Thursday, February 28, 2019

3203. Farming Like We're Here to Stay

By Fernando Funes Monzote, March 26, 2017
Finca Mart visited by international organic farming enthusiasts. 

Editor's note:  Fernando R. Funes Monzote PhD. comes from a pioneering family of agroecologists and organic farming specialists. Both his parents spent their lives making the case for organic farming and agroecology in Cuba and helped reactionaries. After taking his Ph.D. in agroecology from a university in the Netherlands, Fernando Funes Monzote decided that he himself must become a farmer. After the 2006 agrarian reform law which gave 99-years title to use public farming land under cultivation, Fernando and his wife Claudia turned desolate farm outside of Havana into a thriving Finca Marta (named after Fernando's deceased mother) into a thriving agroecological organic farm. In this 44 minute keynote address at to the 35th annual NOFA Vermont winter conference in Burlington, Vermont, Fernando Funes shares his experience.

3202. Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Legitimize Regime Change in Venezuela

By Ben Fredericks, Left Voice, February 28, 2019
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Photo: J. Pat Carter)
As the social and political crisis in Venezuela drags on, the fate of the country’s 32 million residents remains uncertain. Elected president Nicolas Maduro remains in control of the country for the time being, but self-appointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó has maintained his oppositional base and continues to bid for power. The conditions for the masses are dire, with food and medical scarcity endemic. For now, the Venezuelan military has remained loyal to the Maduro government, though its allegiance could change.
The Trump administration, for its part, has put forward an array of militarist right-wingers to push “regime change” in Venezuela: Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and the new “envoy to Venezuela,” Elliot Abrams – a man complicit in propping up right-wing dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s. U.S. forces have linked up with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Columbia’s Iván Duque to plot Maduro’s ouster.
The hypocrisy of the anti-Maduro coalition’s supposed concern for human suffering could not be more transparent. Not only does the U.S. government support regimes far less democratic than Venezuela (e.g. Saudi Arabia), but the U.S. has its own hand in perpetuating the suffering of the Venezuelan people through the imposition of economic sanctions on Venezuelan oil, the country’s main export. Thus, the U.S. political elites are starving Venezuela of billions of dollars, while making a big show of financial aid amounting to only a fraction of lost oil revenue.
In fact, Venezuela is accepting humanitarian aid. Just not from those governments explicitly trying to kill all remnants of the “Bolivarian Revolution.” U.S. aid to Venezuela is not impartial or benevolent. Rather, weaponized aid is being used to destabilize Maduro and provide a potential material base for Guaidó to manipulate the desperate population toward his ends.

AOC and Bernie: legitimizing regime change

With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise to prominence and Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run kicking off, Venezuela provides an important test, both for them and their supporters on the socialist left. If socialism stands for the interests of the international working class, Venezuela today poses the question: what is a truely socialist, internationalist position? How should we, leftists in the “belly of the beast,” relate to the crisis that our own government has a direct hand in creating?
As many have argued, the most basic position of socialists must be a complete rejections of U.S. imperialism’s attempt to destabilize and control sovereign nations – be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela or elsewhere. As we know from history, U.S. foreign policy has never been about helping the masses take their destiny in their own hands. Rather, the U.S. has helped topple innumerable democratic leftist governments, and has propped up innumerable right-wing dictatorships. Opposing U.S. meddling with the call “Hands off Venezuela!” is essential.
The second basic position of socialists in relating to the Venezuelan crisis must be a revolutionary, anti-capitalist perspective for resolving the crisis. This includes drawing a clear delimitation from Maduro’s government, which has become increasingly repressive. Against the idea that Venezuela’s failure is a sign of the failure of socialism, we assert quite the contrary. The reason of Venezuela’s crisis today is that Chávez’s regime did not really break with national or foreign capitalists, and did not end the dependent character of the country’s economy. Whatever gains were made by the Venezuelan masses under Hugo Chávez should be defended, and the working class must fight for real socialism and a workers government.
Yet Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have failed both tests. Neither of them have taken a clear stand against U.S. meddling, and neither advocate real socialism.
Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, recorded herself explaining her opinion about the Venezuelan crisis: “People want to make this about ideology, about capitalism, about socialism. What people don’t understand is that this is about authoritarianism vs. democracy in many different ways…” She went on to compare Venezuela to Zimbabwe as “failed states.” Her message? The Venezuelan people need “democracy.”
Indeed Ocasio-Cortez, by remaining silent on the very real U.S. military build-up and the machinations to topple Maduro, gives legitimacy to “the military option” of a coup. By refusing to denounce U.S. meddling, she betrays the interests of Venezuelan masses and provides a left cover for Trump’s exceedingly right-wing goal of regime change. And by vaguely focusing on “democracy,” AOC is giving an approving nod to Guaidó’s pro-imperialist opposition as the legitimate expression of the Venezuelan people’s will – an absurd claim.
Bernie Sanders, for his part, has also jumped on the bandwagon of regime change by calling on Maduro to allow in weaponized “humanitarian aid” and to “respect the opposition”:
The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters blasted Sanders on twitter for this statement. “Are you f-ing kidding me?” he commented, “you cannot be a credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1%.”
While both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders would likely oppose a crude military invasion of Venezuela, each in their own way are legitimizing the opposition and remaining deadly silent on the threat of a coup. Neither are willing to truly examine the role of U.S. imperialism or envision a socialist Venezuela. The U.S. left must do better than that.
Hands off Venezuela!

