Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline

The Green New Deal legislation laid out by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey sets goals for some drastic measures to cut carbon emissions across the economy. In the process, it aims to create jobs and boost the economy. February 7, 20195:01 AM ET Amr Alfiky/NPR

 

Whether it’s a deadly cold snap or a hole in an Antarctic glacier or a terrifying new report, there seem to be constant reminders now of the dangers that climate change poses to humanity.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., think they have a start to a solution. Thursday they are introducing a framework defining what they call a “Green New Deal” — what they foresee as a massive policy package that would remake the U.S. economy and, they hope, eliminate all U.S. carbon emissions.
That’s a really big — potentially impossibly big — undertaking.
“Even the solutions that we have considered big and bold are nowhere near the scale of the actual problem that climate change presents to us,” Ocasio-Cortez told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in an interview airing Thursday on Morning Edition.
She added: “It could be part of a larger solution, but no one has actually scoped out what that larger solution would entail. And so that’s really what we’re trying to accomplish with the Green New Deal.”

What is the Green New Deal?
In very broad strokes, the Green New Deal legislation laid out by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey sets goals for some drastic measures to cut carbon emissions across the economy, from electricity generation to transportation to agriculture. In the process, it aims to create jobs and boost the economy.

 

 

In that vein, the proposal stresses that it aims to meet its ambitious goals while paying special attention to groups like the poor, disabled and minority communities that might be disproportionately affected by massive economic transitions like those the Green New Deal calls for.
Importantly, it’s a nonbinding resolution, meaning that even if it were to pass (more on the challenges to that below), it wouldn’t itself create any new programs. Instead, it would potentially affirm the sense of the House that these things should be done in the coming years.
Lawmakers pass nonbinding resolutions for things as simple as congratulating Super Bowl winners, as well as to send political messages — for example, telling the president they disapprove of his trade policies, as the Senate did in summer 2018.
What are the specifics of that framework?
The bill calls for a “10-year national mobilizations” toward accomplishing a series of goals that the resolution lays out.
Among the most prominent, the deal calls for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” The ultimate goal is to stop using fossil fuels entirely, as well as to transition away from nuclear energy.

 

https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=5729033-Green-New-Deal-FINAL

 

In addition, the framework, as described in the legislation as well as “FAQs” from Ocasio-Cortez’s office, calls for a variety of other lofty goals:
“upgrading all existing buildings” in the country for energy efficiency;
working with farmers “to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions… as much as is technologically feasible” (while supporting family farms and promoting “universal access to healthy food”);
“Overhauling transportation systems” to reduce emissions — including expanding electric car manufacturing, building “charging stations everywhere,” and expanding high-speed rail to “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary”;
A guaranteed job “with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security” for every American;
“High-quality health care” for all Americans.

Which is to say: the Green New Deal framework combines big climate-change-related ideas with a wish list of progressive economic proposals that, taken together, would touch nearly every American and overhaul the economy.
Are those ideas doable?
Many in the climate science community, as well as Green New Deal proponents, agree that saving the world from disastrous effects of climate change requires aggressive action.
And some of the Green New Deal’s goals are indeed aggressive. For example, Ocasio-Cortez told NPR that “in 10 years, we’re trying to go carbon-neutral.”
According to Jesse Jenkins, a postdoctoral environmental fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, that may be an unreachable goal.

“Where we need to be targeting really is a net-zero carbon economy by about 2050, which itself is an enormous challenge and will require reductions in carbon emissions much faster than have been achieved historically,” he said. “2030 might be a little bit early to be targeting.”
Similarly, removing combustible engines from the roads or expanding high-speed rail to largely eliminate air travel would require nothing short of revolutionizing transportation.
Likewise, some of the more progressive economic policies — universal health care and a job guarantee, for example — while popular among some Democrats, would also be very difficult to implement and transition into.

 

 

On top of all that, implementing all of these policies could costs trillions upon trillions of dollars.
Altogether, the Green New Deal is a loose framework — it does not lay out guidance on how to implement these policies.
Rather, the idea is that Ocasio-Cortez and Markey will “begin work immediately on Green New Deal bills to put the nuts and bolts on the plan described in this resolution.”
And again, all of this is hypothetical — it would be tough to implement and potentially extremely expensive… if it passed.
So did the idea of a Green New Deal start with Ocasio-Cortez?
Not at all.

