Tweet
In answer to our nation’s vast economic and ecological problems, Green Change has launched a campaign for a Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal is an ambitious program to create economic prosperity together with ecological sustainability.
We are building a coalition of candidates, individuals and organizations to support the Green New Deal – starting today.
Join the Green New Deal Coalition now.
Here are the ten policies you endorse by joining the Green New Deal Coalition:
• Cut military spending at least 70%;
• Create millions of green union jobs through massive public investment in renewable energy, mass transit and conservation;
• Set ambitious, science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax to meet them;
• Establish single-payer “Medicare for all” health care;
• Provide tuition-free public higher education;
• Change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards;
• End counterproductive prohibition policies and legalize marijuana;
• Enact tough limits on credit interest and lending rates, progressive tax reform and strict financial regulation;
• Amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood; and
• Pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.
Will you help us turn these ideas into reality?
Sign up for the Green New Deal Coalition now.
The first step is to agree on these ten priorities. The next step is to push for specific policies to make them happen.
We need your help. Share your ideas about a Green New Deal at Green Change.
15 Comments
That’s a pretty awesome start. I especially like that you’ve stated that urban mass transit, rather than inter-urban HST, is where the bulk of transportation money and effort really needs to go. But, I would add/subtract as follows:
1. Tuition-free college. No. Tuition-free first two years of college or community college or other higher education, yes. College is vastly over-rated, and I know it’s difficult for college grads to ‘get’ that. The biggest education problem our country probably has is how bad elementary through high school education is, and that’s where money should be focused. We also need to be more responsive to what is probably the majority of students, that they are not especially interested in a ‘liberal arts’ education and instead want some of that but mostly to get skills they need for a high-paying job. And have the skills they learn matched up to actual jobs in the real world. Not much of that has much to do with four long years of college.
2. Union membership (in a democratic and closely regulated union) should be required of all people who take a job, just like a driver’s license is required of all people who drive a car. This is fundamental to protect workers and especially to shift political power away from corporations and money and toward the common people. So, if we’re dreaming, let’s dream of creating a permanent balance of power that will permanently end the rule of corporations and big money.
3. Closely regulate all monopolies and oligopolies, and tax them so that the ‘rent’ they pull in as profits from their monopolistic/oligopolistic market positions is transferred to the taxpayers who have paid that ‘rent’.
4. Change trade agreements not just to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards, but also to end competition based on who pays their workers the least. Apply tariffs to imported products to take away the unfair advantage of low wages.
5. End counterproductive prohibition policies not just regarding marijuana, but also for all drugs that are not (by scientific, not anecdotal standards) physically addictive. I’m thinking in particular of methamphetamine and crack cocaine, neither of which is physically addictive but both of which are popular drugs among poor people. (There may be a cultural/class bias in your focus only on marijuana.) Even in the case of physically addictive drugs like heroin or its derivatives, they should be available with a doctor’s prescription and if taken in a setting supervised by a doctor or nurse. This kind of change would have a massively positive ‘freeing from the police and violence’ effect on poor neighborhoods everywhere in the U.S. Just focusing on marijuana would have none of that effect.
6. Finally, the news media are a very dangerous failure in this country. They need to be taken out of the hands of private corporations and individuals, and placed in the hands of semi-governmental, semi-private non-profits. To assure real fairness and balance, these non-profits, five in each large urban area or state, would be placed (based on recent election results) one each in the hands of the five largest political parties in that region/state. Well, this idea is not fully worked out, but, definitely, the media needs to be changed, fundamentally, and that surely has to do with changing who owns it.
Well, those are some ideas, but basically, again, it’s a great start you’ve made.
I agree and disagree on that. Yes, we are requiring 2- and 4- year degrees for jobs that don’t require them, and requiring PhD degrees for jobs that only require a 4-year degree. But OTH no one should have to assume a mountain of debt to go to college.
How about simply decreeing:
a) Single-owned and partnership small private businesses allowed (up to a certain size)
b) Larger entities, instead of becoming corporations as today, become employee-owned cooperatives that raise the capital they need via the sale of bonds.
c) No corporations allowed, that economic organization is simply banned. Current corporations become employee-owned cooperatives and their stock transformed into bonds.
Who needs a union to represent you to management when you ARE the management?
Can’t agree at all here. Crystal meth and crack cocaine aren’t powerfully addictive? Are you telling me something that I have seen with my own eyes isn’t true?
