Majority Agenda Project

Boston College sociologist, Charlie Derber is interviewed here by Eileen McCluskey on the "Voices Near & Far" cable TV program.

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:

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.

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.  

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.

Writing in the New York Times today, Bob Herbert reacts to the latest dismal employment data (see also our piece from last Friday). Before pointing to solutions, he writes starkly of the crisis: "Unemployment is crushing families and stifling the prospects of young people... Entire communities are going under." He continues, "The economy is sick, and all efforts to revive it that do not directly confront the staggering levels of joblessness are doomed."

Is there a solution is sight? No: "There is no plan that I can see to get us out of this fix. Drastic cuts in government spending would only compound the crisis...