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

3201. Extinction Rebellion

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig, February 24, 2019
Extinction Rebellion protest in London
There is one desperate chance left to thwart the impending ecocide and extinction of the human species. We must, in wave after wave, carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measures to halt carbon emissions by 2025 and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. If we do not do this, we will face mass death.
The British-based group Extinction Rebellion has called for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience on April 15 in capitals around the world to reverse our “one-way track to extinction.” I do not know if this effort will succeed. But I do know it is the only mechanism left to force action by the ruling elites, who, although global warming has been well documented for at least three decades, have refused to carry out the measures needed to protect the planet and the human race. These elites, for this reason alone, are illegitimate. They must be replaced.
“It is our sacred duty to rebel in order to protect our homes, our future, and the future of all life on Earth,” Extinction Rebellion writes. This is not hyperbolic. We have, as every major climate report states, very little time left. Indeed, it may already be too late.
In Britain, Extinction Rebellion has already demonstrated its clout, blocking roads, occupying government departments and amassing 6,000 people to shut down five of London’s bridges last Nov. 17. Scores of arrests were made. But it was just the warm-up act. In April, the group hopes, the final assault will begin.
If we do not shake off our lethargy, our anomie, and resist, our misery, despondency and feelings of helplessness will mount. We will become paralyzed. Resistance, especially given the bleakness before us, is about more than winning. It is about a life of meaning. It is about empowerment. It is a public declaration that we will no longer live according to the dominant lie. It is a message to the elites: YOU DO NOT OWN US. It is about defending our dignity, agency and self-respect. The more we free ourselves from the bondage of fear to throw up barriers along the forced march toward ecocide the more we will be enveloped by a strange kind of euphoria, one I often felt as a war correspondent documenting horrific suffering and atrocities to shame the killers. We obliterate despair in our acts of defiance, even if our victories are Pyrrhic. We reach out to those around us. Courage is contagious. It is the spark that ignites mass revolt. And we should, even if we fail, at least choose how we will die. Resistance is the only action left that will allow us to remain psychologically whole. And it is the only action left that has any hope of halting the wholesale extinction of the human race, not to mention most other species.
“The times are inexpressibly evil,” Daniel Berrigan wrote. “And yet—and yet … the times are inexhaustibly good. In this time of death, some men and women, the resisters, work hardily for social change. We think of such people in the world and the stone in our breast is dissolved.”
“People have to go to the capital city,” said Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Rebellion Extinction and a researcher at King’s College London, who spoke to me from London. “That’s where the elite is, the business class. That’s where the pillars of the state exist. That’s the first element. Then you have to have a lot of people involved. They have to break the law. There’s no point in just doing a march. They have to literally close down the streets. They have to remain nonviolent. That’s absolutely crucial. Once you get violent, police and the state have an excuse to remove you. It’s got to be cultural. You make it into a sort of Woodstock affair. Then thousands more people come onto the streets.”
“There’s a fundamental difference between breaking the law and not breaking the law,” he went on. “It’s a binary difference. When you break the law, then you’re massively more effective in terms of material and psychological influence as well as media interest. The more dramatic the civil disobedience, the better. It’s a numbers game. You want people blocking the streets, but you need ten, twenty, thirty thousand. You don’t need 3 million. You need enough for the state to have to decide whether to use repression on a mass scale or invite you into the room. The gambit, of course, particularly in the U.K., is that the state is weak. It’s been hollowed out by neoliberalism. They’re going to find themselves overwhelmed. We will get in the room.”
“We’re going to start on that Monday [April 15],” he said. “We’re going to block several major roundabouts in central London. We’re going to spread across the city—swarming. When the riot police or the police come, we’re going get up and go somewhere else. This is a tactic we innovated in November. We’ll give the authorities a fundamental dilemma: ‘Do we allow these people to continue blocking the center of a global city, or do we arrest thousands of people?’ If they opt for arresting thousands of people, lots of things are going to happen. They will be overwhelmed. The police force in the U.K. is underfunded, like most of the public sector. There’s massive disaffection amongst the police. I won’t be surprised if they form a union and say, ‘We’re not doing this anymore.’ I’ve been arrested 10, 12 times in the last two years. Every time, police come up to me going, ‘Keep it up, mate. What you’re doing is great.’ We’re disciplined, nonviolent people. They’re not going to get pissed off at us. They also know it’s over. They spend their days scraping mentally ill people off the streets. There’s no glamour in being a police officer in a global city. The security forces are something you want to subvert, not denigrate.”
The group has stressed what it calls a “pre-social-media age” strategy for organizing. It has created structures to make decisions and issue demands. It sends out teams to give talks in communities. It insists that people who participate in the actions of Rebellion Extinction undergo “nonviolent direct-action” training so they will not be provoked by the police or opposition groups.
