From Revolution Club, Los Angeles:

The Green New Deal: Sustainable Snake Oil for a Green American Empire

February 10, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The Green New Deal is not only an utterly ridiculous delusion, it’s a program for an American chauvinist “better business plan.” It promises a complete reconfiguration of the American economy without confronting the reality that things are produced through vast and interconnected global networks of exploitation, and it promises Americans better distribution of the spoils gained from that exploitation.

The problem isn’t that we need a better business plan for a Green American Empire. The problem is this system of capitalism-imperialism that’s driving the destruction of the planet.

The Green New Deal Resolution modestly states that the U.S. has a “disproportionate responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, having emitted 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions through 2014” and rolls the real dirt on the U.S. under the rug.

The U.S. is king-of-the-hill on top of the capitalist-imperialist system where 77% of the world’s resources are consumed by 20% of the world’s people. And in order to remain the top gangster of planet earth -- the U.S. requires a massive military to brutally enforce its domination of countries and edge out its strategic competitors.  

This has caused massive environmental devastation and human misery not to mention the fact that the U.S. Military is the single largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. With the need to gas up America’s murder machinery, and with the help of Democratic president and so-called ‘friend to the planet’ Barack Obama, the U.S. has become the #1 Fossil Fuel producer in the world.

It’s the very laws of this system that drive capitalists and imperialist governments like the U.S. to move from one part of the globe to another, compelled by expand-or-die competition. The search for profit, and the do-this-more-ruthlessly-or-your-competitors-will dynamic drives them to prey on the people of the world and plunder the planet for resources, causing wars and leaving devastation and destruction in their wake. And anything that goes significantly up against the rules of the game will be rolled back. Just look at the response to the existing paltry protections: this same system has brought to power an anti-science fascist regime that’s revving up the chainsaws and bringing back coal.

Don’t get played! As long as capitalism-imperialism dominates over humanity, the destruction of the planet will and can only continue and accelerate, even if small, utterly insufficient protections are passed, and no matter who you vote for. And you cannot deal with this through small-scale individualized solutions. The consumption of fossil fuels and the destruction of the environment are tightly interwoven with the whole development of capitalism and it is going to take massive upheaval to uproot this system on a world scale to actually take humanity on a different course.

The Green New Deal and its hypemongers are doing nothing but funneling you back into the same system that causes these problems and has brought humanity to the brink of extinction; they are telling you feel good honeyed bullshit to get you revved up to vote for the new ‘woke’ faces of the Democratic Party; they are corralling your righteous anger and locking you up in the voting booth while the planet burns.

What we need to deal with this climate crisis is a real revolution to OVERTHROW the system of capitalism imperialism - to uproot the old ways and build a society in which human beings have a planned and rational interaction with the planet, and where humanity acts as the caretakers of the earth. Everyone who cares about the future of humanity has to work for this revolution NOW.

Further exposure and analysis to come at REVCOM.US

Revolution Club, Los Angeles:
(323) 424-6687  revclub_la@yahoo.com
2716 S. Vermont Ave Unit 8, Los Angeles, CA