True Left

Germany to shut down its nuclear power plans.

When Aaron Mair ascended to the board presidency of the Sierra Club, he brought a new mission to the century-old environmental group: Where once it devoted itself solely to conservation issues, now it would embrace a much broader range of social justice causes.

Mair came from the environmental justice movement, where communities of color battle against industrial pollution rarely seen in wealthier, whiter areas. The movement has DNA more akin to the civil rights movement than John Muir’s reason for founding the Sierra Club: conserving streams and forests.

One of Mair’s first actions in 2015 was joining with the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the NAACP in demonstrations backing the Voting Rights Act.

Mair’s arrival accelerated then-executive director Michael Brune’s own progressive moves. Brune had taken over just a few years before from the Rainforest Action Network, a more activist, protest-oriented group. He took the Sierra Club in an overtly political direction, aligning it with the Democratic Party to create a “green line” of defense, as environmental groups called it, against Republican policies in Congress.

Under Mair and Brune, records show, the Sierra Club funneled its own funds into the groups Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice. In 2017, Brune threw the club’s support behind citizenship for children brought to the country illegally. In June 2021, Sierra Club backed reparations for Black Americans. It changed its definition of environment to the “environmental health of all communities, especially those communities that continue to endure deep trauma resulting from a legacy of colonialism, genocide, land theft, enslavement, racial terror, racial capitalism, structural discrimination, and exclusion.”

While many people within the Sierra Club saw this transformation as a predominantly white organization’s belated embrace of diversity and inclusion, others saw it as an abandonment of core principles. Either way, a group that was once a non-partisan advocate for clean air and clean water had become a full-fledged combatant in the nation’s culture wars.

“I don’t really know where it stands,” Guy Saperstein, a longtime Sierra Club member and donor, said in an interview. “Is reparations now part of the mission of the Sierra Club? I don’t know. I don’t know what the connection is and whether it should be.”

At the Sierra Club, like other Big Greens, these tensions have taken a serious toll on morale, leaving many old-line supporters like Saperstein feeling alienated while a newer, more diverse workforce complains of a faltering commitment to equity and inclusion.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Brune wrote a blog post entitled “Pulling down our monuments” that characterized Muir as racist.

Muir maintained friendships with people like Henry Fairfield Osborn, who worked for both the conservation of nature and the conservation of the white race.
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And Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes
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In these early years, the Sierra Club was basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through -- wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years.

The Sierra Club is hardly the only group facing such tensions, which have spread throughout the environmental movement’s heavyweights just when a unity of purpose seems most needed.
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Mair said he has no regrets, insisting that all the changes – the embrace of a broader range of equity and social-justice causes, the internal tensions that followed – are part of an essential evolution for groups that had lost touch with legions of potential supporters on the left, particularly among people of color.
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“They understand that you cannot win on major pieces of environmental or climate legislation without Black and brown and indigenous and other folks who come from vulnerable communities,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate and community revitalization with the National Wildlife Federation.

Pulling together coalitions of groups with disparate interests can indeed increase political potency, said Jamie Henn, a longtime environmental organizer. He helped orchestrate some of the movement’s most successful mass demonstrations as a co-founder of the group 350.org, reaching out to a labor organization, Service Employees International Union and the NAACP, for a 2014 climate protest that drew 400,000 people to New York City.
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Indeed, in this new phase of environmentalism, Big Green organizations are extending themselves into labor rights, immigration, housing and democracy reform. Some groups are aiming to stir millions of latent Democratic voters across the country; to defeat state-level voter suppression initiatives; to make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states; to end the Senate filibuster and erode structural imbalances favoring red-leaning states.

By 2014, LCV counted voting rights bills. By 2017, it included environmental justice bills in the wake of the Flint, Mich., drinking water crisis. In 2018, immigration. Then Trump-appointed judges.

And in 2020, Floyd’s death opened conversations over racial justice, police brutality and systemic racism. Many saw connections to the environment: People of color and low-income individuals are more likely to live near industrial pollution and suffer from climate change’s effects on health and property.

That year, LCV put the movement’s modern strategy into practice. It scored bills on labor organizing, policing, D.C. statehood, Confederate monuments and even ensuring that the U.S. Postal Service could deliver mail-in ballots for the Biden-Trump presidential election.

