Not particularly surprising for those who’ve been paying attention to oil reserve estimates, but it’s now official that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has been deliberately distorting their estimates to make it appear that peak oil is much further away than in reality. Also interesting that the US govt has been pressuring the agency to lie about it.
As I state in my Synopsis, peak oil is one of the most important ecological limits, which will prevent global capitalism from continuing to expand – if it hasn’t already. [alex]
Key Oil Figures Were Distorted by US Pressure, Says Whistleblower
Watchdog’s estimates of reserves inflated says top official
by Terry Macalister
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
This official oil production estimate is overly-optimistic
The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.
In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.
Now the “peak oil” theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. “The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.
“Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.
A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was “imperative not to anger the Americans” but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. “We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad,” he added. Read the rest of this entry »
This essay, written following a listening tour across the US, asks some of the most important questions facing social movements today, including “How Do We Build Intergenerational Movements?”, “What About Multiracial Movement Building?” and “How Do We Develop Strategy?”
I read this when it first came out in the summer of 2006 and it pretty much rocked my socks off and made me excited to get involved in the new SDS, so I figured I’d repost it for folks who never got to read it. [alex]
Ten Questions for Movement Building
by Dan Berger and Andy Cornell
For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books — Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005) and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) — and to get at least a cursory impression of sectors of the movement in this country. We viewed the twenty-eight events not only as book readings but as conscious political conversations about the state of the country, the world, and the movement.
Of course, such quick visits to different parts of the country can only yield so much information. Because this was May and June, we did not speak on any school campuses and were unable to gather a strong sense of the state of campus-based activism. Further, much of the tour came together through personal connections we’ve developed in anarchist, queer, punk, and white anti-racist communities, and, as with any organizing, the audience generally reflected who organized the event and how they went about it rather than the full array of organizing projects transpiring in each town. Yet several crucial questions were raised routinely in big cities and small towns alike (or, alternately, were elided but lay just beneath the surface of the sometimes tense conversations we were party to). Such commonality of concerns and difficulties demonstrates the need for ongoing discussion of these issues within and between local activist communities. Thus, while we don’t pretend to have an authoritative analysis of the movement, we offer this report as part of a broader dialogue about building and strengthening modern revolutionary movements — an attempt to index some common debates and to offer challenges in the interests of pushing the struggle forward.
Challenges and Debates:
The audiences we spoke with tended to be predominantly white and comprised of people self-identified as being on the left, many of whom are active in one or more organizations locally or nationally. We traveled through the Northeast (including a brief visit to Montreal), the rust belt, the Midwest, parts of the South, and the Mid-Atlantic. Some events tended to draw mostly 60s-generation activists, others primarily people in their 20s, and more than a few were genuinely intergenerational. Not surprisingly, events at community centers and libraries afforded more room for conversation than those at bookstores. Crowds ranged anywhere from 10 to 100 people, although the average event had about 25 people. Even where events were small gatherings of friends, they proved to be useful dialogues about pragmatic work. Our goals for the tour were: establishing a sense of different organizing projects; pushing white people in an anti-racist and anti-imperialist direction while highlighting the interrelationship of issues; and grappling with the difficult issues of organizing, leadership, and intergenerational movement building. The following ten questions emerge from our analysis of the political situation based on our travels and meetings with activists of a variety of ages and range of experiences.
1. What Is Organizing?
Every event we did focused on the need for organizing. This call often fell upon sympathetic ears, but was frequently met with questions about how to actually organize and build lasting radical organizations, particularly in terms of maintaining radical politics while reaching beyond insular communities. There are too few institutions training young or new activists in the praxis of organizing and anti-authoritarian leadership development. Read the rest of this entry »
Who Were the Witches? – Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism
Alex Knight
November 5, 2009
This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici’s brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare’s character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.
Who Were the Witches?
Parents putting a pointed hat on their young son or daughter before Trick-or-Treating might never pause to wonder this question, seeing witches as just another cartoonish Halloween icon like Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula. But deep within our ritual lies a hidden history that can tell us important truths about our world, as the legacy of past events continues to affect us 500 years later. In this book, Silvia Federici takes us back in time to show how the mysterious figure of the witch is key to understanding the creation of capitalism, the profit-motivated economic system that now reigns over the entire planet.
