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barry commoner
What Barry Commoner's Four Principles of Ecology Has to Do With China's Coronavirus
"The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal."
Jan 26, 2020
My world as a very impressionable kid growing up on Long Island was influenced in the late 1950's and early '60's by make-believe television heroes and heroines, like Davy Crockett, tough western cowboys like Paladin and Wyatt Earp, and gentler ones, like the characters in the Wizard of OZ who finally found their courage. A picture of Alfred E Newman, from MAD Magazine, was pinned to the wall next to my bed, and a big pile of comic books were neatly stacked in a nearby bookshelf. Ah, the joys of a sheltered childhood....
These days I often find myself thinking about the people in my adult life that I count as exemplary individuals, like Pete Seeger, Martin Luther King, Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, Francis Moore Lappe, Ralph Nader, Greta Thunberg, and, the late Dr. Barry Commoner, who made the front page of Time magazine in 1970 during the first Earth Day as "the Paul Revere of Ecology."
Barry Commoner published his first best-selling book, "The Closing Circle," in 1971 which coincided with the very beginnings of Earth Day, and he warned Americans that a society which does not follow the basic laws of ecology and nature is a society courting disaster and turmoil. He said, "We are in an environmental crisis because the means by which we use the ecosphere to produce wealth are destructive of the ecosphere itself. The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal." Prescient, wise, and terrifying words..... and probably the first person ever in a modern media spotlight to say that capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Nowadays, Bernie Sanders seems to be the most well-known standard-bearer for this belief, though he is not so blatant as to say exactly that. And there are others, like Naomi Klein, and a mix of lesser well-known eco-socialists.
In "The Closing Circle," Dr. Commoner proposed his now-famous Four Laws of Ecology, a thesis as timely today as it was when he first conceived this 49 years ago.
- "Everything is Connected to Everything Else."
- "Everything Must Go Somewhere." (Also known as There is No Such Place as Away.)
- "Nature Knows Best."
- "There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch."
Commoner's wonderful and exquisitely useful thesis has been summarized, expanded, analyzed with environmental examples for today's world, and discussed many times over, but ironically, a very hot news story this week regarding epidemics - the spreading CoronaVirus from Wuhan, China - presents us with an incredible example of how all four of Commoner's ecology laws apply to this now-international health scare. It turns out that Chinese "wet markets" are, according to Chinese scientist Zhenzhong Si, as quoted on NPR, "the predominant food retail outlets for fresh produce and meat in Chinese cities. A large city typically has a few hundred wet markets," and a huge variety of both plant and animal products are for sale, including live animals, such as rabbits, frogs, snakes, turtles, pigeons, foxes, and many others. Tragically, these animals are kept in notoriously unhealthy confined spaces and their excretions and illnesses are part of the overall market arena, which is visited by thousands of shoppers each day. Additionally, the live slaughtering of animals takes place on a regular basis. Wet markets are an established and ingrained part of Chinese community and culture, and thus it is no surprise that diseases are now jumping from animals to humans and humans to humans. This is how the SARS virus got started in 2002 and 2003.
In China and other parts of Asia, says Dr. Zhenzhong Si, "Eating wild animals is considered a symbol of wealth because they are more rare and expensive. And wild animals are also considered more natural and, thus, nutritious, compared to farmed meat. It's a belief in traditional Chinese medicine that it can boost the immune system...Of course, some people eat wild animals just because they were driven by curiosity."
If the Chinese wet marketplace in urban areas doesn't mesh with Dr. Commoner's big picture of how the world can go very very wrong if it doesn't follow nature's basic rules, then nothing does.... If "Nature knows best" then wild animals should be living wildly, not harvested en masse for consumption and imprisoned in cages or tanks in crowded markets. And if "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and then you set up an unsustainable system such as the wet markets, you will undoubtedly be bitten in the ass, or worse. "Everything must go somewhere", in my opinion, equates to the disease, viruses, bacteria and blood, which are produced by animals in awful modes of captivity and being killed, directly next to people working and shopping. And, of course there's "everything is connected to everything else," which kind of sums up this whole truly unfortunate and inhumane situation.
We're told on the daily news that airports all over the world are now being used as emergency health assessment centers for travelers who may have been exposed to the virus, and that several huge cities in China, with a combined population of 25 million, are quarantined and essentially shut down in fear of the virus spreading to large numbers of people.
