Energy Keepers Energy Killers: The New Civil Rights Battle
Author: Roy Innis
Energy Keepers Energy Killers: The New Civil Right Battle exposes the wrongs done to the poor and minorities by environmental and political elites trying to eradicate fossil fuel production—coal, oil, and gas—supposedly to 'save the world from global warming.' Author Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, shows how their wrongheaded policies price energy out of reach and violate the civil rights of all Americans, but hurt the poor and minorities worst. Innis demands an end to this 'energy racism' and calls for the opening of all federal lands—which belong to the disadvantaged as much as to well-funded environmental leaders—to more energy production in a sustained campaign to increase supply and lower prices. Innis reveals the flaws in global warming hysteria and makes the stunning fact clear in his 'Energy Reality' chart that so-called 'alternative energy' from wind and solar power actually provided less than one-half of one percent of America's energy needs in 2006.
See also: Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment or Strangers at the Gates New Immigrants in Urban America
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
Author: Nelson Lichtenstein
In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century.
The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce.
Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's mostimportant function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Stanley Aronowitz
In State of the Union, a richly documented and well-written book, Nelson Lichtenstein, who teaches history at UC Santa Barbara, traces the rise and decline of American labor, primarily since the Great Depression. He begins the story with the New Deal's struggle to overcome the economic crises of the time.
Commonweal - Kevin Mattson
Lichtenstein wants to see labor resuscitate itself. He argues for expanding on the rights revolution: "Rights consciousness and rights rhetoric...remain powerful weapons available to partisans of working people." As a college professor at the University of Virginia, he helped out with labor campaigns organized around the slogan of "Workers Rights Are Civil Rights."
Nola Theiss - KLIATT
Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of many books on the labor movement in America. In his latest book, he has written a history of the labor union movement in America, from its inception in the 1930s to its current state. Along with history, he analyzes the cultural, economic, and political influences that have determined the attitudes Americans have had toward unions and labor. Decade by decade, the demands of the union movement and the response by government and management have changed and evolved as the country moved from an industrial society to a service and consumer-oriented one. This is a sophisticated and complex book of ideas that is an important resource for any student of labor unions. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Princeton Paperbacks, 336p. illus. notes. index., Ages 15 to adult.
Library Journal
Lichtenstein (history, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit) presents a history of American unionism in the 20th century and argues convincingly that a thriving labor movement is an essential safeguard of American democracy. He chronicles the struggle for economic citizenship and security that led to the burst of organizing during the Depression and World War II. After the war, even as unions reached new highs in membership and political activity, their strength was sapped by corporate resistance, their own bureaucratization, legal restrictions, and ideological attacks from the Right by anti-Communist conservatives and from the Left by disenchanted intellectuals. Throughout, Lichtenstein examines both the positive and the negative sides of American labor unions have been champions of civil rights and equal pay and racially exclusive and economically self-interested clubs. But, Lichtenstein argues, as the only organized counterweight to the power of rapacious corporations, unions play an essential role in preserving American ideals. Today, the labor movement faces political, economic, and organizational problems, but it has overcome equally large challenges in the past and remains a vital force for social progress in the United States. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. Duncan Stewart, State Historical Soc. of Iowa Lib., Iowa City Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Table of Contents:
| Preface and Acknowledgments | ||
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Ch. 1 | Reconstructing the 1930s | 20 |
| Ch. 2 | Citizenship at Work | 54 |
| Ch. 3 | A Labor-Management Accord? | 98 |
| Ch. 4 | Erosion of the Union Idea | 141 |
| Ch. 5 | Rights Consciousness in the Workplace | 178 |
| Ch. 6 | A Time of Troubles | 212 |
| Ch. 7 | What Is to Be Done? | 246 |
| Notes | 277 | |
| Index | 323 |
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