Campaigns

Silencing Climate Change Deniers

According to a new study in the journal Science,”Four boundaries are assessed to have been crossed, placing humanity in a danger zone.”

 

The report defined climate change and loss of species as two core areas of concern. Each “has the potential on its own to drive the Earth System into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed,” the authors wrote.

via Oxfam International Flickr/creative commons

via Oxfam International
Flickr/creative commons

It would almost seem absurd at this point to recognize anyone, high or low, who would argue that the human impacts on the environment have not already reached the “danger zone.” But it’s not absurd, it’s a very, very sad state of current reality.

Alas, we must continue equip ourselves to silence climate deniers by repudiating their arguments, whether a politician or your grumpy uncle Joe, through conversations, publishing, and activism. Quoting from studies or books, such as Naomi Klein’s  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, may help but, unfortunately, these deniers are almost always so proud of their defiance in the face of irrefutable evidence that they refuse to take new information in. If you look closely, you will see that this resistance to new information is a character flaw that seeps into other areas of their thinking, and is therefore hard to overcome.

The cataclysmic results of climate change are already upon us, mass migrations, shrinking coastlines, salinization of drinking water, food scarcity, etc. Are we doomed to wait for the elite to start suffering??

We must keep the pressure on, especially leading up to the hopeful Paris climate summit (Conference of Parties or COP) in December 2015 that will be pushing for ambitious action before and after 2020. Start, if you haven’t already, by updating yourself and staying informed through websites such as the United Nations Climate Change Newsroom. We don’t have a moment to wait, literally.

 

Back To The Future

Lance Shields Installation: "Cosmic Kisses Illuminated"  slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/ Flickr/creative commons

Lance Shields
Installation: “Cosmic Kisses Illuminated”
slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/
Flickr/creative commons

My blog break turned out to be a bit longer than it should have, sorry. But if you have been following the Twitter/venusplusx feed you know I’ve been very busy with activists everywhere as we see, finally, an energizing of the forces for good despite the pain of getting to our destination. And it is and will be painful, very painful for a while, make no doubt, but there’s a new inter-sectional majority able to co-envision the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not a mirage, it’s real. A new day is here.

More than at any point in history, our past and present are showing us what we do NOT want to bring into the future. We are now capable of uniting across the world as never before to rescue our planet from the coercive and inhmane systems which enslave us, and at the same time to build, collectively, a survivable culture comrpising humane and voluntary systems devoted to universal safety and peace. (See our Manifesto for more.)

The midwifery of our pain is delivering a new cohesiveness, a new world consciousness, an energized generation of young people who can speak with one voice. VenusPlusX’s mission calls for the end racism and sexual and gender oppression, and equates the fulfillment of that mission with The New Age of Sexual Freedom, as the singular bedrock to all other freedoms because it is the only one that encompasses all other freedoms. For this reason, we are always concerned with the inter-sectionality of all issues pre-empting or otherwise inhibiting this new age, such as Fundamentalism/Xenophobia/Racism/Discrimination, World Poverty/Income Inequality, Climate Change/Migrations/Immigration, etc.

#CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie) are trending today as we witness another tragic example of this inter-sectionality, this time in Paris, a terrorist attack against free speech. Attacks on any type of freedom come from fundamentalist extremists who have distorted their own religious teachings (Islam/Judaism/Christianity) to excuse their ignorance and hatred of “other.” Fundamentalist extremists are only concerned with killing or otherwise disappearing certain groups of people they are primitively afraid of, whether in Paris, Uganda, or onMain Street USA. Even Right Wingnut and Xeonophobe Laura Ingraham‘s cynical spin on today’s Paris attack is itself an example of fundamentalist extremism. There is no evidence of mental capacity in her vitriol; if there was a shred of it she would soon discover the intellectual impossibility of her own words. By contrast, editorial cartoonists across the world responded loudly and clearly, showing the power of truth.

#BlackLivesMatter has been a fragile meme under constant attack by the #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter crowd who just don’t get it. These individuals have been conditioned culturally to reject all matter of “other” and fear everyone. These are the people who want to go backward in history instead of forward, and by resisting progress, including the evolution of their own thoughts, they have effectively created their own minority that will soon be irrelevant to the march towards racial justice.

