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How Neo-Liberals Shattered the New Deal Coalition… and How Sunrise is Melding it Back Together

Guido Girgenti, Media director of Justice Democrats. Founding board member of Sunrise Movement.

Book Review: Winning the Green New Deal (Part 3 of 3)

Neo-liberalism, also known as “de-regulated capitalism,” has been the predominant ideology of both major U.S. political parties since the Reagan revolution four decades ago, according to the Sunrise Movement’s political advisers Guido Girgenti and Waleed Shahid. Their chapter, “The Next Era of American Politics,” cites Charles Peters’ seminal “Neo-liberal Manifesto” published in 1983 by Washington Monthly, then a nascent neo-liberal standard-bearer. Peters’ lengthy, erudite essay questioned many established Democratic Party doctrines such as support for labor unions, activist government and regulation of commerce that had bound together the New Deal coalition. Peters also urged Democrats to loosen their adherence to the civil rights principles and social programs of the Great Society era. Peters called on Democrats to co-opt much of what he viewed as Reagan’s common-sensical and politically-savvy ideology. Speaking for what became the “New Democrats,” Peters proclaimed, “We will no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business.” Reagan (and alas, Clinton’s) dog-whistles added an even harsher note to neo-liberalism: strategic racism in order to sow distrust in government. Right-wing “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation emerged to fan the flames of racism and anti-abortion fervor that serve as wedges to divide the middle class in order to advance “free-market” ideology and weaken government, benefiting entrenched fossil fuel interests and the wealthiest.

Waleed Shahid, communications director, Justice Democrats.

Girgenti and Shahid argue that President Clinton turned Reagan and Bush’s ideology into conventional political wisdom, for example by implementing fiscal austerity and deregulating financial markets. George W. Bush continued those trends, adding endless war to the neo-liberal portfolio by invading Iraq.[1] Confronting the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama ran on a more activist government, but his administration quickly hewed to the neo-liberal norm. Girgenti and Shahid make a strong case that even under Trump, American politics is “still playing out the Reagan era.” But they point out that our current convergence of economic, political, climate and now COVID-19 crises may — like the bleak conditions of the Great Depression that preceded FDR’s New Deal — offer a rare opportunity for organizing a political re-alignment. FDR’s election and key elements of the New Deal emerged only after U.S. industrial production had dropped from $949 million to $74 million in just three years. The pain was palpable to everyone. In practically every major city, unemployed, hungry people set up encampments known as “Hoovervilles,” named for the GOP president who steadfastly refused to intervene, claiming that government intervention would only distort markets and prolong the crisis. Girgenti and Shahid argue that in the same way the crushing conditions of the Great Depression loosened the grip of Herbert Hoover’s laissez-faire ideology, the current economic, public health and climate crises offer a chance to break the shackles of neo-liberalism that have held back effective government interventions for the past four decades.

In “People Power and Political Power,” Varshini Prakash recounts how in just two years, the Sunrise Movement has begun to build an intersectional alignment of civil rights, women’s rights, climate justice and economic justice activists who have been alienated, even oppressed by neo-liberalism. Prakash points out that while Speaker Pelosi intones that she “believes the science” of climate change, she is not advancing policies that seriously confront the climate crisis, perhaps because Pelosi’s career has been subsumed within four decades of neo-liberal dominance.[2] Prakash questions whether Pelosi, who maligned Sunrise’s proposal as the “Green Dream or whatever it’s called,” can see beyond the confines of the neo-liberal fog she has always inhabited.

In November 2018, by occupying Speaker Pelosi’s office, with the enthusiastic participation of newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise kicked off a movement that aims to re-align the Democratic Party into the party of the Green New Deal. In March 2019, Sunrise and other climate activists occupied Senator Feinstein’s office urging her to endorse the GND. In a confrontation that went viral, Feinstein rudely brushed off the young activists, telling them that she knew better what could pass the Senate. Last January, Sunrise endorsed GND advocate Bernie Sanders for president, adding their organizing firepower to his campaign, especially in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and launching the GND into mainstream press coverage and the Democratic debates.

