Note: this is a cross-post from The Realignment Project.
Introduction:
It is in the very nature of a political alliance that there are tensions between the various constitutive elements. If political interests, experience and tradition, ways of thinking were completely identical, one would expect allied groups to have already merged - an alliance grows out of a shared need to cooperate in cases in which different groups have overlapping but distinct agendas.
The same is true of the "Blue/Green" alliance between environmental and labor groups. On the surface, both groups are united around their support for a "green economy," one in which non-renewable, greenhouse-gas-emitting industries and processes are replaced by renewable, emissions-free alternate forms of energy and production - an economy which labor groups hope involves the creation of many new manufacturing jobs in new "green industries." However, there are conflicts that emerge when the idea of a green economy runs into the reality of class and political economy in the era of globalization, conflicts that illustrate the different interests and goals of the two movements.
continued at Daily Kos....
