On July 14th, Green Change announced the campaign for a Green New Deal, a 10-point program to create economic prosperity together with ecological sustainability.
Since then over 100 candidates for elected office at all levels have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.
The Green New Deal Coalition will cut military spending, create millions of green jobs, and revive the economy by protecting the planet we depend on.
Green Change is inviting all candidates, individuals and organizations that support a prosperous, sustainable future for America to endorse the Green New Deal.
To date, 11 candidates for governor, 11 candidates for US Senate, and 33 candidates for US House of Representatives have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.
All agree on the need to cut military spending, fund green public works, ban corporate personhood, pass single-payer health care, restore progressive taxation, ban usury, enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax, legalize marijuana, institute tuition-free public higher education, change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental and safety standards, and pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.
These candidates represent a clean break with the failed policies of the past that have led America down the road to economic and ecological disaster.
The Green New Deal promises a brighter tomorrow for America – one that combines the New Deal’s promise of freedom from economic hardship with decisive action to protect our planet.
Six years ago, cognitive linguist George Lakoff published a book that caused a sensation, but ultimately failed to have the impact that it should have. One of the reasons was that progressives who should have known better misunderstood Lakoff's discussion of framing as only being about messaging, which is completely false. Of course framing is very important when it comes to messaging, but if you think that framing is only about messaging, then you can simply dismiss it as yet another consultant's trick. You can even denounce it as immoral--as Booman appeared to do in the discussion section of this diary. But as Lakoff himself tried to explain, framing involves our own understanding of things as well as how we communicate to others.
There's nothing terribly new about recognizing this. Indeed, historian Thomas Kuhn's 1963 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which coined the term "paradigm shift" is all about the importance of framing in science: Scientific paradigms are conceptual frameworks that define what the basic elements of study are. They are not about communicating to others. They are about how scientists themselves think about what they are doing. This weekend, I want to give two different examples of this in action. I want to illustrate two different ways in which framing can matter. In the first, I want to talk about contrasting frames that can be virtually interchangeable in some situations, but that nonetheless take us in very different directions, so that their formal compatibility masks a pragmatic divergence. What these sorts of divergent frames show is that frames are ultimately rooted in purposive action, and reflect the logic of that action--a point that William James made repeatedly over 100 years ago.
I know you're probably thinking, "What the fuck is he talking about?" But I promise to make it very clear very quickly--as soon as I tell you what's to come in the next diary, tomorrow. In that one I want to talk about contrasting frames are not virtually interchangeable, where it's literally impossible to understand one of the frames in terms of the other. (In an even more confusing case, it's impossible to understand either of the frames in terms of the other--which is mostly what interested Kuhn. But I'll leave that topic for another time.)
Two Equivalent Coordinate Systems
There's a simple mathematical example of contrasting frames that can be virtually interchangeable in some situations, but that nonetheless take us in very different directions: The use of two different coordinate systems to describe the number plane. The number plane is what we get when we place two number lines at right angles to one another, like this:
It's also called the "Cartesian Plane," after philosopher/mathematician Rene Descartes, who first invented/discovered it. The two number lines are called the x- and y- axes, the point they cross at is called the origin, and it's given the value 0 on both axes. We say it has coordinates 0,0. These are called "Cartesian coordinates."
But it turns out that there's another way to think about the number plane, using what are called "polar coordinates".
Last weekend, I ran a two-part interview I did with Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). (Part 1 / Part 2) This week, PEER announced that the Obama EPA had ordered two EPA attorneys to take down a youtube video they had posted--"The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009"--criticizing the Obama-supported cap & trade approach to climate change as fatally flawed. PEER has reposted it for them. The two attorneys, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, are married to each other, and each has worked at EPA for over 20 years. In the video, Zabel, speaking for both of them, refers to their experience as EPA attorneys, but immediately states that they are not represeenting the EPA:
ALLAN ZABEL: Our opinions are based on more than twenty years each working as attorneys at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.
According to PEER:
The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31 .... On November 5, 2009, EPA ethics officials ordered the two veteran employees to -
"Remove your climate change video from You Tube by the close of business on Friday, November 6, 2009";
"Edit your You Tube video...by:
(i) Removing the language starting at 1:06 min - 'Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco Regional Office.'
(ii) Removing the images of EPA's building starting at 1:06 min...
(v) Remove [sic] the language starting at 6:30 min - 'In my work at EPA, I've been overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years.'"
"All future requests for approval of an outside writing activity must be accompanied by a draft of the document that is the subject of the approval request..."
"EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who has re-posted the original video and its script. "EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay."
Here's the video, so you can judge for yourself (more about the incident, as well as the couple's argument, on the flip):
There are basically two systems for managing carbon emissions. One is a carbon tax, in which you put a price on carbon. The other is called a cap and trade system, where you put an overall economy-wide cap in carbon emissions, issue carbon credits, and let groups trade the 'right to pollute'. Cap and trade is a 'market' based solution, and so it's the one being pushed by a broad range of industry groups and DC greens. It's also the favored approach of Barack Obama. Still, it's not looking likely to happen out of the gate.
David Roberts points to this quote from Senator Clair McCaskill on cap and trade legislation.