Jamaal Bowman, who won the primary for NY-16

One of Sunrise’s key tools is the same one used by the right-wing Tea Party: supporting primary challengers of incumbents. In just the few months since “Winning the Green New Deal” was written, Sunrise has put its activist boots on the ground with dramatic results in several key primaries. After Jamaal Bowman, a Bronx middle school principal endorsed the GND, Sunrise campaigned aggressively with him, defeating Eliot Engel, a 30-year incumbent who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Sunrise co-founder Varshini Prakash with Senator Ed Markey

And just a month ago, Sunrise propelled GND supporter Senator Ed Markey to victory over challenger Joe Kennedy, whose family name recognition in Massachusetts had been considered an almost insurmountable advantage. Sunrise also supported Alex Morse, mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, who ran on a GND platform prodding Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee to address climate policy in his campaign. After state Rep. Charles Booker, the youngest black state lawmaker in Kentucky, endorsed the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, Sunrise pulled him within striking distance of Democratic Party favorite Amy McGrath who prevailed in the June primary and is now challenging Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for Senate his seat.

I strongly recommend “Winning the Green New Deal” for its diverse, inside look at a growing and hopeful youth-led movement that for the first time boldly advocates policies on a scale and in a time-frame commensurate with the accelerating climate crisis.

Thanks to the Sunrise Movement, the Green New Deal vision which Speaker Pelosi ridiculed and Senator Feinstein brusquely dismissed, can no longer be ignored. It remains to be seen whether Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill can be pushed to move beyond the ideology and political habits that have hamstrung government action on climate and social justice for four decades. That portends a long but necessary struggle.

NOTES:

[1] Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, established the pretext for Bush’s invasion by calling witnesses who falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. Biden refused to call U.N. weapons inspectors and State Department experts who knew better. Biden’s leadership of the resolution authorizing Bush to invade Iraq is crisply documented by video of the Senate hearings in “Worth the Price,” a 19-minute mini-documentary by Mark Weisbrot.

[2] Similar to Sunrise’s effort to launch primary challenges to incumbents, peace activist Shahid Buttar launched a primary challenge to Speaker Pelosi. Confronting Pelosi’s continued authorization of military budgets funding endless war, Buttar won the right to run against Pelosi in the November general election, a ballot slot which California election law awards to the candidate with second-highest vote total in the primary.

Why We Can’t Afford NOT To Do the Green New Deal — NOW!

Book Review: “Winning the Green New Deal” (Part 2 of 3)

Writer and climate activist Bill McKibben opens the “Visions and Policies” section of “Winning…” with his chapter, “How We Got to the Green New Deal,” tracing the emergence and current standoff of the U.S. climate movement. McKibben begins with the summer of 1988 when NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously warned the Senate about the catastrophic consequences of global warming. Within a year, McKibben sounded his own alarm, his best-selling book, “The End of Nature.” Looking back, McKibben laments that “fairly modest” steps such as a pollution tax on CO2 and methane, if taken thirty years ago, would now be “scrubbing fossil fuel out of our economy,” putting the world “well the way” to tackling global warming.

McKibben admits that he and other climate activists were naïve to take at face value President Bush’s 1989 vow that the “greenhouse effect would be met by the White House effect” and to place so much stock in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. systematically evaded and undermined. As revealed since then, even when Dr. Hansen testified in 1988, Exxon’s own scientists already had accurately estimated how fast the global climate was warming; the company even factored sea-level rise into design of its offshore drilling rigs. Meanwhile, the public face of the fossil fuel industry followed the “tobacco war” strategy: stirring up spurious uncertainty and denying the existence and seriousness of global warming. McKibben’s history culminates with the U.N.’s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit which deadlocked, accomplishing “essentially nothing.” And yet, even after the Senate subsequently abandoned the House-passed cap-and-trade legislation, the climate movement garnered victories in fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez credits her radicalization on climate to participation in the Dakota Access pipeline fight.

McKibben traces both climate science denial and rising income inequality to the Reagan revolution. These “two great disasters of our time” he writes, were abetted by the fossil fuel industry, especially the billionaire Koch brothers, whose largesse funds countless front groups to “block renewable energy, defund mass transit, trash environmentalists and enact tax cuts for the rich, while depressing social spending.” After pointing out how escalating economic insecurity has fostered public resistance to any kind of economic restructuring, including effective climate policy, McKibben concludes that only by simultaneously tackling both climate injustice and economic injustice can we break the gridlock that the Koch brothers orchestrated.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Green New Deal Architect, Director of Roosevelt Institute.

Continuing the book’s second section, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Green New Deal architect, former Rhodes Scholar and policy director of the Roosevelt Institute, outlines the “Policies and Principles of a Green New Deal.” She expects a rapid shift away from fossil fuels, which power virtually everything (because the U.S. derives only 11% of its energy from renewables), will be hugely disruptive, especially to marginalized people who are already struggling. Therefore, she argues, “the Green New Deal can only succeed if it is just and equitable,” increasing everyone’s economic security in a full-scale economic mobilization that protects front-line communities and rapidly boosts employment.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel-prize winning economist.

