Blog comment in response to Sex and Fertility in the Post-Petroleum Age by Jan Lundberg,
27 July 2010
Look at Historical Evidence
Developed societies like ours, with sanitation, medical care, artificial contraception, and optional bottle feeding of infants, are a recent exception in the history of humanity. The prevailing patterns over the history of our species have involved females becoming fertile at a somewhat later age (16-18 years old), due to less adequate food supply; prolonged breast feeding of infants, which suppresses fertility and ensures a longer inter-pregnancy interval; higher infant and maternal mortality; less investment of effort and calories in infants that have a poor chance of survival or less social utility (e.g., the Greeks abandoning deformed infants at birth); a certain amount of infanticide, usually by men, who kill a woman's children by a former male partner; etc, etc.
My firm, Dayton Machine Tools (below), builds, repairs, and upgrades the complex (and often very large) machine tools that are used in many types of manufacturing. In this position, I am afforded a broad perspective of the American manufacturing sector.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Commonweal Institute Announces Progressive Op-Ed Program
Summary: Commonweal Institute, a Northern California-based think tank, will produce and distribute weekly progressive op-ed columns, available for publication in print and online news outlets.
Menlo Park, California (June 16, 2009) – With the goal of providing an opportunity for local and national news outlets to publish opinion and commentary from a progressive political perspective, Commonweal Institute – a Northern California-based think tank – announced today it will produce and distribute weekly op-ed columns starting July 1, 2009.
Commonweal Institute Fellows, public intellectuals who have organically developed large audiences and authority in their field through their blogs, publications and academic work, will write the columns on a rotating basis.
Perhaps one of the reasons newspapers are seeing declining readership is that opinion pages often carry conservative and libertarian viewpoints that don't reflect the values of an increasingly progressive public.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the Stimulus Package, takes a couple of steps in the right direction. The best part of the package is the money that it provides for improvements in infrastructure.
That's good, because our roads, bridges, power grids, and water systems are in bad shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave the nation's overall infrastructure a grade of D, and we can't maintain the world's biggest economy with failing roads, bridges, and water systems. Still, the plan’s spending for infrastructure is just a tiny part of what the country needs.
Maintaining our infrastructure is something that government must do. So doing something that’s already the government’s responsibility hardly qualifies as a stimulus.
The time lag for infrastructure improvements and creation of new green jobs is not the only problem.
A bigger problem is that the package perpetuates the myth that government can create wealth.
Why are recipients of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) – better known as the Banking Bailout – allowed to continue to lobby? Taxpayer dollars should not be used to influence our government. We, the People should be telling them what to do, not the other way around.
TARP recipients spent $114 million on lobbying last year as the financial crisis emerged. In just the last quarter of the year eighteen bailout recipients spent $14.8 million to influence the government, as the TARP funds were distributed.
The lobbying has paid off. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “The companies' political activities have, in part, yielded them $295.2 billion from TARP, an extraordinary return of 258,449 percent.”
"We're All In This Together"
A talk by Commonweal Institute Fellow David C. Johnson to supporters of public education, presented March 7, 2007.
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how to start this talk, when I came across this video clip from the Sean Hannity show on Fox News:
Tags: media, Education, Dave Johnson, conservative strategy
Advocacy, Organizing & Persuasion
• Educate public officials, candidates, and decision-makers regarding issues
• Influence major institutions to respond favorably to the movement’s ideas and proposals
• Exert an appropriate influence on the legal and judicial systems
• Organize and operate grassroots campaigns (other than legislative, such as those that pressure corporations and office holders)
• Train grassroots advocates and grassroots campaign managers
• Train individual persuaders and idea promoters
• Carry out online education, motivation, and fundraising for issue campaigns (e.g., by non-profits)
On February 15, 2009, Mike Lux energized an audience of some 75 progressives at the Mercury Lounge in San Francisco. Referring to his new book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, Lux put events of the tumultuous recent past in historical context. He spoke about the conflict taking place since the time of the nation’s founding between progressive advances for the common good and conservative retrenchments that favor the wealthy.
Defining the values that underlie and unite progressives became an urgent question in the early 21st Century. Progressives came to recognize that, to a great degree, our political choices emerge from our sense of cultural identity and our emotional responses to stories and images, not from ‘rational’ cost-benefit analyses.
We hope that you can take the time to become informed on these issues, and inform others.
Contents:
Note - We consider these articles, reports and other resources thought-provoking and worth reading. Our recommendation does not imply that we necessarily agree with all the perspectives presented, nor does it imply that we have checked the articles for factual accuracy.
Voter News Service: What Went Wrong?
Larry Barrett , Baseline Magazine, January 13, 2003
and Sideshow's essay linking to this.
Tags: voting, electronic voting, election, ballots
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