A toxic brew, made worse by teeming populations and easy worldwide travel. No easy answers here but many Chinese cities have apparently been moving towards modern supermarkets and away from the socially-popular wet markets. Still, the whole thing is a fine but awful example of how easy it is to go off the rails when you don't think and act like mother nature.
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These Are A Few Of My Favorite Jews
Dec 27, 2019
Like the Passover story, the celebration of Hanukkah reminds us that people can overcome great obstacles and achieve great things if they have a vision of a better society and build movements that challenge the conventional ideas of their day.
Election results and public opinion polls reveal that among white Americans, Jews have consistently been the most liberal and progressive ethnic and religious group. In 1920, when only 3 percent of Americans voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president, Jews gave him 38 percent of their votes. In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover for president with 57 percent of the popular vote, 82 percent of Jews supported FDR. In 1960, John F. Kennedy squeaked out a victory over Richard Nixon, getting barely more than 50 percent of all votes, but among Jews, it was no contest, with JFK garnering 82 percent of their votes. In 2008, Barack Obama bested John McCain by a 53-46 margin, but he won the Jewish vote 78-22.
Despite the prominence of a small number of Jews in the Trump administration - including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and policy aide and alter-ego Stephen Miller - only a small number of Jews are conservatives or Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Donald Trump by 48 to 46 percent, but Jews favored Clinton by 71 to 23 percent. In the 2018 midterm elections that swept in a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Jews led the "blue wave," giving Democrats 79 percent of their votes.
A 2012 survey found that 81 percent of Jews, compared with only 48 percent of all Americans, favored same-sex marriage should be legal. In the same survey, 93 percent of Jews believed that abortion should be legal in contrast to 53 percent of all Americans.
More than most other demographic groups - particularly among white Americans - Jews overwhelmingly disapprove of President Donald Trump's handling of most policy issues, including family separations at the Mexican border (78 percent), treatment of DACA recipients (74 percent), guns (74 percent), the Mueller Report (73 percent), building the border wall (71 percent), taxes (70 percent), Supreme Court nominations (69 percent), health care (69 percent), and banning immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries (66 percent). percent). Seventy-one percent of Jews disapprove of Trump's handling of the upsurge of anti-Semitism in America, a trend that Trump himself has provoked by consistently expressing anti-Semitic stereotypes and encouraging the rise of white nationalist hate groups.
Voting is the most basic of political activities, but social change happens only when people participate in activist movements that influence how people think and vote. Throughout American history, Jews have played and continue to play a disproportionately large role in the key social justice movements - as organizers and activists, politicians and jurists, and thinkers, artists, journalists, playwrights, poets, and novelists.
In 1900, anyone who advocated for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the rights of workers, a progressive income tax, or old-age insurance was considered a dangerous dreamer or a dangerous radical. Today such ideas are taken for granted. The radical ideas of one generation have become the common sense of the next.
Jews were among leaders and rank-and-file activists in all the great movements of the past century -- labor, civil rights and civil liberties, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the crusade against militarism - that have made America a more humane, democratic and inclusive country.
Consider Rose Schneiderman, a fiery socialist union organizer. She was on the front lines of the Progressive Era battles against slums and sweatshops. So were settlement house pioneer Lillian Wald, Rabbi Stephen Wise and lawyer Louis Brandeis (later a Supreme Court justice), whose writings and legal activism helped tame the growing power of corporate monopolies. Victor Berger, an Austrian immigrant and in 1910 the country's first Socialist congressman, introduced the first bill to provide old-age pensions. Eventually, the idea was adopted in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security.
Jewish social activism helped spearhead the early civil rights movement as well. In 1909, Joel Spingarn was a founder and then long-term president of the NAACP. Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roebuck was a pioneer in the new field of progressive philanthropy. He endowed Jane Addams' Hull House and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, funded more than 5,000 schools for African Americans in the rural South, and supported the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee-based training center for labor and civil rights activists.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, labor leaders Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky, Rose Pesotta, and Ralph Helstein led battles for workers' rights and economic reform, while composers Yip Harburg ("Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Over the Rainbow") and Aaron Copland ("Fanfare for the Common Man"), artist Ben Shahn and playwright Clifford Odets ("Waiting for Lefty") gave shape to radical ideas that caught the public's imagination.
