and


4. have straightforward mechanisms to resolve conflicts.

My understanding of Ostrom... is that, under certain favorable conditions, individual cooperation costs among resource appropriators are less than the individual gains achieved by cooperation. Therefore there is an incentive to avoid a tragedy of the commons situation without resorting to privitization or authoritarianism. These favorable conditions can be achieved by self-organized collective institutions that regulate and enforce sustainable rules about resource appropriation. She views resource appropriators as existing within an interdependent system complicated by temptations to free-ride or prioritize short-term gains over long-term productivity. (She also points out that privatization brings with it its own set of economic inefficiencies that are often overlooked. In other words, it costs money to fence the commons.)

Ostrom breaks down resource appropriation problems into first-, second-, and third-order problems. IIRC, first-order problems are operational problems that must be dealt with, such as rule enforcement and the actual apportionment of the resource (or access to the resource). Second-order problems arise with respect to the collective organizations governing groups of resource appropriators (e.g., how to set those first-order rules). Third-order problems relate to the governing framework within which these collective institutions operate (e.g., "constitutional" problems; what are the rules that govern the creation and enforcement of other rules). Different factors at different levels can set things up for success or failure.

To grossly oversimplify things: There are four "internal variables" that govern rational action by individuals: expected benefits, expected costs, internalized norms, and the "discount rate," i.e., how much do you discount the value of future expected returns over immediate short-term gains.

Successful institutions have low discount rates, shared norms that dissuade free-riding (norms I believe that are supported by monitoring and enforcement of rules), low cooperation costs, and user-buy in thanks to user participation in the second-order rule-making process.

1. Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.


2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions: Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.


3. Collective-choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.


4. Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.


5. Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.


6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.


7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.


8. Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Just as the New Deal reforms were partially derived from more aggressive Socialist Party platforms of the preceding two decades, so the Democrats' current attacks on oligarchy began on the party's left fringe with democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, and were then amplified by fellow socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, as well as progressive Elizabeth Warren.

This April, such perspectives finally assumed fuller form. Within a few days of each other, both the Working Families Party (WFP), which functions as a social democratic group within the Democratic Party, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) unveiled progressive populist agendas for the upcoming midterm elections. The agendas are poll-tested; Data for Progress's poll of the 11 proposals on the CPC's list shows majority support even among Republicans for all 11.

Using the affordability crisis as a jumping-off point, the recommended policies not only call for innovations in economic policy but also explicitly target the current crop of economic royalists responsible for the mess. As CPC chair Greg Casar (D-TX) told my colleague David Dayen, "Trump villainized immigrants, Trump villainized the LGBT community. If Democrats want to fight back against that scapegoating, we need to take on the real villains taking your money."

Indeed, each of the CPC proposals comes complete with two sets of villains: corporations that drain consumers, and the Republicans from Trump on down who protect them. One proposal calls for the public manufacture and sale of drugs like insulin, naloxone (which arrests the effects of opioid overdoses), and asthma-preventing inhalers at greatly reduced prices. Other proposals would impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies, eliminate Big Ag's patent power over seeds (enabling farmers to simply replant seeds on their own), ban "surveillance pricing" (the ability of retailers to target prices to individuals based on their online personal data), and enable federal regulators to have expanded power to prevent utilities' exploitation of consumers due to their monopoly status.

• America's Consumer Corporate Protector [ungated] - "Apple, Walmart and Toyota have all benefited from Russell Vought's vision for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau." (Big Take: "how acting director Russell Vought gutted the CFPB, and how the agency has refused to enforce settlements and pursue lawsuits — in some cases letting big businesses pocket millions they'd already agreed to pay consumers." RV previously)


• Russ Vought is doing his part in the Trump administration's war on scientific progress - "Under newly proposed Office of Management and Budget rules, every research grant awarded by the federal government would be vetted by political appointees."