Here I part company with what passes today for “liberal” or “progressive” opinion, because I feel the left has abandoned their philosophical traditions and has been beguiled by libertarianism. Yes, I would legalize cannabis, but for most other drugs I think we need to understand brain chemistry and develop tests for addiction (whether one decriminalizes/legalizes them or not). If you flunk the test, into the hospital you go–no ins, ands, or buts. There you get treatment until you can be released (probably something that would happen in stages and by degrees). Alcohol, FWIW, would be treated no differently for this purpose (and indeed, if we have to have a socially acceptable drug, my opinion is that cannabis would be a FAR better choice than alcohol).
I don’t make any bones that hospitalization would be very expensive. But as someone who has seen what drugs and alcohol do to people, and their economic and social cost and resultant cost to civil liberties, I would argue that *not* doing something is also hugely expensive. The Chinese experience with opium shows that the only real way to curb a drug problem is to take the addicts off the streets. That hospitalization would do. I predict that mandatory hospitalization would also *hugely* lower crime rates and that would make a fearful public more sympathetic to supporting civil liberties than they are now.
With alcohol, I would use the same tactics that has been used against tobacco–kill the alcohol companies’ “right” to pedal their product anyway they wish with “party naked” ads directed at young people (because like with tobacco, the companies know that if they don’t start them as minors, they will be far less likely to become heavy drinkers, and alcoholics make up 2/3rds of their sales). I would also end the legal “right” to drink–people would apply for an alcohol license to purchase alcohol, which could be revoked as a first penalty for any alcohol-induced misbehavior. (i.e., the problem with drunk driving isn’t the driving part). This approach would be both more humane and I feel more effective. I would also mandate no-drinking areas in public places just like we have no-smoking areas. People should be able to go watch a sports event and take their kids without being verbally harassed or even physically threatened by an irate drunk.
In short, while it is fashionable for people who call themselves “progressive” to rant against “failed prohibitionist policies”, in fact is that this argument made from history is a misrepresentation on almost all counts (for starters, most of those who make it don’t understand the true story of Prohibition). Most of the libertarian-type arguments put forward fall apart upon close examination. The “regulate and tax ‘em to produce revenues” argument fails because–say using alcohol as an example–the economic damage that alcohol wreaks is estimated to be 150 % of total alcohol sales (!). So even if you confiscated ALL the sales monies of the alcohol industry, it won’t be enough to patch up all the damage. I can’t fathom why crystal meth, heroin, crack cocaine, etc., would be any different.
Nor does the “legalize it and it will be cheap and that will lower crime as addicts won’t need to steal” argument hold water by my observation. My experience is that addicts eventually lose the ability to keep any sort of job, so they turn to crime not because drug prices are so high, but because their lives have deteriorated to the point they can’t get money any other way–not just money for drugs, but for daily living too.
I have many, many, problems with the generic drug legalization arguments, too many to list here. But as someone who has known people with drug/alcohol problems, I’d like to close by saying that everyone I’ve known who had loved ones with addiction problems *wanted* to see them hospitalized. They didn’t want to see them to be free to continue destroying themselves due to some abstract notion of “freedom”. A typical reaction of most is “how can we get our addict into a hospital where they can forcibly keep them long enough to do them some good?”
StewartM
Well to answer this question:
“
Legalization! Or at least legalization in Amsterdam for heroin users did that, according to these specials on Drugs Inc that I’ve been watching on National Geographic.
And I’ll bite: school me as to what I don’t know about the origins of Prohibition and how the current system actually works…I mean, if you want to create criminal cartels its a great system. I once heard that underground criminal cash was the secret to success for capitalism…school me man…
Sorry for the late response, I work for a living (thankfully).
The myths of Prohibition are many. I don’t have all my resources handy, but here’s a recollection from memory.
