We Need a Green New Deal
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.
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 "health care 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 (EFCA) - 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.
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.
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Norman Solomon, co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, is the author of many books, including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." In California, he is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay.
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By notme, at May 26, 2009 15:35 PM
There is one huge problem with this article. Mr. Solomon just spent all of last year working very hard to make sure this doesn't happen.
Mr. Solomon worked hard in the last campaign to support Obama and the Democrats. He was an Obama delegate at the Democratic convention, and then he worked the rest of the year to help get Obama elected. Thus, in an election where there were at least two candidates (McKinney and Nader) who would have supported such an iniative, Mr. Solomon instead worked very hard to make sure that Wall Street's candidate (Obama) got elected.
At some point, activists on the left are going to have to learn that it is useless to support good causes between elections, but then support the candidates of Wall Street and big business during the elections. This creates a situation where the causes they support have no chance of any movement within the political system with the candidates of Wall Street holding power.
Sure, we need to have good grassroots organizing around causes like this. But then we need to carry that work forward into the election campaigns. Politicians only understand one thing. Political power. Especially political power that can cause them not to be elected next time around. Thanks to Mr. Solomon and others like him, the left right now has almost zero political power.
If Mr. Solomon and others who support causes like this had actually supported candidates who share their views, they would have much greater political power right now. The best way to have political power right now would have been to ring up large and threatening vote numbers for alternative candidates in the last election. If Obama had squeked into office with large vote totals for Nader and McKinney in the last election, then the Democrats would rightly be very worried about the next election. If the left had demonstrated significant political power in the last election, then the Democrats would today be courting the left today. And that would give us the leverage to say "If you want our support in 2010, pass single payer now."
As it is, since Mr. Solomon and others went to great lengths to back Wall Street's candidates in the last election, the situation is very different. Leftist causes like single-payer are not even being discussed. While Obama goes to great lengths to make sure Republicans are well represented in his government, the left is virtually non-existent. That's because while the Republicans are a demonstrated threat to his having a second term, the left is not.
All of this is the very predictable result of the mistake that Mr. Solomon and others made in the last election.
Of course, we could start today to correct that mistake in the 2010 election. We could be orgainizing strong campaigns that support single-payer and oppose war in the key congressional districts that are the tightest races in 2010. By doing so, we could threaten the Democratic majority in the House, and threaten to begin carving away at the Democratic majority in the Senate. Put the fear of God, or at least the fear of defeat into the hearts of Democrats, and then they'll start to listen. But not before then.
That's the logical outcome of the sort of grassroots organizing Mr. Solomon proposes. Sure, we can email and call our congress critters. But, unless the threat of defeat in the next election looms, we'll be ignored. Lots of calls and emails only have an impact when that translates into political defeat in the next election. But Mr. Solomon clearly doesn't go that far in this article. And, given his track record of supporting Wall Street's candidates in elections, it seems likely that about 14 months from now he'll once again be urging us to vote Democrat once again.
This model that's proposed by those in the Democratic Party where we organize at the grassroots between elections, but then always vote Democrat in elections, is doomed to fail. It will always run smack and hard into the wall of a Congress and a White House full of Wall Street's hand-picked minions.
Sure, we should be organizing around this issue. But, that needs to translate very quickly into political campaigns in 2010. The sorts of grassroots campaigns we need to run need to be starting this summer to have the time required for a grassroots campaign to be successful. And, the formation of strong and growing opposition campaigns in their districts would be what would give us some political power in this Congress.
We don't have to have a majority to have political power. We merely have to be able to cause the Democrats to lose. When we can do that, we'll find the Democrats willing to listen to us. Until we do that, we'll be in the same powerless situation that we find ourselves in today.
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Re:
By Ward, Peter at May 27, 2009 19:30 PM
I don't see any obvious objections to this article, judged on its own merits--Solomon's prior support for the Democratic Party, if the case, is irrelevant to the points made here.
Given the Orthruian nature of the parties a Democratic loss wouldn't help much on its own since the Republican Party would be elected instead, to carry out essentially the same policies (power don't care which party "wins" since they win either way). I think that in the medium-term we need to develope an effective Third Party. It wouldn't even have to win elections just be popular enough to force the mainstream parties leftward in reaction to its potential. And in the short-term have to put pressure on incumbent politicians of both parties to "listen" to the public by raising social costs high enough they'll pay a higher price if they choose not to do so. In both cases, mass organization toward a common goal is what's needed and this is just what Solomon is calling for.
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