During the 1960s, Allard Lowenstein, along with African-American organizer Bob Moses, created the Freedom Summer project, which brought more than 1,000 college students to the South to register black voters. About half of the white volunteers were Jews. Many of them -- including Barney Frank, Heather Booth and Vivian Rothstein -- pursued careers in activism and reform that have lasted into the 21st century. Two of them - Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman - died at the hands of extremist segregationists.
Lowenstein, along with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, journalist I.F. Stone, critic Noam Chomsky and other Jews, gave voice to the rising tide of anti-Vietnam War sentiment. Jews constituted at least one-third of the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, the leading campus anti-war organization.
Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Judy Chicago, and Andrea Dworkin were at the forefront of second-wave feminism. San Francisco activist Harvey Milk, poet Alan Ginsberg, scientist Frank Kameny, writer Larry Kramer, and Edie Windsor (plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage) helped catalyze the gay rights movement. A 1970 Time cover story called scientist Barry Commoner the "Paul Revere of ecology." Saul Alinsky inspired several generations of community organizers. Jews in the arts and the academy -- including playwright Arthur Miller, filmmakers Sidney Lumet and Stanley Kramer, TV producer Norman Lear, folksingers Bob Dylan, Peter Yarrow, Theo Bikel, and Phil Ochs, writers Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Studs Terkel, and social critics like writer Paul Goodman, Lenny Bruce, historian Howard Zinn, and Harvey Kurtzman (founder of MAD magazine) -- gave voice to movements of dissent.
Today, when Jews represent less than two percent of the nation's population, a new generation of Jewish progressives is extending this activist tradition. The individuals listed below are deeply rooted in today's movements for social justice. Some of them are directly involved in the Jewish community, but most of them work for unions, community organizing and environmental groups, and other issue advocacy organizations, or serve in public office as allies and activists within government.
I have focused on organizers and activists, rather than writers, journalists, entertainers, artists, musicians, and academics, even though they make critically important contributions to progressive movements. Any history of contemporary progressivism would be incomplete without reference to opinion-shapers like Kate Aronoff, Dick Flacks, Eric Foner, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Michelle Goldberg, Amy Goodman, Jacob Hacker, Janis Ian, Sarah Jaffe, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Krugman, Tony Kushner, Robert Kuttner, Sarah Leonard, Nelson Lichtenstein, Harold Meyerson, Phranc, Francis Fox Piven, Sarah Silverman, Jill Soloway, George Soros, Jon Stewart, Evan Rachel Wood, and David Zirin.
I don't pretend this is a comprehensive list. These are people I know, or know about. They represent a wide spectrum of activism, but there are tens of thousands of other Jews who could be included on others' lists. These are a few of my favorite Jews:
1. Nan Aron is founder and president of the Alliance for Justice, which fights for federal court appointees who respect civil rights and civil liberties
2. Ady Barkan, a veteran activist and publicist for progressive causes, has become well-known as a fighter for Medicare for All after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.), a disease that slowly takes away nearly every physical function while keeping the mind intact, and confined to a wheelchair. Politico called him "the most powerful activist in America."
3. Jeremy Ben-Ami is president of J Street, the leading organization within the American Jewish community committed to challenging Israel's rightward shift.
4. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange and founder of the women-led peace group Code Pink that uses create civil disobedience and humor to challenge corporate and government decision-makers around issues of militarism and the environmental crisis.
5. Rabbi Sharon Brous founded IKAR, a progressive Los Angeles synagogue, in 2004, to attract unaffiliated Jews alienated from the mainstream Jewish community. Brous and IKAR have helped spark a revival of interest in Jewish spirituality, inter-faith ties, and political activism.
6. Heather Booth has been an organizer since the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and women's movements of the 1960s. She created JANE, an underground abortion service started before Roe, and founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for social change leaders and organizers. She has been a key strategist and activist in movements immigrant rights, voting rights, bank reform, marriage equality, tax reform, and health care reform. She is the subject of the recent documentary "Heather Booth: Changing the World."
7. Dan Cantor was described in New York magazine as the "model of a grassroots political boss" for his role as Executive Director of the Working Families Party (WFP) of New York, a progressive third party established in 1998. Under his leadership, WFP led successful campaigns to reform New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws, maintain access to affordable mass transit, and raise New York's minimum wage. The WFP has helped elect progressive mayors, state legislators, city council members and members of Congress.
8. Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, led a major transformation of the union into a more militant, inclusive, and effective organization. Under his leadership, UTLA won major educational victories in 2019 following a week-long strike that catalyzed widespread support by building bridges with community and faith-based groups, parents and students in the country's second-largest school system.
9. Donald Cohen, founder of In The Public Interest, which works with unions, community groups, and local governments to challenge privatization, develop progressive policy ideas, and improve the effectiveness of progressive government
10. Stosh Cotler is the CEO of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social justice group, which has led the Jewish resistance to the Trump administration.
11. Janice Fine, spent more than 20 years as a community, labor, and electoral organizer before joining Rutgers University's labor studies faculty. She is a co-convenor of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, and works closely with many national and local immigrant rights, labor, and community organizing groups.
12. Lew Finfer, a Boston-based community and tenants rights organizer since 1970, is currently executive director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a network of faith-based community organizations that has won significant victories around economic, housing, and racial justice. He has led successful campaigns around rent control, redlining, health care, paid family leave and the minimum wage.
13. Jacob Frey served on the Minneapolis City Council before being elected Mayor in 2017. A college track star and a lawyer by training, Frey provided legal aid to tenants who lost their homes after a tornado struck Minneapolis in 2011. The next year he organized the first Big Gay Race, a 5K charity race to raise money for Minnesotans United for All Families, a political group organizing for marriage equality. On the City Council, he drafted the city's minimum wage law and paid sick leave ordinance, led an effort to require landlords to provide tenants with voter registration information, and sponsored an ordinance requiring polluters to pay fees based on the amount of pollution they produce in order to fund green jobs. As mayor, he has dramatically increased city funding for affordable housing and pushed for a comprehensive zoning reform plan to allow three-family homes in the city's residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors, making Minneapolis the first major city to end single-family zoning and confront the city's segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl.
14. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers union, along with local union president Armando Robles led 240 workers to illegally occupy their Chicago workplace in 2008 after their employer, Republic Windows and Doors, abruptly told them that it was shutting down the factory, denying employees severance and vacation pay they had earned. The workers formed and incorporated New Era Windows, a worker-run cooperative, and raised the funds needed to buy the machinery from their former employer and keep producing windows under the new arrangement. It remains open for business.
15. Andrew Friedman is co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of local and state community organizing groups with 53 affiliates in 34 states that organize campaigns to advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice policy agenda nationwide.
16. Marshall Ganz, the son of a rabbi, joined the Southern civil rights movement before serving as the organizing director for the United Farm Workers union. He teaches community organizing at Harvard, serving as a guru for activists around the world. He was the architect of Obama's 2008 grassroots election campaign
17. Jackie Goldberg's activism started with the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in 1964. After teaching in public schools, she won seats on the LA school board, LA City Council, and California state legislature, serving as an effective advocate for progressive causes, including spearheading battles for a living wage and responsible development. After a decade hiatus in public office, she was elected to the school board again in 2019.
18. Robert Greenwald, an award-winning TV and movie director, founded the nonprofit Brave New Films in 2000 to use documentary films to educate and mobilize for progressive causes. Its films have tackled such topics as Fox News, immigration, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, Walmart, the NRA, the Koch brothers, racism, and voter suppression.
19. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin co-founded Indivisible soon after Trump was elected president in 2016. Their on-line handbook for progressives soon mushroomed into a nationwide movement of volunteer activists, with over 6,000 chapters, devoted to mobilizing voters around progressive issues and candidates.
20. Ilyse Hogue, CEO of NARAL-Pro-Choice America, a leading women's rights organization. She previously worked at MoveOn.org, the Rainforest Action Network, and Media Matters for America.
21. Eddie Iny is the organizing director for OUR Walmart, a nationwide grassroots organization of Walmart employees, which has successfully pushed the nation's largest private employer to raise based pay from $7.25 to $11 an hour, institute paid family leave, and improve conditions for pregnant employees.
22. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which raises awareness and engages in direct action to protect human rights in the United States and Israel.
