Naomi Klein

By Mel Barnes - Green Left Weekly, August 29, 2015

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 week Canadian author Naomi Klein is visiting Australia to speak about why capitalism is incompatible with action on climate change.

Her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate encourages everyone already involved in fighting for social justice and equality to see climate change as the “best chance we’ll ever get to build a better world”.

This vision is the antidote to the bleak picture painted by climate scientists and the knowledge that not just Australia, but the US and China have set targets that put the world on track for rises far above what the science says we can all survive.

Last week, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that July was the warmest month ever recorded and with a predicted El Nino, Australia is set to experience another hot summer.

Rising temperatures and chaotic weather are not the only outcomes of climate change. When this intersects with poverty, racism and unemployment, it is clear that the most vulnerable will be the worst off.

The good news is these issues can be tackled through the same measures we take to tackle climate change. It means transforming our economy and society from one where power is concentrated in the hands of the rich, into one where we enjoy a higher quality of life and greater equality thanks to the need to share resources.

It will mean investing in public infrastructure, such as transport, housing and health, and the creation of permanent, green jobs. It will mean greater democracy for communities to make decisions about issues that affect them; this includes Aboriginal communities having control over their land.

But it will not happen if we leave it up to politicians negotiating through international agreements.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, September 3, 2015

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.

Ten years ago, between August 23-31, Hurricane Katrina overran the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, destroying major portions of the city, killing at least 1245 people. The destruction and death disproportionately affected the poor, mostly nonwhite, working class people and neighborhoods of New Orleans, and the response by the capitalist class and every government from the local municipal authorities to the State of Louisiana to the United States, was to render aid to the mostly white employing class while letting the working class suffer. Law enforcement and the capitalist, in an orgy of racism and class bias, displayed blatant double standards, greatly exaggerating the actions of black survivors, labeling their actions as "violent", "looting", and "thuggish" while ignoring at least as serious actions by white survivors. Then, they used the disaster to bust unions, privatize public institutions (including the public school system), and shred environmental laws, so they could remake New Orleans into a hyper capitalist mecca. Ten years later, the devastation of Katrina is still wreaking havoc on the 99%, however, as a result, broad based, intersectional working class resistance has arisen among them and they are fighting back. A good portion of the resistance is working under the banner of #GulfSouthRising and Katrina Truth. Following are just some of their stories:

• Amid Katrina Commemoration Spectacle, a Southern Freedom Movement Takes Shape - By Anna Simonton, TruthOut, September 1, 2015
• Bush Administration Exemption Allowed Contractors To Steal Wages From Katrina Reconstruction Workers - By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee, Think Progress, August 31, 2015
• Dodging potholes in New Orleans: 10 years after Katrina - By Hannah Bonne, RoarMag, August 31, 2015
• Social Justice and Climate Justice Movements Merge in New Orleans 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina - By Julie Dermansky, DeSmog Blog, August 31, 2015
• Still left behind in the new New Orleans - Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky interviewed by Elizabeth Schulte, Socialist Worker, August 31, 2015
• Gulf South Rising Remembers Katrina, Builds Campaign - By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance, August 30, 2015
• How the Ruling Class Remade New Orleans - By Thomas Jessen Adams, Jacobin, August 29, 2015
• These New Orleans Residents Are Still Trying To Go Home - By Bryce Covert, Think Progress, August 29, 2015
• Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina - By Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, August 28, 2015
• Katrina Plus Ten: Climate Justice in Action - By Scott Parkin, CounterPunch, August 28, 2015
• Shock Doctrine: A Look at the Mass Privatization of NOLA Schools in Storm’s Wake & Its Effects Today - Wendell Pierce and Gary Rivlin interviewed by Juan González and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, August 28, 2015
• Ten years on: Katrina, militarisation and climate change - By Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes, Open Democracy, August 28, 2015
• Was the Katrina Oil Spill Disaster a Harbinger for the Atlantic Coast? - By Sue Sturgis, Facing South, August 28, 2015
• Still Waiting for Help: Lessons of Hurricane Katrina on Poverty - By Laura Lein, The Conversation, August 27, 2015
• A Decade After Katrina, RNs Reflect on What We’ve Learned and Refuse to Learn - By Staff, National Nurses United, August 26, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW

By Out of the Woods - The New Inquiry, January 7, 2015

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 Changes Everything is a book capacious enough to allow Naomi Klein two positions at once. But a real climate-justice movement will at some point have to make choices.

Naomi Klein’s success pulls her in two directions. To some, her decades-long failure to produce “proper” theory as well as writing scintillating and successful books has been an affront. On her Reddit AMA she’s said her writing “will never be enough for hyper-sectarian Marxists, and I’m cool with that.” Perhaps it was her bad luck that Slavoj Žižek had begun to use the phrase “shock therapy, in the Naomi Klein sense.” Both No Logo, published just after Seattle’s WTO conflagration in 1999, and 2007’s The Shock Doctrine, which named “a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation,” were seminal, highly readable accounts of consumerism and neoliberalism, and (primarily) vindications of mostly unvictorious struggles against their encroachment across the globe, in which she participated. The anglophone world is now just beginning to digest her latest, an ecological magnum opus, and its eagerly anticipated castigation of the mainstream environmental movement.

