Dear Mark,
Yesterday, after more than a decade of giving money to those who literally don't need it, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans.
Outrageously, the very same politicians who are pleading poverty and yelling the loudest about the need to make brutal budget cuts had no problem voting to give away more tax breaks to the rich and the ultra-rich.
There is very little that so clearly demonstrates what's broken in Congress than those simultaneously demanding to give the Koch brothers a tax cut while pushing benefit cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.
The good news is that your member of Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, did the right thing and voted to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
We need to support the representatives who voted the right way because we know this issue isn't going away.
Congress is headed for a major showdown after the November election and far too many Senate Democrats appear ready to cut a deal with Republicans. So we can't count on Democratic senators to hold the line in the lame duck session on the Bush tax cuts.
We need to set down a marker now so that when push comes to shove later this year, Rep. McCarthy knows that her constituents support her taking a strong stand on ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
ForgiveStudentLoanDebt is re-branding as "Student Debt Crisis" to reflect the fact that the reforms we seek are not limited to just forgiveness of loans, but a whole host of other steps that chip away at the status quo.....
I'm writing today to ask each of you to participate in our very first video submission challenge wherein we're asking you to create your own short video that we can use to spread our message in favor of fundamental reforms to the way in which higher education is paid for in this country.
"Robert Applebaum" applebaum@forgivestudentloandebt.com
"Organic Consumers Association" <ronniecummins@organicconsumers
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Today I'm asking the organic community - in California and nationwide - to approach the managers of the retail stores, CSAs, restaurants, or farmers markets where you regularly buy your organic food and ask them to endorse Prop 37, educate their consumers and financially support Prop 37. We have thousands of volunteers, but we need more. Please be a part of this historic initiative!
Mark ,
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You probably don’t spend too much time thinking about telecom regulation.
But there's something big afoot, and you deserve to know about it: A scheme hatched by the telecom giants could cost consumers millions or even billions on our cable and phone bills.
Today, the big telecom companies compete for your business. But Verizon and cable giants like Time-Warner and Comcast don't like having to compete by offering better service or lower prices. Now they're trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to change the rules and allow them to team up, and sell each others' services.
If their plan is approved, millions of New Yorkers would only be able get high-speed internet access and TV from one big monopoly. That means prices go up -- and we're not talking Monopoly money.
There's still time to stop the deal. But only if our elected leaders step in and call on the FCC and the DOJ to stand up for consumers, not CEOs.
But there's something big afoot, and you deserve to know about it: A scheme hatched by the telecom giants could cost consumers millions or even billions on our cable and phone bills.
Today, the big telecom companies compete for your business. But Verizon and cable giants like Time-Warner and Comcast don't like having to compete by offering better service or lower prices. Now they're trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to change the rules and allow them to team up, and sell each others' services.
If their plan is approved, millions of New Yorkers would only be able get high-speed internet access and TV from one big monopoly. That means prices go up -- and we're not talking Monopoly money.
There's still time to stop the deal. But only if our elected leaders step in and call on the FCC and the DOJ to stand up for consumers, not CEOs.
New York State AFL-CIO information@nysaflcio.org
by Thomas J. Walter and Molly Meyer
How to screen a company for a good culture fit.
How to screen a company for a good culture fit.
Sustainable Industries webmaster@sustainableindustries.com
Dear Mark,
Good news – today, at 10am ET, the Senate Finance Committee is marking up a tax extension bill that includes the renewable energy production tax credit (PTC). The PTC is an effective tool to keep electricity rates low and encourage development of proven clean energy projects. It is set to expire at the end of this year.
Good news – today, at 10am ET, the Senate Finance Committee is marking up a tax extension bill that includes the renewable energy production tax credit (PTC). The PTC is an effective tool to keep electricity rates low and encourage development of proven clean energy projects. It is set to expire at the end of this year.
"Denise Bode, American Wind" <powerofwind@awea.org>
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After Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) left Fairtrade International (FLO), the dominant certifier of Fair Trade products worldwide, on January 1, 2012, businesses and brands faced a new choice about how to participate in the certification of Fair Trade products. Businesses could become licensees, and use the product label, of: FTUSA; FLO; both; another certification like IMO's "Fair for Life" or CLAC's Small Producer Symbol; or none. An era of significant competition greatly accelerated between certifiers and labels in Fair Trade.
FLO invited businesses, who had been registered with FTUSA while FTUSA had been FLO's sole representative in the U.S., to register as licensees by May 31 or become de-registered with FLO. This week, FLO announced the names of some of the brands that have registered with FLO. Of course, businesses can join and leave any certification system at any time, so current lists are not perm anent.
Op-Ed Contributor
Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework
By JARED DIAMOND
Published: August 1, 2012
MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)
That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power. That is not to deny culture’s significance. Some countries have political institutions and cultural practices — honest government, rule of law, opportunities to accumulate money — that reward hard work. Others don’t. Familiar examples are the contrasts between neighboring countries sharing similar environments but with very different institutions. (Think of South Korea versus North Korea, or Haiti versus the Dominican Republic.) Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.
A different set of factors involves geography, which embraces many more aspects than the physical characteristics Mr. Romney dismissed. One such geographic factor is latitude, which has big effects on wealth and power today: tropical countries tend to be poorer than temperate-zone countries. Reasons include the debilitating effects of tropical diseases on life span and work, and the average lower productivity of agriculture and soils in the tropics than in the temperate zones.
A second factor is access to the sea. Countries without a seacoast or big navigable rivers tend to be poor, because transport costs overland or by air are much higher than transport costs by sea.
A third geographic factor is the history of agriculture. If an extraterrestrial had toured earth in the year 2000 B.C., the visitor would have noticed that centralized government, writing and metal tools were already widespread in Eurasia but hadn’t yet appeared in the New World, sub-Saharan Africa or Australia. That long head start would have let the visitor predict correctly that today, most of the world’s richest and most powerful countries would be Eurasian countries (and their overseas settlements in North America, Australia and New Zealand).
The reason is the historical effect of geography: 13,000 years ago, all peoples everywhere were hunter-gatherers living in sparse populations without centralized government, armies, writing or metal tools. These four roots of power arose as consequences of the development of agriculture, which generated human population explosions and accumulations of food surpluses capable of feeding full-time leaders, soldiers, scribes and inventors. But agriculture could originate only in those few regions endowed with many wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, like wild wheat, rice, pigs and cattle.
In short, geographic explanations and cultural-institutional explanations aren’t independent of each other. Of course, not all agricultural regions developed honest centralized government, but no nonagricultural region ever developed any centralized government, whether honest or dishonest. That’s why institutions promoting wealth today arose first in Eurasia, the area with the oldest and most productive agriculture.
What does this mean for Americans? Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?
Of course not. Some tropical and subtropical countries have become richer despite geographic limitations. They’ve invested in public health to overcome their disease burdens (Botswana and the Philippines). They’ve invested in crops adapted to the tropics (Brazil and Malaysia). They’ve focused their economies on sectors other than agriculture (Singapore and Taiwan).
Conversely, geographic advantages don’t guarantee permanent success, as the growing difficulties in Europe and America show. We Americans fail to provide superior education and economic incentives to much of our population. India, China and other countries that have not been world leaders are investing heavily in education, technology and infrastructure. They’re offering economic opportunities to more and more of their citizens. That’s part of the reason jobs are moving overseas. Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.
Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the forthcoming book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”
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