Join the Anti-capitalist Protest Against FERC on July 13th, 2014

By x365252 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, July 11, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

On July 13th, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) will be organizing a march from the Capitol Building to the office of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to protest FERC's refusal to conduct an environmental impact statement on the liquid natural gas export plant Dominion is planning to build in the Cove Point area of Lusby, MD. FERC has also basically been cozying up to Dominion, and has not taken the residents of Cove Point's concerns about health and environmental safety into account.

While CCAN's efforts against the proposed LNG plant at Cove Point is being supported by some mainstream unions and environmental groups alike, there has been growing frustration from the residents and rank-and-file members of CCAN that the group is ineffective in stopping the plant.

To this end, some Fellow Workers from the DC GMB and members of Chesapeake Earth First! will be forming an anti-capitalist bloc at the protest to show that unless capitalism is abolished, agencies like FERC will do the bidding of companies like Dominion, with no regard for the environment or the safety of working class citizens.

We are meeting at the Capitol Building on Sunday, July 13th, at 12:30 pm. We will be marching from the Capitol Building to the FERC office, which will end at 2:30pm.

If you're free on Sunday afternoon, please come out and show your support! While I'm not sure the bloc alone will be effective in any immediate change, it can serve to help us get contacts with people interested in organizing workers around environmental safety issues.

For further details, contact x365252 [at] iww.org

Capital Blight - Smoke and Mirrors

By x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, July 11, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

This past week reports of a recent trend (but hardly a new phenomena), called "rolling coal", have gone viral in the green media--in particular on Grist and the Huffington Post. Essentially, predominantly white, working class, rural truck drivers are venting their frustrations on "effete, latte sipping, Prius driving, city-dwelling, liberals" by installing devices in their trucks that actually belch smoke and lower their own gas mileage on command. This display of reactionary machismo is detailed in a recent article by Elizabeth Kulze. As the famous comedian, Jack Benny would probably say--in the complete opposite context--"Only in America...".

As one would expect, the comments sections following these articles are full of harshly critical comments directed at these coal rollers, and not entirely without justification, but the anger is misdirected.

To be sure, it's not a classist or elitist slur to properly refer to attitudes such as these as retrograde. Back in the day the Wobblies had a nickname for members of our own class who would side with the bosses. We called them "blocks" (after the block-headed Ernest Riebe cartoon character, "Mr. Block") or "scissorbills", cultural memes which may have influenced both Charles Schulz (Think of Lucy Van Pelt calling Charlie Brown "blockhead") and the Beatles ("Billy Shears" possibly derives from "William Shears), but our fellow workers never forgot who the real enemy was: the employing class.

Why would anyone in their right mind go to such lengths to actually pay money to install such a moronic device on their vehicle and vent their anger at members of their own class? Clearly this is not logical in any sense. Only a fool would deliberately set their own house on fire, crap in their own bed, or piss in their own beer, but that is precisely what these coal rollers are doing. No matter how much they hate those "Commie tree hugging unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs" or whatever, they're ultimately shooting themselves in the foot by spewing more greenhouse gasses into the Earth's atmosphere. Even if the effect is mostly negligible by itself, it still enables the capitalist class by enabling the latter's divide and conquet tactics which keep the 99% divided and at each other's throats.

We've seen this type of behavior before. In 1989, in timber dependent communities, after the US Government (finally) announced intentions to consider listing the Northern Spotted Owl as a "threatened" species (after years and years of lawsuits, campaigning, and frustration by environmentalists), the big timber corporations used a combination of propaganda, pseudoscientific nonsense, and false front astroturf "wise use" groups (as well as a few compliant business union officials) to whip timber workers into a vigilante mob hysteria against the environmental community.

Unfortunately, many environmentalists foolishly vented their frustration at the timber workers and not the timber workers employers, but this was a tactical mistake. Most timber workers didn't actually support this vigilante mob hysteria (though the corporate controlled media made it seem otherwise), but the capitalists wanted us all to think that the divisions were greater than they actually are, and things are no different now. This whole, sorry affair is simply more smoke and mirrors from the employing class.

