People Before Profit blog

Does Natural Gas Have Positive Environmental Impacts?

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:24:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
E - The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: I heard someone say that the environmental benefits of natural gas for electricity generation were overstated and that it is not as green-friendly as the industry would have us believe. What is your take on this? -- D. Montcalm, Brewster, NY

In our increasingly carbon-constrained world, natural gas (also known as methane) does keep coming up as a potentially cleaner fuel source for electricity generation than coal, currently the nation’s primary source of electrical power. Natural gas advocates argue that it generates 50 percent fewer greenhouse gases than coal when burned. And since natural gas is more widely available than ever, thanks to newer more efficient—though in some cases environmentally damaging—extraction techniques, some think it should be playing a larger role in a transition away from coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Today over 50 percent of electricity generated in the U.S. comes from coal; natural gas accounts for less than 20 percent.

But scientists aren’t so sure natural gas should play any part in solving the climate crisis. A 2007 lifecycle analysis of natural gas production, distribution and consumption found that when one factors in the total emissions associated with not only the end use of natural gas but also its extraction and distribution—much of it can leak when it is pulled out of the ground and then piped to power plants and other customers—it doesn’t seem so much cleaner than coal after all.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that loose pipe fittings and intentional venting for safety purposes on natural gas lines cause annual greenhouse gas emissions rivaling that produced by 35 million cars each year. The World Bank estimates that emissions from natural gas extraction operations alone account for over a fifth of the atmosphere’s total load of climate-changing methane.

“When scientists evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions of energy sources over their full lifecycle and incorporate the methane emitted during production, the advantage of natural gas holds true only when it is burned in more modern and efficient plants,” reports Abrahm Lustgarten on the investigative news website, ProPublica. “But roughly half of the 1,600 gas-fired power plants in the United States operate at the lowest end of the efficiency spectrum.”

He adds that, while the median U.S. gas-fired power plant emits 40 percent fewer greenhouse gases than a typical coal plant, some 800 inefficient plants offer only a 25 percent improvement. The fact that methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas—the EPA says methane is 20 times more effective trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) —makes it even less appealing as a replacement for coal.

“The problem is you build a gas plant for 40 years,” James Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest power companies in the U.S., told ProPublica. “That’s a long bridge. What if, with revelations around methane emissions, it turns out to be only a 10 or 20 percent reduction of carbon from coal? If that’s true, gas is not the panacea.” Rogers himself is an advocate for limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

But with the Obama administration still keen on mining domestic natural gas reserves versus upping our reliance on foreign oil, natural gas will likely continue to play a role in the energy mix for some time yet.

CONTACTS: ProPublica, www.propublica.org; Duke Energy, www.duke-energy.com.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

The Unity of Public Workers and Those They Serve

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:42:00 +0000

"You are winning the super-bowl of workers rights," Jesse Jackson told 60 thousand workers, families and citizens in Madison, Wisconsin last week.

It will strike some as extremely odd that Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker gave rise to a political – not a collective bargaining – strike by deciding to attack public workers' right to collectively bargain. When the tens of thousands of teachers, public workers – and those that they serve, students, parents and grandparents – gathered in Madison to protest stripping Wisconsin working people of their rights, they in fact discarded all ordinary collective bargaining interests related to pay and benefits to expose the serious threat to democracy in the Governor's right-wing agenda. In doing so they rose heroically to meet the challenge of a political strike, proposing alternative budget and tax policies, addressing the budget deficit issues head on – taking political leadership on issues that affect not only themselves but all working people – and all citizens – of Wisconsin.

To take away public workers' rights to bargain has devastating effects on both jobs, incomes and economic recovery in Wisconsin. But it also says, with respect to education, for example: the people most directly affected by education – the teachers, students and parents shall have NO seat at the decision-making table on the entire question of education. Further, firefighters shall have no effective say on fire dangers; police no effective say on public safety, not to mention many other public services and their providers – not least sanitation workers who know what is garbage, and what is not.

The attack on public workers has nothing to do with budget fixing, as all actual budget issues are off the table, and is merely a cover to launch an attack on public services of every description while raiding the public treasury for 140 million dollars in new tax breaks for corporations and the rich. In other words: take the money spent on education and give to the Koch brothers who have large timber interests in Wisconsin, and who funded so-called Tea Party and other candidates – including Governor Walker. These candidates are little more than shills, con jobs pretending to be grass roots advocates, intent on destroying democratic government and any other obstacle in the way wealth accumulation for the top one percent of the population.

Butter would not melt in the mouths of the scoundrels who proclaim "unions are only for the private sector" when in fact they and their rich backers have spent the past 75 years attempting to reverse the passage to national labor relations act under Roosevelt, protecting private sector workers, ever since the day it was enacted. Aided by globalization, changes in labor law that permit firing workers who organize or strike to defend themselves, and changes in the modes of private production, these public enemies have made great progress toward rolling workers rights back where they want them to go – to the mid-19th century.

Wisconsin is showing that public workers, when they are united with those they serve, can block, stop, and – if we ALL lend a hand – reverse this exceedingly dangerous assault. To not turn this assault back risks a confrontation between haves and have-nots in this society that could rival the conflict over slavery in its devastating consequences for our country.

Marxists long thought (and it was born out in much experience in the past century) that production workers in mass industries would lead the path toward genuine democracy and progress throughout the world. The advancing social nature of production was a powerful argument for more democratic controls over large-scale economic institutions (corporations) who were all growing "too big to fail" and in many ways "too big to remain private" without unacceptable costs to society. Most democratic and social democratic reforms of the past century were focused on addressing various aspects of the growing social dependencies in advanced capitalist economies. In fact, more socialist-style relations – in the form of more regulatory and income re-distribution legislation (e.g. retirement, health care, education, labor protections, civil rights, environmental regulation, financial regulation, etc, etc) – have given rise to a very large domain public, non-profit, and quasi public institutions upon which all depend. Even the corporations depend on these institutions while they simultaneously, and schizophrenically, seek to corrupt them in order that they do not stray into the "hands of the people", who they noisily proclaim "are not entitled to anything.

Thus public workers – in a sense, the kernel of the socialized component and infrastructures of our society – may have replaced private production workers as the leading edge of this titanic democratic struggle now underway. Perhaps too soon to finally judge – but it is a fascinating and thrilling moment for the entire progressive movement to ponder. Not just ponder – put your shoulder to the wheel, brothers and sisters: because this train is bound for glory.

Photo by PeoplesWorld.org

Profit Pathology and Disposable Planet

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:04:00 +0000

Some years ago in New England, a group of environmentalists asked a corporate executive how his company (a paper mill) could justify dumping its raw industrial effluent into a nearby river. The river—which had taken Mother Nature centuries to create--was used for drinking water, fishing, boating, and swimming. In just a few years, the paper mill had turned it into a highly toxic open sewer.

The executive shrugged and said that river dumping was the most cost-effective way of removing the mill’s wastes If the company had to absorb the additional expense of having to clean up after itself, it might not be able to maintain its competitive edge and would then have to go out of business or move to a cheaper labor market, resulting in a loss of jobs for the local economy.

Free Market Über Alles

It was a familiar argument: the company had no choice. It was compelled to act that way in a competitive market. The mill was not in the business of protecting the environment but in the business of making a profit, the highest possible profit at the highest possible rate of return. Profit is the name of the game, as business leaders make clear when pressed on the point. The overriding purpose of business is capital accumulation.

To justify its single-minded profiteering, Corporate America promotes the classic laissez-faire theory which claims that the free market---a congestion of unregulated and unbridled enterprises all selfishly pursuing their own ends---is governed by a benign “invisible hand” that miraculously produces optimal outputs for everybody.

The free marketeers have a deep all-abiding faith in laissez-faire for it is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like greedy spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government (some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks, plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to entire regions, and pocket obscene profits.

This corporate system of capital accumulation treats the Earth’s life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, foliage, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, bays, rivers, air quality) as disposable ingredients presumed to be of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified at will. As BP has demonstrated so well in the Gulf-of-Mexico catastrophe, considerations of cost weigh so much more heavily than considerations of safety. As one Congressional inquiry concluded: “Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense.”

Indeed, the function of the transnational corporation is not to promote a healthy ecology but to extract as much marketable value out of the natural world as possible even if it means treating the environment like a septic tank. An ever-expanding corporate capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course, so much so that the support systems of the entire ecosphere---the Earth’s thin skin of fresh air, water, and topsoil---are at risk.

It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about all this. Far worse than denial, they have shown outright antagonism toward those who think our planet is more important than their profits. So they defame environmentalists as “eco-terrorists,” “EPA gestapo,” “Earth day alarmists,” “tree huggers,” and purveyors of “Green hysteria.”

In an enormous departure from free-market ideology, most of the diseconomies of big business are foisted upon the general populace, including the costs of cleaning up toxic wastes, the cost of monitoring production, the cost of disposing of industrial effluence (which composes 40 to 60 percent of the loads treated by taxpayer-supported municipal sewer plants), the cost of developing new water sources (while industry and agribusiness consume 80 percent of the nation’s daily water supply), and the costs of attending to the sickness and disease caused by all the toxicity created. With many of these diseconomies regularly passed on to the government, the private sector then boasts of its superior cost-efficiency over the public sector.

The Superrich Are Different from Us

Isn’t ecological disaster a threat to the health and survival of corporate plutocrats just as it is to us ordinary citizens? We can understand why the corporate rich might want to destroy public housing, public education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Such cutbacks would bring us closer to a free market society devoid of the publicly-funded “socialistic” human services that the ideological reactionaries detest. And such cuts would not deprive the superrich and their families of anything. The superrich have more than sufficient private wealth to procure whatever services and protections they need for themselves.

But the environment is a different story, is it not? Don’t wealthy reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized food, and breathe the same toxified air? In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different class reality, often residing in places where the air is markedly better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically raised and specially transported and prepared.

