http://greenforall.org/resources/green-collar-jobs-resources/

Getting Your Green Collar Job


What is a green job? What is a green-collar job? What is the difference?
People sometimes confuse the terms green job and green-collar job. ‘Green job’ refers to any job that contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality.

Green For All believes green-collar jobs are well-paid, career track jobs that contribute directly to preserving or enhancing environmental quality. If a job improves the environment, but doesn’t provide a family-supporting wage or a career ladder to move low-income workers into higher-skilled occupations, it is not a green-collar job.

Finding and Posting Green-Collar Jobs

Check out these great websites that post and list green jobs. You might see a lot of green job listings that require advance degrees, but all of these sites list green-collar jobs as well.

These websites are also good sources of green-collar job postings:

http://www.greenjobs.net/
http://jobs.greenbiz.com/

The factory manufactured the raw materials for making lenses. My fellow workers and I cleaned the lenses of impurities as they came hot off the machine.

Without using any gloves, we had to take off a thin plastic sheet covering the lenses. I often cut my fingertips doing this.

After that, we would clean them gently with ammonia. We had no masks, and the fumes of the cleaning materials got stuck on our clothes and noses. It was hard to shake off the smell of ammonia at the end of the day.

We worked standing up during the entire 8-hour shift while keeping a fearful eye out for the boss, who screamed at us for pretty much anything.
http://ellabakercenter.org/blog/2013/07/why-increasing-the-minimum-wage-just-makes-sense

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) said Monday that she favors legalizing medical marijuana, provided the law has “the right restrictions” to prevent people who aren’t actually sick from getting the drug.

Speaking with Boston talk radio station WTKK-FM, Warren recalled holding her father’s hand as he died from cancer and explained “there was some conversation” about whether medical marijuana would have helped him.

“It puts me in a position to say, if there’s something a physician can prescribe that can help someone who is suffering, I am in favor of that,” she said. “I want to make sure they’ve got the right restrictions, it should be like getting any other prescription drug, that there’s careful control over it. But I think it’s really hard to watch someone suffer that you love.”

Voters in Massachusetts will decide whether to legalize medical marijuana on Election Day. Warren previously said she opposes outright legalization of marijuana.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/24/warren-backs-medical-marijuana-with-the-right-restrictions/

Some scientists have attempted to find out what really happened to the community after the accident. Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, a tenured professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, immediately sought every relevant health statistic he could find. According to Sternglass, a student of Albert Einstein's who holds several patents on X-ray technology, the health impacts from the accident were unquestionable, significant, and included a sharp spike in infant deaths and hypothyroidism. Dr. Gordon MacLeod, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health at the time, tried to ensure all health impacts from the accident were fully disclosed. He was fired by then Governor Dick Thornburgh for his efforts. More recently, University of North Carolina epidemiologist Steve Wing reanalyzed the data from the Columbia University study and concluded that people living closer to the path of the radiation cloud developed all types of cancers more frequently. In the areas of greatest fallout, lung cancer rates jumped 400 percent, and leukemia rates climbed 700 percent. These scientists -- and others who question the nuclear orthodoxy -- have all been either drowned out or viciously attacked as biased, unprofessional purveyors of panic with an anti-nuclear axe to grind.

More than 2,000 people participated in a class-action lawsuit claiming injuries against Three Mile Island. Although an unknown number of cases settled out of court with terms that must be kept confidential, in June 1996 the class-action lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs failed to prove that the Three Mile Island accident had caused their health problems
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011spring/2011spring_Charman.php

But David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer-turned-whistleblower who monitors the U.S. nuclear reactor fleet for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says radiation monitors on the vent stacks at Three Mile Island went off scale during the accident. The exact amount of radiation released will never be known, he says, because crucial records from the first two days following the accident somehow never surfaced, and not enough radiation dosimeters were deployed in surrounding communities to give a true reading. What is known is that the partial meltdown damaged at least 70 percent of the reactor core and caused more than one-third of its highly radioactive fuel to melt.
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011spring/2011spring_Charman.php

JPMorgan has reached a tentative agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to pay a record-setting $13 billion in fines. While negotiations are still ongoing, $9 billion of this penalty is expected to go to the government, while $4 billion will go to the Federal Housing Finance Agency to allegedly end up in the hands of customers who were swindled by the bank.

Yet, JPMorgan may be able to write off a huge swath of these expenses.

"Section 162(f) of the tax code bars deductions for fines and penalties paid to the government, but JPMorgan might be able to negotiate an agreement to classify the payments as something else," Kim Dixon and Brian Faler of Politico write. "Those payments labeled compensatory or for restitution are more likely to be deductible."

"I think it's a safe bet that a substantial portion of the deal will be deductible," Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Common Dreams.
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/10/23-8

Remember former UC-Davis police officer John Pike? That's him in the video above casually pepper-spraying a group of students peacefully protesting a tuition hike back in 2011. The shocking video quickly went viral, becoming the latest in a string of rallying cries for the then-in-full-force Occupy movement and, eventually, costing Pike his job. Last week, he was awarded $38,056 from the university in a worker's comp settlement. Here's the Davis Enterprise with the details:

Pike reportedly suffered depression and anxiety brought on by death threats he and his family received after the Nov. 18, 2011, confrontation at an Occupy UC Davis encampment. Administrative Law Judge Harter approved the settlement agreement between Pike and the University of California on Oct. 16. ...

The state’s Disability Evaluation Unit determines permanent disability ratings based on doctors’ reports. Richard Lieberman, a Piedmont psychiatrist acting as the agreed-upon expert, rated Pike’s disability as “moderate,” according to a Jan. 5 psychiatric report released by the state Department of Industrial Relations in response to a public records request.

Pike faced “continuing and significant internal and external stress with respect to resolving and solving the significant emotional upheavals that have occurred” in his life and had not shown evidence of substantial improvement, concluded Lieberman, who spoke with Pike twice in 2012.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/10/24/uc_davis_pepper_spray_settlement_university_will_pay_fired_officer_john.html

Parsley, celery and chamomile tea are the most common sources of apigenin, but it is found in many fruits and vegetables.

The researchers also showed in this work that apigenin binds with an estimated 160 proteins in the human body, suggesting that other nutrients linked to health benefits – called “nutraceuticals” – might have similar far-reaching effects. In contrast, most pharmaceutical drugs target a single molecule.

“We know we need to eat healthfully, but in most cases we don’t know the actual mechanistic reasons for why we need to do that,” said Andrea Doseff, associate professor of internal medicine and molecular genetics at Ohio State and a co-lead author of the study. “We see here that the beneficial effect on health is attributed to this dietary nutrient affecting many proteins. In its relationship with a set of specific proteins, apigenin re-establishes the normal profile in cancer cells. We think this can have great value clinically as a potential cancer-prevention strategy.”

Doseff oversaw this work with co-lead author Erich Grotewold, professor of molecular genetics and director of Ohio State’s Center for Applied Plant Sciences (CAPS). The two collaborate on studying the genomics of apigenin and other flavonoids, a family of plant compounds that are believed to prevent disease.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/apigenin.htm