Earth Minute: July 2, 2014

By Anne Petermann - Global Justice Ecology Project, July 7, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

On the weekly “Earth Minute” Anne Peterman, Executive Director of the Global Justice Ecology Project, discusses Portland Rising Tide’s recent direct action.

The Earth Minute is written and recorded by GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann in partnership with KPFK FM. 

Click here to listen: 

https://soundcloud.com/sojournertruthradio/sojournertruthradio-7-2-14-2

Earth Minute, June 24, 2014: Detroit’s Water Crisis

By Anne Petermann - Global Justice Ecology Project, June 24, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The shocking water crisis in Detroit: hundreds of thousands of people being denied access to water. 

The Earth Minute is written and recorded by GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann in partnership with KPFK FM. 

Click here to listen: 

https://soundcloud.com/sojournertruthradio/sojournertruthradio-6-24-14-2

Anarres Project with Chris Crass: Social Justice and Hope

By Chris Crass and the Anarres Project - Earth First! Journal, July 2, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s. Crass was also an organizer with the IWW in San Francisco.

Chris Crass on Social Justice Heroes, Obstacles and Hope in the Movement, and Movies: The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures Interview

Chris Crass is a longtime organizer, educator, and writer working to build powerful working class-based, feminist, multiracial movements for collective liberation.  He gives talks and leads workshops on campuses and with communities and congregations around the U.S. and Canada, to help support grassroots activists efforts. He balances family with his public political work and believes they are deeply interconnected, as both are about working to bring our vision and values into the world.

Throughout the 1990s he was an organizer with Food Not Bombs, an economic justice anti-poverty group and network; with them he helped build up the direct action-based anti-capitalist Left internationally.  Building on the successes and challenges of the mass direct action convergences of the global justice movement, most notably in Seattle against the WTO in 1999, he helped launch the Catalyst Project with the support of movement elders and mentors Sharon Martinas, Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.  Catalyst Project combines political education and organizing to develop and support anti-racist politics, leadership, and organizing in white communities and builds dynamic multiracial alliances locally and nationally.

In 2000 he was a co-founder of the Colours of Resistance network, which served as a think tank and clearinghouse of anti-racist feminist analysis and tools for activists in the U.S. and Canada.  After Sept. 11th, 2001, he helped to found the Heads Up Collective which brought together a cadre of white anti-racist organizers to build up the multiracial Left in the San Francisco, Bay Area through alliances between the majority white anti-war movement and locally-based economic and racial justice struggles in communities of color.  He was also a member of the Against Patriarchy Men’s Group that supported men in developing their feminist analysis and their feminist leadership.

He graduated from San Francisco State University in Race, Class, Gender and Power Studies.  Originally from California, he currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his partner Jardana Peacock and their son, River.  He is a Unitarian Universalist and works with faith-based communities to help build up the spiritual Left. 

Noam Chomsky: Our Govt. Is Capable of Creating Total Catastrophe for Humankind

By Noam Chomsky - Alternet, July 1, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs.  In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons.  First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact.  Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it.  Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. -- and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices.  The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond.

There is a “received standard version,” common to academic scholarship, government pronouncements, and public discourse.  It holds that the prime commitment of governments is to ensure security, and that the primary concern of the U.S. and its allies since 1945 was the Russian threat.

There are a number of ways to evaluate the doctrine.  One obvious question to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989?  Answer: everything continued much as before.

The U.S. immediately invaded Panama, killing probably thousands of people and installing a client regime. This was routine practice in U.S.-dominated domains -- but in this case not quite as routine. For first time, a major foreign policy act was not justified by an alleged Russian threat. 

