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Holt Baker: Unions Leading Way to Green Economy |
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America’s future is green and the union movement is in the forefront of creating a new green economy, says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker.
Speaking to the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) education conference in Phoenix last week, Holt Baker said:
“One of our biggest opportunities lies in the creation of green jobs, and a new vision of America that our labor movement is helping make happen.”
She credited many unions for undertaking green initiatives, including the United Steelworkers (USW), the UAW, AFT, AFSCME and the building trades. She also pointed to the institute’s Center for Green Jobs and APRI’s new computer learning lab in Pittsburgh as examples of the ways in which unions are preparing workers for a green economy.
She said she “was never so excited” than she was when she visited the Pittsburgh Public Housing Authority and saw the public housing residents in the APRI Computer Learning Lab learning computer skills and other young people going through basic OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] training taught by Steelworkers health and safety instructors.
They are being prepared for a green future and we all can agree that, at the end of the day, the only color that matters is green. We’re especially proud that APRI is working with the Center for Green Jobs to get additional federal support for creating pathways out of poverty for low-income and under-served communities.
The Obama administration has estimated 5 million jobs (direct and indirect) can be created by a $150 billion, 10-year investment. Green Jobs for America reports that hybrid and other clean cars, public transportation, efficient heating and lighting systems and clean renewable power plants can create more than 1.4 million new jobs.
In addition, the administration has made $150 million available to help create green jobs in areas of high poverty. National, state and local partnerships that include non-profits, labor organizations, employers, education and training facilities and public workforce groups are eligible for the grants. Says Holt Baker:
That is real money, to help solve problems, and help put real people to work.
You can read excerpts from Holt Baker’s speech on the AFL-CIO Working For America Institute website here.
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The transition to a green economy is now essential for both the ecological survival of humanity and the economic survival of working people. Scientists have issued many warnings about the ecological issues. But the warnings are ignored as millions of working people are unemployed, with no health insurance, and facing not a green future but a future of impoverishment.
Why is this happening?
The existing capitalist economy does not function to solve the economic needs of working people. Capitalists promote the unending wars for profit, heedless destruction of the environment while extracting vast wealth from natural resources(oil,etc.), undermining public health and public education systems by privatization and tax avoidance, only to maximize their own wealth.
This wealth accumulation to maximize profit necessarily impoverishes society, destroys the environment, and exterminates millions of people worldwide in profit-generating wars.
In the United States, this process of massive capitalist wealth accumulation has caused the impoverishment of millions of working people.
The vast wealth inequality has become a crisis. Working people need to learn that under capitalism this is intrinsic and inevitable. The corporate controlled mass-media will not tell you what is happening.
Here is an article from WSWS that reveals this reality:
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US income gap widest since 1917
19 August 2009
Bill Van Auken
The social chasm separating America’s financial oligarchy from working people, the vast majority of the population, is wider than at any time since 1917, according to the latest statistics from the Internal Revenue Service.
The income gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent has reached “a level higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the ‘roaring’ 1920s,” according to an analysis of the data published earlier this month by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez.
Saez’s report, entitled “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” shows that the real increase in the concentration of wealth has taken place at the pinnacle of the social pyramid—the top 1 percent, with annual incomes of $400,000 and above.
The figures released by the IRS are from 2007. They indicate that for most of the top 10 percent (families with incomes of $110,000 or more), there was little change in terms of income growth and share, but the top 1 percent increased their share of the national income to 23.5 percent, compared with 22.8 percent in 2006.
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The present crisis, however, is not just another recession. Rather, it signals the final collapse of the post-World War II global capitalist order, which depended on the economic supremacy of the United States. The ruling elite, not just in the US but in all the major capitalist countries, aims to resolve this crisis through a drastic reduction in the income and social conditions of the working class, accompanied by attacks on basic democratic rights and an increasing turn to military aggression.
As part of this global process, the working class in the US has already suffered severe blows. Some 30 million are jobless or relegated to involuntary part-time work, while wage-cutting is rampant.
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The Obama administration has no intention of imposing the kind of financial regulation or tax increases on the rich that Saez suggests could lessen social polarization and the concentration of wealth. On the contrary, all of its policies have been directed at bailing out the banks and the financial elite, while demanding that workers accept drastic pay and benefit cuts, the destruction of their jobs, and a series of counter-reforms in health care and other essential social programs.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a19.shtml
Today, this capitalist economy has now produced