Making “The Economic Case for a Green New Deal,” Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz critiques conventional economic analysis which he concludes has downplayed the “fat tail” (catastrophic) risk of unmitigated climate change by excessively discounting future climate damage and other accounting tricks. Standard economic models “fail to recognize the complex feedback mechanisms, non-linear effects, and tipping points in our climate system,” he says. Sweeping aside the notion that we can’t “afford” a Green New Deal, Stiglitz recalls that our leaders didn’t dither over questions about whether we could afford to fight the Second World War; FDR and Churchill knew the cost of losing would be staggering.

Stiglitz points out that high unemployment and a surfeit of un-invested savings offer ideal conditions for the massive public investment needed to transition to a green economy, concluding with the hope that “deficit fetishism seems finally to be over.” Sticking to conventional Keynesian analysis, Stiglitz sidesteps the controversy over “Modern Monetary Theory.” He is confident that it would be “easy” to raise revenue to finance public investment in fighting climate change while increasing economic efficiency by “taxing dirty industries, imposing a broad range of taxes on pollution and on destabilizing short-term financial transactions and by closing tax loopholes that allow highly profitable corporations to get away with paying almost no taxes…”

Collette Pincon-Battle, Director of Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy.

In “A Green New Deal for the Gulf South,” Collette Pincon-Battle, Director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, envisions what a Green New Deal would mean for her region, which prospers from fossil fuel extraction (the Gulf South includes 45% of US petroleum refining capacity) while also suffering its environmental and health consequences and now faces massive climate damage from increasingly severe hurricanes, flooding and displacement due to sea-level rise. Battle suggests that by revitalizing the region’s economy, the Green New Deal can be understood as a form of reparations for black southerners. She acknowledges the “centrality of the military in Gulf South communities,” urging a transition “away from the military and toward job creation in regenerative local economies.”

In “Green New Bingo Hall,” Julian Brave Noisecat, Vice President of Policy and Strategy at Data For Progress, reminds us that we’re gambling on a global scale: Since 1988, when Dr. Hansen testified to the Senate, we have spewed more carbon into the atmosphere than during all of prior human history. And we’re not slowing down. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. is now the world’s largest oil producer, a “petro-state” or as NoiseCat more aptly puts it, a “necro-state –a uniquely destructive force in global history.” Noisecat recounts indigenous-led struggles against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines and mentions that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributes her climate radicalization to that experience. He urges a Green New Deal built with instead of for indigenous peoples, “honoring the treaties, the tribes, the rivers from which we drink, the air we breathe, and land where we plant and gather our food and to which we return when our time is up.”

Mary Kay Henry, President, Service Employees International Union.

The final chapter of the “Visions and Policies” section of “Winning the Green New Deal” is “A Workers’ Green New Deal” by Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry. With the Wagner Act of 1935, the New Deal Congress established the right to collective bargaining. But since the Reagan administration, federal policies have weakened labor unions and workers’ right to collective bargaining. In 1953, 35% of U.S. workers were represented by labor unions, now that figure has dropped to just 11%. And now almost half of the U.S. workforce earns a paycheck doing service and care work. Ms. Henry points out that the same forces that have crippled labor rights also fund climate science denial and fan the flames of racism. The results: More people working for lower wages, many in places increasingly vulnerable to climate disasters that disproportionately affect low-wage workers and communities of color. She is proud that SEIU stood with the Sioux and climate activists at Standing Rock and also cites SEIU’s successful 2013 strike by New York restaurant workers to enact a $15 wage. She praises the German model of sector-wide labor unions as a means to negotiate job standards with employers in order to transition both workers and employers away from dirty energy sources.

Next: Part III: “How Neo-Liberals Hijacked the Democratic Party…”

How Strategic Racism Has Thwarted Climate Progress for Decades

Book Review: “Winning the Green New Deal” (Part 1 of 3)

If accelerating carbon pollution is turning Earth’s climate into an unlivable, churning hell, shouldn’t promptly stopping that pollution take priority over other problems such as healthcare, education, inequality and systemic racism? In “Winning the Green New Deal,” a collection of essays compiled by Varshini Prakash and Guido Girgenti, co-founders of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, diverse activists, academics and journalists reply with a resounding: HELL NO!

Their message: These struggles are inextricably linked; we must unite to re-take our country and save our planet.