Instead, a series of fraudulent pretexts for the invasion were concocted that collapse instantly on examination. The media chimed in enthusiastically, lauding the magnificent achievement of defeating Panama, unconcerned that the pretexts were ludicrous, that the act itself was a radical violation of international law, and that it was bitterly condemned elsewhere, most harshly in Latin America.  Also ignored was the U.S. veto of a unanimous Security Council resolution condemning crimes by U.S. troops during the invasion, with Britain alone abstaining. 

All routine.  And all forgotten (which is also routine).

People's Climate March: An invitation to change everything?

By Brad Hornick - rabble.ca, Jun 24, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

A very large and loud event is about to reshape New York City once again this September and likely propel social change across the continent. A convergence of organizations under the banner of the "People's Climate March," have pledged to make this event in New York City an opportunity for an unprecedented climate mobilization. Offering no less than an "invitation to change everything" and to "take a stand to bend the course of history", hundreds of diverse organizations (green NGOs, academic, peace, religious, labour, civil-rights, etc.) have already lent their names to the initiative.

The target date is September 19, 2014, when United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is organizing Heads of State and Government, along with corporate and civil society leaders to discuss climate change. This is the first global climate meeting since the disastrous UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. The meeting is not officially part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but is a call by Ban Ki-moon to "scale-up, cooperate and deliver concrete action" and will come one year before countries attempt to conclude another global climate agreement in 2015.

The rationale for Ban Ki-moon is to sidestep the formalized discussions within regular UNFCCC processes and to challenge "those who make the decisions" which for the organizers means a heavy corporate presence. Ki-moon is providing a stage for individual leaders to make individual pledges, and declare their own ambitions (in the midst of hopelessly inadequate official response to massive evidence of impending global ecological catastrophe in the our short-term future). For organizers of a counter climate demonstration, this has all the ingredients of a perfect storm.

To gauge the Peoples' Climate March's potential to "change everything" it is critical to understand the context in which this is all occurring. History produces moments when objective conditions are more propitious, yet never determinative, of revolutionary change. It takes human agency to animate history, but acting in the right moment helps. In terms of objective conditions on the economic front, one need not look any further than the recent and now ubiquitous words of Thomas Piketty who explains that "when accumulated wealth grows to extreme proportions…it becomes especially destabilizing" and that since the 1980s we have had "powerful forces pushing towards divergence… towards extremely high levels of inequality."

Water as a Human Right

By Martin Zehr, aka Mato Ska - New Clear Vision, March 11, 2011 (reprinted by suggestion of the author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

In the Middle Rio Grande region of New Mexico water planning took on a significant character that was open and inclusive. The Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) approved the 50-year plan worked on for over nine years by the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly. The Water Assembly worked with the regional Water Resources Board of the Middle Region Council of Governments (MR COG) and maintained the direction and intent of the plan. The regional water plan was approved by the 15 municipalities of the region, the regional water utility authority, the irrigators’ conservancy district and the flood control authorities of the two counties in the region, some with particular caveats included in their memoranda of agreement. Hundreds of individuals from environmental groups, advocacy groups, real estate interests, water managers of utilities, planners, administrators and specialists in hydrology and geo-hydrology have participated and actively engaged the communities in the region for input on recommendations and preferred scenarios.

The plan is over 400 pages long with 43 recommendations, and a preferred scenario. In the implementation of the plan, Water Assembly officers worked on stakeholder advisory committees such as the Ad Hoc Committee of the Interstate Stream Committee (ISC), the Water Resources Advisory Committee (WRAC) of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority (ABCWUA), the Albuquerque Reach Watershed Advisory Group and the Water Resources Board of the Middle Rio Grande Council of Governments (WRB). These advisory committees were integrated with governmental entities and play an important role in providing real input into their decisions.

New Mexico state law authorizing the development of regional water plans alludes to the active role of the 16 regional plans that have been developed. The experience of the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly would seem to suggest that there is a need in this enabling legislation to make the regional planning processes empowered to act and fund as a governmental entity. This directly impacts on state legislation in California and elsewhere addressing the issue of water as a human right. Many such resolutions are nonbinding and/or generally worded in a way that does not define their intent or establish and empower entities that are to implement the resolution. Without defined authority and funding, the plans are at the mercy of corporate and private interests that so profoundly influence the existing governmental entities and are subject to the intrusions of administrative staff.