During the 15th – 17th centuries the fear of witches was ever-present in Europe and Colonial America, so much so that if a woman was accused of witchcraft she could face the cruellest of torture until confession was given, or even be executed based on suspicion alone. There was often no evidence whatsoever. The author recounts, “for more than two centuries, in several European countries, hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, burned alive or hanged, accused of having sold body and soul to the devil and, by magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbors, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms, and performed many other abominations” (169).
In other words, just about anything bad that might or might not have happened was blamed on witches during that time. So where did this tidal wave of hysteria come from that took the lives so many poor women, most of whom had almost certainly never flown on broomsticks or stirred eye-of-newt into large black cauldrons?
Caliban underscores that the persecution of witches was not just some error of ignorant peasants, but in fact the deliberate policy of Church and State, the very ruling class of society. To put this in perspective, today witchcraft would be a far-fetched cause for alarm, but the fear of hidden terrorists who could strike at any moment because they “hate our freedom” is widespread. Not surprising, since politicians and the media have been drilling this frightening message into people’s heads for years, even though terrorism is a much less likely cause of death than, say, lack of health care.1 And just as the panic over terrorism has enabled today’s powers-that-be to attempt to remake the Middle East, this book makes the case that the powers-that-were of Medieval Europe exploited or invented the fear of witches to remake European society towards a social paradigm that met their interests.
Interestingly, a major component of both of these crusades was the use of so-called “shock and awe” tactics to astound the population with “spectacular displays of force,” which helped to soften up resistance to drastic or unpopular reforms.2 In the case of the Witch Hunt, shock therapy was applied through the witch burnings – spectacles of such stupefying violence that they paralyzed whole villages and regions into accepting fundamental restructuring of medieval society.3 Federici describes a typical witch burning as, “an important public event, which all the members of the community had to attend, including the children of the witches, especially their daughters who, in some cases, would be whipped in front of the stake on which they could see their mother burning alive” (186).
The witch burning was the medieval version of "Shock and Awe"
The book argues that these gruesome executions not only punished “witches” but graphically demonstrated the repercussions for any kind of disobedience to the clergy or nobility. In particular, the witch burnings were meant to terrify women into accepting “a new patriarchal order where women’s bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources” (170). Read the rest of this entry »
a self-explanatory call to action from Jobs with Justice that is right on. [alex]
Too Big To Fail is just plain TOO BIG.
Activists will be in the streets of Chicago tomorrow to protest the American Bankers Association meeting. These banks took bailouts that add up to $15,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. They claimed they were “too big to fail.”
The reality is that these corporate criminals are too big and powerful politically. Explaining why even minor reforms have been bottled up in Congress, Senator Durbin from Illinois admitted that the banks “frankly own the place.”
We have to break their grip on Congress, break up their political and economic power, break up the corporate crime spree and break through this economic crisis with a major jobs program, new regulations (like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency), new financial institutions that put workers and communities first and a new economy that works for everyone
Send a letter to the following decision maker(s):
Your Congressperson
Your Senators Below is the sample letter:
Subject: Break up the Banks; Make the Economy Work
Dear [decision maker name automatically inserted here],
The Wall Street “Bailout Bandits” stuffed their pockets with false profits while wrecking our economy, Read the rest of this entry »
Walden Bello explains the logic of breaking with corporate globalization and points the way towards a more socially and ecologically responsible economic paradigm. Includes “11 pillars of deglobalization.” [alex]
The Virtues of Deglobalization
by Akbayan! Representative Walden Bello
originally posted on Foreign Policy in Focus
reposted from Focus on the Global South.
The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing, even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years. As the much-heralded process of financial and trade interdependence went into reverse, it became the transmission belt not of prosperity but of economic crisis and collapse.
End of an Era
In their responses to the current economic crisis, governments paid lip service to global coordination but propelled separate stimulus programs meant to rev up national markets. In so doing, governments quietly shelved export-oriented growth, long the driver of many economies, though paid the usual nostrums to advancing trade liberalization as a means of countering the global downturn by completing the Doha Round of trade negotiations under the World Trade Organization. There is increasing acknowledgment that there will be no returning to a world centrally dependent on free-spending American consumers, since many are bankrupt and nobody has taken their place.
