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We Need a Green New Deal
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.
President Obama supported that bill. But as the Associated Press reported, he was "facing stiff opposition from banks" and "did little to pressure lawmakers" on behalf of the measure. The Senate "defeated a plan to spare hundreds of thousands of homeowners from foreclosure through bankruptcy."
Big-money vultures are circling the Capitol Dome to feast on the latest multibillion-dollar carrion, whether under the heading of "cap and trade" or "healthcare reform." And many billions in profits can be found inside yet another supplemental bill to fund war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, a familiar pattern is unfolding for the most important piece of labor legislation in decades -- the Employee Free Choice Act -- which would go a long way toward protecting the rights of workers to form unions. Obama says he supports EFCA. But there are no signs that he'll go all-out for its passage.
There are pluses and minuses on Capitol Hill these days. But on big-picture items, it's clear that environmentalists and labor-rights activists are mostly up against the corporate wall -- and the wall is not yielding.
We need a Green New Deal.
It won't happen without a lot more effective grassroots coalitions -- strong and sustained enough to change power relations for the long haul. But acculturation in the USA often encourages us to think along the lines of solo acts.
There's the old American story about the solitary Dutch boy who discovers that a dike has sprung a leak. He inserts his finger, hangs in there heroically by himself and saves the town.
But in the real world, individual heroics are a fool's gold when compared to the genuine value of building political movements. The immense obstacles to effective grassroots organizing can be overcome: not by lone rangers, but by persistent organizers and coalition-builders.
During the last six months, I've participated in a lengthy series of meetings with many other local activists. Across two counties in Northern California, we're about to launch a long-term project called the Green New Deal for the North Bay. www.GreenNewDeal.info
It's just a start. But, as we begin a round of public forums throughout the region, we're in the process of developing a grassroots agenda for far-reaching change that will address these two key questions:
"How can we create a sustainable green future that includes economic equity and social justice?"
"How can agendas for economic rights and environmental protection become more integrated and more successful?"
Seventy-five years after the start of the New Deal, and nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, the need for basic change on behalf of social justice and ecology is clear.
But ideas are the easy part. In an era of massive environmental damage and vast economic inequality, we've got to organize.
- Posted in
34 Comments so far
Show Allyeah, we do, but by the actions of our corrupt to the core Congress, I'm not holding my breath.
A really good start would be to legalize industrial hemp. We also really need to get public campaign financing if the system is ever to see any real progressive change. The fact is the current system boils down to legalized bribery from entrenched corporate interests.
EAT THE RICH
Thank you ! My old friend who used to post here, JWVerez, advocated the same idea. He even mentioned algae for oil and I researched it. It turns out that algae and hemp can be put to use for biocrude and since they can be grown even in the most polluted areas and generate carbon neutral fuel for all our transportation and manufacturing needs, I admire the idea. The only caveat is that the operation needs to be decentralized and Big Oil and gubbmint will have none of it. However, given that our rural heartlands have been turned into rustbelts and depopulated to the point of those areas looking utterly depressing when visited, I say time to revive those places and growing cannabis and algae for fuel could be a healthy start towards evening out the population since more people from the big cities would find incentives to move back out.
Don't bother with any investments in green industries until we get out of NAFTA and WTO treaties. If not any investment in these industries will either be demolished by a flood of cheap imports from overseas and/or those jobs created will be offshored to India or China. Face it folks, the economic cards are stacked against us.
This old Indian sure isn't holding my breath about anything.
The New Deal didn't end the Great Depression and neither did World War II. The depression ended afterwards -- when the rationing stopped and the government stopped trying to run the economy. Central planning doesn't work, however noble the intentions, because no bureaucrat in DC knows how to do your job better than you, nor can they predict what you will or should be doing in five year increments. See: Geithner/Sachs expose in another article on today's CD.
"Central planning doesn't work"
Are you referring to decentralization as the solution? If so, I like that idea. In IT management, I learned the benefits of decentralized networking and could say the same of our economy and going green. I am so sick and tired of Big Oil getting away with their crimes and centralizing operations has never worked. I would love to see government butt out and allow us ordinary citizens the rights to grow our own biofuels and really turn America green in the process. Let me know. Thanks.
Yes, decentralize, exactly, thank you! I think 99.999% of politicians are unfit to change light bulbs.
One interesting note. There's a lot that the Greens and Libertarians actually have in common but then again maybe it's because I'm a mixed indy. :)
Notice that freedomcorpse makes no reference to the corporations. Just government. His rant is against big government alone. He has no problem with big corporations.
Big corporations and big government are symbiotic -- either one would perish without the other. Or do you trust the torturers at Abu Ghraib more than the thieves at Goldman Sachs?
Changing one's lifestyle to green is the single most important thing that an individual can do. As more people change, the new green economy will force the end of the old exploitive banking system and the unregulated capitalist economy that rests upon it. It is a path to peaceful and orderly change and does not require demonstrations, marches, etc. Politics will reflect the positive societal changes. The sooner we begin to focus on being green and implement necessary changes the sooner we move out of this current ugly reality.
The point of Solomon's article is that individual action is next to useless to affect real change. The myth of American "individualism", while seductive, works against progressive change. "Individualism" keeps people atomized and impotent (the goal of ruling elites). Real democratic change has ALWAYS been the result of grass roots COLLECTIVE action, not individual lifestyle changes. Politics is about power. Unless your are a billionaire, as an individual, you have no political power. Mass organization is the only way. One caveat, that mass movement needs to be independent of Democrats (and Republicans), they will co-opt it.
As a labor organizer from the 1930's said: "The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements." The millions that organized for Obama (including Solomon), have, so far, only his lofty rhetoric to satisfy the "change" they hoped for.
Changing one's lifestyle to green is the single most important step that anyone can take to end the hegemony of the banking system and corrupt government. Part of the green culture is localism and a cooperative instead of competitive mind set. There is no split between individual change and cooperative efforts. Changing oneself is merely the first step in the new green revolution. The dynamics of change are decentralization and localism. It is better to have a solar system on each home (decentralization) than to build a centralized solar system owned by a public utility who sells energy to us. Individual action and independence from centralized control is an essential component of a secure green more sustainable future. Since change happens at the bottom first, changing ourselves to green is the first order of business. Take the time to focus on individual change and do it now.
Big agribusiness is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses. The majority of that is from the mass production of meat through very unsustainable and also cruel methods. I have been a vegetarian/vegan for over 20 years. I use public transportation, buy veggies from a CSA and otherwise have a small carbon footprint. None of these personal changes has made any dent in the juggernaut of Capitalism (the most unsustainable "ism" of all). Individual change is important only in its aggregate, and only really meaningful for progressive change in conscious collective action. Decentralization and localization cannot be achieved without mass collective action. I'll give you one small example. If you buy organic produce from a supermarket, you get healthier food for your body and nature, but you do nothing to change the exploitative nature of the economic system as a whole. However, if you join a local Community Supported Agriculture for your organic produce, you, with hundreds of others, now support and are supported by, a local farm. This is collective action but it needs to extend into the political realm to be truly transformative.
In my view, continue to focus on individual change today is misguided and just an unexamined hangover from the "Me Generation" and New Age "woo woo."
here's an idea: we take the people who are losing jobs, and losing homes...we offer this ~ you get to keep living in your house, but you agree to allow the landscaping surrounding your home to be remade into a garden of edibles...you don't work on your own property, you work on the property of others, and they on yours...as gardens are developed, you get to partake of the harvest...in return, you agree to work on a Garden Crew...every day, you get up, leave your house for a few hours and work with others like you...once the private yards are transformed into functioning gardens, we move onto the rooftops and out into the streets, literally...removing pavement from roads and parking lots so that these same Garden Crews can transform them as well...eventually, we might have enough food growing in all of the spaces we recover around the cities to actually feed people meaningfully...as more people become jobless, they can become gardeners rather than homeless...
I know I haven't fully fleshed it out, what with the banks and all, but why not Garden for Housing? What good is it for anyone to have an empty home and people on the street, when you could have people in the home, raising food for themselves and their neighbors, and feeling good about it?
dubet,just move into abandoned McMansions ,till up the lawn and plant away!If you are forclosed on just don't leave ,squat in your own home and insist on a rental deal or a true to market value equity refinance.If you lose your job .create one for yourself doing whatever moves you to passion! We got to be our own green new deal,there is not enough green to go around saving the Bankers and the War mongers first, and then do a new deal too. peace out, peas in
Marx, Mao and Stalin would be proud of you. Green is red.
Oh great, another hot air article by another Democratic Party Apologist ! We haven't forgotten you Mr. Solomon for betraying us and shamelessly putting party over the issues and supporting Obama over real progressives such as Nader and Mckinney. How about telling our government to BUTT OUT and let us locals develop our own green economy solutions ?!?!? Stop subsidizing Big Agri and make it easier for small family farms to sustain in place of those polluting factory farms. Let us grow our own hemp and algae for biocrude ! Those ideas alone would be enough to turn the rural heartlands into GREEN GROWTH and I can finally stop looking at the lands in a depressed mode every time I go out to visit my old friends and family in the rurals.
Actually, telling government to butt out was how they managed to hoodwink folks into thinking de-regulation was good-- the "Get big gubbermint off our backs" battle cry which exposed the libertarian paradise as a fraud.
The worshipping of the free market as freedom and the lack of compassion brand libertarians as regressive machismo suckers. Now their free market masters of the universe own the government--so how are they faring under their own rule?
Vern, please stop confusing libertarians with neo-conservatives -- it's like confusing progressives with neo-liberals. Perhaps consider putting down the Karl Marx for just a moment and picking up the Lysander Spooner, for a real change, my friend.
Stormin Norman is out there with a crew begging Captain Obama of the Starship Capitalist Enterprise to institute a greener capitalism! Poor Mother Earth! She'd going to get royally fugged but with 'greener' hands I'm sure.