#NetNeutrality is fast coming to a head, and, just like #ClimateChange, it’s another battle of corporations versus people. Preparation to fight these issues has never been more focused, organized, and energized.

Likewise, we are prepared to rectify #Immigration and #IncomeInequality by demonstrating the economic rewards of opening rather than tightening borders, and at the same time taking joint responsibility for the physical welfare of all people. Fewer and fewer of us can stand still thinking of those who are suffering under these coercive systems right now, children going to bed fearful, hungry, and often homeless.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and as always will welcome your feedback. The inherent inter-sectionality of each of these hashtags can be negative or positive, but we are beginning to see factual proof of the arc of progress that is capable even of transforming great pain towards the legacy of all that is good. Count on that and stay busy.

Be strong now because things will get better.

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How Days of Action Work in Addressing Police Bias and Anti-Transgender Violence

Today in hundreds of cities and towns across the world transgender and gender-nonconforming people and their allies pause to honor our fallen heroes. The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) was founded in 1998 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith—a transgender graphic designer, columnist, and activist—to memorialize the murder of Rita Hester in Allston, Massachusetts. It occurs annually on (or around) November 20, and its overarching goal is to bring attention to the continued violence endured by the transgender community with the hope that together we can end such violence and intolerance.

Not long ago, Washington, DC, found itself in the midst of an epidemic of violence and murders against transgender people. The rates had been steadily growing over 10 years and suddenly we suffered 4 murders in less than 3 months. (The increase in discrimination was perhaps due to a backlash against the migration of many transgender people to DC, from Virginia and elsewhere, wanting to live in a city that had, and still has, the country’s most comprehensive human rights protections for gender-nonconforming people.)

Transgender Day of Action  Washington, DC November 21, 2011

Transgender Day of Action
Washington, DC
November 21, 2011

Vigil followed vigil and soon it was time for our annual TDOR. But we decided to add on a more immediate and visible Transgender Day of Action to bring this outrageous state of affairs to the forefront of public consciousness and the media and put the police, city officials, and the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, on notice.

In 2011, we started with just 5 people who met once or twice a week to hear directly from survivors of anti-trans violence and police harassment because any action to be effective would have to be grounded in real-world circumstances. We called ourselves the TLGB Police Watch, and eventually represented a coalition that included more than a dozen local organizations which turned these community concerns into goals, a set of demands, and a plan for a day of non-violence civil disobedience.

Within 24 hours after putting boots on the ground, at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters to City Hall and the offices of the U.S. Attorney of Washington, cold cases were reopened, the constitutionality of Prostitution Free Zones was questioned, police training efforts changed, and conference rooms once closed to transgender issues were opened wide.

At an international trans health conference the following spring, we reported out to trans activists from other cities, providing training and materials based on our success in effectively slowing the rates of violent incidents and murders.

Subsequent DC days of actions started popping up at other times during the year, fighting for healthcare access, employment opportunities, and housing nondiscrimination. The number of activists working directly on trans issues in DC right now includes more than 100 people and most of the organizations that were originally part of the TLGB Police Watch coalition.

The important take away is that days of action work and will continue work in visibly fighting this scourge of our community. It is an educational and effective way to make your demands heard and bring about change. The only requirement is your determination to organize across a spectrum of stakeholders, and then show up to do the work. Anyone who wants help in organizing a Transgender Day of Action in their community anytime of the year can tap into our resources and/or contact us for assistance and support.

DC was home city up until about 18 months ago, and tonight my heart and soul (and continuing support) are with all my friends there. Love is what it is all about because it has the power to extinguish hate in our world. Let’s work together to make world a place that is safe for everyone and human rights reign.

George Larcher image Flickr/creative commons

George Larcher image
Flickr/creative commons

 

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Part 2: Take Heart, Evidence Pouring In Hourly

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, I revisited my pre-election theory that progressives and all non-Republicans will see the greater good of a Republican takeover of the Senate and their increased footprint in the House. And I promised to riff on a few memes to substantiate that soon after. (Part 1 here.)

There’s nothing to fear since these election results are actually bringing about the best time in history to put these special interest jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for who they really are and then respond.

A populist movement is the cure, the only cure. And populism is exactly what radical right-wing conservatives fear the most. These lawmakers and billionaires have made people that aren’t rich and white their enemy, out of fear. Populism is coming, call it our American Spring, because these right-wingnuts are and will remain mentally incapable of solving our most pressing problems.

While all the electioneering goes on and on, populist actions and non-violent civil disobedience are becoming ever more finely tuned to respond to our growing unrest. People are being stirred into action in direct proportion to the growing social and economic injustices wrought by this distinctly American capitalist theocracy entirely dependent on the enslavement of mostly everyone else. We’re not just taking it anymore.

Populists succeed in solving problems by standing up for human rights in spite of the temporal obstacles that haters throw at us. Our successes are in part due to our ability to connect across and learn more from different movements, from the climate and military to immigration and equality rights. We are helping each other make sense of the world. The more goofy the Repubs behave, the sooner we will succeed in making things right for all people throughout the world.

The first two issues the right-wingnuts have no clue whatsoever are matters of life and death: responding to the reality of climate change; and curbing our military, here and abroad. Why are these the first? Well, because there’s not much cause to fight for freedom and human rights if we destroy ourselves and/or this planet before then.

The U.S. military-industrial complex is led by special-interest lobbyists (public and private profiteers). They bring us incursions into dozens of countries, where we have no other business except greed and racism (no wonder Americans are hated), in order to annually justify huge defense spending. Along the way they fill body bags for the most part with unemployed poor people choosing to enlist because there is often no other options.

Likewise, these special interests are militarizing local police forces to control citizen uprisings. And, they stand in the way of police accountability. They are also lobbying lawmakers to harden and lengthen prison sentences to keep the growing number of privatized, for-profit prisons making money for the corporatists while disenfranchising huge swaths of the populace, especially brown and black poor men.

This terrible trend will only end if we stand up with each other and say, “No more gain based on someone else’s pain.” We can do it. We are doing it. Find organizations and people in your community to work with or otherwise support. Maybe start with CodePink and anyone in Ferguson, Missouri, these days.

Climate change, and the physical results which are already with us today, is a chief threat to life on this planet, and something that the well-financed, capitalist theocracy is incapable of dealing with.

These right-wingnuts are not just climate-change-deniers, they are science-deniers. The christianists deny science so much they fight to stay blissfully uninformed of reproductive health so they can still call Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs) “built-in abortion factories.” They  don’t know how babies are made but they are determine to have the final say. When it comes to climate change they also fight to stay blissfully in the dark but with even more serious repercussions.

Repubs will always have the handful of scientists they can point to but these are just .001% of all the scientists who are telling us it’s practically too late to put off the degradation the burning of fossil fuels has already caused. Even allowing the science-deniers the luxury of believing that burning fossil fuels aren’t the culprit, everyone must get busy with the results of climate change now upon us: more lightning strikes, hurricane-tornados, lack of clean water, and loss of coastal square miles and assets, increasing exponentially as long as the fossil fuel capitalist elites control our economies. Yes, we have to move to a renewable energy economy but we are already engaged in the mass relocation and economic disruption that will continue to escalate to epic proportions. Consider that rising sea levels caused by the melting ice caps is already causing small island populations to abandon their lives because their fresh water has been compromised by salinization. (If you haven’t already, read Naomi Klein’s new book, a scholarly page-turner, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.)

We are on track to meet the goals the newly-elected President Obama set to reduce the effects of greenhouse gasses by the government, the largest energy consumer by far. Despite the political criticism from the Repubs, Obama used these same benchmarks to the U.S. as a whole this week to prompt China to set its goal, its first, to raise renewable energy sources to 20% by 2030. The recent UN report on climate change, which lays the groundwork for more significant agreements internationally in Copenhagen next year, and a newly invigorated climate movement have the power to curb capitalism in favor of planetary survival.

Make sure you are a part of it. If you can’t become an activist, do things in your local community to make it more earth-friendly, in one step healing us and raising awareness.

There are so many examples of how right-wingnuts will strip themselves bare as they fail these tests of leadership, and I could go on and on, but they will have to wait for a subsequent article. Next up is net neutrality because we cannot allow corporations to silence us and omit us from the debate for their own financial gain.

For now: get busy!

