SIGN THE PETITION HERE!

Oil companies and other pipeline advocates argued that the nation must choose between jobs and the environment. But in an era of climate crisis, this is a false choice: there will be no jobs on a dead planet. Building the Keystone pipeline will throw open the spigot to the Tar Sands in Canada, considered the dirtiest oil on the planet, and drive us ever closer to climate catastrophe.

Hurricanes, floods, and droughts are already having a devastating effect on American jobs, and that is nothing compared to what will happen in the future if Tar Sands carbon and the other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not rapidly reduced. The way to solve the economic catastrophe facing our working people is to go to work solving our climate catastrophe.

But at the same time, workers need jobs now. That’s why it is urgent that we begin investing in a new sustainable economy that puts people to work mitigating climate change. Rather than polluting pipelines, we need to create ‘climate jobs’ that retrofit buildings, green our eroding water and transportation systems, and build a new alternative infrastructure for the future.

So we are asking LNS members to join the 24-hour blitz to gather 500,000 signatures by noon on Tuesday. LNS and other pipeline opponents are rapidly assembling an online army of Davids to take on Big Oil’s Goliath. Bloggers are lining up to help spread the word. Celebrities are preparing to tweet up a storm. Activists in DC are preparing to deliver box after box of signatures to the Senate on Tuesday morning.

President Obama did the right thing when he stood up to Big Oil and stopped Keystone XL. Now it’s time for the Senate to follow his lead. The sustainability movement might not win this round of the Keystone fight — Big Oil has more money than God, after all. But one thing’s for certain: if any Senator thought that the movement would roll over and stop fighting Keystone XL, they’ve got another thing coming.

List of Partners
Credo Mobile, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, Moveon, League of Conservation Voters, CCAN, Solar Mosaic, Environmental Action, Center for Biological Diversity, Labor Network for Sustainability, Oil Change, Bold Nebraska, Rainforest Action Network, US Climate Action Network, Patagonia, Indigenous Environmental Network, Public Citizen, Green for All, Sierra Club, Rebuild the Dream, Energy Action Coalition

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are taking a well-deserved victory lap. The Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada’s pipeline proposal — at least for now — represents an historic win for the environmental movement, and reveals the potency of the emerging alignment between the environmental, anti-corporate, Occupy, and other movements.

Real strides were also made to bridge the divide between environmental groups and unions. While Republicans relentlessly attacked environmentalists as “job killers,” groups like 350.org, Sierra Club, and NRDC reached out to unions early and often, and as a result, six labor unions came out in support of President Obama’s decision to oppose the permit. Not since the “Battle in Seattle” have we seen such diverse and robust coalitions.

But the Keystone campaign also exposed the perennial Achilles’ heel of those who are fighting against climate change: We are often painted by our opponents and perceived by the public as caring more about the environment than about jobs. In a press release titled “U.S. Chamber Calls Politically-Charged Decision to Deny Keystone a Job Killer,” the Chamber of Commerce said President Obama’s denial of the KXL permit was “sacrificing tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs in the short term, and many more than that in the long term.” And its messaging worked, with the media repeating the jobs vs. environment frame again and again. NPR’s headline was typical of many: “Pipeline Decision Pits Jobs Against Environment.”

Where should those proposals come from? As the six labor unions that opposed the KXL pipeline permit pointed out, one source can be the jobs programs that Republican politicians are currently blocking in Congress, like the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, which would boost employment by almost 2.3 million jobs in 2012 and almost 3.1 million jobs in 2013; the extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide for critical infrastructure repair; and initiatives to fund jobs for teachers, firefighters, and police. It’s time for the environmental movement to put the spotlight on the way climate-denying politicians are crying crocodile tears over a few hundred or thousand jobs while blocking millions of jobs unemployed American workers could be hired to do right now.

If we fail to become the voice for both the planet and workers, our movement risks losing the support of increasing numbers of workers, unions, and their political allies. The fossil-fuel industry and its allies know that working families are likely to prioritize bread-and-butter issues over environmental protection, especially in recessionary times. Right-wing forces are counting on the “job killing” message to drive ordinary Americans into the arms of the climate-denying Republican Party. Together, environmental and labor movements can defeat them by presenting a better jobs program to American workers — one that addresses the climate and economic crises at the same time.

Why in the world were protesters occupying the Wisconsin statehouse wearing “King Tut” headdresses?  And why were orders for pizza coming into Madison, Wisconsin from Cairo, Egypt?

The story begins around 1500 BC, when Egyptian workers at Deir El-Medina hadn’t been paid for three weeks by their notoriously corrupt supervisors.  They stopped work and walked out.  It may be history’s first recorded strike.

Fast-forward thirty-five hundred or so years to the very end of 2006 AD.  Another group of Egyptian workers, angered at the denial of their promised year-end bonus and the corruption of their managers, quit work and shut down their workplaces.  The strike by Mahala El-Kobra textile workers startled the Egyptian people, and apparently the government and the government-owned employer as well.

The strike started with night-shift workers who were enraged at the company’s decision not to pay a bonus that had been promised by Egypt’s Prime Minister Ahem Nazif.  The next day they were joined by the day shift, who occupied the plant and a nearby street.  Government security forces surrounded the area and cut off electricity to the plant.  Eventually 27,000 workers were involved, including 4,000 women, who said they were “standing up for their children.”

After five days, the government retreated and offered to restore the bonuses.  An employee reported that on return to work, “The cashiers were sitting to greet the workers” with their back pay “the minute they walked into work.”

In 2006 I was helping start a tiny NGO called Global Labor Strategies.  We called it a “bridge building” organization; our purpose was to help workers and their allies connect across the borders of an every more globalizing world.  While the strike was virtually unreported in the US media, I discovered information about it on the web and wrote it up for the GLS blog.

A couple of years later there was another strike in Mahalla.  This time a small organization of student and youth activists formed to support the strikers.  They set up a Facebook page and called a demonstration on April 6.  Thereafter they began referring to themselves as the April 6 movement.  After the strike was over they continued their social networking site with lively debates on freedom of speech, government nepotism, and economic stagnation.  By 2010 they had 70,000 Facebook friends.

On December 17, 2010, an impoverished Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, after repeated police harassment, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire in a city 190 miles south of Tunis to protest the economic and political conditions he and his country were subjected to.  Within a week, seven other Tunisians had done the same.  What seemed like futile acts of despair inspired massive protests.  With hundreds of thousands of protesters refusing to let business as usual go on, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s ruler for a quarter of a century, was forced to flee and a transitional government made preparations to hold elections under a new, democratic constitution.

Egyptians watched the unfolding events in Tunisia with fascination.  They too faced grinding poverty and a tyrannical government supported from abroad that used violence and torture to repress opposition while looting billions of dollars by means of corruption.  A few small groups, including the April 6 movement, began calling for Egypt to undergo a democratization like that in Tunisia.  They used Facebook and other new social media to get out the word.  They started holding street meetings in Cairo neighborhoods.  To their surprise, large numbers came out in the poor neighborhoods and supported the idea of an “Egyptian Tunisia.”  They began holding daily demonstrations in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square (Arabic for “Liberation Square”) calling for Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic president for thirty years, to go.

Over the course of two weeks the demonstrations swelled.  Men and women, Sunni, Shia, and Christian marched side by side.  Initially the established opposition parties and organizations stayed aloof from the protests, but gradually they began to join in.  Meanwhile the hated security police launched repeated attacks on the demonstrators.  The Army began to roll into Liberation Square with its troops and tanks and its airplanes flying overhead.  Then suddenly the police withdrew and the army high command issued a statement that it would not fire on the protesters.

The United States, which had provided Mubarak’s regime with more than sixty billion dollars over the previous thirty years and maintained a close relationship with Mubarak and the Egyptian military, expressed strong support for Mubarak. But as the number of demonstrators multiplied, the US began to distance itself from the regime.  Within a week, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was declaring, “Mubarak must go.”

Meanwhile, the protests continued to swell, not only in Cairo but throughout the country.  The army troops fraternized with the demonstrators; a young woman told reporters that demonstrators in Liberation Square were arranging a football match with the soldiers.  As the police disappeared from the streets, people in Cairo neighborhoods began organizing their own neighborhood watches.  Workers throughout the country began to conduct strikes, some seeking to establish unions and win wage increases, others calling for the removal of the regime.

On February 1, 2011 a “Million Man March” indeed produced something like a million protesters in Liberation Square calling on Mubarak to leave.  It was widely reported that he was about to do so.  Instead, he went on television and gave a speech making a few concessions but pledging that he would fill out his term and that he would “die on Egyptian soil.”  Commentators observed that he should be careful what he said.

