Chris has put forward some ideas.
I am not an economist, but I would like to offer some ideas for other
areas to cover, or sub-areas.
ENVIRO: I didn't see anything about "green business" policies. I just
finished a private sector project on sustainable development. Whatever
else one wants to say about it, it is "subversive" in the sense it
undercuts much of the business ethic embraced by the right.
First, "monetizing carbon emissions" puts cost back on coal and the
like. Thus, it supports development in alternative energies like wind
and solar and small hydro. Poll after poll, year after year, shows the
general public wants those energy sources. They are popular. However,
the current system, provides hidden subsidies to old energy sources.
Second, the inherent definition of sustainable development is
"subversive" in that it "connects everything." SD is about the "triple
bottom line." That is, business cannot merely operate with a traditional
single bottom line, it has to account for social and environmental
costs. This brings non-business opinion to greater prominence (not
dominant, of course). In this regards, it is not surprising to see
universities starting to offer combination MBA-Enviro programs. I
believe all six law schools in Ontario now offer Enviro-Law programs.
MEDIA: Centralization of ownership is already heavy. Canada has a longer
history of investigating this, for obvious reasons. It can be a popular
issue as well as an educational one. Showing the public how media really
works is productive in a political sense. My formal training is
broadcast journalism. I always enjoy anything that lets people "look
behind the curtain" at how it works. For instance, after all these
years, I still get a smile every time I watch the Daily Show with Jon
Stewart and the audience sees its first "live reporter" -- who, on TV
monitors appears to be at the scene; but, being in studio, the audience
sees he is actually a few metres away from Stewart, against a blue
screen backdrop. Fighting the FCC tendencies permits critique of mass
media manipulation.
Chris wrote:
> Labour policies: Completely premature at this end
> of the 21st century to try to abolish wage slavery
> as part of an electable programme. They need to redo
> their focus groups to find out how to achieve
> consensus between aspirational and disadvantaged
> workers. By no means impossible because even the
> aspirational workers all know family members or
> friends who have suddenly become disadvantaged.
Right.
E.g., the western IT labor sector is currently a disaster area. It went
from "aspiration" to "desperation" in five years. It crammed life times
of industrial labor reality lessons into a short period. These people
are both energized and demoralized at once.
Despite the grand pronouncements of the new economy, in the end, nothing
was different. The same old rules applied. And, unless these same people
want to go through that again, or want their children to go through it,
they had better build a better safety net. Likewise, they are very
likely to want to see more Waksal's locked up in real prisons.
Ken.
--
According to UN estimates, the richest fifth of the worlds people
consume some 66 times as much as the poorest fifth, including 58 percent
of total energy. And they own 87 percent of the world's vehicles, a
major source of greenhouse gases. And the two hundred and twenty-five
people who comprise the super-rich have a combined wealth of over one
trillion US dollars, equivalent to the annual income of the poorest 47
percent of the worlds people. Surely history tells us such imbalances
are not sustainable.
-- Maurice Strong, 2001