Klein’s Twitter bio now claims “they say I’m polarizing.” In fact, the responses to This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, have been unequivocally enthusiastic. The New York Times published one such, which asked only: “what’s with the subtitle? (…) Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global overthrow.” Even the right-wing Telegraph was content to praise someone it clearly saw as “no advocate of socialism.” Opening This Changes Everything, Klein says that “this is the hardest book I’ve ever written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such radical responses.” Yet these radical responses have been warmly embraced by the center. The establishment, if it is trembling, is hiding it well.

Indeed, her difficulty writing it seems to have led to apparent contradictions. Klein supports proposals to create millions of green jobs and liberate people from work. She advocates rapid fossil fuel abolition and a welfare state funded by taxes on fossil fuel profits. She takes aim at the profit motive and endorses small local businesses as the fabric of the community. Rather than make accusations of confusion or hypocrisy, let’s take seriously her claim to have been pushed into radical positions by the urgency and severity of the climate crisis, and propose that, instead, two divergent Naomi Kleins have been formed who together make up the author of This Changes Everything.

By Megan Devlin - Rabble.Ca, July 5 2015

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 March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate filled the streets of downtown Toronto today, demanding a justice-based transition to a green-energy economy.

A press release sent after the Toronto march pegged the number of marchers at over 10,000 including celebrities Jane Fonda and David Suzuki.

The thousands in Toronto were not the only people to take part this weekend. Events for jobs, justice and the climate were held in cities and towns across Canada.

In Toronto, speakers at the march called out the myth of the choice between the economy and the environment as they pushed for a new, green energy economy. 

"They are saying we do have to choose between the environment and the economy -- that is a false choice," said Fonda, who came to Toronto to support the march. "In fact, renewable energy and doing away with the fossil fuel-based economy will create more jobs, more justice and more democracy."

By Judy Rebick - Rabble.Ca, June 29, 2015

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.

Jobs, Justice, Climate is the slogan of what we hope will be a massive march in Toronto on July 5 and Vancouver on July 4. To my knowledge it's the first action in Canada that has linked jobs with the battle for climate change in a context of social justice.  While turtles and teamsters have marched together in the past, it has usually been with a focus on social justice, against corporate globalization and trade deals.  This is not only the first time climate change is a focus in a march co-sponsored by the labour movement, it's the first time that the links are being made to the struggles of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people of colour and the first time our cross-sector movement is not just saying what we are against but what we are for. Check out the video promoting the march.

In May I attended a cross-country meeting called by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis to begin the work of building a broad movement to fight climate change by presenting a new vision where reversing climate change can be done in the context of increasing social justice and good jobs. A movement where Indigenous Peoples, the first defenders of the land, are in the lead. A movement that reaches out to immigrant communities whose countries are already drowning, baking, or collapsing in face of climate catastrophes. A movement where unions realize that climate change is as much a threat to their members as austerity and find ways to link both struggles. A movement where environmental activists understand that it is the peoples of the earth not the corporate overlords who will save the planet. 

There were divisions at that meeting and they continue.  Unions, for example, support certain pipelines that environmentalists oppose. 350.org, a key organizer of the march wants the bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands to stay in the ground. The unions don't agree yet. There remains deep scepticism among Indigenous activists about how solid is the solidarity expressed by settlers. There is concern from activists of colour that support for their issues is only present when their support is needed. There is still the gap of knowledge and sometimes solidarity between Quebec and the rest of Canada. All of these divisions were present in the May meeting and we talked about them. 

I pointed out another powerful movement where the differences were just as great. In the anti-Viet Nam War movement some of us supported the victory of the Viet Cong. We used to chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong are gonna win;” while others were only in the demonstration because they didn't want their sons to be drafted.  In those days we didn't have facilitators to help us through negotiating those differences in a positive way.  We pretty well hated each other but we marched together because the stakes were high and we contributed to stopping that terrible war. This time the stakes are much higher.

As Naomi argues in her book, This Changes Everything, those of us who have been fighting for social justice all our lives now have an opportunity to create a new vision of a just and caring society. A society where caring for each other, the land and the creatures that share it with us is a powerful transformative idea that can appeal to a majority of people around the world. 

Join us on July 5 in Toronto at Queen's Park at 1 p.m. for the Jobs, Justice, Climate March or you can participate in actions sponsored by 350.org in various cities across the country .

By Megan Devlin - Rabble.ca, May 22, 2015

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.

It was chilly in the shadow of the TD building at King and Bay Thursday morning as about 40 members of a coalition of grassroots organizations raised their red placards at the launch for the March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.

The march will happen July 5 -- on the eve of the Pan American Climate Summit of the Americas -- but it was clear that the movement has already gained support.

The launch criticized the fossil fuel industry's power and called for a justice-based transition to a clean-energy-based economy.

"We're ready for the next economy," Naomi Klein said in her address. "Canadians are clearly getting tired of the fossil fuel roller coaster."

