Review of The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones

By Bill McKibben

Van Jones is, beyond any doubt, one of the rising stars of the American environmental movement and the American civil rights movement. He’s fused the two of them in a new way, and in so doing constructed a powerful political argument for how we might move forward with the twin challenges of preparing the country to fight global warming and pulling our economy out of its dangerous current weakness. 
  
The longtime head of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, and now of the Green For All campaign, Jones took advantage of the odd politics of the Bay Area to reach a vital epiphany. He saw the very real environmental passion, and very real wealth, of folks in San Francisco, the Berkeley Hills, and the coastlines of Marin County, and he saw as well the abysmal poverty of the flatlands along the East Bay. How did they need each other? Well, in a practical way, and in a political one.

Practically speaking, the task of actually making all those affluent homes “green” would require lots of workers. Workers that could, and should, come from the communities passed over by prosperity in years past—“green-collar workers” who would need to go past high school but perhaps not to a four-year college to learn the real skills required to make American energy-efficient. “Let’s be clear,” he writes. “The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. . . . Another bit of high-tech green technology is the clipboard . . . used by energy auditors as they point out energy-saving opportunities to homeowners and renters. . . . Other green-collar workers can then follow up with other tasks for building owners: wrapping hot-water heaters with blankets, blowing insulation, plugging holes, repairing cracks.” The point, he insists, is that when we think “green future” the image that should spring to mind is not George Jetson with a jet pack but “Joe Sixpack with a hard hat.” Read More

Review of  The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, By Nicholas Stern

Nicholas Stern is a very interesting man. A member of the British House of Lords (Baron Stern of Brentford!), he was chief economist of the World Bank and head of the British government’s economic service. In 2005, the UK leadership asked him to undertake an evaluation of the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming, and the report he produced a year or so later became one of the landmark documents in the twenty-year debate over climate change. 

What Stern’s team concluded, to be very brief about it, is that the cost of doing nothing about global warming would be very high (larger than the costs of the both world wars and the Depression combined), while the cost of transforming our energy system would be relatively low. In this very lucid and well-written book, he manages to go into detail on those points, mixing in some of the latest science. And as a bonus, he provides a fascinating look at the complicated international politics of climate as we approach this December’s momentous Copenhagen global warming negotiations.

Stern begins where any account of the problem must, with a quick recapitulation of the science. Though he has the annoying habit of using a particularly arcane metric (co2-equivalent concentrations, which includes a variety of other gases and is an unnecessary and obscuring filigree when carbon dioxide is the main problem), his view is based fairly strongly on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He believes that nothing we can do will prevent us from a warming of more than three degrees Fahrenheit (so far we’ve seen about one degree) and he believes really catastrophe lies north of that number, at five or six degrees Fahrenheit. Here his science is perhaps a little out of date—the most recent data indicates that we’re already seeing enormous shifts in the planet’s climate system (the melt of Arctic sea ice and so forth). We now think that we can afford even less carbon in the atmosphere than Stern contends. Read More

One of America’s most distinguished historians and critics, Garry Wills is the author of numerous books, including Saint Augustine, Papal Sin, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. He has won many other awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University.

Which books have most influenced you?

Augustine’s Confessions and Trinity, since they explore the human soul as God’s Image; in politics, the non-Communist attacks on capitalism in John Ruskin’s Unto This Last made their mark - as they did on Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw; Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution give a sense of what his great unwritten work on liberty would have been.

Review of American Grit: What It Will Take To Survive And Win In The 21st Century by Tony Blankley

By Ezra Klein

It is possible I’ve read books worse than Tony Blankley’s American Grit: What It Will Take To Survive And Win In The 21st Century, but it is hard to recall any of them right now. This slim volume – 188 pages of actual argument, large type on every page, ample white space between every line – would make for a very nice present to a very dim conservative who you wanted to play a practical joke on. 

Blankley is a syndicated columnist who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich and speechwriter to Ronald Reagan. He is a man who knows quite a bit more about launching political insurrections than I do. Even so, I’ve rarely heard of ideological renewal – much less a strategy for 21st century survival — emerging quite so haphazardly. Blankley’s vision for the future is the sort of thing that would hardly withstand the rigors of a shoutfest on the McLaughlin Report. Which is fitting, in a sense, because that’s where it comes from.

“It never occurred to me precisely where my political philosophy was moving until an appearance on the McLaughlin Group television show a few years ago,” writes Blankley. He goes on to relate a particularly illuminating exchange he had in which McLaughlin demanded to know the agenda of “neo-cons” like Blankley. “I’m not a neo-con,” Blankley replied. “Well, what are you?” asked McLaughlin. What comes next is a direct quote from the book: “With the red light of the television camera focused on me, I paused and thought for a second or two, and then more or less blurted out, ‘I’m a nationalist!’” Read More

[Posted by Elena Sytcheva]

The following is adapted from Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country, by William Greider.