23. Madeline Janis, organizer and founder of the LA Alliance for a New Economy and Jobs to Move America, has for over 35 years, been on the inside and outside of local and state government, working to create high road, equitable economic development.
24. Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the tragic shooting in 2018 at Marjory Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is a founder of March for Our Lives and Never Again MSD, organizations that advocate for stronger gun control.
25. Larry Kramer is an iconic gay rights activist, playwright, and co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. He helped start the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential direct action protest organization that is widely credited with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases. Among his many plays are The Normal Heart (1985) and The Destiny of Me (1992).
26. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum is the spiritual leader of New York's Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the country. She joined CBST in 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and has become a powerful voice on social justice issues within the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.
27. Larry Krasner, a veteran radical defense attorney, won a surprise victory to become Philadelphia's District Attorney with a mission to end mass incarceration and the criminal justice system's racism.
28. Sheila Kuehl, a former child actress (Zelda on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"), co-founded and served as managing attorney of the California Women's Law Center. In 1997, she became the first woman to be named Speaker pro Tempore of the California State Assembly, just three years after becoming the state's first openly gay legislator. In the legislature, she sponsored successful bills to establish paid family leave, protect victims of domestic violence, establish nurse to patient ratios in hospitals, and prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of gender and disability and led the campaign for a statewide single-payer health care system.She is currently one of five elected members of the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors which serves over 10 million people, where she has fought to reduce homelessness and to establish LA County's first affordable housing trust.
29. Brad Lander spent over a decade as a community organizer and neighborhood planner before being elected to the NY City Council, where he co-founded its Progressive Caucus. He has fought successfully to protect freelancers from wage theft, give fast-food workers a fair workweek, and make sure Uber/Lyft drivers earn a living wage, improve public transit, challenge the NYPD's discriminatory practices, combat school segregation, and expand affordable housing. Through #GetOrganizedBK, he brought Brooklyn residents together to stand up to the Trump administration's bigotry, corruption, and injustice. He serves as chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 800 progressive local elected officials in 45 states.
30. Stephen Lerner has spent three decades unionizing hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers. He was the architect of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign, a nationwide campaign that led to dramatic improvements in the wages and conditions of mostly immigrant service workers. He is currently a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative and working with unions and community organizing groups to expose and change the lax regulations and unsustainable practices of private equity firms.
31. Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater served congregations in the greater New York and Los Angeles for 17 years before shifting gears and become the executive director of Friends in Deed, a local, religious-based non-profit addressing homelessness and poverty in Pasadena. He serves on the board of T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
32. Yonah Lieberman, Emily Mayer, and Simone Zimmerman are founders of If Not Now, a movement to end the American Jewish community's support for Israel's occupation of Arab territories, including their criticism of Birthright tours of Israel for young American Jews.
33. Ruth Messinger is a former NY City Council member and Manhattan borough president, who served as president of (and current ambassador for) the American Jewish World Service, which has provided about $400 million to support thousands of social justice organizations in the developing world to reduce poverty, amplify the voices of poor and persecuted minorities, defend the land and water rights of indigenous communities most affected by climate change, and advance sexual health and rights for women, girls and LGBT people.
34. Karen Nussbaum co-founded 9to5, an organization to address the concerns of women office workers in 1973. That group inspired the 1980 film "9 to 5" starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. She founded a vision of SEIU devoted to organizing office workers and during the Clinton administration directed the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. She is the founding director and now a board member of Working America, the community organizing arm of the AFL-CIO, dedicated to giving non-unionized workers a voice in such issues as raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, and health care reform.
35. Eli Pariser, was executive director of MoveOn from 2004-2009 and has been a pioneer in figuring out how technology can be utilized to promote progressive movements. He is currently a fellow at New America.
36. Rabbi Jonah Pesneris director of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center, which mobilizes Jews around immigration, health care, voting rights, gun control, civil rights, poverty, Islamophobia, LGBTQ equality, environmental justice and other social justice issues.
37. Jane Ramsey, for over three decades, led the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, leading struggles against poverty, racism and anti-Semitism in partnership with Chicago's diverse communities.She is now a consultant to nonprofit advocacy groups and a member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
38. Cong. Jamie Raskin served in the Maryland state legislator before his 2016 election to Congress. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe called Raskin, who taught law at American University for a quarter-century, "the best constitutional lawyer in all of Congress." In 2008 he started Democracy Summer, a program to teach political activist skills to 16-to-22-year olds. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he's played an important role in the current impeachment fight.
