Pseudo-Protests and Serious Climate Crisis
This article by David Swanson is re-posted from ZNet.
Going in, I was of mixed views regarding Sunday’s rally in Washington, D.C., to save the earth’s climate from the tar sands pipeline. I still am.
Why on a Sunday when there’s no government around to protest, shut down, or interfere with?
And why all the pro-Obama rhetoric? Robert Kennedy, Jr., was among the celebrities getting arrested at the White House in the days leading up, and his comment to the media was typical. Obama won’t allow the tar sands pipeline, he said, because Obama has “a strong moral core” and doesn’t do really evil things.
As a belief, that’s of course delusional. This is the same president who sorts through a list of men, women, and children to have executed every other Tuesday, and who jokes about it. This is the guy who’s derailed international climate protection efforts for years. This is the guy who refused the demand to oppose the tar sands pipeline before last year’s election. If he had been compelled to take a stand as a candidate there would be no need for this effort to bring him around as a lame duck.
As a tactic, rather than a belief, the approach of the organizers of Sunday’s rally is at least worth questioning. For one thing, people are going to hear such comments and take them for beliefs. People are going to believe that the president would never do anything really evil. In which case, why bother to turn out and rally in protest of what he’s doing? Or if we do turn out, why communicate any serious threat of inconvenience to the president? On the contrary, why not make the protest into a campaign rally for the president through which we try, post-election, to alter the platform on which the actual candidate campaigned? The advantage to the expect-the-best-and-the-facts-be-damned approach is clear. Lots of people like it. You can’t have a mass rally without lots of people. The organizers of this event are not primarily to blame for how the U.S. public thinks and behaves. But, then again, if you’re trying to maximize your crowd at all costs, hadn’t you better really truly maximize it? Sunday’s rally probably suffered from being held on a bitterly cold day, but I suspect that most people who planned to come did come; and I’ve seen more people on the Mall in the summer for no reason at all, and many times more people on the Mall in the winter for an inauguration (which, in terms of policy based activism, is also nothing at all).
What if the celebrities generating the news with arrests at the White House were to speak the truth? What if they committed to nonviolently interfering with the operations of a government destroying the climate? What if they committed to opposing the Democratic and Republican parties as long as this is their agenda? What if they said honestly and accurately that the personality of a president matters less than the pressures applied to him, that this president can do good or evil, and that it is our job to compel him to do good?
Sunday’s rally, MC’d by former anti-Republican-war activist Lennox Yearwood, looked like an Obama rally. The posters and banners displayed a modified Obama campaign logo, modified to read “Forward on Climate.” One of the speakers on the stage, Van Jones, declared, “I had the honor of working for this president.” He addressed his remarks to the president and appealed to his morality and supposed good works: “President Obama, all the good that you have done . . . will be wiped out” if you allow the tar sands pipeline.
The pretense in these speeches, including one by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, was consistently that Obama has not already approved part of the pipeline, that he is guilty of inaction, that the government is failing to act, that what’s needed is action — as if our government were not actively promoting the use of, and using vast quantities of fossil fuels, not to mention fighting wars to control the stuff.
Van Jones ended his remarks by addressing himself to “the next generation.” And this is what he had to say: “Stop being chumps! You elected this president. You reelected this president. You gave him the chance to make history. He needs to give you the chance to have a future. Stop being chumps! Stop being chumps and fight for your future, thank you very much.”
Reading these words, one would imagine that the obvious meaning they carry is “Stop electing people like this who work for parties like this and serve financial interests like these.” What could be a more obvious interpretation? You elected this guy twice. He’s a lame duck now. You’ve lost your leverage. Stop being such chumps!
Nothing could be further, I think, from what Van Jones meant or what that crowd on Sunday believed he meant. This was a speaker who had, just moments before, expressed his pride in having worked in Obama’s White House. The fact that this crowd of Obama-branded “activists” had elected him twice was not mentioned in relation to their chumpiness but as grounds for establishing their right to insist that he not destroy the planet’s atmosphere. They would be chumps if they didn’t hold more rallies like this one.
Wait, you might ask, doesn’t everyone have the right to insist that powerful governments not destroy the earth’s atmosphere?
Well, maybe, but in Van Jones’ thinking, those who committed to voting for Obama twice, no matter what he did, and who have committed to voting for another Democrat no matter what he or she will do, deserve particular attention when they make demands. Paradoxically, those who can be counted on regardless, who demand nothing and therefore offer nothing, should be the ones who especially get to make demands and have them heard and honored.