While the Green New Deal has in the last year or so grown central to progressive Democrats’ policy conversations, the idea of a Green New Deal itself is well over a decade old. Environmentalists were talking about it as far back as 2003, when the term popped up in a San Francisco Chronicle article about an environmentalist conference.
It gained traction with a 2007 New York Times column from Thomas Friedman, where he used the phrase to describe the scope of energy investments he thought would be necessary to slow climate change on a large scale.
The phrase was also used around President Obama’s 2009 stimulus, which had around $90 billion worth of environmental initiatives.
While the idea gained some currency in Europe and also in the Green Party, it wasn’t until after the 2016 election that it really gained broad popularity on the left in the U.S. (Vox’s Dave Roberts has a more thorough history here).
This latest iteration is different both in the political energy that it has amassed and the grand scope it is taking. While it was a product of the progressive activist community, Ocasio-Cortez has been perhaps the most visible proponent of the plan, and has helped it gain nationwide attention.
So will it pass?
That looks unlikely.

 

 

Yes, there’s some energy for it on the left — some House Democrats have already said they will support the bill. However, there are indications House leadership isn’t prioritizing the idea as much as those more liberal Democrats would like — Speaker Nancy Pelosi frustrated Green New Deal proponents by not giving them the kind of committee they wanted to put the policies together.

In addition, it’s easy to see how the bill could be dangerous for moderate House Democrats, many of whom come from swing districts and may be loath to touch such a progressive proposal.
Among Republicans — even those worried about climate change — the package, with its liberal economic ideas, will also likely be a nonstarter.
“Someone’s going to have to prove to me how that can be accomplished because it looks to me like for the foreseeable future we’re gonna be using a substantial amount of fossil fuels,” said Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., co-chair of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, speaking to NPR before the Green New Deal’s text was released.
For his part, Rooney is in favor of a carbon tax, a policy he helped propose with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in November. Information from Ocasio-Cortez’s office says that the Green New Deal could include a carbon tax, but that it would be “a tiny part” of the total package of policies.
Meanwhile, there’s little chance of a Green New Deal getting a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.
If it’s not going to pass and it’s not even binding, why is it worth even talking about?
It’s worth talking about because it already is a politically powerful idea among Democrats.

Already, presidential candidates are being asked whether they support the idea of a Green New Deal, meaning it’s easy to see the issue becoming a litmus test for some voters in both the 2020 congressional elections and the presidential election.
To more liberal Democrats, the prospect of such an ambitious economic and environmental package at the center of the 2020 campaign may be particularly energizing.
“I think it’s like a really weird instinct that the Democratic Party develops to not be exciting intentionally,” said Sean McElwee, co-founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress. “Most of politics is getting people excited enough to show up and vote for you. And I think that a Green New Deal and Medicare for All — these are ideas that are big enough to get people excited and show up to vote for you.”

For her part, Ocasio-Cortez says that a policy like the Green New Deal could get voters excited enough to pressure their Congress members to support it.
“I do think that when there’s a wide spectrum of debate on an issue, that is where the public plays a role. That is where the public needs to call their member of Congress and say, ‘This is something that I care about,’ ” she told NPR, adding, “Where I do have trust is in my colleagues’ capacity to change and evolve and be adaptable and listen to their constituents.”
That said, it’s easy to see how a Green New Deal litmus test could backfire on that front, endangering some Democrats — particularly in swing districts.
But, it’s not just about national politics. The national-level energy for a Green New Deal could boost efforts in cities and states. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, has been pushing a Green New Deal in his state.
Aside from the politics, of course, there’s the fact that climate change remains an impending threat — one for which the world has yet to come up with a fix.
“It’s a big legislation because it’s a huge [expletive] problem! We’re all going to die,” said McElwee. “Every week it seems like the the risks of climate change become more real, and the amount of devastation it is going to wreak upon humanity becomes larger, and that means we have to do bigger things.”

