SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Christian Science Monitor reports on legislation proposed by Republican law-makers in Wyoming:
The bill would require utilities to use "eligible resources" to meet 95 percent of Wyoming's electricity needs in 2018, and all of its electricity needs in 2019.
Those "eligible resources" are defined solely as coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and individual net metering.
The latter would encompass houses (and businesses?) with solar, wind or co-generation equipment. Utility-scale generation, however, could face a $10/MWh penalty.
The article notes that
Wyoming is the nation's largest coal producer [...] nearly 90 percent of the electricity generated in Wyoming came from coal in September 2016, the most recent month with available data.
A PDF of the bill, SF0071, is available on the Wyoming legislature's Web site.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @09:29PM
Crony-capitalism is a Republican ideology not a progressive one
Not accurate. Progressivism != Socialism
Your hypothesis is incorrect for anyone who is not actually Left of center (anti-Capitalism).
This excludes almost all USAians, who have gladly swallowed their indoctrination by Capitalists (a constant barrage of commercial ads) and their indoctrination by public schools which are obviously forbidden to speak well of Socialism or even to make honest comparisons between Capitalism and Socialism. [democracyatwork.info]
Broadcast in Frisco Bay Area and streamed live: Fridays 10AM Pacific time; 10.7MB webcasts archived for 2 weeks [kpfa.org]
Broadcast in the Los Angeles Area (112,000 watts!) and streamed live: Sundays 9AM Pacific time; no local archive [kpfk.org]
Also available via numerous other Pacifica Radio affiliates.
While The Blue Party may have been noticeably different at some time in the past (arguable), since The Blues chose George McGovern as their 1972 presidential candidate and were creamed, The Blues have shifted even more strongly toward the pro-business region of the political palate (and have become actively anti-Labor).
This is strongly demonstrated by the accomplishments of Slick Willie. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [truth-out.org]
The Blues are NOT anti-Crony-Capitalism ; the "best" that can be said about them is that they simply cater to a slightly different segment of the business community.
As economist and historian Thomas Piketty noted in his 696-page analysis of 250 years of Capitalism, that economic system leads to more and more concentrations of wealth (The 1 Percent) and concentrations of political power (Oligarchy --a bad imitation of Democracy, where the rich buy up the gov't).
If you want to get rid of the problem, you have to get rid of the Capitalist system.
The logical replacement is Socialism, which embodies distributed power and wealth, strong Democracy (with everyone getting a vote and all votes being equal)[1], and public ownership of natural monopolies (roads, bridges, water systems, electricity, natural gas, communications infrastructure, etc.).[2]
[1] This will obviously require publicly-funded elections.
[2] Just watch Trump do the OPPOSITE, selling off public assets to his cronies for pennies and granting contracts for e.g. building roads that will be privately-owned and will have tolls.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 24 2017, @04:12AM
You know, Gewg, *any* economic system can in theory promote human flourishing. Anything from hard collectivism to utter laissez-faire could in theory work, and work just as well. When these systems fail, it is because they fail to take human nature into account. We should focus on figuring out a system, and there may be more than one, that stops the concentration, the accelerating, self-reinforcing concentration, of wealth and resources and power into fewer and fewer hands.
Nothing in nature that remains stable has this sort of positive feedback; indeed, it's *negative* feedbacks, the dampeners on the oscillators, that hold a system more or less steady in the face of fluctuating inputs.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @07:36PM
*any* economic system can in theory promote human flourishing
As mentioned, Prof. Thomas Piketty has studied 250 years of Capitalism.
He has determined that a system whose ONLY goal is to maximize profits for The Ownership Class leads to cartels, monopoly, and a social situation that is less and less stable.
I will argue that the ultimate expression of Capitalism is Fascism.
OTOH, the (Socialist) Mondragon worker-owned cooperative (in continuous operation since 1956)--and, to a lesser extent, the town of Marinaleda, which has a Socialist mayor who has been continuously reelected since 1979--demonstrate that a system whose primary goal is social stability does well at achieving that.
In Italy, the effects of the Maracora law, enacted in 1985, which uses lump-sum unemployment payouts to kick-start worker-owned cooperatives, are similar as well.
It's clear to me that a choice has to be made at the start as to what the goal is.
If social stability is the goal, then having a single Worker-Owner Class is the way to achieve that.
I'm currently listening to Mitch Jeserich's "Letters and Politics" program on Pacifica.
The year 1898 was pivotal in USAian politics.
Overproduction by USAian farmers and industrialists was such that USA needed foreign markets to dump the stuff.
This led to the invasion and occupation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War and yet another ratcheting up of USAian Imperialism/Colonialism/Mercantilism.
The boom and bust cycle inherent to Capitalism is unstable.
For a stable society, it must be avoided.
All systems are NOT equal.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 24 2017, @08:01PM
Well, yes, which is why I said *in theory.* In practice, where unregulated or badly-regulated capitalism runs into trouble is 1) dealing with goods and services for which demand is inelastic, like healthcare, and 2) when it gets its claws into government and the military and starts having wars waged for economic reasons.
You're pretty much entirely correct here, though given Dunbar's Number a.k.a. the Monkeysphere, I'm not sure the coop approach is scalable :/
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @09:14PM
The key, it appears, is that all ELECTIONS for public office MUST BE PUBLICLY FUNDED and that that element MUST be written into the founding document of the democracy with a clause that it is NOT AMENDABLE; if folks think that that needs to be changed, it must be done via a constitutional convention--with everything in the founding document up for grabs.
...otherwise, you end up with Oligarchy/Fascism.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @09:43PM
What's "scalable"?
Mondragon started with 6 guys; they now have 100,000 worker-owners.
Starting in 1985, the Maracora law has spawned 8100 co-ops in a single region in northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna).
...and even if a 100 percent conversion of companies isn't achieved, wouldn't it be great if folks had a -choice- of buying -much- of their stuff from a worker-owned/maximize-wellbeing/profits-stay-local operation as opposed to a maximize-profits/headquartered-in-another-place/exports-jobs corporation?
...and wouldn't the really giant stuff that isn't scalable be considered a natural monopoly which should be publicly owned?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]