Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher : Labor's Keystone Dilemma

Unions and the Keystone dilemma. Image from Kansas Watchdog.
Dirty vs. green jobs:
Labor's Keystone dilemma

Outside of Washington, the very same unions that support the pipeline are down in the trenches fighting for a transition to a green economy.

By Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher / Portside / March 13, 2012

These are tough times to be a construction worker in America. While other sectors of the economy are showing signs of life, the unemployment rate in the construction industry is getting worse, not better -- rising from 16 percent to 17 percent in January.

It is against this backdrop that the titanic struggle over the Keystone XL pipeline is being waged. On one side are unions such as the Laborers International Union of North America and the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters, who support the pipeline because they believe that it will create thousands of high-wage jobs for their members. On the other side are environmentalists and others who believe the pipeline will hasten the climate crisis, threaten our water supplies, and increase oil prices.

The fallout from the conflict has been significant. When six labor unions joined the Sierra Club and other environmental groups in support of President Obama's decision to oppose the permit last month, LIUNA President Terry O'Sullivan accused the coalition as being "job killers," and withdrew his union from the BlueGreen Alliance.

Inside Washington, this divide over Keystone appears insurmountable -- especially since the "jobs vs. environment" debate has been played out repeatedly for decades. But outside of Washington, the very same unions that support the pipeline are down in the trenches fighting for a transition to a green economy.

LIUNA, for example, has created OptiHome, an alliance of skilled workers and certified contractors working in the energy efficiency sector. The program includes training and job placement, and has been effective at bringing a new generation of workers into the green economy.

One of these workers is Tahlia Williams, a 30-year-old single mom who had been interested in construction work for a long time but saw it as "man's work" and was unsure how to break into the industry. But after Tahlia completed LIUNA's weatherization training program she was quickly hired as an energy efficiency mechanic by the Community Environmental Center -- the largest residential weatherization contractor in New York City.

According to Tahlia, she is "proud to be working to protect our environment, while at the same time helping fellow residents save money on their energy bills and enjoy a more comfortable home. This is about a better future for my family, for New York homeowners, and for everyone!"

LIUNA's green jobs agenda has also helped grow the union. They negotiated a card check agreement with Conservation Services Group, a company which conducts nearly a half million home energy assessments annually for utilities and energy efficiency organizations nationwide, reaching more than 2 million homes in the last 25 years.

And LIUNA recently chartered a green local designed for workers specializing in weatherization and other green jobs. Green Jobs Local 58's first round of recruits graduated from LIUNA's training center this month and are earning $14 an hour with benefits. To fund the program, LIUNA joined forces with local environmentalists to pass the New York Green Jobs Financing Law that provides funding for residential weatherization work.

Another building trades union that is riding the green wave is the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters. UA created the nation's first union "sustainability office" in the country, which is developing three new "green" craft-specific certifications: Green Plumbing/Pipefitting, Green Sprinkler Fitting, and Green Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR).

UA has also been driving a "Green Systems Training Trailer" around the country to educate members and the general public about the importance of energy efficiency.

So despite their support for the Keystone pipeline, on the ground in cities and towns around the country building trades unions are at the cutting edge of green economic development. These green success stories show that the green jobs path for LIUNA and other construction unions is not a "pie-in-the-sky" promise -- these jobs are shovel-ready and offer a secure future for their members.

It is also significant that some of these unions have stepped out in front at the international level by joining environmentalists around the globe fighting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. LIUNA, for example, was one of three unions in the U.S. to support science-based targets and timelines for carbon reduction at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen.

But here is the problem: For environmentalists, the Keystone battle has called into question unions' commitment to addressing climate change, which is the primary rationale for green jobs and energy efficiency programs. Some unions are trying to play both sides of the fence: siding with fossil fuel companies and Republicans for new coal plants, pipelines, and refineries, while simultaneously teaming up with environmentalists for green jobs programs. Keystone has laid bare this contradiction.

The Keystone campaign has also put a strain on labor's relationship with Occupy -- a movement seen by unions as a powerful new ally. Indeed, LIUNA's own homepage features a statement that "LIUNA Backs Occupy Wall Street Movement." In November the Building Trades launched the Jobsforthe99.com website and began running ads in newspapers and radio along the pipeline route, using the rhetoric of Occupy and the 99 percent to push for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In response, the main governing body of Occupy in New York issued a statement of disavowal: "The leadership of the unions behind this campaign have made a public alliance with the oil industry and Tea Party funders... We must dissociate from this attempt at co-optation by the 1% to preserve our movement as the 99%."

The last decades have shown that partnering with the right wing and corporations has been a devil's bargain for workers, whereby companies use unions to push for environmental deregulation and subsidies for carbon-intensive projects, while simultaneously funding "right-to-work" and other anti-union campaigns. This unholy alliance has crippled unions' ability to organize workers and laid the foundation for a private sector unionization rate of less than seven percent.

Unions and environmentalists agree on most issues -- ranging from living wages and health care to corporate greed and green job creation -- and there is consensus that defeating the right wing agenda requires solidarity of the 99%.

With this in mind, it's time for labor and environmentalists to sit down and hammer out plans for putting union members to work rebuilding our country and protecting the planet. None of us can build a sustainable future alone.

[Brendan Smith is co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability and Voices for a Sustainable Future and senior fellow at the Progressive Technology Project. His commentary has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Nation. Contact him at www.bsmith.org. Jeremy Brecher's new book, Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action addresses how social movements make social change. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global Village or Global Pillage, and the winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work. He currently works with the Labor Network for Sustainability. This article was distributed by Portside.]

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Carl Davidson : Fighting for Green Jobs against Right-Wing Wave

Photo from treehugger.
Blue-Green Alliance:
Organizing the fight for green jobs
in conservative political climate

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / February 14, 2011

'What brings us together is the commitment to make those jobs green jobs and to make them good jobs.'

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Nearly 2,000 people gathered at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel over three bitterly cold days in Washington, DC, Feb. 8-10, for the fourth annual Good Job, Green Jobs conference. The attendees were a vibrant mixture of seasoned trade union organizers, representatives of government agencies, and young environmental activists waging a variety of battles around climate change and the green economy.

“We want everyone to work at a green job in a green and clean economy,” declared David Foster, executive director of the sponsor, the Blue-Green Alliance, opening the first plenary. “But what stands in our way?” The answer was a new Congress stalemated by neoliberal resurgence centered in a bloc of the GOP and the far right. “It’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have to fight for it the old-fashioned way, from the bottom up, brick by brick, and floor by floor.”

The Blue-Green Alliance today is a coalition of hundreds of environmental groups, trade unions, and green business enterprises. It was founded less than five years ago, largely by the efforts of Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, one of the largest U.S. environmental nonprofits, and Leo Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers, one of the country’s largest industrial unions.

“We’ve come a long way,” said USW’s Leo Gerard, the next speaker up. “Today we have dozens of affiliated sponsors and members with a combined membership of 14.5 million. Those fighting harder against us are going to meet some serious resistance.” The participants at the conference represented more than 700 organizations and came from 48 of the 50 states.

Still, attendance was down from the past two years. The solid core of trade unionists and environmental youth were present, but wider allies like the hip-hop community mobilized by Green For All were absent or only had small representation.

Gerard went on to explain the core idea of the alliance. The old notion that one had to chose between job growth and environmental protection was dead wrong. “Rather than ‘either-or’ we’ve come to see that’s it’s ‘both-or-neither.’ We will have both good green jobs in a green and clean economy, or we will have neither. That’s what it boils down to.”