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Working Towards a Clean Energy Economy

Flicker/creative commons

Flicker/creative commons

As we reported last week, tomorrow, November 1, kicks off “Beyond Extreme Energy Week of Action” in Washington, DC, and cities across the United States and abroad, and we hope you will somehow participate in or otherwise support these efforts.

Did you know that the U.S. government is the largest energy user at $25 billion per year? Perhaps by coincidence today, Performance.gov has released information on how 38 federal agencies plan to overcome their vulnerabilities to reduce their emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, and implement other government-wide plans, to meet goals set by President Obama in 2010. It is currently on track to achieve the 28% reduction in 2020.

While the administration is working toward a clean energy economy, it is not doing enough to foster the switch to renewable energy. The Department of Energy is still focusing on curbing emissions rather than eradicating the special interests who maintain a stranglehold over dirty energy industries.

These vulnerabilities are stark, according to The Washington Post.

  • The Department of Health and Human Services cites “more frequent or worse extreme heat events” that it calls “the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S.”
  • The Department of Agriculture warns of a “100% increase in the number of acres burned” in wildfires by 2050, further draining its budget because of the added fire suppression expenditures.
  • NASA says about 66% of its assets are already within 16 feet of being lost to rising sea levels.

It’s doubtful Obama will ever get credit for being the first president to make climate action a top priority, but that shouldn’t stop his administration from doing more about the scourge of dirty energy, the overall enemy of climate protection.

Most important, stay informed and take action.

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Ethical Prostitution

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen Flickr/creative commons

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen
Flickr/creative commons

As a follow up to yesterday’s discussion of the decriminalization of sex work, take a look at this video of a sex worker ally drilling down to the issues. While perhaps relying too much on sensational memes based on unreliable data that says most sex workers are sex-trafficked children, she makes a durable case for the complete decriminalization and legalization of sex work.

Social acceptance and legalization of sex work is the key to ending sex-trafficking, not its cause. Sex-traffickers are involved in organized crime and should be pursued and punished vigorously; if they disappear so will their victims. But unless society can recognize a separate and growing sex work industry based on voluntary participation, we will not be able isolate and end the scourge of international sex-trafficking.

The first encounter society has with a voluntary sex worker need not be the result of police and the court system, nor their only portal to adequate support, healthcare, and other medical social services (more here) .

Sexual healing from an out-of-the-closet industry is not a bad thing, and will go a long way to ending sexual oppression.

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Reminder: Win one of VenusPlusX’s prized t-shirts for making a video, writing a poem, or creating a work of art as part of our Sexual Freedom Project, on this subject or any other related to sexual freedom, contact: columbia@venusplusx.org. (More videos, here.)

 

 

Decriminalizing Sex Work: The Work Ahead

Highly-acclaimed, reader-supported news site, Truthout, has once again zeroed in on a pressing matter of social justice, the continued criminalization of sex workers. Mike Ludwig‘s news analysis, well worth a full read, weaves together several different threads of this issue in terms everyone can understand.

Ludwig points our attention to “a great leap forward” in New York’s state court system that has introduced 11 new prostitution courts called Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs). These new courts were designed to treat arrested sex workers as “trafficking victims” deserving of medical and social services instead of jails, and to focus instead on the traffickers.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Sounds good on the surface, right? Except that sex workers have been protesting this controversial new model because: a) its premise is based on unreliable and very narrow data; b) actual data collected by sex workers rights organizations, such as the Red Umbrella Project’s recent report, “Criminal, Victim or Worker?” were flatly rejected; and, most important, c) ignores completely the need to decriminalize sex work to begin with.

Balder Rosado, a member RedUP, told Ludwig that this new court model improves what it replaced but the issue remains that access to these services necessarily starts with an arrest by police.

Not every sex worker is a sex traffic victim as anti-trafficking advocates would have us believe. For many, it is a private and personal choice that should not by criminalized in the first place, and if “treatment” is required to help those who are trafficked or otherwise coerced, it should be within a non-criminal, non-police model.

Shira Hassan, a harm reduction and transformative justice specialist in Chicago, told Ludwig . . .

. . . [A]nti-trafficking advocates often push for laws and special courts that reduce the penalties prostitution defendants face, in the name of “decriminalization.” These efforts are not about decriminalization, she said. They are about “changing the process by which someone is criminalized.”

