Majority Agenda Project

Rev. Jesse Jackson and United Auto Workers President Bob King issued the following statement at a July 12th press conference in Detroit.

DETROIT (July 12, 2010) No group has suffered more from America's economic meltdown than working men and women. The auto industry was decimated and workers paid the price. Urban America is in crisis and teachers, transportation workers, and all who do the hands-on work that make our cities run are the first to feel the effects of budget cuts. Unemployment continues at around 9.8%. Detroit is ground zero of this national crisis with an unemployment rate that is far higher. From December 2007 to June 2009, auto assembly and parts production accounted for 325,000 lost jobs. The auto industry has gone from a high of 1.5 million workers to 400,000 today.

In Appalachia and the Gulf, years of unenforced regulation, driven by corporate greed and government complicity, have led to needless deaths and destruction in the coal and oil fields.

The record floods in the Northeast U.S. this spring are classic symptoms of global warning, Dr. Joseph Romm wrote in Climate Progress on March 31.  Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. In 2009, Time magazine named him “the Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.”   He was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Clinton Administration and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.  

As the economic crisis enters its third year, Jason Pramas reports in Open Media Boston that state government plans to continue cutting programs needed by working families. The solutions -- raising revenue through progressive taxation, demanding that Washington provide more help by cutting runaway military spending -- are not on Beacon Hill's radar.

As the global economic crisis continues, Massachusetts lawmakers continue to follow the neoliberal playbook as slavishly as their federal counterparts - slashing programs that help working families and the poor to the bone, and refusing to raise taxes on the rich and corporations to help keep vital social services at reasonable levels. So, as has become our tradition here at Open Media Boston during the annual state budget debates, we're taking a look at the proposed cuts in the final Mass. Senate FY 2011 budget proposal - taking our information straight from the latest budget analysis from the good people at the progressive think-tank Mass. Budget and Policy Center. To get a real sense of what's going on, we highly recommend going to the MBPC's website and checking out their full analysis.

One problem with the U.S.' far-flung military commitmenets is that they generate wars, conflicts, and resentments; but they are also extremely costly.   A policy task force convened by Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank released a report in Washington today which details a package of $1 trillion of realistic military budget cuts.   In a final section, the Cato Institute representatives on the task force say they would cut deeper, adopting a "strategy of restraint" which focuses on defending the U.S.

WASHINGTON - June 11 - House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), along with a bipartisan task force that includes members of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Cato Institute, Center for Defense Information and others, announced the release today of a new report that identifies $960 billion in Pentagon budget savings that can be generated over the next ten years from realistic reductions in defense spending.  The report was produced by the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group convened in response to a request from Rep. Frank to explore options for reducing the defense budget's contribution to the federal deficit without compromising the essential security of the United States.

The oil spill is reminding Americans that government is needed to control corporations, undermining the message of the Tea Party.   Joshua Green, senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote in the Boston Globe June 10.

PRESIDENT OBAMA may be the most visible political casualty of the BP oil spill, but there is another big loser: the Tea Party. A mainstay of cable news programming for much of the last year, Tea Party coverage all but vanished during the month of May, according to the media-monitoring service TVEyes, as the spill dominated the headlines. There are still people in funny hats shouting about bailouts and vowing to “take back the government.’’ But suddenly they’re a lot less prominent.

The U.S. military far overmatches any other force in the world; it is not designed to defend the U.S. homeland but rather to project overwhelming power on every continent and ocean and in space. But playing world policeman is tremendously expensive-- 55 cents of every discretionary spending dollar now goes to the military, even while millions are jobless, teachers are laid off and libraries are closing. Even some of those who wish to continue and strengthen U.S. hegemony, like Defense Secretary Robert Gates, would like to trim pork-laden military projects, but the military-industrial complex is now so politically powerful that this adjustment is a difficult one, writes Christopher Hellman in TomDispatch. Hellman is a former congressional staffer and military policy analyst; he is now communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton. 

Is that the wake-up smell of coffee wafting through the halls of the Pentagon? After a decade and a half of unparalleled budget growth, top Defense Department officials are finally talking about the possible end of their spending spree. And they're not alone.

In recent years, Republicans and Democrats in Congress and successive administrations have not only repeatedly resisted efforts to control Pentagon spending, but regularly pushed for more dollars to go into the defense and national security budgets. And many of them still are.

The American public has long been divided on the Afghanistan war.   Though still fearful of terrorism, the public increasingly understands that military operations in Afghanistan militarily are making the U.S. less, not more, safe.   Longtime peace activist Tom Hayden argues that the public is now turning firmly against the war, even as the U.S. prepares for what will probably be a bloody offensive in the city of Kandahar this summer.

American antiwar sentiment is consolidating, according to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, despite months of official fanfare promoting the US military offensive in Afghanistan. 
 
The news comes as the US military prepares its summer offensive in Kandahar, as Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai is welcomed to the White House, and Congress considers $33 billion for the troop escalation on top of $159 billion for another year of war. 

Congress is now considering reforms of the financial system to prevent financial elites from bringing down the system once again as they wheel and deal.   But with dozens of Wall Street lobbyists working to water down the bill, will the reforms be sufficient to restore legitimacy?   George Friedman of STRATFOR, representing a conservative, "realist" political-economic view, argues that the crisis occurred when the financial elite escaped political regulation, transferring risk to shareholders and customers while enriching itself. The financial reform must be sufficiently convincing to restore legitimacy, or the system's political crisis will continue.  

Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions. The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises — as opposed to normal financial panics — emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political.