The Servant Problem: Josie Foreman of Feminist Fightback asks those who see themselves as on the left to reconsider employing a cleaner.

By Josie Foreman - Red Pepper Blog, June 9, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Something strange is taking place in my world. My friends are employing servants. These are not rich people by any means, but lower-middle class teachers, NGO types, trade union organisers and cultural workers. They are liberals and lefties. Often they are people living in a rented room in shared houses, since living alone in London nowadays is beyond most people’s means. But they can afford to employ cleaners.

I have to admit that I have a strong reaction to this – a mixture of self-righteous moralism and class rage which is not necessarily very politically useful and certainly rather unattractive. Yet I have two kinds of vested interest in this issue: firstly my mum worked as a cleaner, my dad still does, and I used to in my early twenties; secondly, I now write about and research the history of domestic servants, focusing on the nineteenth century when 1 in 3 women cleaned other people’s houses for a living. So I’m writing this article to try to dissect the overwhelming feelings that rise up in me when I hear about my friends employing cleaners – to trace the historical roots of this revulsion and to find out whether it can illuminate the political issues or whether I should just dismiss it as a self-indulgent persecution complex.

What I am sure of, however, is that this is not a trivial question. I do not think that wanting to scrutinise why people employ cleaners is an act of middle-class self-loathing akin to worrying that your friends spend too much money on their organic veg boxes. Because the global market in migrant domestic labour touches on an even wider problem – the problem of reproductive labour. As our sisters in the Wages for Housework and Women’s Liberation Movement pointed out, reproductive labour (cooking, cleaning, caring) ‘reproduces’ labour power and therefore capital by ensuring that people are well-fed, clean and emotionally stable enough to work each day for a wage. Many commentators have suggested that the present historical moment is one of a crisis in care, whereby much of the reproductive labour previously provided by the state (free school meals, old people’s home, childcare centres) are being cut and pushed back into the private sphere of the home.

What all this amounts to, therefore, is that we should not assume that people employ cleaners because they are lazy. The burden of reproductive labour placed on the individual household with all adults in full-time waged work is now immense. This is coupled with the fact that anyone lucky enough to be employed right now is expected to work excessively long hours and to bring work home with them. Many of my friends quite understandably claim that they don’t want to spend their one day off a week doing more work cleaning their house. For people who have children, the problem is intensified – domestic labour is boring and exhausting and takes up far too much of our precious free time.

So does this mean that employing a cleaner is a sensible solution to the crisis in reproduction? Someone gets a job and someone else gets a break? This is the justification given by many of my cleaned-for friends. Yet I believe the dilemmas and emotions awakened by the employment of cleaners extend far beyond this simple calculation, and have powerful material and historical implications for our ability to build solidarity with other human beings and create a different kind of world.

KPFA FM Radio Broadcast: Repression Against Environmental Activists - Terra Verde, June 27, 2014

Terra Verde, KPFA 94.1 FM - June 27, 2014 at 2:00pm, Hosted By Laura Garzon Chica

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

(On this show) we explore the condemnation of eco-activism as terrorism punishable under the law (or outside the law) in the name of national security. Does the government's attack on civil disobedience signal an end to a legitimate democracy in the USA? What does the corroding of civil liberties and the gutting of the Bill of Rights mean for those who struggle to protect our environment, ourselves as a species, and other creatures? What about corporations and the intelligence industrial complex at large? How do these non-state actors engage in the push to prosecute environmentalists involved in nonviolent direct action as terrorists and/or spies? Guests Will Potter, Shahid Buttar, and Steve Ongerth tackle these questions with host Laura Garzon Chica.

Download this clip (mp3, 5.13, megabytes)

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