“Criminalization is about racism, it’s about your neighborhood, it’s about how you are dressed,” Hassan told Truthout. “It’s about policing.”

The needless criminalization of sex work unfairly targets poor people of color and is as unconstitutional as “stop and frisk.” As Ludwig notes, “Police can stop individuals for ‘loitering with intent’ if they are doing as little as wearing revealing clothing or hanging out in the wrong part of town.”

HTICs can only be called a diversion program, at best. They only serve a small number of those arrested, and only a small proportion of these people actually want and need medical or social services. And the HTICs to do not prevent re-arrest for simply walking in the same neighborhood where the first arrest took place thereby nullifying the HTIC’s decision. Only a minuscule number of traffickers every get arrested.

Ludwig quotes advocate Sienna Baskin from Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York:

“If the emphasis is changing to be about offering services and other income options to people who are doing sex work, and intervening in violent situations, and giving people what they need without [harming them], then we need to stop criminalizing them.”

I will add another disturbing dimension, one that Ludwig overlooked or chose not to include: The retired judge, Judy Harris Kluger, who helped develop these HTICs is using the very same faulty data to promote her new business providing the services that the court recommends, reaping financial benefits from the state. Worse still, there no regulations or public standards for non-profit, short-term service providers like hers. Unfortunately, privatization schemes and conflicts of interest now pervade our justice system. Mass incarceration itself is a testimony of how special interests have managed to lobby lawmakers to privatize probation and electronic monitoring services and the prison-industrial complex itself. When will special interests like these, that thrive on increased criminality and the personal pain of others, be brought to justice?

To learn more, get involved in your community to protect sex workers rights. The decriminalization of sex work will begin the end of sexual oppression, a first step towards a world of equality and peace.

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A Week of Climate Action Starts On November 1!

Popular Resistance is driving escalated climate action by calling for a week of demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere around the country, starting on November 1.

Like  Naomi Klein‘s recent, trailblazing book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Popular Resistance says the time for being tentative, simultaneously tapping the break and hitting the accelerator, is over. We are now speeding towards a climate catastrophe.

The November action targets the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), an independent agency whose powers were expanded by the government with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Before you get involved, update yourself on what the FERC actually does, such as licensing and inspecting (regulating) private, municipal, and state energy projects; and, what it does not do, like interfere with anything addressed through through other agencies, such as State Public Utility Commissions and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Nevertheless, FERC is an example of failed government policies because behind all their choices and decisions is a bank of corporate private energy interests, making FERC an excellent media symbol of everything that is wrong with how the U.S. and other countries are dealing with the urgency of climate change. FERC website’s crafty disclaimers aside, this commission’s power in representing special interests exposes in full the major impediment to the social changes that will be needed to meet the challenges of climate change. Simply put, greedy corporations are ruining our planet and must be stopped.

The planet’s life-threatening challenges have already exceeded predictions by shrinking our timeline, cutting it in half to one third of the time we originally believed. We have less time to actually be able to do something. That is why activists across the spectrum of causes have to also be doing something to protect our environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the shorelines we stand on. If not, ending racism and sexual oppression, ending war, solving immigration, equality, economic justice, etc., will never be realized. We will continue to make gains in all these areas but what if life ceases to exist in less than 50 years? Think about and let it chill you.

The well-written demands are attached below, and you can go to the Popular Resistance website for more information on how to get involved in the non-violent civil actions planned for this first week in November, in D.C., or in your own community. (Click here for the Schedule and Logistics, including how you can stay overnight in DC for $5/day.) By working together in larger and larger numbers can we can suppress all the greed-driven special interests, and wield the power we hold in our hands. Please don’t stand still.

WE call on our government to drop its “all of the above” energy strategy. Extreme energy extraction — fracking, tar sands, deep ocean drilling, Arctic drilling, and surface mining and undermining practices such as mountaintop removal and longwall coal mining — of the last fossil fuels condemns us to ravaged landscapes, poisoned water, and weather convulsions. And it ensures catastrophic global warming for future generations.