Needless to say, it doesn’t actually work that way.
Our celebrity emperors attract a great deal of personal affection or hatred, so when I suggest an alternative to packaging a rally for the climate as a belated campaign event, it may be heard as a suggestion to burn Obama in effigy. What if there were a third option, namely that of simply demanding the protection of our climate?
We might lose some of those who enjoyed burning Bush in effigy and some of those who enjoy depicting themselves as friends of the Obama family. But would we really lose that many? If the celebrities and organizers took such an honest policy-based approach, if the organizations put in the same money and hired the same busses, etc., how much smaller would Sunday’s unimpressive rally have really been?
(And couldn’t such a crowd be enlarged enough to more than compensate for any loss, by the simple tactic of promising ahead of time to keep the speeches to a half-hour total and to begin the march on time? I’d pay money to go to that rally.)
The problem, of course, is that the celebrities and organizers themselves tend to think like Obama campaign workers. It’s not an act. It’s not a tactic aimed at maximizing turnout. And it’s not their fault that they, and so many others, think that way.
But imagine a realistic, policy-based approach that began to build an independent movement around principled demands. It would have the potential to grow. It would have the potential to threaten massive non-cooperation with evil. It would have the energy of Occupy. It would have the potential to make a glorious declaration out of what now appears to be self-mockery when oversmall crowds of hungover campaign workers shout “This is what democracy looks like!” as they plod along a permitted parade route.
No. It really isn’t.
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex Project in Grand Rapids
Over the years we have used the term, the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, to describe the economic and power dynamics that are at work with non-profits and their relationship to private and governmental power.
The term, Non-Profit Industrial Complex, was the focus of a major conference organized by the radical women of color group INCITE! and is the subject of a book they published several years ago entitled, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.
The book, and the work of many others in this area, asks important questions about the relationship between non-profit organizations and funders, particularly foundations. According to INCITE, “The non-profit industrial complex is a system of relationships between:
- the State (or local and federal governments)
- the owning classes
- foundations
- and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations
that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements. The state uses non-profits to:
- Monitor and control social justice movements;
- Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;
- Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;
- Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;
- Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work;
- Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them
We are just beginning a project that will investigate the Non-Profit Industrial Complex in Grand Rapids that will be in two parts.
The first part will be a series of investigations into Grand Rapids-based foundations, where we will post profiles of numerous foundations and how they are using their money.
The second part will be an investigation into local non-profit organizations, which include a look at where their funding sources are coming from, who sits on their boards and the results of an interview we plan to do with these non-profits about their history and how they navigate between mission and following the money.
We don’t have a rigid time frame for this project, but are looking to have the non-profit interviews/surveys and analysis completed by late May. Profiles of individual Grand Rapids will begin immediately.
Top 10 Users of H-1B Guest Worker Program are Offshore Outsourcing Firms
This article by Ron Hira is re-posted from CounterPunch.
The H-1B ‘non-immigrant’ temporary foreign guest worker program is called a valuable tool for employers to attract and retain the “best and brightest” immigrants in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Because employers may petition for permanent residence for their H-1B employees, the visa is sometimes described as a “bridge to immigration” that will keep the smartest foreign STEM workers in the U.S. permanently and thus improve the nation’s competitiveness. In part that’s how Senators Hatch, Rubio, Coons and Klobuchar explain their new bill – known as the “I-Squared Act” – that would more than quadruple the size of the H-1B program.
However, for the biggest users of the program, this view is false: In 2012, the 10 employers receiving the largest number of H-1B visas were all in the business of outsourcing and offshoring high-tech American jobs. Many of the jobs that went to H-1B workers should have instead gone to U.S. workers, but employers are not required to recruit them before applying for an H-1B, and can even replace their U.S. workers with H-1Bs. The top 10 H-1B employers were granted an astonishing 40,170 visas; nearly half the total annual quota. The table also shows each firm’s immigration yield: the ratio of permanent residence applications to new H-1B petitions for these companies. It is evidence of the companies’ intention to hire and keep their H-1B workers in the country permanently.
There are two reasons these firms hire H-1Bs instead of Americans: 1) an H-1B worker can legally be paid less than a U.S. worker in the same occupation and locality; and 2) the H-1B workerlearns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him. That’s why the H-1B was dubbed the “Outsourcing Visa” by the former Commerce Minister of India, Kamal Nath.