This past winter, a staff revolt prompted the cancellation of a Sierra Club trip to Israel, out of sensitivity to staffers who objected to Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Even board candidates had to answer where they stood on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hardaway also confirmed that the group is investigating the legacy of its namesake, the famed ornithologist and artist John James Audubon, over his attitudes toward Native Americans and his slave holdings.

Audubon, she said, was “an enslaver and held a racist worldview that was oppressive to Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.”

Audubon called his future work The Birds of America. He attempted to paint one page each day. Painting with newly discovered technique, he decided his earlier works were inferior and re-did them.[58] He hired hunters to gather specimens for him. Audubon realized the ambitious project would take him away from his family for months at a time.
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Audubon developed his own methods for drawing birds. First, he killed them using fine shot. He then used wires to prop them into a natural position, unlike the common method of many ornithologists, who prepared and stuffed the specimens into a rigid pose.

Audubon returned to America in 1829 to complete more drawings for his magnum opus. He also hunted animals and shipped the valued skins to British friends.

The youngest member of the German Bundestag, Emilia Fester, has called for voting rights for everyone, including small children. In a conversation organized by Focus with the oldest member of parliament, Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), the 24-year-old said when asked at what age one should be able to vote: “For me personally: everyone who wants to.”
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The Greens actually demand voting rights from the age of 14. The traffic light coalition has agreed to lower the voting age from 18 to 16.

Josefine Paul, the minister for children, youth, family, equality, refugees, and integration of North Rhine-Westphalia for the Greens, wants to push through a project that encourages Germans to report their fellow citizens, according to the German publication Focus.
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Reports suggest that Paul intends to set up four reporting centers where people can anonymously report other people who are behaving politically incorrect through hotlines. For example, “incidents hostile to Middle Eastern/African migrants, Muslims, Blacks, Roma, and homosexuals are to be reported, even those that are not criminal.

Hitler lives.

God-Hater Hitler and his God-Hater Nazis are re-born in Germany.

The Greens Party must be truthful about their Party and give their Party the correct name, The NAZI PARTY.

"Sleeping rough in the streets was traumatic, especially when I realised that this was the result of a political decision that targeted the migrants," Soumahoro told Reuters.

Now an Italian citizen, the 42-year-old has a unique opportunity to re-shape such decision-making -- from within parliament.

He won a seat in the lower house for the Green and Left party in the Sept. 25 national election and hopes to make his mark from opposition ranks, facing a victorious conservative coalition that has promised to crackdown on asylum seekers.

"One thing I will try to do is make sure that no one ends up living in the streets like me. People need to be treated as human beings regardless of what passport they have," he said, speaking ahead of the Oct. 13 opening of parliament.
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Within a few years of his arrival in Italy, he became an activist helping migrants without official documents, focusing on the exploitation of farm labourers. He subsequently founded a union representing agricultural workers.

He says the right-wing parties that are about to take power have politicised the migrant issue for electoral gain.

Both Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, which took most votes last month, and Matteo Salvini's League party, have vowed to block boat migrants from North Africa and adopted what they call an "Italians First" policy.

"Putting Italians first is not going to pull 5.6 million Italians out of poverty," he said, accusing the right of failing to grasp the severity of problems faced by ordinary families.

“A green mayor makes the difference!” wrote Turkish-born Muslim Filiz Polat, the managing director of the Greens parliamentary group, in a tweet on Wednesday, which confirmed that “by the end of 2026, a third of all newly advertised positions in the city should be filled by applicants with a migration background.”

The draft resolution proposed by the city’s integration committee, which is currently comprised of Greens, SPD, and CDU politicians, says the “target figure for all new hires is 30 percent” in order to significantly increase the proportion of people with foreign roots within the local administration.

The city will furthermore establish a publicity campaign to “motivate young people from immigrant families to take advantage of the wide range of training and study opportunities in the state capital” in order to firmly cement Hanover’s status as an “immigration city.”

You don't have to "guarantee accommodation" for them. You just have to NOT BLOCK THEM FROM ENTERING! All we are asking for is no initiation of violence!