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:
The battle over intellectual property
rights is likely to be one of the most important of this century. It
has enormous economic, social and political implications in a wide
range of areas, from medicine to the arts and culture - anything where
the public interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge runs
up against those whose income derives from monopolising it.
WASHINGTON - When Van Jones - Oakland activist, best-selling author and "green jobs" proselytizer - spoke to online political organizers last fall, he couldn't resist kidding them: "You've really messed up. You're about to win this election."
Their favorite candidate, Barack Obama, was going to inherit a mess, Jones predicted: "It will be like cleaning out the barn with a straw. I don't know why he even wants the job."
Now Jones has signed on to help clean out the barn.
Today we are caught in a global economic crash and depression, a calamity
affecting every nation connected to the global economy, especially poor nations
lacking economic reserves. But this crisis also puts into play new possibilities
for a democratic surge, perhaps toward economic democracy.
In the Arctic, sea ice is melting. In the United States, houses are foreclosing.
And in Washington, the Senate is becoming a real-life Bermuda Triangle for progressive agendas.
Proposals for major limits on carbon emissions aren't getting far in the Senate, where the corporate war on the environment has an abundance of powerful allies.
As for class war, it continues to rage from the top down. Last week, a dozen Democratic senators teamed up with Republicans to defeat a bill that would have allowed judges to reduce mortgages in bankruptcy courts.
The Obama administration has given itself an extraordinarily powerful
tool that could help the president achieve all three of his top domestic
goals at once--but only if he has the political moxie to deploy it to
its full extent.
Our world "leaders" have decided to pump $1.1 trillion into the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to allegedly help countries suffering from the global financial collapse. Seeing as the IMF has a 60-year track record of not effectively promoting development or democracy, we need a new way for this money to be used-not to enforce business as usual-but to empower grassroots democratic development.
Two days ago I wrote about introducing a new kind of scale-based antitrust.
Before exploring some other structural reforms, I want to encourage
people to join a nationwide demonstration of support for some basic
principles of structural change in the banking sector.