“I also want to raise a new idea,” Gerard continued. “Sustainable development is something we hear a lot. But what about ‘restorative development’? It’s not enough simply to build sustainable new things, we have to repair and recover the damage we’ve done with the old ones. He went on to describe the "Smart Grid," the need to deliver clean electric power to the same high standards as the internet and telecommunications, retrofitting the old grids in the process. “In the process, we create an abundance of new high-skilled green jobs that pay for themselves by saving energy and cleaning the environment at the same time.”


Labor opposed to austerity solutions

Along with other labor leaders, Gerard spoke several times throughout the conference, often on panels with Obama’s cabinet officials. Even though they greeted each other warmly, there was a noticeable distancing from officialdom on the part of labor. However valuable any proposals made in Congress, the labor officials were astute enough to know that an anti-deficit "austerity" was still the watchword of the period, and any gains would have to be fought for at the grassroots and in the streets.

Gerard symbolized the problem when he introduced Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and part of Obama’s cabinet. Noting that it was her birthday, he presented her not only with a card from the BGA, but also a huge pair of boxing gloves as a gift "for going into the battles ahead of us."

Jackson’s speech was an effort to turn the tables on the right-wing effort to gut or neuter what they termed “the job killing EPA.” “When people turn of the water to cook their oatmeal or take a shower,” she explained, “they don’t want to worry whether toxic wastes or sewage sludge is going to come out of the faucet. Our regulations enhance markets and create economic benefits, with a $2 savings for every dollar invested.”

Regulations in health and safety, in the end, created far more jobs than they eliminated by creating confidence in products, safety for workers, and stability for markets in clean-up equipment.

“Winning the future also means winning the race for innovation,” explained Jackson.

"The history of environmental protection has been a history of innovation. Innovation made everything we do cleaner, healthier, and more efficient -- and led to the creation of good jobs. The catalytic converters that are manufactured to reduce toxic air pollution from our cars, the invention of more effective water treatment mechanisms to free our drinking water of lead, or smokestack scrubbers that are installed to keep sulfuric acid pollution out of the air we breathe mean new orders for American companies and jobs for American workers."

All the speakers from the administration hammered away on the "win the future" theme from President Obama’s State of the Union speech -- likewise with the phrases about "out-innovating" and "out-performing" against all contenders in every critical sector of the economy. But given the relation of forces in Congress and even his own Cabinet, and the slashing of programs that the deficit-cutters had already launched, the participants tended to take it all with a grain of salt.

The EPA's Lisa Jackson speaks on the first day of the conference. Image from the Sierra Club Compass.

Frustration with resistance at the top

If one key word popped up in nearly every workshop, it was "frustration." The participants, after all, had been working steadily for nearly four years researching, designing, and organizing for solutions to a range of critical problems -- jobs, clean energy, toxic waste, youth entrepreneurship and so on. The first two conferences were full of hope and energy, especially with Obama’s victory and the appointment of Van Jones to head up green jobs. The third year was marked by going deeper into practical solutions, and growing concern about the political climate.

But now, armed with an array of practical programs, the young people especially seemed to conclude that they were banging their heads against a brick wall created by Blue Dogs, neoliberals, and the far right. One option was discussed repeatedly: stop wasting too much time in DC and return to the base. Build organization at the county and state level, and try to win some local victories, even if done piecemeal, and gather more strength.

A case in point was an early workshop on "Building a Movement to Change America: Strategies to Forge Ahead to Create Good, Green Jobs." It asked participants to step back and assess their alliances, their adversaries, and their tactics. It’s worth examining in some detail to see the overall problems facing the conference.

“We took a beating in the 2010 elections,” said Cathy Duvall of the Sierra Club, opening up the subject. “Our campaign for a comprehensive climate change bill with a cap on carbon got turned around into the ‘job killing energy tax.’ We learned that we simply don’t yet have the power to do what we want to do.”

Duvall’s answer was to go back to localities, and focus on setting standards and regulating markets “in favor of Main Street over Wall Street.” She summed up with three points: 1) the need for industrial policy with high domestic content, 2) the need for broader coalitions with people who don’t always agree, and 3) to mount head-on challenges to the oil-military complexes preventing productive investment. “But most of all, we need new coalitions at the local base.”

Ron Collins, a vice president of the Communications Workers of America, picked up where Duvall left off. “We have to do things differently,” he said, “or we have to turn off the lights.” The "One Nation" rally in October, he continued, was a good start, but not much has happened at the local or state level. “‘We need to be building ‘One Maryland’ or ‘One Virginia’ or ‘One Baltimore.’ We need a deeper unity at the base, or the right is going to take us out, one by one. As for some of our fair-weather friends, we have to say, ‘If you’re not with us on the issues, then we’re not with you,' and then act on it.”

In this context, the issue of immigrant rights was rising as a difficult wedge issue, and was taken up by Ali Noorani of the Immigration Forum. “People don’t like to move from their home countries lightly,” he said, “but only do so for compelling reasons of survival.” Noorani gave the example of U.S. agribusiness dumping corn in Mexico at prices below its cost of production, thereby bankrupting Mexican farmers and driving them to border town factories. When those factories closed, many had little choice but to move across the border.

“Look at every player in this drama,” he continued. “There is only one beneficiary, the crooked employer. We need to stop pointing fingers in the wrong directions, and start finding solutions. Our method in the past has been to mobilize our base, persuade the middle and isolate the opposition. If we can combine that with a view that the pie can grow bigger, then we can all win.”

Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation closed up the panel. “I think we have to be mad and strategic at the same time,” she declared. She went on to observe some lessons from the Tea Party, noting that while they had considerable differences, they were able to come together to fight. “But what did we do after the ‘One Nation’ rally? Too many of us just went back to our separate silos.”


Need for ‘street heat’ from the bottom up

In the discussion, one participant offered a critical point from the floor: “For our strategy to work, we need some cracks at the top, but with Obama’s ‘bipartisan’ center-right bloc, all the cracks have closed up, at least for now. It seems we need more organized strength from the bottom up, more street heat to break things open again.” “Exactly,” said Collins from CWA. ‘We need to be drawing some lessons from the people in Egypt."

There was a lot of discussion about the need to build new alliances. This was not just a search for common ground. Rather it was recognition of the necessity for respecting the traditions, the work, and the sacrifice of potential allies in a situation in which conditions, for them, are changing.

A good example is the attitude expressed toward coal and miners. “We have to recognize that without coal miners we would not have the standard of living that we have, the technology that we have, that makes it possible to talk about a sustainable economy with good jobs and a rising quality of life,” said one workshop speaker. “These men and women, the coal miners and their communities, should be our heroes. They are not our enemies.”

There were also warnings to stay away from language that stimulates a fear reaction about what those organizers are trying to win. Examples from coal: solar power and wind that are presented as if they will replace the jobs of miners, with not enough attention given to conversion and re-employment.

Other workshops over the two-day period covered a wide range. Topics included wind manufacturing opportunities, workforce training for solar industries, women in the green economy, sustainable agribusiness, inner city school reform, protecting workers and their families from toxics, high-speed rail, and fighting right-wing science-deniers in elections, among many others.

One Tuesday afternoon workshop, entitled "Building the Wind Energy Supply Chain: Moving from Rhetoric to Reality," brought together a number of issues -- job creation, domestic productive capacity, and industrial policy. Wind energy as a vital part of a clean energy economy was taken as a given. The key question was whether it would lead to new manufacturing and green jobs in the U.S., since the more mature technologies and factories had been developed in Spain, the Netherlands, and China.

Dillep Thatte of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a federal agency, was optimistic. “Anything you need for wind energy can be competitively obtained domestically; the problem is simply in making the connections and relationships.” He was particularly strong on smaller businesses with less than 500 workers: “These are the innovators creating new jobs today.”

Rob Witherell of the United Steel Workers was skeptical. “High-speed rail is in the news today; Obama wants to spend some major money on it. But how many plants in the country right now can actually build high-speed train cars? Only a handful. Can we do it? The answer is, ‘Yes, but...’ It will take some time and investment to get domestic firms up and running.”