Varshini Prakash, co-founder, executive director, Sunrise Movement

Their arguments are not merely political (e.g., the need to build broad coalitions) and moral (climate policy should not make other problems worse, especially for the disadvantaged). Their case also rests on economic footings (with record-level unemployment and mountains of cash parked on sidelines, we have plenty of idle labor and capital available to rebuild and “green” our infrastructure), and psychological grounds (human civilization depends on cooperation at least as much as competition).

Ultimately, the book challenges us to re-imagine the role of our government as much more than a tool to foster economic growth.

The book is organized into three sections, describing the “why,” “what” and “how” of winning the Green New Deal. In Chapter One, “The Crisis Here and Now,” reporter and author David Wallace-Wells sounds a “deafening, piercing alarm” about the “cascade of cruelties” already buffeting humanity. One example of the ferociously-accelerating pace of global warming: In the past five years, Houston has been hammered by five disastrous hurricanes of a magnitude that was previously expected only once every 500 years.

In Chapter Two, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Kate Aronoff lays groundwork for a major thrust of the book: We need a full-scale, government-led intervention even to mitigate the climate crisis. Urging a renewal of the cooperative spirit of the New Deal, she quotes FDR economist Rexford Tugwell (1934): “Laissez-faire exalted the competitive and maimed cooperative impulses. It deluded [us] with a viciously false paradox: the notion that the sum of many petty struggles was aggregate cooperation. The cooperative impulse [must now] assert itself openly.”

Naomi Klein, author, social activist, filmmaker.

In Chapter Three, “Market Fundamentalism at the Worst Time,” Naomi Klein sifts through the rubble resulting from four decades of neo-liberal policy, showing how the ideology of “free” markets and government austerity has systematically demolished the New Deal structures that fostered the kind of cooperation now needed to tackle climate breakdown.

Prof. Ian Haney Lopez, author of “Dog Whistle Politics” (2014)

Chapter Four, “Averting Climate Collapse Requires Confronting Racism” forms a linchpin of the book. In just 14 pages, law professor Ian Haney Lopez traces the GOP’s strategic use of racism over the past 4 decades. Ronald Reagan peppered his speeches with dog whistles like, “Cadillac driving welfare queens” or “strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps” to sow distrust in government, shattering the original New Deal coalition. Lopez reveals the dirty trick of dog-whistle politics: coded racial messages that benefit plutocrats by prompting enough white people to vote their racial fears over their own interests, values and beliefs. In a stunningly candid 1981 interview, Lee Atwater, Reagan’s political adviser and later chair of the Republican National Committee, confessed the strategy. As overt racism, such as chants of “nigger, nigger, nigger” became unacceptable, the wording shifted to “states’ rights” then to “forced busing,” and now to “cutting taxes” built on the coded (and false) subtext that “blacks get hurt worse than whites” when government is hamstrung. Now, strategic racism, funded by fossil fuel interests, including climate-science denying coal magnates like Koch Industries, is thwarting efforts to end the fossil fuel era.

Prof. Lopez takes pains to point out that it’s not necessary for dog whistlers to personally harbor racial animus in order to make strategic use of coded racial messages. Debate about what’s “in someone’s heart” (i.e., whether a particular politician hates people of color) is beside the point. If we know what to listen for, it’s clear that Donald Trump and nearly all GOP politicians (and, alas, too many Democrats) use racial code to motivate their base, regardless of their personal attitudes toward any particular racial or ethnic group.

Lopez outlines three elements of these coded racial messages: “1) Fear and resent people of color, because they’re basically violent and lazy, 2) Distrust government, because it coddles and refuses to control these undeserving minorities, and 3) Trust the marketplace because markets reward hard work. Support the very wealthy and large corporations because they are the job creators.” So when we hear politicians describe the George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protesters as “violent looters,” the same politicians who call for more tax cuts, austerity and abandonment of the social safety net while extolling “free markets” and global trade deals that outsource jobs, we know what’s going on. They’re dividing voters along racial lines in order to grab more power and profit for the top one percent.

Lopez concludes that creating the progressive wave needed to win a Green New Deal requires mobilizing a broad movement that “rejects division in favor of cross-racial solidarity.” That movement must, he says, tackle racism. He offers a countervailing narrative: “1) Distrust greedy elites who sow division. 2) Join together across racial lines. 3) Demand that government work for all racial groups, whites included.”

Next: Part II “Why We Can’t Afford NOT To Do the Green New Deal — NOW!”