Friday, August 28, 2009
Weekly Mulch: Throwing the Environment Away (11:46 am)
Our throwaway economy is largely to blame for our environmental woes, as Lester Brown points out for Grist. First introduced after World War II to stimulate growth and create more jobs, throwaway products offered consumers convenience. Soon, disposable paper towels replaced hand towels, tissues replaced handkerchiefs, and plastic diapers replaced cloth ones, eventually building up an overwhelming amount of garbage. Throwaway products create a multitude of problems, including maxed-out landfills, air pollution and depletion of limited resources. Instead of hunting for new places to stash our trash, we should focus on consuming less altogether. But in the midst of an economic crisis, can we transition to a sustainable economy?
“The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything,” writes Brown.
Materialism is part of our culture, alongside baseball, hamburgers and free speech. It won’t be easy for Americans to break their consumption habits. According to Wiretap, Americans use more paper and create more waste than any other country. The video below, The Secret Life of Paper, explains how paper contributes to global warming, how to reduce paper waste, and the environmental and economic benefits of recycling.
Meanwhile, Tracey Bianchi of Sojourners remains optimistic that the next generation will grow up to be more environmentally conscious. Bianchi’s young son referred to an empty water bottle on the ground as “recycling” rather than trash. To the younger generation, protecting the environment is not an adjustment but a normal way of life.
“Small things like this give me hope. They make me think that indeed, we can change things. And they make me nervous for the day when my son is old enough to demand an excuse as to why my generation lived like sloppy gluttons. The way I demand my parents account for the racism of the ’50s, the way my parents demanded their parents account for two world wars, the way that generation demanded an explanation for slavery,” writes Bianchi.
Although most people are familiar with... read more
posted by Raquel Brown | 3 comments
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Kennedy Was Friend to Immigrants (12:05 pm)
Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death yesterday was a blow to the immigrant community, as New America Media reports. For over 40 years, Kennedy was a tireless fighter for immigrant rights and is remembered for many valuable accomplishments, not the least in making possible the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with the national-origin quotas that had been in effect in the US since 1924. Additionally, Kennedy help bring a close to the exploitive Bracero program, which supplied the U.S. cheap and temporary labor during World War II in the form of Mexican farm laborers who did not have proper protections or rights. Senator Kennedy also helped author the AgJobs bill of 2003, which gave undocumented farmers residency so they could continue working in the U.S. His legacy in the progress of immigration legislation is not in doubt.
The Massachusetts Senator was a vigorous proponent of both Healthcare and Immigration Reform, which isn’t surprising when you consider how much these two issues overlap. In last week’s Wire, we touched on this confluence. Despite the White House’s attempt to compartmentalize the two issues, Immigration continues sit front and center in the Healthcare discussion, often through dishonest argument by reform opponents.
The problem is, if the White House withdraws as an authoritative and reasonable voice on immigration and immigrants, the conversation will be taken over by anti-immigrant fringe groups. Arturo Sandoval of the New Mexico Independent describes the town hall debate during which a protester suggested that a “bullet in the head” was a solution to the idea that the U.S. has millions of undocumented within her borders. The “facts don’t support this xenophobic response,” Sandoval writes. Furthermore, the needs of the U.S. economy “pull” workers into the country. The immigrant workforce is then scapegoated for responding to that need.
The Washington Independent makes it clear that xenophobic sentiment, also championed by members of the Republican party, is not a wise political move. Daphne Eviatar attended town hall meetings where fact-resistant crowds shouted at lawmakers for “seeking to provide healthcare to illegal immigrants.” Eviatar pins much blame on “the anger fomented by... read more
posted by Nezua | 1 comment
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Weekly Pulse: Healthcare Reform After Kennedy (9:49 am)
One of healthcare reform’s greatest champions died last night. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. During his 46-year career in the senate, Kennedy’s name appeared on virtually every major piece of progressive legislation from civil rights to economic justice, to healthcare. Kennedy called healthcare reform “the cause of my life.”
Jack Newfield of The Nation remembers Kennedy as the senate’s fighting liberal, the “best and most effective senator of the past hundred years.”
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones laments:
We are left with weak, squabbling, visionless Democratic puppets and a President whose domestic reform policies are adrift—sliding towards the horizon with each passing day.
The loss is a blow to healthcare reform. Alex Koppelman of Salon notes that with Kennedy’s passing, the Democrats have lost one of their most effective bipartisan deal-makers. Democrats will also be down a vote in the senate for the foreseeable future because Massachusetts state law doesn’t allow for the appointment of an immediate replacement.
Naturally, with congress on vacation, wackos are rushing in to fill the media vacuum. Eric Boehlert asks in AlterNet why Republicans the only ones allowed to get angry about healthcare reform, or anything else. He notes that in 2003, the media decided that Howard Dean was too angry for prime time. During the Republican National Convention in 2008, SWAT teams were sent to raid the homes of suspected anarchist protesters. And yet, conservative demonstrators in Arizona are allowed to tote rifles just outside the security perimeter of a presidential event.
