The noble vision of a Solartopian green-powered Earth is at last upon us.

Our eco-future is defined by the four Great Green Truths: we have a global crisis, it has a solution, the solution is winnable, and winning requires a "middle path" of action that is both non-violent and non-stop.

There are technological solutions to the crisis, but they demand political action. Together they comprise the Eight Green Steps to a sustainable world:

1.BAN WASTE AND WAR: Nothing may be produced that cannot be fully recycled or that will not completely bio-degrade. This includes weapons whose sole purpose is death and destruction, and whose manufacture and use must be ended by a global community that knows war to be the ultimate act of ecological suicide.

2.MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY & CONSERVATION: From energy to building materials, food to fiber, water to paper, our resources must be preserved. Our unsustainable consumption and wasteful industries must be made appropriate and efficient, starting with a reborn mass transit system and complete preservation of all remaining virgin land and waters.

A new study by one of the country’s most highly regarded labor experts makes clear beyond doubt that illegal employer actions and lax government oversight have denied great and growing numbers of workers the legal right of unionization.

That’s had much to with the percentage of workers belonging to unions dropping to little more than 12 percent from a level almost double that three decades ago, says Kate Bronfenbrenner. She’s director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“Our labor law system is broken,” Bronfenbrenner concluded. “Polling consistently shows that a majority of workers believe they would be better off if they had a union in their workplace, but they also feel that they would be taking a great risk if they were to try to organize.”

As a result, she says, “the overwhelming majority of workers who want unions don’t have them.”

The workers, Bronfenbrenner adds, “know intuitively what our data show – that the overwhelming majority of U.S. employers are willing to use a broad arsenal of legal and illegal tactics to interfere with the rights of workers

The Republican National Committee recently dropped its resolution to brand the moderate pro-corporate Democratic Party “Socialists.” As the late, great Democratic Socialist leader Michael Harrington liked to tell it when he testified before a dying Senator Hubert Humphrey on the Humphrey-Hawkins Work Bill, that would theoretically guarantee every American a right to a job, Humphrey bluntly asked him “Is my bill socialism?” Harrington replied, “Senator, your bill’s not half that good.”

Here’s why the Democratic Party is also not half that good. Obama’s “Me too” bailout policy to the largest and most irresponsible banks and investment houses has nothing to do with socializing capital. Democratic Socialists believe in democratizing and socializing money matters. They favor credit unions and co-ops with democratically elected boards over large welfare checks to transnational corporations. In fact, there’s little difference between Obama’s approach to the big bankers and George W. Bush’s.

Based on the global capitalist economic crisis which is wreaking havoc on the lives of hundreds of millions of people world wide, United Nations General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto-Brockman is organizing an urgent Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development, to take place on June 1-3 at the United Nations in New York City. This international gathering, sometimes called the G-192 because every member nation of the UN will participate, is virtually tenfold the participation of nations in the G-20. This summit of world leaders will for the first time give an equal opportunity to those who represent the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, those who are suffering the most but who have been left out in the decisions which have caused this systemic failure, to express their people’s needs to the world and make known their suffering caused by arbitrary acts and excesses of rich nations. The powerful financial institutions that have long been entrusted to manage national and global financial and economic systems have failed. It is time to give all the others a voice and a choice.

Is it important to counter the CIA's lies about what it told a handful of congress members when? Of course it is. It's important to expose every bit of the secrecy imposed by all agencies and departments of what we still rather goofily call the "executive" branch. This is a branch of government that has openly flouted subpoenas for years, and assisted others in doing so. The chairman of the senate judiciary committee is now afraid to subpoena Jay Bybee, or - probably - to blow his nose, without the approval of what we still call "the executive," the individual who's supposed to faithfully execute the laws of congress. (Prove me wrong, Senator Leahy, make my day!)