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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Our Lives Are Under Threat From Some of the Most Powerful and Richest Entities -- Here's How We Can Fight Back and Win

AlterNet.org


ENVIRONMENT

Our Lives Are Under Threat From Some of the Most Powerful and Richest Entities -- Here's How We Can Fight Back and Win



We need to rebuild the kind of mass movement that marked 1970: bodies, passion, and creativity are the currencies we can compete in. It's not impossible.

Photo Credit: 350.org

Not for forty years has there been such a stretch of bad news for environmentalists in Washington.

Last month in the House, the newly empowered GOP majority voted down a resolution stating simply that global warming was real: they've apparently decided to go with their own versions of physics and chemistry.

This week in the Senate, the biggest environmental groups were reduced to a noble, bare-knuckles fight merely to keep the body from gutting the Clean Air Act, the proudest achievement of the green movement. The outcome is still unclear; even several prominent Democrats are trying to keep the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.

And at the White House? The president who boasted that his election marked the moment when 'the oceans begin to recede' instead introduced an energy plan heavy on precisely the carbon fuels driving global warming. He focused on 'energy independence,' a theme underscored by his decision to open 750 million tons of Wyoming coal to new mining leases. That's the equivalent of running 3,000 new power plants for a year.

Here's what we think is going on, in the broadest terms.

The modern environmental movement was born on Earth Day 1970, in an unprecedented burst of mass organizing--by some estimates 20 million Americans, a tenth of the population, took to the streets. It was a young movement, at a time when large numbers of people were serious about not just cleaning the air but stopping wars and ending official discrimination. That popular base inspired--or, more likely, cowed--Washington: the next four years saw the passage of virtually all the environmental legislation that still forms the core of green law.

It also saw the birth or rebirth of many of the organizations we think of when we think of environmentalism. Powered by that initial burst of mass support, they were able to make real headway in DC, and so they concentrated on important and professional tasks: patient lobbying of subcommittees, careful report-writing. And they kept making substantial gains: Superfund toxic cleanups, acid-rain control.

But in recent years two things have happened. One, that battery wound up on the first Earth Day has finally wound down: congressmen, it turns out, can tell the difference between an aging membership list and a vibrant political movement. As the DC political bible Politico put it last month: "green groups are being forced to play defense in a world where D.C. pols aren't scared of them."

Second, the key issue has changed. Forget acid rain and Superfund; these were important but relatively easy fights that didn't directly confront anyone's business model. You could clean up acid rain by putting a filter on your power plant. But global warming is different--you'd have to shut down that power plant, and replace it with a windmill or a solar panel.

And so the full power of the fossil fuel industry--the most profitable business in the planet's history--has been brought to bear on the fight, and they play hard and dirty. The Koch Brothers spend huge sums to underwrite the network of global warming skeptics; the US Chamber of Commerce emerged as the biggest campaign funder of them all, shuttling 94% of its donations to climate deniers. This kind of clout carried the day: the biggest dream of DC Washington groups was the so-called 'cap-and-trade' bill, behind which they mustered every insider technique they'd spent the last four decades perfecting. But in the end they didn't come close: Harry Reid refused to even schedule a floor vote, knowing that he was far short of the votes needed to pass the bill. The White House stayed on the sidelines.

To us, the lesson is pretty clear. Since we're never going to have as much money as the fossil fuel industry, we need to rebuild the kind of mass movement that marked 1970: bodies, passion, and creativity are the currencies we can compete in. It's not impossible. Working with next to no money, the fledgling campaign at 350.org managed over the last three years to coordinate 15,000 rallies in 189 countries--every nation on earth save North Korea. It's been active in every US state and Congressional district. And this week, it combined forces with another important American grass roots climate campaign, 1Sky, for extra reach.

1Sky was founded in the same spirit, and at the same time, as 350.org, and has worked to develop leaders around the country and help build a base of hundreds allies. Together, we'll be smarter, bolder, faster, and more creative than we were before.

This new and expanded 350.org will mobilize on a large scale--circle Sept. 24 on your calendar for a worldwide day of bike-based action. But it's also going aggressively after the backroom money, with a far-reaching new campaign that tackles the US Chamber of Commerce for its climate stance.

This youth-based campaign is linking up with labor, with faith communities, with frontline communities who have the most experience trying to shut down dirty power plants in their backyards. Most of all it's actually out in the streets, organizing new blood. The idea is not to supplant the Washington green groups, but instead to give the whole movement new clout--enough clout to withstand the crushing power of oil money. And enough energy to let us get off defense and back on the attack.

We don't know if we'll win in the end: the science of climate change grows darker by the day, and the window for effective action is swiftly closing. But any chance requires people power replacing corporate power. In the year of Tunisia and Egypt and Wisconsin, it's worth a try.

Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben are board members of 350.org.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Thousands in Mexico Take to Streets To Protest Drug War – We Need to Do the Same Here!

AlterNet.org


Thousands in Mexico Take to Streets To Protest Drug War – We Need to Do the Same Here!


This June will mark the 40th anniversary of the drug war -- let’s take inspiration from our brothers and sisters in Mexico, and demand an exit strategy from this unwinnable war.

April 7, 2011 |




Thousands came out yesterday across Mexico to protest the drug war. The protests were led by journalist and poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was killed last week in drug prohibition-related violence.

More than 37,000 people have been killed since President Calderon launched his “surge” against cartels in December 2006.

The bloody, unwinnable war is leading more and more elected officials to speak out against drug prohibition. In 2009, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Drug Policy – co-chaired by three former presidents (Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico) – issued a groundbreaking report declaring the drug war a failure. The report further advocated the decriminalization of marijuana and the need to "break the taboo" on open and honest discussion about international drug prohibition. Since then, former Mexican President Vicente Fox has also said that legalizing drugs would reduce the daily massacres in Mexico.

While elected officials and the “grasstops” are incredibly important voices against the drug war, it is obvious that we need the “grassroots” – we need people to hit the streets against the unwinnable drug war. That’s why yesterday’s protests in Mexico are inspiring.

The war on drugs is also America’s war at home. Every day, there’s violence in our streets due to drug prohibition. We also arrest 1.7 million people every year for drug law violations, 750,000 for marijuana possession alone. Our state budgets are collapsing because we spend billions of dollars every year locking up people behind bars who don’t belong there.

The heartbreaking carnage in Mexico and in our streets is not due to drugs or drug use, but drug prohibition. There is nothing inherently evil or violent about marijuana and coca, but prohibiting these highly-sought-after plants inevitably leads to violence, as people are willing to kill each other over the enormous profits. Now that alcohol is legal, no one is murdered over a case of Budweiser.

This June will mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon launching the war on drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance will be teaming up with organizations across the country to protest this disgraceful anniversary in cities and towns across the country.

Let’s take inspiration from our brothers and sisters in Mexico, hit the streets, and demand an exit strategy from this unwinnable war.

Tony Newman is communications director for the Drug Policy Alliance.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

A Working Class Hero is Still Something to Be



April 6, 2011 at 12:02:15

The Peasants Need Pitchforks


By Robert Scheer (about the author)

From Truthdig

A "working class hero," John Lennon told us in his song of that title, "is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still f*cking peasants as far as I can see."

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the super wealthy controls 40-percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: "Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1-percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income -- an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."

That is the harsh reality obscured by the media's focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty -- which smartphone to purchase -- for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much home-ownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused.

Instead of taxing the super rich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.

It is a reality further obscured by the academic elite, led by economists who receive enormous payoffs from Wall Street in speaking and consulting fees, and their less privileged university colleagues who are so often dependent upon wealthy sponsors for their research funding. Then there are the media, which are indistinguishable parts of the corporate-owned culture and which, with rare exception, pretend that we are all in the same lifeboat while they fawn in their coverage of those who bilk us and also dispense fat fees to top pundits. Complementing all that is the dark distraction of the faux populists, led by tea party demagogues, who blame unions and immigrants for the crimes of Wall Street hustlers.

My book on the banking meltdown, "The Great American Stickup," begins with the following words. "They did it. Yes, there is a 'they': the captains of finance, their lobbyists, and allies among leading politicians of both parties, who together destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning splendidly. ..." They got to rewrite the laws to enable their massive greed over everything from the tax codes to the sale of toxic derivatives over the past quarter century, smashing the American middle class and with it the nation's experiment in democracy.

The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan first effectively sang the siren song of ending government's role in corporate crime prevention, but it was Democrat Bill Clinton who accomplished much of that goal. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.

The veterans of the Clinton years, so prominent in the Obama administration, still deny their role in the disaster of the last 25 years. Yet the sad tale of income inequality that Stiglitz laments is as much a result of their policies as those of their Republican rivals. In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton's tenure in the White House the income of the top 1-percent increased by 10.1-percent per year, while that of the other 99-percent of Americans increased by only 2.4-percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton's deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1-percent increased its income 11-percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1-percent per year.

And that was before the meltdown that wiped out the jobs and home values of so many tens of millions of American families. "The top 1-percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles," Stiglitz concludes, "but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99-percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1-percent eventually do learn. Too late."

http://www.truthdig.com

Robert Scheer is editor in chief of the progressive Internet site Truthdig. He has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter (more...)

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