New Green Deal

kansashunter

I really hope that they do their best to pass legislation that has the principals of this new deal.

tennmike

Mitch McConnell wants that New Green Deal to be up for a vote in the Senate and get the Democrats on record as supporting gutting the economy.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/12/green-new-deal-mcconnell-vote/2849824002/

WASHINGTON – Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is anxious to corner Senate Democrats – including several running for president in 2020 – on the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to combat climate change and promote social justice that conservatives denounce as radical.

McConnell told reporters Tuesday he plans to bring the resolution to a vote "to give everybody an opportunity to go on record to see how they feel about the Green New Deal."

The non-binding measure is a proposal from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

It has no chance of passing the GOP-controlled Senate.

But such a vote could force as many as seven Senate Democrats who have announced, or are considering, a run for president to choose a side on the debate over the controversial measure that calls not only for a sharp transition to 100 percent renewable energy but also higher education, housing and job guarantees for all U.S. citizens.

jbp-ohio

jbp-ohio

THE FOUR PILLARS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

I - THE ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS

Our country cannot truly move forward until the roots of inequality are pulled up, and the seeds of a new, healthier economy are planted. Thus, the Green New Deal begins with an Economic Bill of Rights that ensures all citizens: 1. The right to employment through a Full Employment Program that will create 25 million jobs by implementing a nationally funded, but locally controlled direct employment initiative replacing unemployment offices with local employment offices offering public sector jobs which are "stored" in job banks in order to take up any slack in private sector employment.

• Local communities will use a process of broad stakeholder input and democratic decisionmaking to fairly implement these programs.
• Pay-to-play prohibitions will ensure that campaign contributions or lobbying favors do not impact decision-making.
• We will end unemployment in America once and for all by guaranteeing a job at a living wage for every American willing and able to work.

2. Worker's rights including the right to a living wage, to a safe workplace, to fair trade, and to organize a union at work without fear of firing or reprisal.

3. The right to quality health care which will be achieved through a single-payer Medicare-for-All program.

4. The right to a tuition-free, quality, federally funded, local controlled public education system from pre-school through college. We will also forgive student loan debt from the current era of unaffordable college education.

5. The right to decent affordable housing, including an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions. We will:

• create a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgages and either restructure the mortgages to affordable levels, or if the occupants cannot afford a mortgage, rent homes to the occupants;
• expand rental and home ownership assistance;
• create ample public housing; and,
• offer capital grants to non-profit developers of affordable housing until all people can obtain decent housing at no more than 25% of their income.

6. The right to accessible and affordable utilities – heat, electricity, phone, internet, and public transportation – through democratically run, publicly owned utilities that operate at cost, not for profit.

7. The right to fair taxation that's distributed in proportion to ability to pay. In addition, corporate tax subsidies will be made transparent by detailing them in public budgets where they can be scrutinized, not hidden as tax breaks.

II - A GREEN TRANSITION

The second priority of the Green New Deal is a Green Transition Program that will convert the old, gray economy into a new, sustainable economy that is environmentally sound, economically viable and socially responsible. We will:

1. Invest in green business by providing grants and low-interest loans to grow green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors.

2. Prioritize green research by redirecting research funds from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries toward research in wind, solar and geothermal. We will invest in research in sustainable, nontoxic materials, closed-loop cycles that eliminate waste and pollution, as well as organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.

3. Provide green jobs by enacting the Full Employment Program which will directly provide 16 million jobs in sustainable energy and energy efficiency retrofitting, mass transit and "complete streets" that promote safe bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing.

III - REAL FINANCIAL REFORM

The takeover of our economy by big banks and well-connected financiers has destabilized both our democracy and our economy. It's time to take Wall Street out of the driver's seat and to free the truly productive segments of working America to make this economy work for all of us. Real Financial Reform will:

1. Relieve the debt overhang holding back the economy by reducing homeowner and student debt burdens.

2. Democratize monetary policy to bring about public control of the money supply and credit creation. This means we'll nationalize the private bank-dominated Federal Reserve Banks and place them under a Monetary Authority within the Treasury Department.

3. Break up the oversized banks that are "too big to fail."

4. End taxpayer-funded bailouts for banks, insurers, and other financial companies. We'll use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off.

5. Regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges.

6. Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks.

