Subscribe RSS

Archive for February, 2010

Green Energy: Puts People to Work, Helps Save Planet

February 28th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Green Energy, trade unions, youth and students

Oregon Tradeswomen’s pre-apprenticeship program will feed students into the Clean Energy Works Portland weatherization training.

Apollo Alliance Local Victories

Paving Way to Clean Energy,

Good Jobs Economy

February 19, 2010
By Apollo News Service 

The Apollo Alliance is a strong coalition of unlikely and diverse interests—including labor, business, environmental and community leaders—advancing a bold vision for the new American economy, centered on clean energy and good jobs.

Over the last six years, the Apollo Alliance has built coalitions in 17 states and cities across America—often partnering with local host organizations—that have advanced the nation’s transition to a clean energy economy through innovative policies and projects. In 2009, our state and local Apollo Alliances continued this legacy of success. Read on to learn about their achievements.  

Launching New Apollo Alliances Across America

In 2009, the Apollo Alliance added new affiliates in Western New York, Missouri and Indiana. We also added a new affiliate in Massachusetts, at the end of 2008, when the Green Justice Coalition, convened by Community Labor United in Boston, became the Massachusetts Apollo Alliance.

(more...)

email2friend

Ayn Rand: Sociopath as Mentor to Far Right

February 26th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

Ayn Rand, Inspiration to Right-Wing,

Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killers

 

By Mark Ames

AlterNet.org

February 26, 2010

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

(more...)

email2friend

The New Globalized Poor: Within Our Borders, Among Ourselves

February 23rd, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in financial crisis, poverty

California 'Shantytown,' 21st Century Style

America's Dirty Little Secret:

Who's Really Poor in America?

 

By Leo Hindery, Jr.

Huffington Post

Every Tuesday the Huffington Post lets me post a featured piece. Mostly I write about jobs, especially the issue of 'real unemployment', and trade, where I worry over the extremely adverse effects which unfair globalization is having on American workers.

Two old friends, civil rights activist David Mixner and former U.S. Senator (and my oft co-author) Don Riegle (D-MI), believe that in the economic recovery, not enough attention is being given to 'who's really poor' now. David and Don have for years advised me -- and others -- on the issue of poverty in America, and they are worried that too many people, and especially too many people in the administration and Congress, are missing this imperative.

To help make their point, they referred me to poverty activist Marsha Timpson, who describes today's poor as "America's dirty little secret, hidden in the backyards of America's shining homes, the hollows, the reservations, the border towns and the dark ghettos of the city where they are the lie of the American dream."

(more...)

email2friend

Snarky Quips Don’t Help Dept: Get Serious about 2010 and the TeaBaggers

February 17th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, racism, rightwing

What Not to Do

About the Tea Parties

& And Some Hints

About What to Do

 

by Leonard Zeskind

Huffington Post

The Tea Party convention has come and gone, and we need to look past the speculative bubble surrounding Sarah Palin's possible presidential ambitions and examine the Nashville gathering more closely. A fact-based analytical look at this developing phenomenon is much needed. There is no call to get snarky about the foibles of these Tea Party-types, however much the blogosphere lends itself to the small pleasures of poking fun at others. Neither will pulling down some off-the-shelf theory devoid of hard data give us the handles necessary to tackle this terribly new situation in real time.

During the past year the Tea Parties have managed to capture the angst and the sense of political and social dispossession felt by a definite strata of middle and working class white people. In the process, they have demolished whatever remained of the notion that the conservative, far right wing movement was dead. Street protests in April and July laid the basis for something akin to a civic uprising during the town hall meetings last August. While the Massachusetts election of Senator Scott Brown is now credited with derailing health care reform by virtue of his possible vote to sustain a filibuster, it was in fact the town hall events that first threw Democratic health care plans off the track.

Tea Partiers have already started to run campaigns for political offices small and large in the 2010 Republican primaries. There will certainly be some Democrats who wish them well, using a partisan-based logic that leads to disaster. If you hope that a more radical Republican Party will make it easier to elect moderate and liberal Democrats, you ignore the simple fact that when Republicans have been pulled further to the right, Democrats have usually followed. Worse is never better, it is always worse.

(more...)

email2friend

Today’s Dueling Populisms: Human Solidarity or Racist BootStrapism?

February 12th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, pushing obama, rightwing

In Search of the Forgotten Man:

Right Wing Populism and the

Return of Social Darwinism

 

Christopher Malone, Ph.D.

Christopher Malone is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Pforzheimer Honors College at Pace University in New York City. He is the author of Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (Routledge Press, 2008).

While Barack Obama's election was evident as early as summer 2008, the financial crisis later that fall certainly sealed the deal. As the economy shed about 700,000 jobs a month in the period between the election and his inauguration, political pundits wondered if 2009 would look more like 1933 or 1993: were we on the verge of a New Deal-style realignment in American politics, or were we simply witnessing the election of a Democrat in the midst of another economic downtown during an erstwhile conservative era?

2009 has come and gone, but the question remains. Gubernatorial losses for Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009, along with a shocking senate loss in Massachusetts in January, have provided Republicans with an opening: 2010 shall be to Barack Obama what 1994 was to Bill Clinton, they assert. With health care legislation stalled if not altogether dead, Republicans declare the Obama agenda has met its Waterloo. Right wing populist anger over big and intrusive government rivals a left wing populist revolt against big banks and big business.

(more...)

email2friend

Reading the Tea Leaves – Not a Pretty Picture

February 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, racism, rightwing

 

White Racial Resentment

Bubbles Under the Surface

of the Tea Party Movement

By Rich Benjamin
AlterNet, February 5, 2010

Editor's Note: Rich Benjamin's commentary on the underlying "white grievance" currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.

The Tea Party movement, holding its first convention this weekend, is angling to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and in deed, since at least the 1960s counterculture. Only this time, the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

(more...)

email2friend