WE call on FERC to make decisions based on the well-being of current and future generations and the protection of our shared natural resources. Rubber stamping industry pipelines, compressor stations and export facilities contaminates the air, water, land and climate that support all life on Earth. Specifically, we call on FERC to reject the proposal to build a dangerous gas export facility at Cove Point and to place a moratorium on approvals of other export facilities.

WE can no longer allow our government to segment gas projects from all others, thereby hiding the full danger. We must look at the whole picture, evaluating what is happening downstream and upstream. Each export terminal creates hazards not only for the local community, but for communities where the shale gas will be extracted, for communities where pipelines and compressor stations are built to transport the gas, and for communities receiving the exported gas. We must also measure the release of climate-disrupting methane and other greenhouse gases during this whole process, from extraction, transport, export, and eventual burning in faraway communities.

WE call on the Obama administration and FERC to recognize the unfolding disaster guaranteed by fueling our economy from the last dregs of fossil fuels.

Nothing less will protect our communities, the climate and the Earth.

THE ACTION: During the week beginning November 1, our coalition will take to the streets of Washington to make these goals a reality

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE BEYOND EXTREME ENERGY ACTION

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See also: Response to Climate Change Impossible Without a Revolution in Thinking, and more, herehere, and here.

 

 

Response to Climate Change Impossible Without A Revolution in Thinking

Adrian Kenyon's The World's A Balloon Flickr/creative commons

Adrian Kenyon’s
The World’s A Balloon
Flickr/creative commons

I will continue writing about the environment for how can we hope for a new age free from racial and sexual oppression if we destroy the world with our stupid choices?

In reading Naomi Klein‘s trailblazing book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, we are destined for ecological disaster within 50 years or less. Here she succinctly lays out the challenge . . .

. . . [W]e are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.

And, the problem . . .

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, what a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face — and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.

The Real News seconds these ideas, exposing just how delusional government can be in misunderstanding the urgency of our response to  climate change.

 

Every activist concerned with social and economic justice should read Ms. Klein’s book. It’s a call to action that cannot be ignored.

. . . [P]oliticians aren’t the only ones with the power to decide [this] a crises. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-aprtheid movement turned it into one.

Let’s continue the forward momentum of this nascent movement and exercise our power, our people power, to silence or remove those who stand in the way of solving this epic problem. Stay informed. Get active. Your life depends on it.

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Retailers Finally Addressing Income Inequality

As politicians in Washington and state capitals debate raising the minimum wage, a new report from the Center for American Progress gathers new evidence showing that the United States’ top retailers are deeply concerned that stagnant wage growth and middle-class weakness are holding the economy back.

photo by pix.plz Flickr/creative commons

photo by pix.plz
Flickr/creative commons

We have written frequently about the scourge of income equality, from fast food workers‘ demanding a living wage and Wall Street’s response to connecting you to organizations on the forefront of this struggle, summing it all up this past Labor Day. Now this new report, “Retailer Revelations: Why America’s Struggling Middle Class Has Businesses Scared,” drills down further, showing us how flat wages has weakened consumer spending and put their stock prices at risk because of low demand for goods and services and high unemployment.

Retailers could improve their profits by embracing a middle-class-growth-oriented agenda instead of spending their political energy on preventing policies that increase wages. Policies such as a minimum-wage increase could provide the perfect mechanism for coordinating wage growth that could benefit the entire retail sector by fueling more consumer spending.

While banks have been rescued by our government and economic indicators in some sectors have been revived since the 2008 financial crisis, “median household income in 2013 stood 8 percentage points below its 2007 pre-recession level” while the cost of everything else, from health care to college tuition has risen.

The evidence assembled in this report directly repudiates “trickle-down economics”—the idea that the only way to produce economic growth is to redistribute money to the rich, who will create jobs for everyone else. Conservative politicians, lobbyists, and commentators may still be stuck in the trickle-down mindset of the 1980s, but corporate America and the Wall Street analysts who closely follow it know better.

In fighting income equality we have to aim our civil actions squarely on the proponents of trickle-down economics and those working actively against living wages, including lobbyists such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, until they get it. Congress is complicit in keeping the minimum wage low despite all the evidence pouring in from municipalities that have raised the minimum wage to $15/hour and actually created economic growth, including more jobs. These are the people and entities who are responsible. Educate yourself and organize accordingly.

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