The Green New Deal (updated 8feb19)

A rose by any other name would smell … .  Wm Shakespeare

George Rebane

Well, the last bits of doubt about our Democratic Party have been swept away by the new House resolution describing a fundamental transformation of America (Barack Obama, call your office).  The Green New Deal, sponsored by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (whom we have met on these pages), is socialism writ large.  So large in fact that the reporter interviewing AOC on NPR this morning had a hard time keeping from audibly gulping as he asked the feather head details and sources of funding for the individual mandates of the GND.  She, of course, had no answers other than taxing the bejeezus out anybody and everybody in the land who could still create wealth after the proposed strictures derive their power from the barrel of a gun.

So what do these two socialists propose in their fundamental transformation?  You can read the resolution here, and some more expanded analysis here, here, and here; but let’s just lay out a few of them in short form for the sake of discussion.

• US carbon neutral in 10 years. “…this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.”
• Guaranteed government job for all. “… provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
• Government control of all medium and large corporations. “Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners.”
• Vastly higher taxes. Top rates for death taxes, income tax, and payroll taxes would increase markedly.  Also proposed is the institution of a “wealth tax” on assets.
• Government take over of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacture of certain products like pharmaceuticals, etc.

Now all this is based on the fundamental socialist tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior.  This belief by the Left is totally immune to historical data, including what France just had to rescind, and what has made NK, Cuba, Venezuela, … what they are today, and what caused the downfall of the USSR, and the massive shifts in the economies of China, Vietnam, … .

So there you have it.  Just keep your eye on the slated 40+ Democrats who sign up to sponsor this resolution – their true colors will wave proudly.  And also see how many more Democrats will be looking at their shoes while mumbling something about not belonging to the new socialist party of America.  Our Founders are spinning in their graves.

[8feb19 update]  It appears that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be the liberal loon for all seasons.  Both sides of the aisle seem to be happy dancing at the advent of this good looking 5-star ignoramus.  The Dems claim that her GND plan is just a negotiating “anchor” point stuck into the land of the ludicrous, a strategic starting point to get people dickering with each other about where we should really wind up.  Their hope is that any surviving putrid pot of progressive public policies will still be close enough to the GND anchor, and by comparison will look good to their light thinking constituents who will then support it as a ‘compromise’ with the Right.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are convinced that AOC (along with mini-minded Markey) have handed them the penultimate political prize for 2020.  WSJ’s national correspondent Kim Strassel details the blessings in her ‘The Socialist That Could’, and offers a succinct summary of “AOC, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.”

It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

And can you imagine the profusion of optics AOC has already provided and will provide during the next 18 months for Republican ads.  This woman has turned out to be a horn of political plenty for the Right that is scaring hell out of the Democrat leadership – “They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.”

Given all this political largesse, my concern now is for AOC’s safety.  The RNC should offer to share with the DNC some of the costs for added security for the congresswoman.  No conservative in the land wants anything to still her voice, or deter her from advocating the clear path she has set out for America.

Comments

[Steven Frisch]

Posted by: Walt | 09 February 2019 at 11:34 PM

Yeah, guess what Walt, Republicans did author the key provision of the Affordable care Act--the individual mandate came from both the Heritage Foundation and Romney care.

[Todd Juvinall]

All the information in "State of Fear" was corroborated and true. TThe author was well known for that in his other novels. But it hits home about the "made-up" crap of facts the hoaxers spew they attacked it then and now. Frisch has less credibility than a three-year-old and the other trolls are just loony.

[scenes]

"Republicans did author the key provision of the Affordable care Act"

Dunno whose staffer wrote the words (I assume that Congressmen can barely fog a mirror), but it makes sense to me.

The moment that hospitals and emergency rooms have to take all comers I can't see how you avoid mandating health insurance.

Now if we could just force people to have car insurance when they drive rather than just slap their wrists after the fact. Some sort of chip-on-a-card would be sufficient I would think. No doubt there would be an uproar since car insurance is 'racist'.

[Todd Juvinall]

Green Revolution? 13th week of riots in France over the Macron attempts to implement his "green" agenda. And the yellow vests stormed their Assembly and were turned back with military violence. My guess is the left in America is hoping for that violence so they can have the excuse to have martial law or somesuch if they gain power. Can anyone tell me, FRISCH? how the cities of the country will get that food into their stores if you and your pals ban fossil fuel? And what about those tanks and military vehicles that are powered by a diesel or gasoline engine? Seems the enemies of our country are right here in our midst.