The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swanky neighborhoods. In fact, the superrich do not live in neighborhoods as such. They usually reside on landed estates with plenty of wooded areas, streams, meadows, and only a few well-monitored access roads. Pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clear cutting does not desolate their ranches, estates, family forests, lakes, and prime vacation spots.

Still, should they not fear the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by global warming? Do they want to see life on Earth, including their own lives, destroyed? In the long run they indeed will be sealing their own doom along with everyone else’s. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now. What is now at stake for them is something more proximate and more urgent than global ecology; it is global profits. The fate of the biosphere seems like a remote abstraction compared to the fate of one’s immediate--and enormous--investments.

With their eye on the bottom line, big business leaders know that every dollar a company spends on oddball things like environmental protection is one less dollar in earnings. Moving away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and tidal energy could help avert ecological disaster, but six of the world's ten top industrial corporations are involved primarily in the production of oil, gasoline, and motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution brings billions of dollars in returns. Ecologically sustainable forms of production threaten to compromise such profits, the big producers are convinced.

Immediate gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a future loss shared by the general public. Every time you drive your car, you are putting your immediate need to get somewhere ahead of the collective need to avoid poisoning the air we all breath. So with the big players: the social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against the immense and immediate profit that comes from harvesting the timber and walking away with a neat bundle of cash. And it can always be rationalized away: there are lots of other forests for people to visit, they don’t need this one; society needs the timber; lumberjacks need the jobs, and so on.

The Future Is Now

Some of the very same scientists and environmentalists who see the ecology crisis as urgent rather annoyingly warn us of a catastrophic climate crisis by “the end of this century.” But that’s some ninety years away when all of us and most of our kids will be dead---which makes global warming a much less urgent issue.

There are other scientists who manage to be even more irritating by warning us of an impending ecological crisis then putting it even further into the future: “We’ll have to stop thinking in terms of eons and start thinking in terms of centuries,” one scientific sage was quoted in the New York Times in 2006. This is supposed to put us on alert? If a global catastrophe is a century or several centuries away, who is going to make the terribly difficult and costly decisions today whose effects will be felt far in the future?

Often we are told to think of our dear grandchildren who will be fully victimized by it all (an appeal usually made in a beseeching tone). But most of the young people I address on college campuses have a hard time imagining the world that their nonexistent grandchildren will be experiencing thirty or forty years hence.

Such appeals should be put to rest. We do not have centuries or generations or even many decades before disaster is upon us. Ecological crisis is not some distant urgency. Most of us alive today probably will not have the luxury of saying “Après moi, le déluge” because we will still be around to experience the catastrophe ourselves. We know this to be true because the ecological crisis is already acting upon us with an accelerated and compounded effect that may soon prove irreversible.

The Profiteering Madness

Sad to say, the environment cannot defend itself. It is up to us to protect it—or what’s left of it. But all the superrich want is to keep transforming living nature into commodities and commodities into dead capital. Impending ecological disasters are of no great moment to the corporate plunderers. Of living nature they have no measure.

Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold. So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.

They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned about the fate of their fortunes than the fate of humanity, so possessed by their pursuit of profit as to not see the disaster looming ahead. There was a New Yorker cartoon showing a corporate executive standing at a lectern addressing a business meeting with these words: “And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”

Not such a joke. Years ago I remarked that those who denied the existence of global warming would not change their opinion until the North Pole itself started melting. (I never expected it to actually start dissolving in my lifetime.) Today we are facing an Arctic meltdown that carries horrendous implications for the oceanic gulf streams, coastal water levels, the planet’s entire temperate zone, and world agricultural output.

So how are the captains of industry and finance responding? As we might expect: like monomaniacal profiteers. They hear the music: ca-ching, ca-ching. First, the Arctic melting will open a direct northwest passage between the two great oceans, a dream older than Lewis and Clark. This will make for shorter and more accessible and inexpensive global trade routes. No more having to plod through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn. Lower transportation costs means more trade and higher profits.

Second, they joyfully note that the melting is opening up vast new oil reserves to drilling. They will be able to drill-baby-drill for more of the same fossil fuel that is causing the very calamity descending upon us. More meltdown means more oil and more profits; such is the mantra of the free marketeers who think the world belongs only to them.

Imagine now that we are all inside one big bus hurtling down a road that is headed for a fatal plunge into a deep ravine. What are our profit addicts doing? They are hustling up and down the aisle, selling us crash cushions and seat belts at exorbitant prices. They planned ahead for this sales opportunity.
We have to get up from our seats, quickly place them under adult supervision, rush the front of the bus, yank the driver away, grab hold of the wheel, slow the bus down, and turn it around. Not easy but maybe still possible. With me it’s a recurrent dream.

EPA Moves to Regulate Carbon Dioxide, Holds Atlanta Hearing

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 10:01:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive New

ATLANTA, Georgia, Feb 24, 2011 (IPS) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun the initial stages of a process that may lead to the federal agency's first regulations to limit emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants and oil refineries.

The agency has held four of five "listening sessions", including one attended by IPS in Atlanta, Georgia, on Feb. 15. The EPA also held a meeting with electric power industry representatives in Washington, DC, on Feb. 4; a meeting with state and tribal representatives on in Chicago, Illinois, on Feb. 17; and a meeting with coalition group representatives in Washington yesterday.

The EPA will hold a fifth hearing for petroleum refinery industry representatives in Washington on Mar. 4, and is also accepting written comments from the public through Mar. 18.

"In December, [EPA administrator] Lisa Jackson committed to set standards for two carbon dioxide most-polluting industries, the electricity and utility sector, and the petroleum and refining sector," Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator at the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, said at the Feb. 15 meeting.

"But before beginning to set standards, she wanted to hear from the public... especially the environmental justice communities," McCarthy said, referring to grassroots groups that defend the rights of low-income communities and communities of colour, where polluting plants and factories have often been located.

The EPA is pursuing these standards under the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) programme and under the authority of the Clean Air Act, which McCarthy called "our most flexible tool in the toolbox".

After years of inaction by the U.S. Congress, which is debating whether to pursue even a weak, market-based policy of carbon emission credits trading, Jackson made the stunning announcement in December 2009 that the agency would look at regulating carbon dioxide under the existing powers already granted to the agency under the Clean Air Act.

This followed the landmark 2007 court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide can be defined as a pollutant. This definition has allowed the agency to pursue regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

Shortly after President Barack Obama took office, the EPA also issued an important ruling that global warming is a threat to public health and safety, which laid the groundwork for the current process.

Leaders of environmental and environmental justice organisations, as well as members of the public, spoke at the Feb. 15 hearing.

"What about the core mission of the EPA?" Nicky Sheats, member of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, asked. "How are the standards going to protect the public health of communities and residents?"

Sheats argued the EPA should also regulate existing coal plants, not only new ones.

"We support EPA's authority and decisions to protect low- income people," said Seandra Rawls of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "There are 90 coal plants in the Southeast [U.S.]... emitting 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. We need to retire old facilities. We must require a limit by a certain date."

"The southeast is more vulnerable to the impact of climate change," Rawls said, citing coastlines, sea level rise, erosion, storms, and drought.

"Power plants in [poor] communities should be covered under the standard. NSPS is greater than cap and trade. NSPS is far and away from cap and trade. We want to keep it that way," said Sharonda Williams, environmental policy and advocacy coordinator for WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

While carbon dioxide is naturally occurring - we exhale it when we breathe, for example - its production in mass quantities by transportation and fossil fuel power plants is not natural.

"There is symbiosis, harmony, and balance in the natural order. Today we're out of balance. There were once 90 million acres of long leaf pine forests [in the Southeast] but now there are three million. In Georgia in 1936, there were four million acres and now there are only 376,000 acres," said John Hammond, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation.

"We in the faith-based community are concerned with the mind, the body, and the spirit," added Rev. Gerald Durley of Providence Missionary Baptist Church and Georgia Interfaith Power and Light.

"We are not only concerned with spiritual well-being but physical well-being. If we're not concerned about the planet we'll be too dead and all of us will be gone. Products may cost more, but which is more important? God or Allah created a perfectly balanced world and we're destroying it," Durley said.

The EPA anticipates making actual recommendations by July 2011 for power plants and December 2011 for refineries. The agency will issue final standards in May 2012 and November 2012, respectively.

EPA officials say they are also in the process of addressing other pollutants, including mercury and particle pollution, in separate, coordinated actions.

Yet even as the consequences mount of global climate change such as melting of the polar ice caps, the EPA is facing retribution from the new Republican-led House of Representatives for daring to take action.

Congress is considering cutting the agency's funding, among other measures.

Republicans have introduced bills this session which would block the EPA from cutting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, overturn the EPA's recent endangerment finding that global warming threatens public health, block states from setting their own standards, and/or exclude greenhouse gases from the Clean Air Act.

Standing Up for Working Families in Wisconsin and Everywhere

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:48:00 +0000

Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, Wisconsin Solidarity Rally in Trenton, New Jersey
February 25, 2011

Thank you, Arlyn [Halvorson] and Susan [Blaustein], for your courage for igniting the spark that has inspired the nation, and for touching off the rallies that have given so much hope to so many working people across America.

I'm honored to pledge the unflinching support of the 12 million members of the AFL-CIO to your cause. Because your cause is our cause.

What happens in Wisconsin affects every man, woman and child in America – because nothing less than the fate of our middle class is at stake!

Isn't that right, New Jersey?

The fundamental right to have a voice and bargain for a middle class life --- That's what this is all about.

Good jobs! That's what this is all about.

Standing together! That's how we'll do it.

United! That's how we'll win.

That's how we'll end the scapegoating of our public employees, who didn't cause our economic crisis, but nonetheless stand willing to help solve it.

Here's the key, something that every governor and state legislator from New Jersey to Arizona, from Florida to Alaska, needs to understand: They were not elected to dictate. They were not elected to serve only the CEOs who bankrolled their campaigns. They were elected to create JOBS. They were elected to solve problems, not create conflict. They were elected to work together for the people -- not against us. If they have a problem with public employees' contracts, then they should do the responsible thing: Sit down and negotiate!