These five major elements are driving the deterioration of American prospects:

(1) Globalization’s net negative consequences for the country
“The US economic engine is running on empty, borrowing vast sums of capital from abroad to stay afloat. We borrow to pay for the privilege of consuming more than we produce—that is, living beyond our means.”

“The US has accumulated more than $5 trillion in indebtedness to foreign creditors over the last 15 years.”

(2) Militarism and it’s dominance of U.S. foreign policy
“America’s military power remains truly awesome and spans the globe, but its uses have been expanded far beyond the original idea of national defense. The military now attempts to direct other nations’ politics by “projecting power”—deploying troops and forward bases to distant places where no obvious enemy exists.”

“The global reach of American deployments and strategies for keeping out new enemies are magnifying the risks for Americans rather than reducing them.”

(3) The triumph of free-market ideology and it’s deconstruction of an equitable society
“For the last thirty years, conservative reforms like the deregulation of industries and finance and regressive tax reduction have gradually eviscerated the government’s protective mantle. Families were exposed to the harsh edges of market forces. Businesses and banks were freed to innovate and maximize returns, but also discard their long-standing obligations to workers and society.”

“One million households in the uppermost tier—the top 1 percent—now collectively earn the same amount as the 60 million families who make up the lower two-thirds of the economic ladder.”

(4) The ecological crisis and the coming scarcity of oil
“Coping with both of these threats requires a profound industrial transformation—the thorough redesign and retooling of virtually every product and production process.”

“The United States is not alone in facing these challenges, but we are particularly vulnerable, first because our society consumes more than any other nation and is wasteful on a bloated scale, and second because the United States lags far behind other advanced nations in developing ways to cope with the well-understood imperatives. Global warming is the greatest and most obvious danger, but it is compounded by the overall destruction of nature as industrial capitalism steadily encroaches upon and undermines the finite capacities of the land, air, water, and ecosystems needed to support all life on earth. The industrial transformation that is now required must also simultaneously invent a system for producing alternative fuels that can replace hydrocarbons.”

(5) Our decayed democracy and the paralysis of reform
“The political factor trumps all the others. Major policy shifts that could begin to address these large wounds are effectively stymied. The same business and financial interests that profit robustly from the status quo stand in the way. Representative democracy has been captured and deformed by these interests, and the voters are distanced from those in power. Both parties collude to insulate themselves from voter retribution.”

Buy Come Home America for $1 when you join Progressive Book Club.

This article was originally published at Progressive Book Club in June, 2008.

Misrule by Design
Conservative policy ideas have failed again and again. But Grover Norquist doesn’t seem to notice.
Review of Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives by Grover Norquist
By Greg Anrig

A 2005 New Yorker profile aptly described Grover G. Norquist as the conservative coalition’s “ringleader, visionary, and enforcer.” As head of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform since 1985, Norquist relentlessly pushed disparate factions on the right to cooperate in electing Republicans at all levels of government and in killing the careers of politicians who dodged or broke his signature “no-new-taxes” pledge. Because Norquist’s ascent to power coincided with the conservative movement’s domination of American politics, when he speaks, everyone across the ideological spectrum listens.

Norquist wrote his new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, to lay out his roadmap for his “Leave us Alone Coalition to continue its progress toward Jefferson’s vision of the self-reliant, independent American—toward a free society where everyone lives off the earnings of no man but himself.”  But with the conservative era apparently on the verge of collapsing in November, Norquist’s book is more illuminating as a resource for understanding why his movement’s resounding political successes ended up producing such catastrophic failures of governance. The belief system built on hostility toward government that motivated Norquist and his followers left the public officials they elected with no effective ways to respond to challenges ranging from Hurricane Katrina to stagnating wages to the downward-spiraling health care system to tainted spinach to global warming and so on. Drowning government in a bathtub, to use Norquist’s characteristically blunt language, left the residents of New Orleans on their own when Katrina drowned their city. A large majority of Americans were appalled at what that looked like. Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

The following is an adapted excerpt from Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy (Houghton Mifflin).

1) The way we look at ourselves

“One parallel involves the way Americans see America; and, more to the point, the way the tiny, elite subset of Americans who live in the nation’s capital see America—and see Washington itself. Rome prized its status as the city around which the world revolved. Official Washington shares that Ptolemaic outlook. Unfortunately, it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy—just a faulty premise. And it leads to an exaggerated sense of its importance in the eyes of others, and of its ability to act alone. Washington led the fight against some of the twentieth century’s most dangerous ‘-isms.’ Solipsism is one it missed.”