The march is a collaboration among a range of stakeholder groups including 350.org, Idle No More, No One is Illegal, GreenPeace, oil divestment activists from the University of Toronto and Canada's largest private sector union, Unifor, which represents many of Alberta's energy workers.  

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, February 5, 2015

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 following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Story:

• Register now for the Future of Railroads: Safety, Workers, Community & the Environment Conferences: Richmond, California (March 14, 2015) and Olympia, Washington (March 22, 2015) - railroadconference.org

USW Refinery Workers Strike News:

• Greens get behind striking oil workers - By John Light, Grist, February 3, 2015
• In Stand for People and Planet Over Profit, Green Groups Back Oil Worker Strike - By Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams, February 3, 2015
• Local Union President Says National Oil Refinery Strike Isn’t About Wages, It's About Safety - By Sydney Brownstone, The Stranger, February 2, 2015 [USW video]
• Martinez: Tesoro refinery among nine plants where strikes planned - By George Avalos and Rick Hurd, Bay Area News Group / San Jose Mercury News, February 2, 2015
• Refinery workers in Martinez, elsewhere go on strike - By Michael Cabanatuan, San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2015
• Solidarity with Striking Refinery Workers - By David Turnbull, Oil Change International, February 2, 2015
• Strike negotiators back at the table Tuesday night - By LM Sixel, FuelFix, February 3, 2015
• Tesoro Refinery workers strike over work conditions, contract - By Laura Anthony, KGO ABC 7, February 2, 2015
• Tough talk from Shell, union as refinery pay talks resume - By Erwin Seba, Reuters, February 3, 2015
• United Steelworkers stage downtown Houston protest at LyondellBasell HQ - By LM Sixel, FuelFix, February 3, 2015
• For bargaining updates call 888-429-4217

Crude by Rail:

• Safety Board Says Transport Canada Must Do More To Keep Railways Safe - By John Kristensen, Railroaded, February 2, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Drilling contractor may cut 2,000 jobs - By Jennifer Hiller, FuelFix, January 30, 2015
• Economist: A short-term ‘bloodbath’ in oil and gas; More layoffs - By Jennifer Hiller, Collin Eaton and Ryan Holeywel, FuelFix, February 2, 2015
• More oil jobs threatened as cheap crude persists - By Ryan Holeywell, FuelFix, February 2, 2015
• Oil rig count falls by 94 in biggest drop since 1987 - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, January 30, 2015
• Russian pipe maker OAO TMK laying off at Pennsylvania plants - Associated Press, FuelFix, February 2, 2015

Green Jobs and Just Transition:

• Greenwire: Groups pressure Congress to invest in passenger rail, transit infrastructure - Environmental Law & Policy Center, January 30, 2015 [related] Report: Long-term Federal Funding Needed in Passenger and Transit Rail Projects - By Anika Reed and Jasmine Whittington, Capital News Service, January 30, 2015
• MACED statement on announcement of President Obama’s proposed budget plan to aid Central Appalachian communities - By Ivy Brashear, Renew Appalachia, February 2, 2015
• New Report Showcases America’s Rail, Transit Manufacturing Opportunity - By the Blue-Green Alliance, Mass Transit Magazine, February 1, 2015

Other News of Interest:

• Crossing the River of Fire: The liberal attack on Naomi Klein and ‘This Changes Everything’ - By John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, Monthly Review, February 2015
• EPA should strengthen the standards for clean air - By Heather Albright, Sacramento Bee, January 31, 2015
• In an Age of Soulless Mass Production, the Artisan Craft Worker Still Lives On - By W. Rand Smith, In These Times, February 2, 2015
• Nuclear power plant’s security changes mixed one year after ‘unusual’ death - By Joe Jordan, Nebraska Watchdog, February 2, 2015
• Review: Another Politics by Chris Dixon - By Alexander Reid Ross, Earth First! Newswire, February 1, 2015
• UWAC: More than 5500 trees uprooted in one month! - La Via Campesina, February 2, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, January 7, 2015

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 following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Story:

• Why Is the FBI Harassing Activists in Cascadia? - By Alexander Reid Ross, Defending Dissent, January 5, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Plunging Oil Prices Trigger Economic Downturn in Fracking Boom Town - By Anastasia Pantsios, EcoWatch, January 3, 2015
• Investors falter as fossil fuels face 'perfect storm' - By Kieran Cooke, The Ecologist, January 1, 2015
• Midland Basin oil worker talks crude prices, fracking bans in Reddit AMA - By Joshua Cain, FuelFix, January 1, 2015
• Oil driller laying off 700 in California - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, January 2, 2015

Other News of Interest:

• Biomass Facility Fires a Regular Occurrence - By Josh Schlossberg, Vail Daily via Energy Justice Network, December 29, 2014
• India coal strike the biggest industrial action since 1977 - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, January 6, 2015
• Kinder Morgan: law-breaking, pollution, and cover-ups - By Derrick, West Coast Native News, January 5, 2015
• RMT pledges full support for general strike in Belgium - RMT Press Office, RMT, December 15, 2014
• This Changes Something - By Dru Oja Jay, Briar Patch, January 2, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC