Friday, July 31, 2009

Weekly Mulch: Why Diplomacy is Key to Fighting Climate Change (9:42 am)

International climate negotiations are currently bogged down in smog. Many countries are in disagreement about the best way to go about reducing emissions and curbing climate change. Some, like the U.S. and Great Britain, are working together to cut carbon emissions; while others say it’s their way or the highway. Until the air clears, it will be difficult to determine which global leaders are making the most effective choices—or even what the best path to a cleaner earth will be.

On Tuesday, the world’s two leading polluters, the United States and China, finally signed a “memorandum of understanding” and pledged to work together to create a global solution to arrest climate change by December’s United Nations summit in Copenhagen, as Stephen Robert Morse reports for Mother Jones. The two countries have long disagreed on the best way to control climate change and used each other as an excuse for inaction. Disagreements have centered around which country should pay for clean-ups and new technologies.

As Agence Grance-Presse emphasizes in Grist, China and other developing nations have argued that they shouldn’t have to cut their emissions, as the bulk of pollution comes from industrialized countries. Developing countries do not have the means to finance a more energy efficient economy and many argue that the U.S. should take a leadership role and help them.

India made a similar point when Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visited last week. India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, was remarkably candid when he told her that India would not succumb to international pressures to set targets on emissions. After all, as Barbara Crossette points out for The Nation, developing countries shouldn’t have to clean up after rich countries’ negligence. Although India has a strong economy and is one of the world’s largest polluters, their rising population keeps per capita emissions lower than other developed nations.

Yet, actions speak louder than worlds. Going back to Grist, Grance-Presse notes that despite China’s non-committal stance, it has made significant strides in wind and solar power. Their next step towards improved energy efficiency should be reducing its coal-dependency, which accounts for 85 percent... read more

posted by Raquel Brown | start the discussion

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Schwarzenegger Eliminates Domestic Violence Shelter Funding (3:53 pm)

In a last-ditch effort to pass the state’s struggling budget, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a number of jaw-dropping cuts to health and human services programs to the tune of nearly $500 million.

One move that has left many outraged has been the elimination of the state’s Domestic Violence Program, cutting $16 million that would normally go to the state’s 94 DV shelters.

Shelter employees and volunteers, who say state funding is vital to the maintenance of DV-prevention programs, are reeling over the cuts. For example, Catalyst Domestic Services, based in Oroville, Calif., relies on state funding to account for about 35 percent of its operating budget, Executive Director Anastacia Snyder said in a report in the Oroville Mercury-Register.

“We’re still in shock,” Snyder said Wednesday afternoon. “We were bracing for the 20 percent cut, but did not believe the governor could, with a clear conscience, cut 100 percent of funding for services that keep women and children safe and alive.”

Additional cuts, a full list of which can be found on CaliforniaProgressReport.com, include $50 million from the Healthy Families Program and $52 million from AIDS prevention. Schwarzenegger wielded his line-item veto power to make the cuts.

California residents wishing to get involved in the fight against the cuts to the state’s domestic violence shelter funding can go to StopFamilyViolence.org for more information.

posted by Lindsay Eanet | 1 comment

Nothing Personal, Mr. President (11:43 am)

I didn’t vote for Barack Obama—but it was nothing personal. I’m a Green and a lefty and always vote for candidates whose politics are closest to mine. That way I don’t get confused.

I knew Obama was a business as usual Dem with a gold card from Goldman Sachs. But he was smart, personable and a fresh breeze. I hoped he might just try to repair our real economy rather than reinflate its collapsed bubbles. He disappointed me in that regard—but still it wasn’t personal.

He super-sized our war on the medieval Pushtuns of Afghanistan and commenced a new one in Pakistan. He’s currently spreading that fight from the Northwest Frontier down to Baluchistan to provoke the adjacent Persians, whom he apparently wants a piece of (the piece with the oil in it). In other words, he’s become Queen Victoria II, rumbling his elephantine echelons down exactly the same imperial ruts that led Kipling to pen:

At the end of the fight is the tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased,
and the epitaph drear,
a fool lies here who tried to hustle the east.

Still, his targets are religionists with their heads stuck in the 8th century. So I don’t take it personally.

At home, he’s pitching every marketer’s wet dream: mandatory consumption. He wants to force us to buy intangible products called health insurance peddled by the same financial hustlers who, if you recall, took themselves and this country broke just a few months back. Still, no skin off my nose since I’m already on Medicare and have backup coverage from an elite institution that provides the equivalent of socialized medicine to its own people.