Moreover, whether agreed on internationally or unilaterally set up by national governments, a whole raft of restrictions will almost certainly be imposed on finance capital, the untrammeled mobility of which has been the cutting edge of the current crisis.
Intellectual discourse, however, hasn’t yet shown many signs of this break with orthodoxy. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on free trade, the primacy of private enterprise, and a minimalist role for the state, continues to be the default language among policymakers. Establishment critics of market fundamentalism, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, have become entangled in endless debates over how large stimulus programs should be, and whether or not the state should retain an interventionist presence or, once stabilized, return the companies and banks to the private sector. Moreover some, such as Stiglitz, continue to believe in what they perceive to be the economic benefits of globalization while bemoaning its social costs.
But trends are fast outpacing both ideologues and critics of neoliberal globalization, and developments thought impossible a few years ago are gaining steam. “The integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front,” writes the Economist. While the magazine says that corporations continue to believe in the efficiency of global supply chains, “like any chain, these are only as strong as their weakest link. A danger point will come if firms decide that this way of organizing production has had its day.”
“Deglobalization,” a term that the Economist attributes to me, is a development that the magazine, the world’s prime avatar of free market ideology, views as negative. I believe, however, that deglobalization is an opportunity. Indeed, Read the rest of this entry »
This article only scratches the surface of why capitalism as a system based in constant expansion is absolutely incompatible with a planet of real social and ecological limits, peak oil being one. My book will flesh these arguments out in greater detail, but for now check out what Professor Wolff has been cooking up. [alex]
Worker Productivity (blue) vs. Wages (pink), 1890-2009
The concept of peak oil may apply more generally than its friends and foes realize. As we descend into US capitalism’s second major crash in 75 years (with another dozen or so “business cycle downturns” in the interval between crashes), some signs suggest we are at peak capitalism too. Private capitalism (when productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and when markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences. Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all justified in the name not only of extricating us from a crisis but also finally preventing future crises (as Obama repeated this week). They all failed to do that.
The tendency to crisis seems unstoppable, an inherent quality of capitalism. At best, flare outs were caught before they wreaked major havoc, although usually that only postponed and aggravated that havoc. One recent case in point: the stock market crash of early 2000 was limited in its damaging social consequences (recession, etc.) by an historically unprecedented reduction of interest rates and money supply expansion by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The resulting real estate bubble temporarily offset the effects of the stock market’s bubble bursting, but when real estate crashed a few years later, what had been deferred hit catastrophically.
Repeated failure to stop its inherent crisis tendency is beginning to tell on the system. The question increasingly insinuates itself even into discourses with a long history of denying its pertinence: has capitalism, qua system, outlived its usefulness? Read the rest of this entry »
Anti-Capitalism Goes Mainstream
Michael Moore’s New Film Names the System and Presents a Radical Democratic Critique
Alex Knight, October 16, 2009
Capitalism: A Love Story, which opened in 962 theaters earlier this month, is Michael Moore’s most ambitious work yet – taking aim at the root cause behind the injustices he’s exposed in his other films over the last 20 years. This time capitalism itself is the culprit to be maligned in Moore’s trademark docu-tragi-comic style. And by using the platform of a major motion picture to make a direct assault at the root of the problem, Moore has created space in the political mainstream for a radical conversation (radical meaning “going to the root”).
It’s a conversation that is desperately needed as the economic crisis continues to devastate low- and middle-income Americans in spite of President Obama’s and Congress’ efforts to stop the bleeding by throwing trillions of dollars at the banks. Yesterday, Democracy Now! reported that while the Dow Jones topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, foreclosures have reached a record level of 940,000 in the third quarter. But with this film airing in major chain cinemas across the nation, the normally taboo topics of how wealth is divided, who owns Congress, and how vital economic decisions are made are now open for discussion in a way they haven’t been in the U.S. for decades.
In Capitalism, Michael Moore features the reality of the economic crisis for America’s usually-invisible poor and working class. The movie begins with a family filming their eviction from their own home. In a terrifying scene, we watch from inside their living room window as 7 police cars roll up to throw the ill-fated family onto the street for failing to make their payments. Moore explained in an interview, “You see [a foreclosure] really for the first time from the point of view of the person being thrown out of the house.” This same bottom-up viewpoint carries the audience through the rest of the film, from the stories of kids in Pennsylvania sent to private detention centers for minor offenses by judges who received kickbacks from the prison company, to airline pilots whose wages are so low they have to go on food stamps.