RNC Chair Michael Steele raised eyebrows by championing single-payer healthcare in an op/ed in the Washington Post framing the GOP as defenders of Medicare.
Odd that Steele has so much love for Medicare, but none for the nation’s other leading source of government-run healthcare, the Veterans Administration (VA). This week, Steele accused America’s other leading public insurance provider of encouraging veterans to commit suicide, based on a booklet published by the VA which explains living wills, advanced directives and other key concepts in end-of-life care, Rachel Slajda reports for TPM DC.
Progressives have been doing... read more
posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | 1 comment
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Weekly Audit: EFCA, Tax Cheats and Racial Inequality (10:38 am)
The U.S. economy may finally be bottoming out. But if the worst is really behind us, we are likely facing a painful period of “growth” that looks very much like the present. Without increasing unionization and mitigating racial inequality, our economic progress will prove as hollow as it is slow. While the economy may improve in a dry, statistical sense, the foundation for a productive economy has been decimated over the past three decades.
The economy has shown some encouraging signs of strength lately. Home prices have actually increased and the pace of layoffs slackened quite a bit in July. But that data doesn’t signify a strong recovery, as Andrew Leonard notes in a pair of blog posts for Salon. Even in areas where there is some good news—housing and the job market—there is plenty of contradictory bad news. First, mortgage delinquencies are at an all-time high, and the souring loans are not just subprime. Even people with relatively affordable mortgages have problems paying when they lose their jobs, and with the unemployment rate at 9.4%, a lot of people are losing their jobs.
What’s worse, Leonard notes, new claims for unemployment benefits escalated in August, suggesting that last month’s job market improvements may have been a fluke. And while home prices may be ticking up slightly, they have been abysmal for the past two years. Since many households accumulated debt based on higher home values, the overall ratio of consumer debt to household net worth is perilously high.
Household net worth is a crucial statistic and is often overlooked by a focus on day-to-day measurements of worker well-being, like wage growth. While wages matter for paying the rent and buying groceries, our long-term economic security is defined not by what we make each week, but by the value of the things we own. In a piece for The American Prospect, economists Derrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. detail the massive racial disparities in household net worth in the U.S. While the median white family has roughly $90,000 to its name, the median Latino family has just $8,000, while the median... read more
posted by Zach Carter | 3 comments
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Weekly Immigration Wire: Silence Strengthens Opposition (11:57 am)
President Obama is citing the Healthcare debate as a reason for postponing immigration reform until 2010. But in the interim, the White House is laying the groundwork for an enforcement agenda by expanding programs such as 287(g), Secure Communities and e-Verify, amidst a growing matrix of detention centers. Anti-immigration factions are taking advantage of the lull in legislative action to push their own agenda.
The Progressive takes the unequivocal stand that “President Obama is wrong to postpone immigration reform.” Author Ed Morales makes it clear that while healthcare and economic issues are “understandably urgent,” the choice to delay reform “de-prioritizes” people who have paid their taxes but have not been given a path to citizenship.
The problem is, immigration reform and healthcare reform are inextricably connected. WireTap cites a central tenant of healthcare reform’s “artificially amplified ‘public’ opposition” to immigration, as reported by the Los Angeles Times: It’s “the notion that ‘Congress would give illegal immigrants health insurance at taxpayer expense.’”
Is the racially charged core of this “chameleon colored outrage” being purposefully left out of the general dialogue? The ugly facts are that a “third of all ‘Hispanics’ in the U.S., almost half of the undocumented, and a fifth of African Americans” lack health insurance today. And yet, only “one in eight whites” lack health care.
After all, “Not all immigrants are alike.” New America Media’s David Hayes-Bautista compares the experiences of two immigrants named Jean-Claude and Juan Carlos. Hayes-Bautista effectively illustrates the Good Immigrant/Bad Immigrant paradigm and asks “Why do some immigrants move quickly and swiftly up the educational and professional ladder, while others appear to remain stymied at the bottom?” Ultimately, “both segments of immigrants deserve to be included in the future healthcare system that their presence will help to fund.”
But some clearly don’t think with such a progressive bent, as the New Mexico Independent reports. Instead of trying to bring greater truth to the entire discussion, anti-immigrant factions are “using [healthcare reform] to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants,” unsurprisingly claiming that they are “a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care... read more
posted by Nezua | start the discussion
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Weekly Pulse: Public Option on Life Support (10:49 am)
Will healthcare reform include a public health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance? President Obama campaigned on the promise of a public option, but over the past week he and his top advisers have repeatedly signaled that they aren’t willing to fight for it.
On Saturday, Obama told a town hall meeting in Colorado: “Whether we have it or we don’t have it, [the public option] is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” an unnamed senior White House official gripes in this morning’s Washington Post.