Then he started going macho south of the border. He’s on board with the reconstitution of a World War II era naval fleet to patrol Latin America. (Imagine if—or should it be when?—the Chinese send warships to maintain the peace up and down our east and west coasts!). Obama’s beefing up our bases in Columbia, a country where rightwingers regularly win elections mainly because leftwingers regularly catch bullets behind the ear—if they’re... read more

posted by Pete Karman | 1 comment

Weekly Immigration Wire: Post-Racial Hypocrisy (9:44 am)

Nobody said becoming a post-racial nation would be easy. The United States has its first black president, but as the son of a Kenyan immigrant, his citizenship and legitimacy are still being questioned. In the meantime, the White House is advancing programs like the 287(g) agreement, which have been linked to racial profiling and civil rights violations. It’s a form of oppression made possible, perversely, by the very administration that many hoped would combat such injustices.

Not that the issue of race ever really went anywhere, but the topic is front and center in the news again since the June 18 arrest of Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor who was picked up by police in his own home. Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo runs through the “racially-charged attacks that have circulated against [President] Obama” since his comments on Gates’ arrest. Kleefeld notes that this rhetoric has been a regular focus of the Right’s attacks against Obama since “the phony rumors of a tape of Michelle Obama defaming whites.”

But that’s old news. Today’s paranoiac can tune into the strange campaign spearheaded by CNN’s Lou Dobbs known as “Birtherism,” which is the belief held by a very fringe element of the Right that President Obama was not born in the U.S. and is ineligible to hold office. Dobbs has been obsessively documenting the fact-resistant Birther debate, supposedly because the group needs representation and a voice in the media. The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen reports on Dobbs’ response to criticism from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: Lou is now calling Maddow names like the “Teabagging Queen.”

It’s hard to understand this despicable reaction to Obama’s remarkable story. Has the U.S. forgotten its own myths about the great opportunity available to each and any of us? Hawaiian Congressman Neil Abercrombie has come up with an interesting solution: A resolution that ostensibly celebrates Hawaii’s fifty years in the union, but also states that the President himself was born there. The “Anti-Birther’s Resolution,” as The Young Turks are calling it, passed the House unanimously on Monday. The resolution puts the GOP in the position of voting... read more

posted by Nezua | 1 comment

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Weekly Pulse: Healthcare Bill Poised to Suck (10:40 am)

The Senate Finance Committee is reportedly very close to finishing its healthcare legislation. But as the bill’s details leak, anticipation is quickly turning to dejection in progressive healthcare circles. Early word has it that the almost finished a bill includes no public option, no employer mandate, and no insurance exchange. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly explains why the Senate Finance Committee bill is going to suck.

At TAPPED, Scott Lemieux argues that if the Senate legislation doesn’t have a public option or an employer mandate, we’d be better off not passing a healthcare bill. Conventional wisdom is that even a bad bill would be better than nothing: Once we get the basic infrastructure for universal healthcare in place, it will be easier to build on that rather than starting from scratch. However, as Lemieux points out, a bill with no public option would only further entrench the insurance industry and make it easier for them to block reforms in the future.

Remember that the bill that comes out of the Finance Committee still has to be reconciled with other versions, like the version from the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. So, it’s possible that progressive Senators will win some concessions. However, as we’ve discussed before, the Senate is the key to passing healthcare reform, and the Blue Dogs are the key to passing the bill in the Senate. Whatever comes out of the Finance Committee is going to carry a lot of weight with the Blue Dogs.

It’s no wonder we’re fighting over a bunch of lackluster options. As Isabel MacDonald observes in AlterNet, corporate-run media has virtually banished all talk of single-payer healthcare. If you’re a single-payer advocate and you want to get on TV, you have two options: Be Bernie Sanders or get arrested in the Senate.

Democrats should try implementing a radical progressive agenda one of these days—they’ll be accused of doing so, anyway. Amanda Marcotte of RH Reality Check notes that even though universal healthcare is more likely to cover iPods than abortions, mainstream media and the anti-reform brigade insist on discussing abortion funding as... read more

posted by Lindsay Beyerstein | 1 comment

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Weekly Audit: Why the Rich Can’t Afford to Get Richer (9:29 am)

If we want our economy to be strong and stable, we have to start thinking about it as a product of community—not a get rich quick scheme. As unemployment escalates and the housing crisis deepens, ordinary people are feeling the economic pinch. In the meantime, corporate executives and shareholders are coasting above the storm. If we want to tear down the useless casino that is Wall Street, our wealthiest citizens will have to pitch in when times get tough.

Salon carries an excellent three-part email exchange between Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund, and John Talbott, a reformed Goldman Sachs investment banker. Taken together, the emails constitute a thorough, in-depth analysis of the causes of the economic crisis, needed reforms and political hurdles to making policy changes. Johnson’s basic argument is as frightening as it is accurate: Bankers line our elected representatives’ pocketbooks, convincing them to re-write regulations that made big bonuses for bankers and a catastrophe for everyone else.