In state after state, public employees are waiting. There's not a teacher who isn't also a taxpayer. There's not a police officer who wants her city to fail. There's not a firefighter who wouldn't run into a burning building to save a life, and that same firefighter will help find reasonable answers to budget questions.

But you can't take away our freedom! And you can't take away our dignity as public employees!

What is with your governor, anyway? What makes him claim that middle class working people are the have's, and you're somehow robbing from the taxpayers?

Public employees didn't cause New Jersey's budget problems. Public employees didn't cause New Jersey's pension problems. We held up our end of the deal. We made our contributions. But for 15 years -- 15 years -- New Jersey has either provided reduced contributions to the state pension fund -- or nothing at all! That's negligence! And making you suffer is not going to fix it.

Slamming teachers and our public schools with private school vouchers, with merit pay, eliminating tenure, and just generally throwing every attack imaginable at teachers and other public employees—it's not going to solve anything.

What have we learned from Wisconsin? That it's not all about the money! In Wisconsin, Gov. Walker ginned up the budget crisis with tax breaks and giveaways, and then he used it to come after pay and benefits that should be addressed at the bargaining table.

It's not all about money. It's about power. It's about weakening workers and our unions to get us out of the way of CEO profits, and bonuses.

Gov. Christie and Gov. Walker are playing the same old political game, the same as too many politicians in Washington, D.C., who fight first and hardest for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, so they can turn around and holler about the deficit as an excuse to take a knife to Social Security and Medicare, and so much of what working families across America rely on.

It's been happening for 30 years.

Tax cuts create deficits, that create the urgency, to cut, cut, cut.

And now, Gov. Christie and Gov. Walker, and too many others think they can get away with trashing good, middle-class jobs because other people have been getting away with abusing us for years! Giving obscene tax cuts to the rich, rewarding CEOs for outsourcing good American jobs, deregulating Wall Street so it could collapse on us while making the Big Bankers even richer, saying 'Yes' to lobbyist-written free trade deals, and saying 'No, No way!' to working families.

They've taken a lot from us—but they cannot take our freedom!

In New Jersey—in all of America—we still believe in the American dream, our vision of an America, where a lifetime of hard work has its rewards—fair and decent pay, time with our families and a measure of comfort in a secure retirement. The freedom to form unions together, and bargain together for a better life.

That's not too much. That's a dream we can all aspire to.

That freedom built America's middle class, and America's middle class is what makes America great!

Instead of attacking our basic rights, I'd like to see our leaders create good jobs for a change.

Instead of tramping on collective bargaining, create jobs! We need good jobs here in New Jersey. We need good jobs all across America.

If the centerpiece of Gov. Christie's argument is—why should public employees have a little security, fair pay and pensions, while private employees suffer. Then our answer must be to lift up all working people.

The answer isn't to knock down public employees. Instead of attacking the retirement security of public employees, let's achieve retirement security for all workers!

All work has value. We win when we fight for all working people, when the fruits of our victories are shared by everyone who holds down a job for a living. That's the beauty of the labor movement.

So now we're seeing an unprecedented wave of solidarity.

Working people are energized.

We're building new and stronger community alliances.

And together, we're going to win a fair state budget, to end the tax breaks for millionaires, to renew the earned income tax credit for New Jersey's working poor, to renew property tax rebates for working families, to renew funding for critical needs like women's health care, and education and public safety.

So shake things up. Let them know that an attack against teachers, or firefighters, or nurses, is an attack against all working families in New Jersey. Let them know that we will not be divided.

That's the way forward. I know you're ready. Let's get there together. Roll up your sleeves! New Jersey needs to stop the scapegoating and start investing in a fair and decent future.

We can build on this moment. We can keep our freedoms. We can make New Jersey and the rest of the country the kind of place we're proud for our children to grow up in.

This is our mission. We've got to work for it. We've got to stand together.

Work for it. Stand for it. March together. Fight together. Win together. And don't let anyone—anyone—stand in our way.

Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America!

It’s 1968 All Over Again, and King’s Fight For Unions Is Still Essential

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:10:00 +0000

Original source: Colorlines.com

In light of the clash of wills in Wisconsin, we should remember the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s slogans that we rarely hear is this one: “all labor has dignity.”

King spoke these words in Memphis on March 18, 1968, in the midst of a strike of 1,200 black sanitation workers that had lasted over a month. After rousing them to a fever pitch, King called for a general strike by all workers to shut the city down on behalf of the sanitation workers.

What was the demand of these workers? Improved wages and benefits, yes, but their key demand was that the City of Memphis grant collective bargaining rights and the collection of union dues, without which they knew they could not maintain their union.

These are the very two items that Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker wants to take away from public employees. He knows, as did Mayor Henry Loeb in Memphis, that if you can kill union bargaining rights and dues collection, you can kill the union.

Also like Loeb, Walker is a fiscal conservative. As he cuts taxes for business he raises costs for workers and says ending union power will benefit the fiscal health of the state. Walker wants to end the right of public employees to bargain collectively, even though the workers have accepted a tripling of their health-care costs and a wage cut to help offset the state’s fiscal crisis.

In nearby Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to take away the right to join a union for 14,000 state-financed child-care and home-care workers, among the most overworked and underpaid of public servants. In other states, Republicans want to adopt “right to work” (for less) laws that would take away the requirement that workers in unionized jobs pay union dues. This would undermine the unions while, in King’s words, providing “no rights and no work.”

Even in Midwest states that have been union strongholds, Republicans now have public-employee unions in their cross-hairs. This is the latest and potentially most deadly phase of government assault on unions. Ever since the Reagan counterrevolution, government policies joined with private sector profiteers have vastly worsened racial-economic inequalities, created a gambling casino on Wall Street and paved the way for the current economic crisis.

Conservatives rationalize their attacks on unions by saying unionized public workers are unfairly privileged. But they only look privileged by comparison to the rest of the working class, which is suffering economic catastrophe and has almost entirely lost the benefits of unionization. Yet class envy is an easy means to divide and rule.

Racism is another part of the Republican arsenal of divide and rule. Thanks to the destruction of manufacturing jobs and unions, black and Latino workers in manual occupations have disproportionately suffered high rates of poverty and incarceration as many of their families disintegrate. The one toe-hold many black and minority workers (and especially women among them) still have in the economy is in unionized public employment. Now, the Republicans want to take that away.

In one stroke, by eliminating both bargaining rights and union dues, Republicans can insure that organized, dues-paying workers and particularly minorities and women will no longer provide a potent base for the Democratic Party. There will be few grassroots organizations left to counter the huge infusion of money into politics by the rich.

Workers in Wisconsin have agreed to make sacrifices to get state government out of its budgetary hole. But it would be a huge mistake for anyone to go beyond that and buy into attacks on public employee unions. Loss of unions will further decimate the spending power of working people, thereby intensifying the economic crisis while further removing the voice of workers from politics. That’s a downward spiral.

Republicans most especially wants to undermine the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Founded in Wisconsin, AFSCME flowered after King died in the fight for union rights in Memphis in 1968. AFSCME became one of the largest unions in the country, with King regarded as an honorary member and practically a founder of the union.

In King’s framework, killing public employees unions today would be immoral as well as foolish. He said the three evils facing humankind are war, racism and economic injustice, and that the purpose of a union is to overcome the latter evil. King said the civil-rights movement from 1954 to 1965 was “phase one,” to be followed by a second phase—the struggle for economic advancement. We are not doing very well in phase two, and unions remain essential to carry it out.

I’ve recently finished a new collection of King’s remarkable speeches, titled “All Labor Has Dignity,” which shows that throughout his life, King stood up for union rights. There is no more important time than the present for us all to follow his lead.

Maj. General Smedley Butler’s Open Letter to President Barack Obama

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:07:00 +0000

Maj. General Smedley Butler’s Open Letter to President Barack Obama

Preface

Last night I had a dream about Major General Smedley Butler USMC (ret.) writing a letter to President Barrack Obama. This is what he said:

Dear President Obama,

For 33 years I have served in the Marine Corps with distinction; I received two medals of honor and 16 battle decorations, and I retired with the rank of Major General. Of course they would not make me Commandant of the Marine Corps, as I often spoke my own mind. I've written this letter to respond to your present situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a fool’s cause and I see you are taken in by the nitwits, pencil pushers, tin star Sheriffs, and other morons who work at the Pentagon. They are the finest bushel of fools I have ever met, and that is a kind assessment. The incompetence of the Pentagon is matched only by the greed of the war profiteers and the Wall Street bankers. This was true in my day, and it is even truer today. I hope you will hear this old General’s comments and advice.

I said in the l930’s, my interest in peace is personal. I have three grown sons, and I’ll be damned if anybody's going to shoot them. The only purpose for war is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. A war has never been fought by the sons of the rich. It is only the sons and daughters of the rest of us who march off to war. Look at the damn mess the Wall Street bankers and war profiteers have made in the USA in 2010. The USA has lost thirty of its manufacturing base in the last decade, and we've sent our factories to China. The young men and women who used to be able to get money to go to trade schools and college find that the only way they can get that money now is to join the military. Then the right wing nuts feed them some hogwash about how doing it is their patriotic duty. That is not only nonsense; it is an outright lie. The only reason these young men and women are in Iraq and Afghanistan is to support the greed of the rich. How many days did that young GW Bush serve in the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam? How many weeks was he AWOL?

If you look at the last eight years or more, you can see the companies that have profited from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies (The Carlyle Group is for the Dick Cheney and George W. Bush crowd.) I seem to remember back in my day George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott doing business with the Nazis. The snake of greed still runs through the Bush family, and all of these war profiteers and Wall street blood suckers are a cancer that is destroying America

This is an excerpt from a speech I gave in the 1930s:

…I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the national city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its own way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Mr. President, before your brain is filled with all the hogwash of the Pentagon, the generals who should be serving your interests and those of the American people, and those damn parasite lobbyists of the war profiteers, please review my comments, and I have enclosed my book written in 1936, War is a Racket. It is a sad state of affairs that war has become even more of a racket than before. In the words of my friend General Dwight David Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Mr. President, as a military officer, I had sworn to protect and defend the USA, and the best way to defend our country is to stop the military bleeding. America is spending itself into bankruptcy and robbing future generations. I enclose a quote from my book that I wrote in l936 War is a Racket:

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

Thank you for your attention, Mr. President. If you heed our warning about the military and instead spend that money here in America, it will be the best defense any country will need.