Norman Solomon has hit the target again. Progressives need to begin work on long-term projects. The New Green Deal is an example of the kind of visionary work that needs to begin, and that is why a few of us have also begun the long-range, visionary project of a National Safety Net. Check it out at www.nationalsafetynet.info
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
Abraham Lincoln
Time for the crowd to admit to themselves that Bubba Clinton with his WTO and
Nafta, has sold out the working classes who were the backbone of the Dem Party.
Our industrial base has been moved to China and other countries. The only gainer
is Bubba and Hillary. He with his millions of dollars coming in every day for
his fovorite causes, what ever they are, and Hillary who outsourced much of our
base to India. We are in a major depression because we have lost our industrial base. Why is this so difficult to understand by the Media? The Stimulus is a
deversionary tactic to avoid talking about China..
Just great, all sorts and types of programs or solutions that are just short-termed at best when the unequivocal answer lies in the size of the human population and its 'unfettered' growth, much akin to cancer trying to kill the patient, earth.
This problem of overpopulation is becoming more evident and discussed in the scientific circles ""In a new book titled "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," British biologist James Lovelock says humanity is "Earth's infection.""".
And this {"Individuals occasionally suffer a disease called polycythaemia, an overpopulation of red blood cells. By analogy, Gaia's illness could be called polyanthroponemia, where humans overpopulate until they do more harm than good," Lovelock writes. He says the cure won't come until the human tribe is trimmed back from its current 6.8 billion to, say, 1 billion people.}I believe this low end number to be not low enough.
But this is just talk and discussion as there is no real viable real way to achieve such a reduction in the number of people short of the 'perpetual wars' being inflicted on various groups of people around the world under the guise of such 'meaningful' sounding names such as the 'war on terror' where there is the mass slaughter of civilians or peaceful people just trying to live their lives, and then the nonchalant way of our old and new leaders offering apologies to those survivors as acceptable collateral damage, which is really 'cold comfort for change'.
I offer here a link to the article which, for me, surprisingly was presented on msnbc:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/05/06/1924384.aspx
So, instead of a 'green new deal' maybe it should be expressed by a 'pigment/anthropodal new deal'.
sameoldsameold, what is the name for the illness where you hate your species so much you call it cancer and wish 85% of your fellow human beings were dead? Is that what fascists like James Lovelock want?
Thats funny freedomcorpse. Listen you dimwit. what sameoldsameold is saying is that it is now evident that we as a species are not intelligent enough think our way out of this. Hatred has nothing to do with it. And whats with this "fellow human beings" thing. Quantity does not make quality.
You lean green killing machines are a laff, most certainly. Is there no hope for you outside slaughtering all those who lack the qualities you desire in the species?
Its interesting there is so much denial in the truth of overpopulation. Maybe its the biological imperative. Maybe its the belief technology will solve the problem. Maybe it the fear of losing something and having to let go of concepts. Maybe it the robot like mantra of continual growth. Maybe it capitalism which collective insanity at its best. Me thinks me hearty's we have sailed off the edge of the world. One can only laff.
We Need A Grass Roots Deal
"How can we create a sustainable green future that includes economic equity and social justice?"
GRASS ROOTS DEAL
"How can agendas for economic rights and environmental protection become more integrated and more successful?"
GRASS ROOTS DEAL
GRASS ROOTS DEAL
GRASS ROOTS DEAL
The only way we're going to get a Green New Deal is by building a strong Green Party. The corporate Democrats won't even allow discussion of single-payer health care, which 64% of Americans want... who thinks they're going to take meaningful action to prevent climate change?
It's time to build a grassroots movement, independent of corporate lobbyists and unafraid to take power. The Green Party, based on principles of justice, nonviolence, grassroots democracy and sustainability, is the vehicle for that movement. Check out gp.org and get active with the Greens.
Ahem:
The ice in the Arctic is not melting as Mr. Solomon indicates. In fact, it is above the 1979-2008 mean.
For those who say individual actions are not worthwhile, I totally disagree. Talk to your neighbors, friends etc to use less energy. It is quit easy, and the culmutive effect is huge. We do NOT need government telling us how to live oru private lives.
If I see the buzz word green one more time I will know it has become as meaningless as most of our words anymore. What we need is a whole new deal, a new paradigm. A new paradigm where our method of barter, ie, money is worth as much as it was yesterday. Time to get off the merry go round, change the rat race. Life is way to short to be doing the things we are doing. You know what they are.
Norman Solomon wants a green New Deal, but he didn't want the Green Party.
Check out the Green Party's 10 founding principles. I'm sure that those principles would provide the foundation for what Solomon proposes in this article, and there'd be no need to start a new organization.
It sounds like Solomon has given up on the Democratic Party. That's no big deal. Grassroots orgs just get ignored by the Democratic Party these days anyway. Maybe Solomon is acknowledging the need for a third party, but I doubt it. He's still using the old FDR meme-type language that got Obama elected.
Time to wake up. It's not 60 years ago, so stop using false metaphors. There is no public participation under the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans. There's only the raw deal, and we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
So, Norm, drop the New Deal language, please. Support a party that supports the people's agenda (yes, like the Green Party). Right now, you won't get anything with your pressure group. You'd have to have a serious disruption of the status quo first before any "real change" could begin.
-TIA