10/8 News Roundup & Open Thread -Only Bernie’s Green New Deal Answers Greta’s Call for Action & More
Only Bernie’s Green New Deal Answers Greta’s Call for Action
It ‘simply won’t be enough if it stops this week and people just go home.’ To reverse today’s climate madness, we must connect the strikes and protests with politics and policy.
In a bit of reverse parenting, the young climate strikers are teaching the rest of us an embarrassingly obvious lesson in moral clarity and courage. Mobilizing more than 7 million people across 185 countries September 20–27—with about 1,000 actions in the United States alone—youth struck a thunderous blow against adults’ insane intransigence regarding our climate meltdown.
Students have been striking for our climate future since at least 2015, but September’s actions were by far the largest, featuring huge marches, civil disobedience (activists shut down the “Wall Street West” financial center in San Francisco on September 25), and truthtelling before the United Nations—significantly ratcheting up awareness and pressure.
The question following this profound inspiration is: What next?
As the global climate strike’s website warns, it “simply won’t be enough if it stops this week and people just go home.” To reverse today’s climate madness, we must connect the strikes and protests with politics and policy.
Here, too, young folks are showing us the way, with strike organizers demanding an end to all fossil fuel extraction, a rapid transition to 100 percent clean energy and support for the victims of climate chaos, which is “mainly caused by rich people and mostly suffered by the poor.”
But the adults still hold the levers of political and economic power (for now). In 2018, carbon emissions rose to an all-time high, and the adults still aren’t acting. As Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg observed in her scathing speech before the UN Climate Summit, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
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To meet this moment, we must create a new politics, economics and culture—a new system of producing and consuming far less—that makes climate repair and justice the central driving force of our actions. Climate change is not “another issue,” but the issue that defines the others.
Only one major U.S. politician has put forth a serious, urgent and comprehensive Green New Deal proposal: Sen. Bernie Sanders. Investing $16 trillion over 10 years (nearly five times what fellow presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls for), Sanders’ plan stands out for creating millions of jobs for displaced fossil fuel workers; pushing for publicly owned power companies; dramatically increasing financial support to decarbonize the Global South; and zeroing all emissions from electricity and transportation by 2030—all of it on a faster timeline than his rivals.
If we are to celebrate Greta and the climate-striking youth, we must embrace Sanders’ sweeping Green New Deal. Otherwise, what are we rallying and marching and striking for?
More news/videos/tweets/etc. in the comments.
Tips, Comments, Complaints, Etc!
‘Good!’ Says Sanders as Lobbyists Lash Out at Proposal to End Corporate Domination of US Politics
The corps can take that lobbiest money and put it towards something useful like paying livable wages.
‘Maddening’ Graphic Shows How 400 Richest Americans Paid Less In Taxes Than Any Other Income Group
Meet the Hawkish Liberal Think Tank Powering the Kamala Harris Campaign
CNAS:
Bernie Sanders Is Spoiling for a Fight With the DNC
He certainly owes them for the treatment he got in the previous campaign.
‘It Was Like A Rallying Cry’: Bernie Sanders Campaign Surges Ahead After Heart Attack
The MC weekly poll is relatively stable, which is good news for Bernie after this week. In fact, Bernie is now tied with Warren in the early states. He stayed the same and Warren was down 2.
T and R, LD!! Still hate polls. Warren keeps waffling and it will start to hurt her with voters including the GOPUKE Lite and Pumas. Watch.
Oh no! I’m outed. 😉
Can you see your name on there? Hope you don’t mind, if so!
Hell I got the Bernie bumper sticker on my car. so this doesn’t bother me 🙂
No, can’t see my name, altho I did send some (very tiny) contributions. Is there a place to peruse the list?
Upon first seeing this big ol’ list I was a little surprised, am kind of a private person, but I don’t mind. People certainly know I’m for Bernie.
I’m on it but that is such a huge list my name is lost in space. 🙂
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/supreme-court-gay-rights-workplace-equality-895565/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/08/tide-has-shifted-new-poll-shows-nearly-60-americans-support-trump-impeachment
We could end up with President Pelosi as Trumpcorp is trying to drag down Pence with him from what I read. Not that that would thrill me much but suspect that it would show the need for M4A as the R’s would be off to the hospital with heart problems of their own.