“Most of recent mass mobilizations have been social-media-fueled,” Hallam said. “Consequently, they have been chaotic. They are extremely fast mobilizations. Social media’s a bit like heroin. It’s a high, but then it collapses, like we’ve seen in France. It becomes chaotic or violent. A lot of modern social movements put stuff on social media. It gets clogged up with trolls. There’s lots of radical-left organizations arguing about different privileges. We’ve circumvented that and gone straight to the ‘common people,’ as you might say. We’ve held meetings in village town halls and city halls. We go around the country in a 19th-century sort of way, saying, ‘Hey guys. We’re all fucked. People are going to die if this isn’t sorted out.’ The second half of the talk is: There’s a way of dealing with this called mass civil disobedience.”
“Nonviolent discipline, as the research shows, is the No. 1 criterion for maximizing the potential for success,” he said. “This is not a moral observation. Violence destroys movements. The Global South has been at it for a few decades. Violence just ends up with people getting shot. It doesn’t lead anywhere. You might as well take your chances and maintain nonviolent discipline. There’s a big debate within the radical left over the attitude towards the police. This debate is a proxy for the justification of violence. As soon as you don’t talk to police, you’re more likely to provoke police violence. We try to charm the police so they’ll arrest people in a civilized way. The metropolitan police [in London] are probably one of the most civilized police forces in the world. They have a professional team of guys who go to social protests. We’ve been in regular communication with them. We say to the police, ‘Look, we’re going to be blocking the streets. We’re not going to not do that because you ask us not to.’ That’s the first thing to make clear. This is not an item for discussion. They know it’s serious. They don’t try to dissuade us. That would be silly. What they are concerned about is violence and public disorder. It’s in our interest as civil-disobedience designers not to have public disorder, because it becomes chaotic.”
“You’re basically holding the economy of a city to ransom,” he said of the shutdowns. “It’s the same dynamic as a labor strike. You want to get into the room and have a negotiation. Extinction Rebellion hasn’t quite decided what that negotiation is going to be. We’ve got three demands—the government tells the truth, the carbon emissions go to zero by 2025, which is a proxy for transformation of the economy and the society, and we have a national assembly which will sort out what the British people want to do about it. The third demand [calling for a national assembly] is a proxy for transforming the political structure of the economy. It proposes a different, concrete form of democratic governance, based around sortition rather than representation. This has had a big influence in Ireland and Iceland. The optimal transition is going to be from the corrupted ‘representational’ model to a sortition model in the same way aristocratic law shifted to representational law at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 19th century.”
“The intelligent people on the political left have woken up to the fact that we’ve got an existential emergency that could destroy human society in the next 10 years,” he said. “It’s in the cards. A lot of us have already gone through the grief process. But these [newly awakened] people just had that enlightenment. They’re in shock. They’re maintaining a veneer of ‘It’s sort of OK.’ This is what the Green Deal [a United Kingdom government policy initiative] is about. It is an attempt to pretend that industrialization can stay the same. We can all still be wealthy. We can all still have great jobs. It is like Roosevelt’s New Deal. But the New Deal was based on the idea that we can carry on plundering nature and nothing’s going to happen. Maybe that was right in the 1930s. But it’s not right anymore. It’s a matter of physics and biology. We simply cannot maintain these levels of consumption. They haven’t reckoned with that. One of the main reasons the climate debate has not gotten into a serious mode over the last 30 years is because people who are in charge of informing the public are terrified of telling the public that they can’t have the high consumer lifestyle anymore. It’s a taboo. But like any addiction, there comes a moment of truth. We’re there now.”
“For 30 years we’ve had one political metaphysic, reform,” he said. “You either reform or you are irrelevant. But now, we have two massive, exponentially increasing structural faults—the inequality problem and the climate problem. A lot of people—because of path dependency dynamics—have worked for 30 years in this lost-cause sort of space. They’re desperate for change. For 30 years they’ve been putting their money on reform. The tragedy—and you can see this in the history of political struggle going back hundreds of years—is there’s a flip where the reformists lose control. They’re still living in the past world. The revolutionaries, who everyone thinks are ridiculously naive, suddenly come to the fore. It’s usually a quake. It’s not a gradualist thing. It’s a double tragedy because it’s a quake and the revolutionaries usually aren’t organized. I think that’s what’s happening now. It has very big implications for [resistance against] fascism. Unless you have a clearheaded mass mobilization on the left which is connected with the working class you’re not going to be able to stop the fascism.”
The mass actions on April 15 might fizzle out. The crowds might not gather. The public might be apathetic. But if only a handful of us attempt to block a bridge or a road, even if we are swiftly swept away by the police, so swiftly there is not enough disruption to notice, it will be worth it. I am a father. I love my children. It is not about me. It is about them. This is what parents do.