Rather than keeping jobs from leaving our shores, the H-1B does the opposite, by facilitating offshoring and providing employers with cheap, temporary labor – while reducing job opportunities for American high-tech workers in the process. The I-Squared Act does nothing to protect against this, while vastly expanding the size of a deeply flawed program that accelerates the offshoring of American high-tech jobs and reduces America’s future capacity to innovate.
This article by Seth Freed Wessler is re-posted from ColorLines.
On a call for investors on Thursday, the president and CEO of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s largest private prison contractor, said that he’s not concerned about the impact that immigration reform might have on the immigration detention business.
“[T]alking with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], who has been a partner for us for many many years, I think their general belief is there’s always going to be a demand for beds,” said Damon Hininger, in response to a question about Beltway immigration reform talks.
Recent news reports have suggested that the legalization of undocumented immigrants could strike a blow to the private prison business, which profits significantly ICE contracts. But as I outlined last week, immigration reform also threatens to usher in an expansion in the incarceration of non-citizens if a bill includes provisions that tie immigration enforcement more tightly to the criminal justice system.
On the investor call, Hininger hinted that although immigration reform might shrink the rates of detention for immigration offenses, CCA expects a steady flow of bodies moving from the criminal justice system to the immigration detention system.
“[ICE’s] profile of detainees in those beds may change over time to where they focus more on what they call criminal aliens versus non-criminal aliens, so that may change over time…based on both the demand and maybe any policies out of the administration,” he said.
CCA pulled in more than $200 million from ICE contracts in 2011. The company earned about the same amount from contracts with the federal Bureau of Prisons, mostly for facilities used to hold immigrants convicted of federal crimes. Hininger said CCA was waiting to hear a response from the BOP regarding a bid for a new 1600 bed prison that will hold non-citizens.
“It’s too early to tell exactly what the impact [of reform] is going to be,” Hininger said, “but again, ICE has always said that there’s going to be a demand for bed space here in the US because of all the things they’re doing both within the interior, on the border, from the people that are released from state prisons that are ultimately need to be deported.”
“There is always going to be strong demand regardless of what is being done at the national level as far as immigration reform,” he added.
A Look Inside Climate Deniers’ Secret Piggy Bank
This article is re-posted from GreenPeace.
For those familiar with the effort of ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers to bankroll a network of organizations denying basic climate science, a new article in the Guardian offers some revelatory information on the secret funding network that outweighs even top denier sugar daddies like Koch and Exxon.
Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, based out of the DC suburb of Alexandria, VA, have sent $118 million to the “climate denial machine” from 2002-2010, according to a Greenpeace analysis featured in the Guardian. The graph above, from the article, illustrates the significance of this money as compared to giants like Koch and Exxon.
Of course, the Koch brothers are part of the Donors Trust network, using the donors groups to hide their own giving to a variety of corporate front groups. Because of the obscurity provided by donors, we don’t know exactly who is getting exactly how much of the Koch payments to Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.
An accompanying article by the Guardian shows how the donors groups provide large portions of organisations’ entire budgets, such as the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, which even among climate deniers is notably anti-scientific.
The support helped the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (Cfact), expand from $600,000 to $3m annual operation. In 2010, Cfact received nearly half of its budget from those anonymous donors, the records show.
The group’s most visible product is the website, Climate Depot, a contrarian news source run by Marc Morano. Climate Depot sees itself as the rapid reaction force of the anti-climate cause. On the morning after Obama’s state of the union address, Morano put out a point by point rebuttal to the section on climate change.
CFACT is among over a dozen organizations that get 30 – 70 percent of their total budgets from the two donors groups. As we reported on PolluterWatch last October using 2010 IRS tax filings:
- Americans For Prosperity Foundation (AFP) got $7.6 million from donors groups in 2010, 43 percent of its budget. AFP Foundation is chaired by David Koch and has received millions in direct funding from Koch foundations since the Koch brothers founded it.
- Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow got $1.3 million from donors in 2010, 45 percent of its budget.
- Cornwall Alliance (through the James Partnership) got $339,500 from donors in 2010, 75 percent of its budget.
- Heartland Institute got $1.6 million from donors in 2010, 27 percent of it’s budget, which came from Chicago billionaire Barre Seid (see p. 67).