Sincerely,

Major General Smedley Butler USMC (Ret.)

After Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, Are chemical plants any safer today?

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:51:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: December 2010 marked the 26th anniversary of the infamous Bhopal disaster in India when chemical company Union Carbide leaked deadly gases, killing thousands of people. What safeguards are in place today to prevent incidents like this? -- Charlene Colchester, via e-mail

Bhopal should have been a wake up call, but it is unclear whether chemical plants around the world are any safer a quarter century after the December 1984 disaster—during which some 40 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide (now part of Dow Chemical), killing 2,259 people immediately and causing lifelong health problems and premature death for tens of thousands more.

In the U.S., the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) oversees chemical and other facilities that deal with hazardous materials, making sure various “process safety” routines are followed so as to “prevent or minimize the catastrophic injury or death that could result from an accidental or purposeful release of toxic, reactive, flammable or explosive chemicals.” Also, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security instituted its own “Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards” (CFATS) that chemical and other hazardous materials facilities must follow or be shut down.

While this system has worked pretty well in the U.S. so far, some worry that a Bhopal-scale tragedy, whether due to an accident or terrorist attack, could still occur on American soil. For one, water treatment and port facilities are exempt from CFATS altogether, so some of the nation’s largest chemical facilities are not subject to as rigorous standards as they could be. A 2009 bill that passed the House of Representatives but failed to make it through the Senate addressed this and other issues. Supporters are optimistic that the bill in one form or another could resurface in future legislative sessions.

Of course, what happens in industrial facilities abroad is up to the host country to regulate. And while standards are higher than they used to be in many developing countries today, runaway economic growth often means oversight and enforcement are lacking if nonexistent, so dangerous facilities still threaten people and the environment in ways that wouldn’t be tolerated in the United States.

Advocates for corporate responsibility say that companies should be held accountable for accidents with their materials, whether they occur on home soil or elsewhere, arguing that a double standard presently exists that is much too lenient on multinational corporations operating in developing countries. Martin Khor, executive director of The South Centre, a Geneva-based research group, reports that this double standard also seems to apply to compensatory pay-outs. Union Carbide’s settlement for the Bhopal disaster, for example, was only $470 million, or a few thousand dollars per affected family.

If nothing else, the Bhopal disaster certainly raised awareness around the world about the dangers of modern chemicals, especially those used or manufactured in close proximity to people. Hopefully at least some local governments in developing countries have taken heed and stepped up efforts to site potentially hazardous industrial facilities away from both human population centers and environmentally sensitive landscapes. But, unfortunately, without stronger regulations and enforcement around the world, it may be only a matter of time before another highly lethal accident occurs.

CONTACTS: South Centre, www.southcentre.org.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk®, c/o E – The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. E is a nonprofit publication. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Request a Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

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Prison Firms, Suspected Hate Group behind Georgia's Immigrant Bills

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:46:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA -- Private prison firms and right-wing hate groups have supported, lobbied for, and--either directly or indirectly--helped to craft several bills pending in the Georgia legislature this Session, including HB 87, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011.

"Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)- we know they have lobbyists here," Larry Pellegrini, a long-time activist and lobbyist for progressive causes, told Atlanta Progressive News.

"We do not know which legislators they have contributed to," Pellegrini said. Disclosures are not available yet for the current quarter, but CCA officials have a pattern of donating to legislators in Arizona. HB 87 is modeled on Arizona's controversial immigration law.

"The feeling is that these folks are certainly communicating or have communicated with their counterparts in Arizona," Pellegrini said.

"They [CCA] will benefit by the legislation. They have a corporate stake in it around the country, through bills like the ones proposed here. I think they're salivating in the hallway," Pellegrini said.

Kris Kobach, a lawyer for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), is generaly considered the main architech of Arizona's law.

"Those that have put together this copy-cat bill seem to be quite proud to have had his counsel," Pellegrini said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has listed FAIR as an anti-immigrant hate group since 2007, citing the organization's "ties to white supremacy and its long track record of bigotry." SPLC is internationally known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups.

The Kobach, who is Harvard and Yale-educated, has been the brains behind similarly tough local-level immigration measures and legal actions across the country according to Mother Jones magazine.

Other news reports describe Kobach as an anti-immigration extremist who comes to town with big ideas but leaves behind huge legal bills, and unworkable laws coupled with social unrest.

As Kansas's new Secretary of State, Kobach has aleady helped state lawmakers draft a knockoff of Arizona's controversial immigration bill.

"The people behind Arizona's immigration bill and Georgia's copycat bills are the private prisons," Prof. Martha Rees from Agnes Scott College, told the House Judiciary
Non-Civil Committee during a recent hearing on HB 87.

Rees points to numerous articles on the internet including one by National Public Radio.

NPR exposed the close relationship between business interests and lawmakers within the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

It was an ALEC task force, which included a representative from a private prison, along with lawmakers from Arizona and other states, that helped draft the Arizona immigration bill.

According to CCA reports reviewed by National Public Radio, CCA executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market.

DETAILS ON HB 87

HB 87 has been called reactionary, dehumanizing, and scape-goating; it will lead to racial profiling of the Hispanic community, opponents say.

It will cost Georgia millions of dollars to implement and Georgia will lose billions in revenue, opponents point out. These bills will hurt state and local economies with tourism, agricultural, and poultry industries especially hard hit.

"HB 87 makes me feel like I have been sent back in time to the hate years of the 1950's and 60's. This bill makes me really ill," retired Lt. Col. EV Howe, who served for 21 years as a Cold War and Vietnam pilot, told the State House Non-Civil Judiciary Committee.

HB 87, also known as Show Me Your Papers, was introducted State Rep. Matt Ramsey.

HB 87 would require state and local law enforcement officers to investigate the immigration status of all individuals they "reasonably suspect" of being in the country illegally.

This means that "suspicious looking people" can be stopped for minor traffic violations such as going a few miles over the speed limit or rolling a stop sign. They are then sent to private for profit-prisons to work as unpaid laborers before eventually being deported.

HB 87 would require private employers to use the E-Verify database, which some say is flawed, and established civil sanctions in case of non-compliance.

HB 87 creates criminal penalties for any individual who encourages an undocumented person to come to Georgia, or transports or habors them once they arrive. This means taxi, ambulance, and MARTA drivers could be subjected to criminal penalties.

HB 87 would provide additional incentives for localities to enter into 287(g) or Secured Communites.

HB 87 would allow any "legal resident" to bring a lawsuti against any Georgia official or agency to force them to enforce provision of the bill.

This means lots of lawsuits by anti-immigration activists against the government which tax-payers will have to cough up. Can we say let's bankrupt Georgia?

SB 40 mirrors several provisions of HB 87 but also would order fines and jail time for certain non-citizens that do not carry a "certificate of registration." It is assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia (ACLU) claims that HB 87 and SB 40 are unconstitutional and will subject the state to exorbitant litigation costs.

"Those illegal immigrants who are using a Tax ID are not filing tax returns. That means the state and federal government are retaining 100% of the tax withheld from their paychecks," Doug Rohan, an attorney, registered Republican, and son of a Cuban immigrant, told the Committee.

"Representative Ramsey stated that the reasons for drafting this bill included the purported use of public benefits by undocumented immigrants. Welfare, food stamps and unemployment assistance are simply unavailable to undocumented immigrants by existing law," Charles Kuch, an expert in immigration law, told the Committee.

"Representative Ramsey sited a number of $2.5 billion as the cost of illegal immigration in Georgia, without also noting that illegal immigrants contribute more than $9.4 billion to Georgia's economy. They also contribute between $215 million and $253 million to state coffers in sales, income and property taxes," Kuch explained.

HB 87 is currently being amended and will appear again in a similar form.

High-speed Rail Coming to America

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:58:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: Vice-President Joe Biden just announced a commitment by the Obama administration of $53 billion to high speed rail. Isn’t it about time? Why is the U.S. so far behind other nations in developing environmentally friendly public transportation? -- Diane A., Boston, MA

There are many reasons why public transit hasn’t taken off in the U.S. as it has in parts of Asia, Europe and elsewhere. For one, ever since the Model T first rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, Americans have had a love affair with cars. Also, a successful plot by General Motors and several partner companies in the 1930 and 1940s bought up and shut down rail transit lines across 45 American cities, replacing them with bus routes driven on GM buses. Meanwhile, the U.S. government embarked on a plan to link the nation’s metro areas via interstate highways, further encouraging car travel. The sexy new car designs of the 1950s then drove the final nail in the coffin, relegating public transportation to an afterthought.

But with rising oil prices and growing fears about global warming, public transit is looking sexier to many Americans. As part of 2009’s landmark American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the White House committed $8 billion to efforts to create and maintain high-speed intercity passenger rail service. And just weeks ago, after calling for giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years, Barack Obama pledged another $53 billion to increase the nation’s network of high-speed rail lines.

Plans to expand high-speed rail service are already underway in several U.S. regions. Illinois was the first of 31 states to receive a portion of the funding to begin building high-speed rail lines linking Chicago and St. Louis. A recent report found that high-speed rail in the Midwest would reduce air travel by 1.3 million trips and car travel by 5.1 million trips per year by 2020, saving 188,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions (equivalent to taking 34,000 cars off the road while still getting everyone to and from work).

Funding is also slated to go to California, where trains traveling up to 220 miles per hour will move people between San Diego and San Francisco in less than three hours. California’s high-speed rail system, which should in service by 2020, is expected to cost about half as much as would expanding highways and building new airport runways and gates to accommodate fast growing passenger transportation demand.

