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Climate Progress

Power Shift 2011: Climate Youth Mobilize For The Largest Organizer Training In History

By Brad Johnson on Apr 11, 2011 at 8:30 pm

Power Shift 2011, the biennial national summit of the youth climate movement, begins this Friday in Washington, DC. The challenges facing the Millennial generation posed by the dirty energy economy is seemingly insurmountable: the destruction of our planet’s atmosphere, the poisoning of our political discourse, the dissolution of the American Dream. Armed with the vision of a cleaner, greener, future, the participants in Power Shift are choosing not just to fight back, but to organize and realize their collective potential.

This year, the conference is focused on movement building, with the intent of being the largest organizer training session in history. As many as 10,000 youth activists will be trained in community organizing, facilitation, and campaign leadership, led by professionals from the New Organizing Institute, founded by Judith Freeman and Zach Exley, using the knowledge built by the likes of Marshall Ganz. The conference is departing from the earlier Power Shifts in 2007 and 2009 with the recognition that the youth climate movement can’t simply be part of the “chorus of advocates simply calling for change,” but must emerge “into a position of leadership“:

As the largest generation in American history, we are ready to build the green economy city by city, to transform higher education, to join forces on the ground with our religious and local community leaders so together we can build the future we know is essential for our long term success as a nation.

Over the course of Power Shift, participants will work through a series of sessions to learn powerful skills to share their own stories, create powerful strategies to motivate others in collective action, and lay the groundwork to launch grassroots campaigns across the country. The organizing trainings will condense what is usually a week-long course in progressive leadership methods into two four-hour sessions, Saturday and Sunday morning.

Sunday afternoon will be spent on action-oriented training on lobbying and nonviolent direct action, preparing participants for protests and lobbying Congress on Monday, April 18.

This ambitious schedule means that participants will have to choose just three from among over 100 panels taking place Saturday afternoon, ranging from panels on the Koch brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to workshops on sustainable agriculture and weatherization training. Or participants can instead join the Clean Economy Canvass, hitting the streets of Washington DC with Weatherize DC to teach homeowners about how they can participate in the green economy.

Keynotes will be delivered by climate leaders like Al Gore, Van Jones, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Bill McKibben. However, this year the real leadership will come from the Millennial generation, who are preparing for the awesome challenge of inheriting this earth.

Update

Follow @PowerShift11 and @EnergyAction on Twitter. On Facebook: Power Shift 2011. Although online registration is closed, anyone can show up at the convention center and sign up.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 11, 2011 at 8:10 pm

Wasn’t that your heart?

— If you want people who “make money off the community” to “serve the interests of the community” higher booze taxes make more sense than denying people liquor licenses.

— Big Ag demands the right to pollute California’s Central Valley.

— AP shocked to discover that women drink bourbon.

— The transformation of retirement strikes me as the solution to the problem of wage-slavery, and not a problem to be solved.

— When it comes to macroeconomic shocks that worry me, I’m an oil man.

The Blow, “Pardon Me”.

Economy

Owned By The World’s Largest ‘Charity’ Organization To Dodge Taxes, IKEA Thwarts Union Organizing

By Guest Blogger on Apr 11, 2011 at 7:55 pm

Three years after an IKEA factory moved to the small blue collar town of Danville, VA, the international furniture giant has become the center of a union battle, racial discrimination complaints, and high turnover from disgruntled employees.

Workers at the Danville IKEA plant say they are forced to work at a frantic pace, participate in mandatory overtime — possibly facing disciplinary action for not showing up — and raises have been eliminated. Six African American employees have filed discrimination complaints, claiming that they were assigned to the least-wanted third shift and forced to work in the lowest-paying departments. Moreover, while making a profit of $2.2 billion in 2009 and a 7 percent sales increase in 2010, the hourly wage in the Virginia IKEA packing department was slashed from $9.75 to $8.00. Attempts at forming a union have also been thwarted by IKEA, as some of the 335 IKEA workers in Virginia signed cards expressing interest in forming a union with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. But, in response, IKEA hired the law firm Jackson Lewis — known for keeping unions out of companies — and workers were required to attend meetings where the management highly discouraged union membership.

A colossal difference exists between IKEA laborers in Sweden and Virginia:

Vacation Days Per Year Salary Per Hour
IKEA workers in Sweden 5 weeks off $19/hour
IKEA workers in America 4 days off selected by workers, 8 days selected by management $8/hour


But some IKEA employees work for even lower wages and have no benefits, as IKEA draws one-third of its workers from temporary-staffing agencies. These conditions have caused Bill Street, who tried to organize IKEA workers with the machinists union, to say that it’s “ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico.”

What’s more perplexing is that while busting unions and paying workers low wages, IKEA is owned by the world’s richest charity organization. The parent company of IKEA is the private Dutch-registered Ingka Holding, which, in turn, is owned by the tax-exempt, non-profit entity Stichting Ingka Foundation (SIF). With a mission dedicated to “innovation in the field of architectural and interior design,” the Economist valued SIF at $36 billion in 2006.

The net worth of SIF outstrips that of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation — valued at $33.5 billion in 2009, a full three years after SIF’s conservative estimate of $36 billion. But its grant of only $1.7 million annually to the Lund Institute — “barely a rounding error in the foundation’s assets” — shows that SIF, technically classified as a charity organization, is not about good deeds. As a comparison, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dispersed $1.645 billion towards curing the diseases affecting the world’s poor. Even more striking, the money SIF has acquired from IKEA, while in the tax haven Netherlands, is used “for investing long-term in order to build a reserve for securing the IKEA group, in case of any future capital requirements.” Whereas, the grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are used to “improve access to advances in global health and learning.”

– Paul Breer

Yglesias

Is Our Economic Growth Fake?

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 11, 2011 at 7:30 pm

Karl Marx’s account of economics hews in many ways more closely to the classical economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo than does the modern mainstream. In part as a result, you sometimes see left-right convergence in dissents from the mainstream. Thus one way of thinking about Duncan Foley’s paper “The Political Economy of U.S. Output and Employment 2001–2010″ is as a left-wing version of Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation argument and, indeed, Foley makes the link to Marxist and classical accounts explicit. Here’s the core of his argument:

Service industries such as Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, Education and Health Services, and Professional and Business Services, for which value added is imputed from incomes, are included in Gross Domestic Product, distorting measures of recession and recovery. An alternative index, Narrow Measured Value Added, which excludes all services, has similar historic correlations with employment to GDP, and tracks employment in recent business cycles better. The U.S. economy as measured by NMVA has a lower long-term real rate of growth. Long-term macroeconomic policy requires attention to some version of the productive-unproductive labor distinction of the classical political economists.

To the extent that you focus on finance as a source of phantom GDP, this will read as a left-wing argument. To the extent that you focus on health care and education as a source of phantom GDP, it will read as a right-wing argument. My view is that this style of argumentation went out in favor of accepting market prices at face value for some pretty good reasons. Does the superior aesthetic design of a Mac laptop “really” make it more valuable than a PC laptop with similar tech specs? I don’t know how we would know except with reference to the fact that consumers seem to be willing to pay more.

Justice

The Next Frontier In Voting Rights: Online Voter Registration

By Scott Keyes on Apr 11, 2011 at 7:25 pm

For all of the fringe theorizing that our president was not born in the United States, one fact remains about his election in 2008: seven in ten adult Americans did not vote for Barack Obama. And Obama’s 30 percent far surpassed the vote percentages of his predecessors: Bush (28 percent and 25 percent), Clinton (24 percent twice), and Bush Sr. (27 percent). Indeed, even in an election that many considered the most important in their lifetime, nearly 100 million voting-age Americans skipped the ballot box in 2008.

A chief reason why people don’t vote is quite simple: they aren’t registered. Indeed, while approximately 57 percent of voting-eligible adults cast their ballots in 2008, turnout among those who were registered to vote topped 70 percent. In 2006, the disparity was even more pronounced: turnout was 20 points higher for eligible adult citizens who were registered to vote compared to those who weren’t. Yet more than 40 states bar their citizens from registering on Election Day; many states require citizens to register a month before an election.