[George Rebane]

ToddS 1001pm - Apologies. It appears that my question to you was one bridge too far. Let me spell it out. I meant services such as healthcare, education, environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, delivery and transport, information storage and retrieval, customer service, ... where the private sector can compete. Citing national parks, large museums, and the Library of Congress is something in which the private sector does not compete. (However, if we consider hunting 'parks' where private landowners compete with hunting on govt lands, then again there is no comparison as to how poorly the govt agencies provide this (dis)service.) I'll try not to be so obtuse for you next time.

[Todd Juvinall]

Lizzy Warren a signatory to AOC's Green New Deal announced her candidacy for the Cherokee Tribal Presidency and has high hopes the Cavalry will fail to show up and save the settlers.

[Walt]

Damage control,,, epic fail. Can you say BUSTED?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/10/nolte-ocasio-cortez-adviser-caught-lying-to-tucker-carlson/
"On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez adviser Robert Hockett appeared on Carlson’s Fox News show and falsely claimed that something that is in fact part of the Green New Deal [GND] is not; namely, the promise the GND would ensure “economic security” to those “unwilling to work” and is aimed at eliminating air travel."

[Gregory]

The Green Leap Backwards is imperative if you think the world will end in twelve years.

Hop to it, boys! Meat is off the menu, ground all the jet aircraft... except for Nancy's Airforce G4 she uses to commute home every week.

Gavin Schmidt made the mistake of taking Crichton lightly when he agreed to debate him and Lindzen and Stott at the intelligence squared debate.

https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/global-warming-not-crisis
At 1:06:20 Stott mentions the cosmic ray effects being researched by the likes of Shaviv and Veizer, Schmidt and Sommerville scoff.

Shaviv and Veizer are still at it and their science is stronger than ever.

[Bill Tozer]

Re: Update and this provocative link is targeted mostly for Mr. Scenes. Too many money quotes covering several topic under the New Green Deal.

“Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia

And, hence, the Green New Deal: Our war, requiring a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.” Under whose command? That of Field Marshal Sandy, of course.“......

And so we have the grand game of make-believe and moral dress-up, in which Field Marshal Sandy rallies her troops on Twitter in the service of a half-organized bouquet of slogans and prejudices that no mentally normal adult — and there are still a few of those around — takes quite seriously. The purported goal of the great national deployment isn’t the point — the deployment itself is. It is an excuse for a great deal of noise and running in circles and excitation and displays of Very High Moral Seriousness that is its own reason for being. Sandy’s war is not a struggle over the future of Earth — it is only a struggle over the future of Sandy, and all the other Sandys out there in the great vast wilds of America, waiting tables at TGI Friday’s or grinding away in the obscurity of some master’s program in women’s studies, sure that however things were supposed to turn out, they weren’t supposed to turn out like this, a mess of loneliness and pointlessness, all dressed up for battle with nowhere to go and no comfort but Netflix and Facebook and Twitter, little fixes of dopamine just strong enough and frequent enough to keep the addicts upright and sedated enough that they do not begin asking the really difficult questions and demanding answers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal/

[Walt]

That didn't take long,, the grand plan turns into a huge LIB turd,
and now the Left is trying to flush it.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/11/hayward-ocasio-cortez-disavows-green-new-deals-faq-after-becomes-mockery/

OH how the excuses are flying.
The Green New Deal (GND) quickly became the subject of such mockery that its godmother, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, attempted to scrub the talking points from her website and pretend they never existed at all. The effort to erase this political disaster is one of the biggest political gaslighting operations in recent memory. It happened so fast that half of the online Left is still touting the GND as the irresistible wave of the future, while the other half thinks it’s a trick concocted by right-wing pranksters.

[Gregory]

Sandy Ocrazio-Cortez is ripe to be primaried. Perhaps even by the guy she beat but hadn't been spending much time campaigning back home.

If she leaves the House after two years she won't even have too many drinks to learn to make restarting her old job bartending.

[Scott O]

Ah - from the known ultra-ultra-right-wing WaPo - "Ocasio-Cortez’s staff posted online and sent to reporters a list of “frequently asked questions” about the Green New Deal. Those pages included language and policies not included in the resolution itself such as providing economics security to those “unwilling to work” and ruling out nuclear power as part of the solution to the climate crisis."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/11/ocasio-cortez-retracts-erroneous-information-about-green-new-deal-backed-by-democratic-candidates/?utm_term=.b92dd8190124
Gee - I thought the Republicans did it!
Apologies?
You know that's not happening.
"An early draft of a FAQ that was clearly unfinished and that doesn’t represent the GND resolution got published to the website by mistake,” Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, wrote on Twitter on Saturday, two days after the document’s release. “Mistakes happen when doing time launches like this coordinating multiple groups and collaborators.”"
No dude - mistakes like this happen when you can't keep your intellectual pants zipped.
You guys authored this shit - no one else did.
Even better -
"One House Democrat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak about internal discussions, said he and other liberal members have privately vented frustration over the publication of the FAQ page."
Oh yeah - 'privately'. How very convenient.
All the while you knew the AOC crew were blaming Republicans for it and you said nothing.
Total scum bags.
Trump continues to rise in public esteem solely due to the left's complete and abject failure to provide any sort of honest and meaningful ability to articulate a way forward for America and back it up with facts, honesty and integrity.
It is a pretty sad day that a man like Trump does, in fact, become by default the best leader for our country.

