The Green New Deal consists of five main parts:
1. Invest in sustainable businesses including cooperatives and non-profits by providing grants and loans with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors.
2. Move to 100% clean energy by 2030. Invest in clean energy technologies that are ready to go now. Redirect research funds from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries toward research in wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal energy. We will invest in research in sustainable, nontoxic materials and closed-loop cycles that eliminate waste and pollution, as well as organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.
3. Create a Commission for Economic Democracy to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory. We will strengthen democracy via participatory budgeting and institutions that encourage local initiative and democratic decision-making.
4. Establish a Renewable Energy Administration on the scale of FDR’s hugely successful Rural Electrification Administration, launched in 1935, that brought electrical power to rural America, 95 percent of which had no power. Emulated by many other countries, this initiative provided technical support, financing, and coordination to more than 900 municipal cooperatives, many of which still exist. The Green New Deal would update this model with eco-friendly energy sources.
5. End unemployment in America once and for all by guaranteeing a job at a living wage for every American willing and able to work. A Full Employment Program will create up to 20 million jobs, both directly and indirectly, by implementing a nationally-funded, locally-controlled, direct employment initiative replacing unemployment offices with local employment offices. The government will be the employer of last resort, offering jobs meeting community-identified needs in the public and non-profit sectors to take up any slack in private for-profit sector employment. These will include jobs in sustainable energy and energy efficiency retrofitting, mass transit and “complete streets” that promote safe bike and pedestrian traffic, regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture, clean manufacturing, infrastructure, and public services (education, youth programs, child care, senior care, etc). Communities will use a process of broad stakeholder input and democratic decision making to fairly design and implement these programs.
This launch is just the first step, there will be amendments to this document before it reaches its final form as a bill. But what is certain, young people no longer want to accept the premise the elements that worked for the past generations (like social security) will be there to supported by them.