By grounding the viewers in the human costs of out-of-control capitalism, Moore finds firm footing for launching his attacks on the Wall St. firms who he believes are responsible for this crisis. As the film points out, the richest 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 95%, a sorry state of affairs that has grown steadily worse since the 1980s. Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, and his two buddies Larry Summers and Robert Rubin are implicated in Capitalism as responsible parties behind the gutting of regulations and the deliverance of the federal government into the hands of the bankers.
Michael Moore’s conversations with congressmen and women about the $700 billion bank bailout passed last October best illustrate this transfer of sovereignty. The congresspeople are remarkably candid in their dismay at what was essentially a blank check to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup. Representative Baron Hill from Indiana recounts that the bailout bill was pushed through Congress in a similar manner as the Iraq War authorization, under threat of catastrophe and terror. Marcy Kaptur, congresswoman from Ohio, however, does one better. “This was almost like an intelligence operation,” she laments. And when Moore asks her if the bailout represents a “financial coup d’etat” by the bankers, she responds, “I could agree with that. Because the people here [pointing to the Capitol] really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.”
We also see Kaptur’s courageous honesty on the floor of the House, urging Americans to resist foreclosure by remaining in their homes. Detroit sheriff Warren Evans stands out as another hero in the film when he announces he will cease foreclosure evictions in his jurisdiction because of the damage to the community caused by making more houses vacant and more families homeless. Moore also features grassroots organization Take Back the Land, which has dramatically responded to the crisis by moving evicted families back into their homes in the Miami area.
Regular folks fighting back against a system that is depriving them of income, housing, health care and other basic needs is inspiring stuff to watch, and it’s not something we’re used to seeing up on the big screen. Capitalism displays this grassroots defiance surprisingly well by humanizing those on the bottom of the pyramid. One man whose farm is foreclosed angrily warns, “There’s got to be some kind of rebellion between people who’ve got nothing and people who’ve got it all.” His words are buttressed by a behind-the-scenes look at Republic Windows & Doors, where laid-off workers occupied their Chicago factory and refused to leave until receiving their promised severance pay. For Moore this represents the kind of direct action that everyday people must now begin to take to protect themselves from having to pay for the misdeeds of the wealthiest one percent.
This call to action is well taken. However, one piece lacking in the film’s analysis of capitalism is how the system of economic power interlocks with other structures of oppression, for example U.S. imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Capitalism affects different people in extremely different ways, and while some fear losing their jobs, others fear imprisonment, rape, or even being hit by a drone attack. But Michael Moore seems to avoid a conversation about racism, sexism and homophobia in order to appeal to a mythical homogeneous American working class. And besides a brief comparison to Rome, the movie also shies away from discussing the U.S. role in the world and how a militaristic foreign policy serves the interests of corporate and financial elites – even though opposition to the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq have never been greater.
Another weakness is how Moore handles Barack Obama with kid gloves. Even while his economic advisers are skewered in the film, President Obama’s role in the bank bailouts is downplayed, and he comes out looking like a champion of the people, or at least a potential champion. In this respect Michael Moore bestows honors like the Nobel Committee, not so much for what the president has done, but for the “hope” of what he might do.
So what does Michael Moore propose as an alternative to capitalism? Not socialism, but a kind of economic democracy – an opportunity for average folks to have a say in how their money is used, from the workplace on up to the government. Moore takes us inside co-ops in America where workers vote on decisions about finances democratically, and where salaries are equal and adequate for everyone in the company. In one factory, assembly line workers and the CEO each make about $60,000.
To reinforce his economic prescription, Moore even dug through archives to recover lost footage of FDR’s long-forgotten proposal for a “Second Bill of Rights,” which called for guaranteeing meaningful work and a living wage, decent housing, adequate medical care, and a good education for every American. It is striking how such common-sense ideas in our current political climate appear dangerously radical, even coming from the lips of a U.S. president. It seems the overriding purpose of Capitalism: A Love Story is to flip these expectations on their heads. For Michael Moore, guaranteeing basic economic security is as American as apple pie; what is radical is a system that would deny such prosperity to bolster the wealth of a tiny few.