3200. Summary and Index for the Last 99 posts

By Kamran Nayeri, February 26, 2019
Assistant Editor, Echo, in her favorite spot having dinner. She lives under a barn in the local marijuana farm. Photo: Kamran Nayeri

Of the last 99 posts, 19 were ecosocialist contributions, 11 were dealing with labor and with climate change each, nine were about animals and animal rights, seven discussed the "Green New Deal," and six were about biology, ecology, and conservation.


Hyperlinks follow:


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Saturday, February 23, 2019

3199. Book Review: Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy/Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism

By Michael Löwy, New Politics, Winter 2019
There is a growing body of ecomarxist and ecosocialist literature in the English-speaking world, which signals the beginning of a significant turn in radical thinking. Some Marxist journals, such as Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Monthly Review and Socialism and Democracy have been playing an important role in this process, which is becoming increasingly influential. The two books discussed here—very different in style content and purpose—are part of this “Red and Green” upsurge.

Kohei Saito is a young Japanese Marxist scholar and his book is a very valuable contribution to the reassessment of the Marxian heritage, from an ecosocialist perspective. It justifiedly polemicises with those authors (mainly but not exclusively German) that denounce Marx as “Promethean,” productivist, and partisan of the industrial domination of nature. But Saito also criticises, in the introduction, what he defines as “first stage ecosocialists,” who believe that Marx’s 19th Century discussions on ecology are of little importance today: this would include, among others, Alain Lipiez, Daniel Tanuro, Joel Kovel and…myself. This seems to me a bit of an artificial construction… Lipietz calls to “abandon the Marxist paradigm,” the three others consider themselves to be Marxists, and whatever their criticism of (some of) Marx views on nature, do not comsider his views as “of little importance.” Since this issue is mentioned, but not really discussed in the book, let us move on….
One of the great qualities of this work is that it does not treat Marx’s work as a systematic body of writing, defined, from the beginning to the end, by a strong ecological commitment (according to some),or a strong unecological tendency (according to others). As Saito very persuasively argues, there are elements of continuity in Marx’s reflection on nature, but also some very significant changes, and re-orientations.
Among the continuities, one of the most important is the issue of the capitalist “separation” of humans from earth, i.e., from nature. Marx believed that in pre-capitalist societies there existed a form of unity between the producers and the land, and he saw as one of the key tasks of socialism to re-establish the original unity between humans and nature, destroyed by capitalism, but on a higher level (negation of the negation). This explains Marx’s interest in pre-capitalist communities, both in his ecological discussion (for instance of Carl Fraas) or in his anthropological research (Franz Maurer): both authors were perceived as “unconscious socialists.” And, of course, in his last important document, the letter to Vera Zassoulitsch (1881), Marx claims that thanks to the suppression of capitalism, modern societies could return to a higher form of an “archaic” type of collective ownership and production. This is a very interesting insight of Saito, and very relevant today, when indigenous communities in the Americas, from Canada to Patagonia, are in the front line of the resistance to capitalist destruction of the environment.
However, the main contribution of Saito is to show the movement, the evolution of Marx reflections on nature, in a process of learning, rethinking and reshaping his thoughts. Before Capital (1867) one can find in Marx writings a rather uncritical assessment of capitalist “progress”-an attitude often described by the vague mythological term of “Prometheanism.” This is obvious in the Communist Manifesto, which celebrates capitalist “subjection of nature’s forces to man”and the “clearing of whole continents for cultivation”; but it also applies to the London Notebooks (1851), the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, and other writings from those years. Curiously, Saito seems to exclude the Grundrisse (1857-58) from his criticism, which is not justified, considering how much Marx admires, in this manuscript, “the great civilizing mission of capitalism,” in relation to nature and to the pre-capitalist communities, prisioners of their localism and their “idolatry of nature”!
The change comes in 1865-66, when Marx discovers, by reading the writings of the agricultural chemist Justus Von Liebig, the problems of soil exhaustion, and the metabolic rift between human societies and the natural environment. This will lead, in Capital vol. 1 (1867)—but also in the two other, unfinished volumes—to a much more critical assessment of the destructive nature of capitalist “progress,” particularly in agriculture. After 1868, by reading another German scientist, Carl Fraas, Marx will discover also other important ecological issues, such as deforestation and local climate change. According to Saito, if Marx had been able to complete volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, he would have more strongly emphasised the ecological crisis, which also means, at least implicitly, than in their present unfinished state, there is no strong enough emphasis on those issues.…
This leads me to my main disagreement with Saito: in several passages of the book he asserts that for Marx “the environmental unsustainability of capitalism is the contradiction of the system” (p.142, emphasis by Saito); or that in his late years he came to see the metabolic rifts as “the most serious problem of capitalism”; or that the conflict with natural limits is, for Marx, “the main contradiction of the capitalist mode of production.”