The White House is sorely mistaken if it thinks that the public option belongs in the “nice but not necessary” category. Josh Holland of AlterNet explains why the public option is the pillar of healthcare reform. Without it, there’s little hope of containing costs or reigning in the power of insurance companies:
It may be just one “aspect” of health reform, but without it, the legislation promises to be a massive rip-off; a taxpayer give-away of hundreds of billions of dollars to an unreformed ‘disease care’ industry.
The industry would get millions of new customers thanks to generous government subsidies and a law requiring that (almost) everyone carry insurance. And that windfall would come without the structural changes needed to bend the medical “cost curve” in years to come — without any provisions that might endanger the industry’s bottom line.
In Salon, Robert Reich agrees. Competition between private insurance companies and the public option is the only hope to controlling costs. A public plan could bargain with providers to reduce costs and pass the savings on to taxpayers. The private insurance industry would have to slash its prices to compete.
Without a public option, “reform” would likely involve subsidies to private insurance companies, temporarily dulling the pain as premiums rise unchecked. That’s the worst of both worlds.
Progressives shouldn’t be surprised at the White House’s noncommittal stance, though. Obama campaigned on a public option, but he... read more
posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | 1 comment
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Weekly Audit: Depression-Era Inequality (2:17 pm)
A new study by Economist Emmanuel Saez revealed this week that income inequality in the U.S. is more severe today than at any time since World War I, and the current recession is taking its heaviest toll on the worst-off members of our society. As our government rebuilds the financial sector using taxpayers’ money, it’s important to remember that both financiers and the government are responsible to our communities, not just bank shareholders. If we want to strengthen our country’s economic foundation, we need to demand better wages for workers and an end to all kinds of predatory lending.
Saez’s new data on income inequality is, as Paul Krugman put it, “truly amazing.” Saez, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, found that the top 0.01% of U.S. earners had 6% of total U.S. wages, more than double the level in 2000. Earners in the top 10%, meanwhile, took home an astonishing 49.7% of all wages. That gap is larger now than during the Great Depression or the Gilded Age of the Roaring ’20s.
“We’re seeing Depression-era inequality again—only now it’s slightly worse,” writes Steve Benen for The Washington Monthly. Benen also notes that this level of inequality is not an inevitable consequence of a market economy: It’s an extreme historical aberration. In the U.S., prosperity for much of the 20th Century was shared. But in 2007, at the economic bubble’s peak, the wealthy simply got wealthier.
In that context, it is beyond absurd that the government is allowing eight-figure bonuses to be doled out by bailed out banks. Writing for Salon, Robert Reich dissects the policy implications of Citigroup’s plans to pay its top executives an average of $10 million this year and award over $100 million to its top trader, a man who literally owns a castle in Germany. Citigroup was one of the most reckless U.S. banks during the housing bubble, a major subprime offender that received $45 billion in direct bailout money, as well as hundreds of billions in federal guarantees. How much is $45 billion? With the median U.S. home price at $174,100, that’s... read more
posted by Zach Carter | start the discussion
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Weekly Mulch: Why’s Your Carbon Footprint So Big? (8:57 pm)
Our team was at Netroots Nation this past week, so the Mulch is a little shorter than usual. We’ll be back in full form next Friday! In the meantime, enjoy our latest roundup of environmental news.
People are finally realizing that climate change affects more than the weather. From national security to cattle to birth rates, it is clear that ╲no area of human activity will be untouched by a changing climate,╡ writes Osha Gray Davidson in Mother Jones. Climate change will pose many strategic challenges to national security, including famine, drought, mass migration, epidemics and massive storms. And while our defense department isn’t synonymous with “environmentally friendly,” (How do you think it develops and fuels its weapons?), it is enormously influential. The defense department could effectively encourage other countries to view climate change as a serious problem and help curb its effects.
Although a UN report claims that meat consumption is responsible for 18 per cent of human-induced carbon emissions, Grist’s Eliot Coleman argues that itâ•˙s not how much meat you eat, it’s how the animals are raised. Feedlot cows that munch on chemically fertilized grain contribute more greenhouse gasses than grass-fed cows, according to Coleman, a renowned small-scale farmer.
Few have considered the carbon impact of children. Air America’s Avery Trufelman reports that a child produces 5.7 times more carbon than an average female adult, according to a study conducted by Oregon State University. A child’s carbon footprint will outweigh their mother’s environmentally conscious practices, including recycling, driving less or using energy efficient light bulbs. According to the study, an American childâ•˙s carbon footprint is almost 160 times larger than a child in Bangladesh. Joe Veix raises important questions about how carbon footprints are related to adoption, population control and sexual education for RH Reality Check.
But what if we could eliminate our carbon footprint altogether? In These Times features Colin Beaven, a New Yorker who drastically changed his familyâ•˙s wasteful consumer lifestyle and made no environmental impact for a year. Beavan, his wife, and daughter lived in Manhattan without electricity, cars, television, or producing any trash. A documentary... read more
posted by Raquel Brown | start the discussion
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