If there is to be any solution to the economic crisis that doesn’t involve millions more people thrown out of their homes or dropped from their health care, it will have to involve a sharp break from a system that values private profits higher than meeting people’s basic needs. To this end, Michael Moore has done a great public service by making a film that is essentially an invitation for views outside the bounds of established mainstream discourse to propose what might be done about the economic quagmire we now find ourselves in. It is time for an American Left to come out of the wilderness and speak out with proposals for better ways of organizing our economy. I see no reason to be any less bold than President Roosevelt was 65 years ago.
JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, less than nine months after taking office. The chair of the Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, made the announcement today in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
THORBJORN JAGLAND: [translated] The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The Nobel Committee specifically highlighted what it called Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world and his attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. After the announcement, Jagland took questions from journalists.
REPORTER: If we could just go over that same territory of the fact that he’s not been in office one year yet and has not fulfilled any of his promises, may never do so, and in English, if you could state why you’re so certain that this is a good choice so early in the day.
THORBJORN JAGLAND: Because we would like to enhance, to support what is he’s trying to do, what is he trying to achieve. And it is a clear signal to the world that we want to advocate the same as he has done, namely to promote international diplomacy, to strengthen the international institutions, to work for a world free of nuclear arms. All these kind of things, which—I mean, it’s a longstanding history of the Nobel Committee that we have tried to promote that kind of attitudes and that kind of policies. And, I mean, I could mention a lot of examples of awarding a prize to a personality that has started that kind of processes in the very beginning.
REPORTER: Mr. Obama is in the middle of a major decision, as you know, on—and will probably end up increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. How does the committee feel about that at this time?
THORBJORN JAGLAND: The conflict in Afghanistan concerns us all. And we do hope that an improvement of the international climate and the emphasis on negotiations could help resolve that. I do not claim that it must help or will help, but we could hope that this could help resolving that conflict, as well.
REPORTER: And what—do you have an opinion about raising the troop levels, increasing the—
THORBJORN JAGLAND: Well, I could have an opinion, but not the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama took office less than two weeks before the nomination deadline. He is the third sitting American president to win the Nobel Peace Prize after Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919.
For more, we’re joined by award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein. She’s the author of the books The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. She joins us on the line from her home in Toronto.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Naomi.
NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you, Juan.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Your reaction to this surprise announcement?
NAOMI KLEIN: You know, I try not to speak about things before I really had a process—you know, a chance to process it, because my raw reaction is really that this represents—it’s very significant and disappointing, cheapening of the Nobel Prize. And, you know, it’s been cheapened before, and it will cheapen again—be cheapened again, but I think there’s something really striking here. And even just listening to the rationale that, despite overwhelming evidence, they’re giving this prize in the hopes that it will change Obama’s mind or encourage him to do things he hasn’t done—this is a candidate that ran a campaign that was much more based on hope and wishful thinking than it was on concrete policy. So we have hopes being piled on hope and wishful thinking.
Organizers from Philly will be traveling across PA ahead of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh next week to meet with grassroots movements and strengthen statewide social change networks. This is being called the People’s Caravan. There are still spots available, so please RSVP if you’d like to join the caravan! – alex
Pennsylvania, along with the rest of the world, is in crisis. Many people do not have access to decent housing, education, healthcare, jobs, healthy food, transportation and communication. While we are told that there are not resources to provide for our basic needs, bankers and the ultra-rich get trillions of dollars in bail-out funding, and our services are cut and costly wars are waged. From pools, libraries and health centers in urban areas closing, to factory lay-offs and families losing their farms, Pennsylvanians are feeling the impact of an economic and political system that has placed profit over people. We will not pay for their crisis!
In the coal mines, steel mills, textile mills, family farms and in the front seats of rigs, poor and working Pennsylvanians built this state. As one industry after another has collapsed in Pennsylvania, we’ve become poorer. Our economic crisis didn’t start in 2007. Now, all across the state, local governments and business people are spending our taxpayers’ money on developments that benefit developers and not the communities that paid for it. Meanwhile, our population has been in decline for generations because too many of our young people see no future in our state, and need to look for jobs elsewhere.
What is the G-20?