Some of Talbott’s most interesting observations concern Wall Street’s epic transformaiton. Over the past three decades, our financial sector has morphed from a kind of economic rebar to a wrecking ball. Once upon a time, the financial industry provided loans to businesses and entrepreneurs and funded constructive enterprises. Today, almost all of this activity has been replaced by hedge fund speculation. As a result of excessive deregulation, a wild array of complex transactions called derivatives have developed on Wall Street. Many derivatives, including the credit default swaps that brought down AIG, are intended to provide insurance against losses.

But this readily available “insurance” has removed any sense of risk from the minds of U.S. financiers. All kinds of casino experiments have come in play over the last several years because traders could insure any bet, however crazy, against losses. The whole point of a financial sector is to make sure that good ideas get funding. Instead, we’ve guaranteed that risky ideas gets funding, even when the idea is socially destructive and financially unsound, like, say, subprime lending.

As David Sirota emphasizes in Truthdig, this financial recklessness has... read more

posted by Zach Carter | 1 comment

Monday, July 27, 2009

Social Change for the Kids: Feminist Coloring Books and the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck (7:43 pm)

This is first of an occasionally-weekly ITT List series on ways social progressivism is reaching the next generation, both in America and worldwide. This edition’s topics: feminist coloring books and NYC’s Big Gay Ice Cream Truck.

Jezebel.com has a post this week about artists Julie Novak and Jacinta Bunnell, who have created coloring books for young children to combat the “Disney Princess” approach to femininity and gender roles. Instead of waiting to be rescued, the Rapunzel depicted in the aptly-titled Girls Are Not Chicks takes her future into her own hands with “some power tools, a pair of scissors, a roll of duct tape, a Tina Turner album and a bus pass.”

In its companion book, Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls, traditional gender roles are shattered; boys pick up baking supplies, girls drumsticks.

More information on the books can be found on the Girls Not Chicks website.

Douglas Quint started New York’s most-discussed dessert dispenser, the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, not necessarily to promote acceptance but to make some money with a unique summer enterprise. The truck has been featured in a number of articles and blog posts over the past several weeks, most highlighting its distinctive offerings (most notably cayenne pepper as a topping and the “choinkwich,” a chocolate ice cream sandwich with caramelized bacon) as opposed to its colorful, heteronormativity-stomping logo.

But the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck’s added consequence, gradually dismantling homophobia (particularly in language) among the NYC youths who buy the truck’s treats, is not to be ignored. An excerpt from one of Quint’s blog posts sheds some light on the truck’s larger implications:

Lots of kids- most seem to be tourists- point at the truck banners. They tell their parents “it says GAY on it!” The first time I didn’t think much of it, but it happens consistently and I’ve started to pay attention to how the parents react to their child. Usually the kid is between 7 and 12, I’d say. You can tell that they only think of the word ‘gay’ as an insult. The parents brush it off.... read more

posted by Lindsay Eanet | 1 comment

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Weekly Mulch: Market-Driven Sustainability (9:01 am)

Last week, Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil and the American Automobile Association (AAA) announced new programs that promote sustainability and a cleaner planet. The three corporations may have turned over a new leaf, but their efforts may actually be a case of corporate greenwashing. In today’s economic climate, many companies are taking advantage of consumers that don’t have the funds to be choosy about the environmental-friendliness of their purchases.

Wal-Mart announced its plans to develop a sustainability index to measure the environmental impact of its products, establish international sustainability standards and offer transparency to consumers. This program, described by The American Prospect’s Alexandra Gutierrez as “nutrition labeling, but for the planet,” is very ambitious. Wal-Mart will work with a consortium of universities, retailers and government agencies to determine each products ranking over its life cycle, then relay that information back to consumers.

But when has Wal-Mart ever acted in the environment’s best interests? In a two-part blog for Sojourners, Tracey Bianchi writes skeptically about Wal-Mart’s ulterior motive, given the corporation’s reputation of using unethical business practices to maximize profits.

“Wal-Mart’s green claims are good, but the reality is that they are not a free ride to environmental bliss. They are, at best, a $400+ billion change in the way we do business in the global marketplace. At worst, they are greenwashing and a sort of salve to the part of our soul that silently moans, “’How you consume comes with a price tag that you cannot afford,’” Bianchi writes.

But at the end of the day, Wal-Mart’s true intentions are irrelevant, says Jodi Kasten in Salon. As the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart has an incredible amount of influence over which products are made and sold. The company can use its clout and market-driven incentives to curb pollution and implement environmental changes. This approach could yield more effective results than climate change legislation. Retailers who might be willing to flout the law aren’t willing to risk losing customers.

“Uncovering greenwashing is an Olympic sport amongst environmental activists. I’m all for that. I think that abuse of the systems which are already in place give consumers... read more