I wonder where Saito found, in Marx’s writings, published books, manuscripts or notebooks, any such statements…they are not to be found, and for a good reason: the unsustainability of the capitalist system was not a decisive issue in the 19th Century, as it has become today: or better, since 1945, when the planet entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene. Moreover, I believe that the metabolic rift, or the conflict with natural limits is not “a problem of capitalism” or a “contradiction of the system”: it is much more than that! It is a contradiction between the system and “the eternal natural conditions” (Marx), and therefore with the natural conditions of human life on the planet. In fact, as Paul Burkett (quoted by Saito) argues, capital can continue to accumulate under any natural conditions, however degraded, so long as there is not a complete extinction of human life: human civilisation can disappear before capital accumulation becomes impossible.…
Saito concludes his book with a sober assessment which seems to me a very apt summary of the issue: Capital remains an unfinished project. Marx did not answer all questions nor predict today’s world. But his critique of capitalism provides an extremely helpful theoretical foundation for the understanding of the current ecological crisis.
Victor Wallis agrees with the ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett who emphasize the ecological dimension of Marx. But he also acknowledges that there are illusions in the “technological neutrality” of the capitalist productive forces in some of his writings.
In any case, the object of his outstanding book is not Marx as such, but the Marxist perspective of a Red-Green Revolution. Being a collection of essays, the chapters do not follow a precise order, but one can easily detect the main lines of the argument.
The starting point is the understanding that capitalism, driven by the need to “grow” and expand at any cost, is inherently destructive of the environment. Moreover, through ecological devastation and climate change—the result of fossil-fuel emissions of CO2 gases—the capitalist system undermines the conditions of life itself on the planet. “Green capitalism” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms: it offers only false solutions, based on corporate interests and a blind faith in the “market,” such as “biofuels,” the trade in “emission rights,” etc. A typical exemple of “green capitalism”: the monitoring of global environmental measures has been entrusted, by the ruling class, to the World Bank, which invested 15 times more on fossil-fuel projects than on renewables.…
Radical measures are the only realistic alternative: a revolution is needed to overcome the environmental threat to our collective survival. The aim is an ecosocialist society, without class domination and with life in balance with the rest of nature. Of course there are risks involved in any revolutionary enterprise, but the risk of keeping things as they are is much greater…Long term species survival is contingent upon a nearly 90 percent reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. This requires to a sharp break with capitalist priorities: accumulation, profit-making, commodification, “growth.” A key component of the ecosocialist project is conscious democratic planning, reorganizing production and consumption around the real popular needs, and putting and end to the waste inherent to capitalism with its artificial “needs” induced by the advertising industry, and its formidable military expenditures. Democratic planning is the opposite of the Soviet model of top-down directives: the identification of planning with Stalin is a dangerous relic of Cold War demagogy, which could obstruct ecological conversion.
Ecosocialism requires also some key technological choices, for instance privileging renewable energies (wind, solar, etc.) against fossil-fuels. But there is no purely technical solution: energy use must be reduced, by sharply reducing wasteful consumption.
Victor Wallis insists, and this is one of the most valuable insights of his book, that ecosocialism, as a long-term objective, is not contradictory with short-range measures, urgent and immediate ecological steps: they can, in fact, reinforce and inspire each other. Similarly, to oppose local ecological communities to the global political struggle is pointless and counterproductive: both are necessary and provide mutual support.
Which are the forces that will lead this struggle for social and ecological change? In one of the essays, Wallis insist on the centrality of the working-class—in spite of the present anti-ecological position of most union leaders (in order to “protect jobs”). Is the working-class the “implicit embodiment of ecological sanity” (unlike its present leaders)? Is it the only force capable to bring together all constituencies opposed to capitalism? I’m not so sure, but I think Wallis is right to emphasise that class oppression concerns the vast majority of the population—and therefore a radical change cannot take place without its support.
But there are also other social forces engaged in the process of resistance to the capitalist onslaught on the environment: for instance, the indigenous communities. This is another very important contribution of this book: to show that indigenous communities—direct victims of the capitalist plunder, a global assault on their livelihoods—have become the vanguard of the ecosocialist movement. In their actions, such as the Standing Rock resistence to the XXL Pipeline, and in their reflections—such as their Declaration at the World Social Forum of Belem in 2009—“they express, more completely than any other group, the common survival interest of humanity.” Of course, the urban population of modern cities cannot live like the indigenous, but they have much to learn from them.
Ecological struggles offer a unifying theme around which various oppressed constituencies could come together. And there are signs of hope in the United States, in the vast upsurge of resistance against a particularly toxic racist, mysoginist and anti-ecological power elite, and in the growing interest, among young people and African Americans, in socialism. But a political revolutionary force, able to unify all constituencies and movements against the system is still lacking.

