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The Green Way Out Dept: Some of Them Know, But Face Too Much Greed and Too Little Courage

August 8th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Green Energy, structural reform

Green Recovery

A New Program to Create Good Jobs

and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy

Large windmills and solar panels in Atlantic City; the wind farm consists of five windmills that generate 7.5 megawatts, enough energy to power approximately 2,500 homes.

SOURCE: AP/Mel Evans

By John Podesta

Read the full report (pdf)

Written in 2008

The signs are clear: Our economy is in trouble. Falling home prices, foreclosures, bank failures, a weaker dollar, rising prices for gas, food, and steel, and layoffs in banking, construction, and manufacturing sectors are all indicators of serious economic strain—following a long period in which the middle class went nowhere even while the economy grew as a whole. What’s more, evidence suggests the current downturn will continue for at least another year.

At the same time, we face a growing climate crisis that will require us to rapidly invest in new energy infrastructure, cleaner sources of power, and more efficient use of electricity and fuels in order to cut global warming pollution. There is much work to be done in building smart solutions at a scale and speed that is bold enough to meet this gathering challenge.

It is time for a new vision for the economic revitalization of the nation and a restoration of American leadership in the world. We must seize this precious opportunity to mobilize the country and the international community toward a brighter, more prosperous future. At the heart of this opportunity is clean energy, remaking the vast energy systems that power the nation and the world. We must fundamentally change the way we produce and consume energy and dramatically reduce our dependence on oil. The economic opportunities provided by such a transformation are vast, not to mention the national security benefits of reducing oil dependence and the pressing need to fight global warming. The time for action is now.

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Jobs for All Dept: Dump the GOP’s Neoliberal Kool-Aid Down the Drain

August 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Jobs, elections, rightwing, trade unions

First Punish The Unemployed,

Then Declare War On The Employed

By Jason Linkins

Huffington Post

August 6, 2010 - Over the past few months, Congressional Republicans and skittish Democrats who've lingered too long at the Deficit Panic Kool-Aid Stand have made life extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable members of society -- the nation's unemployed.

Rather than extend unemployment benefits so that the millions of Americans who are out there busting their humps to find the needle-in-a-haystack that is a job of any kind, they've demanded that those benefits be offset, essentially punishing the unemployed for the deficits they giddily ran up for years.

It's been pretty embarrassing to watch, frankly. But at least no one's out there running on an actual platform of kicking those who have managed to secure employment out of work, right?

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Where is the Class Struggle? Are We Prisoners of Old Ideas?

August 2nd, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in poverty, trade unions

Solidarity Rally at Workers Occupation of Republic Windows

 

Class Struggle & the Crisis in the U.S.:

A Look at Social and Economic Effects

Restructuring and Methods of Adapting

 

By  Henri Simon

Introduction

The text below first appeared in ECHANGES, No, 130, Autumn 2009 as part one of a three part series on the social effects of the crisis in the U.S . We’ve shortened the original French, cutting background material on US public sector finances and social programs and correcting minor factual errors. With its focus on actions not usually considered “political” in the traditional use of the word, we think this text makes an important contribution to understanding the full ramifications of the crisis and the responses to it within the US.

We hope the question at the end, “what weight should be put on the proliferation of resistances?” stimulates wider debate, discussion and research on the larger question which frames it: do these actions in some way, despite “not following traditional paths…testify by their existence and forms to (changing) something in the capitalist system” or “are they only adaptations, helping the system overcome the crisis without changing basics?”

Most events described here took place in the earlier phase of the crisis. For several months, roughly beginning with the first bank bailouts and in the fall of 2008, through the Republic Windows occupation and ending in the spring of 2009, it seemed like a larger social explosion was building. However, even as unemployment, foreclosures and evictions remain at record highs, little in the way of the open mass action predicted by many in the traditional left has taken place. Many actions mentioned in the text, like the bank occupations, have since died out, or are no longer as visible.

But if traditional forms of class struggle can’t yet be detected, there are signs that on the micro-level, in the areas where individual resistance merges into the collective so well identified in this text, subtle but real changes are brewing. A good example is the May 31, 2010 New York Times article, “Owners Stop Paying Mortgages and Stop Fretting,” describing how, “ A growing number of people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.