Helping to form supply chains of small component manufacturers, however, was something the USW could do fairly easily, he added, since the union was connected with some 6,000 firms.

As for the quality of production, Dee Holdy of the Global Wind Network explained how her group’s task was to sort out who could effectively be in or out of global competition. “We take a lot of surveys and analyze a lot of reports, but some of it is done by walking around production facilities to find any duct tape or C-clamps holding equipment together.”


Taking on the neoliberal alliance with the far right

Another workshop narrowed the target on the far right. Entitled "Confronting Science Deniers: Lessons from Minnesota’s Sixth District," it featured Tarryl Clark, the former assistant majority leader of the Minnesota State Senate. Clark had run and lost against Tea Party firebrand Michele Bachman, who got 52 percent of the vote.

“Michele Bachman was perhaps the only member of Congress to stick up for BP during the Gulf Oil spill crisis,” Clark started off, “but she’s more widely known for calling on people to become ‘armed and dangerous’ against legislators working for Cap and Trade and Climate Change laws.”

She explained that the race became one of the most expensive in the state’s history, with Bachman raising over $13 million, largely from wealthy rightists, while she raised some $5 million in smaller contributions, and from labor unions.

“We did well in televised debates,” Clack continued, “but there was no way we could match her massive direct mail operation, which were filled with falsehoods. They were not above absolutely fabricating information while being very good at playing the victim.” One example of a bold headline from a Tea Party website: "Tarryl Clark… Backed by Foreign Contributors Who Murder Irish-American Korean War Veterans in U.S. Healthcare Facilities!”

Despite the lies and wackiness, Clark explained that, even with her crafted persona of being slightly unhinged, “Bachman is very smart; she knows exactly what she’s doing, and she knows that most of her claims are misleading at best. The truth simply doesn’t matter to her; it’s the results that count.” Clark concluded that the only alternative was to keep organizing and keep fighting, or “otherwise the Darth Vader side wins.”

The final plenary on Wednesday morning focused on green transportation. The session was opened by AFL-CIO vice president Arlene Holt Baker, who noted the prevalence of clean energy manufacturing and high-speed rail in Europe and China, and the need to promote it here:

“What brings us together here,” Baker explained, “is the commitment to make those jobs green jobs and to make them good jobs. Good jobs that provide the wages and benefits needed to sustain families and enable them to buy the products we will be making. Good jobs that can put our economy back in working order. Good jobs that afford workers the opportunity to choose for themselves whether to join a union to have a strong voice on the job for quality American-made products and services.”

Baker went on to give the examples of several new high-design battery plants, including one near New Castle, PA, that had been aided by stimulus money from Obama initiatives. “We are opposed to the idea that the only way out of this crisis is through austerity; we have to invest in the ways to build our way out.”

Baker was followed by Deputy Secretary of Transportation John Porcari. A strong advocate of high-speed rail, he noted that our current transportation system consumes one-third of our oil and produces more than one third of harmful emissions. “Modern high-speed trains can operate at one-third less energy per mile than either planes or trucks. For decades, we have blindly refused to invest in our rail system, and we have to turn this around.”

Conference summary panel: (L-R)Manus, Herwig, Hanley, Rep. Ellison, and Nnamdi. Image from the Sierra Club Compass.

The need for ‘industrial policy’ of a new type

The case for Obama’s current economic policies was presented next by Jared Bernstein, the chief economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. “Let me start by declaring that neither five-year planners nor laissez-faire ideologues are going to get us what we want.”

The former, he explained, could never get pricing right, while the latter ignores "externalities" like pollution and waste. No single firm or cluster of firms could rise to the task of basic research, less than 20 percent of which is privately funded. Nor is a major and vital infrastructure project like the "smart grid" even conceivable without a role for government in public-private partnerships.

The conference organizers prepared a summary panel on stage to take off from these final presentations, guided by talk show host Kojo Nnamdi. Panel participants included Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), Lawrence Hanley of the Transit Workers Union, Kathy Gerwig of Kaiser-Permanente, and Clark Manus of the American Institute of Architects.

“Good jobs, clean energy, sustainable communities -- everyone wants these things,” said Nnamdi, posing a question to the group. “But how do we get there? That’s where we differ, isn’t it?

“Some mean it, and some don’t,” replied Congressman Ellison. “The fact is, we have no urban policy; we have no energy policy. We need a multi-city campaign of town meetings, culminating in a national rally in DC. We need to organize and strengthen the progressive Democratic base, and we need to expand the Progressive Caucus.”

Hanley added that where there’s no will, there’s no money. In mass transit, people are facing massive fare increases along with cutbacks in service and mass layoffs. “Yet we have money for wars and the military,” he noted. “There no way out of this without taking on the War Lobby.

“We are living on our grandparent’s infrastructure,” added Ellison. “The rich got tax cuts while we got school cuts.”

The prospect of hard struggle against a recalcitrant neoliberal-dominated Congress, and key parts of the White House as well, were duly taken as a challenge. For many, it also suggested the shift to more local base-building that was a common theme of many panels and workshops.

The issues that seem best suited for local focus are diverse:

• Green building codes for new construction;
• Mass transit investment and lower fares;
• Local tax credits/deductions for green capital investment for companies, and for individuals (homes, cars, etc.);
• Local renewable energy goals and requirements;
• Local vehicle fuel economy standards;
• Incentives for local/urban agriculture.

In the last round of workshops, there were some hopeful signs for the future. One panel on partnership for technical education and green jobs was presented by Erica Swinney of the Center for Labor and Community Research and focused on the Austin Polytechical Academy, an innovative neighborhood public school on Chicago’s West Side.

Swinney, who serves as the school’s communications director, started with a PBS NewsHour clip on the school’s achievements, bringing together unions and dozens of manufacturing firms to create both a high school and an engine for community economic development.

Another workshop following hers focused on a high school in a low-income West Philadelphia neighborhood with a unique after-school program. They design and build hybrid gas-electric “X-Cars” that can get over 150 miles per gallon, and have won in design fairs over teams from MIT and industry groups.

Students from both schools stressed a common theme: “We are problem solvers, not test takers.”They voiced their opposition to a one-sided and undue emphasis on standardized testing, rather than more creative approaches to education needed for a clean-energy and green-economy future.

The final day, February 10, was “Advocacy Day,” where attendees headed for Capitol Hill. David Foster estimated that there were more people participating in this event than last year. Several delegations were very large, mainly from the Steelworkers, Teamsters, and Electrical Workers. They flooded the House and Senate Office Buildings for meetings with congrespeople and senatorial staffs.

“Large groups of workers roaming the halls of Congress were an inspiring sight,” said Ted Pearson, a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism from Chicago, who was attending the conference.

“Union members and other activists from Illinois, for instance, met with 5th CD Representative Mike Quigley and his legislative aide, who pledged support for all the Blue-Green target issues. Other meetings were held with staff for Jerry Costello (D-12th CD, Southeastern Illinois), and Chicago’s Bobby Rush and Danny Davis.”

Whether it will all amount to a winning campaign for a new clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy to replace the old oil-military-industrial policy remains to be seen. But the ongoing work of the Blue Green Alliance and its annual conferences have helped to draw clear and informed lines of demarcation in the battlefield.

[Carl Davidson is a USW (United Steelworkers) associate member now living in Aliquippa, Pa. He is a national board member of the Solidarity Economy Network and a National Co-Chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and was a leader in the 60's New Left. Together with Jerry Harris, a former Chicago steelworker, he is author of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age and editor of Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet. Carl also writes and lectures on the topic of the Mondragon Cooperatives, a network of 120 worker-owned factories centered in Spain, and writes for The Rag Blog and the Beaver County Blue, where this article was also posted.]

