Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the cover of Businessweek!

Jay OwenGreen Prosperity, Reforming Global Finance, Sustainability News, Beyond GDP, Transforming Finance

“Ethical Markets fully supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and all her allies in the 116th US Congress  advocating for the Green New Deal, which we think can finally engage the nationwide coalition we identified in 2009  and have covered annually in our Green Transition Scoreboard® which has tracked private investing in solar, renewable resource technologies and companies.  These private investments reached a cumulative $9.3 trillion in our 2018 report: “Capturing CO2 While Improving Human Nutrition and Health“, where we also examined all the startup companies in plant-based proteins, e.g. Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and another 20 others, also being tracked in Business Week.

 

We are also happy that AOC has done her homework, and understands Next Economy Portfolio Theory (NEPT), as well as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) practiced by pioneer asset managers in creating successful fossil-free portfolios.  These theories reject defunct economic textbooks which are invalidated by all the current scientific research in the social and physical sciences as I document in “Mapping the Global Transition to  the Solar Age: From Economism to Earth Systems Science, London (2014) Foreword By NASA Chief Scientist D.Bushnell. (download from www.ethicalmarkets.com).

 

In AOC ‘s interview on CBS “60 Minutes” (Jan 6, 2019) she handily parried the tired economics in Anderson Cooper’s question about funding the Green New Deal, parroted by politicians and media interviewers from obsolete textbooks: “Where’s the money coming from?”

As all MMT proponents know, money is not scarce, it is printed by all central banks in their Quantitative Easing (QE)  and most of  the money in circulation is created out of thin air by private commercial banks when they make loans (see my reviews of Collusion by Nomi Prins and A Green Bank of England by Positive Money) .

 

The politics of money-creation and credit allocation are now in full view since the 2008 financial crisis and the question is: how is this money created and how is it spent? If it is created, as in 2008, to bail out the mistakes of  Wall Street and to buy their toxic mortgage bonds, it is a waste of taxpayers’  and public resources and will create the backlashes of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, (both carried signs saying “Where’s MY Bailout?”).

The Public Banking Institute , founded by lawyer Ellen Brown, author of “Web of Debt“ and many other books, is active in many states to reform our current Wall Street dominated financial sector.   Happily AOC understands all this and points out that as long as new money created (QE) is used to invest in building future productive assets and new infrastructure to underpin the green transition to sustainable, equitable futures, and millions of good jobs, it is well-spent and will not cause inflation.  Many of us call for “Qualitative Easing” and “Green QE” to underpin the global transition from fossilized economies to those cleaner greener, knowledge-richer societies in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ratified by 193 countries in 2015.

Opponents of the Green New Deal (the fossilized incumbent sectors) try to miscast AOC’s call for 70% tax rates.  These would only fall on incomes beyond $10 million annually: i.e. only the next dollars earned after the original $10 million!!  Such top rate, even up  to 90%  have been in effect in the 1960s, and did not impede progress in our economy.

 

We at Ethical Markets agree it is high time for a visionary “moonshot“ like the GREEN NEW DEAL and we will do all we can to  help!

 

Hazel Henderson, Editor, author also of “The Politics of the Solar Age“(1981) now in 800 libraries worldwide in over 20  languages.“

 

appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper that aired on Jan. 6, she was talking up the Green New Deal, a plan to move the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Cooper challenged her by …