Posted by admin on January 8, 2009 under Elections, Obama, Organizing, Strategy | 
Discussion on Our Future:
What Next for Progressives for Obama?
An Organizing Proposal
for a Left-Progressive
National Network and Clearinghouse
by Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher, Jr.
How can the people brought together by the `Progressives for Obama’ project make a transition into a broader and ongoing post-election nationwide network? How can that network continue to serve as a left- progressive pole within the broader alliance of Obama activists and voters, while contributing to the organization of the instruments for popular political power? What follows is an outline of the organizing tasks and components of such an effort, with an invitation to wider discussion among our community of supporters and activists.
Starting Points
The most important node on the new network is the base community. This is a grassroots group of left- progressive voter-activists situated where people live, work or go to school. Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on January 7, 2009 under African American, Climate Change, Energy, Organizing, Trade Unions, Youth and Students |
Photo: Van Jones and ‘Green Collar’ Workers
[Note from CarlD: While this is a article rather than a paper, I think it contains a vital plank in any jobs program we would want in our basic problem, jobs with new skills for those who need them most.]
It’s Not EasyBecoming Green
By David Roberts
In These Times
One early July morning in Austin, Texas, I sat slumped in a cavernous, featureless conference hall on the last day of Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of progressive bloggers. Half the attendees had already split town. Two days of events and two nights of vigorous celebration had left those who remained bleary-eyed, weakly nursing their bad coffee and stale muffins.
The morning’s only featured speaker was African-American activist Van Jones, co-founder of the national advocacy group Green for All, who had come straight off a plane from the North Pole. (Really.) Given his exhaustion — and ours — Jones could have been forgiven for phoning it in.
Instead, he began joking, cajoling and provoking, weaving an urgent narrative out of class, race, activism and the existential threat of global climate change. Sleepy bloggers sat up a little straighter and closed their laptops. They began nodding, then cheering, then rising to their feet, stomping and shouting. After a half hour, the previously somnolent room hummed with energy.
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Posted by admin on January 2, 2009 under Climate Change, Socialism, Strategy |
Photo: Green jobs installing solar panels
IS SUSTAINABLE
CAPITALISM
AN OXYMORON?
[Note from CarlD: To spur some discussion on both climate change and socialism, I'm posting this article, widely circulated among environmentalists by Rachel's List. Rachel's Introduction: Growth of the human enterprise is wrecking the planet, so we must develop a steady-state economy -- one in which the use of energy and materials remains constant (or declines) instead of always growing. Unfortunately, we have very few concrete proposals for such an economy. David Schweickart of Loyola University in Chicago has proposed an economy that could grow, but does not have to grow, based on competitive markets plus public ownership of productive facilities (factories, farms), renting them to producer co-ops, with investment capital raised by a flat tax on productive assets and distributed each year to all regions of the nation on a per-capita basis. It is time to give these ideas a proper hearing. Schweickart's short book After Capitalism is must reading.--P.M.]
By David Schweickart
The subtitle of Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature (Zed Books, 2007) states his thesis bluntly: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Kovel thinks we need a revolution — although he is fully cognizant as to how remote that prospect seems.
Growing numbers of people are beginning to realize that capitalism is the uncontrollable force driving our ecological crisis, only to become frozen in their tracks by the awesome implications of this insight. (p. xi)
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins also think we need a revolution, but of a different sort than the one envisaged by Kovel. Natural Capitalism (Little, Brown, 1999) is subtitled Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. President Clinton is reported to have called it one of the five most important books in the world today.
Hawken and the Lovinses agree with Kovel that the current model of capitalism is problematic. “Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development” (p. 5). But they do not see the problem as residing in capitalism itself. They distinguish among four kinds of capital, all necessary for production: human capital, financial capital, manufactured capital and natural capital. The problem with the current form of capitalism, they argue, is its radical mispricing of these factors. Current market prices woefully undervalue — and often do not value at all — the fourth factor: the natural resources and ecological systems “that make life possible and worth living on this planet.”
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