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‘Absolutely Racist’ – Exposing Fox New’s Case-Hardened Media-Lynching Politics

July 27th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

 

Fox News' Long History of Race-Baiting

Media Matters, July 27, 2010 5:34 am ET

Howard Dean and Joan Walsh recently called out Fox News, criticizing what they called its "racist" handling of the deceptively edited Shirley Sherrod video clip. Indeed, Fox News and its personalities have a long history of aggressive race-baiting and racially charged commentary.

Walsh, Dean describe Fox as "racist," highlight Sherrod, New Black Panthers coverage

Howard Dean: Fox acted "absolutely racist." In a July 25 appearance on Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean told host Chris Wallace: "Let's just be blunt about this. I don't think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and you're certainly not a racist, but I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a -- they had an obligation to find out what was really in the [Sherrod] clip. They have been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this [Sherrod] business and [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor and all this other stuff."

Walsh: "It's true" that Sherrod is a victim of Fox racism. On the July 25 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, Walsh, Salon.com editor in chief, stated of Sherrod: "I'm not giving her a pass, but I think the idea that she shouldn't be able to say Fox or Breitbart is racist is preposterous. She gets to say that because it's true, and because, from her vantage point, it's especially true."

Walsh describes "Fox News's 50-state Southern strategy." In a July 25 Salon.com post, Walsh noted that Fox News is hyping "one 'scary black people' and 'Obama's a racist' story after another" and wrote: "Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state 'Southern strategy,' the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon)."

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Nuts and Bolts: What Every Political Organizer Should Know

July 20th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Organizing

Carl Davidson: May Day Summit 2010 from Artemis on Vimeo.



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Note to Obama: It’s Helps to Be Antiwar and pro-Green

July 19th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, youth and students

Millennials, Issues and Politics

Why Dems Are Losing the Youth Votes

by DemFromCT

 

Pew poll on millennials

Young Americans are the linchpin of a new progressive era in American politics. So why aren't Democrats paying more attention to them?

That was the lead to an essay by E.J. Dionne in February, part of a series of articles he wrote outlining a huge problem. The younger voters (millennials, aka Gen Y, Gen Next, echo boomers, etc) are more liberal, less white and more accepting than their elders, but there's a catch, as EJ outlines:

For Democrats looking ahead to this fall's election, the Pew study has some disturbing news.

It's true that Millennials are the most Democratic age group in the electorate -- they voted for Barack Obama by 2 to 1. Their turnout rate relative to older voters was higher in 2008 than in any election since 1972, the first presidential contest in which 18-year-olds could vote.

But Pew notes that since 2008, the Millennials' "enthusiasms" have "cooled" -- "for Obama and his message of change, for the Democratic Party and, quite possibly, for politics itself."

look at the R2K polling found here: the 18-29 vote (graphics below the fold) consistently supports Obama and Congressional Democrats more than any other age demographic.

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Upcoming Battle: Left’s ‘Green and Clean’ vs. Right’s ‘More Nukes’

July 17th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Green Energy, Jobs

The U.S. Needs a New

Energy Policy ... Now!

 

By Michael T. Klare

The Nation, July 17, 2010
This story is from a new special issue of The Nation on energy. Read more here.

If the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico tells us anything, it is that we need a new national energy policy—a comprehensive plan for escaping our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels and creating a new energy system based on climate-safe alternatives. Without such a plan, the response to the disaster will be a hodgepodge of regulatory reforms and toughened environmental safeguards but not a fundamental shift in behavior. Because our current energy path leads toward greater reliance on fuels acquired from environmentally and politically hazardous locations, no amount of enhanced oversight or stiffened regulations can avert future disasters like that unfolding in the gulf. Only a dramatic change in course—governed by an entirely new policy framework—can reduce the risk of catastrophe and set the nation on a wise energy trajectory.

By far the most important part of this strategy must be a change in the overarching philosophy that steers decisions on how much energy the United States should seek to produce, of what sorts and under what conditions. It may not seem as if we operate under such a philosophy today, but we do—one that extols growth over all other considerations, that privileges existing fuels over renewables and that ranks environmental concerns below corporate profit. Until we replace this outlook with one that places innovation and the environment ahead of the status quo, we will face more ecological devastation and slower economic dynamism. Only with a new governing philosophy—one that views the development of climate-friendly energy systems as the engine of economic growth—can we move from our current predicament to a brighter future.

