Free Republic

Introduction We are living in a time of grassroots demands to transform our built environment and our relationships with one another and the earth.2 To abolish prisons and police, rent, debt, borders, and billionaires.3 To decommodify housing and healthcare and to decolonize land.4 To exercise more collective ownership over our collectively generated wealth.5 Some of us are reimagining the state. Others are dreaming of moving beyond it.6 But these are more than dreams. These are demands for a democratic political economy. These demands increased in volume this year as the violence of policing continued, the fires burned in California and...

OPINION The USA, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK which had the moral responsibility to rapidly phase out oil and gas production are responsible for planned expansion from new oil and gas fields for next decade and half. How can these countries advise India to cut on coal consumption? Our greenhouse gas emission is nearly 3 Giga tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually. We are distant third behind the two top emitters China with 14 Giga tonnes and the US with 8 Giga tonnes Among the important outcomes, COP 28 text proposes to triple renewable energy capacity and double the global...

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are “piling up on dealer lots” as American consumers continue buying traditional gas-powered cars at faster rates, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the Journal, despite major investments from the federal government and automakers into EVs, Americans are not warming to President Joe Biden’s green energy agenda the way the administration and the industry had predicted. The Journal reports: As a result, electric cars and trucks are piling up on dealer lots, causing auto companies to reassess their investment plans. It takes a dealership around three weeks longer to sell an EV than a gasoline vehicle,...

As part of his Bidenomics agenda to lower costs for American families, President Biden is announcing nearly 30 new actions to strengthen supply chains critical to America’s economic and national security. These actions will help Americans get the products they need when they need them, enable reliable deliveries for businesses, strengthen our agriculture and food systems, and support good-paying, union jobs here at home. President Biden will announce these actions alongside members of his Cabinet and other senior Administration officials at the inaugural meeting of the new White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience. The Council, which President Biden is...

Nearly 4,000 car dealerships are begging Joe Biden to pull back on the “unrealistic” EV mandates. The EVs are piling up on lots and carmakers are losing billions of dollars. A group of 3,882 dealers sent President Biden a letter begging him to lighten future EV sales requirements. EVs are not ready for the average buyer and may not be for some time. It’s amazing that Biden’s advisors didn’t see that before demanding the regulations. In the letter dated November 28th, 2023, dealers say that while BEVs are ideal for many people, “demand today is not keeping up with the...

The White House has announced it plans to use a cold-war era law to ease supply chain issues that the administration argues are contributing to higher inflation – a key electoral challenge to Joe Biden’s re-election chances next year as polling consistently suggests voters are not buying his Bidenomics pitch. In a statement, the White House said Biden will use the Defense Production Act to improve the domestic manufacturing of medicines deemed crucial for national security and will convene the first meeting of the president’s supply chain resilience council to announce other measures tied to the production and shipment of...

Biden acknowledged Monday that prices are still “too high” and argued that companies should lower them after an 18% jump in consumer costs since he took office.“We know that prices are still too high for too many things — that times are still too tough for too many families,” *** “We’ve made progress, but we have more work to do,” “Let me be clear to any corporation has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even supply chains have been rebuilt: It’s time to stop the price gouging and give the American consumer a break.”...

Is there anything more Soviet than a bank that lends money to companies making things no one wants to buy? That's the missing puzzle piece on why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up, and Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has found it: the failure of the bank was premised on ESG, which descended into wokester lending priorities, creating the abnormal conditions that left the bank ripe for a meltdown. Strassel: Most of these companies weren’t filling some vital market need. Rather, as the Journal reported, SVB was beloved for its willingness to offer “banking services to startups that...

House Bill 24, the Idaho Launch bill, passed the House yesterday afternoon by a razor-thin margin after more than an hour of spirited debate. Rep. Megan Blanksma is the House sponsor, but Governor Little has been the driving force behind this bill, which would expand the existing Idaho Launch Grant program, providing $8,500 per high school graduate ($102 million overall) for technical education and workforce training. Idaho Freedom Foundation strongly opposes this bill because it significantly expands a government program, subsidizes corporate training programs, and distributes money to certain industries as determined by the unelected Workforce Development Council. Opponents of...

The White House is pushing an infrastructure bill that could reshape the discussion around capitalism as it seems to reestablish the federal government as a primary driver of how the economy should grow and function. In addition to traditional infrastructure projects, Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan would make government investments in broadband, electric vehicles, climate change, elderly care, child benefits, housing and developing future technologies. It would redefine classic infrastructure projects to include investments in workers and families paid for by tax hikes on corporations. The ambitious proposal effectively transforms the relationship between the government and the private sector,...

display of grassroots power, the Denver chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, successfully convinced the Denver Democratic Party to endorse a key tenet of democratic socialism in their party platform. The party’s official platform now includes the following plank: We believe the economy should be democratically owned and controlled in order to serve the needs of the many, not to make profits for the few. The construction used here is similar to “for the many not the few,” the slogan used by the U.K.’s Labour Party. That party is currently run by Jeremy Corbyn, a committed socialist, who...

