The Coming Storm

** This article appeared in  TruthOut  December 15, 2014 ** What if there was a way to address climate change, halt police brutality, heal the environment, end unemployment, take the profit out of exploitation and racism, and put an end to endless war?  It stands to reason that the powers that be would do all they could to keep it from us.  Those who profit from the violence, injustice and destruction all around us have every incentive to obfuscate, misrepresent and undermine anything that might threaten their privilege. Well it turns out there  is  a concrete, eminently practical way to build a better world.  But don’t expect to read about it in the  New York Times  or the  Washington Post.   Don’t look for it to be featured on network TV news.  It’s called  A Bill of Rights for Working People  and it’s detailed below. The BRWP is more than just a set of ideas; it’s an action plan....

Joshua Frank is spot-on as he argues against tying movements to the Democratic Party in his article, We Don’t Need Climate Marches, We Need a Political Awakening in the October 3-5 edition of Counterpunch.  I also quite agree (as I have written about here and here ) that it’s high time working people break with the Democratic and Republican parties and build a party of our own.  However, Frank’s piece flounders when it comes to analyzing the essential nature of the September 21 climate march in New York City.  Moreover, I submit that Frank’s well-intentioned critique misses the point when it comes to evaluating marches, tactics and movements for social change in general. Let’s take for granted that we live in a class society, with those at the top pulling all the strings.  The vast majority of us may lean a particular direction on some important issue or policy, but what counts is what the small stratum that owns Wall Street, the banking sector, our ma...

Naomi Klein’s welcome new book, This Changes Everything , identifies the capitalist economic system as the chief obstacle to addressing the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, but also as the main roadblock to addressing so many other seemingly intractable problems facing humanity—poverty, economic inequality, austerity, shredded civil liberties, endless war, racism and injustice in its many forms.  She’s right.  Of course, some have been arguing this very point for generations.  It’s not as if human civilization was rational and equitable before climate change reared its head.  But each of us reaches the point of epiphany in our own way, and if official inaction on climate change helps you to see the big picture, so much the better. As difficult as it may be to reach consensus on the need to move beyond capitalism, that’s actually the easy part.  The real difficulty lies in how .  Thanks to Klein’s book, many more people will be ...