One is political–that Prohibition and the campaign against demon rum was something foisted upon the nation by a bunch of backwoods hick Southern fundamentalist preachers, and that it was a conservative initiative passed against the wishes of most Americans. Wrong on all counts–while there were admittedly were conservative and rightist advocates (the KKK, for one) the prohibition and the previous temperance movement overall had a long progressive history stretching back well into the 19th century. Many of the members involved in the campaign against alcohol were also involved earlier in the anti-slavery moment (and later, Civil Rights movement), the women’s rights movement, the movement for workers’ rights and against child labor, and other progressive campaigns. To list some of the more famous names–Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass–ever heard of those guys? (Abraham Lincoln, in his earlier years, while not formally associated, was sympathetic to its goals and was a non-drinker). Nor was the movement Southern in orgins–in fact, the temperance movement began in the North, and was associated with Northern liberalism, while Southerners and conservatives were the “wets” until the latter part of the 19th century and were johnny-come-latelys to the movement. Nor was it something foisted upon the nation. Prohibition required a Constitutional amendment to enact, and I don’t need to remind anyone on this forum that passing a Constitutional amendment is something that isn’t easily accomplished without significant public support. Prohibition passed because it was popular.
Myth two is that once passed, Prohibition was largely ignored by the public. That appears to be false, most people obeyed the law. From what we can tell, estimated per capita alcohol consumption fell by a factor of *three* compared to the pre-WWI years. In fact Prohibition had a lasting effect on US drinking patterns even after its repeal–per capital drinking rates remained depressed and did not reach pre-WWI levels until the 1960s, even despite a campaign by the alcohol industry to portray drinking in movies and TV as being more of a widespread facet of American life than it actually was. (And in fact still today, America remains largely a dry nation–only about 40 % of the adult population drinks with any frequency (light-moderate-heavy drinkers as defined by the NIAA) while about 60 % is either lifetime nondrinkers or former drinkers).
What is really interesting (in fact, downright amazing) about the apparent widespread compliance of the public with Prohibition is its weak enforcement and many loopholes. Current advocates for drug legalization or decriminalization often compare alcohol Prohibition with our current drug Prohibition, but the two are not really comparable. Unlike the often-vociferous prosecution of the current Drug War, alcohol prohibition was laughably weak. For starters, it was never illegal to consume alcohol–in all the busts of the speakeasies, the patrons could simply go home undisturbed. One could sip a beer on one’s front porch and wave at a passing policeman. One could also produce up to 200 gallons (!!) a year for one’s personal consumption, or get a doctor to write you a prescription for it with no government oversight or intervention (quite unlike the dicey situation for medical marijuana today). There were enough loopholes in Prohibition to drive the proverbial Mack truck through.
If today’s marijuana prohibition allowed users to do these things, to grow their own weed and smoke joints on their own porch while pleasantly waving at policemen passing by, or to get a marijuana prescription from their doctor with no government interference, most marijuana advocates would think they’d died and went to heaven. That is quite a contrast.
Myth Three is that Prohibition touched off a crime wave, and created a link between organized crime and alcohol. Neither “fact” is unequivocally true. Organized crime was *already* linked to alcohol before Prohibition–they already sold alcohol in saloons linked with their prostitution and gambling businesses. Moreover, organized crime remained linked to alcohol after prohibition, for the same reasons outlined (Las Vegas, anyone??). It is true that Prohibition changed the relative profitability of their businesses “ventures” and made alcohol more profitable. But to people who contend that we would put organized crime out of business or even make a large dent in their profits, I say the repeal of Prohibition does not support that argument.
As for the crime rate, analyzing the effect of Prohibition is difficult to assess. For one, crime statistics for that era vs today are less reliable, some of the angst about the “crime wave” of the latter 20th century might be just due to improved reporting. Reported homicides did go up during the 1920s, but they went still higher in the early 1930s and did not fall until the late 1930s, well after Prohibition was repealed. If one argues that drug/alcohol prohibition drives them up, then one must also be willing to admit that periods of increased drug/alcohol usage drives them up as well (65 % of ordinary homicides today involve alcohol, and it may be that the US’s highest homicide rate was during in the period of its heaviest alcohol consumption, during the early 19th century (128 gallons per capita annually!!), to which the Temperance Movement was in large part a reaction). The homicide rate seems to be influence by the overall broad prosperity of the country, the availability of firearms, and the percentage of young males in the population, so reducing it to just one factor is too simplistic.
As for the specifics of the Prohibition era, it was also a period of conservative political dominance, an era where the economic situation of many if not most worsened instead of bettered (sound familiar??) so that a few turned desperate and turned to crime–like robbing banks, not always alcohol-related at all, crimes with their own accompanying homicides.
