Majority Agenda Project

The One Nation Working Together team announced today that over 60 organizations have endorsed the mobilization. In an e-mail to steering committee members the team reflects the growing and gathering energy: "We are growing stronger every day. On October 2, we will send a message that there is a movement in this country for good jobs, equal justice and quality education for all."

A full list of groups is available from the OneNationWorkingTogether.org website. Here's a list current as of 8/29:

August 30, 2010–One Nation Working Together released a powerful and lyrical vision statement today: For Jobs, Justice and Education for All! Speaking to "peace abroad and jobs at home" and the need for a green economy, it quickly drew many "likes" on Facebook but also prompted one supportive but cautionary comment: "You know, we really need many nations working together." Here's the full text:

Amid the disheartening economic news, folks taking a longer-term view of the economy point to ominous trends but they also findi signs of hope in new forms of organizing from abroad and even from some home-grown examples, like the freelancers union. This article by Peter Hall-Jones from last November's New Unionism introduces us to the "precariat":

As organizers and activists around the country gear up for the October 2, 2010 jobs march in D.C. there are startling signs that--absent a major new stimulus package--the economy is headed for a double dip. Last week's new unemployment claims numbers are out and they top 500,000. This prompted Nouriel Roubini, among the few mainstream economists to predict the current collapse, to tweet: "Unemployment claims up to 500K after optimists predicted all year they would fall below 400K. Labor market dismal & double dip risks rising..."

The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency warns that a warmer-than-usual North Atlantic means that the state's relatively high latitudes may not protect it this hurricane season. Taken together with the flooding in Pakistan and China, it is certainly not too early to ask, "What global warming looks like?" This month, James Hansen looks at the physical evidence from across the globe in a peer-reviewed paper by that title (published in Reviews of Geophysics). Below we reproduce his summary. Hansen and his co-authors note that their scientific task is made difficult by the prevalent denialism and suggest that repeated clear scientific analysis is needed to overcome this climate.

$7.13 trillion! Trillion! New York Times Magazine columnist Peter Maass cites new studies for the non-war costs of US carrier groups along major oil routes: over three decades, the cost of patrolling the Persian Gulf, in purely economic terms, amounted to $7.13 trillion. Of course, these costs are not figured into the price you pay at the pump, but you can be sure that's where your tax dollars go. Here's Maass' full essay from Foreign Policy magazine.

Like state governments increasing unemployment through budget cutbacks at a time of dire joblessness, the US Senate declined to take up even the severely compromised climate bill before it. This is not for lack of political opportunity, indeed the last few months have been the hottest on record and, of course, there is the Gulf... As Bill McKibben observes in the Huffington Post, the sweltering heat is not an isolated happening; these hotter summer months follow the hottest decade.

How to take on the "coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused"?

Anemic job growth persists in June with little over 80,000 new private sector jobs created last month. Anticipating these numbers, several writers this week warned that the real deficit to address is the jobs deficit. Economics columnist, David Leonhardt, cautions that the US is cutting back public sector budgets at just the same time that the rest of the world's economies are cutting back – putting us on a sure path to a double-dip downtown. Who, after all, will create the demand needed to put people back to work?

Watching the news often leaves us worried about climate change and apparent public apathy. There is increasing despair over "cimate denialism" – the claim that the climate is not changing or that the changes are not due to human activity. No need, according to a recent poll described in the New York Times: Stanford University researcher, Jon Krosnick finds that, "huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it." This good news challenges climate activists to convert public opinion into a powerful social movement.