The Green New Deal Connects the Dots

Photo credit: Rachael Warriner / Shutterstock.com

By Randa Solnick
Santa Cruz Branch

The Green New Deal (GND) is one of the most hopeful proposals we’ve seen in a long time. The previous eNews had the first part of this article; here’s the second.

The Green New Deal is being proposed and considered in this Congress, but it has a history:

• 1930s and 40s: Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted his New Deal economic reform and job programs
• 2000: Ralph Nader’s talk of a “blue-green alliance” between labor and environmentalists begins, then in 2006 the BlueGreen Alliance was established
• 2007: The term “Green New Deal” is coined by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
• 2008: Van Jones talked about green jobs in his book The Green Collar Economy
• 2016: Noted by Obama, GND became part of Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy, and was already central to European Greens
• Then 2018:  Brand New Congress members took it up, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. AOC visited young Sunrise Movement activists twice when they were occupying Pelosi’s office to forward the concept of a Select Committee on a Green New Deal. By December 2018, several senators—including Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Jeff Merkley—had signed on with some Congresspeople to support the formation of a Select Committee.

The four pillars of the GND are: The Economic Bill of Rights, a Green Transition for the economy, real financial reform including public banking, a functioning democracy. You can see the details of the four pillars here.

What Can WILPFers Do?

Here are some of my ideas about what we WILPFers can do, and I’m sure you’ll be able to think of more once you get enthused about this:  

1. Let your organizations know of your support for the GND. Many of them are very familiar to us: Food and Water Watch, Organic Consumers Association, 350.org, the Sierra Club.
2. There’s one major organization you might not have worked with yet, the Sunrise Movement. Founded a year and a half ago by young adults, you might have read that two hundred of their activists occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office a week after the midterm elections, pushing for a Climate Committee that would have the teeth of subpoenas. They were joined by AOC and other Representatives! We can educate young people and their families by signing them up for notices from the Sunrise Movement (again, it’s a movement for young people). They say they’re “building an army of young people to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.” Get high school students to sign up for the High School Green New Deal Campaign here.
3. Talk to community groups, get them excited and hopeful. I have lots of articles and ways to use them, contact me if this would help. In this article in The Atlantic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says “This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation.”
4. Speak to groups of voters and workers; speak to workers’ rights activists, to community organizers, to single-payer health care proponents, to sustainable farmers. Create public information programs on the GND together. An informative article in The Nation, Why the Best New Deal Is a Green New Deal, explains: “The climate movement has become a powerful political force, with tens of thousands of people from across America’s largest cities and smallest communities calling for an end to the unsustainable use of fossil fuels—but now the call includes plans that create jobs and address the possible disproportionate effects on marginal and at-risk communities. Progressive politicians are following their lead, increasingly realizing that the only way to equitably meet the challenge of a clean-energy revolution is a 21st-century economy that guarantees clean air and water, modernizes national infrastructure, and creates high-quality jobs.”
5. Visit your Congressional reps and say (as this Huffington Post opinion piece puts it): “We need a mass mobilization of people and resources, something not unlike the U.S. involvement in World War II or the Apollo moon missions―but even bigger. We must transform our energy system, transportation, housing, agriculture and more.”  
6. Contact your local people involved in Public Banking – you can find a map and information at PBI, Public Banking Institute. Its founder, attorney Ellen Brown, has a number of articles on the PBI website to explain her ideas for funding the GND in the huge amounts we need to counter climate change. We’re trying right now to connect her to the Congresspeople involved in figuring out how to pay for this undertaking.

The Green New Deal connects the dots just as WILPF has been doing for this last century. For those of you who’ve been the recipients of some of the good done by FDR’s New Deal–help pass that on to our younger generations.  Spread the message that the Green New Deal for our time needs to be "broader and more inclusive" than the original one!

Sign up for the websites, to get updates, and help spread information and action opportunities around your community. A GND week of action in early February already took place, getting even more individuals and groups involved. We’ll be hearing a lot more about the ideas and efforts taking root, and very soon!

The Greens say:  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.

I hope to hear from some of you with your ideas and plans for action. Contact me at rsolick@gmail.com.