In the end, Prohibition was not repealed because of any of these–it was repealed on the promise of jobs in the depression and as an economic boost, just as Rachel Maddow on one of her programs not too long ago advocated as an argument for repealing Drug Prohibition. As I said in my previous post, whatever the other merits of repeal might be put forward, the economic one is a false “broken window”-type argument. Alcohol sales (say in 2004 were in the neighborhood of $115 billion while the most recent estimate of cost is c. $185 billion). Alcohol consumption is an economic drag on the economy, not a boost; the alcohol industry is a prime example of the case of private profits with externalized social cost. In that way, it’s not unlike any environmental polluter; worse, it is one where the cost of the “pollution” is worse than the worth of the product. It’s the BP oil spill, without even the admitted worth of oil in the modern economy.
Finally I’d like to conclude with this–and this is from an article I do have, by Mark Klieman, on Prohibiton (another source I don’t have with me now I’m using is a New Scientist article, for reasons of full disclosure). Professor Klieman is a proponent of cannabis legalization/decriminalization, and has been cited by pro-legalization advocates, so don’t mistake him for some hardened Drug Warrior. But what he says about the real story of Prohibition should make advocates of legalization seriously ponder. Klieman says is that while Prohibition may have been a failure, that does not mean that Repeal of Prohibition was a success. Alcohol is still a HUGE problem for this society–legally, medically, socially, and politically. Repeal did *not* create a Golden Age where alcohol’s problems were solved or even reduced. What Repeal did do was to give us a society where anyone–minors, convicted criminals whose crimes were alcohol-related or caused, or others who had demonstrated problems–have access to alcohol. What Repeal also did was to create an politically powerful industry that lobbies government to make sure that access is protected, and effective regulations and taxes on alcohol fought.
SO…if one does draw an analogy with Prohibition, then one should conclude that if one legalized drugs, then 1) consumption will go up, not down; 2) the problems associated with drugs will also go up, not down; 3) and that there will be created powerful and bemonied interests to fight any change for the better in the public interest. Kids used to get ads from the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel from Big Tobacco, and currently get the message from Big Alcohol in the form of “Party Naked” ads, and ads that show it’s “normal” for people to value their next beer over their family, girlfriends, or life’s necessities (all to a funny har har har yuck yuck yuck!). Under libertarian-minded legalization at least, expect Harvey Heroin and Mary Meth and Carl Cocaine ads directed at minors, their future customers–ads maintained by yet another industry that lobbies Congress the states to make sure this stays so.
Klieman writes that legal alcohol today causes more deaths, more illnesses, more crimes, etc. than all the other drugs put together. Yet we are encouraged by at least some (libertarian-minded?) legalization advocates that Prohibition was altogether bad and Repeal was a great success, and that by simply applying this “lesson” to currently illicit drugs will likewise result in the same success. But that “lesson” is simply not so. “Unless and until we have demonstrated the political will and administrative capacity to get the alcohol problem under control, the argument for repealing the prohibitions on heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine will have little persuasive force”, he writes.
(I’m glad to see that Klieman advocates in another article, like I have, a drinking license to control access to alcohol, and to use that to deny alcohol to people with a behavioral history of problems, though I don’t agree with his elimination of the drinking age–in fact, the license would be a good way to control that).
Anyway, this is all I have time for tonight. My apologies to others who commented, I will try to return to reply another time.
StewartM
Thank you for the comment.
This really needs to be in diary form to be appreciated.
You can author your own diary here.
Actually, the most abused drug in the world is caffeine. According to the book, “Contrary to Popular Belief,”
http://books.google.com/books?id=LEpSKemGA2QC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Contrary+to+Popular+Belief%22&source=bl&ots=J_ibZI1NRz&sig=QTHi0SWNkd1xJsE2aaVc8qx-4sQ&hl=en&ei=97k9TKD0AYLfnAfnspTeDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
First of all, it’s fun to have this sort of discussion, and thanks for your ideas and analysis. On two of your points:
The decisive problem with this –
.
– is that employee-owned cooperatives have strong incentives to maximize the income of existing employees, and little incentive to increase the total number of employees. This difficulty created huge problems for the experiment with ‘worker self-managed’ firms in old Yugoslavia. I don’t think there is a reasonable way around the problem, to tell the truth, but who knows? I prefer the idea of putting worker representatives (and community and regional representatives, and representatives of creditors (i.e., all of what we think of as corporate stakeholders) onto existing corporate boards, so many such representatives that they’d have at least a plurality of power. But I wouldn’t eliminate all representatives of shareholders, because they are also stakeholders. Anyway, long story short, maybe you are right and unions would not be needed in your or my ideal, but I’d rather not risk it. If, after they saw how unions were not needed, workers on their own could abandon them.