Not everyone is on board with high speed rail. Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott recently rejected $2 billion in federal funding to build an 85-mile high speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando, arguing that cost overruns would likely leave Florida taxpayers making up billions of dollars for something they don’t need. Scott’s move in killing the Tampa-Orlando run calls into question whether or not Obama can push his plans through in other parts of the country that are also conservative strongholds.

No matter how quickly Americans get up to speed on high speed rail, the U.S. certainly has some catching up to do. According to statistics from the International Union of Railways and other sources, China leads the world with upwards of 2,800 miles of high speed rail lines in operation and another 5,500 miles planned. Spain, France and Japan each have around 1,200 miles in operation; Germany has 800 miles and Italy has 577. The U.S. has only 226 miles in operation currently. The Obama administration would like to see Americans riding on more than 16,000 miles of high speed rail lines by the middle of the century.

CONTACTS: ARRA, www.recovery.gov; International Union of Railways, www.uic.org.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk®, c/o E – The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. E is a nonprofit publication. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Request a Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

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Financial Journalism and The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:56:00 +0000

Original source: Black Commentator

In a good novel, writes blogger Randy Mayeux, "we can find quotes that speak to the issues of the age." He's referring to the much acclaimed "The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo" and its relevance to the state of financial journalism in real life today. "Read it, and think about the financial reporting (and, really, most 'journalism') in this country over the last two-three years," he says.

Some critics have taken the author Stieg Larsson to task for spending time on the state of economic reporting, suggesting that dragging in the issues of the day distracts unnecessarily from the enjoyment of a good murder mystery. For me it was one of the book's highlights. The story's central character, Carl Mikael Blomkvist, himself a financial journalist, says some pretty nasty things about his Swedish colleagues, especially about their tendency to go along to get along, to accept the official line or conventional wisdom about events.

I was thinking about this the other day when I read on the front page of the New York Times:

"Yet their preference for spending cuts, even in programs that benefit them, dissolves when they [the public] are presented with specific options related to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that directly touch millions of lives and are the biggest drivers of the long-term deficit.'

The problem with that sentence is that the last dozen or so words in it are simply not true. Social Security is not one of the major contributors to the Federal budget deficit; it's not a contributing factor at all. Now it's possible that the reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, doesn't know any better, that she just read it somewhere and assumed it to be true. The problem is that the question has been explored so many times over the past year and the mythical contention between Social Security and the deficit exposed by so many experts in the field that one has to wonder why such misleading statements get past the Times' editors.

"Just to be very clear, absolutely nothing needs to be done," economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written. "If we look at the projections from either the Congressional Budget Office or the Social Security trustees - they've yet to come out with their new ones, but in any case, the one from last year - the program could pay all scheduled benefits well into the future, at least twenty-seven years into the future. And even after that, it could still pay the vast majority of benefits, assuming nothing is ever done. Now, somewhere down the road, we'll probably make changes in the program as we've done in the past. But the idea that somehow something has to be done anywhere soon, this is crazy. People have paid for those benefits. So, in effect, what we'd be doing is defaulting on the bonds that are held in the trust fund to pay people their benefits that - when they come due. So, nothing has to be done."

"Now, what's going on is that you have this real craze about the deficit, because the reason we have the deficit, of course, was we had a collapse of the housing bubble," continues Baker. "But there's this obsession about the deficit - 'we have to do something' - and you have people running around Washington saying, 'Well, you know, we can't do anything on healthcare, because we tried that and the insurance industry was too powerful, the pharmaceutical industry was too powerful, so therefore we have to cut Social Security.' It's close to a non sequitur and should have people absolutely fuming at their representatives in Congress. But that's where we are in Washington."

Evidently, Times columnist, Davis Brooks, doesn't see it that way. Last week he was yapping away at how "Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt" is driving up the deficit. He even proposed a new united front of "foreign aid people, the scientific research people, the education people, the antipoverty people and many others" to insist on action to" slow the growth of Medicare" and "reform" Social Security. Keep in mind that if the objective is to save money, any reform of Social Security means less of it. Brook has assigned to his new group the pompous title of "The Freedom Alliance."

Why any "antipoverty people" would join in an effort to cutback Medicare and Social Security is hard to fathom unless they just wanted more people to represent.

"That's right folks, you get to say whatever you want in the media now to further the cause of cutting Social Security," economist Baker has said. He made the remark a year after hearing Cokie Roberts telling viewers that, "You could close this capital or turn it into condos and you could close down every domestic program that we have and you would still have a deficit because of Social Security and Medicare and interest on the national debt."

"Well that's not quite right. Social Security is running an annual surplus," wrote Baker. "The money that program takes in each year in taxes and interest on its bonds exceeds what is being paid out in benefits. It's not clear what Ms. Roberts had in mind when blaming Social Security for the deficit, but it has nothing to do with reality."

David Brooks is quite aware that the vast overwhelming majority of people in this country are opposed to cuts in Medicare and Social Security. Elderly Tea Party people aren't buying that one. That's why he trying to trick advocates for the poor and defenders of education into his absurd coalition. "Specifically, they have to get behind an effort now being hatched by a group of courageous senators: Saxby Chambliss, Mark Warner, Tom Coburn, Dick Durbin, Mike Crapo and Kent Conrad. These public heroes have been leading an effort to write up the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission report as legislation to serve as the beginning for a serious effort to get our house in order."

"Hatched" is the right word here.

Imagine trying to tell students who are up in arms about the draconian cuts being made to public education these days that to their precarious futures should be added reduced Medicare benefits and cutback benefits or a privatized Social Security system turned over to Wall Street.

Actually, there is no Simpson-Bowles deficit commission report and Brooks knows that. The commission was a failure. It never produced a plan for dealing with the deficit or anything else. When it became apparent that the 14 out of 17 votes necessary were not there, the co-chairs, Republican, former Sen. Alan Simpson and a Democrat, former Clinton Administration Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles released their own proposals in their own names.

Reality? Who said anything about reality?

This Monday on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Report, host Nora O'Donnell ripped into President Obama, accusing him of ignoring the recommendations of "his own fiscal commission" in his budget proposal. What "is he really doing about our deficit?" she sputtered. After saying, "we've got to get this clear," she put up the above quoted David Brooks erroneous allegation about Social Security and the deficit.

Take this from the prestigious UK-based magazine The Economist:

"A year ago Mr. Obama set up a deficit-reduction commission, which duly produced a sensible report at the end of last year. He has failed previously, and failed again this week, to endorse the commission's conclusions. He offered no specific proposals for cutting the cost of the biggest drains on the federal purse: health care, Social Security (pensions) and defense."

Again, Social Security pays for itself.

Again, the commission reached no conclusion. It didn't even take a formal vote.

That last bit about defense is interesting. A lot of people in our country favor reducing the bloated and mostly irrelevant military budget. But you won't get any support for that from the leading deficit hawks, nor from any of Brooks' Congressional "heroes."

While Social Security and Medicare are usually linked in these discussions, the problems are not the same. The latter actually is linked to federal expenditures. But the problem is not Medicare itself; it the inexorable rise in medical costs. Don't hold your breath waiting for anything to be done about that. Affect the huge profits of the pharmaceutical and medical devise industries, or the corporate hospital chains? Give me a break.

Because of demographic changes, sometime in the future Social Security is going to need more money to meet the needs of retiring seniors. There is something that can be done about it. When President Obama was candidate, Obama he said: "I do not want to cut benefits or raise the retirement age. I believe there are a number of ways we can make Social Security solvent that do not involve placing these added burdens on our seniors."

And, "Currently, the Social Security payroll tax applies to only the first $102,000 a worker makes. If we kept the payroll tax exactly the same but applied it to all earnings and not just the first $97,500, we could virtually eliminate the entire Social Security shortfall."

Why can't that be put on the table? Because it doesn't fit the larger object Les Leopold wrote about recently on the Huffington Post:

"Wall Street has a plan and a new logic that is quietly infiltrating the media and policy circles. It's called `structural reform.' Although it is likely to involve some additional pain and suffering, it's being sold as the new magic bullet for our ailing economy."

Leopold continued, "Structural reform is Wall Street speak for reducing what is often called the 'social wage' for working people in every way possible: increasing the retirement age and cutting Social Security benefits, government employment and benefits, funds for public education, defined benefit pensions, and health care expenditures....and of course, extended unemployment benefits as well."

Sometimes this business can get downright cynical and heartless. What is being promoted is not just to change Social Security and Medicare. It is to diminish them. It is - by any means necessary -- to devote fewer resources to the sick and elderly.

Last July, columnist Michel Gerson wrote in the Washington Post: "Devoting resources to the sick and elderly counts many achievements and benefits. But we are reaching a point where these important priorities threaten to overwhelm everything else."

That's utter nonsense. But Larson's protagonist missed one important point. Writers write but editors edit and publishers publish. They all ought to be accountable.

"Media coverage reflects what sells, and the political arena is no exception," Tarsi Dunlop, who is the Director of Operations at the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network wrote February 10 on the new deal 2.0 site. "Conflict and hypocrisy reign supreme, while the realities of policy are often left to fend for themselves. Social Security is a poignant example of such casualties. It is often the victim of misinformation and political agendas, which are designed to obscure the fact that a majority of Americans support the program. Most recently, Social Security was hijacked by the conversation about the national debt, yet another attempt by conservatives to reframe the narrative and detract from the facts. Consequently, the program's fundamentals were once again lost to media spin, which sees no profitable advantage in telling a non-partisan story. The media's reluctance to move beyond Republican sound bites is a fundamental disservice to Americans across the country. How else are they supposed to get the full story?"

The Fightback Fire is Being Lit Down Below

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:45:00 +0000

This article is not so much about the economy as it is about the jobs fight. But some overall points about the economy. You don't need to be told that the economy is bad for working people and getting worse for many. People are falling through the cracks in the system. Everybody heard last month that unemployment dropped from 9.4 to 9 percent and fortunately a lot of attention was paid to the fact that the drop was mainly due to 99ers (those who have run completely out of unemployment benefits), in particular, falling out of the system. Millions and millions of people are not counted anymore as looking for work and not counted in the unemployment figures.

