Majority Agenda Project

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.

What are the real effects of long-term unemployment? The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article "Recession Strikes Deep Into Work Force."

"The nation's 9.7% unemployment rate tells only part of the recession's story, according to a new study that found more than half of adults in the U.S. labor force have suffered a spell of unemployment, a pay cut or reduction in work hours. Middle-age workers—50 to 64 years old—are most likely to have taken a hit in the last 30 months of the downturn, a group normally at the peak of its earning potential ...

"Those without jobs are enduring the longest spells of unemployment recorded in modern history. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months, almost double the previous post-World War II peak—12.3 weeks in 1982-83...

"Long-term unemployment is associated with severe breaks in career paths and erosion in income, health and other aspects of well-being."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.