African American pastors express support for Occupy movement – The Washington Post

3 Feb

But Bryant, who observed the movement from a distance before deciding he wanted to be part of it, was adamant that Occupy the Dream has a defined agenda.

“Number one, we are asking for more Pell grants so that our young people might be able to compete and go to colleges and universities,” he said. “Number two, we are asking for an immediate freezing on foreclosures.” The group is also seeking billions of dollars “from Wall Street for economic development and for job training.”

Beginning in February, Bryant plans to launch a campaign to urge people to bank only at minority-owned financial institutions.

via African American pastors express support for Occupy movement – The Washington Post.

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Environmentalism and the Black Church – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com

3 Feb

Those in the African-American church have a long history of environmental justice that goes back to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nascent role. He was a central figure during the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, in which working-class people were striving to improve their conditions — a precursor to some of today’s environmental struggles….

I am not aware of any national faith-based organization leading the charge around issues that face African-Americans concerning the environment. I do know that we have a local model at St. Andrew A.M.E. in Memphis. The church and the surrounding community are actively responding to the plight of local African-Americans concerning poor nutrition and environmental inequity.

via Environmentalism and the Black Church – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

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Black Church Activism on Education and Incarceration – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com

3 Feb

Second, black churches need to resist the wave of attacks against public workers. These groups, traditionally those who have needed the protections of unions, also form the bedrock of the black middle class. If black churches do not wake up to the practical threat of the political discourse that vilifies those who work for all of us, we may witness the shrinking of the middle class even as the poorest among us become increasingly mired in poverty with nowhere to go other than to prison.

via Black Church Activism on Education and Incarceration – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

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Apple makes good products but flawed arguments | Prestowitz

3 Feb

Concerning the recent NYTimes article that argued that Apple has no choice by to manufacture in China, Clyde Prestowitz calls foul!. In this article he sketches three decades worth of American and Asian policies that allowed this to happen. His conclusion:

One only has to look at the fact that Germany and Japan, both high wage high cost societies, have trade surpluses with China and Asia to understand that the Apple arguments are weak and superficial.

It wouldn’ t be difficult to make a lot more of the iPhone in America and to make it competitively if either Apple or the U.S. government really wanted that to happen.

via Apple makes good products but flawed arguments | Prestowitz.

The protectionism boogeyman | Prestowitz

3 Feb

A second, more fundamental question, is why anyone thinks that free trade and globalization are always win-win. In the first place, free trade and globalization are not the same thing. Globalization involves capital flows, direct foreign investment, and technology transfers that are not usually involved in plain old trade transactions. Economic theory holds that free trade is win-win, but only under certain restrictive assumptions such as that all markets are perfectly competitive, that exchange rates are fixed, that there is full utilization of resources, that there are no economies of scale, and that there are no cross border flows of capital, technology, or labor. Obviously, those assumptions hold only in very few instances in modern trade.

Turning to globalization, there is even less of a theoretical basis for arguing that it is always a win-win proposition, and that argument is usually made without making a full accounting of the costs of globalization such as those affecting the environment, dislocation of workers, capital investment losses, and skills learning. The truth is that globalization may or may not be a win-win proposition depending on a wide variety of circumstances.

via The protectionism boogeyman | Prestowitz.

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Global Business Elite Go Marxist at Davos! | The Nation

3 Feb

But many attendees lost their cool over Barack Obama’s State of the Union promise to introduce a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires. American CEOs who had followed the speech on their iPads during the three-hour drive from the airport vented their spleen during a session on the world business outlook. “They say they want to create employment, then they attack the employment creators,” complained Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the electronic stock exchange Euronext, who took home $5 million last year. “It’s wealth creation that matters, not income distribution,” chimed in Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, whose last compensation package topped $11 million. Only John Chambers of Cisco (who took home $38 million last year) seemed to sense that the old Davos clichés of trickle-down might not work anymore. He chided Kleinfeld’s arrogance, saying, “It’s an embarrassment that US business has not found a way to combine its success with a growing middle class.”

via Global Business Elite Go Marxist at Davos! | The Nation.

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Indian Point Fire Safety Plan Rejected by Regulators – NYTimes.com

2 Feb

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday that it had rejected some of the Indian Point nuclear power plant’s procedures for assuring fire safety, noting that its two reactors lacked some equipment that was typically used to meet the commission’s regulations.

via Indian Point Fire Safety Plan Rejected by Regulators – NYTimes.com.

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Democratic Individuality: Are American war crimes above the law?

2 Feb

Sam Morison, a Department of Defense lawyer for prisoners in Guantanamo, sent the following letter about the violation of the rule of law there. Big Brother monitors the phone conversations (the only ones allowed) between lawyers and the prisoners in violation of the principle of lawyer-client confidentiality. Further, the Pentagon acts covertly to prevent the New York bar ethics committee from asserting this principle (one might also imagine that the lawyer in question is simply a sycophant – see here and here).

via Democratic Individuality: Are American war crimes above the law?.

H/T ComeHomeAmerica.

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From Ron Paul, to the Reform Party, to Occupy, to a New America

2 Feb

With your support, I secured a strong top-tier finish in Iowa and an historic 2nd place in New Hampshire. In Iowa, we more than doubled our vote total from 2008. We more than tripled our 2008 total in New Hampshire, and we quadrupled it in South Carolina.

—Ron Paul

People are catching on to Ron Paul’s honest, consistent, principled. and carefully planned program for combating fascism, racism, militarism and imperialism by returning to Constitutionally required and economically necessary LIMITED GOVERNMENT.

But Republicans are not catching on fast enough.

I registered as a Republican just recently, to be able to say I voted for Ron Paul in the Connecticut primary in April, but I can’t find, so far, any House or Senate candidates in this state who want to rein in the Fed and bring all the troops home, support the key Ron Paul fiscal & foreign policy proposals. Too many “military industrial complex” submarines and helicopters made in this state, I guess.

To mobilize that huge majority of Americans, mostly Independents and the 100 million alienated on the sidelines, who want honest politicians and real solutions, we’ll need to revive the Reform Party, test the Americans Elect processes, bring the genuine tax refusers from the ‘tea party’ over to the Occupy Mainstreet movement, and green the grass of the grassroots relentlessly before November 2012.

Let’s get it done this American spring, so we can hear the volume of the loud majority in the streets this summer.

Charlie Keil

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Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

1 Feb

Meanwhile, though Haidt still supports President Obama, he chides Democrats for a moral vision that alienates many working-class, rural, and religious voters. Though he’s an atheist, he lambasts the liberal scientists of New Atheism for focusing on what religious people believe rather than how religion binds them into communities. And he rakes his own social-psychology colleagues over the coals for being “a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering” and for making the field’s nonliberal members feel like closeted homosexuals. (See related article, Page B8.)

“Liberals need to be shaken,” Haidt tells me. They “simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around.”

via Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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