2) The way we run our military

“Another parallel concerns military power. This is the subject that comes most often to mind when Rome and America are compared. All that empire talk! Rome and America aren’t carbon copies or fraternal twins, in either approach to power or the tools at their disposal. Amid all the differences, though, two large common problems stand out. One is cultural and social: the widening divide between military society and civilian society. The other reason is demographic: the shortage of manpower. For a variety of reasons, Rome and America both start to run short of the people they need to sustain their militaries, and both have to find new recruits wherever they can. Rome turned to barbarians for help: not a good long-run solution, history would suggest. America is increasingly turning to its own outside sources—not the Visigothi and the Ostrogothe but the Halliburtoni and the Wackenhuti. Also not a good long-run solution.”

3) The way we privatize public services

“A third parallel is something that can be lumped under the term “privatization,” which can often also mean “corruption.” Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private responsibilities—and between public and private resources. The line between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it becomes too hazy, or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities once thought to be public tasks: collecting the nation’s taxes, patrolling its streets, defending its borders. This may make sense in the short term—and sometimes, like Rome, we may have no choice in the matter. But how will the consequences play out over decades, or centuries? Badly, I believe.” Read More

In the introduction to his Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America,  Jay Parini writes:

“By books that ‘changed America,’ I mean works that helped to create the intellectual and emotional contours of this country. Each played a pivotal role in developing a complex value system that flourishes to this day. I expanded my list of works under discussion in Promised Land from twelve to thirteen, preferring the odd number, a baker’s dozen, as it reflects the irregular nature of my project and distantly echoes the number of original colonies. I might easily have discussed fifteen or twenty books, but one has to stop somewhere, and I wanted to reflect certain major strains in American thought or culture without seeming encyclopedic.”

Here are Parini’s thirteen books:

1. Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford

2. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

3. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

4. The Journals of Lewis and Clark

5. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

6. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

8. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

9. The Promised Land by Mary Antin

10. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

11. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock

12. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

13. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Buy Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America for $1 when you join Progressive Book Club. 

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 24-26

Outside the Window: May 29, 2009. New York, New York. Cloudy and cool. Maybe some storms tonight.

Inside the Book: 2003. Ghazni and Shkin, Afghanistan. Hot. Tense.

In a 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, Milton Bearden (CIA station chief in Pakistan between 1986 and 1989) dubbed Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” The Soviets had tried and failed to pacify it. A century earlier, the British fought three costly wars on the same terrain before retreating. Two millennia before that, Alexander the Great barely escaped with his life. Only Genghis Kahn had any luck incorporating the tribes into his empire, and according to Bearden, even he had to make “painful accommodations with the Afghans.” The initial invasions sometimes went pretty well, with foreign armies marching into cities and setting up puppet governments. But then, little by little, ambush by ambush…

This history is much on Mullaney’s mind. A well-trained historian, he sees evidence of it everywhere: from Ghazni’s 12th century “Towers of Victory” to a half-buried Soviet tank. The latter is another example of Mullaney’s keen eye for metaphor: the land can swallow an invader whole. Mullaney implies here and elsewhere that—despite a history of invasions and occupations—no outsider has been able to impose its will on this country, at least not for long. As he points out, “Afghans say Americans have all the watches, but they have all the time.” Read More

Jehan Sadat, widow of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who was assassinated in 1981, is the author of My Hope for Peace. A lifelong activist for women’s rights, literacy, and humanitarian causes worldwide, she has received more than twenty honorary doctoral degrees and a number of prestigious international awards. She is senior fellow with the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and lives in Virginia and Egypt.

Q: Why did you choose this particular moment to write this particular book?

A: The end of March [2009] was the thirtieth anniversary of the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel. In My Hope for Peace I talk about the struggle for peace in the Middle East, the cause for which my husband gave his life.

Q: You talk about other kinds of peace, too.

A: Peace is the defining theme of my life. After my husband was assassinated, it was a very hard time for me. But our love together made me feel a kind of peace inside, and instead of staying at home doing nothing and just living in grief and sadness I tried to come out and start working again—teaching. It is much more peaceful for me to feel that I’m doing something, which will please his soul also.

Q: You also talk about peace as being inherent to Islam.

A: Being here in the United States half of the year, I’ve noticed—especially after 9/11—that Islam is misunderstood in this country. As a Muslim woman, I feel that’s it my duty and the duty of all Muslims—reasonable Muslims, not the fundamentalists, of course—to enjoin others to live a life of brotherhood without distinction. We are to respect and treat all human beings as equal, regardless of creed or color, whether man or woman, civilians or soldiers, rulers or subjects, rich or poor, whatever they are. Islam is in fact a spiritual democracy, radically egalitarian and deeply, deeply concerned with human dignity. Read More