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Green New Deal is the future

The New Deal during the 1930s had a tremendous and long lasting impact that will continue well past its 100-year birthday. Many of the roads that we drive on today in Todd County were built by local people working for the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. The beautiful murals in the Long Prairie and Sauk Centre post offices were painted by artists employed by the New Deal arts project. Many of Minnesota’s state parks were started during the New Deal and many of the buildings and roads in use today at our nearby parks of Lake Carlos, Sibley and Itasca were built by WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers. There probably are other New Deal projects in our area that we use regularly but don’t recognize as having been built by the government’s New Deal programs.

The New Deal not only provided employment for, and gave dignity to, America’s working people when there were few to no jobs available in the private sector of the economy, but it created useful and beautiful results that have improved the lives of generations of Americans.

There has been talk among some progressives about a Green New Deal. It seems that the situation is much different today than it was 90 years ago when America’s Great Depression began. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing. So why would we need a government stimulus?

At the beginning of the 1930s there was a crisis of grand proportions in America. There was a terrible drought throughout the middle of the country. That environmental crisis, combined with the crisis brought on by the failure of the capitalist economy, brought about homelessness, hunger and suffering on a grand scale.

We are in a crisis now. Substantial sections of California are burning, including towns and most of a small city of thirty-thousand. Because of this, thousands of people are faced with homelessness and its related problems. Across the country, in Puerto Rico, thousands of people are still suffering from Hurricane Maria. And there have been other storms and fires in Texas, California, and across the country. 

Why not create a Green New Deal where the federal government steps in to put people in Paradise, California or Puerto Rico to work rebuilding their own communities in ways that are friendly to their local environment as well as the broader environment? Why not call this argency the Civilian Crisis Response Corps or CCRP? The CCRP, like the WPA and CCC, would build things that are beautiful, environmentally sound, and that would provide utility and joy for generations to come.

A lot of people have already put a lot of thought into what a Green New Deal would look like. The Green Party, for example, has been thinking about it since at least 2012. The Greens believe that a Green New Deal that will benefit all Americans would be built on four pillars. They are 1) an Economic Bill of Rights, 2) A Green Transition, 3) Real Financial Reform and 4) A Functioning Democracy.

Each of the four pillars includes ideas most people are familiar with as well as some ideas that are new. An Economic Bill of Rights includes Medicare For All and a locally controlled but federally funded Jobs Bank that will provide work for everyone. The Green Transition will “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.” The Real Financial Reform will put an end to taxpayer funded bank bailouts and the Functioning Democracy pillar will “Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.” You can read the Green’s whole Green New Deal Program at their website gp.org.

Another organization called Data for Progress has laid out a fairly similar Green New Deal program. They’ve backed their proposals up with some solid research that establishes that a Green New Deal is not a wacky fringe idea. For example, they point out that the majority of Americans support a local jobs program similar to the Green Party proposal.

“Fifty-five percent of Americans also support community job creation, especially when it has a green job framing,” Data for Progress writes. “Data for Progress, along with Sunrise Movement, commissioned a survey on major progressive policies with YouGov Blue fielded in July 2018. The survey found that a majority of respondents support both community job creation for any person who cannot find a job, and green jobs programs scaling up renewable energy, weatherizing homes and office buildings, developing mass transit projects, and maintaining green community spaces.”

You can read about the Data for Progress Green New Deal Program and their research at dataforprogress.org.

Tim
Central Minnesota Political



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