When Green is Red

ROOSEVELT‘s New Deal managed to delay America’s recovery from the Great Depression for years after the UK, Europe and Australia had recovered. This is a mere blip on the course of history compared with the dystopian future offered by the Green New Deal.

Backdropped by older white men of privilege, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) announced her Green New Deal (the Deal) in Washington; in the form of a proposed fourteen-page House of Reps resolution. Presumably the men were props calculated to give the impression that the madness had a kernel of sanity. After all, could middle- and older-aged white men sign up to flights of fancy? Well, yes, they can. Think of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

Before I cover some of the elements of the Deal a note of caution is warranted. I heard some conservatives and a few level-headed Democrats say that it was pie-in-the-sky. It isn’t. Pie-in-the-sky is an empty promise of unattainable benefits; writ large, it is a utopian promise of nirvana right here on planet Earth.

The Deal is not a pie-in-the-sky promise but a concrete threat of a future hellhole. And, as we know, unlike nirvanas, hellholes have been regularly brought about. This particular one, as for so many, would be a product of socialism. Don’t be fooled, climate change in the Deal is simply a trojan horse. Inside lurks comrade Karl Marx.

Certainty of climate catastrophe of biblical proportions sets the scene: mass migrant flight, enormous economic losses, wildfires such as we haven’t seen, ninety-nine percent of coral reefs gone, more than 350 million people “exposed to deadly heat stress.” And on top of all of this, rising sea levels, severe storms, and droughts, etc., etc.

If this were not enough on the climate front; on the socio-economic front, inequality and discrimination bear down on swathes of the populace. Suffering are “indigenous people, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialised communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” Who’s left, you might ask? Obviously, those left are privileged white men – hence I suppose those aforementioned privileged white men hovering behind AOC lest they be among those for the guillotine come the witching hour.

The Deal puts the onus squarely on the federal government to create a utopian future for all. Seemingly omnipotent (a God substitute), the Government is deemed capable of totally dismantling America’s energy sector while dispensing largesse to all. It is given a heavy and long list of so-called “duties.” You need to read all nine pages of them to understand fully how completely divorced it all is from reality. Maybe it’s a spoof? Unfortunately not. Among many senior Democrats, presidential candidates Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand have rushed to sign up.

The sound mind boggles, but then sound minds did not win out in Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in Castro’s Cuba, in Chávez’s Venezuela. Socialism is like a dormant disease forever waiting for the right conditions to strike with morbid effect. Old fools like Sanders and wet-behind-the-ears, self-righteous, glib-talking zealots like AOC pounce. Here is a selection of just a very few of the government’s duties under the Deal (verbatim, except for some minor tense changes):

• Achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
• Create millions of good, high wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.
• Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous people, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialised communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.
• Meet 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable energy sources [while] ensuring affordable access to energy.
• Spur growth in clean manufacturing.
• Overhaul transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.
• Upgrade all existing buildings in the Unites States and build new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency [no, I am not making this up].
• Provide resources, training and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.
• Ensure the use of democratic participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the GND mobilization at a local level.
• Create high -quality union jobs.
• Guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, retirement security to all people of the United States.
• Provide all people of the United States with high quality health care; affordable, safe, and adequate housing; economic security; clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.

AOC is being advised on the Deal by Robert Hockett a professor of law at Cornell, with economics and public affairs in his background. He is associated with a number of left-wing think tanks. Obviously, she could not have thought up this delusional tripe herself. Obviously, he has being stewing over it for years. Ordinarily you would say it is a match made in la-la land. But when Marxist university departments have been churning out disciples for decades and a whole political party is fast moving to the left there is danger afoot.

I think I caught Jordan Peterson saying something like this. It doesn’t matter. Just how many millions more people does socialism have to plunge into misery and death before everybody catches on, even university professors?