credit: Adam Borkowski for Unsplash “What do you do for a living?” That’s a common question when people are introduced. A way of saying, “Who are you and what do you do?” “Where is your place in the social strata and how should I relate to you?” “Are you a doctor, a lawyer, an Read More
All posts by jmp
What If Again
We have spent a lot of time and energy, yours and ours both, in arguing for a simple and equitable tax policy that will serve our society far better than what we have now. People tell us it’s complicated. Not that easy. Our efforts are appreciated, of course, naïve though they may be. But, really! Read More
Them Changes
Last month in this space, we posted a blog entitled What If? It suggested we stop taxing income and start taxing assets. How’s that for a long shot? Wonder of wonders, a small piece of that idea briefly seemed like it might actually happen. When the President’s efforts to increase taxes on corporations and high Read More
Plastics
Remember the 1960s movie The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman is taken aside by Mr. McGuire, who says to the young man just setting off on his way to a career, “Just one word: plastics! There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” “I will,” says Hoffman. “I will.” Many of us thought not enough Read More
What If?
Do you ever ask yourself: what if? How things might be if we took a different approach. Maybe changed our priorities. Set new goals. See what the world might look like from one particular perspective or another if we altered our point of view. There are certain things we believe to be true that are established Read More
Inflection Point
Do you ever get the feeling we might be reaching an inflection point? Not because the sky is falling, although it often seems to be when we wake to another day covered in ash. Not because strongmen (and they are nearly all men) in the service of plutocrats are once again the dominant political force Read More
Post-Growth Parameters
At New Northwest, we love probing sacred cows, giving them a poke in the ribs, seeing which ones stand and which might fall with just enough of a push. All those sacrosanct, inviolable concepts, adages, and tenets we blithely accept because they are repeated by one and all so assuredly so often. Sometimes they are less Read More
It’s a Mystery
One day when I was a young man working at The Denver Post, a reporter I admired dropped by my desk to give me some surprising news. His name was John Dunning, he was a few years older than I, and struck me as equal parts 1930s movie character and Jack Kerouac protagonist. John Read More
Consumer or System
More discussion about where we best might focus our efforts to deal with the critical problems of our time. None is bigger than climate change, none is more overwhelming to contemplate, and nothing else is quite as insidious at inspiring nihilism. But there are effective ways to address these issues if we’re willing to challenge Read More
Consumerizing Blame
Recently, a friend was passing out those little curlicue florescent light bulbs, the type that every hotel now uses. She said we all needed to start using them because of climate change. They save a lot of energy precisely because they give off so damn little light. All we need to do is learn to Read More