"I think a delay may be necessary," she continued. "Yes, we've got to do something. Yes, we have to move forward. But we can't kill the business climate at the same time. I'm from a state where most of the people who turn on the lights in the state get it from utility companies that depend on coal. And the cost of switching all that to clean coal technology or to alternative sources is going to be borne by them -- by regular folks who are trying to figure out how to pay their mortgages right now."
Meanwhile, the cap and trade system in Europe is a fiasco, since designing an emissions credit system from scratch, loopholes and all, is proving to be a boon for lobbyists and polluters while not doing so much for carbon emissions. An economic downturn should reduce carbon emissions on its own (China's exports are already dropping), and depending on infrastructure investment (like electrifying our auto fleet), that reduction could be sustained for some time.
Eventually, a carbon tax and a whole set of carbon-focused regulations should be part of our international currency regime, but I don't see this happening soon for a whole set of political reasons.
[Sorry to single you out Chris, but I'm attempting to refute a common thread in your recent posts, so you need to be singled out.]
I've been following with interest Chris's argument that the "big three" Democrats don't have different policies on various topics [http://www.openleft....], [http://www.openleft....]. He commonly uses the "cap and trade to cut carbon by 80% by 2050" example in this context. However, I would like to point out a few differences between the plans, which indicate that they aren't as similar as the one-sentence excerpts indicate.
As Obama rapidly transitioned from a senator with less than three years in office to a presidential candidate who has delivered detailed policy speeches, he has assembled a personal think tank that easily outsizes any of the established Washington policy institutes that provide intellectual fodder for the political war of ideas.(…)
On foreign policy alone, some 200 experts are providing the Obama campaign with assistance of some sort, arranged into 20 subgroups. On the domestic front, more than 500 policy experts are contributing ideas, campaign aides said. Veterans of previous election campaigns say the scale of the policy operation resembles the full-blown effort candidates typically undertake for a general election campaign rather than the more stripped-down versions common for the primary season.
Given this, it certainly isn't surprising that the policy proposals coming from the Obama campaign are always in line with the most mundane, non-controversial policy ideas of the Democratic establishment. Mandated health care. Residual troops in Iraq. Cap and trade without a carbon tax. I am not really sure what "war of ideas" in which the Obama campaign is involved, since outside of the argument over nukes and his original opposition to the war, I can't think of a single policy where he is really challenging the rest of the Democratic field. And to have such an enormous policy shop certainly reinforces what Matt wrote last week about "his strategy is targeted at elites." If several hundred people are putting together your foreign policy alone, and most of your advisors came from establishment jobs including serving as aides to Robert Rubin, is it even possible to develop a distinct set of policy proposals? Public policy teams of this size are pretty much always going to arrive at so-called "consensus" options.
I think Obama's academic instincts are taking over here. I don't doubt that he finds formulating policy fascinating, especially as a contrast to what he has at times called the ridiculous and demeaning other aspects of a national campaign. However, coming from academia myself, I can say that in many ways it is the opposite of a political movement. Academia is covered in several overlapping layers of constant professional critique and evaluation, that it is virtually impossible to fully develop an idea outside the mainstream of current thought. Creativity is encouraged in so far as finding new means of applying existing ideas, but overall frameworks are rarely challenged. It is in this way that one will see Obama's campaign develop several different possibilities for residual force plans, for example, but you won't see the premise of residual forces seriously challenged itself.
Movements fundamentally challenge the status quo on major ideas of the day: worker's right, civil rights, the separation of church and state, etc. They also challenge the status quo of powerful institutions of the day, and in fact that is probably the main reason why they challenge the status quo of major ideas of the day. In terms of small donors, volunteers, and attendance at campaign rallies, the Obama campaign has already equaled the Dean campaign in terms of grassroots activism. However, there isn't the same challenge laid down against media and political establishment, and thus no major idea contrast as there seemed to be with the Dean campaign. Even if most of Dean's separation focused on strategic changes (small donors, fifty-state strategy, full throated opposition to Republicans, overthrowing the corporate media oligarchy, etc), it still had enough of a radical feel about it that, for a while, it was considered dangerous to your career in Washington to go to work for the Dean campaign. That clearly is not the case with the Obama campaign, which has apparently invested a huge amount of resources in becoming a wonkish, insidery "think tank" unto itself. This is the main reason why the Obama vs. Clinton narrative to this point has focused on personality issues, including the ever tiresome "change" verses "experience" argument. Neither campaign represents a challenge to the institutional status quo in the Democratic establishment. Perhaps that is necessary in order to win the party's nomination, but it also makes for a less than exciting campaign, not to mention a campaign that is doing little to build a broader movement.
For my money, the really exciting moments in primary campaigns are when elites feel threatened by outside forces, ala Dean in 2004 or Lamont in 2006. In 2008, the closest any candidate comes to threatening elites if John Edwards, but overall the major threats to elites are coming in the form of ideas like no residual forces (Richardson) and the carbon tax (Gore and Dodd). Given that many of the innovations of the progressive movement in 2003 have now been incorporated by virtually every campaign (large small donors operations, netroots outreach, blogs, house parties, etc), to make an impact on the 2008 campaign, new pressure points have to be found in the realm of policy instead. We can still make a difference in Congress by lining up behind a few candidates in primary challenges, but in the presidential campaign the challenge has to come from rejecting "consensus" policy ideas trickling out of the Democratic establishment, ala residual forces. Figuring out a way to be effective in this realm is where I intend to spend most of my energies for the remainder of the campaign.
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