One way in which states are trying to combat low voter turnout is by allowing citizens to register to vote online. Currently, most states require voter registration forms to be submitted in hard copy. However, 11 states across the ideological spectrum have opted to permit residents to register via the Internet. These states include:

- Alaska
- Arizona
- California*
- Colorado
- Indiana
- Kansas
- Louisiana
- Nevada (Clark County only)
- Oregon
- Utah
- Washington

Numerous other states have also introduced legislation to enable online voter registration, including Hawaii, Nebraska, Maryland, and Mississippi.

Erin Ferns Lee of Project Vote lays out the benefits of online voter registration:

Electronic registration is purportedly cost-effective: in Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, an electronic application reportedly costs about $0.03, compared to $0.83 per paper registration. With only 77 percent of voting eligible Americans registered to vote in 2008, online voter registration may be a welcome reform, particularly for young Americans who are simultaneously the most likely to have Internet access (88%) but least likely to be registered to vote (61%), according to a 2009 Project Vote memo by consultant, Jody Herman.

The Pew Center on the States also studied Arizona and Washington’s experiences with online voter registration during the 2008 election. They found that online registration boosted younger voters, a group that has traditionally exhibited low turnout. In addition, Pew found that the system increased voter list accuracy, streamlined the process for government officials, and enjoyed overwhelming public support.

Citizens are already permitted to pay taxes and register for Selective Service online; barring voter registration from the Web makes little sense. Indeed, modernizing our voter registration methods is nothing new. In 1993, President Clinton signed the National Voter Registration Act (popularly known as the “Motor Voter Act”) which allowed for voter registration at government agencies like the DMV. Eighteen years later, it is time for more states to take the next step and update their registration systems by allowing for online voter registration.

Thanks to Erin Ferns Lee of Project Vote for research assistance.

*- California is projected to implement online voter registration in 2012. The legislation has passed, but it will not go into effect until the state complies with the 2002 Help America Vote Act’s statewide voter registration database provision.

Climate Progress

As record drought hits Texas, Congressional delegation votes to deny climate change

By Joe Romm on Apr 11, 2011 at 7:19 pm

Our guest blogger is Nick Sundt, Director of Climate Change Communications at the World Wildlife Fund, and a longtime forest firefighter.

Last Thursday, all but one of the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas voted for H.R. 910 to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding that greenhouse gas pollution threatens the health and welfare of Americans with a wide range of impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts and wildfires. One Texas Republican (Rep. Michael Burgess) abstained and one Texas Democrat (Rep. Henry Cuellar) also supported the measure. The measure passed the House (255 Ayes, 172 Nays), with no Republicans voting against it. 19 Democrats also voted in favor of the legislation.

The vote came immediately after Texas experienced its driest March on record, and as nearly 98 percent of the state is experiencing drought conditions. This includes 60 percent that is experiencing “severe” drought and 5 percent experiencing “exceptional” drought, the most extreme category. The National Drought Summary from the National Drought Mitigation Center on April 5th reports:

Read more

Yglesias

The Base

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 11, 2011 at 6:41 pm

Barack Obama continues to deliver results that his electoral base likes:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday indicates that the budget agreement that prevented a government shutdown is popular, with Americans supporting it by a 58 to 38 percent margin. But there’s a partisan divide, with two-thirds of Democrats and a majority of independent voters backing the deal, and Republicans divided.

It’s important for people to be clear on the asymmetries of American politics. Strongly identified conservatives are the base of the Republican Party, in a way that strongly identified progressives just aren’t the base of the Democratic Party. My guess is that just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats. Naturally that ends up skewing the landscape in terms of outcomes.

Politics

Alan Simpson On GOP: ‘We Have Homophobes In Our Party’

By Zack Ford on Apr 11, 2011 at 6:25 pm

On MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews today, former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), co-chair of President Obama’s debt commission, railed against the social conservatives in the Republican party. He admonished male legislators for voting on abortion issues and “homophobes” like Rick Santorum who say “cruel, cruel things” about gays and lesbians:

SIMPSON: Who the hell is for abortion? I don’t know anybody running around with a sign that says, “Have an abortion! They’re wonderful!” They’re hideous, but they’re a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don’t think men legislators should even vote on the issue.

Then you’ve got homosexuality, you’ve got Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We have homophobes on our party. That’s disgusting to me. We’re all human beings. We’re all God’s children. Now if they’re going to get off on that stuff—Santorum has said some cruel things—cruel, cruel things—about homosexuals. Ask him about it; see if he attributes the cruelness of his remarks years ago. Foul.

Now if that’s the kind of guys that are going to be on my ticket, you know, it makes you sort out hard what Reagan said, you know, “Stick with your folks.” But, I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, moral values—while you’re diddling your secretary while you’re giving a speech on moral values? Come on, get off of it.

Watch it:

Simpson could be referring to any number of leading Republican presidential contenders, including Newt Gingrich, who recently defended his support of the anti-gay American Family Association, Mike Huckabee, who “would love the world to be led by people who have a Biblical worldview, or Tim Pawlenty, who will never be at the point where he sees same-sex relationships as the same as traditional marriage.

LGBT

Alan Simpson On GOP: ‘We Have Homophobes In Our Party’

By Zack Ford on Apr 11, 2011 at 6:21 pm

On MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews today, former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), co-chair of President Obama’s debt commission, railed against the social conservatives in the Republican party. He admonished male legislators for voting on abortion issues and “homophobes” like Rick Santorum who say “cruel, cruel things” about gays and lesbians:

SIMPSON: Who the hell is for abortion? I don’t know anybody running around with a sign that says, “Have an abortion! They’re wonderful!” They’re hideous, but they’re a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don’t think men legislators should even vote on the issue.

Then you’ve got homosexuality, you’ve got Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We have homophobes on our party. That’s disgusting to me. We’re all human beings. We’re all God’s children. Now if they’re going to get off on that stuff—Santorum has said some cruel things—cruel, cruel things—about homosexuals. Ask him about it; see if he attributes the cruelness of his remarks years ago. Foul.

Now if that’s the kind of guys that are going to be on my ticket, you know, it makes you sort out hard what Reagan said, you know, “Stick with your folks.” But, I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, moral values—while you’re diddling your secretary while you’re giving a speech on moral values? Come on, get off of it.

Watch it:

Simpson could be referring to any number of leading Republican presidential contenders, including Newt Gingrich, who recently defended his support of the anti-gay American Family Association, Mike Huckabee, who “would love the world to be led by people who have a Biblical worldview, or Tim Pawlenty, who will never be at the point where he sees same-sex relationships as the same as traditional marriage.

Alyssa

Another Week of Ice and Fire

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 11, 2011 at 6:13 pm

Over at The Atlantic, where we’re running a roundtable on HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s series. My contribution, a piece on Game of Thrones‘ place in between aspirational fantasy like Harry Potter and Twilight and grim realism like The Wire, is up:

Instead, there’s the grinding brutality of quasi-medieval life. And it is brutal. There are two beheadings in the show’s first 15 minutes. Men choke to death on their own blood when they’re wounded in tournaments, and kill their horses after unsuccessful jousts. When a young princess has sex with her Ghengis Khan-like husband for the first time, the camera watches her weep as he undresses her, prying her hands away from her body as she tries to hold up her clothes. It may not be the same as watching Dr. Melfi get raped in a parking lot stairwell on The Sopranos, but the emotions are no less complicated, and the physical and emotional discomfort that play across her face are no less real.


It’s not that other fantasy series don’t create lovable characters or compelling anti-heroes and put them through a lot. But there’s an ugly edge to Game of Thrones that’s absent in some of the other most popular fantasy series of our times. Harry’s encounter with a snake inhabiting the body of a dead woman in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a genuinely creepy passage, but the horror serves a higher purpose: forging Harry into a hero and cementing his emotional bond with his lost parents. Similarly, there’s something pristine about Bella Swan’s ordeals in the Twilight books: whether she’s being physically attacked, risking death by exposure, or sacrificing herself to save her unborn child in a truly stomach-churning caesarean section, her pain is a sign of her fortitude and purity, proof of her special goodness. Frodo Baggins is, for religious skeptic J.R.R. Tolkien, the closest thing that exists to a martyr in the Lord of the Rings. Those stories tell us about ourselves and our world only by inference: They are better than we are, but that doesn’t give us much of a benchmark as to whether we are all saved or fallen.

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