Manufacturing and durable goods production figures were down again this month even as the pundits touted that the economy was picking up. Without a strong manufacturing and durable goods sector it's really impossible to have a recovery.

Total construction activity both private and commercial is down again and continuing the downward drift. We all know that the housing crisis bubble has not finished bursting.

Falsely blamed on the freedom movement in Egypt, oil prices are topping $100 a barrel. This will have a huge downward effect on the economy and particularly on working people.

And there are the continuing attacks and cuts in state and local budgets and federal programs. I would add that the ongoing discussion about doing away with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will certainly have a downward pull on the economy as fewer working class people will be able to afford housing. The government spending freeze and the wage freeze also have a very negative impact on the overall economy and on working people.

The jobs fight, the fight of the unemployed, and fight to defend public workers are all the same fight. The overall attack on workers and unions are all basically part of the same fight for jobs and for relief for people who are victims of the system.

The Good Jobs Green jobs conference in Washington DC, the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit and the Steelworkers Rapid Response conference conclusions all really confirm our estimate that the battle is shifting dramatically to local and state struggles.

At the state level the attack is even more drastic than many realize without having a full survey of state and local anti-labor actions. An incredible array of anti-labor, anti-immigrant and racist and anti-women legislation is being proposed is state legislatures by the Republican right wing. Just to mention a few.

Right-to-work laws are pending in Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Montana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The attack in Wisconsin is one of the most drastic attacks that you can imagine. It seeks to destroy public workers bargaining rights. The proposed law also mandates that public workers revote every year for their union representation.

"Paycheck deception" laws designed to take away the ability of unions to engage in political action are proposed in 17 states Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Attacks on the building trades against project labor agreements are proposed in Alabama, Arizona, California, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Attacks on public sector workers union rights and benefits are threatened in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin. These include also attacks on education workers and bargaining rights for teachers.

And there is attack legislation against immigrants in 30 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana.

Twenty-eight states are proposing legislation to preempt Card Check and the Employee Free Choice Act. And 25 states have filed suit against implementation of the healthcare act.

One conclusion we have to draw from this is that this is not just a spontaneous thing that's going on in different states. This is a highly coordinated attack on the working class and on unions and working people across this country. That is what's going on here. This is not simply a spontaneous happening because of the 2010 elections.

Big business, the Republicans (and some Democrats), and the far right saw the opportunity to launch this all-out attack on the working class. It's very important that we see it this way. This is the kind of battle that we're in. Every single one of these over 424 state laws worsens the economic situation. Every single one of them will lead to unemployment and more jobs loss. That's not even mentioning the horrible cuts that are coming also. Now of course there is fight back and it is an extremely fast-growing fight back. We really need to hear from all across our country, what are the fights going on, so we get a picture of how the working class is responding to this attack.

There is important legislation in the hopper. House Resolution 589 introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee and Rep. Bobby Scott addresses the plight of the 99ers, the long term unemployed. It provides for 14 more weeks of unemployment insurance and has 60 cosponsors. It's critical legislation that everyone can get a hold of in terms of getting more cosponsors for that bill. This is life-and-death bill for literally millions and millions of people in this country. HR 516 is a bill that is basically an outline for an industrial policy for the country. HR 402 creates a federal infrastructure bank.

Rep. John Conyers will reintroduce his comprehensive infrastructure jobs bill that is financed by a stock transaction tax. It is a vast jobs bill like the WPA that is revenue neutral and does not add to the deficit. In the Senate two sense-of-the-senate bills introduced by Harry Reid are important. SB 1 and SB 2 together basically outline a progressive policy for jobs creation touching on infrastructure, minimum wage and other issues vital to working people. While they are agititational, they do lay out some important elements of a progressive program.

Also local coalitions are developing all over the place at the state and local level. There are grass roots actions and demonstration building momentum all over. Our Jobs committee has discussed some exciting ones from Illinois, Ohio and Connecticut. And we have gotten word of exciting developments in California, Wisconsin and New York.

There are many ways and venues that we have to be involved in struggle. So much takes place at the grassroots, at the local and state level.

We have five main things we need to project going forward:

   1. We have to defend and protect public workers and vital public services. We should never let anybody forget that when you attack public workers you are also cutting out vital services for people who need them most - the working class and the working poor. When people can't get their unemployment, when people can't get their disability, when people can't get public aid, these are all services being threatened when public workers are attacked and laid off.

   2. Relief for the 99ers and the unemployed has to be foremost in our efforts. Including the fight against foreclosures and for food and shelter and for emergency healthcare aid.

   3. We have to fight all the cuts in federal state and local people helping programs. And there are many cuts coming down both spearheaded by the Republican right but also supported by some Democrats. These include heating assistance, unemployment benefits, food programs, emergency health care programs, emergency shelter programs and many more. We have to fight tooth and nail for these kind programs no matter who is proposing the cuts.

   4. Infrastructure is becoming a huge byword in the progressive movements and in the labor movement. This is a movement to develop the kind of job creating infrastructure needed to provide modern, green and sustainable industries and jobs of the future. The infrastructure fight doesn't only have to be fought at the national level. President Obama has opened the way for infrastructure demands. But even at the local level we can find projects in every state in every city: hospitals that need to be rehabilitated, housing that needs to be rebuilt, schools that need to be modernized, public buildings that need to be weatherized. As the Good Jobs Green Jobs conference concluded, we have to build the grassroots pressure to make these things happen. It's not going to happen by the president calling for it and it's not going to happen by introducing bills in Congress. We have to develop locally at the grassroots the demand for infrastructure rebuilding in this country for a sustainable green economy that puts people back to work.

   5. More and more working people are blaming the corporations that the CEOs and the banks for the crisis. We have to make that tie-in for every struggle. We have to contrast the billionaires to working peoples on the tax deal. We have to give a wider kind of class view of what's happening to people. We have to be very clear who's to blame for this crisis and who's not to blame.

There is fightback fire beginning to rage and we have to be in the middle of it. We have to put a premium on unity and broad coalition building. We have to mobilize all of our members, friends and potential allies to join in with others in this fight. We have to see the important role that organized labor is and can play in this fight. Never in our lifetime have we seen labor so coalition oriented reaching out to civil rights, youth, women, immigrant, LGBT and even business forces to build this movement. People are inspired by Egypt. The State House in Madison, Wisconsin is beginning to look like Cairo.

Japan: Labor Movement Launches National Effort for Higher Wages

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 09:20:00 +0000

Original source: Japan Press Weekly

Unionists carry out nationwide actions to press large companies to increase wages

Unionists across Japan on February 10 and 11 took part in actions with the aim of putting pressure on large companies to increase wages to help in the recovery of Japan’s economy.

In Tokyo on February 10, members of the People’s Spring Struggle Joint Committee’s unions, including participants affiliated with the National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren), staged a day of action.

During the lunch break, about 7,000 workers participated in a rally held at Hibiya Amphitheater under the slogan, “Eradicate poverty! Provide job opportunities! Protect employment and livelihoods!”

In a show of support of labor unions’ demands for economic recovery led by domestic demand and opposition to Japan’s entry into Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade pact, small- and medium-sized company owners, farmers, and citizens also joined the rally.

After the rally, holding placards and banners, reading, “Say ‘No’ to Japan’s participation in the TPP!”, “No consumption tax hike!”, and “Raise the minimum hourly wage to 1,000 yen!”, the participants marched in demonstration through one of Tokyo’s most famous shopping districts, the Ginza.

Earlier in the day, the unionists assembled in front of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) building to call on the business circles to increase wages for stimulating Japan’s economy.

On the following day, in Aichi Prefecture, about 1,000 workers braving the snow converged on a park near the Toyota Motor’s head office to hold a rally to urge Toyota to share its excessive profits with the workers and local communisties.

Participant Kawamoto Takashi, a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Panasonic seeking a full-time position, said, “Large corporations should contribute to the development of Japanese economy and not just hoard their excess profits.”

Cell Phones and Cancer

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:21:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the latest research on the question of whether cell phone use causes cancer? -- William Thigpen, via e-mail

Cell phones have only been in widespread use for a couple of decades, which is far too short a time for us to know conclusively whether or not using them could cause cancer. Research thus far appears to indicate that most of us have little if anything to worry about.

According to the federally funded National Cancer Institute, the low-frequency electromagnetic radiation that cell phones give off when we hold them up to our heads is “non-ionizing,” meaning it cannot cause significant human tissue heating or body temperature increases that could lead to direct damage to cellular DNA. By contrast, X-rays consist of high-frequency ionizing electromagnetic radiation and can lead to the kind of cellular damage resulting in cancer. Nonetheless, some cell phone users and researchers still worry about our cell phone usage, given how much we now use them and how little we know about their potential long-term effects.

The reason the issue keeps coming up is that some initial studies in Europe, where cell phone usage caught on a decade before the U.S., showed links between some forms of tumors and heavy cell phone usage. As a result, researchers teamed up to do a more definitive study, called the “Interphone” study, across 13 countries between 2000 and 2004. The results, published in May 2010 in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Epidemiology, indicated no increased risk of developing two of the most common types of brain tumors, glioma and meningioma, from typical everyday cell phone usage. Study participants who reported spending the most time on their phones showed a slightly increased risk of developing gliomas, but researchers considered this finding inconclusive due to factors such as recall bias, whereby participants with brain tumors may have simply remembered past cell phone use differently from healthy respondents.

Researchers looking to get past the relatively short timing window and the recall bias issues of the Interphone study recently launched a longer term study, dubbed COSMOS (short for Cohort Study on Mobile Communications), in Europe. Some 250,000 cell phone users between the ages of 18 and 69 and located in Britain, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark will participate by allowing researchers to track their cell phone usage and health over three decades. According to an April 22, 2010 article in Reuters, the study will factor in the use of hands-free devices and how people carry their phones and will also be on the lookout for links to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

There are some precautions you can take to minimize whatever risk may exist. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suggests reserving the use of cell phones for shorter conversations, or for times when a conventional phone isn’t available. Also, using a hands-free device places more distance between the phone and your head, significantly reducing the amount of radiation exposure. If the fact that many states require hands-free devices for using a cell phone while driving isn’t enough to make you go out and spend the extra money on such an accessory, maybe the cancer risk, perceived or real, will.