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

3198. Can 'Green New Deal' Avoid Cap and Trade's Fate?

By Mark K. Matthews, Adam Aton, and Scott Waldman, E&E News, February 19, 2019
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) celebrating the passage of major climate legislation in June 2009.
Photo: Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom
The last time congressional Democrats tried to pass major climate legislation, the effort barely cleared the House before hitting a wall in the Senate.
A decade later, its two main authors are back — this time in support of the "Green New Deal." And both Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and former Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) have argued in recent days that a "Green New Deal" ultimately has a better chance of passage because of its potential to be more than just a piece of legislation.
What's emerging is a two-track process. While activists build public support for the most ambitious tenets of the "Green New Deal," lawmakers in Congress are advancing smaller proposals to keep up the momentum.
"The green generation has risen up," said Markey on Thursday during a rollout of the "Green New Deal." "We now have the troops. We now have the money. We're ready to fight."
There are some similarities between what's happening now with the "Green New Deal" and what Waxman and Markey tried to do in 2009 with their greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill.
For one, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is in the same role as House speaker. And two, the Senate remains just as much of an obstacle — if not more so, given that Republicans now control the upper chamber, rather than the Democratic majority of 2009-10.
But both Markey and Waxman said the political landscape has shifted in such a way that climate change — and Democrats' aspirational response to it — has the potential to be a force that sweeps into office a new generation of leaders willing to support it. That's a departure from typical politicking in which activists try to convince the people already there to back an idea.
"This is going to enter the 2020 election cycle as one of the top two or three issues [that] every candidate on both sides [will] have to answer," Markey said.
Signs of this new approach can be seen in the proposal unveiled Thursday by Markey and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The nonbinding resolution reads like a liberal wish list, as it pairs the desire to cut greenhouse gas emissions with aspirations to implement universal health care, close income gaps and "promote justice and equity."
In other words, it's the political equivalent of an all-in bet in poker.
"We tried to pass legislation by putting in a cap-and-trade bill or a tax on carbon, and Republicans are not open to anything," Waxman, who is now a consultant, told E&E News. "Rather than saying that's the way to go until we get a time when we can pass legislation, we should get more force behind a 'Green New Deal.'"
With little chance of passage in the next two years anyway, Waxman said it's not a bad idea to focus attention on ginning up political support for like-minded candidates.
"Whatever we want to do, we can't do it right now, because Republicans can stop it," he said. "So let's get more involved in trying to find a solution, and then we can figure out what can actually happen when we get a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate."
A number of Republicans, for their part, are willing to take up Democrats on their bet.
In a Twitter post on Friday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who worked on the Senate cap-and-trade bill before ultimately walking away from talks, said he was ready to see the proposal on the floor. "Let's vote on the Green New Deal!" he wrote. "Americans deserve to see what kind of solutions far-left Democrats are offering to deal with climate change."