- State Policy Network (SPN) got 36 percent of its 2010 budget ($4.8 million) from donors. SPN members include just about every climate-denying organization and every conservative think tank in the country, including AFP and Heartland.
Koch is clearly embarrassed by the negative publicity. Koch “Facts,” the company’s PR website that lashes back at unfavorable reporting on Koch, attempted to respond to the flood of press on the donors groups without mentioning them by name. Similarly, Donors Trust president Whitney Ball has done her best to keep Donors Trust and Koch from being synonymous. To be clear–they are not, but the Kochs and their operatives are key players in the Donors network, with people like Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute and Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute helping oversee donors operations, including millions in funding to their own organizations.
A Keystone Moment: How Will Obama Decide?
This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.
Barack Obama is receiving accolades from liberal environmentalists for saying progressive-sounding things about global warming in his fifth State of the Union Address (SOTUA) last Tuesday. The reason for this praise is not mysterious. The President made some minimally decent comments about the leading issue of our or any time.
Mentioning the “dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet,” Obama said that “for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.” He noted that “the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15” and that “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods — all are now more frequent and more intense.”
“We can choose to believe,” Obama added, “that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.”
Take that, American Petroleum Institute. The President knows that the dire consensus findings of climate science aren’t bogus.
But how excited do people who care about the fate of livable ecology really want to get about such rhetoric in light of the president’s actual climate record? I heard candidate Obama say similar green-sounding things in Iowa in 2007 and 2008 only to watch his presidency green-light expanded offshore oil drilling and almost single-handedly efforts to restrict global greenhouse emissions at international climate summits in Copenhagen and Durban. Obama has approved and celebrated (in the name of “national energy independence”) the environmentally noxious “homeland” practice of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), whereby the carbon-industrial complex has discovered a deadly new way to waste energy and poison water supplies, and to extract and spew fossil fuels. Listen to the following judgment on the president’s less-than-inspiring climate policy résuméé in the latest issue of the legendarily Obama-worshipping magazine Rolling Stone:
“Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. After promising in 2008 that his presidency would be ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,’ President Obama went silent on the most crucial issue of our time. He failed to talk openly with Americans about the risks of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, failed to put political muscle behind legislation to cap carbon pollution, failed to meaningfully engage in international climate negotiations [that significantly minimizes his terrible role in the failure of the global summits – P.S.], failed to use the power of his office to end the fake ‘debate’ about the reality of global warming and failed to prepare Americans – and the world – for life on a rapidly warming planet. It was as if the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced became a political inconvenience for the president once he became elected.”
The president’s inspiring words are one thing; policy deeds are something else altogether. That basic distinction ought to have been driven home once and for all by his first term, a grand tutorial on who really runs the country – a moneyed oligarchy that remains firmly entrenched beneath and beyond the nation’s formally democratic character.
But ok, fine. Let’s say you want to cut Obama some slack and give the nation’s first technically black president a second (or third or fourth or…) chance to be a green president (“green” as in saving the earth, not the color of corporate and Wall Street money) in his second term. He’s the only president we’ve got and, unlike all but a small number of elected Republican officials, he says he agrees with climate science, right? He can’t run for a third term and this is his chance to burnish his “progressive legacy” by (among other things) acting to help save the species (and other living things) from greenhouse gassing…right?
The fact that Obama defeated Mitt Romney last fall means there’s at least a chance of a decent decision. The Republican candidate promised to make signing off on Keystone XL his very first action as president and there’s no reason not to believe he would have acted in accord with that promise…right? 
As it happens, there’s a policy decision staring Obama in the face right now – one that goes close to the heart of the climate problem and “to act before it’s too late.” It received no direct mention in the SOTUA, but it had to be on his mind as tens of thousands of environmentalist protestors prepared gather in Washington to demonstrate around that decision.
