Majority Agenda Project

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:

What with Glenn Beck and the Tea Potheads, you'd think that Americans are revolting against a "Big Government" that has smothered their lives. Turns out, however, that a less biased reading of the polls finds that people want a more responsive government and not the one they believe they have: a state captured by "Big Interests." Political psychologist, Stephen Kull, Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, recently appraised the data carefully and recognized much more nuance in public opinion than the media suggests. Below we run his piece, "Big Government is Not the Issue" from WorldPublicOpinion.org.

The noted peace movement thinker, Phyllis Bennis explains why she's supporting the One Nation Working Together mobilization:  "I think Oct 2nd is a great example of what it means for us as a peace movement to take on the dual challenges of both bringing our anti-war, anti-military budget messages to a much broader mobilization than our own, making the links about how the costs of war directly impact all the key issues around jobs, health care, the environment, housing, the economic crisis/recovery, etc., AND demonstrating our willingness/capacity to mobilize in support of the broad call around jobs etc. because it's important in its own right... 

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":

$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?

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.  

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...