The National Republican Congressional Committee, whose job is to elect GOP House members, took a similar stance as it targeted individual Democrats with messages slamming the idea.
"The extreme socialist Democrats are out with their 'Green New Deal' plan," read one.
Caught in the fray are more established Democrats who have signaled recently that they may try to use the rubric of a "Green New Deal" to pass related legislation — as the resolution itself barely speaks to the "how" of achieving its ambitious goals.
At its current stage, the "Green New Deal" is largely a "combination of policy and D.C. theater," said Adele Morris, policy director for climate and energy economics at the Brookings Institution and the former economic adviser to the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.
To get closer to an actual policy that has a chance of succeeding on Capitol Hill, the "Green New Deal" must move beyond the regulatory mandates and standards the resolution centers upon, she said.
While the "Green New Deal" now works as an ambitious vision statement, it doesn't currently lay out the road map for policy that can get buy-in from a wide swath of lawmakers, Morris said.
"The challenge is going to be when you really try to translate it into statutory authority for specific agencies to do specific things," she said. "It's going to be really tough to come up with that legislative language that really implements the ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"My hope is that we can move quickly past the vision statement to doing something pragmatic and truly action-oriented."

Possible paths through Congress

A possible legislative route for "Green New Deal" legislation runs through two House committees — where the resolution's co-sponsors have enough power to bend policies on fossil fuel extraction, forests, research and other areas critical to the policy's success.
The proposal's supporters are stacked on the Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over EPA, the Interior Department and other environmental agencies. A near-majority of the panel — five of the 11 members — have co-sponsored the "Green New Deal" resolution, including Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the subcommittee's chairwoman.
The only Democrat on the subcommittee not co-sponsoring the resolution, Rep. Derek Kilmer of Washington, has previously told activists he does support the proposal, according to 350.org.
Appropriators will be key for a proposal whose critics emphasize cost.
The Natural Resources Committee, another center of gravity for the policy, is run by two co-sponsors of the resolution, Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Vice Chairwoman Deb Haaland (D-N.M.). Co-sponsors also run two critical subcommittees: Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) chairs the Water, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee.
Grijalva and Huffman last week offered the outlines of an agenda — one that seems to use the umbrella of the "Green New Deal" to advance priorities they've eyed for years, like restricting offshore drilling and restoring ecosystems.
"We will prioritize ocean-related climate adaptation and mitigation measures as we go forward," Huffman said.
He was most specific about strengthening three existing policies: the Coastal Zone Management Act, the National Sea Grant College Program and the Coral Reef Conservation Act.
None are the sweeping, transformative policies outlined in the "Green New Deal" resolution. But they do serve as the vehicles for climate funding, which could spur the research and jobs that proponents are seeking.
"With this resolution as our guide, our emphasis on climate action is only going to get stronger," Grijalva said.