The G-20 summit is a gathering of financial ministers and heads of states of the 20 richest countries in the world. They are meeting in Pittsburgh, September 24-25 to advance their agenda: cutting essential social services; privatizing schools, healthcare, and social security, promoting “free-trade,” which cuts labor and environmental standards across the globe and places corporate profit above human needs. They are meeting to rebuild the world’s economies- in a way that keeps them on top.
Pittsburgh’s history of economic decline is why it was chosen to host the G-20. It will be promoted as an example of how to rebuild an economy. They’ve done this by bringing in companies that provide low wage jobs while reaping large profit and rebuilding the region with little thought to community benefit. This is unfortunately a familiar story to not just Pennsylvania, but much of the country.
The Caravan
We want to take this opportunity to focus on Pennsylvania, and strengthen our statewide networks. We want to meet up with people who are organizing locally for their dignity and a better Pennsylvania. Whether you are working for better wages, organizing for childcare, demanding healthcare, fighting pollution, struggling to keep your home and put food on the table or to keep your family’s farm; we all have an interest in making our voices heard and working together to advance an agenda for economic human rights.
We will be taking our own vehicles, carpooling and splitting the travel costs. The caravan will depart Philadelphia on Monday morning, September 21, stopping in Lancaster, traveling to York for the afternoon, and then spend the evening in Harrisburg. On Tuesday, September 22, we will rally at the state capitol, make a stop in Altoona, and arrive in Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit.
Join Us!
This is a perfect time to make connections between our struggles and communities so that we can break our isolation and work together. We want you to invite your neighbors, church, family, school, VFW chapter, and your community organizations to join us on this caravan. While we bring stories of our struggles in Philadelphia, we want to learn from people struggling throughout the rest of Pennsylvania.
Contact us if you are interested in organizing a local event along the route that can benefit your work, joining or supporting the caravan. We need RSVP’s, and we can tell you about costs, ride information and answer any other questions.
If justice is served, Troy Davis won’t become another Cameron Willingham. Davis is facing execution in Georgia for the 1989 murder of an off-duty Savannah police officer, but whether he actually committed the crime is questionable. Questions were also raised about the guilt of Willingham, but he was executed in Texas five years ago for murder in an alleged arson fire that killed his three children. Now, there is new scientific evidence that Willingham was innocent.
An arson expert hired by the Texas Forensic Science Commission has issued a report that says there was no basis for a conclusion that arson caused the 1991 fire. He said the blaze that killed the three children may have been accidentally set.
“I have been persecuted 12 years for something I didn’t do,” were Willingham’s last words.
His case epitomizes why capital punishment must end. Even if it happens only once, that’s too often when the result might be the execution of an innocent person.
Davis received a last-minute reprieve last month, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered his case reheard to consider new evidence that might clear him. It was the first time in half a century that the high court took such a step.
“The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing,” said Justice John Paul Stevens in the majority opinion.
Until the Supreme Court’s ruling, lower federal and state courts had repeatedly denied Davis’ appeal for a new trial.
Georgia prosecutors maintain they convicted the right person. But they have presented neither physical evidence nor a weapon linking Davis to the crime. And seven of the nine witnesses who testified that Davis was the killer have since either recanted or changed their stories.
Pope Benedict XVI, former President Jimmy Carter, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among those who have called for clemency for Davis.
States such as Pennsylvania, which remain committed to the death penalty, should take note.
Davis’ and Willingham’s cases again raise strong questions about capital punishment and whether it can ever be fairly administered, especially when the defendant is poor or a minority, like Davis, and statistically more likely to get a death sentence.
Two men sent to Pennsylvania’s death row were later exonerated. The risk of a wrongful execution is simply too great to continue with capital punishment.
The Security Guards at the Art Museum are demanding recognition for their union and an end to poverty wages. Here is their new video presenting their campaign to the incoming CEO of the museum, Timothy Rub:
The guards are also holding a rally next Sunday to welcome Mr. Rub, check it out!Also see below for more information on the campaign from a recent article in Philadelphia Weekly.[alex]
Welcoming Party for Timothy Rub
2 pm, Sunday, September 6, 2009
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, front “Rocky” steps
•
Join the Philadelphia Security Officers Union and Philly Jobs with Justice as they hold a — “welcoming party” — for incoming museum CEO, Timothy Rub.
• Security Guards at the museum earn less than $20,000 per year, below the federal poverty line.
