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kaisers_sun@yahoo.com (Brian Raab) wrote in message news:<8d001dc6.0410061616.4d22aa3f@posting.google.com>...
> These morons have no rights, they steal the jobs of people because
> companies have to move to India.
> 
> Kill all of them!

This is a totally wrong-headed message, but it's one that should
alert Green activists and other environmentalists to a real problem.

It's NOT environmental regulations, mostly, that are prompting 
US companies to move jobs to India and other Third World locations.
It's labor costs and corporate hunger for profits.  

It's cheaper for
the big companies to move production from the US, where people are
paid more or less decent wages, to other countries where you can
hire people for a fraction of the cost.  It's cheaper, and because
it's
cheaper, it raises corporate profits (at least in the short run).  And
because it raises profits in the short run, stockholders like it.

So the corporations move, the US jobs disappear -- and presto, people
like
Brian Raab are blaming environmentalists for the problem.

Isn't the real problem here that American capitalism, as we know it,
is bankrupt environmentally? - and morally bankrupt in its treatment
of
people as well?  

And that global "free trade," as promoted by Republicans
and Democrats alike, is making the economy's social and moral
bankruptcy
evident to everyone?

American capitalism has done some truly amazing things over the years,
as well as some awful ones, but whatever its past virtues and faults,
it now basically can't keep most people employed at the wages its own
advertizing campaigns have led us to expect, and indeed, to "need."

So rather than face the fact that the global capitalist market is
about
to screw American working people, and many small business owners
as well, defenders of the system are looking for scapegoats for the
system's failure.

For some people, the scapegoats are Jews, or Muslims, or "overpaid"
American workers.  For others, the scapegoats are new immigrants
to the US; and for some people, the scapegoats are environmentalists.
Just kill the environmentalists (or the Muslims, the Jews, the
rednecks -
pick the scapegoat of your preference here!) and the system will go
back to the "good old days," is what the demagogues tell us.

Except this won't work, because the problem is with free competition,
with globalization, and with an employment market that buys and sells
the
labor of human beings in just the same way you and I might decide to
buy a new PC. With consideration for "price" only - with no heed for
the human lives
at stake in the decision.

The fact that Brian's proposal to "kill all the environmentalists" is
both irrelevant and crazy, however, doesn't mean it's one that serious
environmentalists can afford to ignore.  

If Brian and his friends kill
all the Greens, and the hurricane damage to Florida and other places
just
gets worse because of global climate changes that the
environmentalists
were working to stop, the same people who crush the environmental
movement are going to miss it, in the end.  They're going to realize
what
a terrible mistake they made in killing the messenger.  BUT --

In the short run, with the big corporations indeed shipping jobs to 
India just as Brian says they are, environmentalists are going to have
to address the "jobs issue," or risk being devastated by a political
backlash arising from mass unemployment and blasted career
expectations.

Several different environmentalists and labor activists have looked
into
the "jobs issue" and formulated plans for dealing with it.  Some of
the
more promising ideas call for:

1.  The creation of new industrial jobs through government and
corporate
investments in "green" industries such as renewable energy production;

2.  Efforts to bolster employment in the construction industry and
related
trades through labor/environmental/small business coalitions that
promote
INFRASTRUCTURE repair and upgrading throughout the US -- needed
government
expenditures on long-overdue repair and maintenance activities on the 
nation's railroad tracks, subway lines, buried sewer and water pipes,
bridges,
and even its existing highways.

3.  Labor/environmentalist/construction industry coalitions to promote
federal spending on new infrastructure projects needed for
environmental
purposes.  For example, a few years ago the Association of State and
Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrations (ASIWPCA) estimated
that the redesign of "combined sewer" systems around the US, urban
sewer
systems that pollute rivers and streams with untreated human fecal
material
during rainstorms, would require construction and reconstruction work
costing $120 billion over a 30-year period.

$120 billion worth of state and federal expenditures on "combined
sewer"
problems could put a LOT of construction workers, pipe fitters,
backhoe
operators, construction contractors etc. etc. to work at good wages,
while improving the nation's environmental quality rather than hurting
it.

It would be win/win for everybody - for everyone who likes to swim or
canoe
or fish on the nation's lakes and rivers.  For the nation's dwindling
population of commercial fishermen, who earn their livings taking fish
from these water bodies.  For green groups like the Sierra
Club.  And for thousands if not tens of thousands of fairly
conservative
construction workers who often think of themselves as foes of the
environmental
movement. 

4.  In addition to the three strategies of "green" job creation listed
above, environmentalists and labor activists could and should
cooperate
to establish a "Superfund for Workers," or "GI Bill for Workers," that
will cover the living expenses and college/trade school tuition of
workers
who are displaced from dirty industries, and who need to/want to earn
new
high-paying trades that are easier on the environment.  

This idea for
a "Workers Superfund," modeled after the successful GI Bill enacted in
the
US in the 1940s, to put returning WWII veterans in school and keep
them off a glutted job market while giving them new skills, was
pioneered in the 1980s by Anthony Mazzocchi, a vice president of the
old Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers
union.  And it's another win/win proposal that could benefit several
different groups -- the environmentalists working to shut down filthy
industries, the local communities affected by pollution from these
industries,
the workers affected, and the nation as a whole, which could train
workers for the high-tech jobs of the future, rather than seeking to
preserve the
polluting industries of the past.  A workable "GI Bill for Workers"
operating
on a large scale would be good for the revenues of colleges,
universities
and trade schools, as well.

5.  In addition to proposals 1-4, environmentalists and labor
activists also
should look at France's experiment with a shorter, 35-hour work week,
as
one possible mechanism for spreading work and leisure around more
equally
in society while somewhat scaling back heavy industry and its assaults
on
nature as well as the human family.  

In the US today, millions of people
find themselves trying to work 60 hour weeks, if they can get in the
hours,
and stealing time from their families and kids while the companies
they work
at produce "goods" that sometimes are "bads," because they're really
useless or really detrimental to the environment.  

Yet even as our society forces some people to be workaholics in order
to support their families, which they rarely see, other people are
partly or totally squeezed out of the work force. They become
unemployed, or go on
welfare, or become part-time "temps" with few if any benefits.  And
corporate
America loves the profits to be made from employing fewer people, but
working
them longer hours.

If Americans worked the same hours that French workers do, on the
other hand,
and if we enjoyed 4-week and 6-week vacations as many European workers
do,
rather than the measly 2-week vacations many of us actually receive,
the
American economy might be forced to hire more people for a given
output
of Gross Domestic Product. 

Without increasing its "environmental footprint,"
its total pollution impact and impact on the world's natural
resources,
American capitalism might be compelled to provide greater job security
to
the people who do the hard work of actually keeping it going.  And
American
families and neighborhoods might benefit as middle-class people (now
that
they were putting in fewer hours on the job), found more time for
their children, their friends, their spouses and their communities.

****

These are all potential solutions, or part-solutions, to the "jobs
issue" that the Green movement and the mainstream conservation
lobbying
groups in Washington need to start considering.  Of course, there
are undoubtedly other answers to the "jobs vs. environment" conundrum
to be found, if we start looking for them.  But ignoring the jobs
issue, simply focusing on saving wildlife and wildlife habitat and
other
natural systems while ignoring the economic insecurities of our
neighbors,
is a recipe for an anti-environmental backlash.  Which the polluters,
of
course, will be only too willing to foster for selfish reasons of
their
own.