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Tom Hayden : Jerry Brown's Green Vision for California

California Governor-elect Jerry Brown at Los Angeles campaign rally November 1, 2010. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
But it can't be just for whites...
Brown's green vision for California

Through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

By Tom Hayden / November 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES -- During the campaign season, it was easy to dismiss the idea of a green energy future for California as mere campaign rhetoric. But with the second coming of Jerry Brown, the reelection of Barbara Boxer, and voter endorsement of state policies to curb global warming, California really is poised to lead the country to a greener future.

Why were California voters not carried away by the Republican wave? We have certainly had our conservative hiccups in the past. There was the 1978 election when voters passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes but also damaged school funding and caused chronic budget crises. And in 1984, California had its Arizona moment when voters passed Proposition 187, which would have terminated many public services, including schooling, for undocumented immigrants had the courts not struck it down.

But through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

During Brown's previous tenure as governor from 1975 through 1982, the nuclear industry was projecting the need for one nuclear power plant every five miles along the California coast. One of them was slated for Corral Canyon on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. Corporate interests also insisted on the need for a liquefied natural gas terminal at Point Conception in Santa Barbara, saying it was necessary to keep the lights from going out.

Brown turned these powerful interests down, siding instead with the no-nukes movement and the early dreamers of a solar future. Thirty years later, as a direct result of his vision, California is the most energy-efficient state in America, with an estimated 1.5 million clean-energy jobs and accumulated savings of $50 billion to $60 billion to California consumers. Two-thirds of venture-capital investments in American clean energy are in California.

American leadership on global warming has been derailed by a relentless campaign from oil companies and energy interests. "Remember Renewable Energy?" asked a New York Times editorial last week. Here in California we do remember, and the vote Tuesday reaffirmed our commitment to it.

The Obama administration still can wield regulatory power for energy conservation, and Boxer will continue to chair the Senate's environmental policy committee. But it is Brown's California that is poised to implement a vision of putting people to work at green jobs that will reduce air pollution and carbon emissions. Brown's promise is to create 500,000 new green jobs in the next eight years, and we voters should hold him to -- and help him realize -- that pledge.

Brown faces two main challenges. The first is how to pay for a cleaner energy future. He has expressed hope that setting a requirement that one-third of the state's energy needs come from renewable sources by 2020 will jump-start private investment.

Brown cites the example of the aerospace industry as a model. But he downplays the billions in federal investment that made that industry possible. He needs to recognize that some combination of rate hikes and tax revenues will be necessary to get the electricity-based transit revolution he envisions up and running.

The other challenge is to ensure that all Californians benefit from the state's green energy push. Brown has succeeded in portraying his energy vision as good for the economy, but he has not explained how it will benefit the black and brown voters at the core of his support.

Put bluntly, the green future cannot be purely white. This is a great opportunity to put people to work who are now locked out of the job market. And in the end, it makes far more sense to employ at-risk youth weatherizing homes and installing solar collectors than locking them up in the largest mass incarceration system in the world.

That incarceration system could be Brown's Achilles' heel. If his energy policies are an example of his "paddling on the left," his law-and-order legacy is an example of "paddling on the right." In 1976, when then-Gov. Brown was supporting punishment rather than rehabilitation as state policy, the state prison population was slightly above 20,000. Today, the system holds 165,000 inmates and creates a massive drain on the state budget.

With Brown's longtime support, California leads America and America leads every country in the world in incarceration rates. The state prison budget currently exceeds the combined budgets of the University of California and the California State University systems.

Brown may find that a greener future is incompatible with the state's massive spending on incarceration at the expense of education. African Americans are 3% of UC students and Latinos are 11%. At the same time, those groups are 30% and 40%, respectively, of the state's inmates.

While the state was building 33 new prisons in recent decades, its school funding has been stagnant. Prioritizing education and rehabilitation over prisons in state budgets could both save money and supply a steady and well-trained workforce for a green economy.

[Tom Hayden was chairman of Gov. Jerry Brown's SolarCal Council in 1979 and a state legislator from 1982 to 2000. A founder of SDS and a leader of the Sixties New Left, Tom's latest book is The Long Sixties.]

Source / LA Times / Progressive America Rising

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Marcy Winograd : We Need a Green New Deal

Image from Conservation Value Notes.
It's time to retool our economy:
The United States needs a Green New Deal

What if our engineers, now building weapons, could build solar cities instead?

By Marcy Winograd / September 15, 2010

My talented young cousin works as a rocket scientist at a local aerospace plant. She considers herself one of the lucky MIT grads who landed a job in the space end of the aerospace industry.

Her friends, however, are designing drones that sometimes miss their terrorist target, accidentally bombing innocent brides and grooms in Afghanistan.

My cousin tells me about a colleague of hers, a drone-builder, who had a nightmare; she accidentally droned her own bedroom.

“She’s still designing these drones, though,” my cousin tells me. “That’s where the money is, the jobs, in military contracts, in building sophisticated weapons systems.”

What if our engineers, now building weapons, could build solar cities instead? Under the Solar America Initiative, Boeing started the ball rolling, contracting with the Department of Energy to make solar energy competitive with conventional electricity by 2015.

Aerospace conversion could happen -- and should for the sake of our planet.

Flying 100,000 troops to a far off land to fight an ever-morphing enemy leaves a huge carbon footprint; bombing cities and then rebuilding them emits a carbon monster.

Some might argue the carbon cost is necessary to protect national security, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that war and occupation multiply our enemies.

Plus, war is not job smart. In 2007, University of Massachusetts economic researchers found a billion dollars invested in mass transit generates twice as many jobs as the same billion invested in military contracting.

Future economic recovery plans should offer explicit career-path transitions from a permanent war economy to a new green economy. Pay people to retool.

Train laid-off missile defense workers to build wind farms. Offer federal contracts for aerospace firms to fortify the Vincent Thomas Bridge. Invest in health care, education and cleanup at the Superfund sites in Torrance.

President Barack Obama recently signed an $18 billion jobs bill with payroll tax breaks for businesses, as well as tax credits for companies hiring the unemployed and purchasing new equipment. The bill invests billions in federal highway construction and mass transit. Optimists predict the legislation could generate 250,000 jobs.

Not bad, but not great either, given that America has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of this recession.

Congress would be wise to model a new green-job stimulus package after the Works Progress Administration, the 1935 Roosevelt Depression brainchild that employed an estimated 10 million Americans building 850 airports; 110,000 libraries, schools, and hospitals; 500 water treatment plants; 78,000 bridges and 8,000 parks. The WPA also employed artists to paint murals in post offices, like the San Pedro post office on Beacon Street where a WPA mural depicts the history of the harbor.

Can we afford a super stimulus? Critics lament the growing deficit, estimated to climb to $1.6 trillion this year. But these same critics rarely talk about the elephant in the room: our bloated near-trillion-dollar military budget that siphons much-needed resources from our daily needs.

Take housing, for example. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, our congressional district suffered 7,000 foreclosures in 2009. Over the next four years, the center predicts 25,000 homeowners from West Los Angeles to the harbor will lose their homes to foreclosure.

Freeze the foreclosures. Save our neighborhoods. Instead of funding no-bid contracts in Iraq, Congress could create the Loan Officer Corps to pay mortgage brokers to mediate between banks and homeowners to keep more Americans in their homes, more counties collecting property taxes, more cities solvent.

Prime the jobs pump. Recreate the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that employed 250,000 men, ages 18 to 25, at work camps in every state to stop soil erosion and plant trees. Hire more teachers for Head Start, President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty preschool program. Launch a Nurses Now Initiative to pay college grads to train as nurses at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Saving lives, saving minds, saving forests -- it’s all green. But how do we pay for this?