39. Hillary Ronen was an immigrant rights lawyer before being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where she's been a strong advocate for tenants' rights, public transit, and environmental justice. She led the successful fight for a tax on big business to fund affordable housing, a ballot measure approved by 60% of the voters.
40. Steve Rosenthal has been described by the New York Times as one of the Democratic Party's "smartest and most influential strategists" and by the Washington Post as, "one of the party's best-known voter turnout specialists." He began is career in the labor movement as an organizer with the Communication Workers of America, served as Associate Deputy Secretary of Labor under Secretary Robert Reich in the Clinton administration, founded America Coming Together (one of the largest voter mobilization campaigns in Democratic Party history), and served as political director of the AFL-CIO. He is currently president of The Organizing Group, which works with unions and other progressive organizations to increase voter turnout.
41. Amy Rutkin, chief of staff for Cong. Jerrold Nadler, has been a key behind-the-scenes architect of the Democrats' impeachment strategy.
42. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has sparked a grassroots upsurge and changed the national debate with his two presidential campaigns, putting democratic socialism on the political map.
43. Cong. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) has been one of the most progressive members of Congress since she was elected in 1998, after serving for eight years in the Illinois State Assembly. During the previous 20 years, she was a community organizer, serving as program director of Illinois Public action and director of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens. In Congress, she has been deeply involved in the fight to protect women's reproductive freedom, supports a single-payer health care system, opposed the Iraq war, and has been a leader on issues of consumer safety, opposition to U.S. military, and LGBT equality.
44. Amy Schur, the organizing director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, spearheaded the successful campaign for statewide rent control and just-cause eviction law in 2019, and building the power of the tenants rights movement
45. Marilyn Schneiderman, longtime union organizer, is currently director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, which conducts research and sponsors workshops to strengthen the influence of community organizations, worker centers, and labor unions. She previously directed the National AFL-CIO's Department of Field Mobilization and served as executive director of AVODAH, a national Jewish social justice organization.
46. Leah Simon-Weisberg has been on the front lines of the housing crisis for over a decade. She is the Directing Attorney of the Tenant Rights Program at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, working closely with community organizers to fight rent increases and evictions. She's worked with Tenants Together, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and other groups to challenge bank foreclosures and predatory lending, drafted rent control and other laws for Bay Area cities, and serves as an elected member of Berkeley's Rent Board.
47. Daniel Sokatch is CEO of the New Israel Fund, the largest funder of grassroots activist groups in Israel that promote Arab-Jewish cooperation, human rights, LGBT rights, and democratic change and oppose the Occupation and violation of Palestinian rights.
48. Gloria Steinem is a feminist icon and founder of MS magazine, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the National Women's Political Caucus.
49. Becky Wasserman is the director of Government Relations for the Service Employees International Union. She previously worked for J Street and the American Jewish World Service and was President of the United States Student Association for two years. She serves on the boards of Local Progress and the Center for Community Change.
50. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers since 2008, has pushed to improve education standards, raise teachers' salaries, and challenge efforts to allow teachers to carry guns in schools.
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Who Will Displace the Omniciders?
The only reason Congress has been an oil, gas, and coal toady, instead of an efficient, renewable energy force, is because we have sat on the sidelines watching ExxonMobil be Congress’ quarterback
Mar 07, 2019
Citizens challenging the towering threat of climate crisis should never underestimate the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuel corporations. Real engagement with the worsening climate disruption means spending more of our leisure hours on civic action. The fate of future generations and our planet depends on the intensity of these actions.
This was my impression after interviewing Dahr Jamail, author of the gripping new book, The End of Ice, on my Radio Hour. Jamail, wrote books and prize-winning articles, as the leading freelance journalist covering the Bush/Cheney Iraq war and its devastating aftermath. For his latest book, Jamail went to the visible global warming hot spots to get firsthand accounts from victims of climate disruption. His gripping reporting is bolstered by facts from life-long specialists working in the regions he visited.
Readers of The End of Ice are taken on a journey to see what is happening in Alaska, the mountain forests of California, the coral reefs of Australia, the heavily populated lowlands of South Florida, the critical Amazon forest, and other areas threatened by our corporate-driven climate crisis.