The protestors felt betrayed; a wave of rage pervaded the entire country. Within six hours, the senior officers of the army announced that Mubarak had “resigned” and that an officer’s council had taken power.  They also announced that they would establish a transitional government that would establish a new democratic constitution and hold democratic elections.  Large demonstrations continued in Liberation Square and throughout the country insisting that they indeed do so.

Early on in the Egyptian demonstrations, I saw a young woman being pressured by a TV journalist to name those she considered leaders.  After repeatedly trying to explain that people were acting on their own, finally in exasperation she pointed around the crowd and said, “Right now it looks like we have half-a-million leaders.”  Her words reminded me of the group of “Wobblies” – members of the Industrial Workers of the World union — nearly a century before:  Asked who their leaders were, they replied, “We’ve got no leaders — we’re all leaders.”

To many people the events in Egypt revealed a courage, a solidarity, an activism, and an intelligence that seemed to violate their very sense of what is possible.  Many commentators on the scene said things like, “These are not the Egyptians I know,” and “This is a new Egypt.”  At Graterford prison outside Philadelphia, where many of the inmates were glued to the television watching scenes of rebellion in Egypt, a life prisoner named Charles Coley came up to a friend of mine in the hall and summed up a response shared by many around the world: “I just didn’t know that people had it in them.”

The Egyptian upheaval electrified the entire Middle East.  Popular upheavals rocked Bahrain, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.  Demonstrations in Jordan and Yemen led to the firing and replacement of the entire cabinet.  Demonstrations in Libya turned into civil war followed by NATO and Arab League military intervention.  Comparing them to the upheavals that brought the overthrow of Communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, commentators began referring to these events as the “Arab Spring.”

But the impact of events in the Middle East didn’t stop at the boundaries of the region.  Students planning anti-government actions in London called for turning Trafalgar Square into a British Tahrir Square; nearly half a million people turned out for the demonstration protesting public spending cuts.#  As faculty, staff, and fifteen thousand demonstrators backed Puerto Rican students protesting the military occupation of their campus and the repression of freedom of speech and assembly, newscasters compared them to the protestors in Tahrir Square; US Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez said it reflected “a lesson the people of Egypt taught the world last week: Brutal laws and secret meetings and armed enforcers don’t extinguish the flame of justice – they are the spark that makes it burn brighter.”#  At a demonstration in Mexico City, Martin Esparza, Secretary General of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, called for a peaceful civilian insurgency, taking its example from the events in Egypt.#

The ripples even reached the United States.  At the same time as the Egyptian upheaval, a string of right-wing state governors were taking office with the backing of the “Tea Party” and wealthy energy company executives.  In Ohio, Indiana, and many other states they seized on budget crises to pass laws restricting or completely eliminating the right of public employees to be represented by unions.

The epicenter of the struggle was Wisconsin, where newly-elected governor Scott Walker introduced legislation to abolish collective bargaining for teachers, social workers, and most other government employees.  Students and workers began holding demonstrations in the state capitol rotunda in Madison to protest the new anti-labor laws.  First there were hundreds, then thousands.  Eventually more than 100,000 people were occupying the building.  It represented the largest demonstration in Wisconsin at least since the Vietnam war.

According to a news report, “Many protestors appeared to be taking inspiration from the recent democratic uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, with some even wearing King Tut hats.”#  Orders for pizza for the demonstrators poured in from around the world — including some from Cairo.  And, parodying a famous pop song titled Walk Like an Egyptian, bumper stickers appeared reading “March Like an Egyptian.”

The events in Wisconsin were as unanticipated as those in Egypt.  Yet from 1500 BC to today, history shows that nothing is as predictable as unpredictable popular upheavals.

What does the future hold for the relationship between environmentalism and organized labor? Judging from the highly-publicized controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline, America might appear to be entering a new era of conflict over environmental protection versus jobs. But in a recent speech to the UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka opens the way for expanded labor-environment cooperation around climate protection. Trumka argues that addressing the climate crisis is the way to address the jobs crisis. He calls for a new dialogue between labor and environmental movements based on that frame. Yet he also repeats some of the arguments and allegations that have fuelled labor-environmental conflict in the past. How should labor activists who care about climate and environmental advocates who care about workers respond?

The climate threat
President Trumka begins with a forthright statement of the climate threat. “Scientists tell us we are headed ever more swiftly toward irreversible climate change - with catastrophic consequences for human civilization.” And far from being a threat only in a distant future, “Climate change is happening now.” That demands action: “The carbon emissions from that coal, and from oil and natural gas, and agriculture and so much other human activity - causes global warming, and we have to act to cut those emissions, and act now.”

While the AFL-CIO has gradually accepted the reality of man-made global warming, this represents a far more forceful statement of the severity of the problem and the urgency of action. However, the AFL-CIO still has not endorsed even the minimal targets for carbon reduction proposed by the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), let alone the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million that America’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, says is necessary to prevent those “catastrophic consequences for human civilization.” Having recognized the reality of the threat, it’s time for the AFL-CIO to endorse the cuts in carbon necessary to forestall them.

Climate jobs
President Trumka poses the question whether the climate threat is something we should disregard in the face of our global economic problems. Again his position is forthright: “Addressing climate risk is not a distraction” from solving our economic problems. Indeed, it is critical to the solution. “Every factory and power plant, every home and office, every rail line and highway, every vehicle, locomotive and plane, every school and hospital, must be modernized, upgraded, renovated or replaced with something cleaner, more efficient, less wasteful.” That means “retooling our world.” And that means there is plenty of work to be done. “If we are going to rebuild, restore, modernize or replace everything we inherited in just 30 years” we need “the skill and effort of all of us.”

Trumka recognizes that this will not happen simply through current market forces. “By themselves, capital markets will not properly incorporate climate risk and reward into pricing investment opportunities.” Investors need “government policies to make sure that critical investments get made - investments in building retrofits, in high speed rail and the smart grid, in carbon capture and sequestration.”

Trumka does not discuss what kind of economic tools may be required. Such a discussion should certainly be part of any proposed labor-environmental dialogue.

While “putting a price on carbon” is necessary, both labor and environmental movements need to recognize that it is not likely to be adequate. Trumka observes that “not since World War II” have Americans “faced an equivalent national challenge.” But that challenge was not met by letting companies that failed to shift to war production to buy “permits” that exempted them from such responsibilities. It was met by a combination of economic planning, public investment, and national resource allocation. The government contracted with corporations to produce for wartime needs or met them itself; nonessential production was curtailed; and resources were allocated to the war effort. The result was the greatest investment in production the world had ever seen and the creation of millions of jobs. That is the kind and scale of effort that will be necessary for “retooling our world.”

Trumka says “we as a nation must return to the work of passing a climate bill.” But to be effective in protecting the climate or creating jobs, such a bill will need to be far different from the climate bills that emerged in Congress in 2009. For one thing, those bills largely exempted the largest carbon polluters from making serious reductions in their emissions. For another, they relied on “cap and trade” incentives to encourage companies to make carbon-reducing investments. They did not provide for the necessary public investment in new infrastructure that is necessary to move to a low-carbon economy. And they did not provide for a just transition for workers and communities impacted by climate policies. Although as Trumka notes climate legislation is currently blocked by the domination of climate deniers in Congress, labor and environmentalists need to start a dialogue now on such a new approach so that a powerful coalition can be drawn together for legislation that offers real solutions to both our climate and our jobs problem.

A just transition: A matter of justice
President Trumka points out that “too often, we have failed to consider who bears the cost of change and ensure that change is managed fairly and respectfully.” He calls for “those who care about climate change” to “engage with the people whose livelihoods are tied up with carbon emissions.” Any other approach is “fundamentally unfair.”

“We must ask ourselves, ‘How well does this pathway serve the least, the hardest to reach, the most likely to be left behind.’ Places like West Virginia and the Ohio Valley must come first, not last.” In short, we need a “Just Transition to a low carbon-emissions economy.”

It is entirely appropriate for organized labor to pose environmentalists the challenge of making a “just transition” to a low-carbon emissions world. But such a transition will inevitably impact some of those whose livelihoods are “tied up with carbon emissions.” Organized labor needs to develop a strategy for protecting the livelihoods of people that is compatible with changing the jobs they do.

A just transition: A political necessity for climate protection
President Trumka says “we are not acting fast enough” in response to the climate crisis, and he asks why that should be when “tens of millions need work, when investors have billions in cash parked making almost nothing and the risks of doing nothing are mounting?”