 

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Capitalism as Obstacle to Equality and Democracy: the US Story

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

by RICHARD D. WOLFF

The Cold War displaced the legacies of the New Deal. Time and Trump are now displacing Cold War legacies. Where capitalism was questioned and challenged in the 1930s and into the 1940s, doing that became taboo after 1948. Yet in the wake of the 2008 crash, critical thought about capitalism resumed. In particular one argument is gaining traction: capitalism is not the means to realize economic equality and democracy, it is rather the great obstacle to their realization.

The New Deal, forced on the FDR regime from below by a coalition of unionists (CIO) and the political left (two socialist parties and one communist party), reversed the traditional direction (to greater inequality) of income and wealth distributions in the US. They shifted toward greater equality. US history thus illustrates Thomas Piketty’s argument in his 2014 Capital in the 21^st Century about long-term deepening of inequality that can be punctuated by interruptions. Indeed, the New Deal reversal was such an interruption and featured just the sorts of taxation of corporations and the rich that Piketty favors now to correct/reverse capitalist inequalities.

Yet, after World War Two the resumption of capitalist accumulation undid the New Deal and has since returned modern global capitalism to new depths of inequality. What Piketty proposes now again as a remedy proved then to be merely temporary. The reversal was itself reversed. After 1945, corporations and the rich devoted their profits and their high incomes/wealth to buy even further control of the two major political parties. That extra control enabled them to undo the New Deal and to keep it undone.

US history thus exemplifies more than capitalism’s tendency to deepening inequality and the use of taxation to reverse that inequality. It also teaches us how and why that reversal was unable to be more than temporary. That lesson implies skepticism about whether tax-based – or indeed, any – reversals can be more than temporary given capitalism’s proven success in undoing them. Such skepticism hardens when parallel evidence emerges from other capitalist countries’ likewise merely temporary reversals of basic tendencies to deepening inequalities.

The conclusion to be drawn from the US story is not that efforts to reverse deepening inequality are foredoomed to failure. It is to face the fact that mere reforms such as tax law changes are inadequate to the task. To make reforms stick – to overcome temporariness across so many histories – requires going further to basic system change. Because capitalism tends toward deepening inequality and can defeat reversals by keeping them temporary, it is capitalism that must be overcome to solve its inherent inequality problem.

 

 

Capitalism presents a parallel problem in its structural contradiction to democracy. The “democracy” label that so many modern nations use to describe themselves has always been a misnomer. The political sphere was indeed, at least formally, a place where governmental decisions were made by persons accountable eventually to a one-person-one-vote election. In that precise sense, those required to live with a decision exercised the democratic right to participate in making that decision via the accountability of governmental officials.

However, the economic sphere was never organized in a parallel democratic manner. The leaders of enterprises – the owners, shareholders, and the directors they chose – made all the basic enterprise decisions. These included deciding what, how and where to produce and what to do with the net revenues (or surplus or profits) of the enterprise. The leaders were not at all accountable to the people – all the other employees – who had to live with the results of those basic enterprise decisions. The latter were excluded from participating in key economic decisions affecting and shaping their lives. In short, “democracy” has been applied to societies whose political/residential sphere was at least formally democratic but whose economic sphere was decidedly not.

The ideological rigidity of most brands of anti-stat-ism across US history served nicely to keep the focus forever on state/public versus individual/private in thinking and acting about social change. Democracy was redefined in practical terms as the liberty of the individual/private from the intrusion of the state/public. The democratic quality of the individual/private enterprise – the central structure of the economy – was exempted from analysis or even from view in terms of its structural incompatibility with democracy. Legalistic equations of capitalist corporations with individual person-hood also helped to distract attention away from the undemocratic structure of the corporation. Likewise, the US government’s commitment to a “democratic foreign policy” fostered the reproduction elsewhere of the same undemocratic economic structure that characterized the US.

 

 

 

The right wing of US politics has long understood and responded to social movements for equality and democracy as threats to capitalism. Its leaders built their coalitions by working to mobilize public opinion against those movements as threats to the “American way of life.” It built its ideology on the notion that democracy meant a state kept from intruding on the lives and activities of persons and enterprises rendered as equivalently “individuals.” Equality to them meant equality of opportunity, not outcomes: and then only if opportunity was strictly disconnected from the wealth, income and social position each individual was born into.