CONTACTS: National Cancer Institute, www.cancer.gov; INTERPHONE Study, www.rfcom.ca/programs/interphone.shtml; COSMOS Study, www.ukcosmos.org, FCC, www.fcc.gov.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk®, c/o E – The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. E is a nonprofit publication. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Request a Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Israel: Anti-boycott Bill Approved

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:19:00 +0000

Bill imposes fines on Israeli citizens who back, initiate boycotts against occupation

The Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee approved a bill on Tuesday (February 15, 2011) that calls for heavy fines to be imposed on Israeli citizens who initiate or incite boycotts against Israel and the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israeli parliament (Knesset) approved an initial reading of the bill over six months ago. The bill will now move on to a first reading in the Knesset for approval. If it becomes a law, the fines would apply to anyone boycotting Israeli individuals, companies, factories, and organizations.

The bill was submitted by coalition chairman Ze’ev Elkin and sponsored by 27 MKs from right-wing and fascist parties: Likud, Israel Beiteinu, Shas, Habayit Hayehudi, United Torah Judaism and the centrist Kadima in its preliminary reading.

Reactions to the bill from the Israeli Left were unanimously negative. Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel) MK Dov Khenin said it was the latest in an emerging trend of anti-democratic legislation promoted by Israel Beiteinu.

“The bill is crass, aggressive, brutal and anti-democratic,” Khenin said. “The true significance of the bill is far-reaching and seeks to enlist the political Center to the agenda of the extreme Right. Its true intent is to determine that Israel and the occupied territories are one and the same.”

Khenin said that if the bill becomes law, it would mean that people who sit at a restaurant and ask to return a bottle of wine produced in the West Bank, because they object to Israeli settlement there, would be subject to a large fine.

Hadash MK Hanna Sweid added the bill was meant to intimidate critics of government policies and was a clear violation of the freedom of expression. After a fiery discussion, which included a procedural commotion, the bill was passed with its opponents storming out of the room, refusing to participate in the vote. Before the decision was made, MK Khenin suggested renaming the "Prohibition on Instituting a Boycott Bill" to "Prohibition on Freedom of Expression Bill," reported the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

On the bill

The boycott bill was first submitted on June 2010 by 25 Knesset members and endorsed by members of various factions. Its hazy wording would make a number of actions, now considered free speech, illegal. It is prohibited to initiate a boycott against the State of Israel and "the territories under Israeli control", to encourage participation in it, or to provide assistance or information with the purpose of advancing it,” section 2 of the proposed bill states.

Sections 3 and 4 of the proposed legislation state that, “An act of a citizen or resident of Israel in violation of Section 2 constitutes a civil wrong, and it will be subject to the provisions of the Torts Ordinance,” and “The court will award compensation for the civil wrong according to this law in the following manner: a. Punitive damages of up to 30,000 NIS to an injured party subject to the proof of any damage.”

If proven they participated in a boycott, individuals who are not citizens or residents of Israel can also be punished by having their right to enter the country denied for at least 10 years, according to the proposed legislation.

Eilat Maoz, Coalition of Women for Peace Coordinator, responded to the proposed bill saying: “This is a step up in which the government isn’t satisfied with persecution of left wing organizations, but tries to make leftist protest illegal and silence its citizens. It’s a government that’s afraid of democratic debate, because such a debate will expose the disagreement of the public with the destructive policies of the occupation and the settlements.”

The Internet Belongs to All, Not Just the US

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:14:00 +0000

Original source: Global Times

On February 15, the US government announced that it would increase its research into Internet penetration tools, in order to exert pressure on "authoritarian states," including China. Driven by the United States, ideological attacks reminiscent of the Cold War have appeared on the Internet.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an impassioned speech, saying that the US aims to promote "absolute freedom" of the Internet information flow and that whoever prevents it is "antidemocratic."

The US has forgotten that in 1992 when China first applied for access to the Internet, it was rejected for fear that socialist China would gain information about the West. The selfishness of the US has not changed in adopting this strategy.

The US attempts to control the Internet's direction, constantly committed to transforming the rapid development of Internet technology into a shaping tool for other countries.

It is indisputable that the freedom of information flow in China and other non-Western countries is not as good as that in the US and Europe, but this has changed bit by bit over the past 30 years. China is no longer a country shrouded by the information iron curtain. Increasing freedom to information is a goal for Chinese society.

However, China is clearly unable to remove all the "firewalls" at the moment. All countries consider national security above all.

The US Patriot Act allows the government to monitor citizens' online communications, including their browsing history. The grandstanding of the US about information freedom is fundamentally insincere.

The unfriendliness of the US government in the information field will force China to adopt temporary response measures, which may cause each side to develop the Internet separately. For example, Americans are using Twitter, while Chinese favor micro-blogs. The distance between the two sides is gradually being widened.

At least in the beginning, the US will remain superior but this is not immutable. China is under rapid development, and its number of Internet users has greatly exceeded the entire population of the United States.

The spread of online information in Chinese is also expanding. Although English-language information is still dominant in the world, it cannot dominate the lives of Chinese people today and may not always be able to dominate the future of mankind.

In the future, with the increasing tolerance of information for Chinese society and gradual introspection of the West, the integration of the two sides may begin anew, based on mutual respect and equal access.

Some scholars have said that, when the United States tries to promote soft power, it is when hard power alone has failed. In fact, the power of the Internet is not as large as Hillary Clinton images. It was just the last straw for the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.

China may not achieve political stability only by monitoring the Internet, and the US cannot play tricks on the Internet and expect to turn China into another Middle East.

Impact of Green Economy Investments in the Recovery Act

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:27:00 +0000

I did a spit take yesterday when I heard MSNBC commentator Mika Brzezinski tell another TV personality that to reduce the federal deficit we all "need to live within our means." I wasn't surprised by the remark so much as angered that yet another wealthy media pundit was lecturing us about being economical.

Usually, the "living within our means" comment refers to "shared sacrifice" of both working families and the rich in order to solve the government's perceived fiscal problems. In real life it means working families and low-income retirees yet again will be the one's to carry most of the burden.

See for example the Republican budget outline announced this month, which cuts tens of billions from education and other programs that benefit working families – with no sign of them budging on the tax cuts for the rich they fought tooth and nail to extend last year. See also their willingness to close down the government and stall Social Security payments to retirees in order to make their political point, further risking economic recovery.

When, during a press conference call dealing the positive impact of President Obama's recovery act on creating "green" manufacturing jobs, I questioned United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard about how he responds to comments like these, he expressed righteous working-class indignation.

"Depends on where I am at. If I was in the shop, I wouldn't use words you could print in your paper," he said. "But on this, I'd just say it's baloney."

"The fact of the matter is that the problem we have in America is not a spending problem; it's a revenue problem," he said.

"During the Bush era, we lost 53,000 factories," he explained. Those factories didn't just employ workers and make things. Those companies paid taxes and made purchases that sustained local economies. Those working families paid taxes and also made purchases that sustained local economies. And the "multiplier effect" rippled through the economy with additional revenues for local, state, and federal governments and even more businesses.

That's basic economics.

"We've now had not 15 million people unemployed (the official figure), we've had closer to 27 million people either underemployed and unemployed," Gerard continued. "And that came about as a result of the financial collapse and the lack of a manufacturing policy and bad trade deals."

"On top of that, you take the years of Bush tax cuts (trillions of dollars), two wars fought off the books, all of the usual stuff, and then last December giving almost a trillion dollars to the rich and ultra rich," he said. "Don't come back to me then and say that an investment that creates jobs, that pays back the investment in eight months, and almost doubles the investment in creation of gross domestic product in the same amount of time is a bad investment."

"More people are working," Gerard said, "and creating real wealth as opposed to the paper wealth created on Wall Street. That's the reason the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was such a powerful tool, and that's why we need more of it, not less of it."

Both government and private analysis of the manufacturing sector revealed that it has been one of the biggest winners in recent years, and indeed may be driving the economic recovery.

"It's not sexy, but it's got teeth"

In the movie adaptation of the John Grisham novel, The Firm, Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) explains to an FBI agent the best way to handle the crooks at the law firm under investigation. It's a pivotal point in the story because it happens when Mitch, who has been pushed around by the FBI and is scared stupid of the gangsters in his law firm, finally grasps how he can bring the bad guys down and escape the clutches of the FBI – all at the same time.

He tells the agent that the firm systematically overbilled its clients and sent those fraudulent bills in the mail. Agent Tarrance responds, "Get 'em with what? Overbilling, mail fraud? Oh, that's exciting."

"It's not sexy, but it's got teeth," responds Mitch. Millions in fines and decades-long prison sentences bring down the corrupt lawyers.

Sexy sound bites like "living within our means" are effective propaganda tools, because working families, the overwhelming majority of Americans, know what it is like to do that. Mika Brzezinski, who has never had to live within any means other than that of one of the most influential families in Washington, has no real life understanding or experience of what she said. But it's catchy and powerful. Who would dispute it?

But Gerard's economic analysis isn't just punditry. It has a basis in real life. According to a new joint report from the Blue-Green Alliance and the Economic Policy Institute, the investments in the green economy (production of renewable energy, weatherization programs, mass transit, etc.) created 1 million jobs, added $146 billion to the GDP, and took some of the biggest steps in protecting the environment in U.S. history.

In fact, the report notes, the $93 billion allocated for the green economy, i.e. less than 12 percent of the price tag of the recovery act, created 29 percent of the jobs and 28 percent of the total GDP created by the recovery act as a whole.