I am referring, of course, to whether President Obama is going to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which, “if built, is slated to bring some of the ‘dirtiest’, oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast” (Michael T. Klare). How much of this “dirty,” that is tar sands, oil (extracted at great carbon-generating, water-wrecking, and ecology-despoiling expense from landlocked reserves of sand and clay in northwest Canada)? Alberta is home to a trillion barrels of this highly toxic but carbon-rich form of petroleum, equivalent to the conventional oil reserves of any nation except Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. According to leading climate activist and writer Bill McKibben, releasing this vast greenhouse reservoir into the atmosphere in coming years will “run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would bring if not hell, than at least a world with a similar temperature.”[2]
The leading climate scientist and current director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen has been blunt about the consequences of spilling Alberta’s distinctively filthy greenhouse load on Mother Earth. It’s “Game Over for the climate…. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels,” Hansen noted in The New York Times last year, “there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.” No wonder Hansen was perturbed to read Obama telling Rolling Stone that he expected Canada to exploit the oil in its huge tar sands deposits “regardless of what we do.” [3]
The president who says he wants to honor “the overwhelming judgment of science…for the sake of our children and our future” may have it in his power to defuse this Epic Carbon Bomb. Since the Keystone XL pipeline crosses an international (U.S.-Canada) border, it’s the president alone who makes the final decision on whether the eco-cidal, environmentally exterminist project should proceed. And a negative judgment from the White House may do the trick to kill the corporate assault on Alberta tar sands for the near future, buying us more time to save a livable planet. This is because none of the other methods being considered to bring Alberta’s tar sands oil to the global market appear to be economically or politically viable. They all face steep barriers to profitability that are likely to undercut the massive fixed capital investment required to extract and transport Albert’s dirty oil outside of Canada’s limited market.
Obama may well be wrong if he believes that Canada’s tar sands oil is going into the atmosphere “regardless of what we do” – regardless, that is, in this context, of what he does. Obama’s decision is likely to either save or sink the tar sands industry. His approval would ensure investors “enough return to justify their massive investments. It would also,” Michael Klare notes, “prompt additional investments in tar-sands projects and further production increases by an industry that assumed opposition to future pipelines had been weakened by this victory.” [4]
How will the president decide? As will surprise nobody familiar with my writings on Obama since the summer of 2004, I am less than optimistic about the chances that he will respect the wishes of climate scientists and the protestors outside his gates. For what its worth, some of his post-election rhetoric is less than encouraging. When asked about global warming at his first post-election press conference, for example, the president said that “the American people have been so focused on our economy and jobs and growth that if the message is somehow ‘we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change,’ I don’t think that anybody is going to go for that” (emphasis added).
This was a dreadful, ecologically appalling statement in two key ways. First, Obama used the phrase “simply to address climate change” as if global warming was a minor matter compared to “jobs and growth.” That was a tellingly dismissive way in which to refer to what has become gravest current threat to human existence.
Second, Obama’s comment bought into what Mother Jones editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery rightly call “the jobs vs. climate action straw man….a false and outdated dichotomy propagated by those with a vested interest in the status quo….”[5] Tackling climate change and other environmental ills in a meaningful way means putting many millions of people to work at all skill levels to design, implement, construct, conduct, and coordinate the essential environmental, climate-friendly retro-fitting of economy and society: the ecological re-conversion of production, transportation, office space, homes, agriculture, and public space. [6]
In his SOTUA, Obama said that “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. That’s why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new gas and oil permits.” That sounds like a thumb up to Keystone to me.
It is relevant that Obama made no mention of Keystone in the address. It was a curious deletion in light of the imminence of his decision and the green-sounding rhetoric of his talk – a reflection perhaps of the vast resources the “energy industry” has been pouring into pushing (in the name of national “energy security” and “American jobs”) for the pipeline’s approval.
I could be wrong. I hope I am. I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350 comrades and allies make a loud and significant impact in Washington D.C. this weekend. It is a hopeful sign that Obama’s recently appointed Secretary of State John F. Kerry is a self-described “climate hawk” who says he will be deeply engaged in the State Department’s review of the pipeline.
Still, I will not be surprised if and when Obama does with some delay what Romney pledged to do right away. And I will not be surprised when a rising number of us on the green left are (for better or worse) considering the moral urgency of mass direct action and sabotage in light of a post-democratic political process that long ago sold its soul to the unelected, interrelated, and significantly petro-capitalist dictatorships of money and empire.
Obama’s State of the Corporate Union
This article by Glen Ford is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
It was an impassioned performance by a cynical politician who offers little but corporate tax incentives and continued austerity. Barack Obama peppered his State of the Union address with up-tempo buzzwords about illusory “progress,” but the president’s substantive message was that he is determined to complete the austerity bargain he struck with the Republicans in 2011. Thus, it is a sign of “progress” that “we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances” – meaning, he will collaborate with the GOP in cutting almost $2 trillion more.
