United Steelworkers blog, July 31st, 2012: [Rebuilding US infrastructure would mean] a nation more capable of fending off and recovering from natural and man-made disasters….Americans want that work, with unemployment stuck at 8.2 percent. And America needs that economic development, with the economy growing at a paltry 1.5 percent in the second quarter. Continue Reading…
News Articles > Jobs and the Green Economy
On March 7, 24 senators urged President Obama to bring American combat forces home from Afghanistan. The bipartisan group said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt the interstate highway system five times over. See their letter here.
New York Times, January 18th, 2011: Less than a tenth of the nation’s metropolitan areas have regained the jobs they lost in the economic downturn, according to a report being released Wednesday by the nation’s mayors. Continue Reading and also see When Different Parts of the Country May Recover.
| Center for Economic Policy Research, October 26th, 2011: Believers in the military spending fairy say things like “the government can’t create jobs,” but also think that military spending creates jobs. Under the military spending fairy story, if the government spends $1 billion dollars paying people to do research or to build items related to the civilian economy it is just a drag on the private economy; however if the same spending goes to military related purposes, then it creates jobs. Continue Reading… | |
International Relations and Security Network, October 3rd, 2011: As the depth and breadth of our financial/economic and environmental crises deepens, it is urgent to ask whether the way we are going about searching for solutions lives up to the challenge. The risk is that our institutions are focusing on means – such as recapitalizing banks, tackling perverse subsidies, or promoting energy efficiency, while the driver of the crises lies in the end goal: more growth. Continue Reading….
Jeff Klein, Counterpunch, July 6th, 2011: if workers are being held hostage to military spending, they are the tens of thousands of public employees facing layoff or attacks on their pay and benefits in cash-strapped cities and states. They are the millions of unemployed in construction, manufacturing and services who could find jobs if we invested wisely in what our country actually needs. And they are the retirees who are in danger of seeing their Social Security and Medicare cut by politicians using the pretext of budget deficits to promote a partisan agenda. Isn’t it long overdue to re-examine our priorities? Continue Reading…