Green-Rainbow Party members were among those attending a rally in support of Wisconsin union workers on Tuesday (February 22), where Beacon Street had to be closed off to accommodate a boisterous crowd. Greens in attendance offered these reflections:
The fraud that Scott Walker and the billionaire-funded Tea Party movement represents is slowly unraveling before our eyes. Their magic show has stumbled, and like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar al-Gaddafi, their worthless lies are being exposed. All elected officials who want to play the role of the Wizard of Oz, keeping us from looking behind the curtain, should take heed. Now is the time for honest dialogue and debate about where we stand. No matter what political stripe you color yourself — Green, Blue, Red, Black Tea or whatever — it’s time for some hard truths to emerge. And it’s time for people to start standing up for common sense collective problem solving. United we stand, divided we fall.
It will be interesting to see whether they go through with this charade, whether Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity will really go ahead with an ad campaign designed to turn the tide against the public employees and their supporters. It was dumbfounding to see Mubarak and Gaddafi take to the airwaves so many times in such a clueless, tone deaf manner. The clearer these billionaires want to create a frontline of fraud, the better for the people fighting such an unholy alliance of greed and government.
Now Madison police chief Noble Wray is calling on Governor Walker to explain his comments that he looked into sending infiltrators into the crowds in Madison. Time to throw this guy out of office.
If you want to watch the incredible “prank” phone call that outs Walker’s naked allegiances, you can watch them below the fold.
Continue reading Koch brothers making Wisconsin a front lineFrom Massachusetts Jobs with Justice:
Support the Rights of Wisconsin Workers
Tuesday, February 22nd
4-6PM
Massachusetts State HouseJoin workers from across Massachusetts to show support for our sisters and brothers in Wisconsin who are fighting to keep workers’ rights alive. Click here for more info on their struggle.
Sponsored by: Mass Teachers Assn., AFT Massachusetts, Mass AFL-CIO, Greater Boston Central Labor Council, AFSCME Council 93, SEIU Local 509, 1199 SEIU, SEIU Local 888, Jobs With Justice and many others.
For more information call 617-524-8778
Check out the Facebook event here
Continue reading Support the Rights of Wisconsin Workers{ Installment 7 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }
The elusive threshold
Paradoxically, the concept of a traffic-optimal top speed for transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger, whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver. Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger and too high to convey the sense of a limit to the three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: The elusive thresholdFrom Cornell West to Jeffrey Sachs, the truth seeps out… watch these videos!
And as Jeffrey Sachs asks, “Do we really have to have our own Egypt here in the United States, or are we gonna actually understand that we have a society where half the people have no voice in this country at all?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPz2SzROFQ
Continue reading You ain’t got nowhere to go!While Bloomberg News was boasting that Chevron might be able to muscle its way out of paying a cent for the environmental damage that Texaco wrought upon Ecuador, Democracy Now! was reporting on the hypocrisy of Chevron’s legal maneuvers, led for years by our own Deval Patrick. Which side are you on, Governor Patrick?
Continue reading Chevron ordered to pay $17 billion for Ecuador pollutionThis article is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book which has the working title ‘The End of Growth’ and is set for publication by New Society Publishers in July 2011. Given the urgency and fragility of the global economic crisis, the Post Carbon Institute is serializing the rough content as Richard writes it. Additionally, Richard will be offering ‘live peeks’ at the events and information that inform his writing process through Facebook and Twitter accounts created expressly for this publication.
The article was originally published as the MuseLetter #222
Introduction: The New Normal
The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.
The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.
The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades-a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.
Continue reading Intro: The End of Growth{ Installment 6 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }
The radical monopoly of industry
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.
Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed-and with it the cost-of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: The radical monopoly of industry{ Installment 5 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }
The ineffectiveness of acceleration
It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society, while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that transportation claims.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: The ineffectiveness of accelerationPioneer Institute sponsored this graphic depiction of the 2011 Commonwealth of MA budget. This seems to be a great tool for those who want to examine this subject in depth. There is also a graphic depiction of the Federal budget.