Cut the waste in our military budget. Bring our troops home from the trillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Exact a serious fee on every stock trade on Wall Street. Bust open the bank vaults in the Caribbean where corporate tax dodgers stash their profits. Repeal the Bush tax cuts for the rich. End the war on drugs with its obscene prison costs.

When President Franklin Roosevelt enacted the New Deal, one out of every four Americans was out of work. Today, in California, the real unemployment rate, the one that includes the underemployed and those who have given up looking for a job, is pushing 20 percent.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Together, we can create a better future: new jobs, health care, clean air, land and water. With our wealth of talent, we can champion a new green economy competitive with China and Germany.

It’s time to put America back to work.

It is time for a Green New Deal.

Source / WarIsaCrime.org

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BOOKS / Van Jones' 'Green Collar Economy'

Environmental activist Van Jones, author of Green Collar Economy.
A Review of 'Green Collar Economy:
How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems'

'The best answer to our ecological crisis also responds to our socio-economic crisis. The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities are not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. And that same path can lead us to a new green economy' -- Van Jones

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

[Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones, Paperback, 272 pp, HarperOne, September 29, 2009, $14.99.]

This review was first published on The Rag Blog on March 17, 2009. We are reposting it today because of the forced resignation of environmental activist Van Jones by the Obama administration. Jones was serving as an advisor to the administration on green jobs.

It's time to link the newly insurgent U.S. Green Jobs movement with the worldwide efforts for the solidarity economy. Both are answering the call to fight the deepening global recession, and both face common adversaries in the failed "race to the bottom," environment-be-damned policies of global neoliberalism.

That's the imperative facing left-progressive organizers with connections to these two important grassroots movements. It's even more important in the wake of the appointment of a key leader of one of these movements, Van Jones of "Green For All," to a top environmental and urban policy post in the Obama administration.

Jones is a founder of an urban-based campaign focused on low-income young people, multinational and multicultural, that first developed as a progressive response to police repression, gang killings and all-round "criminalization of youth." He saw the exclusion of this sector of the population from living-wage work and other opportunities as a key cause of the violence and destruction. Putting young people to work at low-to-medium skill levels retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency seemed like a no-brainer, so the demand for "Green Jobs, Not Jails" was raised.

The slogan found deep resonance as it spread across the country. Its all-round implications were spelled out in Jones' widely acclaimed book, "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems." It spells out a string of ingenious, interconnected programs aimed at resolving the savage inequalities of structural unemployment and the global dangers of climate change rooted in carbon-based energies systems.

"Let's be clear," says Jones in the opening pages of his book, "The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. Hundreds of thousands of green collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States."

He doesn't leave the matter there, but makes use of this picture to point out what's "shovel ready," to use the lingo of debate around stimulus spending. Green jobs span the entire range of occupations, with a special focus on high-tech manufacturing in emerging alternative energy industries.

"Green Collar Economy" was instantly a powerful voice in policy circles. It gained a wider and deeper significance in light of the financial crises that hit the fan soon after it reached the bookstores. Just as the voter revolt against Wall Street helped lift Obama to the Oval Office, so too was Van Jones's urban policy monograph raised into a "What Is To Be Done" manifesto for deep structural reforms capable of busting the onset of a major depression.

"The best answer to our ecological crisis also responds to our socio-economic crisis," Jones explains. "The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities are not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. And that same path can lead us to a new green economy."

How does it connect with the solidarity economy? This parallel movement with even earlier roots is widely known throughout the Global South, especially Latin America, as well as Europe and Quebec. It has been comprised of a range of projects where social capital is partnered with worker, community, consumer and peasant cooperative ownership structures. These were designed to fight back against the economic devastation wrought by neoliberal IMF-imposed "solutions" that left people without a safety net or means of survival. People turned to each other at the grassroots in common efforts, hence the term "solidarity economy."

Both the solidarity economy and the green economy are "value centered" schools of economic thought. They are in the classical tradition of political economy, which in turn is rooted in moral philosophy. They are not simply descriptive of supposedly objective economic processes, but are prescriptive. At full throttle, they are organizing principles for shaping the future, locally and globally, via local organization and mass mobilization. For its part, the solidarity economy stresses the values of cooperation and mutual aid, especially in governance structures of productive, consumer or financial units. The green economy emphasizes ongoing sustainability and harmony between people and the eco-system of which they are a part.

The solidarity economy is about how people relate to each other, while the green economy is about how people relate to their wider environment. Naturally, there is considerable overlap between the two. Both see the current order as destructive of people and planet, and are working to turn things around.

"Equal protection of all people, equal opportunity for all people, and reverence for all creation." These are what Jones terms the "three pillars" of the new green global economy.

Neither economic vision is monolithic. Both schools of thought span a range of views, some of which are in contention. In the Green Jobs movement for instance there are debates on nuclear power and "clean coal," and what role, if any, these might have in a low-carbon future. In the solidarity economy movement there are discussions on the place of markets and government, and whether cooperative structures can use either or both to their advantage. There is also debate over the importance of "high road" allies within the business community, "high road" meaning traditional business structures that bring wider community and environmental responsibility into their business plans, rather than simply short-term shareholder profit.

Where Van Jones' approach to both the green and solidarity economies most compels our attention is that he starts where the need is greatest, the millions of unemployed and underemployed inner city youth. The structural crises of neoliberal capitalism has long ravaged this sector of our society through deindustrialization, environmental racism and a wrecking ball approach to schools in favor of more prisons. To borrow from Marx, these young people are bound with radical chains, and when they break them with the tools suggested in Green Collar Economy, they free not only themselves, but the rest of us are set in a positive direction as well.

"The green economy," Jones explains, reflecting on Hurricane Katrina, "should not be just about reclaiming thrown-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not be just about recycling materials to give things a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance. Formerly incarcerated people deserve a second shot at life-and all obstacles to their being able to find that second chance in the green sector should be removed. Also, our urban youth deserve the opportunity to be part of something promising."

Jones is a strategic thinker who gives definite answers to the question, "Who are our friends, who are our adversaries?" He narrows the target to speculative capital with roots in carbon-based energy industries and the militarism needed to secure their supplies. He seeks close allies in the wider working class of all nationalities, especially in the Blue-Green Alliance formed on the core partnership of the United Steelworkers with the Sierra Club. He also looks for allies among faith communities, environmentalists in the suburbs and rural populations suffering at the hands of anti-ecological agribusiness, offering a vision of wind farms and solar arrays for sustainable rural development. He sees the importance of cutting back defense spending and opposing unjust wars abroad.

Finally, he holds out a hand to green businesses in alternative energies, the current and future manufacturers of clean power:

"Our success and survival as a species are largely and directly tied to the new eco-entrepreneurs-and the success and survival of their enterprises. Since almost all of the needed eco-technologies are likely to come from the private sector, civic leaders and voters should do all that can be done to help green business leaders succeed."

Jones is not talking just about mom and pop operations here, but an important and growing sector of productive capital. These will range from small upstarts to T. Boone Pickens-type investors wanting to create giant wind farms and large coastal arrays of wave generators, along with the manufacturing firms that build their equipment. Some on the left who want to see a clean renewable energy future will have to make adjustments in their "anti-corporate" strategies if they want to pursue this goal effectively with these high-road allies. Dan Swinney of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council explains his current project, the Chicago Green Manufacturing Network, as a case in point:

"CMRC is working with the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Wind Network/WireNET and the City of Chicago in building the capacity of local manufacturing companies to become the supply chain for the explosive wind turbine industry. Illinois and other states currently have ambitious Renewable Energy Portfolios that create a huge market for wind turbine companies and others in the renewable energy field. Currently the components for these companies are principally made by European and Asian suppliers. We will rise to the challenge of building the capacity of local companies to supply the high quality components for wind turbines and other renewable energy companies. This will be a means to diversify the markets for some of the 12,000 manufacturing companies in our region and an opportunity to create hundreds if not thousands of new permanent, full-time jobs in manufacturing."

