Andy Wimbush is nef‘s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Once again, it’s time to track our Green New Deal meme through the headlines.
First off, Matthew DeBord at the Huff Post says that a bail-out of the American auto industry could be a decent launch pad for a GND. Professor William Ayers (a.k.a. Barack Obama’s ‘terrorist pal‘) has also come out as an advocate of Green New Deal solutions. Reuters’ Paul Taylor also thinks that a Green New Deal would be emminently sensible – but laments that “it takes political courage in a recession to think big”.
At the Independent, Geoffrey Lean reports that Boris Johnson – yes, Bush-backing, Kyoto-bashing Boris Johnson – has undergone something of an eco-conversion and will now call for a Green New Deal in his speech to the Environment Agency this week. Boris says he wants London to become the greenest city in the world. Lean also maintains faith that Barack Obama will deliver the GND goods: the President-Elect promises that 2.5 million jobs will be created over the next two years via spending on green infrastructure.
But the Economist says that we should stop comparing Barack Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They once again dismiss the notion of a Green New Deal, arguing:
the election result was more a verdict on the incompetence of the Bush administration than a plea for an era of activist government. Forty-three per cent of voters (and 27% of Obama voters) have told pollsters that they think government is doing too much.
But there are a couple of problems with this argument. First of all, there’s no distinction made between good intervention and bad intervention. To be honest, it’s not surprising that US voters are unhappy about the way in which the government has stuck its fingers into the economy: we’ve just seen a $700bn bail-out of the big banks without any provision for homeowners or small businesses. But just because people are sceptical about this welfare programme for the rich it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t support a more intelligent and socially-just form of intervention. If anything, they are clamoring for it: 69 per cent of people worldwide want to see their governments doing more to tackle climate change and other environmental challenges, even though it would cost a lot of money. That, by the way, means a Green New Deal.
Second, the article conveniently divorces the disastrous legacy of George W. Bush from the ruthlessly deregulated financial system which he supported. The free marketers at the Economist are keen to wash their hands of Bush’s wars, environmental destruction and torture camps, just as Milton Friedman criticised Augusto Pinochet’s human rights record while praising his neoliberal economic policies. But what Friedman and the Economist fail to see is that Bush and Pinochet committed their atrocities in the service of free market economics. As Naomi Klein points out in her book The Shock Doctrine, Bush’s imperialism and ‘crony capitalism’ isn’t an aberration of Chicago School orthodoxy – it’s the logical result of an ideology based on the notion that ‘greed is good‘.
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25 November, 2008 at 2:56 am
Chris Cook
The Green New Deal is a great meme. But when you say…
“Current responses simply aren’t getting to the root of the problem”
why is it your proposal leaves in place the existing infrastructure of Central Banks and credit intermediaries? The fact of the matter is that in a “Peer to Peer” world credit intermediaries are no longer necessary.
To paraphrase Gilmore…”the Internet interprets Banks as damage and routes around them…” That’s actually a bit unfair to Banks, because I do see a future for Banks as service providers, rather than middlemen. The credit (aka “time to pay”) necessary to create productive assets may be created “Peer to Peer” between sellers and buyers within the framework of a “Guarantee Society”.
There need be no “interest” in such a Clearing Union, but system costs and default costs may be shared among participants through provisions made into a default fund.
As for secured debt and conventional Equity – the two conflicted and deeply toxic forms of financial capital – there simply is no need for these if “Peer to Peer ” investment takes place in the streams of value created by productive assets using new forms of “unitisation” within partnership frameworks..
What do I know? Well, I used to be a Director of a global energy exchange, fwiw, and I recently made a presentation in respect of “unitisation” of carbon-based energy to Iranian ministers and parliamentarians etc, (http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisJCook/introducing-the-petrotrust-presentation) and also gave the annual FEASTA lecture in relation to an alternative to secured debt (http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisJCook/equity-shares-a-solution-to-the-credit-crash-presentation) as a route to solving the Credit Crash problems.
So the Green new Deal IS a good meme, but NEF is otherwise, IMHO, still stuck in the same conventional paradigm, which is a shame.