In a September 11 Bloomberg article, economist Noah Smith claims that John Maynard Keynes, the architect of today’s government economic policies around the world, wasn’t a “‘socialist’” or even a “‘progressive.’” He did not favor “a command economy.” Yes he “was in favor of some amount of wealth redistribution and government intervention into the economy.” But “Keynesian policies are fundamentally … about economic stability,… about smoothing out the fluctuations in the economy, reducing risk for everyone concerned.” “Stabilization theory says that you can smooth out the wrinkles of the business cycle without messing with the deep structure of how the...

Great catch by Hot Air’s Erika Johnsen of President Obama elaborating on his economic philosophy: He told his audience Republicans, including presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, “believe that we should go back to the top-down economics of the last decade.” “They figure that if we simply eliminate regulations and cut taxes by trillions of dollars, then the market will solve all of our problems,” Obama said. “They argue that if we help corporations and wealthy investors maximize their profits by whatever means necessary — whether through layoffs or outsourcing or union-busting — that it will automatically translate into jobs and...

President Barack Obama needs to go further than criticizing millionaires and oil companies. He needs to propose an industrial policy. In his June 29 news conference, Obama was right to come out against tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, corporate jet owners and oil and gas companies. What is passing as the free market is a system of giveaways to those who don't need it -- the richest Americans, corporations that relocate jobs overseas and banks that are "too big to fail," yet have failed the economy with their predatory practices. With more than 10 million jobs lost to the...

Valerie Jarrett recently posted a blog entry at Whitehouse.gov titled "Celebrating National Entrepreneurs' Day," a reference to the Presidential Proclamation last week announcing both a Day and a Week to celebrate the American capitalist: "Entrepreneurs embody the promise that lies at the heart of America -- that if you have a good idea and work hard enough, the American dream is within your reach." What's going on here? Valerie Jarrett, the Senior Advisor to the President, "Barack's Rock" as Vogue magazine put it, is suddenly a booster for capitalism after a lifetime of mingling with the anti-capitalist Chicago left? Jarrett...

Good morning. Take your seats, turn off your cell phones, and keep them off for the duration of this lecture. Today's subject is jobs. As even the dimmest among you are aware, we're in a jobless recovery, which means that economic activity is picking up, but businesses just aren't hiring enough workers to bring down the unemployment rate to an acceptable level. Between now and the November elections, Republicans will blame Democrats for this mess, and Democrats will say that it's all the Republicans' fault. The decibel level will be excruciating. If you're among those who would rather argue than...

Opponents of a massive new energy tax and federal bureaucracy breathed a small sigh of relief last month when the Lieberman-Warner climate tax bill went down in flames on the Senate floor, with even 10 Democrats breaking from the party line and saying, in writing, that they would have opposed the bill on final passage. Unfortunately, power-mad bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency are undaunted. Empowered by an activist Supreme Court in the 5-4 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the EPA is expected today to release a staggering document blueprinting a dizzying array of greenhouse gas regulatory programs under dozens of...

The Republican-controlled Congress favored legislation to help expand and improve Health Savings Accounts and brought consumers the not-so-popular changes to Medicare. Now, as Democrats prepare to take control of the 110th Congress a new approach to healthcare reform is expected - universal coverage. Democrats look to place greater responsibility on government and employers for increasing access to insurance coverage, and they don't intend to sit idly by about it either. A survey in November shows a majority of Americans would favor government intervention. Very large majorities, for example, favor increased government funding for programs aimed at children and low-income Americans...

Back then, on the streets of Harlem, he'd take a full swing at his foes. He was a high school dropout, a dead-end kid until he picked himself up and put on that military uniform. In the Korean War he fought like hell, brought back a couple of medals, too. After he came home, he set himself on a course straight as a ruler: college, law school, assistant U.S. attorney, politics. Charlie Rangel is 76 now and the dean of New York's congressional delegation. It's been more than 50 years since those days as a street fighter, but this fall's...

CONGRESSMAN BARNEY FRANK, incoming chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, has proposed something big and bold -- a grand bargain with labor and business to create a society more equal, more dynamic, and less bureaucratic. Democrats control Congress by narrow margins, which limits their power to two areas. They can block things Republicans and business elites want -- and hold those goals hostage for things Democrats and liberals want. And they can use the hearing process to shed light on the real America. Frank plans to do both. His committee has broad economic jurisdiction. Business, Frank explains, wants...