But Green Collar Economy's core mass base remains a united Black and Latino community in close alliance with organized labor, the same engine of change that put Obama in the White House. And by asserting the interests and needs of that base, the green jobs and infrastructure proposals in Obama's stimulus package serve to drive the entire recovery effort in a progressive direction.

"We want to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty," says Jones, "We want this green wave to lift all boats... In the wake of Katrina, we reject the idea of 'free market' evacuation plans. Families should not be left behind to drown because they lack a functioning car or credit card…In an age of floods, we reject the ideology that says we must let our neighbors 'sink or swim'."

The nature of the Green New Deal's adversaries -- the carbon-based energy speculators and the military industries defending them -- is the key reason Jones' strategy requires a massive mobilized base. The structural reforms needed to dislodge and displace them are going to require a great deal of popular power from below. The petroleum-coal industrial nexus alone is subsidized to the tune of $1 trillion annually, according to Congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. in his foreword to Jones' book. Some are outright opposed to any "New Deal," green or otherwise, as the GOP in Congress reveal with their votes against the Recovery Act. The Green Jobs components were often cited by the right as "pork" or "the road to socialism." Others want to destroy the Green New Deal from within, via "greenwashing." These are politicians who take their lead from some corporations that have become skilled at changing their ads to "green" but continue producing toxics and other waste from the polluter's agenda.

Jones singles out Newt Gingrich, the GOP's neoliberal-in-chief, as particularly devious: "He has skillfully used rising fuel prices to stoke public support for climate-destroying measures…Their new tactic is to spread confusion about the real solutions by deliberately blurring distinctions between themselves and the champions of genuine answers." Jones has to take the battle into the government and electoral arenas. The resources of state power are required to bring the green economy to scale, even if it requires a gut-wrenching struggle with polluters who have a good number of politicians on their payrolls and with revenue streams long fused to the public trough.

The solidarity economy faces these battles as well. For the most part, it overlaps with the green economy at the grassroots. Its mission can be summarized as generating new wealth in a green way, but with a worker-community ownership or control component built into a project's agenda from the start. As a major finance capitalist and former oilman who wants to invest in wind farms in a major way, T Boone Pickens is clearly part of the green economy, but not part of the solidarity economy. A wind farm on an Indian reservation cooperatively owned by the tribe and employing its members and selling power both locally and regionally would be very much part of the solidarity economy.

But the picture is more complex. "Stakeholder" solutions are not quite as clear-cut. For instance, GAMESA, a Spanish high-tech firm and a leading European manufacturer of wind turbines, recently opened a plant in Bucks County, PA. To do so, it formed stakeholder partnerships with the county and state governments, getting tax allowances and land-use easements to refit and old closed steel mill. The United Steel Workers union was brought in as a partner: 1000 new union jobs were created, hiring many of the unemployed steelworkers. The "solidarity" here is between high-road capital, the USW, local government and the unemployed of the area, but it's a stretch for some who might want to reserve 'solidarity' strictly to cooperative ownership structures.

The stakeholder solidarity offers practical flexibility in the wider struggle to bring both movements to scale. Cooperative structures that evolve out of deeper structural reforms have the quality of altering the relations of power in production and local governance. Even if on a small scale, they can point to a future of wider economic democracy, acting as a bridge to new socialist relations.

In any case, a powerful high-road alliance opens the door to those on its left wing who want to take it farther. Van Jones himself has no problem with either form; his book celebrates the stakeholder green jobs alliances implemented by the Green Party mayor of Richmond, CA, as well as the Green Worker Cooperatives in building salvaging businesses in the South Bronx, NY.

At one point in his book, Jones uses a metaphor of two ships to sum up the current crossroads facing the American people, the Amistad and the Titanic. The latter carried the wealthy elite indulging in idle pleasures, and a proletarian crew labored below in an unsound structure. The former had been taken over by insurgent slaves, taken to safe harbor, but still lacked wider resources for the crew's future. The folly of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic has long been a metaphor for doomed tinkering at reforms in a closed system. The Amistad, however, offers a more open future. Those familiar with the story know it involves further complex struggles, with new allies, high born and low, against a dying system. But it offers hope and change, both of which are in high regard these days.

[Carl Davidson is a member of the coordinating committee of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, and is webmaster for Progressives for Obama.' He is co-author of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age, and co-editor of Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, both available at lulu.com. This article was also posted at SolidarityEconomy.net.]

Find 'The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems' by Van Jones on Amazon.com.

Please see The New McCarthyism : Van Jones Fed to King CONG by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009. Post also includes 'The right wing's assault on Van Jones and the progressive left,' by Carl Davidson, and the article that started it all, 'Van Jones scandal threatens Obama presidency' by Cliff Kincaid.

And see

• The Blue-Green Alliance, and the Threat from the Populist Right by Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2009


• Green Jobs 2009: Steelworkers, Hip-Hoppers and Tree-Huggers Get It On! by Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2009

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The New McCarthyism : Van Jones Fed to King CONG

Portrait of Van Jones by Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell the Truth.
Obama has fed his green Jones to King CONG

With clarity and verve [Van] Jones finally brought to the mainstream the critical message that what’s good for the environment is also good for the economy.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

See 'The right wing's assault on Van Jones and the progressive left' by Carl Davidson, and the article that started it all, 'Van Jones scandal threatens Obama presidency' by Cliff Kincaid, Below.

Van Jones has been fed to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas).

Obama’s one serious green bright spot has been sacrificed at the McCarthyite altar of the corporate bloviation machine.

The brilliant, charismatic Jones was responsible for the administration’s single significant accomplishment to date. With clarity and verve Jones finally brought to the mainstream the critical message that what’s good for the environment is also good for the economy.

The convenience of this simple truth has long been known to the green power movement. Since the early 1970s we have argued that converting away from fossil and nuclear fuels -- coal, oil, nukes & gas -- and onto a Solartopian system based on renewables and efficiency is the only route to long-term prosperity. With community-based solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, mass transit, increased efficiency and efficiency, we can and must build a sustainable economy that will create jobs and geo-political stability.

An early articulation of this green-powered vision came at the “Toward Tomorrow” Fair at the University of Masschusetts, Amherst, in 1975. As the “No Nukes” movement was just gathering grassroots steam, we envisioned a community-based Solartopian energy system that would guarantee full employment and a survivable planet.

For the next quarter century, the No Nukes movement helped drive atomic energy into its economic and ecological black hole. As fossil fuels became ever more unsustainable, the vision took shape. Wind, solar and efficiency technologies boomed ahead.

But the multi-trillion-dollar fossil/nuke industry is nothing if not entrenched. Throughout the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush nightmare it made common wisdom of the Big Lie that saving the environment meant economic sacrifice. In fact, except for King CONG’s short-term mega-profits, the opposite has always been true.

Van Jones finally broke through. As an informed, exciting and compelling presenter, Jones made clear that the “green collar economy” is tangible and terrific. In his writings, mass meetings, television and legislative testimony, Jones turned the corner on the message that what’s good for the environment is not only good for the economy, it’s essential. Appearing with the likes of Robert Redford on Larry King, and much more, Jones finally injected into the mainstream the message that there will be no prosperity, no full employment, and no survivable planet without the necessary and doable conversion to a green-powered Earth.

With Jones running point, Obama has in fact made millions of critical dollars available for renewable energy. The Stimulus Package does include a significant sector of cash for those wishing to bring wind, photovoltaics and other Solartopian systems into their home, office and industrial energy mix.