The big cuts will come from those programs that enjoy overwhelming support among Americans. He claims to be with them in spirit while opposing them in practice. “Those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms – otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children, and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations.” His reasoning is identical to the Republicans, who say these programs must be bled, or die.
Obama created the model to gut entitlements through his Simpson/Bowles Deficit Reduction Commission, appointed well before the GOP took control of the House. Now he pretends that the cuts have been forced upon him, but that he will acquiesce in the spirit of compromise. “On Medicare, I’m prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.”
He constructs a phony trade-off for children, the poor and the elderly. “Why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks? How is that fair?” he asks, rhetorically. The cuts must come, but in return Obama will revise the tax code “that lowers incentives to move jobs overseas, and lowers tax rates for businesses and manufacturers that create jobs right here in America.”
This is the double-whammy. Austerity in people’s programs is traded for tax breaks for corporations that will, in totally discredited theory, bring back the jobs they had outsourced overseas. But don’t complain, says Obama. “None of us will get 100 percent of what we want.” And most of us will get the shaft.
Obama’s jobs program is almost entirely a corporate tax incentive scheme, to bribe corporations to send home the jobs they sent offshore, where they have also hidden tens of trillions from taxation – a subject not deemed worthy of mention in a national discussion of shared sacrifice and patriotic obligations.
The military-industrial complex will make “America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing,” says the president. Fifteen manufacturing “hubs” will be built around businesses that “partner with the Departments of Defense and Energy to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.” You can bet there are huge corporate subsidies involved, through negative taxation.
Obama will repair America’s infrastructure through a “Fix-It-First” program that nobody has ever heard of before, and has no price tag – which means it doesn’t exist in anything more than rhetorical form. And his “Partnership to Rebuild America” proposal to upgrade private infrastructure – oil and gas pipelines, ports and the power grid – almost certainly involves corporate subsidies, or else why wouldn’t the private sector be repairing its own properties, already?
Those business incentives just keep on coming. All one need to qualify is say the word “jobs” – but don’t you dare say “public works.” The Corporate-Subsidizer-In-Chief says: “Let’s offer incentives to companies that hire Americans who’ve got what it takes to fill that job opening, but have been out of work so long that no one will give them a chance. Let’s put people back to work rebuilding vacant homes in run-down neighborhoods.” Obama says he will “partner with 20 of the hardest-hit towns in America to get these communities back on their feet.” How will that get done? By offering “new tax credits to businesses that hire and invest.” Obama can do a passable Al Green, but when it comes to public policy in 2013, he sings only one song: tax schemes for business. And he stole that tune from the GOP.
Obama’s Black boosters will no doubt point to the president’s concern for the “hardest hit” to conclude that he is now open to targeted aid to the those communities that have been most devastated. Not so. He is simply open to aiding corporations under any all circumstances. His administration failed to spend almost all of $7.6 billion set aside by Congress for a Hardest Hit Fund, to aid communities hurt worst by the housing collapse. Hard-hit people don’t get special attention from this administration; well-off corporations do.
During his 2008 campaign, Obama vowed to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011. He must have thought no one was listening, because he didn’t mention the subject for the next four years. Now, in 2013, he promises to fight for a $9.00 minimum – 50 cents an hour less. And he didn’t even apologize to the nation, Tuesday night, for reneging during his first term.
“Race to the Top,” Obama’s signature program to privatize education through withholding of funds to states that fail to establish an alternative charter system and transform teachers into temporary workers, is set for a great corporate leap forward. States that craft their curriculums to suit corporate priorities will get additional funding; those that do not, will be punished. “We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.” Obama is an education gangster, hired muscle for the corporate class.
It is fitting that Obama, who has made it possible for all of us to experience the First Black U.S. Presidency, will enhance the experience of choosing between corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans: “I’m announcing a non-partisan commission to improve the voting experience in America. And I’m asking two long-time experts in the field, who’ve recently served as the top attorneys for my campaign and for Governor Romney’s campaign, to lead it.”
We discovered during the presidential debates that there was very little that separated the two contenders. The Republican and Democratic experts should have no problem finding a mutual electoral comfort zone.
February 15th: The Day the World Said NO to War!
The trailer of the film We Are Many is re-posted from Common Dreams.