The left wing of US politics has always tried hard to sustain the notion that capitalism was not only compatible with egalitarianism and democracy. It would also be strengthened, not threatened, by moving capitalist society closer to equality and democracy. In practical terms it contested against the right wing by insisting that the mass of people – the workers in capitalist enterprises – would become disaffected from and disloyal to capitalism if it indulged its anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic tendencies. Capitalism, it argued and argues, will be strengthened not threatened by less inequality and more democracy.

Both left and right – and their expressions in the leaderships of the Republican and Democratic Parties – live in fear, conscious or otherwise, that the mass of people, the working class, will become disaffected from capitalism. “Populist” is the currently popular epithet that expresses this fear.  Both parties contest for the support of the leaders of capitalism – major shareholders and the corporate boards of directors they select – by offering their alternative strategies for avoiding, controlling, or safely channeling mass disaffection with capitalism.

 

 

The GOP offers a mix of (1) repression for egalitarian and democratic (i.e., populist) social movements, (2) support and subsidy for capitalists, and (3) symbolic gestures and policies pandering to certain sectors of public opinion (fundamentalist religion, patriotism, nationalism-anti-immigration, and so on). The Democratic Party offers a mix of limited, gradualist support for movements toward less inequality and more political democracy. It offers itself as the means to bring marginalized groups into full participation in capitalism, thereby keeping them from populism. Each party leadership deplores populists and tries to associate them with the other party. Democrats especially see populism in Trump; Republicans and quite a few centrist Democrats see it especially in Bernie Sanders. Both parties rarely refer to “capitalism” per se. Both proceed as if no critique of or alternative to capitalism exists or makes any sense.

Not only the Republican Party, but also the Democratic Party support, serve and reinforce the capitalism that stands as a basic obstacle to economic equality and democracy. Because those goals are never achieved they have long served as objectives to which both Parties offer lip service. The absurd contradiction of their shared position is now giving way to the recognition that the necessity for system change is the lesson of US history. If, in place of capitalist enterprise structures, a transition occurred to worker cooperatives with democratic organizations and procedures – likely to distribute net revenues far less unequally among enterprise participants than capitalist structures did – it would have removed a key obstacle to a broader social movement toward equality and democracy.

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More articles by:RICHARD D. WOLFF

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

 

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Source: Capitalism as Obstacle to Equality and Democracy: the US Story

A Timeline of 1968: The Year That Shattered America;

                               January 15

The nation is still reckoning with the changes that came in that fateful year

By Matthew Twombly, Research by Kendrick McDonald

Movements that had been building along the primary fault lines of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Cold War, civil rights, human rights, youth culture—exploded with force in 1968. The aftershocks registered both in America and abroad for decades afterward.
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At age 87, Jeannette Rankin, who as a congresswoman from Montana voted against U.S. participation in both world wars, leads some 5,000 women on a march in Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. The event highlights generational, political and class differences among the marchers but gives the growing women’s movement a motto: “Sisterhood Is Powerful.”

January 20

Game of the Century! Top-ranked UCLA, led by the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, faces second-ranked University of Houston, led by Elvin Hayes, at the Astrodome. Houston snaps UCLA’s 47-game winning streak, 71-69, in the first NCAA basketball game to be nationally televised in prime time—the granddaddy of March Madness.

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January 22

“Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” debuts as an NBC-TV series and, over six seasons, sets a standard for sketch comedy unmatched until NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” launches in 1975.

January 23

North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo, claiming the surveillance ship strayed into its waters. One U.S. crewman is killed and 82 others are imprisoned; an 11-month standoff with the United States follows.

January 30

 

 

North Vietnamese communists launch the Tet Offensive. The assault contradicts the Johnson administration’s claims that the communist forces are weak and the U.S.-backed south is winning the war.

 

 

Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker are crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. Their deaths lead to a strike that becomes a civil rights movement.

February 7

After a battle for the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre, an American officer tells Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

The quotation, printed in newspapers nationwide, becomes a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam War.

February 8

At the South Carolina State campus, police open fire on students protesting segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. Three protesters die and 27 more are wounded. Nine officers are tried and acquitted of charges related to the use of force. A protest coordinator is convicted of inciting to riot, serves seven months in prison—and is pardoned 25 years later.

