What Comes After Labor’s Death

The Article: What Happens If Labor Dies? by Harold Meyerson in AlterNet.

The Text: Imagine America without unions. This shouldn’t be hard. In much of America unions have already disappeared. In the rest of America they’re battling for their lives.

Unions have been declining for decades. In the early 1950s, one out of three American workers belonged to them, four out of ten in the private sector. Today, only 11.8 percent of American workers are union members; in the private sector, just 6.9 percent. The vanishing act varies by region—in the South, it’s almost total—but proceeds relentlessly everywhere. Since 1983, the number of states in which at least 10 percent of private-sector workers have union contracts has shrunk from 42 to 8.

Following the 2010 elections, a number of newly elected Republican governors and legislatures in the industrial Midwest, long a union stronghold, moved to reduce labor’s numbers to the trace-element levels that exist in the South. A cold political logic spurred their attacks: Labor was the chief source of funding and volunteers for their Democratic opponents, and working-class whites, who still constitute a sizable share of the electorate in their states, were far more likely to vote Democratic if they belonged to a union. The fiscal crisis of the states provided the pretext for Republicans to try to take out their foremost adversaries, public-employee unions.

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Is Peak Fertilizer The Next Peak Oil?

The Article: Are We Heading Toward Peak Fertilizer? by Tom Philpott in Mother Jones.

The Text: You’ve heard of peak oil—the idea that the globe’s easy-to-get-to petroleum reserves are largely cashed, and most of what’s left is the hard stuff, buried in deep-sea deposits or tar sands. But what about peak phosphorus and potassium? These elements form two-thirds of the holy agricultural triumvirate of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (also known as NPK, from their respective markers in the periodic table). These nutrients, which are essential for plants to grow, are extracted from soil every time we harvest crops, and have to be replaced if farmland is to remain productive.

For most of agricultural history, successful farming has been about figuring out how to recycle these elements (although no one had identified them until the 19th century). That meant returning food waste, animal waste, and in some cases, human waste [1] to the soil. Early in the 20th century, we learned to mass produce N, P, and K—giving rise to the modern concept of fertilizer, and what’s now known as industrial agriculture.

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Buying And Relieving Debt: A Great Start But Not A Solution

The Article: Rolling Jubilee The Spark, Not The Solution by Andrew Ross and Astra Taylor in The Nation.

The Text: We don’t speak for Strike Debt, but as members of the team that helped organize the Rolling Jubilee, a campaign that buys and abolishes debt, we are happy to report that the project is already a phenomenal success. In two weeks, the Rolling Jubilee fund has raised ten times more than we expected (it is now rapidly approaching $450,000), and some debtors will be genuinely elated when the first letters from Strike Debt arrive informing them they are off the hook for medical bills they have been unable to pay. Debt relief, by any means necessary, is a lifeline to desperately overburdened people. It is also a first strike against the predators who feed off the debt system.

The Rolling Jubilee team has received tens of thousands of messages from people whose spirits have been raised by this example of mutual aid in action. Their heartfelt letters remind us that political change rests on emotional stirring among ordinary people, just as much as it is driven by debates among full-time leftists.

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Want Democracy? You Won’t Find It With The GOP…Or Obama

The Article: 5 Ways the GOP (And Obama) Have Undermined Our Democracy by Steven Rosenfeld in AlterNet.

The Text: Is Barack Obama — the former constitutional law professor and voting rights activist — allergic to democracy reform? Or have congressional Republicans have thrown up such roadblocks that the White House has decided it’s not worthwhile to fight for the key federal agencies that defend democracy.

Whether the fault lies with the White House or with GOP obstructionists — or both — the results are the same: federal institutions created to make campaign finances more transparent and ensure that election technology is evolving are paralyzed by empty leadership positions, while the executive branch’s efforts to push ahead on its own have yielded little.

“I’ve felt like Diogenes looking for an intelligent Republican and never found one—I am hoping that will change,” said Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s Capitol Hill lobbyist, who puts the blame on the GOP for blocking Obama’s appointments. “But I’ve also been very critical of Obama for not taking on these fights. I’ve been asking Obama since 2009 to replace these commissioners and take on [GOP Senate leader] Mitch McConnell.”

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Those Poor Plutocrats

The Article: Pity The Poor Plutocrats by Gene Lyons in The National Memo.

The Text: Pity the poor plutocrats.

What with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign having come to an ignominious end, new champions have been called forth lest mobs of pitchfork-waving grandmas and torch-bearing old men rendered fearless by Dentu-Grip breach the walls of their elegant suburban redoubts.

One such hero is Lloyd Blankfein, the universally revered CEO of Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs. At least that’s how anchorman Scott Pelley presented him in a November 19 CBS News interview. Adopting a tone of awed deference most often reserved for British royalty and Hollywood actresses with breasts bigger than their heads, Pelley depicted Blankfein as “one of the world’s most influential bankers.”

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