Another 35 percent of the recovery act was "transfer payments to individuals" in anti-poverty programs like unemployment compensation, food stamps, and the like, as well as direct aid to states. Federal dollars paid to states governments helped shore up their budgets and prevent the worst budget cuts. But because of the nature of the political process involved and resistance from Republicans in state governments, this portion of the recovery act has been slowed or even blocked. When successful, however, the money did stop the worst hemorrhaging of the crisis, protecting public safety and public education jobs in the hundreds of thousands. Still, states continue to face fiscal crises and need a second dose, but this time a much bigger one.

One-quarter of total recovery act spending came in the form of tax breaks and tax cuts. Tax cuts, however, are the least efficient means of stimulating the economy, the report explains. Obviously, if you give $1 trillion to the richest Americans, because they form a tiny portion of the population, they simply can't – even if they wanted to – spend enough to create real economic growth.

In addition, tax cuts for businesses are saved rather than spent, especially in an economy where one of the biggest problems is a drop off in consumer demand. Business owners don't hire new people no matter how much of a tax break you give them, until someone comes into the shop to buy something. Those are basic economics Republican ideologues simply refused to accept, risking economic recovery by blocking or trying to block implementation of recovery act programs.

In raw numbers, the economic impact of government spending under the recovery act looks like this. For every dollar in direct spending, such as for the "green economy," $1.75 in economic activity was generated. For every dollar spent in anti-poverty programs, $1.45 in new economic activity resulted.

And, in Gerard's theory, it is such new economic activity that leads to new growth, new job creation, new tax revenue, better public services, and fiscal soundness in government spending, i.e. deficit reduction.

Simply put, spending taxpayer dollars on direct investment in infrastructure and unemployment insurance ain't sexy but it's got teeth.

For every dollar spent on tax cuts for low- and middle-income families, $1.05 in new economic activity was generated. Ok, but not as effective.

On the other hand, for every dollar spent on tax cuts for the richest Americans, 40 cents – four thin dimes – in new economic activity resulted. Even less new activity was created with the corporate tax breaks in the recovery act. In other words, tax breaks for the rich and the corporations actually sucked life out of the economy. This partially explains the slow, uneven nature of the recovery.

And ineffective tax cuts for the rich are the foundation of all Republican Party policy – just so you know.

Photo: President Obama visits a cleaner energy battery factory in Wisconsin. (White House photo)

Racist Roots of Republican Party Immigration Policy

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:51:00 +0000

Republican extremism on immigration could cost them at election time, especially in states with significant Latino populations, recent polling data appears to confirm.

According to pollster Fernand Amandi, Latino voters are reacting strongly against Republican immigration policies that emphasize mass deportation, racial profiling of Latinos, or other punitive measures such as harassment by police or withholding medical care to immigrants.

On a conference call with reporters this week, Amandi said, "As long as the Republican Party’s rhetoric and policies continue to be as extreme and harsh as they have been, you’ll see more and more Latinos leave the GOP not just in 2012, but for a lifetime.”

"Latinos are poised to represent more than 10 million voters in 2012 and will no doubt play a major role in the upcoming Presidential election," he told reporters.

Amandi's remarks came as a reaction to new media reports that show Republican members of Congress are pushing for mass deportation of millions of Latino immigrants.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer also recently filed a countersuit against federal authorities who successfully blocked a racial profiling law which would target Latinos in her state. Brewer signed the controversial bill into law last year, prompting a national uproar over the law's requirement that police demand the papers of any Latino person suspected of being an immigrant.

Racist origins and affiliations

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, tied much of the Republican Party's anti-immigrant policies to three groups with innocuous sounding names that his organization labels hate groups: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA

Each of these groups originated with the goal of maintaining a "European American majority" in order to preserve what they see as a "European American society," Potok said.

"At the end of the day that is what we're talking about here," he added. "They're interested in protecting a European American majority, meaning white people."

He said that current leaders of FAIR have described past immigration reform laws that ended racial quotas on immigration as a retaliation against "Anglo-Saxon dominance."

"That's what is at the heart of the organizations we're talking about," he stated.

John Tanton, the founder of each of these groups, has been exposed as having corresponded in friendly ways with Holocaust deniers, KKK organizations and leaders, as well as leaders of the "white nationalist world," Potok continued. Tanton's organization has accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, which advocated eugenics activities designed to increase the genetic stock of the original white colonists.

And if you think the connections between these organizations and the Republican Party are only tenuous, Potok would ask you to consider Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., newly elected member of the GOP-controlled House and head of his party's Congressional Immigration Caucus. That caucus, despite its bland name, actually advocates mass deportation, striking birthright citizenship from the Constitution, and other punitive measures aimed mainly at Latino immigrants.

Bilbray is a former lawyer for FAIR.

Another lawyer by the name of Kris Kobach, who is tied to FAIR, co-authored laws like Arizona's "papers please" law. Kobach allied with Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce (Republican), who has been tied to neo-Nazi organizations, to win passage of that law. (See pictures of Pearce with white supremacist leaders here.)

Potok suggested that this network of anti-immigration activists, white supremacists, and Republican Party leaders has taken over reasoned debate of the issue. “They want local, state and federal measures that expel immigrants here and stop immigrants from coming in the future. Their radicalism causes huge upheaval in local communities that take their recommendations to heart, and are exacerbating racial tensions across the country," he said.

Not taking it lying down

While much of the corporate English-language media has ignored the deep roots the white supremacist movement has in the Republican Party, Latino voters aren't taking the violent rhetoric against their community lying down.

Spanish-language media have followed Republican Party immigration efforts closely. According to Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, an immigration advocacy organization, America's Spanish-speaking community is deeply concerned about the Republican Party's "radical" anti-Latino, anti-immigrant agenda.

He further indicated that polling suggests a Republican nominee for president will need to win 40 percent of the Latino vote in states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Florida, but by pushing strong anti-immigrant policies, "it's going to be very hard to do so."

"If the Republicans do indeed choose to pursue this mass deportation strategy," added Amandi, "the only conclusion one can draw politically is that it is a strategy of mass insanity and mass destruction to the short and long-term prospects of the GOP."

Exit polling after this past election cycle found that for Latino voters, immigration is among their top concerns, he pointed out. "Sixty percent of Hispanics said it was one of the most if not the most important reason they voted." Only the economy is higher on the list of concerns for most Latino voters.

Amandi also countered claims that Latino voters aren't impacted by the immigration debate because by definition they have no "legal status problem." More than three in five Latino voters tell pollsters they know undocumented immigrants personally and that motivates their deep interest in this issue.

"These kinds of policies have a direct consequence in the lives of many Latino voters," Amandi explained.

In addition, Republican Party anti-immigrant policies appear to be anti-Latino policies, and that "adds to feelings of discrimination Latino voters are sensing around the country," he said.

"For the foreseeable future, this policy continues to be a destructive one for the Republicans," Amandi said. "And with the specter of 2012 coming up, it seems they are writing off the Latino vote in pursuing these types of policies."

Democrats need to respond with meaningful immigration reform measures and proposals if they want to benefit electorally from both the growth of the Latino electorate and its increasing dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, he concluded.

Photo by JacobRuff, cc by 2.0, Flickr

Michigan Says No to Republican Pollution Agenda

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:02:00 +0000

Michigan residents strongly oppose Republican plans to block the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent survey. Michigan is the home state of Republican Rep. Fred Upton, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and is leading the charge against the EPA.

"What we found is that there is overwhelming support for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions," pollster Al Quinlan of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, which conducted the poll on behalf of The Energy Foundation, told reporters on a conference call Feb. 15.

The polling data revealed that 68 percent of Michigan residents supper the EPA's role in regulating greenhouse gas emissions, include almost six in 10 self-identified Republicans and two-thirds of Independents.

Less than one in five Michigan voters registered "strong opposition" to the EPA's role.

Significantly, when provided with some of the specific language in the public debate used by Republicans and Democrats over the EPA's role, Michigan residents showed increased support for the EPA.

For example, Michigan voters were asked about their level of support for the following argument: "The American people rejected Nancy Pelosi's cap-and-trade plan, but now the Obama administration is trying to impose a similar plan through the EPA. Their plan would impose more burdensome regulations that will cost American businesses hundreds of billion dollars, lead to higher gas and electricity prices for consumers and put thousands of American jobs at risk. Congress should rein in the EPA and stop this harmful and excessive new bureaucracy."

When presented with this statement, obviously lifted from the rhetoric of Republican politicians and Republican-oriented media personalities, support for the EPA's role actually increased. The biggest shift in favor came from Republicans, suggesting thin support for Republican rhetoric even in its base.

"Americans feel strongly that there's the need for accountability when it comes to greenhouse gases," Quinlan explained. "They want somebody to hold companies accountable for what they're putting into the air."

Years of polling and research shows systematically that the American public firmly believes that "this is an appropriate role for the government to play," he added. "We want them to key an eye on corporations and what they are doing and making sure they are not polluting beyond a certain limit."

In addition, Americans want scientists and the EPA taking on this job of regulating air pollution, not politicians in Congress. "The experts, the scientists are the ones who can best make the decisions about how to curb pollution and how to keep these companies accountable," he said.

The strength of public opinion on this issue comes as the Obama administration is preparing to release new guidelines regulating greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Michigan attitudes appear to reflect the general opinion shared by most Americans, according to other polling data released earlier this month.

Podcast: Who's Afraid of Socialism, an Interview with John Nichols

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:18:00 +0000

On this episode we play a special interview with author John Nichols. Nichols' new book The S Word, which is subtitled A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism, is forthcoming from Verso Books, VersoBooks.com. Nichols is also the Washington correspondent for the Nation magazine, TheNation.com.

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From a review of The "S" Word by Norman Markowitz:

There is much that is very valuable in John Nichols work. He writes with intelligence and often eloquence about the broad American left, where socialism cannot be simply separated from what was called progressivism in the late 19th and early 20th century and later came to be called liberalism in the New Deal period.

The socialist movement is like a river which diverges throughout the world with the socialist revolution in Russia into a social democratic tributary and a communist tributary, winding their respective ways, sometimes crashing into one another to create disasters, sometimes merging cooperatively to advance social progress. You cannot really understand one without the other, since each are the products of both the development of Marxist theory and the effects of working peoples' economic and political struggles.