We Are Many is a documentary film about one historic day, and its legacy. On 15 February, between 10-14 million people took to the streets in nearly 800 cities around the world, to protest against the impending war on Iraq. Filmed in six countries over 7 years, this film also reveals unexpected legacies, from the influence on the Egyptian democratic movement to the Occupy Movement. Told by first hand participants, organizers and the public alike as well as leading public figures, this film is the first documentary account of the biggest single protest in the history of humanity. We Are Many is both the untold story of a powerful movement, and a witness to the rise of the ‘Second Superpower.’ The film is due for worldwide release in this year, the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War and of the Day the World Said No to War.
2nd Annual Women and the Environment Symposium at GVSU: Keynote lecture by Roxana Tynan
Earlier today, GVSU Women’s Center and the West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC), hosted the 2nd Annual Women and the Environment Symposium at the downtown campus of GVSU.
The symposium began with a talk from the keynote speaker Roxana Tynan, Executive Director of the LAANE, a Los Angeles group that promotes the need for communities to develop a “green economy” or “the new economy.”
Tynan began by showing a short video about a Latina woman in LA who works at a recycling center. The video talks about the low wage and dangerous realities for workers in this industry and what LAANE is doing to challenge the practices of the company. LAANE partnered with the Teamsters to force the company to adopt new policies and practices that improved the wages and working conditions for the workers at the Los Angeles recycling center.
Tynan then talked about LAANE’s vision, which was creating an economy where everyone has enough to live on and a descent place to live. The keynote speaker also talked about the need for creating green jobs, which she believes is necessary in order to create a new economy.
The speaker showed a graphic that laid out a threefold plan for creating this new economy, which included Good Jobs, a Greener Healthier Future and Effective Government. This framework presented the notion that we can achieve a sustainable future within the current free market system, by making adjustments to reform areas of concern. Tynan does believe that we can have a triple bottom line economy, where the planet, people and profit can all flourish.
In some ways it was encouraging to see the work being done, particularly with the recycling center workers and their partnerships with low-wage workers. However, much of the rhetoric and practice of LAANE continues to believe that it is possible to achieve sustainability within a capitalist framework of economic development, which ignores larger structural problems, both economic and environmental, that are inherently unsustainable and necessitates worker exploitation.
Tynan’s comments were brief, but took several questions from the audience that focused on specific projects her organization works on. She was asked about co-ops and the cooperative model as a way of achieving equity. Tynan supports the idea, but wasn’t sure that cooperatives could work on a large scale. This flies in the face of the massive worker run, cooperative ventures that have a long history and is best exemplified by the Sin Patron movement in Argentina.
Indonesian Workers ask for solidarity from GVSU students in their struggle for justice against Adidas
Last night roughly 25 students and some community members came to listen to two Indonesian workers who were on tour with the group United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).
The two Indonesian workers, Aslam Hidayat and Heni, talked about their experience of working in an Adidas contracted factory in their community and the working conditions, but these two humble workers spoke mostly about the campaign they are engaged in to get severance pay from Adidas, which closed the factory and owes them and their fellow workers $1.8 million in severance pay.
Last week, Aslam and Heni demonstrated at a Selena Gomez fashion show, featuring Adidas apparel, an action that got lots of attention.
Aslam and Heni were both very descriptive and very emotional in telling their stories and talk about the struggle to survive since the factory shut down. The also talked about being paid near the end with vouchers instead of cash and asked the students gathered is any of them would be willing to be paid in vouchers instead of money?
Both Aslam and Heni are part of a union that is still fighting for worker justice and solidarity and were on a several state tour to not only seek support for their struggle, but to assist USAS is rejuvenating the student movement.
The USAS tour was touring universities that currently have contracts with Adidas. Grand Valley State University is one of the many colleges that has contractual agreements with Adidas, although it was not known how large the contract was that GVSU was engaged in. One of the USAS organizers who also spoke last night said that the contract that U of M has is worth $60 million dollars and anytime a university ends its contract with a company like Adidas over human rights and labor abuse, that will get the company’s attention.
At the end of the talk, the USAS organizers asked if GVSU students were interested in starting up a chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, to which the students responded with a resounding yes.
There was a USAS chapter at GVSU years ago, which worked on campaigns against Taco Bell, but also were part of the creation of the Workers Rights Consortium. If a GVSU chapter of USAS does get off the ground, we will provide updates on their efforts.
