Last week it was very clandsetinely reported that 50,000 people showed up at Cobo Arena in Detroit for housing, energy, and food assistance. A couple of days later, a report sneaked through that about 10,000 people showed up to apply for 90 jobs in Louisville, KY. With the history of protracted loss in manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia, it is probably safe to assume that unemplyment and under-employment rates in the City of Brotherly Love are much higher than the reported statistics.
This is a marginally reported manifestation of a huge problem that has been going on for years, and accelerating recently; the plight and "invisibility" of those dispossessed by the schism between the rich, the owning classes, and the losses in livability for the working and non-working (many former "middle class" elevated to such success by the former strength of unionization) poor as the inflationary spiral of Capitalism shed many and left them and others behind in the day to day struggles and realities of the "supply-side" and post-"supply side" eras.
We need fundamental change.
Whereas, hope is hard to find, I found a sliver of it in the new AFL-CIO's leadership proclamation of a mission to "organize the unorganized".
We desperately need working class leadership in this country and the world. We need to commit and dedicate to the famous old slogan of the International Workers of the World (sic) [IWW], "One Big Union".
Given resource limitations, economic collapse, population pressures, and ongoing and increasing tensions brought about by environmental inequality, now more than ever we need to enunciate, inculcate, and commit to world unity and cooperation. The explicit principles to underlie such are related later in this letter.
I offer the following for your consideration, inter-organizational and related communications, and commitment relative to policy, program, and project development:
I am named after my great uncle, Mike Misenti, who worked and fought? his way from humble beginnings as a mason to President of the Building Trades Union, and later President of their Pension Fund, in the State of Connecticut.
Mike Misenti didn't care what "his folks" were building, as long as they were building. That is my major complaint with Labor Unions, their need to self-perpetuate, and offer blind loyalty and complicity with less than optimal corporations/contractors and the latters? self-interested profit motivated projects and industries that are sometimes, if not often, counter-productive to social/environmental goals..
Don't get me wrong, I consider the interests of workers of all "stripes" and the poor to be of the utmost importance. However, in this era of post-peak oil, climate change, inequality and the tensions that such brings, and the perception of hopelessness that are held by and for youth and for the children, it is necessary that we allocate scarce resources in the most optimal ways and means possible.
We must recognize the fossil fuel age and the subsequent overshoot in automobile and airplane use as a historical exception that must be phased into perspective.
If we want to conserve precious fossil fuels for priority uses such as solar assisted heating, cooking, electricity generation, cooling, agricultural inputs, durable products, necessary industrial processes, inter-community and inter-regional transport within a paradigm of relocalization for all communities and regions (moving towards self-sufficiency), and preserve the luxury and convenience of occasional automobile and airplane travel in a manner that explicitly adjusts for economic disruption, then we must plan and implement.
We need to see the study and practice of Resource and Regional Planning beyond the historical complicity, and at best mitigation of, the irrational Capitalist growth paradigm that does not recognize and/or respect a finite planet whose limits that we are fast approaching. We must enter an era of Resource Allocation based on the explicit principles of meeting human needs, inclusion, equity, humanity, quality of life, environmental/public health and wellness, sustainability, economic democracy, and peace.
The key to a bountiful green (building) economy is the reversal of the thirty, fifty, one hundred year trend of sprawl development in the United States.
By rebuilding neighborhoods and reallocating goods and services to those renovated neighborhoods (made walkable, meaning that the great
majority of Americans will be able to get what they need and reasonably want within walking distance of their homes), we can succeed.
Such a tremendous dedication of resources will be a boom to the building trades and other sectors and will create the effect of reducing automobile
usage by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years. Automobile use currently squanders about 14 MILLION BARRELS of oil a day in the continental United States.
Neighborhood commercial,community and work/telecommute centers will be centrally placed in what are now alienating, automobile dependent, strictly residential areas, alleviating the problems associated with post-peak oil and
climate change and bringing with it the quality of life associated with communities and neighborhoods, that most individuals and
families currently lack.
If we do this, we can take the opportunity to retrofit for weatherization, passive solar design (heating and cooling), electronic environmental controls, solar assisted hot water applications, limited PV and wind applications, etc.
Also, if done correctly, we can make changes in ownership arrangements that are much more fair and just, and work towards an equitable distribution of wealth among neighborhoods.
It is important that we fundamentally reassess our economic system and replace the current economic/finance system with one that targets
the needs of the current residents, and not, for-profit speculation.
Because of the terrible inflation of real and capital assets that is a product of the speculative and profit-taking modus operandi of the Capitalist system, it will be fundamentally necessary to reform our economic/financial
system by consolidating private (while rededicating them as quasi-public) real and capital assets and equity and writing way down
the ?market value? of those assets.
After completing that awesome task, we could proceed with a ?plan and implement? economy dedicated to meeting the needs of the indigenous populations of all communities: inclusion, humanity, equity, quality of life, environmental/public health and wellness, sustainability, and peace.
Mike Morin
Eugene, OR, USA
www.peoplesequityunion.blogspot.com
wiserunion@earthlink.net
(541) 343-3808
The Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia has published new research detailing the sorts of investment necessary to build the foundation for economic progress related to sustainable manufacturing, green construction and demolition waste recycling, and energy efficiency projects/retrofits.
The biggest potential obstacle to this progress: strategy and worker training/education policies rooted in the past.
The reason I’m paying attention to this report is because this group is a founding member of the larger Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, which is ALL about sharing ideas and best practices for achieving sustainable growth at the community level. These are spunky local businesses, many of them in the “small” category. The sustainable economy isn’t something we should be relying on mega-corporations to create.
So even though the details and recommendations are specific to Philadelphia, which has lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs over the past 40 years and certainly could benefit from the sustainability movement, there are definitely lessons here for other metros around the United States.
Among the recommendations in the report (called the “Emerging Industries Project”) are that cities like Philadelphia give priority to bids for public projects that have a “recycling” component to them (whatever gets knocked down gets handled differently than in the past, with materials such as bricks being reused) and that the policy of allowing commercial and residential development on land previously zone for industrial zones be reconsidered. Encourage “clean” industrial parks instead of more condominiums, the report suggests.
For any progress to be made in building green jobs or a sustainable local economy, it will take cooperation from the government, from non-profits and the private sector for new industries to emerge, the report suggests. (No argument from this vantage point. No finger-pointing, either.)
The other thing it will take is a bit of a reboot in terms of public perception: Even though the Philadelphia metro supports the base and policies to accommodate manufacturing, the local perception is that this industry is “dead” and has moved elsewhere. While this is true of the historical industry, the business model around manufacturing products for the clean energy sector is another matter entirely. Many people also are still hung up on the idea that sustainability comes at the expense of profitability, the report finds.
Local products also need local markets, so finding ways to make it easier for the community to find and buy local goods and services should be a priority.