February 27

 

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Walter Cronkite, in a CBS-TV special on his recent tour of Vietnam, says the U.S. war effort is “mired in stalemate” and amplifies public skepticism of the war.

 

February 29

The report of the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to examine the causes of race riots in American cities in previous years, declares the nation is…“moving toward two societies, one black, one white–seperate and unequal.”

March 1-8

Some 15,000 Latino high school students in Los Angeles walk out of classes to press their demand for a better education.

March 5

The government of Czechoslovakia abolishes censorship, underscoring the expansion of freedom during the “Prague Spring” and angering its Communist overlords in the Soviet Union.

March 6

Some 500 New York University students picket a university-sponsored recruiting event for the Dow Chemical Company, the principal manufacturer of napalm.

March 12

Nixon wins 78 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s GOP primary. Eugene McCarthy, Minnesota’s antiwar senator, takes a shocking 42 percent of the Democratic vote.

March 13

Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil)  announce the discovery of an oil field beneath Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the largest oil and natural-gas discovery in North American history.

March 16

New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy enters the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, saying McCarthy’s showing in New Hampshire “has proven how deep are the present divisions within our party and country.” It “is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who make them.”

 

March 19

 

(Getty Images)

Hundreds of students take over the administration building at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking a greater voice in student discipline and the curriculum.

March 31

As war pressures mount, President Lyndon B. Johnson—who in 1964 won 61 percent of the popular vote, to Barry Goldwater’s 39—announces he is not running for re-election.

April 3

Some 1,000 men return their draft cards to government offices all over the country.

April 4

 

(Getty Images)

Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis for the sanitation workers’ strike, is fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Gunman James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, flees the country. Over the next week, riots in more than 100 cities nationwide leave 39 people dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested.

April 6

After a 90-minute shootout between Black Panthers and police in Oakland, California, police shoot Bobby Hutton, 17, as he tries to surrender.

April 11

Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act, banning discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. It is the last of the landmark civil rights laws he signed.

April 23

Students take over five buildings on Columbia University’s campus and briefly hold a dean hostage, calling for the university to cut its ties to military research. Before dawn on April 30 administrators call in the police, who respond with about 1,000 officers. More than 700 people are arrested, and 132 students, four faculty and 12 officers are injured.

April 29

Hair opens on Broadway and runs for more than 1,700 performances, introducing mainstream theatergoers to sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and draft resistance.

 

May 6

 

(AP)

A riot breaks out between police and more than 5,000 university students in Paris. Within a week workers throughout France are staging sympathy strikes, threatening the economy.

May 10

The United States and North Vietnam begin peace talks in Paris.

 

May 17

 

(Getty Images )

Nine antiwar activists enter a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland, remove nearly 400 files and burn them in the parking lot with homemade napalm. The example of the Catonsville Nine (later convicted of destruction of government property and sentenced to jail terms between 24 and 42 months) spurs some 300 similar raids on draft boards over the next four years.

 

The Supreme Court rules 7-1 that burning a draft card is not an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

 

 

June 3

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Andy Warhol is shot and critically wounded in his New York City loft by Valerie Solanas, apparently for losing a copy of a play she’d written. She pleads guilty to assault and spends three years in prison.

 

June 4

 

(Getty Images)

Robert F. Kennedy, gaining momentum in his presidential campaign, wins the California primary—and is assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Gunman Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian citizen of Palestinian descent, is captured at the scene. Now 73, he is serving life in prison.

 

June 8

James Earl Ray is arrested in London. Extradited to the United States, he pleads guilty to murdering King but later recants, saying he was an unwitting pawn in a conspiracy. He dies in prison of liver failure in 1998, age 70.

 

(Matthew Twombly)

 

June 19

 

(Getty Images)

The efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign climaxes in the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom in Washington, D.C. Fifty thousand people join the 3,000 participants living at Resurrection City on the National Mall to rally around the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign on Solidarity Day.

July 1

 

(Getty Images)

Johnson signs the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which remains the world’s primary means of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states and reducing nuclear weapons in the world.