Jamail, an accomplished mountaineer, precisely illustrates the late great environmentalist, Barry Commoner's first law of ecology. Namely, that "everything is connected to everything else." Jamail makes the connection between the rising sea levels and the untold catastrophes engulfing forests, mountains, and the wildlife on land and in the sea. Jamail is not relying on computer models. What he is seeing, photographing, and experiencing is often worse than what the models show in terms of accelerating sea level rises and the melting ice of the glaciers.
Jamail's trenchant conversations with bona fide experts who have spent a lifetime seeing what mankind has done to the natural world, presents a compelling case of the threat the climate crisis poses to human survival.
Jamail, near the end of his narrative, writes: "Disrespect for nature is leading to our own destruction... This is the direct result of our inability to understand our part in the natural world. We live in a world where we are acidifying the oceans, where there will be few places cold enough to support year-round ice, where all the current coastlines will be underwater, and where droughts, wildfires, floods, storms, and extreme weather are already becoming the new normal."
If you don't know that melting ice and permafrost is a big tragedy, then that is all the more reason to read this book and immerse yourself in its vivid prose.
His chapter on south Florida and its millions of residents is probably the one scenario that will bring the alarming message home to people in coastal communities worldwide. South Florida could be underwater in fifty years or less. Many of the houses, buildings and infrastructures are located only a few feet or yards above sea level. Engineers and some city officials see Miami Beach as doomed and say Floridians must prepare for evacuations.
There are other more approaching, intermediate dangers. As Jamail writes: "One major source of concern is the Florida aquifer. Once that water is contaminated by saltwater, it is over."
Already, some banks will not provide 30 year home mortgages for vulnerably located houses. Some home values along the ocean are starting to be adversely affected. Insurance companies are reluctant to publicize their projections but their actuarial tables are not, shall we say, consumer friendly.
Then there are the lethal-storm surges during major hurricanes as sea levels and high tides rise relentlessly.
Most businesses, people, and municipalities are looking the other way. Two-term Governor Rick Scott (a corporate crook) even prohibited state employees from uttering or writing the words "climate change" in any state documents. It is admittedly hard to face such catastrophe while the sun is shining and most normal life continues. In 2017, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Florida Power and Light, the go-ahead to build two new nuclear power plants (they're too expensive and won't be built) to join its aging plants on the beach. Shades of the Fukushima disaster in Japan 8 years ago.
None of these warnings are recent. Climate scientists warned President Lyndon Johnson about the dangers associated with carbon release in the atmosphere in 1965. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore released a detailed, urgent, report, with pictures and graphs, about climate disruption in 1993 to demonstrate that the clock was ticking. Unfortunately, in the following seven years, they mostly did what the auto industry wanted them to do--nothing.
Some of the most poignant passages in Jamail's book are the informed cries and worries of the onsite specialists he interviewed. People you have never heard of, but who should be heard all the time. One of them, Dr. Rita Mesquita, a biologist with the largest research institute in Brazil for the Amazon forest says, "We are not telling the general public what is really going on." While the general public is spending more time in virtual reality and, with growing urbanization, becoming estranged from nature, this ominous disconnect is widening.
The new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has openly vowed to bolster more commercial development in the Amazon and on indigenous tribal land.
How will India's billion plus people get their water if its rivers dry up because the glaciers in the Himalayas have melted? How do you relocate 30 million people from Mumbai from rising sea levels? How do you head off spreading diseases due to habitat destruction? Meanwhile, 100 corporations (e.g. ExxonMobil, Shell, and state entities) continue to be the source of 71% of total global carbon dioxide emissions.
There are 600 cable channels in the U.S. transmitting largely junk programs. How about one percent of them (six) being dedicated to the global stories and urgencies of climate catastrophes, and to how movements like Drawdown (of greenhouse gases) are succeeding in cutting these menaces (see Drawdown by Paul Hawken) around the world?
Think about what we should be doing with some of our time for our descendants so as not to have them curse us for being oblivious, narcissistic ancestors!
We can start with instructing our Congress to deploy its transformative leverage over the economy. The only reason Congress has been an oil, gas, and coal toady, instead of an efficient, renewable energy force, is because we have sat on the sidelines watching ExxonMobil be Congress' quarterback.
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