7. Establish a 90% tax on bonuses for bailed out bankers.

8. Support the formation of federal, state, and municipal public-owned banks that function as non-profit utilities. Under the Green New Deal we will start building a financial system that is open, honest, stable, and serves the real economy rather than the phony economy of high finance.

jbp-ohio

IV - A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY

We won't get these vital reforms without a fourth and final set of reforms to give us a real, functioning democracy. Just as we are replacing the old economy with a new one, we need a new politics to restore the promise of American democracy. The New Green Deal will:

1. Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Those rights belong to living, breathing human beings - not to business entities controlled by the wealthy.

2. Protect our right to vote by supporting Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s proposed "Right to Vote Amendment," to clarify to the Supreme Court that yes, we do have a constitutional right to vote.

3. Enact the Voter Bill of Rights that will:

• guarantee us a voter-marked paper ballot for all voting;
• require that all votes are counted before election results are released;
• replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions;
• celebrate our democratic aspirations by making Election Day a national holiday;
• bring simplified, safe same-day voter registration to the nation so that no qualified voter is barred from the polls;
• do away with so-called "winner take all" elections in which the "winner" does not have the support of most of the voters, and replace that system with instant runoff voting and proportional representation, systems most advanced countries now use to good effect;
• replace big money control of election campaigns with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves;
• guarantee equal access to the ballot and to the debates to all qualified candidates;
• abolish the Electoral College and implement direct election of the President;
• restore the vote to ex-offenders who've paid their debt to society; and,
• enact Statehood for the District of Columbia so that those Americans have representation in Congress and full rights to self rule like the rest of us.

4. Protect local democracy and democratic rights by commissioning a thorough review of federal preemption law and its impact on the practice of local democracy in the United States. This review will put at its center the "democracy question" – that is, what level of government is most open to democratic participation and most suited to protecting democratic rights.

5. Create a Corporation for Economic Democracy, a new federal corporation (like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory.

6. Strengthen media democracy by expanding federal support for locally-owned broadcast media and local print media.

7. Protect our personal liberty and freedoms by:

• repealing the Patriot Act and those parts of the National Defense Authorization Act that violate our civil liberties;
• prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI from conspiring with local police forces to suppress our freedoms of assembly and of speech; and,
• ending the war on immigrants – including the cruel, so-called "secure communities" program.

8. Rein in the military-industrial complex by

• reducing military spending by 50% and closing U.S. military bases around the world;
• restoring the National Guard as the centerpiece of our system of national defense; and,
• creating a new round of nuclear disarmament initiatives.

Let us not rest until we have pulled our nation back from the brink, and until we have secured the peaceful, just, green future we all deserve.

jbp-ohio

6. The right to accessible and affordable utilities – heat, electricity, phone, internet, and public transportation – through democratically run, publicly owned utilities that operate at cost, not for profit.

You can just look a the success of the USPS to see how well this will work......

earlyagain

This is what you guys are afraid of??????

jbp-ohio

Just because they want to put control of jobs, minimum wage, agriculture, college education, heat, electricity, phone, internet, banks, and house mortgages all under the loving care of the Federal Government??

What could possibly go wrong?

Get rid of the electoral college?? It's about time we let California run the country!

Obviously we under estimated the brilliance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez...... History will reveal her as the modern day Thomas Jefferson and James Madison all rolled into one!!

earlyagain

We can't even put up a fence. You think that whole camel's gonna fit through the keyhole????

jbp-ohio

Never thought we would have an openly Socialist congresswoman be the toast of the town.....

earlyagain

I don't think Mitch has a glass.;-) 

Make_My_Day

If all this were actually accomplished, we would have true totalitarianism under Fascism or Communism....take your pick. Nowhere in their plan does it say "confiscation of guns" which has been purposely left out for a reason.

Make_My_Day

jbp-ohio said:

Never thought we would have an openly Socialist congresswoman be the toast of the town.....

I never expected to have Jew-hating Muslims either.

Make_My_Day

alphasigmookie said:

jbp-ohio said:

Never thought we would have an openly Socialist congresswoman be the toast of the town.....

With the way our politics work these days, the more you guys hate her, the more liberals will love her. She actually owes the vast majority of her power and fame to right wing media outlets demonizing her as next great boogyman to be very very afraid of. Without them amplifying her profile she'd just be another freshman congresswoman making some noise on Twitter. She's basically the Michelle Bachmann of the left. 

So we should basically shut tf up, and everything will be OK?

earlyagain

Make_My_Day said:

alphasigmookie said:

jbp-ohio said:

Never thought we would have an openly Socialist congresswoman be the toast of the town.....

With the way our politics work these days, the more you guys hate her, the more liberals will love her. She actually owes the vast majority of her power and fame to right wing media outlets demonizing her as next great boogyman to be very very afraid of. Without them amplifying her profile she'd just be another freshman congresswoman making some noise on Twitter. She's basically the Michelle Bachmann of the left. 