But we’ve seen this before. Jimmy Carter took halting steps up the Solartopian highway in the late 1970s. Tens of thousands of green jobs were created in California and elsewhere. Then Ronald Reagan ripped the solar water heater off the White House roof and Gov. George Deukmejian killed Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax credit program. The industry went into a tailspin, those thousands of jobs disappeared, and America’s dependency on foreign oil soared out of control.

With Jones gone we have to worry that Obama might now repeat history. The pretext for forcing Jones out was pathetic. Like millions of Americans he signed a petition asking for an investigation into the 9/11 felling of the World Trade Center. He used the dreaded term “asshole” to accurately describe some Republicans, and then used it to describe himself and his friends. He may have said some things that some right winger might’ve construed as racist.

Did he kill someone? Did he engage in torture? Did he steal money? Is he a lousy parent?

This is McCarthyism at its most lethal, and administrative timidity at its most dangerous. If groveling to the corporate bloviators is Obama’s strategy for making change, we are in deep deep trouble.

In fact Van Jones, as imperfect as the rest of us, was Obama’s critical firestarter in a green-powered revolution that is decades overdue. While the likes of Glenn Beck can crow over his demise, it’s the gargantuan King CONG barons of fossil/nuke who are really in the saddle. Pushing Van Jones aside is a major coup for the destroyers of the planet, and a big loss for those of us who would re-power and save it.

We will, of course, continue to fight against fossil and nuclear power and for a green-powered Earth. But as it has been for decades, the going is rough. Will this administration really be with us?

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com. In 1973 he helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.”]

The right wing's assault on Van Jones and the progressive left

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

Here's the motherlode piece fueling the rightwing blogosphere that helped bring down Van Jones. The text will show you that it won't stop here. They will use everything they can to cripple and take down Obama from the right, and will use more and more sham "connections," such as with me, to do it.

The right is aiming at any alliances between the liberals and the progressive left to destroy both. Their success here in this case, thanks to capitulation on this matter by the White House, shows why liberals have always been rather weak and wavering when the right bares its fangs, and why we, the progressive left, have to take up the slack, bringing others along with us. Moreover, it shows we need better and stronger organization to back up our gains.

Finally, it show the stupidity and futility of those on the left who want to aim their main fire at this time at Obama's presidency, and end up carrying water for the right wing populists and proto-fascists. None of this means we shouldn't criticize Obama's wars and take to the streets against them. But it does mean you have to study how to deliver the main blow to the immediate rising danger. If you want to lend a hand, make use of the PayPal button at Progressives for Obama. Even better, join or organize a PDA and/or a CCDS chapter, or something similar that you like better. But get organized.

Van Jones scandal threatens Obama presidency

By Cliff Kincaid / September 5, 2009

Our media have been slow to grasp the significance of the Van Jones story.

Reporting from near the home turf of embattled Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle says it's clearly a bad sign when White House flak Robert Gibbs is asked if Jones still enjoys the confidence of the President and merely replies that Jones "continues to work in this administration."

But the White House has to know that, if Jones goes, the questions won't end. Who appointed him? Who looked into his background? Who knew what and when?

Gibbs knows that the Jones controversy undermines confidence in the President, who bears ultimate responsibility for the appointment. Gibbs also has to know that, if Jones' background can sink Jones, the President himself is in trouble. Obama has decades of friendly associations with communists and terrorists, ranging from Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis in his youth in Hawaii to communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in Chicago when he was doing community organizing and running for political office.

By comparison to Obama, when it comes to nefarious connections, Jones is a piker.

Curiously, it's not Jones' communist background which has proven to be the most controversial. Rather, it's his two apologies in a week for statements calling Republicans "assholes" and having signed a 9/11 truth statement blaming the terrorist attacks on U.S. officials.

It's the communism, stupid.

As Professor Paul Kengor points out, "We now know that even the most authoritative sources, such as the seminal Harvard University Press work, The Black Book of Communism, were conservative when estimating only 100 million deaths at the hands of communist governments. The latest research, for instance, claims that Mao Zedong alone was responsible for the deaths of at least 60-70 million in China, and Joseph Stalin alone may well have killed 60 million in the USSR-those are just two communist countries that managed to far surpass the entire combined death toll of World War I and II, the two worst wars in the history of humanity."

Do we want adherents of this foreign ideology of mass murder holding high government positions?

Van Jones, of course, is only a symbol of the problem. And communists are not required to promote communist policies. The Obama Administration is pursuing the destruction of anti-communist Honduras, in order to please Hugo Chavez, the Marxist ruler of Venezuela currently on a friendly visit to terrorist Iran. This is a scandal that deserves at least as much attention as Van Jones' communist connections.

Our media have been slow to grasp the significance of the Van Jones story. Some news outlets have only reluctantly covered it because of the Jones statements about Republicans and 9/11.

But Jones' communist background has been known since April 6, when New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon revealed it in striking detail. This was only a few weeks after the appointment was announced. Joseph Farah's World Net Daily then picked up the story and ran several important follow-ups.

While the Jones appointment has now become both a White House and Democratic Party scandal, one prominent Republican has already gotten burned as a result of her association with the identified communist.

Meg Whitman, the former president and CEO of eBay who is running for Governor of California, has been forced by the controversy to disavow her previous comments in support of Jones. She says, "My husband and I met him and many others on a cruise sponsored by National Geographic and The Aspen Institute. He talked about supporting job growth in California, but of course I did not do a background check of his past over dinner."

Look who else was on the "Arctic Expedition for Climate Action 2008" cruise with Jones:

• Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
• Larry Brilliant, Director, Google.org
• President Jimmy Carter & Rosalynn Carter
• Senator Tom Daschle & Linda Daschle
• John Fahey, President, National Geographic
• Mike Finley, President of the Turner Foundation
• Walter Isaacson, President, the Aspen Institute
• Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union
• R.E. "Ted" Turner, Chairman, Turner Foundation, Inc.
• Governor Bill Ritter, Jr., Governor, Colorado>

On March 27, 2009, the Aspen Institute gave its Energy and Environment Award in the category of "Individual Thought Leadership" to Van Jones.

Although Whitman now says that she wasn't able to do a background check on Jones over dinner, she had previously said that she "got to know him very well."

Here's what she said, in comments captured on You Tube: "There's a guy over in Oakland, I think his name is Van... Jones. And he and I were on a cruise last summer in the Arctic for climate change. And I got to know him very well. And a lot of the work he's doing to enfranchise broader communities I'm a big fan of. He's done a marvelous job... I'm a huge fan of his. He is very bright, very articulate, very passionate. I think he is exactly right."

For someone who "got to know him very well," she seemed to have some trouble remembering his name. In any event, while Whitman endorsed Jones and his work, at least she didn't hire him. The White House did.

According to the Van Jones website, "In March 2009 Van went to work as the special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality." What does this phrase "went to work" really mean?

As we have previously reported, the Obama Transition Project developed a 7-page questionnaire of 63 questions for people seeking top administration jobs. Here are some of the questions:

• Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.
• Please identify all speeches you have given. If available please provide the test [sic] or recordings of each such speech or identify any recordings of speeches of which you are aware.
• If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

The final question 63 was all-encompassing: "Please provide any other information, including information about other members of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the president-elect."

But it's not known if Jones ever filled out the questionnaire. It seems doubtful.

The New York Times said that for those who managed to fill out the questionnaire and clear those hurdles, "the reward could be the job they wanted. But first there will be more forms, for security and ethics clearances from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Government Ethics."

So was Jones subjected to a security investigation by the FBI? No one seems to know. It seems doubtful.

I went to the website of the Office of Government Ethics, which collects and posts "Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Reports or Other Covered Records." I put the name "Van Jones" into the search engine and "0 records" turned up.

It turns out that this data base only includes individuals "nominated or appointed by President Obama with the advice and consent of the Senate." Since Jones didn't have to go through a Senate confirmation hearing, he didn't have to complete any of these forms.