July 18

Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce incorporate their microprocessor manufacturing firm. After rejecting the name “Moore Noyce” as too close to “more noise,” they eventually settle on Intel.

July 20

The first Special Olympics opens at Chicago’s Soldier Field, with more than a thousand athletes with intellectual disabilities competing in 200 events.

July 23

 

(The Cleveland Press Collection)

In Cleveland, the Glenville Shootout, between police and black militants, leaves three dead on each side, plus one bystander. Riots rock the city for five days. Mayor Carl Stokes, seven months into his term as the first black official to lead a major U.S. city, later writes, “That night was to haunt and color every aspect of my administration.”

 

July 25

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Pope Paul VI issues Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception and rejecting recommendations made under his predecessor, Pope John XXIII.

 

August 5–8

The Republican National Convention formally nominates Nixon for president.

August 20

The Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia, halting the Prague Spring.

August 21

 

Pvt. First Class James Anderson Jr., who died covering an enemy grenade to protect fellow Marines during a firefight in Vietnam, becomes the first black recipient of the Medal of Honor.

 

 

August 26

“Hey Jude,” the first Beatles single issued on their Apple label, is released in the U.S. At more than seven minutes, it becomes the longest song to hit Number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

August 28

 

 

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police and Illinois National Guardsmen go on a rampage, clubbing and tear-gassing hundreds of antiwar demonstrators, news reporters and bystanders, with much of the violence broadcast on national TV. The next day, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, perceived as the heir of Johnson’s war policies, wins the Democratic nomination, mostly through delegates controlled by party bosses.

September 7

 

(AP)

Feminists protest the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

 

September 9

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Arthur Ashe wins the U.S. Open, becoming the first black man to win a Grand Slam tennis tournament.

 

September 16

 

(Wiki Commons)

Nixon, seeking to dispel his sourpuss image, appears on Laugh-In just long enough to proclaim, “Sock it to me” on-camera. It is a rare intersection of politics and entertainment—Humphrey declines a similar invitation.

September 24

 

CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” debuts. It is now the longest continuously running prime-time program in history.

 

 

September 30

 

(Getty Images)

Boeing rolls out the 747 Jumbo Jet, the biggest passenger plane the world has seen to date—231 feet long, wings spanning 196 feet and seats for 490.

October 2

 

 

In Mexico City, police and troops fire on a student-led protest, killing or wounding thousands. The precise number is still unknown.

October 11-22

The Apollo 7 mission, which spends more time in space than all the Soviet flights to that time combined, makes the first live TV broadcast from up there.

October 16

 

(AP)

At the Olympic Games in Mexico City, Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos receive the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash, then raise gloved fists during the national anthem to protest violence toward and poverty among African-Americans. The next day, the International Olympic Committee strips their medals and sends them home.

October 31

Citing progress in the Paris peace talks, Johnson orders a halt to “all air, naval and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam,” effective the next day.

November 5

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Nixon wins the presidency, beating Humphrey by just 0.7 percent of the popular vote. Segregationist candidate George Wallace carries five Southern states.

 

November 5

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Shirley Chisholm of New York becomes the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

 

November 9

 

(AP)

Yale University, after 267 years, decides to admit female undergraduates, beginning  in 1969.

November 12

The Supreme Court unanimously rules that an Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools violates the First Amendment.

Novem​ber 20

Consolidation Coal’s No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia, explodes, killing 78 miners and becoming a catalyst for new mine-safety laws.

November 26

O.J. Simpson of USC wins the Heisman Trophy. (In 1999, it is auctioned for $255,500, which goes toward the $33.5 million civil judgment against him in the killing of his ex-wife and a friend of hers.)

 

December 3

 

(Matthew Twombly)

Elvis Presley begins a comeback from years of torpor and schlock with a one-hour special on NBC-TV.

 

December 9

Douglas C. Engelbart’s 90-minute demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco includes the world’s first mouse and word processor.

 

(Matthew Twombly)

 

December 21-27

 

(NASA)

Apollo 8 becomes the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon and return safely to Earth. During the mission the “Earthrise” photograph is taken.

December 23

 

(Getty Images)

North Korea releases the Pueblo crew but keeps the ship. It is now an exhibit in the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang.

 

 

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