Dear friends,
Is the care economy part of any climate action plan? Is it infrastructure? The answer in both cases is yes.
Last night, Heather Cox Richardson sent what I hope will not be one her last Letters from an American. She noted:
Biden has already embraced the idea that addressing climate change is not a loss but an opportunity. It will, he insists, bring good jobs to ordinary Americans. “When people talk about climate, I think jobs,” Biden said on Thursday. “Within our climate response lies an extraordinary engine of job creation and economic opportunity ready to be fired up.”
Indeed, Biden’s American Jobs Plan already calls for $16 billion to clean up abandoned mining sites and more for the training in new infrastructure jobs coal miners want. It also addresses job losses in rural areas in an obvious but novel way: by supporting the caregiver economy. Caregiving jobs cannot ever be mechanized, and there are caregivers—and people who need care— in every single community in this country. Supporting those positions will bring money into towns left behind by the loss of jobs like mining.
I don’t know what the fate of the American Jobs Act will be in Congress and I don’t believe there’s any need to tell our Senators or Congressional representatives how to vote, but I am, again, returning to my request to hear your thoughts about NYS’s Climate Community Investment Act (CCIA).
The CCIA is designed to make corporations pay for their greenhouse gas emissions so that we can use those funds to invest in infrastructure to protect frontline communities, facilitate green transportation and manufacturing, and provide a just transition for folks who will lose their jobs in the sectors of the economy that must be scaled back.
I’d like to send an organizational memo to NYS legislators on behalf of those of us who live in NYS.
Please trust me and record a YES or review the materials linked to this doc and then, tell me what you think about sending an organizational memo in support of the CCIA from us, Work from home for justice.
Although the Biden Administration yesterday agreed to send vaccine ingredients and other medical supplies to India, which is experiencing the most frightening viral surge on the planet, the president is holding back some of the assistance that we could offer. The president has remarked on more than one occasion that the pandemic is a global problem, not a national one.
But he is also grappling with the legacy of his predecessor’s “America First” approach, and he must weigh his instincts to help the world against the threat of a political backlash for giving vaccines away before every American has had a chance to get a shot. As of Sunday, 28.5 percent of Americans were fully vaccinated, and 42.2 percent had had at least one dose, according to the CDC.
The Economist, which is hardly a humanitarian operation, has called on the Administration to stop stockpiling vaccines. At the current rate of production, hundreds of millions of extra doses — beyond the needs of the US population — will be produced this year.
Call on President Biden to export stockpiled vaccines.
A friend read me a passage from Albert Einstein’s writings this morning. It is a reminder that our interdependence is a large web.
From the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men — in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy.
Here are the fourth graders from PS 131, who cleaned and stocked the community fridge on Friday and then marked the sidewalk to direct neighbors to the fridge.
Have a great day!
with love,
L