[Bill Tozer]

But, but, but how are we going to pay for this??

Economics for Knuckleheads. 4 min.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EsyenHQZ8JA

[Gregory]

scott o 936pm

"It is a pretty sad day that a man like Trump does, in fact, become by default the best leader for our country."

Well said, maybe. We shall see. After all, the Mueller report isn't in yet...

[Walt]

Nothing like political suicide. Especially when your own side hands you the gun.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/11/mayor-eric-garcetti-declares-green-new-deal-in-l-a-cancels-natural-gas-officials-doubt-keeping-the-lights-on/
"Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti declared Monday that the city would abandon plans to rebuild three natural gas power plants, despite concerns that the city could face acute power shortages as a result."

[Bill Tozer]

This guy gave me a great idea. At every campaign stop, ask the Dem canidates who signed on to the GND if they plan to take the train from Memphis to Seattle to the campaign stump. Hey, Corey, plan to take the train to LA to meet those donors? Hey Kamala, how many hydro dams are we going to build? Hey Kristen, are you ready to honor treaties with Native Americans on tribal land in Manhattan? Hey Pocahontas, what is your plan to bring 100% employment to deindustrialied regions and rural areas? Every campaign stop, every darn day. :)
——
“Look back at the list of presidential-candidate endorsers of this plan, all experienced politicians, all with years of experience working through the American legislative process. Now look back at the promises above. If you believe for one second that any material provision of the Green New Deal will become policy, you’re being conned.

A competent media could and should prove as much in mere moments. A competent media could and should ask Kamala Harris at every campaign stop for her precise plan to “guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage” to every person in the U.S. A competent media could and should rush to press Elizabeth Warren about her precise plan to completely overhaul American power generation in a mere ten-year span without crushing the economy.

After all, if a series of Republican presidential candidates pledged together to, say, abolish Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid yet still also guarantee health care and retirement security for all Americans, wouldn’t the media be extremely curious as to how they could pull off such an astounding achievement? The press relentlessly and rightfully pressed Donald Trump on the feasibility of his most outrageous campaign pledges. And, by the way, building a wall and making Mexico pay for it is child’s play compared with the promises in the Green New Deal......

And so the very same people who laughed at Trump supporters and called them rubes for believing Trump’s promises now indulge progressives who believe even more insane promises. This time it’s the Democrats’ turn to tell the wildest tales. It seems they aren’t above Trump-style politics after all.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/democrats-con-their-base-with-green-new-deal/

[Bill Tozer]

Walt @7:40 am
Well, Obama did promise our utility rates would go up. Hey, you did not build that! Read ‘em and weep....since no one else is interested in looking at the nuts and bolts.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-green-new-deal-versus-rural-america/

[Don Bessee]

Ya, go fly your socialist freak flag and see what that does, in this case you alienate even the union bosses who PREVIOUSLY backed dems. THANKS! -

Union leaders warn Green New Deal may lead to poverty: 'Members are worried about putting food on the table'

Union members “working in the oil and gas sector can make a middle-class living, whereas renewable energy firms have been less generous,” Sean McGarvey, NABTU's president, said last week.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/union-leaders-voice-skepticism-on-green-new-deal-what-does-that-really-mean

;-)

[scenes]

DonB@7:45PM

You just have to get with the program, man.

https://images.dailykos.com/images/642104/story_image/US-High-Speed-Rail-System-by-FirstCultural-2013-02-03.png

I mean, I can't think of anything better for long distance travel than a 200 mph train that makes 100 stops on the way to Chicago.

re: rural communities.

No problem there either. Simply automate the farms and move everyone into great big apartment complexes that are near high speed train stations. We can all telecommute from our own pads using internet synergy and buy goods from the robot farmers market.

[Don Bessee]

@822 - That sounds a lot like a sac bill to override local zoning to get tall apartment buildings in close proximity to transit hubs. 8 stories even when the local height is a story or two.

We are seeing more and more chipping away of the assurances of local control by the supermajority in sac. Screw you, you, you forest dwellers!

;-)