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Cynical Hogwash: Wall St ‘Structural Reform’ is to Make the Jobless Suffer More

July 9th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Jobs, poverty

Left Margin:

The Theory of "Structural" Unemployment

and the Jobs That Aren't Coming Back

By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com

July 8, 2010

Is there any hope for the unemployed? Apparently not. Many, says Chrystia Freeland, global editor-in-chief of Reuters news, are people "on the wrong side of history." The comment came last Saturday during one of CNN's innocuous chats about the state of the economy where people of note sit around and try to spell out what has gone wrong. Freeland, 32, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, was explaining how the stubborn joblessness in the U.S. wasn't necessarily the result of the recession but is rather "structural," that is, the result of those looking for work and not finding it lacking the requisite skills for today's economy. Her fellow panelists seemed to agree, one of them, Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute, saying that most of the jobs being wiped out daily "will not come back." Then, the moderator read the words of some Republican politician putting responsibility for the jobs crisis on President Obama saying, "I smell the coming of midterm elections." They all giggled.

Frankly, I couldn't find anything funny about it. The actions of those in Congress that have held up the extension of benefits to the long-term unemployed are not only politically reactionary but also morally repugnant. It's easy to understand their continued assault on the concept of empathy; they don't have any and don't think anyone else should. And, as far as working women and men being on the "wrong" side of history, well that depends on who's making it. The fellow who said the jobs are not coming back failed to say where they went.

It's all so cynical and so much hogwash.

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Deconstructing Gringo Vanity: Oliver Stone’s ‘South of the Border’

July 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in latin america, pushing obama

Oliver Stone's Latin America

By Tom Hayden

Huffington Post

An intriguing and newsworthy moment in Oliver Stone's South of the Border comes as Stone describes a private meeting between presidents Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez at an April 2009 conference in Trinidad. With footage of a light-hearted Obama and Chavez on the screen, Stone narrates:

In private, so I'm told, the new man in Washington assured Chavez that under his administration there would be no further destabilization attempts or any interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela.

I first reported those Obama-Chavez private contacts in The Huffington Post on April 21, 2009. My source was a Venezuelan official. I further noted that the State Department official in charge of the US delegation, Jeffrey Davidow, was an anti-Chavez hardliner who tried to spoil any impression of a warming of US-Venezuelan relations.

In South of the Border, Stone goes further, alleging a US promise not to destabilize or interfere in Venezuela's internal affairs, which would be a sharp departure from the Bush years and the views of Davidow and Clinton-era operatives like Doug Schoen and Mark Penn. What's the truth here? Who are Stone's sources?

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Taking a Deeper Look at the Women in the Tea Party Orbit

July 5th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing, women

The Tea Party and

the New Right-wing

Christian Feminism

By Ruth Rosen

5 July 2010

OpenDemocracy.net

Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.

Most Americans are not quite sure what to make of the sprawling right-wing Tea Party, which gradually emerged in 2009 and became a household name after it held nationwide Tea Party rallies on April 15th 2010, to protest paying taxes. Throwing tea overboard, as you may remember, is an important symbolic image of the colonial anger at Britain’s policy of “taxation without representation.”

Many liberals and leftists dismissed the Tea Party as a temporary, knee-jerk response to the recession, high employment, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, and an African American president who had saved American capitalism by expanding the government’s subsidies to the financial, real estate, and automobile industries.  Perhaps it is a temporary political eruption, but as E.J. Dionne, columnist at The Washington Post has argued, the movement also threatens the hard-won unity of the Republicans. “The rise of the tea party movement,” he writes, “is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional. It typically perceives the most dangerous threats to freedom as the design of well-educated elitists out of touch with “American values.”

Who are these angry people who express so much resentment against the government, rather than at corporations?   Since national polls dramatically contradict each other, I have concluded that the Tea Party movement has energized people across all classes.

One important difference, however, is race.  At Tea Party rallies you don’t see faces with dark complexions.  Another important distinction is that men and women are drawn to this sprawling movement for a variety of overlapping but possibly different reasons.  Both men and women seem to embrace an incoherent “ideology” which calls for freedom from government, no taxes, and an inchoate desire to “take back America,” which means restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and “safe.”

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