On drugs, I’m opposed to “failed prohibitionist policies” but not in favor of complete legalization, but maybe didn’t make that clear. My approach would start from the thinking that drug addiction is a medical and not a legal problem. In other words, physically addictive drugs (according to experts, not your “I saw it with my own eyes”) could be made available to addicts in medically safe, supervised settings, if a doctor and patient decide that is the best course of action in that patient’s circumstance. And, of course, the doctor should not profit from applying one course of ‘treatment’ rather than another.
As for ‘psychologically addictive’ drugs (I don’t actually think the term ‘psychologically addictive’ has any scientific meaning or even makes sense), schools need to educate young people regarding them, and they generally should be illegal for teenagers. But beyond believable, continuous and pervasive education and warnings, and offering medical and psychological care when asked for, we need to allow people to work out their lives and the involvement of drugs (all non-addictive drugs, from caffeine to crack) in their lives, as if adults are in fact adults and able to make such decisions better, in general, than the state could. It would suck, I guess, but the current reality of a gigantic police and prison industry (do you realize how much of the world record U.S. prison population is in for drugs offenses?) based on prohibition and jail time sucks worse.
By the way, I really think you’re on the wrong track with the following:
Alcohol is not my favorite drug, but some folks like the effect it has on them, and that should count for something. For example, it probably has helped a few shy people climb a little out of their self-consciousness and helped them to talk to that girl/boy they’d been wishing to talk to but hadn’t hadn’t had the courage to in their sober state. And so on and so forth. In other words, maybe the social cost of alcohol is 150% of its sales, but without calculating the social benefits and attaching some (silly) dollar number onto them, you haven’t established anything meaningful (i.e., a final ‘calculation’ based on costs _and_ benefits).
1. Tuition-free public education is common in Western Europe. We should demand quality primary education and higher education as well. A better educated populace will mean a richer culture and better society. Better access to higher education also means more opportunity and more critical thinking, both of which are crucial.
2. I strongly support workers’ rights, yet I think there is a line between pushing a progressive populist position and going a little farther than most people are comfortable with. I know that sounds timid, but we’re trying to build a wave of popular support for a platform that any establishment politician or journalist would deem radical.
3. Sounds good, but complicated in theory as well as in practice. I believe that progressive taxation and tough financial regulation would accomplish most if not all of the desired effects.
4. Yes, I consider minimum wage laws to fall under the purview of “labor standards”. Many of the details you bring up are already in our agenda. You can also share your ideas at:
http://network.greenchange.org/news/19590-green-change-s-new-campaign-the-green-new-deal
I’ll come back to the prohibition one…
6. For a media policy that I mostly agree with, check out http://www.gp.org/committees/platform/comments/?p=556
I favor ending prohibition of most drugs, at least those that will not cause you to harm others or kill you the first time you try them. However, while legalizing marijuana is fast becoming a majority position, support for legalizing all drugs is still quite low. In attempting to build a groundswell for a radical agenda, I don’t want to scare off most potential allies by reaching too far on a single item. Legalizing marijuana will be true progress, and I hope that the reduction in organized crime and government waste that follows will convince more people of the foolishness of addressing a public health issue as a criminal justice problem.
Great responses, and I will check your program out in more detail.
This is a VERY good start. What you’ve posted is a platform, something any political organization worth its salt needs in order to plan how it will go about achieving its goals. An inclusive platform that represents the broader spectrum of progressive and socialist beliefs is much more effective than a single-issue platform. Obviously this is not everything that can or should go into a progressive political platform, but it is a start.
Great idea. I clicked to sign. I worry about “renewables” including Solar Panels and Wind Farms, which cause massive Global Warming:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/59856
Signed; EVERYONE of the proposals I can get behind.
rec’d.
I think we need a new constitutional convention because I think even if the greens win the demopublican courts will overturn many of the laws we pass.
I also wish the green party would have a dailykos type community blog.
Well, there is ONE blog that might serve that purpose…
:^)
Yes it time but you can bet just as much that this WH is not going to
do anything about it.
Folks shouldn’t we start trying to find a Progressive candidate for the Presidency in 2012.We ought not to sit back and wait,this current President is a corporatist,we ought to get our own candidate and not rely on the corporate Dem party.
What more evidence do we need that this current Prez aim seems to be to decelerate the progressive movement.