• The Philadelphia Security Officers Union supports the Employee Free Choice Act.
• We have signed up a majority of the security officers at the Philadelphia Museum on union representation cards.
• If the Employee Free Choice Act was law right now, we would already be a union.
March with the Philadelphia Security Officers Union in support of card check and the Employee Free Choice Act
2:00 pm—3:30 pm,
come early and take advantage of the free day at the museum
Featuring NYC’s Rude Mechanical Orchestra! It’s a party!
On April 19, Jennifer Collazo woke up with a $2,882.47 hospital bill. The 33-year-old Army veteran is a Philadelphia Museum of Art security guard employed by the private contractor AlliedBarton. Collazo pays into the medical insurance offered by her employer, but when she came down with severe neck and back pain on the job, she discovered that her health benefits didn’t even cover things like the ambulance ride.
Paltry medical coverage combined with low wages has driven Collazo and other museum guards to organize the Philadelphia Security Officers Union (PSOU). While the museum and AlliedBarton have rebuffed them in the past, guards hope that the institution’s incoming director, Timothy Rub, will be open to dialogue when he takes charge early next month. Read the rest of this entry »
After watching the brilliantly-acted and courageous film Silkwood (1983, starring Meryl Streep), I learned the compelling story of Karen Silkwood and her death, which has seemingly been forgotten by America. Karen, only 28, was a union activist working in a Kerr-McGee nuclear power plant in Oklahoma, who died in a suspicious car accident while on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter for a story that would have exposed the company’s dangerous and illegal mishandling of plutonium.
Karen was active in her union, calling attention to the radioactive contamination in the plant, and spent months compiling evidence to show that the company was deliberately covering up the fact that their fuel rods contained imperfections, which could put millions of lives at risk if they sparked a meltdown. The night of her death, many believe Karen was deliberately driven off the road by another car, and her family was later able to sue Kerr-McGee for $1.3 million in damages, but the company admits no wrongdoing.
The nuclear plant where Karen worked was shut down in 1975, one year after her death. When Karen’s story became public controversy, it helped display the dangers inherent to nuclear power, contributing to the amazingly successful anti-nuclear movement that has stopped construction of all new nuclear plants in the US since 1979. Thus is especially important today as some corporate lobbyists are trying to repackage nuclear power as a “clean” or “carbon-free” energy “source.” In fact, it’s none of those things.
Karen’s story is both a warning and an inspiration – that capitalism pushes companies to sometimes do terrible things to protect their profits, even if it means endangering lives, but also that brave people such as Karen Silkwood, in bringing the truth to light, can challenge us to create a better world.
Here is her entry on Wikipedia for more info. [alex]
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
by Murray Bookchin
1982 Cheshire Books
Murray Bookchin (R.I.P., 2006) was one of the most important American theorists of the 20th century. He is most known for pioneering and promoting social ecology, which holds that “the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.” In other words, the only way to resolve the ecological crisis is to create a free and democratic society.
The Ecology of Freedom is one of Bookchin’s classic works, in which he not only outlines social ecology, but exposes hierarchy, “the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command”, from its emergence in pre-’civilized’ patriarchy all the way to capitalism today. The book explains that hierarchy is exclusively a human phenomena, one which has only existed for a relatively short period of time in humanity’s 2 million year history. For that reason, and also because he finds examples of people resisting and overturning hierarchies ever since their emergence, Bookchin believes we can create a world based on social equality, direct democracy and ecological sustainability.
It seems to me this fundamental hope in human possibility is the most essential contribution of this book. In discussing healthier forms of life than we currently inhabit, Bookchin makes a distinction between “organic societies”, which were pre-literate, hunter-gatherer human communities existing before hierarchy took over, and “ecological society”, which he hopes we will create to bring humanity back into balance with nature, but without losing the intellectual and artistic advances of “civilization” (his quote-marks).
Of ‘organic society’ he says “I use the term to denote a spontaneously formed, noncoercive, and egalitarian society – a ‘natural’ society in the very definite sense that it emerges from innate human needs for association, interdependence, and care.” This, he explains, is where we come from. Not a utopia free of problems, but a real society based on the principle of “unity of diversity,” meaning respect for each member of the community, regardless of sex, age, etc. – an arrangement that is free of domination. Read the rest of this entry »
Who Were the Witches? – Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
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