from The Nation
Across Europe, people are vocally and actively rejecting austerity. But they’re not doing so as Europeans, Nation columnist Gary Younge points out. Global and regional solidarity has been limited, Younge explains in this video, even as people fight similar battles against income inequality and other forms of injustice.
from Democracy Now!
Public spending is under assault from the United States to Europe in the name of fighting deficits. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues in his new book, “End This Depression Now!”, that the hysteria over the deficit will constrain an economic recovery in a time of high unemployment and stagnating wages. “The economics is really easy,” says Krugman, “If we were to spend more money at the government level, rehire the school teachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks, we would be a long way back toward full employment. … Right now there’s just not enough spending. We need the government to step in and provide the demand we need … We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession in a way that we’ve never had before since the 1930s. The results are clear — it is disastrous.” Krugman writes about the economy as a columnist for the New York Times and is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
The interview continues after the jump …
from The Nation
Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, explains that while growing up, he was exposed to a “myth of work” that involved spending one’s entire career in a single industry and working 9am to 5pm in office parks or factories. But in recent decades, he says, the idea of standard employment has “come apart at the seams,” and now as much of a third of the labor force in developed countries—including the United States—consists of precarious workers such as freelancers, independent contractors, seasonal part-time workers and interns.
from The Nation
The short-term work of strikes and sensational displays of worker power will not be enough to dislodge capitalism’s grip on our lives, says Professor Gayatri Spivak of Columbia University. These short-term tactics must be paired with the longer-term efforts of education and organization. This educational work, Spivak insists in this video, is “not really the pedagogy of the oppressed, it is indeed the pedagogy of the liberated, because if you do not have training in the practice of freedom, when you win… it will not last.”
from The Nation
The call for a general strike on May 1 should not be solely about work, argues Marina Sitrin, a postdoctoral fellow at CUNY specializing in global mass movements. Instead, it should reshape our ideas about how society is built, as Sitrin explains in this video, by asking hard questions about class, consumption, work and society.
Part two of an interview from Democracy Now!
DemocracyNow.org – In part two of our interview with Tavis Smiley and Prof. Cornel West they discuss growing up in working-class households. “I saw so much poverty growing up,” says Smiley, who lived with 13 family members in a three-bedroom trailer and learned that even when he was not optimistic, he could be hopeful. “Hope needs help,” Smiley notes. West recalls how he worked with the Black Panthers to organize a general strike while growing up in Sacramento, California, in order to push for African-American studies programs in local high schools. Looking at current events, Smiley and West cite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s comment that “war is the enemy of the poor.” They compare the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq, and the 2012 presidential campaign, to funding for programs that assist the one in two Americans who are now poor.
The first part of this discussion can be seen here.
from the Center for American Progress
from Democracy NOw!
DemocracyNow.org – The latest census data shows nearly one in two Americans, or 150 million people, have fallen into poverty — or could be classified as low income. We’re joined by Dr. Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, who continue their efforts to spark a national dialogue on the poverty crisis with the new book, “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.” Smiley, an award-winning TV and radio broadcaster, says President Obama has failed to properly tackle poverty. “There seems to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that the poor just don’t matter. President Obama is a part of that,” Smiley says. “I take nothing away from his push on healthcare, but jobs for every American should have been priority number one.” West, a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University, says that after the historic U.S. struggles against monarchy, slavery and institutionalized racism, “the issue today is oligarchy. Poverty is the new slavery, oligarchs are the new kings — the new heads of this structure of domination.”
The second part of this discussion can be seen here.
from 350.org
“Over the past five years, grassroots leaders throughout the country (and the world) have led the charge for a clean energy economy with 350.org. We’ve organized more than 15,000 actions together, helped stop a tar sands pipeline, and generated momentum to solve the climate crisis. Join us http://350.org“
from the Center for American Progress
Over the last year, green jobs have become a political punching bag. But in many states throughout the country the industry is gaining traction. In Massachusetts, more than 64,000 engineers, construction workers and entrepreneurs have found jobs in the sector. The Center for American Progress came here to learn how they’re doing it, and to tell the real story about the clean energy economy.
The Progressive Fox is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License