He says an important part of the answer lies in the fact that many people see climate protection as threatening their jobs and economic wellbeing. In many places “there is fear that the ‘green economy’ will turn into another version of the radical inequality that now haunts our society - another economy that works for the 1% and not for the 99%.” He asks “why, in an economy without an effective safety net, would the good men and women of my hometown [Nemacolin, PA] and a thousand places like it surrender their whole lives and sit by while others try to force them to bear the cost of change.”

Dealing with their concerns is essential for climate protection. “Addressing climate risk” is a path that is only open “if it is a path to an economy that works for the 99% who seek good jobs, economic security and healthy communities - not just in New York, but in Nemacolin, and in countries around the world, from Australia to Poland to South Africa to China, countries that face the same issues and share the same climate with you and me.”

To get there, Trumka calls for “those who care about climate change” to “engage with the people whose livelihoods are tied up with carbon emissions.” Investors, companies, workers, environmental activists, governments - need to be part of this dialogue. “Any other approach to addressing climate risk is not just fundamentally unfair, it simply won’t work in our democracy.”

Coal
President Trumka is the son and grandson of coal miners, and was the president of the United Mine Workers Union before becoming president of the AFL-CIO. So it is not surprising that he puts the issues of coal front and center. His main theme is right on target: The basic principle that those who work in coal producing and using industries should not pay the cost of a socially necessary transition. But there are a number of factual and analytical issues that need to be looked at with a critical eye.

Trumka says that Mayor Bloomberg advocates that we stop burning coal “this afternoon” and “cut the power in the U.S. grid by 50 percent.” He adds, if we did, “He’d be reading handwritten memos by candlelight this evening.” Bloomberg did indeed give the Sierra Club a $50 million grant to campaign to move “beyond coal.” What the Sierra Club is calling for, however, is not an instant shutdown of all coal-fired power plants but a planned closing of at most a third of the nation’s oldest coal-fired power plants by 2020.

A thoughtfully planned transition from coal to other forms of power has been the basis for labor-environmental cooperation in phasing out coal-fired power plants in places like Centralia, Washington and Madison, Wisconsin in ways that cut emissions while protecting workers. Labor-environmental-community dialogue is required to develop such plans for a worker-friendly transition beyond coal. But the only concrete proposal Trumka advocates for coal is to assure that companies that commit to retrofits to reduce mercury and sulfur emissions will have time enough to complete them.

A just transition for coal miners
Part of the environmental-labor dialogue needs to be a far broader approach to the wellbeing of coal-related workers and communities.

Trumka speaks eloquently about the role of coal in his hometown of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, where his father and grandfather were coal miners. He says that when folks in Nemacolin hear the slogan “End Coal,” it sounds like “a threat to destroy the value of our homes, to shut our schools and churches, to drive us away from the place our parents and grandparents are buried, to take away the work that for more than a hundred years has made us who we are.”

However, the traditional mining that Trumka describes is steadily becoming a thing of the past. In Appalachia the accessible coal seams have almost all been used up. Instead, in Appalachia coal is increasingly produced by techniques like mountaintop removal that devastate the environment but create few jobs. Meanwhile, most of the industry has shifted to the West. Wyoming produces nearly three times as much coal as West Virginia, yet Wyoming employed fewer than 6,000 coal miners. The United Mine Workers Union, which once had half a million miners on its rolls, has only 86,000 members, many of whom are retirees or are not even miners. There are fewer than 50,000 underground miners left in the US. It is the coal companies pursuing profits, not environmental protection, that is destroying the way of life in Nemacolin. In fact, the coal companies are already “ending coal” as the Trumka family knew it. After operating nearly 70 years, the coalmine in Nemacolin shut down production in 1986.

This is not to argue that coal miners and their communities should have to bear the burden of climate protection - that, as Trumka points out, would simply be unjust. But the way to provide them a decent future is not to perpetuate the use of coal-fired power plants. Instead, it is to develop a serious plan for a just transition. Labor should join hands with environmentalists and local communities to demand:

• Massive public and private investment in renewable energy and energy conservation in declining coal regions like Appalachia.
• A redevelopment strategy like that used for military bases that have been closed under the Base Closing Commission.
• A “GI Bill”-style retraining program, including full college education or its equivalent, for those who have lost employment due to climate protection policies.
• Retirement with good pensions and full medical benefits for all for whom such retraining is not an appropriate solution.

These are demands on which organized labor and “beyond coal” advocates can join hands. They should be part of the national policy of both. Equally important, in every community where there is a possibility that coal plants will be shut down, there should be a labor-environment-community alliance to promote just transition policies.

The future of the dialogue
President Trumka closed by proposing that “all of us sit down together on the basis that we live on one planet, and that we share a common humanity that requires respect for each others’ families and communities. In particular we need dialogue between environmentalists and workers and communities about the future of coal. About what the global labor movement calls a Just Transition to a low carbon emissions economy.” He added, “The AFL-CIO is ready to host that dialogue.”

The Keystone XL pipeline divided the labor movement itself and divided it from its crucial environmental allies. To rebuild that alliance will take just the kind of dialogue that Trumka has called for. Furthermore, Trumka’s speech articulated a superb frame for such a dialogue. But realizing the objectives of that frame will require both labor and environmentalists to rethink some established positions and develop more effective solutions - and to do so in dialogue with each other.

There is a “grand bargain” to be made here. Let organized labor put its full weight behind the targets, timelines, and action plans necessary to prevent “irreversible climate change” with its “catastrophic consequences for human civilization.” Let the climate protection movement put its full weight behind the targets, timelines, and action plans necessary to end today’s devastating mass unemployment by putting every available worker to work realizing those action plans. Let us mobilize our human and material resources the way we did to fight World War II and to rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan. The result will transform the politics of climate - and the life prospects of the 99%.

Let the dialogue begin!

The Labor Network For Sustainability is deeply encouraged by the Obama Administration’s decision to oppose the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

According to LNS Executive Director Joe Uehlein, “It’s an encouraging development. Oil companies and other pipeline advocates argued that the nation must choose between jobs and the environment. But in an era of climate crisis, this is a false choice: there will be no jobs on a dead planet. Building the Keystone pipeline will throw open the spigot to the Tar Sands in Canada, considered the dirtiest oil on the planet, and drive us ever closer to climate catastrophe.”

As LNS has documented (see “Climate Change: A Dagger Pointed at Your Job“), failure to address the climate crisis will result in the loss of millions of jobs and cripple our economy. The way to solve the economic catastrophe facing our working people is to go to work solving our climate catastrophe.

According to Uehlein, “Hurricanes, floods, and droughts are already having a devastating effect on American jobs, and that is nothing compared to what will happen in the future if Tar Sands carbon and the other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not rapidly reduced.”

But at the same time, workers need jobs now. That’s why LNS believes it is urgent and essential that we begin investing in a new sustainable economy that puts people to work mitigating climate change. Reflecting on the President’s Keystone decision, “Rather than polluting pipelines, we need to create ‘climate jobs’ that retrofit buildings, green our eroding water and transportation systems, and build a new alternative infrastructure for the future.”

The Labor Network for Sustainability is dedicated to engaging trade unions, workers and our allies to support economic, social, and environmental sustainability. LNS provides a community for those in the labor and sustainability movements and their allies who care about economic justice, ecology, and equality. Our members are helping labor become a force for advancing worker interests - while advancing the broader social good.

Contact Joe Uehlein, 202-256-7848/joeuehlein@mac.com

For decades environmentalists have fought to save our oceans from the perils of overfishing, climate change, and pollution. All noble efforts — but what if environmentalists have it backwards? What if the question is not how to save the oceans, but how the oceans can save us?

That is what a growing network of scientists, ocean farmers, and environmentalists around the world is trying to figure out. With nearly 90 percent of large fish stocks threatened by over-fishing and 3.5 billion people dependent on the seas as their primary food source, these ocean farming advocates have concluded that aquaculture is here to stay.

But rather than monolithic factory fish farms, they see the oceans as the home of small-scale farms where complementary species are cultivated to provide food and fuel — and to clean up the environment and fight climate change. Governed by an ethic of sustainability, they are re-imagining our oceans with the hope of saving us from the grip of the ever-escalating climate, energy, and food crises.

The Death and Rebirth of the Ocean Farm

Ocean farming is not a modern innovation. For thousands of years cultures as diverse as the ancient Egyptians, Romans, Aztecs, and Chinese have farmed finfish, shellfish, and aquatic plants. Atlantic salmon have been farmed in Scotland since the early 1600s; seaweed was a staple food for American settlers.

Unfortunately, what was once a sustainable fishery has been modernized into large-scale industrial-style farming. Modeled on land-based factory livestock farms, aquaculture operations are infamous for their low-quality, tasteless fish pumped full of antibiotics and polluting local waterways. According to a recent New York Times editorial, aquaculture “has repeated too many of the mistakes of industrial farming — including the shrinking of genetic diversity, a disregard for conservation, and the global spread of intensive farming methods before their consequences are completely understood.”

Unsurprisingly, once information got out among the general public, “aquaculture” quickly became a dirty word. Industry responded with a strategy of mislabeling seafood and upping their marketing budgets, rather than investing in more sustainable and environmentally benign farming techniques.

But a small group of ocean farmers and scientists decided to chart a different course. Rather than relying on mono-aquaculture operations, these new ocean farms are pioneering muti-tropic and sea-vegetable aquaculture, whereby ocean farmers grow abundant, high-quality seafood while improving, rather than damaging, the environment.

One example is Ocean Approved in Maine, which cultivates seaweed that doubles as a nutrient-rich food source and a sponge for organic pollutants. Farmers in Long Island Sound are exploring diversifying small-scale organic shellfish farms with various species of seaweed to filter out the pollutants, mitigate oxygen depletion, and develop a sustainable source for fertilizer and fish meal. In southern Spain Veta La Palma designed its farm to restore wetlands, and in the process created the largest bird sanctuary in Spain, with over 220 species of birds.

Seaweed farms alone have the capacity to grow massive amounts of nutrient-rich food. Professor Ronald Osinga at Wageningen University in the Netherlands has calculated that a global network of “sea-vegetable” farms totaling 180,000 square kilometers — roughly the size of Washington state — could provide enough protein for the entire world population.

The goal, according to chef Dan Barber — named one of the world’s most influential people by Time and a hero of the organic food movement — is to create a world where “farms restore instead of deplete” and allow “every community to feed itself.”

But here is the real kicker: Because they require no fresh water, no deforestation, and no fertilizer — all significant downsides to land-based farming — these ocean farms promise to be more sustainable than even the most environmentally-sensitive traditional farms.

Ramping up food production without increasing greenhouse gas emissions is vital if we are to survive the coming decades. But land-based food production is entering an era of crisis. The U.N. estimates that global grain production will plummet by 63 million metric tons this year alone mainly because of weather-related calamities like the Russian heat wave and the floods in Pakistan.

Bun Lai, world-renowned sustainable seafood chef, believes that:

If done right, this new generation of green aquaculture is poised to become the most sustainable form of farming on the planet. We need healthy food that protects rather than harms our climate and Earth. It is a key piece of the puzzle for building a sustainable future.

Nature’s Climate Warriors: Seaweed and Shellfish

Rather than finfish, the anchor crops of the emerging green ocean farms are seaweed and shellfish — two gifted organisms that might well be mother nature’s secret weapons to fight climate change.

Considered the “tree” of coastal ecosystems, seaweed uses photosynthesis to pull massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere — with some varieties capable of absorbing five times more carbon dioxide than land-based plants.

Seaweed is one of the fastest growing plants in the world; kelp, for example, grows up to 9-12 feet long in a mere three months. This turbo-charged growth cycle enables farmers to scale up their carbon sinks quickly. Of course, the seaweed grown to mitigate emissions would need to be harvested to produce carbon-neutral biofuels to ensure that the carbon is not simply recycled back into the air as it would be if the seaweed is eaten. The Philippines, China, and other Asian countries, which have long farmed seaweed as a staple food source, now view seaweed farms as an essential ingredient for reducing their carbon emissions.

Oysters also absorb carbon, but their real talent is filtering nitrogen out of the water column. Nitrogen is the greenhouse gas you don’t pay attention to — it is nearly 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide, and according to the journal Nature, the second worst in terms of having already exceeded a maximum “planetary boundary.” Like carbon, nitrogen is an essential part of life — plants, animals, and bacteria all need it to survive — but too much has a devastating effect on our land and ocean ecosystems.

The main nitrogen polluter is agricultural fertilizer runoff. All told, the production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides contributes more than one trillion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere globally each year. That’s the same amount of emissions that are generated by 88 million passenger cars each year.

Much of this nitrogen from fertilizers ends up in our oceans, where nitrogen is now 50 percent above normal levels. According to the journal Science, excess nitrogen “depletes essential oxygen levels in the water and has significant effects on climate, food production, and ecosystems all over the world.”

Oysters to the rescue. One oyster filters 30-50 gallons of water a day — and in the process filters nitrogen out of the water column. Recent work done by Roger Newell of the University of Maryland shows that a healthy oyster habitat can reduce total added nitrogen by up to 20 percent. A three-acre oyster farm filters out the equivalent nitrogen load produced by 35 coastal inhabitants (PDF).

About 50 percent of seaweed’s weight is oil, which can be used to make biodiesel for cars, trucks, and airplanes.

There is an array of projects sprouting up that use a mix of seaweed and shellfish to clean up polluted urban waterways and help communities prepare for the effect of climate change. One initiative, spearheaded by Dr. Charles Yarish of the University of Connecticut, is growing kelp and shellfish on floating lines in New York’s Bronx River to filter nitrogen, mercury, and other pollutants out of the city’s toxic waterways, with the goal of making them healthier, more productive, and more economically viable.

Then there is the emerging field of “oyster-tecture,” dedicated to building artificial oyster reefs and floating gardens to help protect coastal communities from future hurricanes, sea level rise, and storm surges. Architect Kate Orff from the design firm SCAPE is developing urban aquaculture parks that use floating rafts and suspended shellfish long-lines to build more urban green space while improving the environment. She envisions the new urban ocean farmer as part shell fisherman tending to oysters reefs, and part landscaper, tending the above-surface floating parks.

In Connecticut, advocates are pushing for an expansion of the state’s existing nitrogen credit trading program to include shellfish farms, thereby reimbursing oystermen for the nitrogen they filter from Long Island Sound each year. With new oyster operations sprouting up all around the country, rewarding “green fishermen” for the positive effect their farms have on the environment could be a model for how to stimulate job growth while saving the planet.

Farm Your Fuel, Power the Planet

Finding a clean replacement for existing biofuels is becoming increasingly urgent. A report commissioned by the European Union found biofuels from soy beans can create up to four times more climate-warming emissions than equivalent fossil fuels. Biofuels have also forced global food prices up by 75 percent — far more than previously estimated — according to a confidential World Bank study. And a recent report from the International Food Policy and Research Institute, warned that U.S. government support for corn ethanol was a major factor behind this year’s food price spikes.

Seaweed and other algae is increasingly looking like a viable substitute. About 50 percent of seaweed’s weight is oil, which can be used to make biodiesel for cars, trucks, and airplanes. Scientists at the University of Indiana recently figured out how to turn seaweed into biodiesel four times faster than other biofuels, and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a way to use alginate extracted from kelp to ramp up the storage power of lithium-ion batteries by a factor of ten.

But unlike land-based biofuel crops, seaweed farming does not require fertilizers, forest clearing, water, or heavy use of fuel-burning machinery — and, as a result, according to the World Bank, has a negative carbon footprint. While the technology is still in development, farmers are eager to begin growing their own fuel and create some of the first closed energy loop farms on the planet.

The U.S. Navy has already developed the Riverine Combat ship and Seahawk helicopters powered by seaweed-based bio-diesel. The Pentagon views seaweed and other algae as a key component in their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. According to Alan Shaffer, the Pentagon’s principal deputy director of defense research and engineering:

The beauty with algae is that you can grow it anywhere and to grow it needs to absorb carbon dioxide, so it’s not only a very effective fuel, in theory it’s also a carbon sink. That’s a pretty good deal.

The DOE estimates that seaweed biofuel can yield up to 30 times more energy per acre than land crops such as soybeana. According to Biofuels Digest,

Given the high oil yield from algae, some 10 million acres would be sufficient … to replace the total petro-diesel fuel in the United States today. This is about one percent of the total amount of acreage used in the United States today for grazing and farming.

The world’s energy needs could be met by setting aside three percent of the world’s oceans for seaweed farming. “I guess it’s the equivalent of striking oil,” says University of California, Berkeley microbial biology professor Tasios Melis.

The Bitter Reality of Climate Change

These are urgent times, demanding creative and bold solutions. In his best-selling book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben breaks the news that climate change is no longer a future threat — it is here and now and we had better get our affairs in order.

Our oceans are already locked in a death spiral. According to the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) — a consortium of 27 of the top ocean experts in the world — the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and oxygen depletion have already triggered a “phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.” Simultaneously, greenhouse gas emissions are breaking records, exceeding even the worst-case scenario envisioned by scientists four years ago.

We face a bitter new reality: Mitigating the effects of climate change may force us to develop our seas to save them — and planet. This re-imaging of the oceans will be heart-wrenching and controversial. Our waters are revered as some of the last wild spaces on Earth — ungoverned and untouched by human hands. If we develop our oceans, farms will some day dot coastlines, mirroring our agricultural landscape. But in the face of the escalating climate crisis, we have little choice but to explore new ways of sustaining humanity while protecting the planet.

As we search for new solutions, we cannot afford to repeat the errors made on land, subsidizing industrial-scale factory farms at the expense of environmental and food quality. Simply substituting destructive fishing fleets with destructive fish farms will only hasten the demise of our oceans.

Instead, we can learn from our mistakes and chart a new course guided by principles of sustainability and meeting social needs. This means dedicating portions of ocean to farming — while reserving large swaths for marine conservation parks. And rather than building sprawling ocean factories, we need create decentralized networks of small-scale food and energy farms growing food, generating power, and creating jobs for local communities. While no panacea, ocean farming — carefully conceived — could be a vital part of reversing course and building a greener future.

All of us who hold dear the deep blue sea need to confront the brutal reality that if we ignore the largest environmental crisis of our generation, our wild oceans will be dead oceans.

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/11/the-coming-green-wave-ocean-farming-to-fight-climate-change/248750/

By sending his police to beat, pepper-spray, and evict unarmed protestors, billionaire Mayor Bloomberg is placing himself in the great tradition that runs from King George III of England to Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

History will not judge him gently — nor will those around the world who believe in democracy.

The Labor Network for Sustainability expresses its solidarity with the Occupy movements everywhere and calls on everyone who cares about a sustainable future to undertake the following Key Action Items recommended by OWS and its allies:

KEY ACTION ITEMS

1.     MAKE NOVEMBER 17 HUGE  (November17.org, We-r-1.org, OccupyWallSt.org)
2.     Send people and Principals to NY
3.     Get out people in NYC today to new Occupation at 6th Avenue & Canal St. (Zuccotti is Closed)
4.     Send statements of solidarity and cc. Lizbutlerdc@gmail.com
5.     Folks should call: 212-New-York to complain.
6.     Send out statements, tweets, throughout day. (NY Groups are drafting a model letter)
7.     Push OWS statements to reporter networks: Keep checking OccupyWallSt.org
8.     Next Allies Call 4pm ET Wednesday. We will send reminder with info.
The following message from Occupy Wall Street was issued in the midst of the attempted eviction:

Statement from OWS:  1:36am Tuesday, November 15:

A massive police force is presently evicting Liberty Square, home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country and around the world.

The raid started just after 1:00am. Supporters and allies are mobilizing throughout the city, presently converging at Foley Square. Supporters are also planning public actions for the coming days, including occupation actions.

You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.
Two months ago a few hundred New Yorkers set up an encampment at the doorstep of Wall Street. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol — with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future.

Americans are talking about the consolidation of wealth and power in our society, and the stranglehold that the top 1% have over our political system. More and more Americans are seeing the crises of our economy and our democracy as systemic problems, that require collective action to remedy. More and more Americans are identifying as part of the 99%, and saying “enough!”

This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The “us” in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.

This moment is nothing short of America rediscovering the strength we hold when we come together as citizens to take action to address crises that impact us all.

Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces — our spaces — and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people — all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement.

You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

The 99 Percent Organize Themselves

[by Jeremy Brecher; Original Published at Nation.com]

In mid-October I spent two days and a night with Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. Since then I’ve read a barrage of advice for what OWS and its companion movements around the world should be doing. But I’ve been haunted by another question: What should those of us who are sympathetic to OWS (according to polls, roughly two-thirds of Americans are), but are not going to relocate to a downtown park, be doing to advance the well-being of the 99 percent?

I got one part of my answer as I groggily logged on to the web at 5:30 the morning after I returned home from Zuccotti Park. When I left the park, its private owner Brookfield Properties had announced it would clear the park “for cleaning” and enforce rules preventing tarps, sleeping bags and lying down. Mayor Bloomberg said the NYPD would enforce those rules, effectively ending the encampment.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the eviction. When OWS put out a call for support, thousands of people began to converge on the park for nonviolent resistance to eviction. Unions called on their members to protect the encampment. The president of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Council lobbied the city to cancel the crackdown. Lawyers prepared to bring suit to protect the occupiers’ First Amendment rights. City council members and other New York politicians lobbied the mayor to halt the eviction. Against all expectation, Mayor Bloomberg announced that Brookfield was abandoning the “cleanup” plan and the company announced it would try to reach an accommodation with the occupiers. The mobilization of supporters had forced the mayor and the park owners to back down. I had my first answer to what the rest of the 99 percent can do: protect the occupations.

Since then, there have been similar mobilizations to protect occupations in cities from Atlanta to Oakland. Many have involved a similar combination of public officials, trade unions and rank-and-file 99 percenters just showing up to defend their rights. In one extraordinary case, law enforcement officials themselves were responsible for saving the Occupy Albany encampment in Academy Park across from the State Capitol and City Hall. As protests grew, Police Chief Steven Krokoff issued an internal memo stating, “I have no intention of assigning officers to monitor, watch, videotape or influence any behavior that is conducted by our citizens peacefully demonstrating in Academy Park” and that the department would respond “in the same manner that we do on a daily basis” to any reported crime.

According to the Albany Times-Union, Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, under pressure from the administration of Governor Andrew Cuomo, thereupon directed city police to arrest several hundred Occupy Albany protesters. The police refused. The Times-Union reported that “State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany police leaders to hold off making arrests for the low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.” According to the official, “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.” Meanwhile, Albany County District Attorney David Soares informed the mayor and police officials that, “Unless there is property damage or injuries to law enforcement we don’t prosecute people for protesting.”

A 99 Percent Movement?
I remember well how the movement against the Vietnam war, so powerful among the youth on America’s campuses in the 1960s, was largely isolated from the rest of the country. Something very different is happening right now, however: the Occupy movements have been building alliances through direct action mutual aid. And 99 percenters are connecting with them and utilizing their spirit and methods to contest their own injustices. The result is that OWS, instead of becoming isolated, is morphing before our eyes into what some are calling the 99 Percent Movement.

When Rose Gudiel received an eviction notice for her modest home in La Puente, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, she announced, “We’re not leaving.” She and her family hunkered down while dozens of friends and supporters camped in their yard, determined to resist. When thousands started to gather outside Los Angeles City Hall to launch Occupy LA, Rose Gudiel went down and told her story to one of its first General Assemblies. A group from Occupy LA joined the vigil at her home and some stayed to camp out. Next Rose Gudiel and an Occupy LA delegation protested in front of the $26 million dollar Bel Air mansion of Steve Mnuchin, CEO of OneWest, which serviced her mortgage. The next day they held a sit-in at the Pasadena regional office of Fannie Mae, where Rose Gudiel’s 63-year-old disabled mother, made an impassioned plea to save her home and nine protesters were arrested—all broadcast that night on the TV news. The next day Rose Gudiel received a letter from the bank saying her eviction had been called off and soon she had a deal for a renegotiated mortgage. Housing advocates are now considering a campaign called “Let a thousand Roses bloom.” MSNBC commented that Rose Gudiel provides “an example of how the sprawling “Occupy” movement—often criticized for its lack of focus—can lend muscle to specific goals pursued by organizations and individuals.”

An alliance has been developing between the occupations around the country and many different layers of organized labor. In New York a group from OWS joined a march of 500 to a Verizon store held to support the contract campaign of Verizon workers. “We’re all in this together,” 53-year-old Steven Jackman, a Verizon worker from Long Island, said about Occupy Wall Street. In Albany, New York, Occupy Albany joined a protest outside the State Capitol featuring a roasted pig wearing a gold top hat, sporting a gold chain and chomping on a cigar. The adoption of OWS themes and language was apparent. A local union official said, “The corporate pig’s been out there, taking a bite out of America, out of the 99 percent, for years and I’m inviting all of the 99 percent of America to come on down today and take a bite out of the corporate pig.”

The collaboration of OWS and labor can take some unusual forms. To support art handlers of the Teamsters’ union, activists from OWS started showing up at Sotheby’s auctions, masquerading as clients. They would suddenly stand up and, instead of offering a bid, disrupt the proceedings with loud denunciations of the company’s labor practices. OWS activists likewise went to a Manhattan restaurant owned by a prominent Sotheby’s board member, clinked on glasses for silence, and then denounced the company as a union-buster. Jason Ide, president of the Teamsters local that represents the art handlers, told the Washington Post that the Occupy tactics surprised and inspired him and his members—so much so that the workers have become regulars at OWS. “Now is this rare opportunity for labor unions, and especially the union leadership, to take some pointers,” for example by considering the civil-disobedience approach taken by Occupy demonstrations.

Meanwhile, a close working relationship has developed between climate and environmental activists and the Occupy movement. A number of environmental activists, including Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, were early endorses of the Occupy movement, and a delegation from Occupy DC marched to join a rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. Next a group of students and climate activists organized an “#OccupyStateDept” action and occupied the area outside the Ronald Reagan Building overnight to protest the Keystone XL pipeline—and to secure admission to a hearing on the pipeline the next day. Ethan Nuss, who had stood in line for fourteen hours, told the hearing, “Every day I wake up and work for a vision in this country of a 100 percent clean energy economy that will create jobs for my generation when my generation is facing the largest unemployment since the Great Depression.” Bill McKibben urged pipeline opponents to join the Occupy DC encampment and invited Occupy DC to join the upcoming anti-pipeline action at the White House.

Bringing It All Back Home
Just as workers, community residents, students, and even housewives in the 1930s adopted the “sit-down strike” to address their grievances, so the robust but nonviolent direct action of the Occupy movements is being adopted by diverse communities and constituencies to address their own concerns. For example, a hundred students and teachers recently occupied a New York Board of Education meeting to protest budget cutbacks, layoffs, large class sizes and overemphasis on standardized testing. After the city school chancellor and school board members fled the meeting, the crowd held an impromptu “general assembly.” Her voice amplified by the echo of the “people’s microphone,” an elementary school student named Indigo told the assembly,

“Mic check. I’m Indigo, and I am an 8-year-old third grader, and I’m sad Ms. Cunningham is doing work for free. I don’t think it’s fair that teachers are getting laid off. The thing that would help me learn more would be if we had smaller classes. My teacher, Ms. Lamar, has to shout to be heard.”

99 percenters are also bringing the OWS message back into their own communities. For example, OWSers joined a protest in Harlem against “stop and frisk” racial profiling by law enforcement officials. Soon, activists began holding Occupy Harlem General Assemblies. And civil rights and labor groups, including the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the National Action Network and the New York State and New York City chapters of the NAACP organized their own rally in City Hall Park and marched to the Zuccotti Park to show their support for the OWS movement.

Occupy College provides another example of how 99 percenters are taking the Occupy message—and mode of self-organization — into other arenas. It is organized both to support the occupations around the country and around the world, and to address the specific issues affecting college students like the cost of education and the burden of college debt that have been important themes of the Occupy movements. Occupy College has established a website and is initiating national solidarity teach-ins in early November at colleges around the country.

While there has been a lot of debate in recent years about face-to-face vs. Internet organizing, in fact the Occupy and 99-percenter movements have brilliantly combined the two. While many Occupy groups and General Assemblies have been highly local, there is also widespread self-organization occurring on the web by groups such “Knitters for Occupy Wall St” and “Knitters for the 99 Percent” linking people all over the country who are making warm clothes for the occupiers. Here are some ways 99 percenters might want to think about organizing with their own real and virtual communities:

• Bring a speaker from your local Occupy group to a meeting in your living room or to whatever organizations you belong to.
• Organize a General Assembly in your neighborhood to discuss the issues of the 99 percent. Discuss what is upsetting people and decide on some concrete action to address it.
• If your PTA supports teachers’ jobs and programs for low-income students, get them to visit their political representatives and also do a joint action with your local Occupy group.
• If your church’s food pantry or homeless shelter needs money, hold an action at your local bank offices demanding that they feed the homeless in “their” community. If they won’t, ask your elected officials to take a look at the benefits they receive from “their” community. (Remember, according to Mayor Bloomberg it was the threat of city council officials to look into benefits received by the owners of Zuccotti Park that led them to back off their efforts to shut down OWS.)
• Create a Facebook page for your own equivalent of “Knitters for the 99 Percent.”
• Create a group to monitor local media and to protest when they favor the concerns of the 1 percent over those of the 99 percent.
• Organize public hearings in your town about what’s really happening to the 99 percent and how the 1 percent’s power is affecting them.
• Create your own temporary occupations in your own milieu addressing concerns about housing, jobs, media or whatever else concerns you and your fellow 99 percenters.

While the connections that have developed with unions are of great importance, we need to remember that the great majority of 99 percenters don’t have unions. Self-organization of non-union workers is a crucial next step. Take some of your co-workers down to visit your local occupation. Invite someone from your local Occupy group to meet with people from your workplace. Discuss what support you can give each other and the 99-Percent movement.

The Power of the Powerless
There is clearly a bigger movement growing out of the Occupy movement. But how will it develop? Some expect it to become like the Tea Party, a pressure group within the political party system. Others imagine something like the Tahrir Square demonstrations that toppled the Mubarak regime in one concentrated upheaval.

Neither of these visions takes enough account of the role of “secondary institutions”—schools, religious congregations, workplaces, communities, ethnic groups, and subcultures—in American society. The cooperation and acquiescence of these institutions provide the “pillars of support” on which both the government and the corporations depend—and through which their power can be humbled. And they provide arenas in which people can make change that will genuinely affect their lives long before they are powerful enough to defeat corporate control of national politics.

In our top-down, corporate-controlled political system, even our political parties and local governments can be considered secondary institutions. Those who are active in political parties and organizations can play a role supporting the Occupy movements and addressing the needs of the 99 percent. You can invite a speaker from your local Occupation group; support them in the street; and insist your organization’s leaders and the politicians it supports take a pro-Occupation stand. You can identify ways in which your organization and those it supports acquiesce in the interests of the 1 percent and demand that they stop.

The same is true of local governments. In Los Angeles, for example, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting “the continuation of the peaceful and vibrant exercise in First Amendment Rights” of the Occupy LA.

Beyond that, local governments and political parties can start pursuing the interests of the 99 percent and stop supporting those of the one percent. In Los Angeles, for example, the same night the city council voted to endorse Occupy LA, it also reaffirmed its support for a “Responsible Banking Initiative,” which would leverage the city’s over $25 billion in pension and cash investments to pressure banks to invest in the city. Moving city funds to nonprofit development banks is also being discussed.

In Brooklyn, Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez proposed a millionaire’s tax to raise $4 billion to prevent the cutting of vital social services. Absent such a tax, he proposed a $4 billion fund to be voluntarily contributed by 400 companies in the financial sector each contributing $5 million to $10 million for three years to create jobs, fix infrastructure and build affordable housing. He did not say how the companies would be persuaded to contribute, but his proposal was made at the start of a march from the Brooklyn Borough Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street.

I remember when, during the Vietnam War millions of people joined the monthly demonstrations and “work breaks” known as the Vietnam Moratorium—only to have the national leadership shut it down and move into electoral politics. Although some politicians and labor leaders have called for OWSers to campaign for Obama or the Democratic Party, such a shift is unlikely to happen to the Occupy movement. For those who want that to happen, their best strategy will be to make Obama and the Democratic Party something the Occupy movement (and the rest of the 99 percent) believe is worth supporting. Start freezing foreclosures, taxing the rich, creating new public works jobs and housing the homeless. Build an alternative to corporate greed and they will come.

Winter Soldiers
The occupations have been incredibly successful. But nothing can fail like success. Z magazine founder Michael Albert, just returned from conversations with protest veterans in Greece, Turkey, London, Dublin and Spain, reports he was told that their massive assemblies and occupations at first were invigorating and uplifting. “We were creating a new community. We were making new friends. We were hearing from new people.” But as days and weeks passed, “it got too familiar. And it wasn’t obvious what more they could do.”

Besides boredom (rarely a problem so far), winter is coming. I can testify just from sleeping out on one rainy night in October that, whatever the occupiers’ determination, it’s going to be tough. Some will need to create sturdier encampments better protected against the elements. Some will need to come inside.

When a threatened army successfully repositions itself it is a victory, not a defeat. What matters is that the social forces that have made OWS and its kin continue their feisty, imaginative, nonviolent reclaiming of public space by marches, occupations and other forms of direct action without getting pinned down in positions they can’t sustain. That way they can continue their crucial role in inspiring the rest of us 99 percenters to organize ourselves.