The President, of course, didn't have to fill out those forms, either. He didn't have to go through an FBI background check. So the same questions being asked about Van Jones can be asked about Obama. Van Jones and his supporters know it. They probably know more about the President than we do. And that gives them political leverage and potential blackmail material.

As we argued in a previous column, it appears that a Communist Party spin-off, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), was instrumental in some way in getting Jones his job. A one-time secret member of this network, Rep. Barbara Lee, is a close friend of both Jones and Obama. Jones comes from Oakland, California, and Lee represents Oakland. They worked together on the "green jobs" issue before Jones "went to work" at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Lee hailed the Jones appointment.

Another key CCDS official is Carl Davidson, a Marxist and former SDS activist described by blogger Trevor Loudon as "a big fan and promoter of Van Jones' work." Indeed, the latest edition of the "CCDS Mobilizer" notes that Davidson participated in New York City's annual "Left Forum" in April of this year where he "presented Van Jones' program for Green Jobs for inner city youth, but framing it as a larger structural reform project that could, if done right, unite a progressive majority and help get us out of the current crisis."

In other words, the "Green Jobs" project is a disguised form of socialism.

Loudon reports that Davidson has pushed Van Jones and his agenda at every opportunity -- just as he was pushing Obama as a political candidate in the 1990s. "Davidson was an ardent supporter of Obama for several years and helped organize the famous peace rally in Chicago in where Obama pinned his colors to the anti-Iraq war cause," Loudon explains.

If you go to the CCDS website, you'll see that one of the speakers at the recent CCDS convention was Angela Davis, former CPUSA candidate for vice president. I saw a picture of Davis on the first floor of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland when I was there in April looking into the Van Jones controversy. Jones founded the Ella Baker Center.

Rep. Lee, in her book, Renegade for Peace & Justice, talks about her work as "Comrade Barbara" in the Black Panther organization with Angela Davis, "the noted African American member of the Communist Party." Davis was a key endorser of the July 17-19, 1992, national CCDS conference, "Perspectives for Democracy and Socialism in the '90s." One of the topics was, "Toward a Socialist United States?" Jones spoke to a CCDS fundraiser in 2006.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the scandal threatens not only the job of Van Jones but the Obama presidency.

The evidence suggests that a communist network has a direct pipeline into the White House. It is a network that includes the President himself.

So how can Obama fire Jones without putting his own presidency in jeopardy? This is the dilemma that grips the White House.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report.]

Source /AIM Report

Glenn Beck's attack on Van Jones


Also see BOOKS / Van Jones' 'Green Collar Economy' by Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

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The Blue-Green Alliance, and the Threat from the Populist Right

Van Jones and the Green Jobs Initiative

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2009

[Prepared as a Memo for the Working Class Studies Association Conference, June 6-8 2009, at the University of Pittsburgh.]

1. One of the more important progressive measures launched in the first 100 days of the Obama administration is the Green Jobs Initiative within the broader Economic Recovery Act. There is substantial money allocated to it, and the appointee brought on to shepherd its development, Van Jones, is one of the few Obama appointees clearly from the left. Green Jobs is also a product of the Blue-Green Alliance, a joint effort by labor unions and environmental groups, which has funded advocacy for the program for years.

2. There are two aspects to Green Jobs, the immediate and the structural. The immediate has to do with bringing living-wage employment with a future to those who need it most, the unemployed and under-employed youth of the inner city. The structural has to do with Green Jobs being part of a larger effort to shift the country's energy system from one based on burning carbon and uranium to one based on sustainable renewables -- solar, wind, wave, hydro and geothermal. All these require major upgrading of the country's infrastructure and a retooling of its manufacturing for more advanced products and production. Both aspects require a new Green industrial policy, alongside an erosion of the country's traditional military-industrial policy and more recent neoliberal market fundamentalism.

3. The neoliberal diehards in the House and Senate GOP, together with the right-wing populism stirred up by the Fox-Limbaugh-Hannity media reactionaries, are preparing an all-out attack of Green Jobs on several fronts. First, they attack the whole concept that there is any urgency to anything Green. In their view, global warming and climate change are simply left-wing hoaxes used as a cover to attack the free market and promote government planning, leading to socialism. Second, they attack it as affirmative action for people of color, supposedly masking moral failure and public schools as the real reason for the problems of the inner city. Third, they are preparing a red-baiting campaign against Van Jones in particular, as part of a wider effort to red-bait Obama and deny the legitimacy of his election.

4. Green Jobs will require more than White House and Congressional Democrat support in order to survive this resistance and counter-attack. Getting a program adopted by Congress is only the first step on a long road to its deployment. Community and youth organizations, environmental groups and the trade unions are facing the task of launching a social movement to see to it that Green Jobs is not gutted, delayed or otherwise sabotaged.

5. Green Jobs can be undermined indirectly as well. The program ultimately has to be deployed locally, and pass through state, county and city governments and their hangers-on. Left to their own inclinations, funds for Green Jobs may be diverted to parks or highway projects that shore up existing government worker payrolls with little new employment of those most in need. Alternately, new construction can be turned over to firms importing non-union labor, or using labor at minimum wage rather than living wage standards. Only local coalitions mobilized with some clout at the base can prevent this, and the ball is in the court of the left to organize them.

6. Green Jobs is a natural for the left to build coalitions of diversity in working-class and low-income communities. Start with organizations close to those who need Green Jobs most-inner city youth service agencies, neighborhood churches and their youth groups, sports groups-then approach others needed to make a collaborative work, such as trade union apprenticeship programs, community college trade skills teachers, local home building or remodeling companies looking for new projects. With this assembled, find the local political incumbents, especially at the state level, ready to go to bat for your project. Connect with Green for All, Van Jones' group, if it's in a major city near you, for advice.

7. The left has its own approach to bring to the Green Jobs table, apart from being a catalytic organizer. Green Jobs can be implemented in a "low road" way, by giving funds to contractors who hire youth at minimum wage, who in turn winterize a few public buildings, bypass the unions and dump the youth when it's over. Obviously, this is to be avoided. But there's a high road, solidarity economy approach that builds a stakeholder collaborative on businesses, unions, credit unions and schools, with a strategic view of a lasting green construction worker cooperative as an outcome, together with higher-tech career paths through community college partnership with high-tech green firms. The solidarity economy, in turn, serves as a way to educate concretely about the prospects for a socialist future.

8. Green Jobs is a product of a long and complex series of working-class and youth struggles. One part reaches back to the global justice battles in the streets of Seattle more than a decade ago. The unions joined this to battle NAFTA, and the youth came out of green and global justice concerns. Both found themselves on the same side of the barricades battling police in the streets -- 'Teamsters and Turtles Forever!' was a spontaneous slogan. Some in the Steelworkers' Union and the Sierra Club took it further, and in a paradigm shift, began to see each other as natural allies rather than natural adversaries. The tons of steel and 19,000 machined parts in every wind turbine had to be manufactured and assembled somewhere, after all. This was formally put together and funded as the Blue-Green Alliance. The other component came from the anger of inner city youth facing jails and police harassment and brutality. Demanding jobs for youth was not new and often ignored, but when Van Jones in Oakland put out "Green Jobs, Not Jails" to put kids to work insulating buildings and installing solar panels, he suddenly had people listening in a new way. There is more to the story, but this is the heart of it, and organic development from class struggle, labor-community alliances and youth insurgency. There will be more battles, but with this energy to build on, the prospects are very bright.

[Carl Davidson is webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net, a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and a coordinating committee member of the US Solidarity Economy Network. Together with Jerry Harris, he is author of Cyber-Radicalism: A New Left for a Global Age, available at lulu.com. This article was also posted to Keep on Keeping On.]

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