So we should basically shut tf up, and everything will be OK?

Not you/we.
Right wing media outlets.
They've elevated her and her agenda to a sensational grandiosity of un-American evil that rivals war time dehumanizing caricatures of enemy combatants.

As alarming as some of the proposals might be. The over-reaction guarantees a spotlight.

bisley

alphasigmookie said:

jbp-ohio said:

Never thought we would have an openly Socialist congresswoman be the toast of the town.....

With the way our politics work these days, the more you guys hate her, the more liberals will love her. She actually owes the vast majority of her power and fame to right wing media outlets demonizing her as next great boogyman to be very very afraid of. Without them amplifying her profile she'd just be another freshman congresswoman making some noise on Twitter. She's basically the Michelle Bachmann of the left. 

You are missing the main point.

Republicans have been accusing Democrats of socialism, since LBJ. The Democrats have been jumping through hoops for decades, redefining words and whatever semantic tricks they can come up with to distance themselves from the label of socialism. You are still doing it.

Then, BINGO! Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, gains so much popular support that the DNC's anointed candidate has to fight for her political life to secure the nomination, despite all of the super delegate BS that was supposed to make it a slam-dunk. She loses focus, in the purple states, and loses the election. Then, other hard-core socialist candidates win congressional races, among them, a political moron from NYC who becomes a media darling and publicly states all of the socialist 'wet dreams' that the DNC had been suppressing from the media, for years.

Now, every Republican can debate socialism vs. American capitalism, legitimately. It is what the argument has always been, but now, the media cannot 'honestly' condemn them for it, because they glamorize the socialists, all day, every day. The Democrats are now divided, and all the new presidential candidates in the Senate are about to be forced to publicly pick a side. They can no longer jump back and forth between the two factions. Some will still try, but it probably won't work.

earlyagain

That's the plan.

Attempting to force politicians into the open could be an interesting spectacle.👀👓

bisley

Exactly. And there are political minefields to be maneuvered through, for Republicans, too.

I place myself in the 'principled realism' sector, which has grown very small in the Republican Party, through the years. I am basically conservative/libertarian, but I completely understand that majority rule that does not attempt to assimilate the disenfranchised is not much better than any of the other political sects. I have a 'heart,' and will occasionally make a decision on some subjects that is not purely realistic or logical, but I will try to temper such decisions with honest logic, inasmuch as I am capable of doing so..

jbp-ohio

It's like the DNC is ran by the two old guys from Trading Places movie.

 Say Mortimer, I bet we can get a guy that has never held a real job AND has a Muslim name elected President....... Twice!

 Well Randolph, I bet we can get a bartender with a room temperature IQ elected to Congress.......

earlyagain

jbp-ohio said:

It's like the DNC is ran by the two old guys from Trading Places movie.

 Say Mortimer, I bet we can get a guy that has never held a real job AND has a Muslim name elected President....... Twice!

 Well Randolph, I bet we can get a bartender with a room temperature IQ elected to Congress.......

This is animus over content. It may be very amusing, especially coming from someone obviously concerned enough with content to post it in depth here. But if the congressional, and subsequent public debate follows that line, gaining supportive electorate will become an imposing hurdle.

I think this whole thing might get cleverly side stepped. If not it will be interesting. There is though, as Bisely says a minefield or two.

jbp-ohio

It took 30 seconds to copy and paste.

I have seen the headlines, but this is the first I saw all of the 'ideas' in the deal........

earlyagain

That one's actually alot funnier.  😆

tennmike

I can't wait to see how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tackles that railway across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, the islands in the Pacific, and the Far East, and the railway across the Atlantic to Europe and Africa. That's gonna be some VERY tall trestles across both oceans to get the tracks above the waves!

Airplanes use fossil fuels and will be forbidden until they figure out the design for solar cells, and pedal powered generators at each seat on the plane.

earlyagain

I think a few of those proposals are good. Some if not many absolutely lend themselves to ridicule.

Cortez, her contemporaries, and the Green Deal are created by explicit invitation contained in the decades old focused intentional erosion of the middle class. This erosion is not fictitious conjecture and it's consequences are looming.

Make_My_Day

alphasigmookie said:

Make_My_Day said:

jbp-ohio said:

Never thought we would have an openly Socialist congresswoman be the toast of the town.....

I never expected to have Jew-hating Muslims either.

I'd like to hear a singles legitimate argument as to why pointing out that large swaths of Congress take huge sums of money from pro Israel lobbying groups is somehow anti-semitic? 