For that, they need help right now from the rest of us 99 percenters. In New York, there is now a campaign to let the protesters stay and set up tents. Elsewhere possibilities for using indoor spaces where occupiers can “come in from the cold” (with or without official permission) are being explored. Occupiers need both material aid and political pressure from unions, religious groups and ordinary 99 percenters to make the transition to the next phase.

In 1932 at the pit of the Great Depression, labor journalist Charles R. Walker visited “Hoovervilles” and unemployed workers’ organizations around the country. He predicted:

There will be increasing outbursts of employed and unemployed alike—a kind of spontaneous democracy expressing itself in organized demonstrations by large masses of people.” They will “march or meet in order, elect their own spokesmen and committees, and work out in detail their demands for work or relief. They will present their formulated needs to factory superintendents, relief commissions, and city councils, and to the government at Washington.

What Walker called a “rough and ready democracy” is what OWS and its progeny around the country are creating today.

The unemployed councils Walker described lasted only a few years, but from them sprang the Workers Alliance, a hybrid of a trade union for workers on government public works projects and a welfare rights organization. It in turn was a crucial springboard for the industrial union movement that would transform the US economic and political system.

The Occupy movement is not unlikely to last forever, nor would it be a good thing if it did. It could be forgotten like so many movements of the past. But it instead it could be remembered as the progenitor of the 99 Percent Movement. That depends on the rest of us 99 percenters.

We firmly believe that climate change is a real, dangerous, and rapidly worsening problem with deep moral implications. But the U.S. has done little to reduce its contribution to the crises. Concern about the costs of reducing emissions is one of the primary reasons we have failed to act. Given the stakes, we must acknowledge and act on the core moral principles our nation has long stood for, enacting effective climate goals that will at the same time protect vulnerable workers and communities.

The statement argues that our most fundamental principle is to prevent unjustifiable suffering and death among current and future generations in the U.S. and abroad. The statement calls on us to honor the principles of justice and equity. This requires that we do our part to ensure that the people and nations that are most impacted by climate change have the financial and technological capacity to prepare for and adapt to climate change. Finally, it asks that we honor the moral principle that we protect the Earth’s natural systems and species that support all life. These principles require that we significantly and rapidly reducing our carbon pollution.

We hope LNS members will sign to show that the labor movement is committed to addressing the climate crisis and building a more sustainable future for all.

Statement of Our Nation’s Moral Obligation to Address Climate Change

We, the undersigned current and former elected officials and representatives from the business, labor, youth, financial, academic, mental health, physical health, conservation, racial justice, civil rights, development organizations, and faith communities of the United States, recognize that climate change is a real, dangerous, and rapidly worsening problem with deep moral implications.

Although reducing carbon pollution will have costs, it will also produce incalculable benefits. Our response must therefore be driven not solely by near-term economic or national self-interest. We must also acknowledge and act on our long-standing moral obligation to protect current and future generations from suffering and death, to honor principles of justice and equity, and to protect the great Earth systems on which the wellbeing of all life, including ours, depends.

We call on every citizen to act on these moral principles without delay. Individually, and collectively as a nation, we must rapidly reduce carbon pollution by significant levels, prepare for the consequences of an already warming planet, and insist on public policies that support these goals and create a just transition to a low-carbon economy. The risks of inaction are exceedingly high. The benefits of acting on these moral principles are even greater.

The Moral Obligation to Prevent Suffering and Protect Human Life
The most fundamental of our guiding moral principles is that it is wrong to unjustifiably cause human suffering or death. Climate change-related impacts are already harming and killing people here and abroad. Unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, the resulting natural disasters, floods, diseases, illnesses, water and food shortages, and environmental degradation, along with associated rising violence and social breakdown, will injure or kill millions more every year.

Climate change-induced suffering from food shortages and the dramatic spread of disease and illness will be especially significant. Millions of people worldwide will be affected. Suffering will also result from the job losses and disruptions to families and communities caused by the billions of dollars in direct and indirect annual costs of climate impacts, as well as from the escalating market volatility, supply chain disruptions, and other impacts businesses will experience.

Over the past century, the U.S. has been the world’s largest overall contributor to climate change, generating about 30 percent of the total energy-related CO2 emissions that are destabilizing the climate. Today, we continue to produce far more emissions on an annual basis than any other nation except China. Even if the costs are high, we must avert one of the worst violations of human rights the world has ever seen by acknowledging our contribution to the climate crisis and significantly reducing our emissions.

The shift to a low carbon economy can create millions of good jobs that support healthy families and communities. This requires a ‘just transition’ that spreads the investments in solutions and the benefits of new approaches equitably, enables whole industries to make the changes needed, provides adequate resources for workers and communities adversely affected by the shift and ensures that all Americans have a democratic voice in their workplaces and their communities in how those decisions are made.

The Moral Responsibility to Honor Principles of Justice and Equity
Those who suffer the most from climate change are not the same people who now benefit greatly from the overuse of fossil fuels and other natural resources. As a matter of justice and equity, we have a moral obligation to reduce our carbon pollution in order to prevent suffering and death among people who have contributed little to climate change but who are, at least initially, most impacted: those living in the Arctic; people in less developed, hotter regions of the world; low-income and working-class communities; communities of color; women as well as children in the U.S.; and future generations everywhere.

In addition, even as we reduce our emissions we must do our part to ensure that vulnerable populations and nations have the financial and technological capacity to prepare for and adapt to the consequences of a warming planet and grow clean energy economies.

The Moral Obligation to Honor and Protect the Processes that Make Life Possible
Because we have a moral obligation to protect human life and prevent suffering and injustice, and because Earth’s gifts have intrinsic value, we have a responsibility to protect the ecosystems and organisms that provide the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the materials we use to sustain life and prosperity, and the natural beauty that lifts our spirits.

Whether we believe that the Earth and its great abundance is a product of natural processes or, as millions of people nationwide believe, that the Earth is the gift of the Creator, or both, our obligations are fundamentally the same–we must be good stewards of what we have inherited. Humanity is not in command of creation, but merely part of it. To disrupt the climate that is the cornerstone of all life on Earth and to squander the extraordinary abundance of life, richness, and beauty of the planet is morally wrong.

We Have the Know-how and Tools
The people of our great nation have the spirit, knowledge, and tools required to reduce climate change. The greatest obstacle is lack of human will. History is watching us. Our legacy will be determined by what we do now and in the next few years.

We call on everyone in the U.S. to act on their moral principles now by rapidly and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in their homes, places of work and government.

We call on every citizen to actively prepare for the consequences of climate change.

Moreover, we urge every citizen to insist that their government adopt policies to foster emission reductions and prepare for climate change, and to provide sufficient resources to build the capacity of the most impacted people worldwide to do the same.

This is not just about avoiding harm. Acting on our moral principles will foster the growth of a sustainable economy that creates millions of good jobs in clean energy fields, supports healthy families, and builds vibrant communities. That, itself, makes this imperative.

The need for action is urgent, the possibilities enormous.  Please join us in heeding this call. Click here to sign on.

How did we get here?

At the end of World War II, the generation that had lived through the Great Depression established the so-called “Bretton Woods” institutions they hoped would prevent a return to the mass unemployment and misery of the 1930s.  They established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to prevent the trade discrimination and trade wars that had so aggravated the Depression.  They established the World Bank for Reconstruction and Development to finance the rebuilding of the war-torn world.  And they established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help countries maintain full employment by growing domestic demand through fiscal and monetary policy rather than by capturing the markets of other countries.  As Robert Kuttner puts it in Exiting from the Crisis, their goal was “to create a global financial system biased toward full employment policies domestically.”

The next quarter century saw the longest period of sustained growth in modern economic history.  With low unemployment, relatively mild recessions, and rising wages and profits, it has often been called “the Golden Age of Capitalism.”

In the late 1960s, however, the global economy stumbled, with a sharp drop in profits, soaring unemployment, devastating recessions, stagnant real wages, and stagflation worldwide.  Despite a variety of policy responses, these conditions persisted through the 1970s.

The era of neoliberal globalization

In response to the crisis of the global economy, many economists, corporations, and political leaders abandoned the economic strategy designed to maintain full employment through domestic demand and turned to a radically different approach variously known as neo-liberalism, Reaganomics, free-market globalization, and the Washington Consensus.

