Mother Jones Magazine-- STOP BLAMING THE POOR

This Earth Day, Tell Mother Jones (and everyone else) to End the Population Panic

I want Earth Day to be a time for people to think and take action about the absurd global inequalities that force the poorest nations and the poorest people in all nations to carry the heaviest burden of pollution, food and water insecurity, and climate change-related disasters. I want people to think about what governments, industries, institutions, and systems are responsible for this mess.
Mother Jones, which I thought I could count on to support me in this view, decided to go a different route.  Their newest issue instead focuses on the "population crisis" and the dangerous myth that poor, brown people and their babies are the biggest threat to our planet.

I was in a bit of disbelief at first and was somewhat relieved to see quotes like "Mention population, and discussion goes straight to the teeming Third World masses--never mind that an American's carbon footprint is 23 times that of an Indian" in the Editors' Note.  You'd think that with a beginning like that the feature story might be about the disproportionate consumption levels of developed countries, right?


Article Availble Feministing.org

United by Hard Times: Workers Organize Across Race Lines

I’m feeling relieved. For a while it seemed like the historic election of our first African American president would give legitimacy to the idea that we live in a “post-racial” America. The idea that race is no longer a part of people’s daily experience is not merely false. It’s potentially dangerous when a majority of people are struggling to understand what’s happening to them economically.
What people are experiencing is exactly what’s supposed to happen to them under capitalism and its current variant, neoliberalism. That economic system is grounded on the idea that society must have winners and losers. It has convinced people that those categories are based on race: that people of color are, in the natural course of things, losers; and that white people, regardless of class, are supposed to win.
When hard times hit, as they have recently, people who are losing their grip on their middle-class status—or those who were already poor and are getting poorer—look for someone to blame. They fall back on the official story: White people’s troubles are caused by people of color; the troubles of people of color who were born in this country are caused by immigrants. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy that keeps people who are natural allies on a class basis from looking at who’s really causing their trouble: the people who run the capitalist system.
This moment presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to get people with shared economic interests working together—to get them past learned racial divides. As long as poor and working-class white people remain convinced that they win by keeping people of color on the margins, all workers will continue to lose economic ground. The opportunity is to use this economic crash as a way to find common ground among those who are the real losers—regardless of race—in the existing system.