There's no doubt in my mind she took money from anti-American and anti-Israel lobbyists, which makes her a hypocrite.

bisley

alphasigmookie said:

blah, blah, blah...

In short the tides are shifting. I would not be surprised if someone calling them self a socialist is elected president within the next decade. That said, because the current definition has become so divorced from it's original meaning it will not in fact mean that we are "becoming Venezuela" or any of the other outdated scare tactics. It will just mean that we will have elected a president who looks a bit more like FDR than Ronald Reagan. 

No need to keep repeating myself, here.

Take all the polls you need, with all of the different 'new' definitions and perceptions that you can scrape up, or invent, and you still end up with zero examples of it ending the poverty that all versions of it purport to be a panacea for. Socialism, in all of its forms, is a lie that can be temporarily sold to the Democrat base, and any other group that has historically been easy to fool.

I say 'temporarily' because only those who have adopted it as their religion or earn their livelihoods from selling it will continue to make excuses for it, for extended periods of time. There are more ex-Socialists out there than there are ex-smokers, and new 'meat' must to be continuously fed into the political machinery, to keep it functioning. It is why all of the left of center Democrats support open borders, and why they begin indoctrination at earlier ages, and why they encourage entire generations of entire families to live on government handouts. A person with real world experience, that understands the language, can only be fooled for a few years, at best, without continuous government gratuities of ever increasing size.

By the way, your silly article takes its so called 'data' from 2015, before Democrats started openly admitting that they were socialists.

tennmike

World War II brought the South out of the sustained poverty we were in since the end of the Civil War and that misnamed Reconstruction which was nothing more than finishing the rape of the entire South and its resources. My Mother's parents told me something about the Depression that stuck with me. I asked my Grandpa what the Depression was like, and he said he didn't notice much difference, except the government made it harder to get things they couldn't afford to buy in the first place.

Socialism is nothing more than the creed of envy, and coveting that which some people have, and not wanting to put in the effort to work for and get it on their own. I also note that most people hot for socialism don't contribute much to their own upkeep or to society as a whole. They'd rather 'rob from the rich, keep most for themselves, and give the poor just enough to stave off mass revolt'. That's my take on socialism and socialists. And they all say that socialism failed because it wasn't implemented right and if we just tweaked it a bit it would be heaven on earth. I counter with:

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic

Nazi Germany

China under Mao

Zimbabwe

The collapsing of South Africa no one is reporting about

Cambodia

Laos

Vietnam

Venezuela

Italy and France are dabbling heavily in it now and having huge social upheaval over it.

Many others have also tried that aren't in that short list of abject failures. History is also littered with a few hundred millions of corpses of the people that got shot or ground into the dust due to the 'benevolent socialist governments' that took power. Nobody reads history anymore, so they're ignorant of the warnings it teaches.

zorba

Mike - add to that the oh-so-often touted Sweden that few, if any, Socialist desirers in this country have ever visited. Oh, Greece isn't doing so well either.

bisley

alphasigmookie said:

Bisley, the example is FDR. We can argue over the details and the merits of specific proposals, but it definitely did not end up with the country in poverty.

Poverty was still widespread, when FDR's second term ended. Had he retired after two terms, like every other president in our history, his successor would have gotten credit for ending the depression. By that time, his National Recovery Agency had already failed to jump-start the economy, and been ruled unconstitutional, and his effort to co-opt the Supreme Court had also failed.

The first effective plan FDR had was the Lend-Lease Act, which put Americans to work, without having to be financed by American taxpayers. It was financed by banks that were guaranteed repayment by the eventual repayment of war debt. Lend-Lease was enacted in the last months of FDR's second term, and subsequent similar plans for selling war materiel to allies eventually put the US on the road to prosperity.

I give FDR credit for preaching hope to the unemployed, ending Prohibition, and for having the wisdom and courage to resist fascism at an early enough date to make victory possible. No doubt, a good deal of prodding from Winston Churchill helped him to do the latter. His efforts to inject socialism into the American system were half-baked, but probably well intentioned. In the end, pure capitalistic endeavor and war profiteering ended the depression, and propelled us to great prosperity for the majority of the country, and much less painful poverty for US citizens than anywhere else in the world.

zorba

*IF* I remember my history correctly - and I may not - many of FDR's first actions were "rebranded" ideas from Hoover that had previously been rejected. (??)

tennmike

zorba said:

Mike - add to that the oh-so-often touted Sweden that few, if any, Socialist desirers in this country have ever visited. Oh, Greece isn't doing so well either.

They're on 'socialism lite' so far.