The guiding idea of this approach was to eliminate anything that interfered with capitalists trying to maximize their profits by competing in markets.  The GATT was replaced by a World Trade Organization (WTO) dedicated to reducing labor, environmental, consumer, and other regulations as “barriers to trade.”   The IMF abandoned its role as supporter of domestic-led economic growth and became the promoter of export-led growth based on cutting wages and public programs.  The World Bank became a vehicle for imposing such policies on poor countries under the guise of “structural adjustment.”  Most of the world’s governments adopted such neoliberal policies voluntarily or as a result of international pressure.  Corporations took advantage of such conditions to go global, producing and selling their goods directly and through dependent suppliers and vendors around the world.

The consequences of neoliberal globalization

For most of the world’s people the thirty-year reign of neoliberalism has been disastrous.

In the developed countries, deregulation of labor led to falling wage share in national production and increased inequality. Europe largely abandoned the “European social model” of redistributive tax systems, welfare states, codified industrial relations, and social dialogue.  Its Stability and Growth Pact and the freedom of movement of capital largely nullified measures promoting domestic employment.  Precarious work proliferated and threatened the standards of those who continued in regular employment.

While “Washington Consensus” policies were supposed to help poor countries develop, in fact “GDP growth rates in developing regions that applied the policies most diligently, such as Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, were actually lower in the 1980s and 1990s than in the previous two decades.”  Inequality and the number of poor increased in most developing countries.  The great exception was East Asia, which “had not followed the Washington Consensus policies and had grown faster than any other region of the world.”

The debt problems of less developed countries deepened.  International capital flows became much more volatile.  The era has been marked by a string of global financial crises.  While given labels like the “Mexican,” “Asian,” and “Argentinean” crises, they actually were world crises in which catastrophe ricocheted from one country to another.

Meanwhile, there was a huge shift of resources from the real economy to the financial economy — what came to be known as “financialization.”  In the US, “The financial sector’s share of total corporate profit reached 42 percent before the crisis, up from about 25 percent in the early 1980s.” During the 2000s, “less than 40 percent of the profits of non-financial firms in developed countries were used to invest in physical capacity,” 8% below the early1980s.

Who gained from neoliberalism?  From 1976 to 2007, the share of US national income of the top one percent of Americans grew from nine percent to more than twenty-three percent.

The Great Recession

Inadequate incomes for ordinary people around the world inevitably led to inadequate purchasing power, aka economic demand.  But this was hidden for years by the growth of debt  — the other side of “financialization.”  Every possible way to make money without making something of value was pursued.  Banks lent recklessly; mortgages were sold to impoverished purchasers and bundled for sale to investors; exotic derivatives were invented and sold; credit default swaps purported to insure against financial losses.  Rating agencies endorsed the value of these “products” — while being paid by the very companies that produced them.

Inevitably the bubble burst.  Credit crunched.  Banks refused to lend even to each other.  Capital became unavailable.

For a brief period, governments abandoned neoliberalism and “resorted to the supposedly discredited old-fashioned Keynesian recipes” to control the crisis.  Policies “that had been off the agenda for the previous thirty years — such as deficit spending and public ownership — were suddenly back in vogue.”  Governments “substituted private debt-led demand with public debt-led stimulus.”  Fiscal stimulus in 2009 represented 1.7% of world GDP.  With the support of the IMF, demand-promoting measures like  “coordinated global fiscal stimulus,” “quantitative easing” to inject liquidity into the system, and improved unemployment benefits to increase purchasing power became the order of the day. The IMF estimates that such stimulus policies saved 7-11 million jobs worldwide.

That was only one side of the response, however.  Governments in one way or another took on much of the colossal debts that were crushing the financial companies.  And they did so with little change in the practices that had led to the financial collapse in the first place.  The trillions of dollars they spent under various schemes to bail out and support the finance industry dwarfed the economic stimulus that went to support the wellbeing of ordinary people.

Further, within a year, economists, investors, politicians, and pundits began warning of excessive government debt.  (Public debt had indeed grown, less as a result of profligate spending than because of falling tax revenues and the public assumption of private debt.)  They called for “consolidation,” aka fiscal austerity.  Financial crisis in Greece and elsewhere began to reveal that there was a “sovereign debt crisis.”

The austerity drive included a demand for “wage flexibility.”  As Joseph Stiglitz put it mockingly, “If workers were only ‘flexible’ in their wage demands, we could get the world back to work.” Wage flexibility represented “a hidden call” for “reducing the wages of the most vulnerable.”

Such “neoliberalism on steroids” further weakened aggregate demand, thus threatening to prevent economic recovery and bring about a “double-dip” recession.  Exiting from the Crisis warns that “policymakers are now, through fear of the bond markets, about to plunge the global economy into a prolonged slump.”

The crisis continues

Despite claims of recovery, the devastating effects of the Great Recession on poor and working people continue unabated.  In developed countries unemployment rates are 50 percent higher than in 2008.  The youth unemployment rate is now nearly 2.5 times that of adults. Worldwide, there are one hundred million more people in extreme poverty than before the Great Recession began.

The revival of neoliberal policies is aggravating this situation in multiple ways.  “Consolidation” is creating cutbacks in public services and weakening the “automatic stabilizers” like unemployment compensation that normally boost demand when employment falls.  These austerity policies put downward pressure on wages, further reducing effective demand.

While for many companies profits have returned to pre-crisis levels, many profitable companies are still reducing investment.  “The companies are sitting on piles of cash, and using low and even negative interest rates to boost dividends.”

In the US, manufacturing investment remains weak because of “global excess capacity.”  Construction remains weak as a “hangover from the property bubble.”  Consumer spending remains weak because “households are deleveraging and increasing savings.”  Such is the touted recovery from the Great Recession.

Pillars of a global labor alternative

It is clear that a further continuation of neoliberal globalization will only aggravate the Great Recession.  But Exiting from the Crisis does not propose a simple reversal of neoliberal policies and a return to those of an earlier era.  Indeed it notes, “Simply to call for a return to the policies of the post-war boom period would be a catastrophic mistake.”  New realities like globalization and climate change require new solutions that may incorporate elements of past programs but also must go far beyond them.

The approach laid out in Exiting from the Crisis can be summarized in the following “pillars”:

Redefining growth:  The apparent economic growth of the past thirty years, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has left the rich richer, the poor poorer, the global economy in ruins, and the world threatened by devastating climate change and other forms of environmental destruction.  We need a new gage to measure our economic success, one based on real human needs and environmental impacts.

Equalization:  The benefits of neoliberal globalization have gone to a tiny minority; the costs have been paid by the overwhelming majority.  Not only is that unjust, it has led to the very lack of purchasing power — aka economic demand — that is producing recession and unemployment.  Raising the incomes of workers and the poor is central both to economic justice and to the kind of economic growth that benefits people and the planet.  Worker organization and collective bargaining locally, nationally, and internationally are critical aspects of that process.

Public investment for a green and sustainable future: Hundreds of millions of people are unemployed and underemployed while billions suffer from poverty, climate catastrophe, and other preventable problems.  We need to develop forms of global public investment to use our human and natural resources to meet our needs.

Countering the downsides of globalization:  While globalization was supposed to “lift all the boats,” for most it has led instead to a race to the bottom in which workforces and countries compete to attract footloose capital by lowering their labor, environmental, tax, and social standards.  Countering the race to the bottom requires global labor rights, limits on financial speculation, and a focus on producing for home markets rather than for export.

Definancialization: As financial institutions have taken over more and more of the economy, ordinary people have become so much the poorer.  Instead of dictating to society, finance should be a tool that society uses.  Downsizing, regulation, taxation, public accountability, and the creation of public purpose financial institutions can all help make that so.

Making corporations accountable to people: The original justification for laws allowing incorporation was to encourage people to join together for socially beneficial purposes.  In neoliberal doctrine, however, corporations instead should aim exclusively to “maximize stockholder value.”  A worldwide movement is developing to make corporations accountable to a wide range of “stakeholders,” including workers, communities, and citizens, and to pressure them to adopt sustainable practices.

Shifting power: Neoliberal globalization has not prevailed because its proponents had better ideas, but because they were able to amass more power.  The policies that can make it possible to “exit from the crisis” will only be implemented if labor, popular movements, and their allies grow strong enough to impose them.

Exiting from the Crisis makes one thing clear:  “Markets, if left to themselves, will never develop effective institutions for global economic governance.”  Markets alone “cannot solve global imbalances, deal with exchange rate questions, establish a fair trading regime, tackle climate change, or reduce income inequality.”  That will take people, acting through their unions, social movements, and governments.

[The next piece in this series, “Growth for What? Growth for Whom?,” argues that current definitions of economic growth, based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), are counterproductive for both our livelihoods and our environments, and how they can be replaced by a new gage that actually measure our wellbeing.]